The US Government never really admitted, from wikipedia:
The U.S. government issued notes of regret for the loss of human lives and in 1996 paid reparations to settle a suit brought in the International Court of Justice regarding the incident, but the United States never released an apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing.[8]

Thanks for that, you gave me a chuckle. I agree with you in spririt, but there are a lot of people out there molesting data in order to perform their work function and to get paid. Far more than have any understanding of data structures, algorithms or even basic data normalization. It's unfortunate.

Working. There are far more people that work with large amounts of data than know how to program.

Oh the horror.

... for complex software engineering projects. It's okay for 99% of the stuff that regular people use it for.

Perl no good for people that don't program.

The problem isn't that people that know how to program and to test are writing crappy spreadsheets. The problem is that people that don't know how to program and test, ie. the general non IT tech population is writing spreadsheets because they don't know another way to build these tools and they do it in the only way that they've taught themselves to do. If they knew better they often wouldn't start by clicking the excel icon in the first place.

Arguably Howard Hughes Spruce Goose was a fantastic success. But not from a aeronautical engineering point of view. In fact Howard Hughes did about zero to increase the field of aircraft design, nothing ever worked (at least in time to be useful) and none of his designs ever made it to production.

Solaris... yes... it is a better film, I wonder how many ten year olds could sit through it though, and of those that could how many would understand or enjoy it? But that is a digression, ten year old enjoyment does not make a movie science fiction.

However, I never did feel that Solaris was actually science fiction though. It was more a movie about regret, remembrance and guilt. Sure it was set in space, but that really was just a plot device, the Solaris effect could have been a mysterious planet or a mysterious crystal, or a potion, or session of hypnosis. This was not science fiction in the true sense of the word, there were no science bits.

Of course you can say the same about Star Wars, which I believe was originally a serial set during the second world war. Star Trek I think just makes it into the category of science fiction, Close encounters, certainly, Superman is another opera. Blade Runner was a potential science fiction you missed, but that's more dystopic than science based.

Even in 1977 with no plans to make any more Star Wars movies it was always called Episode IV. The idea was that it was a part of an imaginary serial so they could skip straight to the good parts.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh I get it.

No, you're right, it really was a mashup of grand war films heavily slanted to WW2 and Kurosowa samurai movies.

Didn't someone say the art of genius is in knowing how to hide your sources?

What I don't understand is that if this was only a money grab why did he stop after ROTJ? He could have pumped out movies at that point and made millions more, all through the late 80's and early 90's.

Unless them being elevated means that they can have shields or something. The other thing is that they are awesome in the true sense of the word, they are terrifying as they stomp along.