Designing, printing, and delivering crappy ads that most people will just immediately throw away is NOT a constructive activity.

--Jeremy

It's a chicken/egg problem. The show gets popular; the network is able to sell expensive ad slots. The actors know that they're part of a valuable asset so they negotiate for a larger piece of the pie.

I'm perfectly fine with this, personally. Same with pro athletes. They're the ones doing the useful stuff that makes a ton of money, they should get their cut.

The root of the problem is the selling of advertising itself, not that actors/athletes are greedy.

--Jeremy

The difference is: if the man on the street decides to attack you, he's going to have to deal with you defending yourself, and will probably be looking at jail time.

If the NSA blackmails you, they will suffer absolutely no consequences.

--Jeremy

"Pacific Rim" was absolutely terrible. I don't think there was a single second of on-screen time that wasn't 100% lifted whole cloth from any number of very tired cliches.

But it was highly entertaining, in a way that none of Michael Bay's shit ever is. I'd watch it again when it's available on disc; if for nothing else than to play TV Tropes Bingo.

Actually, that sounds kind of fun. If TV Tropes Bingo doesn't already exist, someone should put that together.

--Jeremy

Umm, there are plenty of "progressives" that are perfectly ok with censoring porn, with the justification that it's degrading to women.

--Jeremy

You can't brute force a problem that doesn't have discrete parameters.

The rest of your responses make it clear that you don't understand this. Brute forcing a password is possible because for every character in the password, it can be from a discrete set of characters.

You can't brute force an optimal real number, unless your equation is so simple that you can solve it by just looking for local optima and wouldn't need a computer anyway. Your search space could be [0, 1] or it could be [-1000, 1000] or it could be [-inf, inf]; it doesn't matter. Say your brute force algorithm comes up with 0.5 as an optimum ... when you search 0.0, 0.1, 0.2... 1.0. If you increase the resolution, maybe your optimum becomes 0.73. Increase the resolution again and maybe it becomes 0.348. Searches in a continuous space work COMPLETELY differently than searches in discrete space, and you can't just brute force them.

--Jeremy

It's amusing to me that for the longest time, Apple fanbois mocked Android users for having the permissions list which "nobody reads anyway," while having *no* information or control over what iOS apps used.

Apple finally gets something that is clearly superior to what Android has out-of-the-box (though it would still be nice to know an app's permissions list before downloading) and suddenly they have no idea why Android doesn't also do it this way. In another 6-12 months when this feature is rolled into stock Android, the Apple fanbois will then claim that Google stole the idea and that iOS has *always* had better handling of app permissions (while also ignoring the fact that this feature has been available for years to pretty much any Android user who wanted it enough to get it).

--Jeremy

It doesn't exist, and your goalpost moving doesn't constitute much of an argument.

You can only try to minimize the middlemen as much as possible. If you look at the percentage of GDP spent on health care in the US vs any other nation with socialized healthcare, they're doing a much better job than we are; by a factor of 2 or better.

--Jeremy

So ... are you saying that unregulated business have failures, and regulated businesses have failures?

I don't think that a few anecdotes really supports whatever position you have, though the "Occupy bloviating nonsense" bit makes it pretty clear where you stand.

--Jeremy

Nope. I'm as anti-Bible-as-authoritative-reference as the next guy, but I still chalk people using it as one up to ignorance, not evil.

Most people who deal in absolutes are idiots. I include the people who try to demonize their opponents as evil using "wit' us or ag'in us" in that category.

--Jeremy

As opposed to the True Believers who will label you a Church of Global Warming member because you used the words "nuance" and "discussion" in connection with Global Warming.

Your characterization of your (presumably) opponents says a lot about you; if you leave out that last aside, I assume you are actually interested in discussion of nuance. But its inclusion tips you in the direction of "probably actually a moron with a persecution complex."

--Jeremy

That's a pretty terrible strawman. Would you like to actually provide an argument, or is this the limit of your intellectual honesty?

--Jeremy

Which is a demand that's absolutely impossible to meet, so you can sleep comfortably that nobody will ever "defeat" your argument.

Well played.

--Jeremy

This entire discussion is roughly equivalent to an argument about which timeline is 'correct' in The Legend of Zelda. The difference is, fans of Zelda know that they're splitting hairs over fantasy stories.

--Jeremy

Maybe he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990? Maybe he's the "Real Killer" of Nicole Simpson?

Seriously, are you channeling Glenn Beck or something? I'm no fan of the Catholic church but idle speculation is NOT +5 worthy.

--Jeremy