" That's the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they're ready for consumption."

If that were really the case then the latest Terminator movie wouldn't have been the box office bomb that it was.

OTOH, he just finished a movie that none of the major studios wanted to do, so perhaps he is expressing how modern Hollywood is reacting to his movies.

Yes, it is poor government regulation.

However, the free market wouldn't have touched this kind of project. You have companies that have bought the baby Bells, who in turn inherited the infrastructure of the original Bell monopoly. Those companies have what is often the only existing telecommunications infrastructure in the area. For another company to compete, like Google tried with their fiber service, means trying to set up a competing infrastructure to something that has been in place for decades. That is just prohibitively expensive and would take years to accomplish.

BTW, a recent article in The Lancet looked at 135,335 individuals from 18 countries over a median time of 7.4 years and they found that a diet high in carbs (as a percentage of total calories) was far more typical in Asia than in the West.

That's nice. You are an n =1. From the article, 2.9% of 4052 people in the study skipped breakfast, which works out to either 117 or 118 people. Some of them might be just like you, but probably not too many.

There might be other factors involved, like culture or the job. Unless the authors control for it, maybe there is something with being a Spanish bank employee that leads to this kind of poor health if you don't eat breakfast?

Until we have a way to mass produce the stuff, all this research is fine and well but you won't be seeing it in products anytime soon. Not saying the research is pointless, just that people shouldn't get too excited about the applications just yet. There are some more fundamental issues that need to be resolved first.

...is published in a journal (in)famous for its lack of a peer review process. Makes complete sense.

It is my training as a toxicologist coming out here, but the term "non-toxic" is nonsense. There is no such thing as non-toxic. Be exposed to enough of anything, including water and oxygen, and it is toxic, even fatally so. The question is "how much is safe". The assumption here is whatever they are using, the amount being used is within the expected maximum tolerable dose for humans. I would start to worry if they are doing this to bottles of baby formula, as what is tolerable for a 60kg adult might not be for a 6kg infant.

"They also argued misleadingly that the bills would have required Web sites to “monitor” what their users upload, conveniently ignoring provisions like the “No Duty to Monitor” section. "

Having just read through HR. 3261 (SOPA), the only mention of "No Duty to Monitor" applies to Payment Network Providers (the people who process credit card charges) and Internet Advertising Services (services that send ads to various websites). There is no "No Duty to Monitor" at all for Internet Sites, Internet Search Engines or Service Providers.

So, no, they were not conveniently ignoring those provisions, because those provisions do not apply to Web sites.

You mean like Russia?

Which means that Lucas and Spielberg are tied at five each for films included in the Registry (unless I have overlooked some).

Lucas: Star Wars, American Graffiti, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Empire Strikes Back, THX 1138
Spielberg: Jaws, ET, Raiders, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler's List

Oddly enough, neither Wikipedia entry for Lucas nor Spielberg makes mention of the inclusion of their films in the National Film Registry.

Electronic Labryrinth: THX 1138 4EB was also added. That was a student film of Lucas' in 1967 while he was at USC.

...it was probably CDC, not the DoD, that did it. CDC is based in a neighboring county (Fulton) and has offices in Dekalb. Definitely not county officials, though. The county police just shoot people.

It was posted here two and a half years ago.