Here's a screenshot from the said SGU episode: http://i.gateworld.net//gallery/albums/uni_season2/207-TheGreaterGood/screencaps/sgu_207_0205.jpg

The Canadian-made SGU had movie-grade FX on a TV budget (it cost $2.5mil per episode according to Robert Carlyle, the main actor on the show). SGU's FX were the best ever on TV (so far). Just check on Netflix "The Greater Good" episode to see the amount of detail and craftsmanship that went on the FX. But I think Lucas' problem is that he wants to do the FX via ILM, which is an expensive company to work with, even if he owns it. The answer is to go off shore for FX. Either Canada, or even South America.

Fully agreed. All the elderly family I have in Greece have feature phones, but they learn by habit: press some numbers, press the green button, then the red. Nothing else. They don't even know how to program their TV, someone else has to set it up for them the first time, and then they remember by habit that button with a 3 on it, is "News channel", for example. They don't want to learn how things really work. I tried. I tried with my mom, I tried to explain her the logic, but she prefers to write down on a paper which button does what, and then press these blindly, without understanding what's really going on.

So the problem really is "I don't want to learn", not that iOS is too difficult to use. Especially iOS, is not.

Epirus in Greece, where I'm coming from, is a quake zone btw, we have "feel-able" earthquakes regularly there (at least once or twice a year). The biggest ones, where people died, were in 2004, and then back in 1981.

In my mother country, Greece, we have a word for this: koufovrasi. Supposedly (or so the superstition goes), a few hours before an earthquake, the weather becomes hot, stale, like you're choking, and it's like the sound doesn't travel as much (that's why it's called as such, which in free translation it means "deaf, boiled weather"). In the villages of the mountain Epirus, this is a known "sign" that an earthquake might hit soon. I personally experienced this kind of weather once or twice during in my early life there, but I don't remember if an earthquake ever hit soon afterward or not.

No, you're using the wrong update button. Not the one for ALL apps, but in each app's page. So when you try to update apps one by one, this doesn't work anymore.

This does not work here, for two different devices, and if you read the article, you will see that there are many people who can't. There are many threads about it. If you can, you're special.

Apple needs to be a bit more carefully about older versions of the OS and models. Case in point:

1. This: http://www.osnews.com/story/24428/The_Next_Brick_to_Decorate_Your_Wall_iOS_3_x_Devices
After months this article got posted, the App Store STILL DOES NOT work properly. You still can't update an app from within the device by hitting "update". The button does nothing! You need iOS 4.x or above before you can update via iOS (so we now have to use iTunes, which I don't want to use since that iPod has no music in it, I just use it as a PDA).

2. Apple REMOVED AirTunes support from iOS 4 when the second generation of AppleTV came out. What they did exactly was to stop supporting the original AppleTV (that was still sold at the time), from within iOS. So I can't use the 1st Gen AppleTV to send audio too from my iOS device anymore. This used to work just fine up to a few months ago. After the iOS 4.2 update, the support was removed.

While parts of technology might stop progressing as fast, other parts of technology will start getting optimized, to get over the halting of that other part. So if hardware stops getting faster, people will start optimizing software (which is currently extremely inefficient), until we get a better HW/SW tech at some point later in the future. There's a very nice comment on the Amazon page of the book by JPS, give it a read.

>That's like saying you'll never go back to Vivaldi after hearing Mozart...

No, because both were good. In my case, I can't say that Rihanna, who sells millions of records, is better than Washed Out. She's not.

> Music is all about taste

Sure, but there's also a common denominator threshold. When you cross it, things sound kitsch.

It's like watching "Lost in Space", and then you started watching "Babylon 5", after someone transported the tapes back to 1967 for you. After you go Babylon 5, and see how much DEPTH there's there, you will find the rest of 1967's TV boring as hell.

Same with music. Yes, there are tastes, but what I tried to communicate goes beyond tastes. For example, the "taste" paradigm would work for me when thinking that I like "Surfer blood", but I don't like "Toro Y Moi" -- both pretty hipster artists otherwise. But when it comes to Rihanna and Surfer Blood, then that's not a matter of taste anymore, because we're talking about two different WORLDS. Two different products: one's music, the other one's not!

I have 140 GBs of legal music, and I will not stop buying or legally downloading free new music, not because I'm a consumer drone, but because the music changes over the years, and I want to keep up with it. I like the new stuff more than I like the old stuff. Music evolves and becomes more complex, and requires more time to get accustomed to it, and I like that because the payout is better. Of course I'm talking about underground indie music, I don't listen to mainstream artists. Either way, RIAA won't get my money, since they don't support the kind of artists I listen to.

You said it!