While 1984 was disappointing in many ways, the post-sex scene, complete with nudity, was so dour, so grim, that it truly stated the sense of the film.

Yes, snarking indeed.

For less snarking the thing is clear: if Snowden can be brought within US jurisdiction again then he should be prosecuted. To the full extent of the law. I'm sure a law can be made to fit. Al Capone did his time for tax evasion.

Furthermore, he should be prosecuted. Even if he has done the people of the United States a great favour in providing the information he has.

If he is not prosecuted (or at least, actively pursued for prosecution) then the message to all with security clearance is: you are entitled to make your own personal judgement on your own personal sense of right and and wrong whether you'll spill all to some newspaper report.

Untenable.

I hate with every fibre of my being the concept of unpaid work in a for-profit organisation. But just because I don't like something doesn't mean that it should be prohibited.

This one comes down to an issue of whether the work was misrepresented. If the plaintiffs undertook the work in the reasonable (especially if stated or implied by the respondent)  expectation of training and useful experience, then I can see their action and the judge's decision as being a just correction of a wrong. If Fox Searchlight made clear what their duties would entail beforehand, then the company would be the wronged party here.

But how much is this due to workplace regulation?

With minimum wage laws, you can't have a super low paid trial period that might suit everyone. It's either full pay or nothing, and now 'nothing' is being prohibited.

Radical deregulation of labour markets would be the best solution.

If  the 'legal definition of treason' is that 'he provided aid and comfort to those waging war against the United States', then clearly he is guilty of treason. After all, who could doubt that The Guardian newspaper is anything other than a body waging war against the US?

Rob Long: you are right. It is the perfect analogy. And yes, he really did burn the spaghetti.

I kind of like the TV adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand. Aside from the weak special effects. Not as good as the novel (even less so than the expanded version), but amazingly good for a TV miniseries encompassing big themes.

To add to the refutation: The Puppet Masters. From the scriptwriter's essay on this fiasco:

So of the seven great sequences of the book, maybe two and a half of them got up on screen in some form. Not a very impressive score, and it was a horrendous fight to get even that. I've come to believe that making a film is like a massive version of throwing a dinner party -- you invite a lot of people and hope that it turns out good, but you can't really control it. And after everyone has left and you've got this big mess, you wonder if all the work was worth it, why you went to all the trouble.

Hummphhh! It's Autumn here and getting cold.

The Danish winner of this most recent Eurovision struck me as, well, Abba-esque. Except not as good.

Australia has been the salvation of a couple of groups over the years. Abba amongst them. The Swedes apparently considered commercial pop,  regardless of its considerable musical merit, beneath them and so disdained Abba. I kind of went off Abba when 'Fernando' was number one on the Australian charts for fourteen bloody weeks in a row! It became a bit tedious. Apparently the single sold 720,000 copies in Australia, which must be some kind of international record. That would mean that some 5.2% of the population bought a copy.

Everyone is entitled to natural justice. That Ariel Castro guy will, in due course, be entitled to challenge what witnesses say about him in his trial. Even though he is the lowest of lowlifes we  don't dispute this right.

Holder was accused of something. Regardless of what we think about him, even if we think that every word he utters is a lie, he should share that right to respond. Issa did not permit that.

Had Holder not responded, the record could have been read as him acquiescing in Issa's characterisation.

As always, reverse the situation. A Republican administration official is being grilled by a Democrat in a House Hearing. The Democrat assigns objectionable motives to the official. The official should be entitled to respond. 

I'm with Tom Kirkwold on this one. In these kinds of inquisitions the inquisitor is the one with the power. It behoves them not to put words into a witness' mouth, not to lay a charge without allowing the witness to respond.

After Holder's answer, Issa accused him of having nefarious purpose and then tried to move on. Perhaps his accusation was right, but how can it be just to label the man in public, before lawmakers and the TV cameras, and then use your power to stop him from responding to the accusation?

Issa was the unfair, unjust one in this case. Just because Holder may as Attorney General make a great partisan hack doesn't justify Issa's actions.

Blues Brothers: 'We got both kinds [of music]: country and western!'

Most polygamous families are motivated by religious faith, such as fundamentalist Mormonism or Islam, and as long as all parties involved are adults, legally able to sign marriage contracts, there is no constitutional reason why they shouldn’t be able to express that faith in their marriages. (My emphasis.)

Would that not suggest that the State should recognise marriage contracts as they are entered into? That would involve respecting the 'till death do us part' bit, rather than the State, as it has, arbitrarily overriding wholesale the terms these contracts.

Hmmpphhh. I got 9/10 on the grammar one ... intentionally. The first question was about putting the stop inside or outside the quotation marks, and I insist that it belongs inside only if you know that the stop was there in the original. Convention be damned when it leads to inaccuracy!

This is a graphic I made twenty years ago for my letterhead paper (ah, back when we used paper!), primarily because I was reviewing some graphics software and a real-world project made a decent test.

That software was Micrografx Designer, which for a long time was the oldest software on my system (the version I was using was Copyright 1995 -- I upgraded a couple of times after doing the review.)

Sadly, when I upgraded to Win7 this year from WinXP, it proved to be no longer compatible. (Likewise, my ancient Adobe PageMaker carked it under Windows 7, but the amazing CoolEdit 2000 still works!). I had to pull out a very elderly Toshiba notebook which has XP installed, loaded up Designer and export the graphic at high res to a couple of different formats so I can continue to use it in the future.

I thought it was a sketch of George Harrison, circa Sgt Pepper's days.