One must ask, what good is news that filters?

It is impossible for there to be any other kind. The sum total of what happens on the earth is far beyond the ability of anyone or anything to track or follow. Most of it is not relevant to you, of course. Any news you read is, and of necessity, must be, filtered. The only question is how it is filtered.

News is news, be it bad, sad, happy or violent.

Your view that occurances can be easily and definitively defined as "news" or "not news" is incredibly naive.

I remember a time when the news was reported and read.

No, you remember a time when the biases in selecting what would be news and what would not be were better hidden.

...these guys.

How else are we going to beat the Kaiser?

A film based on a title by Isaac Asimov

Not even that. Just a film with a title by Isaac Asimov pasted on it. The screenplay was already written (the name at that point was "Hardwired") when they decided to buy the title. They changed a few of names to match characters in the book and pasted in a nod to the Three Laws of Robotics. Done!

That's not Asimov. It's a film he had nothing to do with that they put one of his titles on for marketing purposes(it bears no resemblence whatsoever to the book). Still a clever piece of dialog, though.

Well, no human alive today in any case. All so-called "original" works produced today are derivatives of older works (Shakespeare, folklore, etc)

If you think Shakespeare was original, you are sadly deluded. Just about all of his plots can be traced back to other sources, from which he often lifted them virtually intact. What elevated Shakespeare wasn't the originality of his stories, but the way he told them.

I would, but I have to go Q up to learn Spanish to finish this joke.

John de Lancie will come teach you Spanish?

Why not just let the users do the job? Cheaper, faster and easier...

And subject to massive trolling by malicious users...

Which is segregated by sex. You *must* have one man, and one woman. You can't have a man in the woman's slot, you can't have a woman in the man's slot.

How about rock-paper-scissors?
[X] physical skills involved
[X] some kind of scoring system
[X] objectively declare winner
Ticks all your boxes!

And guess what? It's a sport!

Most people use Google mail by simply accessing Google's servers via web. Since the email is stored on Google's own server, they can delete it. Now, if it had been *me*, they'd have been SOL, because I have all my Google mail forwarded to my private IMAP server, and it's out of Google's hands. But the average Gmail user, yeah, Google would be able to kill the mail.

I've never encountered any sort of computer drawing tool that wasn't excrutiatingly painful when compared to paper and something pencil-like.

From which I can infer you've never used a really decent graphics tablet + stylus. It's the standard tool of the many, many artists who have given up physical media to go digital. Of course, it's not a convenient thing for everybody to use in a meeting.

Bandwidth isn't like water or electricity. You either use it in the moment or don't. You can't save it for later.

So, you don't have caches in your world?

It's really about data, not bandwidth. Just like your utilities connection is about water or electricity, not pipes or wires.

In fact, that's what this *article* is about--the TV should've saved data for later, but didn't.

"[Object-oriented programming] is both anti-modular and anti-parallel by its very nature"

This sentence makes no sense to me. What are objects if not modules? And surely one can have independent objects run in parallel.

That's good, right?

Can someone explain to me why all these program manpage references have e.g. "(1)" after them?

It's the manpage section. Section 1 is general commands, for example, while section 3 is library calls. Thus, if you want to see the man page for the printf command, you can say "man 1 printf", while if you want to see the man page for the printf system call, you can say "man 3 printf".