Based upon the fact there's no Unobtainium on our planet, I suspect they've already been here and taken it all.

I guess Moores Law proves Intelligent Design! :) Oh wait... Intel... I mean Intel Design... :)

Nonsense. Religion isn't going away, nor should it. Roddenberry's biases is one aspect of his work that dates it. In general, one of Scifi's greatest flaws is despite its portrayal of fascinating scenarios and technological wonders it is difficult to apply to actual people because its main characters are often not people. Instead they are agnostic idealogues that come across as shallow. Its wooden/unrealistic portrayal of human depth due to many authors who insist in creating a caricature of religion for the sake of either making it either a cliche'd villain or the elimination of meaning altogether makes many of the great ideas presented therein flawed...

Good scifi takes into account that intelligent people can and do acknowlege a higher power without turning all evil or into one-dimensional automatons.

A series takes a while to get going because of a number of factors. Not just the series writers, but also the actors don't know their characters well enough to know how to act their parts. The production crew, the effects, everything is new up front. What is stiff and wooden, often is eliminated as it receives feedback from discriminating fans, honest feedback, and producers who spot what works and what doesn't.

Very few series start out "fresh", and if they do, it's often based on a gimmick that's unsustainable. (like Lost, or The Event, for example)

The data on pirate sites tends to reflect a target demographic that pirates movies, which may be ineffective if you're attempting to sell ads.

Also, some shows don't show up on Hulu, or netflix... so many networks have their own websites, like cbs shows are on their own network website cbs.com, which Hulu will point to, but really is not a reflection of the viewership. Hulu really gets nothing for pointing to their site, other than an indication that people are searching for the show. Some Shows have sites dedicated to their shows too... And that's if you can find it. And YouTube performs the same sort of service... or amazon, and then that doesn't count cable and digital broadcasting... but is there something that puts all this information together?

PinkiePie is one of the My Little Ponies. That handle's kinda cute, considering that that those that are pwn'd are sometimes called Pwnies and there are the Pwnie Awards. And all the bronies know that PinkiePie is the funniest of the ponies... not that I'd admit watching the show... wink, wink... ahem...

The problem with too much fragmentation is that you never gain mainstream acceptance and it confusese developers who don't want to rewrite the tools that are fragmenting. Toolsets lose support, and if you developed your particular software on their toolsets then you're screwed.

It's nice to have options, unless you're the guy that chooses to implement your system on an option that is a deadend. Then you kinda wish for a Microsoft platform--something that's going to be around for a couple decades and you don't have to continually be redeveloping expertise in it just to build a stupid gui window...

Not to mention that with smaller government, the work that needs to be done gets sent to contractors that tend to charge a lot more for the same services. (defense contractors are quite adept at this). Anyone who's worked in government knows if you want a high paying salary you don't work in government--you contract to government.

And you can only imagine just how much lobbying goes on to get those contracts... So smaller government can be a recipe for more aggressive lobbying.

There was a time when the creative minds of this country were discredited, blacklisted and even arrested because they were accused of being Communists, Radicals, Social Deviants and Homosexuals. Now the Homosexuals have their turn, and have proven they never really objected to McCarthyism, their righteous self-will knows no bounds, and they will oppress as they were oppressed.

Where is the tolerance that they strove for when they were not a mainstream religion of thought? Is this the price of tolerance: More Oppression?!

Ridiculous. This whole scandal, its hypocrisy is galling. Judge the art, not the artist. Some of our very best classics in science fiction are from people who were nonconformists in their day. In fact that goes for most authors... perhaps it is their outspoken natures that drives them to do things the rest of us can do little more than wish we did.

OSC's comments seem almost prophetic in the face of what's occurred.

The problem with encouraging a person to program for the sheer joy of it is that they start to adopt useful/fun programming languages that managers don't know... like Perl... and that's just too dangerous. It's best to keep programming soulless... :)

I would not be surprised if introverted personalities do precisely this sort of thing or something similar. Not just for sexual or even silly reasons, but because it creates a barrier to communication that at some level introverted personalities would prefer. Psychologically the ability to do this sort of thing could become very addictive. These devices form a buffer between the uncertainties of cold hard reality and ourselves.They enable (or at least give us the perception of such) us to be more clever than we really are.

We already see this happening a lot with people that would rather text you than talk with you in person. There's a subliminal dislike to actual conversations, and the uncertainty that comes from an immediate action/reaction--that lack of control and the inability to formulate the perfect response, I suspect, is part of the reason why people do this. Texting and other forms of communication that require a time-lag or deny you of personal one-on-one exchanges, enable both parties the ability to be conveniently (and purposefully) ambiguous. iow, we feel smarter, more emboldened, and even more able to objectify one (which sounds bad, but at some level serves us because if people aren't objects the stakes are just too high) another with this sort of technology.

Unfortunately, a technology that is supposed to assist us in communicating and seeing one another in greater clarity, will most likely have the opposite effect. It will enable those who wish it, to put on another costume atop all their other ones. . . but then social media is all one giant masquerade of smiling idyllic snapshots of who we all wish we could be.

Unfortunately most of the jargon doesn't translate to the company, and often that's perfectly okay with the uppermost management, which is why it gets really ridiculous when the CEO (and/or marketing) starts quoting from it, and the engineering staff has no idea what they're talking about. I first encountered this at HP, when Carly Fiorina the Chief Executioner was blowing smoke about her baby "e-speak", which turned out to be mostly smoke and mirrors. She spoke so inspiringly that most people they allowed her to be inspiring without any actual substance. I remember One day I'd had enough of having no idea what the CEO was saying, so I decided as a lowly engineer that I would take her speech and disect it. As I started to study it, I would ask my fellow engineers, management, and their management what the different buzzwords meant. She was basing the whole direction of the company on this stuff... right? So someone should know what it meant. I was flabberghasted to discover that: NO ONE KNEW WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT!? They all smiled or nodded when she'd come to visit, but after the warm fuzzies had faded and we had to go back to making PCs we still didn't really have a clue how it impacted us at all. Little did we know she was laying the ground work for the dismantling of the company... but that's another story for another time... oh and as far as I was able to discover, espeak turned out to be (as far as I could tell) an hp(ish) proprietary type of XML, back around the time xml was still competing to be the standard open source solution and hp thought they could do better.

This company sounds absolutely reptillian in their nature. Like some massive hungry slithering bottom-dwelling reptile that strikes out at any warm-blooded thing that's good, and wraps itself around it for its own selfish enrichment, squeezing the life out of its prey. Dunno why they'd want to be named Python, it's a lovely language... and friendly... unless you don't like indenting.
 

Dunno how it is now, but when I lived in Italy (20 years ago), I would move from appartment to appartment about every other month. One day I got a letter that had been postmarked 6 months prior. It had been forwarded a couple times. Italian post was notorious for being delayed at least three to four weeks longer than anywhere else in Europe, but this was beyond ridiculous. I once calculated the time it would take a pidgeon to carry this letter, and it actually beat the Italians. :) Heaven forbid my parents ever send me a package... which would only arrive part of the time, and always opened with parts missing...

Why should anyone care?

"640K ought to be enough for anybody..."
also...
"The internet is just a passing fad" and "We will never make a 32 bit operating system..."