Perhaps you should discuss this with the people you are talking about. No one is this thread is demanding increases in asset values or anything like that.

Ok. There are two broad things I didn’t like. The first is that the plot is highly formulaic. I reckon that from the first time we see Julian, it is possible to predict every major plot point from that time all the way to the end of the movie. So then it’s just a matter of when and precisely how the various things will happen. Like obviously he’s going to get drawn into the rebel group, and obviously they’ll have a pregnant woman that he need to protect, and obviously there is going to be a betrayal, and obviously the people closest to him are going to die, and obviously the child will be seen as beacon of hope - etc. Its like the movie is made by snapping together a selection of off-the-shelf general-purpose tropes.

And the second thing I disliked is that several of the conversations seem like they are performed for the viewer rather than for the characters. For example, early in the movie in the car when they are discussing treatment of refugees… It reflected their views and situation pretty well to the viewer, but it made it sound like they’d barely discussed it with each other before - which I did not find plausible. I think ‘real’ people in that circumstance would already be very familiar with the situation and with each others opinion on the situation - and so the the conversation would be different. Another similar example is near the end, talking about when the miscarriages started in the hospital. It sounds like a sharing of an powerful experience, new information, very heart-felt. But it seems to me that since those events were 18 years ago, and were of critical importance to everyone on the planet, I think everyone would have been highly familiar with that kind of account. It would not be a new sharing of information. It would be an extremely well know sequence of events; and so the conversation should have been different. (And at the end, they made a comment about it beings strange living in a world without the sound of children… like, ‘no shit’ - is that a novel thought? After 18 years? It just didn’t feel real to me.)

One other particular scene I disliked was when Jasper sacrificed himself to let the others escape. I just could not believe that Theo et. al would just stand on the hill in plain sight of their pursuers, while Jasper obviously was ready to give his life to allow them to escape. They made no effort to stay hidden or anything. They’re just standing there watching, while their friend gives up his life to protect them and the one hope for humanity… a simple glance from any of the baddies could spell their doom, but they just stand and watch. Like… what the hell are they doing? I feel like the reason they stayed is that so the movie could show the death and their reaction, and avoid having to jump between different characters’ view points. And Jasper starts doing the ‘pull my finger’ thing… which I feel they only did because that kind of thing is basically the only characteristic the movie had managed to build up for Jasper that they could use as an emotional lever…

By contrast, today I watched Das Boot. Which is a much older and less flashy movie. But in Das Boot, the characters only say things that are realistic conversations for people in that situation. And the plot was not so easy to predict, because since it was not a message of hope or anything like that, it was much harder to guess how it might end. And if you aren’t watching the running-time, this makes certain action scenes fair more intense - because they could very well be the end of the movie. There is no ‘plot armour’ for these characters. So… for me, Das Boot is better than Children of Men. (The movies are very different. The only reason I’m comparing them is that I happened to watch them in succession and I thought it might be useful to help illustrate what I was talking about above.)

I see such a large number of these electric motorbikes that I’d started to doubt my understanding of the law. Like, maybe there had been a change that I just didn’t know about. But it turns out that the change I didn’t know about was Morrison undermining the law by messing with the import regulations.

It’s good to have some clarity on that.

To clarify, what I didn’t like about it was not really about it having gaps in the details. I don’t mind that the viewer was not told the cause of the problem for example.

(At this point I started trying to be more specific about what I didn’t like - but I’ve decided to skip that. You liked the movie. That’s good. Enjoying things is good, and I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind!)

Fair point about the positives. Thanks for that.

Firefox is a commercial product. Is it not?

Well, it’s partially a matter of semantics. Perhaps different people have different understandings of the word ‘commercial’. For me, I’d say that Firefox is not something a user pays for. It’s existence is not about making a profit, or strengthening a business, or anything to do with money at all - and therefore it is not a commercial product.

I agree that the engineers should be paid, and that browser development is very difficult. But nevertheless, Firefox historically has not been about maximising a profit - or even making any kind of profit at all. (Although it does seem Mozilla leadership are looking to change that.)

The text you quoted sounds like a reasonable and normal definition of a sale to me. i.e. transferring to another business in exchange for something else of value.

So yeah, Firefox previously promised not to do this, “not ever”, and now they say they need to do sell your personal data “in order to make Firefox commercially viable”.

But hang on a second… Firefox is not a commercial product. So making it ‘commercially viable’ is highly questionable in itself.

It’s a shame that Mozilla’s current leadership is more interested in self-enrichment than in the past. But Firefox is still the very best option by far. I hope that the Ladybird project becomes strong the future, if for no other reason than pressure Firefox into staying good.

I’m no expert, but it seems to me that global politics is growing more and more unstable. China has gradually been becoming more assertive and provocative as they grow in power. The USA has become unreliable and somewhat unpredictable. And I’d say this makes other wars and tensions around the world a more volatile, and it makes it harder for Australia to maintain good relationships.

It doesn’t require magic, or intervention from otherworldly spirits, etc.

Perhaps it is you who failed to see clever anti-humor in the post you are replying to!

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive-humor)

Let’s hope they find out about it at all. Entrenched social media platforms deliberately discourage discussion of alternatives.

Meh. Lemmy is a fairly small community of people who know at least enough about computer and software that they’re willing to push away from main-stream sites like Reddit. It seems kind of obvious that those same people would also be inclined to push away from Windows.

I wouldn’t call it a ‘hard-on’. It’s just a kind of obvious correlation of people’s interests. And no, it’s nothing like 1/3 of the posts. It’s just that you only think about linux when you’re reading one of those posts, and so you only think to mentally tally the posts when you’re actually reading one. It’s a kind of cognitive bias. You could easily check this by just looking at the first few pages of ‘all’ right now. There’s almost no posts about linux there at all.

It says ‘anyone who witnessed the incident or who had footage of the assault’. So perhaps they aren’t interested in sightings outside of that. Perhaps its about gathering sources of evidence for charges rather than finding / identifying the offenders.

Well we are talking about the greatest repository of human knowledge ever created. So we can afford to spend a little on it at least.

I guess one way of looking at it is that it as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to find a set of assumptions to support inaction.

Apparently the perpetrators fled the scene before the police arrived. So your suggestion wasn’t an option in this case.

And when the police do manage to find these people, I can think of a few other things the police might like to try before resorting to killing people.

I sounds like the main reason for switching to a throw was that the bounce was difficult for umpires to do. … which I think is an interesting motivation to arise after such a long time of using the bounce.

Google is an enormous beast. It doesn’t care about you, or me, or the good of anyone. Sometimes its goals happen to align with a common good for awhile - and so good stuff can come from that. But often their goal do not, and they cause harm while crushing any possible alternative path. And as time goes on, less and less of what google does is for the common good.

For that reason, I think it is unwise to support google. Supporting them further entrenches their power, preventing others from contributing.

The smart engineers you spoke of would still be smart engineers with or without google. Google didn’t create them. They can still contribute with or without Google. But Google did direct their efforts to suit Google’s own needs. - Sometimes that’s also good for other people, but often it is not.

In a similar way to how feudalism is people?

I agree with that. But the claim was that capitalism puts profit above all else, not necessarily that individual people do that.