But, like everybody else in the comments so far, I find the Scottish Independence talk fascinating and am interested in hearing more.
]]>Though, since you mention it, I'm American and have never heard of Peel or seen this list of principles. That probably says something.
Granted, I'm not in law enforcement, and maybe they cover this stuff in training -- but if Ferguson (or, say, my native Maricopa County) is any indication, I kind of doubt it.
]]>And congratulations to all the other winners too.
]]>I switched to OpenSUSE as my primary OS about two years ago, because all the reviews said it was the one to get if you wanted KDE (and I'd had some weird compatibility issues in Kubuntu). I think its package management is phenomenal, although its repos are of course less exhaustive than Ubuntu's.
I keep a Debian/XFCE boot as a backup though, and it works great in a pinch.
Back to the subject of tablets: I'm looking at grabbing a Galaxy Tab S; the biggest downside seems to be that the Exynos chipset is pretty poorly supported and I'll be stuck using Samsung's firmware.
]]>Lord knows when/if I'll actually have time to try it, but I appreciate the link.
]]>You CAN install a Hackintosh bootloader to get around the 32-bit EFI limitation, but then you wind up with a genuine Mac that has all the stability and compatibility issues of a Hackintosh. I tried it for awhile and found it to be considerably less fun than just looking at a 1080p picture on a 1440p monitor.
]]>Appreciate the heads-up, though -- yeah, the G5 was a beast.
]]>I own a 2006 Mac Pro.
Its last supported OS is 10.7 Lion (due to 32-bit EFI compatibility issues).
Lion does not support my monitor resolution (2560x1440).
Unless you install Xcode, which comes with an app called Quartz Debug.
Except you can't install Xcode on Lion.
Because Apple has removed all the Xcode downloads from its site. If you want to download Xcode, you have to do it through the App Store.
And the App Store will only let you download the current version of Xcode.
Which...well, you see where I'm going with this.
The sheer number of levels of fail at work here is breathtaking -- from being unable to set your friggin' monitor resolution without installing development tools, to requiring a username, password, and credit card number to access a free download, to needlessly breaking compatiblity with legacy systems...
(Seriously, the entire App Store model feels like somebody took a look at apt-get, decided it was amazing and that all software should be distributed that way, and then explained it to a manager who lacked the technical acumen to understand that dependency resolution is the ENTIRE POINT of apt-get.)
tl;dr last year I built a new computer and my Mac Pro is currently serving as an overpriced and overpowered backup fileserver.
]]>The new female Captain Marvel and Pakistani-American Muslim Ms. Marvel have both been wildly successful and it appears that Marvel is following up by making Thor a woman, Captain America a black man, and...doing...something with Iron Man? They haven't cleared that one up just yet.
It's easy to look at this cynically -- yes, eventually Thor and Cap will be "back to normal" -- but on the other hand, Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel have both been critically-acclaimed AND brought new readers (including, yes, new female readers) onboard.
So I think it's fair to say this isn't JUST a marketing stunt, Marvel actually is trying pretty hard to make good comics, too.
]]>Further reading: Google the phrase "You can't have a Negro." tl;dr it's about the straw that broke the camel's back for EC Comics (widely viewed as the most innovative publisher in comics history, and which the Comics Code Authority set its sites on destroying from day one).
The story's also well-told in The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu, but he gets a few details wrong (his version ends in the oft-told but wrong claim that Mad became a magazine to avoid the Comic Code -- actually, Mad became a magazine because Harvey Kurtzman wanted to run a magazine; avoiding the Code was a happy coincidence).
I've been putting off reading Supergods too. I really should get to it one of these days.
I like Morrison's approach a lot. He writes complex superhero stories without confusing complexity with whining and violence. (Not to say there isn't plenty of those, too...)
]]>I've got an OwnCloud server that I use for filesync, and I think it's got some RSS support -- I might have to look into it.
]]>I tend to be wary of one- and five-star reviews regardless of the product, for much the reasons you describe -- five-star reviews often come from people who've just opened a box and not noticed any obvious defects, while one-star reviews disproportionately come from statistical outliers who had a bad experience with the product; people are more likely to post negative comments about something that made them angry than positive ones about something that made them happy.
Secondly, on your "And the telling clue is that their comments say things like "I had a bad reaction to this book", rather than "this book is bad"" point -- I think linguistic hedges that acknowledge the speaker's own biases are a sign of sophistication. Not to mention a good tool for avoiding conflict in general conversation -- the difference between saying "it is" and saying "it seems to me" in an argument can mean the difference between escalation and a sympathetic dialogue.
Plus, being able to say "I didn't like it but I think it's a fine example of the craft" is a good perspective to have. Plenty of brilliant books can be unpleasant slogs, due to subject matter, presentation, or both. (When I read Toni Morrison's Beloved in college, I wasn't the only person saying "This is a brilliant book I never want to read again"; I think that was nearly everyone else's reaction in the class, including the professor.)
Being able to say "It's not for me but you might like it if you like..." is a must-have skill for a reviewer -- or, for that matter, a salesman, at least if he's a salesman at a small business who expects to deal with the same customer again in the future. You don't want to trash your customer's tastes, but at the same time you don't want to kiss ass and claim to like things you don't actually like because once people catch on then your stated opinion becomes completely worthless.
]]>I'm a superhero fan, and THERE'S a genre dominated by dark-for-the-sake-of-dark. 25 years ago people read Watchmen and decided that rape and murder and sexual dysfunction were the way to go, rather than notice the other elements that made the work brilliant and unique (Alan Moore has said that what Watchmen is really about is that life is governed by millions of tiny coincidences). The American comics market is dominated too heavily by superheroes, and the superhero genre is dominated too heavily by violent grimdark.
I think there are, ultimately, two questions: does the darkness serve the story, and are there too many people telling the same kind of story?
I'm not sure I've kept a close enough eye on the past few years' SF to answer either one definitively. Charlie's work's certainly gone to some darker and more uncomfortable places, both in Fuller Memorandum and in Rule 34 (haven't gotten to Apocalypse Codex yet) -- but I'd certainly say that in both cases the nasty stuff needs to be there, it's essential for the story he's telling. Laundry is, after all, a series about otherworldly horrors (and had some pretty horrific events even in Atrocity Archives), while Rule 34 is speculative fiction with a focus on organized crime and sexual kinks. Pulling punches in that kind of story would have defeated its purpose.
On the other hand, aspirational/utopian SF serves its purpose too, and as you say, we shouldn't have too much of one kind of story.
While I think you're right that things were rough in the 1980's, too, I think there's something to be said for the notion that the general public opinion wasn't as bleak back then. I think Reagan was an awful President, but there's no denying he was a popular one.
Course, when cynics are in the minority, that probably makes them even more cynical.
Don't know, hard to say -- at a guess I'd say there's probably a stronger sense of malaise, generally, in science fiction now than there was in the 1950's, though that certainly doesn't mean things are actually WORSE now than they were in the '50's. (Maybe they are for straight, middle-class white males; there's certainly panic in some quarters on THAT score.)
Hell, I don't know; rambling again. Lots of observations but little unifying theme or conclusion. I can sure talk about what stinks about superhero comics, though.
...ah hell, the conversation's moved into UI design now? Best not get me started on that. (I'm a KDE user. It's got its flaws but it hasn't run headlong into "let's make a 24" monitor with a keyboard and mouse behave the same as a 4" touchscreen phone" syndrome like GNOME, Canonical, MS, and Apple have. ...yet.)
]]>I never played much D&D but I've always had friends who did. (Sure enjoyed the early Dragonlance books as a teen. Speaking to your comment on how it's usually, but not always, a bad idea to turn a D&D campaign into a novel: I think they get progressively worse as Weis and Hickman start writing the novels from scratch; the early books that ARE based on their campaign are the best.)
I DID do the community theatre thing for a number of years, and that helped me both socially and in being able to work my way into someone else's headspace. Plus, after a few years doing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it's become close to impossible to embarrass me.
Well, I'm rambling. It's what I do.
]]>