I understand the need for ads to keep /. free.

I'm okay with losing 20, 30 even 60 seconds of my life in order to watch a video.

But 2:15 of IBM talking about vague business practices around the "cloud" is horrendous and sadistic.

Stop torturing your audience, get sponsors that have something to do with technology and understand it and keep the ads at least reasonable to the typical TV :30 or :60 at most.

Dislike of fast food is not social conditioning.

I grew up with home-cooked meals, not healthy but typical comfort food. Once I was old enough to cook for myself, most of my meals came out of the freezer and cardboard boxes. When I was old enough to drive, fast food joints were my primary source of food.

I grew obese, developed a few health problems then met and married a woman who not only knows how to cook, but has recently learned to cook healthier food. I'm losing weight, all health issues are gone and I'm eating the best food I've every had in my life.

Your analogy of a barbarian choosing between a burger and ethnic food is far off the target. Compare apples to apples. Given the choice between a McD/BK/W/whatever burger and a burger made with fresh beef, fresh vegetables and fresh baked bread, the barbarian will steer clear of the fast food one after one bite. (Actually, he'd probably eat both.)

Food does not have to be fancy to be good. It should be fresh, healthy AND taste good. Fast food restaurants provide NONE of those factors.

Try eating fresh food for a month, and you'll wretch at the thought of trying to eat a fast food burger, too. Don't try the "fast food is cheaper" argument either. It's been well documented that buying and preparing food is much cheaper than fast food, not only at the cash register but also at the doctor's office.

A simple analogy for a non-technical person is by using "fork in the road."

Making a change to software is like choosing to take a fork in the road - you either change, or continue unchanged.
Version control remembers when and where you took that fork in the road and most importantly provides a map of how to get back to that fork.
By descriptions of VC software here, it sounds like you can also view multiple forks at the same time and judge which one would allow you to arrive at your desired destination.

That's been one of my gripes. Jackson has the hobbits the same height as the dwarves. Hobbits range from 3 to 4 feet, the tallest having been 4' 6". Dwarves range between 4 and 5. While you may have some seeing eye to eye around the 4 foot height, there should be a visible difference between Bilbo and the other dwarves.

It's mostly when they do the close scenes with characters side by side. On action or distant scenes where they substituted actual little people, those were much more accurate.

This is the key point of the debates between the movies and books.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in similar styles which is no wonder since they attended college together and were friends. They both "skip over" the details of long journeys and battles. The final battle in "Lion, Witch and Wardrobe" only took up two pages in the book. Likewise the battle of five armies only took up a few pages until Bilbo was knocked unconscious and the battle was summarized for him upon his awakening.

Today's writers, directors and audiences leave nothing to the imagination. All the details are poured forth so the audience does not have to think.

I'm sure I'll enjoy these movies, too, despite disliking all of unnecessary additions and changes.

It was rumored that Nimoy was going to voice Smaug. I still hear Richard Boone's gravelly boom every time I think of the dragon, though.

Legolas is there logically; he just was not mentioned in "The Hobbit" as Tolkien had not yet created him.
"Prince" Legolas is the son of the Elven King, Thranduil of the wood elves who reside in north eastern Mirkwood. Like Aragorn he chose to go without his royal title and amenities until he felt he had earned it.

The addition of Tauriel, or more accurately, the naming and extrapolation of the captain of the woodland guard, is all Jackson's creation.

I wish I had boycotted KK. It made the 1976 version look like a classical masterpiece.

Not only was the major plot point of the Scouring lost, but the change to Faramir being tempted by the ring tells me that Jackson, Boyens and Walsh did not GET Tolkien's writing or understand how the ring worked.

While I'll be cringing and bitching about changes to "The Hobbit," I'm sure I'll still enjoy the scenery and journey of these movies. I just don't understand the gall of thinking you can improve on what many consider the epitome of fantasy writing.

You can also learn and practice conference leadership, organization, funding and logistics skills through Toastmasters. http://www.toastmasters.org/

As many others have commented here, the basic "dart" is one of the worst possible designs for gliding. I, too, spent many, many hours in school designing, folding and testing airplanes. Once you've exhausted what you, your friends and other paper airplane enthusiasts around you know, finding a new source (like White Wings or Wings & Things) you get inspired to go in new directions and try new materials.

I was taught the "basic glider" (according to rwa2 and his website) by a Japanese man who called it a "Mitsubishi." The best and worst part of the design was that any inconsistencies in folds would result in erratic, acrobatic flights. While looping, swerves and abrupt dives are cool for random throwing, they are counterproductive to gliding.

My point is that any paper airplane enthusiast who has spent more than two hours folding paper knows the dart is the worst possible design. While I applaud that any organization put effort into a project such as this, I'm baffled that more work was not put into a better design.

Low speed aerodynamics do not scale up well, it appeared the center of gravity was not even tested and I saw no presence of a dihedral, the keystone of a paper plane's stability against rolling.

They'd probably have done better to scale up a flying hole. http://davepowell.hubpages.com/hub/The-Safest-Most-Unique-Paper-Airplane-Ever-The-Flying-Hole

an invention to stop the monstrosity that is Wal-mart - duping people into thinking they're saving money, but instead buying cheap, disposable, foreign products or products altered to a sub-standard grade to meet Wal-mart's price point.

I give my ideas to Wal-mart for a one-time prize and they rake in money year after year on its sale? Go blow that smoke up your consumers' collective butts.

Indeed. Isn't this the point of literature, fact or fiction, for us to learn from possibilities and history so we don't make the same mistakes in "real life?"

Sit in WoW trade chat spamming how SW:TOR is going to kill WoW while you wait for the EA beta servers to respond.

I was debating whether or not to cancel my DVD by mail subscription. The streaming was out the door due to lack of good/current content. This e-mail from Reed today nailed it for me in one sentence:

Borders, maybe. But when was AOL ever great?!?! Unless it was the only possible way of getting onto the internet, AOL hands-down sucked compared to any of their peers or predecessors, namely Prodigy, CompuServe or Bubba's tin-can ISP. The only thing AOL ever did was support the CD production/duplication industry and the postal service.

If Netflix is using these two companies as a role model, they're already on the path to failure.

I'll concur with Cayenne8 since I've dealt with closing a government data center in the past.

Granted what I was involved with was migrating and upgrading, but I saw hundreds of perfectly usable, 1-3 year old servers stacked in the old data center, hard drives pulled and drilled and the servers sold to a scrap company.

Complete and utter waste. I seriously doubt TFA servers will be treated any differently regardless of age.