Jackson ends up telling NO story - just a vomit of computer-guided coloured lights. Sound and fury, signifying nothing...

I was more worried about replenishing Red Vines, than seeing what happened next.

As a result, the money is stolen not from the customers, but from the bank itself.

"Party on, Garth."

Bizarre argumentation. One hardly knows where to begin with your assumptions and red-herring analogies.

To address your first point - with it's ill-considered implications of parity between democracy, capitalism and actual worth or value: Commercial success at this scale simply indicate how thoroughly that vulgarity and thoughtlessness have been cultivated and encouraged by this media-driven culture over the past 90-100 years or so.

When people make "free choices" in such a society, they do so in appalling ignorance, with a maximum of empty stimulation. This is the post-Edward Bernays world.

The vulgarity of this decadent age. So? He rapes the corpse of JRR Tolkien and that's just fine if it earns a bauble and a penny?

That was a case of "resource constraint".

Exactly.

I AM one of those "small musicians and authors".

Apple are assholes, not cowards. They probably didn't approve the movie because something is the wrong color, or because it competes with their own movie, or because it has product-placement ads but Sony hasn't yet agreed to give Apple 30% of the ad revenue.

I think the first quote is attributed to Jeremy Clarkson (of Top Gear) but otherwise is an acceptable opinion on the subject.

"Conservatives are hesitant to change things, so they don't screw things up."

I think that "conservatives" have a huge gap between what they say they want and what they actually achieve.

Were corporations historically people? Did conservatives change that. Yup.

Was america historically a torture state? Did conservatives change that? Yup.

Was america founded on religious principles, being one nation under god? Or did conservatives change that? Yup.

Was hemp and marijuana historically demonized? Did conservatives change that because they feared the blacks and mexicans? Yup.

I can obviously find hundreds of more examples of conservatives changing things for the worse. Saying that conservatives want things to stay the same does not equate with the rise of corporatism in the us in the last 40 years. Nor does it equate with the greed is good and inequality is great mentality which predominates conservative thought.

You might just have to realize that "conservatives" are far from the historical definition of conservatives "resistance to change" and other attributes. Oh how I wish it were so. America wouldn't have killed hundreds of thousands in iraq, corporations wouldn't be people, wealth inequality would go back to 1950s levels, and do nothing bankers would be vilified as the enemies of real working people.

In short, there is absolutely nothing conservative about today's so called american conservatives. It's a fiction, a more friendly name on the pro corporate anti public interest party. I would name it the fascist party, matching it up to a proper historical definition. If anyone was allowed to use that term anymore.

Jackie Chan is so many forms of awesome that it's not funny. (Well, no, actually.. he's funny too.) And you have provided Yet Another in the long list of ways he is awesome: as an example for why video fidelity is a good thing rather than a bad thing. (Which you'd think would be obvious, but some people don't get it. Until you mention Jackie Chan.)

Thunderbolt is more like USB to the user - it's a thing you use to connect untrusted devices to your system.

No. USB is not safe either. Don't plug untrusted devices into your system's I/O ports, period.

USB, Firewire, eSATA, SAS, and Thunderbolt do not have a security model.

Thunderbolt just happens to have more capabilities since there is direct access to the PCI bus, and this is also where the greater performance comes in.

With greater capabilities and access comes greater possibilities of abuse from untrusted components. Including the possibility of malicious option ROMs and malicious access to other hardware devices attached to the bus.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it does....

It's actually a tragedy and missed opportunity, that Jackson has so little talent as a director, and so little discipline in telling a story.

I was appalled by how little he regarded the audience - and proportionally insulted his actors - in "Desolation". Huge musical cues 'instructing' the audience of the drama or character development that was supposed to be on screen, at all times. This seems to be because he cannot elicit real performances from his actors.

I might muse that this is because to Jackson, they are not actors - but merely the armatures on which he templates his green-screen composited glory... But to assume that this is the root of his deficiency, rather than another symptom of of his artlessness, would be to succumb to curmudgeonly urges.

The lesson to be taken away is that Jackson should be designing games, not ruining popular cinema.

It appears that - despite the contempt it provoked in my teenaged self - Rankin and Bass actually produced the best ever adaptation of Tolkien, with the greatest respect and truth towards the source text in feel and substance. Perhaps, when we have destroyed the concept of copyright as a tool of corporate greed, another - more thoughtful - filmmaker might use this as a point of departure for a loving and well-crafted "Hobbit".