BRIAN BLESSED APPROVES!

Without voicing a personal opinion on either side of the copyright debate here, I think it's helpful for anyone commenting on this topic to know a bit about how the current situation regarding the costs of scientific publication came into being.

This (admittedly lengthy) article does take a fairly clear position on the debate, but it also does a really excellent job of explaining just how we got to where we are now:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsc...

(Disclaimer: I'm a publicly-funded professional scientist that has published in a range of peer-reviewed journals, some of which required the payment of page charges).

Try using startpage.com instead? Google results, but without the tracking. Unfortunately, it's not one of the alternatives offered in Mobile Safari, but you could just go to their page, or download and install the startpage app instead.

So, the logic behind this new provision apparently goes as follows:

"Before we permit you to become a resident or citizen of the USA and are allowed to live, earn and spend money there, you must demonstrate a history of fiscal responsibility in the USA via your US credit scores.

"Of course, since foreign credit scores will not generally be considered, you must first actually live, earn and spend money in the USA in order to build up your US credit scores."

Who came up with this nonsense? Joseph Heller?

I lived in Finland for more than 5 years, and have a real soft spot for Finns & Finnish culture even now. There's just very little superficial BS involved, & I found that extremely refreshing.

I also agree about the Finnish sense of humo(u)r: Finns can be drily hilarious like no other people on Earth.

And yup: the language is tough. It's really cool, though: it can sound very mellifluous, but someone swearing well in it could frighten a Klingon. It was a big influence on Tolkien's Elvish language, Quenya. The influence on Tolkien of both the Finnish language and the national epic, the Kalevala, is something a lot of Finns are actually very proud of. There's a BBC article about it here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fmagaz...

See, one of the biggest problems I had with TLJ is that the heroes all failed because of basic incompetence, which absolutely wasn't the case in TESB.

In TESB, the heroes do make decisions that cost them, but they all do them for logical reasons, and do the best they can. For example, it could be argued that Luke leaving Dagobah before completing his training was an impetuous, reckless decision, but he knowingly made the choice in order to try to help his friends. Han took a chance and trusted Lando, because it was his least-worst option at the time. All of these were rational, considered choices that may or may not have turned out to be the right long-term course of action from the character's perspective, but they made sense and drove the narrative forward naturally.

The TLJ simply doesn't operate in the same way at all. Holdo specifically opts to keep the people she's just been assigned command of (and who hence don't know her at all) utterly in the dark about her plans and motivations, and she apparently does this *just* to teach Poe a lesson about the chain of command? There's not even a fig-leaf line about increased security concerns about spies on-board or anything, I think. That makes no real sense at all. Poe, Finn and Rose all unilaterally decide to undertake a hare-brained scheme (against direct orders) involving hunting down some slicer they've never previously met who's supposedly the *only* person that can do what they want. Then they don't hire him anyway, and just replace with some random, shifty guy with whom they just so happened to get locked up? And their whole plan immediately falls apart anyway, because they can't even park their ship somewhere sensible? That's just absurd.

From an established "in world" technology perspective, the whole slow fleet chase made no sense either, as did the weirdly-yet-conveniently-inconsistent abilities of Snoke. In essence, everyone in the film was a complete screw-up from their own perspectives, simply because the story the director wanted to tell required them to be: the whole thing was like a game of "Pass The Idiot Ball".

Don't get me wrong: I thought the cinematography and special effects were spectacular. I'm willing to give the Holdo Maneuver a pass because although it potentially causes major problems with canon, it looked really cool. I actually also liked Kelly Marie Tran's onscreen presence a lot (which I'm fairly sure means that I'm not some fedora-wearing Russian bot). However, the direction, plotting and characterization were deeply, deeply flawed. Also, the director's unswerving determination to push his "Let it die, kill it if you have to" agenda for the future direction of "Star Wars" at the clear expense of narrative consistency with the preceding films was inexcusably clumsy. It was suddenly, painfully clear that there was no Grand Plan for the three films after all - something that's since been admitted by the filmmakers.

FWIW, though, I've generally liked or loved all of the other Disney-era "Star Wars" films. TLJ was the first film of the whole series for which, when the house lights came up, I didn't actually even know what the filmmakers thought I was supposed to feel about it. That's not good. For comparison, my initial reaction to my first viewing of TESB was exactly the same as Luke's when first told about his father: the sense of the ground falling away beneath me as a great chasm. It was dramatic, and it was clear.

TLJ is the only "Star Wars" film that I haven't already bought (and I own "Solo", FWIW).

But hey: more power to you if you really liked TLJ. I don't want to take that away from you or anyone else. However, if it's the a foretaste of the long-term direction of "Star Wars", I'll probably mostly just politely be watching it from the sidelines.

I thought the same.

I guess it's impossible to spell "Stasi" in the US without T, S, A...

Since they intend to go Open Source with this, does that effectively mean that anyone with access to sufficient computing power could then use this to cheat at online Go tournaments for money? Are there such things?

PS: Asking for a friend...

You are Ajit Pai & I claim my $5.

So you're actually saying that there's next to nothing good to be said about what MS has done in the last few years?

I so, then I can't argue with that. Windows 10 is an intrusive, invasive piece of spyware with a horrible interface.

These comparison statistics are probably largely irrelevant to the main point of the article. They're much more likely to just be a reflection of how decades of London-centric central government policies have resulted in prolonged neglect of the already-poorer provinces of the UK. This neglect has led to increased poverty, poorer public education, health and healthcare standards.

It may indeed be possible to make a case that such environmental and cultural differences are of much greater comparative significance than local radioactive fallout. However, the way they're used in the summary is almost certainly misleading to those unfamiliar with the wealth gap between London and much of the rest of the UK (particularly Scotland and the north of England). A US analogy would be something like directly comparing (e.g.) Detroit to Manhattan.

Guilty as charged. I even revert the touch-scroll direction and Mail client layout on all my new Macs as soon as I get them. :-)

I don't think that I'm actually opposed to change for the better, but I do seem to have an increasing number of "Old man Yells at Cloud" moments these days. The big issue for me is the increasing impact of the dreaded duo of "form over function" and "change for change's sake". The loss of the (excellent) MagSafe power ports is a good example of that: I know that the new port is a standard one, but I can't believe that Apple couldn't have come up with a variant including a magnetic breakaway. I heard the owner of a new Mac laptop just on Friday lamenting its loss, having recently walked into his own power cable & pulled the computer off the desk.

FWIW, I can't help but suspect that if Jobs were still in charge, Apple would have (e.g.) outdone the moribund Ubuntu phone project and already produced a (probably cubical...) charging base for the iPhone & iPad that could would work as a light desktop, effectively replacing the Mac Mini line. That's the sort of thing that Apple used to do: take an idea that's already been tried & failed at by the rivals (see also tablet computers, early MP3 players, early wireless routers), and re-implement it in a user-friendly way that works seamlessly with their other products.

Your overall point is well made, though: Modern Apple doesn't design their gear to include the options that accommodate grumpy old shell users like me any more. It's a shame, because all I really want is for them to stop taking away the still-useful stuff that they've already done.

Preach.

The new-style keyboard and lack of ports drove this long-time Mac user to opt for an end-of-line MacBook Air over the newer MacBook. I had a Toshiba Portege back in the day, which was the original "thin laptop with a bag o' dongles(TM)", & all that dongly junk was tedious back then as well. Ironically, it was the old 12" MacBook Pro I bought immediately after that that turned me into a Mac user, partly because it had pretty much everything I wanted in one nice, compact box. My work machine's a pre-Touchbar MacBook Pro, & although the lack of an ethernet port on a "Pro" machine is still pretty silly, I can just about tolerate a single dongle (although it's inconvenient: I frequently work in a radio-quiet zone, & we have to keep a range of dongles handy for visitors).

I'm also holding onto my iPhone 6 because of the lack of a headphone socket on the newer models. I don't need even more dongles & adapters in my life. Like the late, great, Douglas Adams, I already have a drawer full of the stupid things.

And lastly, why are the "standard" ports on current iPhones and Macs different? Does Tim Cook want to own that one?

The current range of Apple products are just so disappointing in terms of actual usability.

"It just works." -> "It just doesn't really work any more."

You're referring to some sort of chorded keyboard:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

"We think it's the best Skype we've ever built..."

This statement may even be true, since it's coming from an MS employee. However, it still doesn't change the fact that Skype was better before the MS buyout.