Another vote for Abrams on Star Wars based on his work on Star Trek. As an old person we are truly through the looking glass. :-D

As just a thing independent of any baggage, the new Star Trek is fun. As a Star Trek movie in the context of other Star Trek movies, which it has to be said the inclusion of original Spock invites, it is sort of sad.

Sound familiar? Depends on what angle you're approaching it, and it can be more than one thing. :-)

Glad somebody got it. :-D

I'm a big Trek fan in general, and I LIKED the new Star Trek just fine. But it didn't really feel like Star Trek at all, it frankly felt a lot more like Star Wars.

One of the things I always thought was cool about Star Trek in general was that the crews were mostly made up of pretty ordinary people that didn't have super abilities or anything like that. Just people trying to do the best they could in crazy situations. The new Star Trek is totally the opposite of that - everybody is a young super genius who is the best in their class at something or other. It's no longer a bunch of average people who have learned through experience, you know? Chekov is some kind of super math genius, Uhura can hear crazy signals that nobody else can, Kirk is some kind of Luke Skywalker boy of destiny...

I'm not saying it wasn't fun and good, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I even bought the DVD. But as a fan of the old shows and movies, it's really Star Trek in name only and I totally get why old Trek fans don't like it.

It really could have just been "Space Action Movie" instead of having the Star Trek name. And it still would have been fun.

EDIT: Also I think ol' JJ could probably do a pretty good Star Wars movie based on the Star Trek movie he did. The remark about the same director doing Star Trek and Star Wars though is spot on - it's a weird thing to contemplate. :-D

Like: Donnie Darko, Dumb and Dumber.
Did not like: Forrest Gump, English Patient

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/04/06/js_history.html

I think we mostly agree. Marketing is why it is called JavaScript, which is your point. My point is simply that the Java boom was the impetus for it existing in the first place.

Categories definitely are tough though, especially with how much crossover there is now. We do debate this stuff pretty regularly on staff. Whether we get it right or not is for you guys to decide for sure, but we do think about this stuff. It's just not as easy as it used to be - which is a good thing actually!

I like Elf, Anchorman, and Spirits Within. Don't like the Matrix.

For one particular group of pals, it is There Will Be Blood. I'm in the "love it" camp.

Excellent - the link you provided is exactly what you want to do if concerned about this.

The LANGUAGES have never had anything in common - but it was originally conceived as a portable version of Sun Microsystem's Java. Hence why I said "anymore" - probably dated myself as the old man I am with that though, essentially your point is correct. The similarities really did end there.

Quick PSA - Java and JavaScript are not the same thing, in fact they aren't even related anymore. The only thing they have in common is the letters.

When you bring a site down completely, you absolutely prevent people from doing stuff. You prevent them from accessing the website, which in many cases is the same thing as the store. So I actually don't agree. They are not physically harming people, agree 100% there. But they are definitely preventing people from doing stuff.

The potential "physical damage" to the servers themselves is a little more dubious to me, although it could potentially be costly. But more important is the notion of blocking business.

What I really mean is that I'm not sure that launching a DoS attack against, say, some blog or whitehouse.gov is the same thing as launching one at, say, amazon.com or something.

Obviously there are ways to sniff out DoS attacks and prevent them, just like there are ways in the physical world (hiring security guards or something) to do it, but failure to protect yourself does not necessarily mean you are complicit as a victim of an attack.

It is definitely an interesting approach though.

It is simply not legal to deny people access to a place of business, even in a protest. You can, like, yell at them and stuff and make a big stink, but you can't deny them entry. You can't do it in the physical universe and it seems reasonable to me the same thing should apply online.

That is one way to do it, yeah.

It is an interesting angle. However I'd argue that the reason distributed denial-of-service attacks are not okay is that from a practical standpoint this is the same as physically denying entry to a place of business you are protesting. Which is not legal.

They're games. They're entertainment. If you feel your entertainment is diminished for any reason you can let your wallet do the talking. You don't even have to be rational about it.