I already saw that movie. It came out in 2001 and was called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And after the "OOOH SHINY!" wore off, we're left with a dull movie that I really don't care if I ever see again. That is the movie I think of when I see a lot of reviews that rave about the "cutting edge animation" of Avatar, then forgive the ho-hum story. When Avatar's CGI has been surpassed in a decade, will we still want to watch it?

And you missed the point. Cutting edge CGI does not a movie make. If it's just Dances with Smurfs in 3D!!!!, where will the film be when its CGI is no longer dazzling you because something newer and shinier has come along? Is the story good enough to be enjoyable long after the CGI has become commonplace and "old tech"?

Look at Pixar, filmmakers who know how to incorporate the shiny new things with solid stories and memorable characters. Toy Story was cutting edge animation when it came out, but has since been far surpassed by the other Pixar films in the CGI department. An Animation 101 student can render CGI at Toy Story's level nowadays. However, the reason I still watch Toy Story is that it didn't depend on the "OOOH SHINY!", it has a solid story and wonderful characters that still makes it enjoyable a decade after its "cutting edge" animation has lost its shine.

Having whizz-bang "cutting edge" effects does not give a free pass to have a lame story.

The sentence is referring to two separate agencies: DHS and TSA. Rewrite the sentence to "How has they addressed the repeated posting..." vs. "How have they addressed the repeated posting...", and you'll see the error.

ROTFLMAO! Thanks for making my day!

If the rules should have been taught long ago, then he shouldn't have had any grammar mistakes in his writing. If he wants his paper read for content, then he should not waste the teacher's time by filling it with elementary grammar errors.

If this was English 101 and the criteria for writing the assignment was "correct punctuation and grammar", then he needs to meet the criteria and have correct punctuation and grammar. If it's any sort of "formal" writing, then there is no excuse for incorrect usage of the language. Unless it is a creative writing assignment where the teacher specifies they can get creative with their grammar, then his teenage-angst short story with incorrect grammar can be done on his own time.

I agree that a computer would not be able to grade creative writing because of allowed variations to the rules in that genre, but even in creative writing you cannot just haphazardly write with crappy grammar and then expect to get a free pass because "It's creative writing. Grammar doesn't matter!" Yes, grammar does still matter. You need to know all the rules before you can break them, and "good writing" means they were broken in deliberate and thoughtful ways. It's usually easy to tell which are "thoughtful errors" and which are just plain laziness. For every wonderful piece of creative work, there is a ton of bad paintings, bad music, bad photography, and I've seen plenty of "creative uses of grammar" that made me want to claw my eyes out, all of which can quite easily be graded as "bad". Even painting, music and photography have their own version of "grammar", and I think in many, if not most cases of "bad" art, it's a matter of the artist either not knowing the rules in the first place, or else breaking the rules through sloppiness and laziness rather than thoughtful deviation.

Ooooh, well aren't we just the special little snowflakes.

OMG, they made you wait in line behind people who were there first. How dare they. HOW DARE THEY!! And I suppose you get to cut in line at the grocery store, too, when you have 25 items and the people in front of you have full carts? And how dare that shoe salesman continue helping the family of four who were there first, when you only need one pair! That pretentious prick!

Fucking hell, you and the wife are like the poster children for Generation Narcissist.

So they have to waste resources triaging everyone who comes in, and the poor schmucks with more complicated problems keep getting shoved to the back of the line. Oh, well that will just solve everything, won't it? Or -- and I know this is crazy talk -- maybe they could implement some sort of system where you can call ahead and arrange a specific time that they will set aside to devote to your problem, so you can arrive at the appointed time and get the problem taken care of quickly.

And, here's a free clue for you: you make an appointment so you don't have to wait in line! Dun dun Duuuuuuuuuhhhhh!!

I made an appointment to get my desktop looked at. And right at the appointed time, a tech called me over to work on the problem. Wow, what a concept! Maybe doctors and dentists and auto mechanics should look into using this "appointment" thingie.

... will have run out of money. That "montly subscription" is sure as hell gonna wring every last buck out of yout wallet once they got you hooked.

Try reading the website next time:

Emergency use (1 alert/month) - £5 ($8).
Standard use (60 alerts/month) - £10 ($16)
Advanced use (90 alerts/month) - £13 ($21)
Unlimited use (unlimited alerts/month) - £20 ($32)

$32 is less than what a family spends at a restaurant. Go out to eat one less time per month, have plenty of money for the top-level subscription. And yeah, it's very much worth it if you can give your autistic kid a little more freedom and yourself a back-up system to keeping an eye on them.

Same here. My son has pulled the disappearing act on us a couple times. Both times we got extremely lucky, and both times were "look away for five minutes because he seemed to be busy doing something and then he was gone". He's getting better now that he's getting older about asking if he can go somewhere, but we still can't completely trust him not to wander off. Since we like to travel, we spend a lot of time in new (and often remote) areas. And since he's almost a teenager, it would be nice to be able to let him explore on his own (within a boundary) without us having to hover over him.

Why is it so hard to understand that liking the outdoors/road and having internet are not opposites. Actually, they ARE opposites. These people said they want "remote". I'm guessing you've never been to "remote" before? Remote means that at the campground the toilet very well may be just a seat over a hole in the ground, the water comes from a hand pump, most likely no electricity, and you may have to drive 50 miles to get cell phone coverage. Maybe they are from NYC and their idea of "remote" is Chicago, but it's kind of the definition of "remote" that you are away from many of the amenities of civilization -- including internet access. The internet is just as much a tool as a frying pan or a tent these days, and having access to it at all times is very useful. And guess what? When I want to get remote, I make sacrifices. When I backpack into the wilderness, I don't carry a frying pan (far too heavy) and I use a light-weight tent that barely squeezes two people into it (once again, weight is an issue). And I don't expect there to be internet access, or even cell coverage for that matter! Yes, it would be very useful if I could pack in a comfy mattress and a bathroom, but if I really need those things that badly, I can take my vacations at a hotel or just stay home. If they must have a constant connection for gaming, and satellite isn't good enough for them, then they should forget about remote and just stay at KOAs as others have suggested. Or a Holiday Inn.

I've lived two places that have very cold winters, with lots of cloud cover and large accumulation of snow (upper Great Lakes and the Great Plains) and I don't think it's as easy-peasy as they make it out to be. I'm guessing these people have never lived in a region that gets a ton of snow in a short amount of time. So lets ignore the problem of these panels collecting enough energy after a month of cloud cover to not only keep up with the daily accumulation (oh, and fulfill the original goal of providing power) but also melt the two feet of snow that got dumped by a blizzard overnight. The snow is not going to magically disappear. It turns into water. So where is all this water going to go? And what is it going to do when it flows off the toasty solar panel and onto, say, non-solar roads. It's going to FREEZE. So non-solar roads connecting to the solar roads will have a nice layer of ice forming at the intersection. So now rather than making quick runs up and down roads tossing snow out of the way, plows are going to have to deal with the icy death traps wherever ice is being formed in inconvenient places by the rapid melting of a large amount of snow in freezing temperatures (And as plows aren't exactly precision instruments, chances are the solar panels at these intersections will be hit). I'd prefer non-heated solar panels that can be plowed over ice rinks at intersections, thanks.

The panels would probably work great in the southern states (where any snowfall would be just a tiny amount), but it's laughable to think about putting this in places that get real winter.

Since none of them support OS X unless you have an Intel processor

Hulu does. I'm running Hulu Desktop on a G5.

You are reading too much into what he is saying, because that is what he just said. This is from his blog, not a legal analysis of copyright law, and are his thoughts on an argument he was having with his agent, who was claiming that all rights to the spoken version of the book are sold separately, including text-to-speech. Neil is saying that this is true for professionally produced Audiobook versions, but that a person being able to read aloud (whether with their own voice or a text-to-speech device) is part of owning a book (included in the purchase price, so to speak), not something that must be purchased separately as the publishers/lawyers are demanding.

If you want to be a Disgruntled Pedant, Neil Gaiman is the wrong person to direct it at. He's on your side. Really.

Neil Gaiman has expressed his opinion of this issue in his blog.

My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

Rowling simply copied the primary character types from Every other fantasy book,

Yes, much like Tolkien copied from myth and legend, sometimes to the point that today he would be considered a plagiarist. The poem "Where now the horse and the rider?" from The Two Towers was pretty much lifted from The Wanderers, an Old English poem. Read Beowulf and you'll get a crick in your neck from all the double-takes when you stumble across familiar LOTR names. Magic rings? Try The Ring of the Nibelung. I love Tolkien's work, but I'm more than a little tired of him being put on this pedestal as if LOTR sprang pure and fully formed from his own mind, while other fantasy authors are considered 'hacks' for doing the same sort of borrowing.

And oh yes, JK Rowling is sooooo greedy for suing a guy she left alone until he tried to ride her coattails and make money from his copy & paste of her work without adding anything significant of his own to the effort. Boo fucking hoo.