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Talking about video games, I tire of the myth that Australia gets games later than the US because the game companies are a bunch of meanies.

No, it's because they have the climb Mt Bureaucracy to get things imported there because Australia's import laws were made a bunch of paranoid psychos.

No, you cannot make more money by withholding products from customers.  Sega tried that and it backfired horribly.

Mind you, the movie and TV distributors don't seem to have figured that one out yet.  They persist with both staggered release dates in different markets and DVD region coding.

I'm not talking about the audience having a problem.  13 episodes of good stories and good ideas and good writing and good acting is better than 26 episodes of mediocre stuff.

I'm talking about the broadcasters having problems fitting odd-formated shows into their schedules.  When you build your schedule around having 22-26 episodes a season, dealing with 13 (which is a LOT of episodes a season for stuff coming out of the UK, 4 or 6 has been more typical, and Doctor Who has always done this) is something of a problem.  Some broadcasters (I'm looking at YOU, Fox!) also tend to have problems with series that have a definite order that the episodes need to been seen in to make sense.  (Firefly, specifically, doesn't make a lot of sense in the order Fox aired it, particularly with the pilot at the END.)

I don't think broadcasters quite know what to do with Doctor Who, of any era.  The classic form was like a group of loosely related miniseries.  The new form is sort of like a standard sci fi drama, but it doesn't have enough episodes a season to be treated like one.

It seems like the unions miscalculated.  While it is definitely the case that Doctor Who has long been very important to the British as a cultural thing, it does not seem that the BBC considered it all that important, particularly as at this point they had only just started exporting it recently.

Coolest scam I ever ran into was an interview with Direct Energy.

Some of you may have heard of this outfit.  At the time, it had a BBB rating of F, and I suspect that was only because they don't have a rating lower.  (I just checked, it's currently at D+, but with a warning of active government regulatory action against it that was started during the summer.)

I could tell that they were a scam because of the interview questions.  I'm a computer technician and highly experiences help desk agent.  They were asking questions relating to a sales position (which was appears to be an independent contractor position paid commission only, rather than an employee, but I never got so far as finding out if they were going to openly violate the labor code in Ontario when it comes to actually being an independent contractor, which are rather clear about what you CAN'T require of one) when the person who booked my interview had told me that she couldn't print my resume (which means either they were having other system problems that were more important than getting the printers working, or she was lying to me).

Some people wouldn't twig that it's a scam when somebody pulls such a thing.  I'm a bit more on the ball when somebody CLAIMS to have technical problems that are right up my alley, and then tries to hire me for something else.

And with Obama apparently quite proud of what he's helped to do in toppling Qaddafi without putting a single ground forces person in country, he's set himself up for a grand fall when the whole mess comes apart in a general bloodbath once everyone looks around and sees all their most hated enemies right in front of their guns.

It's gong to be a BAD TIME to be in Libya for quite a while.  It's likely to be much worse than in Iraq or Afghanistan since there's no troops present to try and get some kind of ordered process going to create even a semblance of an attempt at a reasonable government.

I guess Obama is doing all he can now before the next election comes up because he's about to have a press conference claiming that he will be taking all troops out of Iraq by the end of the year.

Let's see where this goes. Will post details once details come up.

Given the 'skill' he's shown in the handling of really frickin' HARD international events (and removing your troops from a place where they're kind of a large part of what's keeping various groups of people from trying to slaughter each other has GOT to be one of the worst problems you can have) I expect that if he does that, the whole thing will have long since gone to hell before the election comes up, and this will be seen as his fault for screwing up the withdrawal.

IIRC, this is pretty much the problem that everyone who said going into Iraq was strategically unwise were saying:  How do we get OUT again?

I just realized the article doesn't mention something that ought to be impeachable:

Obama has (despite being presented as the President who would END these kinds of wars) no only NOT gotten the US out of either Afghanistan or Iraq, he's gotten the US into a THIRD war in the Arab world in Libya, and this time he's done it in such a way that he's made it FAR more likely that the whole thing is going to go FOOM! and turn into a blood bath immediately than either of Bush's wars, AND he didn't even make the slightest pretext of getting even the most legally dubious authorization from Congress to do so.

As of today, lots of people are happy that the war against Qaddafi is over (what with him being dead and under what are obviously NOT good circumstances, I mean transporting a high-level prisoner in a soft-skinned vehicle through a crossfire is a suicidal decision in any case, never mind what it says about protecting the prisoner for ANY sort of trial, no matter how much of a phony show job it might be), but there's a great likelihood that a lot of them are celebrating Qaddafi's death and the expected ascendency of their own factions. 

He's also gone and sent troops into a FOURTH war (again without authorization) for the apparent purpose of capturing the leader of one side and turning him over to the International Criminal Court, an institution which Congress has already issued authorization for the use of force against should it attempt to try any US citizens.  (In fact, the desire of the ICC to prosecute this man seems to be the ONLY remaining issue causing the war in question to continue.  EVERYTHING ELSE has apparently had a political solution that is considered adequately satisfactory by both sides.)

I have to agree with Shane on this.  The appropriate method of study for tests is mostly about how you're being tested.

If the testing is going to be about knowing the formulas and you'll fail if you don't know them, then you're going to have to get those formulas down by rote.

If you're going to be tested on how well you understand how to USE the formulas, then going through problem sets is probably going to be helpful.

Physics courses are the sort of thing where it can go either way.  Same with maths.  (Except for statistics, which is rather difficult to do anything with unless you have the relevant tables, and if you're going to have to let the student use the tables, you might as well let them use the whole book.  You can set up a stats test to either force the student to grind through computing stats from a mass of data, which is pointless because that's almost always done by machine and has been for years, or you can have the student devise statistical tests and show what they mean, which is the part of statistics that's actually important.)

They Occupation groups seem to think that they're somehow like the protest groups in the late 60's.

Of course, they don't know that those protesters figured out what they wanted to say BEFORE they started protesting.  Yes, some of it was good, and some of it made no sense whatsoever, but they figured out what they wanted to say BEFORE trying to occupy anything.  (Mind you, rather a lot of them just wanted to not get drafted and have to fight in Vietnam, but that's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to say, especially when it's going the way of drafting you and sending you to fight in Vietnam and you don't even know why the Democrats started sending US troops or why the Republicans want to keep doing it.)

I had gotten the impression it was production staff or something that went on strike that killed Shada mid-production.

It always feels to me like Obama is giving one of those big-toothed grins that Carter was always giving (which is particularly odd as Obama has neither conspicuously large teeth nor a particular propensity to grin).

I also get the distinct impression that Obama is having trouble understanding why his big-toothed-grin-substitute isn't working for him.

They could at least hire "nuns" without absurdly fake boobs, tattoos over 60% of their bodies, and 8 million piercings...

Yes, that would help.

While fine as fetishes go, tattoos and piercings really don't go with the nun thing very well.  At least, not on ALL of them.

Try telling that to the Obama-zombies...

Or to people blaming the Republicans for the Democrats not bothering to pass a budget.

I had a bit of a poke around what's presenting itself as the Occupation group's web site.  They're even more disorganized than they look in the videos, and they don't seem to even grasp the notion that you can't get anywhere unless you know where you're trying to get. 

Looks to me like they're going to eventually peter out with no actual stated goals, just lots of poorly written rhetoric.