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I think there's three main points here:

(1) The availability of shows online legally and illegally is what has encouraged people to invest in deeper storylines that build over time rather than episode to episode sitcom with little continuity. The pilot model and short term nature of these shows comes from a different era where there wasn't that same availability to catch up on a show you missed. As a result, people were reluctant to get overly involved in a storyline, nowadays it's the opposite.

(2) I think cable companies are always going to struggle to embrace video on demand because their advertising agreements as a major source of revenue (compared to subscriptions for Netflix) require them to stretch out the broadcast of the show. I'd wager that as an ad sponsor, the value of being able to reinforce a brand weekly as a opposed to dozens of times over short several day binge weekend is much larger.

(3) US TV tends to be based on very short term contracts and consequently short term narratives and story arcs. This becomes particularly evident where shows that never expected to make it to their 4th or 5th season see characters acting irrational and appearing to exhibit multiple personality disorder as writers try to inject drama into underdeveloped characters. You can see the lack of long term planning, and the writing looks like it's been done episode to episode, with the result being a mess. I'd say that this was a big issue with Lost and Heroes (subjectively speaking).

Comparatively, I would argue the success of something like Game of Thrones is partly attributed to a ready-made long term narrative from the source material which avoids these usual issues. In the case of House of Cards, they not only had the UK version to base it on and the additional flexibility that Netflix provided and I'm sure these were major contributing factors to the strength of the show.

This has to be the most boring "world's best" video I've seen. Not that the guy isn't super-talented, I get that, but it's so technical that I don't understand it.

Half the time it looks like he's knotting and flipping the string around more than the yo-yo. I was expecting a yo-yo flying around at super speeds / arcs while the guy was leaping around like a ninja or something.

Um, well, if that's your only complaint . . Wings can actually be useful for a ship that does both atmosphere and space flight. Like the shuttle. It has wings. And it's a space ship . . . of sorts.

Let's see . . . Lasers. Yeah, we've already had lasers debunked as a weapon in space. Unless there's some breakthrough later on. But, that said, it wouldn't be visible as there's no atmosphere to reflect it back to us. It would be traveling at the speed of light.

Explosions would be limited to the amount of oxygen in the ship being destroyed. They wouldn't create sonic waves or sound, or cause the nearby camera to rattle.

Ships wouldn't fly in arcs. That's atmosphere. In space, a ship can turn 180° and still be going the same direction. Babylon 5 is a good example of newtonian physics in action while in space.

Humans wouldn't be flying small ships. It'd kill us. Literally. Unless we have inertial dampeners like in Star Trek, making those turns and twists would destroy our bodies. Just ask a pilot.

Lastly, anyone advanced enough to do FTL and navigate massive star clusters with pinpoint precision who DOESN'T have a targeting system that can predict a ships movements and then fire a at speed of light weapon and destroy it, well, failed somewhere.

Not to mention, we'd use missiles that would self-destruct. Fire a physical projectile at near speed of light velocities and it not hit it target? Well, you may have just fired a bullet that would take out your space base in 1,000 years. It's be fruitless, require tons of energy and end up killing yourself with your own bullet.

But I'm glad we focused on wings. The only thing that has a real legitimate use in space travel.

If that was the US there would be arcing streams of electricity dancing across the various cars due to all the taser fire.

I'm an electrician, so I can tell you what he did could have caused an arc flash. They are very dangerous and can cause damage on that scale easily. I have experienced one first hand (on a higher voltage) and ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital to be treated for first degree burns to my face, neck and hands

It's all about potential difference. Electricity will normally arc about 1cm for every 1000 volts of potential difference (ground vs live). Usually the lines running to your house would be 220v (or 110v in some places), and insulated, so the critter is quite safe as long as he doesn't actually chew through the wire while standing somewhere grounded.

High voltage transmission lines are quite safe for birds to sit on, because although they might be 10,000v or 100,000 volts potential with respect to the ground, the bird is sitting on the wire and has a potential of 0 with respect to that wire.

So, back to these guys. Their outfits are protective, containing conductive material so the electricity will flow around and not through the worker, but as you can hear they were still getting quite hot. Usually line inspectors would have a conductive hook to throw over the line to bring their bucket up to the same potential as the line, the fact that they haven't done so is most likely precisely so they can make these arcs.

From the length of the arcs, perhaps this was a 33kV transmission line? I doubt they would have been quite so cavalier with a 110kV one.

Two seconds on google and it confirms the arrested man is correct. You can carry a rifle without a license and within plain view of the public - loaded and ready to go - as long as you don't carry it in a manner to purposefully cause alarm.

At 3:00 mark - the police officer retrieves the .45 from his pocket and arcs the barrel across the arrested's torso and the back of his head.

YouTube description:

According to the pilot-in-command (PIC), he was performing autorotations at the lower part of the main rotor rpm green arc in part due to weight considerations. Upon entering the accident autorotation, he maintained an airspeed between 85-90 knots in the hope that extra speed would allow a more aggressive deceleration flare prior to touchdown, which should in turn further slow the rate of descent and forward speed. The helicopter's rate of descent was high, and as the PIC turned the helicopter onto the runway heading it was apparent to him that the rate of descent was excessive and that he was too low to execute either a proper deceleration flare or perform a power recovery. He attempted to level the helicopter as much as possible prior to impact to minimize the damage to the helicopter and prevent injury. The helicopter landed hard with the left skid contacting the runway first. The left skid collapsed, damaging the outboard landing gear damper attachment structure. The helicopter slid about 100 yards before coming to a stop. According to the manufacturer, the main rotor rpm range is 90 percent to 106.4 percent. At the helicopter's weight and the density altitude on the day of the accident, the main rotor rpm during the autorotation should have been above the 106.4 percent limit (red line), requiring the pilot to increase collective pitch to maintain the rotor rpm within limits. Performing autorotations at the lower part of the green arc provides less availability of rotor energy to perform an autorotation landing. The pilot should have recognized that he was not achieving the required main rotor rpm for the autorotations and terminated the maneuvers. The helicopter was within weight and balance limits.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:

The pilot's failure to maintain adequate main rotor rpm during an autorotation, which resulted in a hard landing.

Nope, most people have two creases that arc away from each other in the middle, like this.

I think we're talking about quantum mechanics here and there are aspects there which aren't completely deterministic, or if they are then the information we need to predict what will happen is hidden to us. I suppose its a question of how much impact these quantum phenomena have on our decision making.

I'm not sure which is worse. Is the arc of my life as predicable as the orbit of the planets? Or is there a version of me somewhere that didn't make my mistakes just out of pure chance? Lucky sod.

Heres a video describing the Many Worlds interpretation as well as some of the others. http://youtu.be/ZacggH9wB7Y

Anybody been playing Bioshock Infinite?

I like that plasma sound.

Good thing there were no tourists along the way. I notice that they put themselves in dangerous predicaments in order to get a good snap shot, and would of for sure wanted to stand by the plasma arc to get a picture.

I think programming would be a good thing to teach elementary aged kids, but not as a means toward making them programmers or software engineers. Rather it should be a tool used to teach general problem solving techniques. I haven't used any seriously, but I have seen some clever learning 'languages' that involve dragging and dropping images of procedures or actions, and then connecting them up to make a program that does something.(Scratch, I believe is a popular example). I think this is good stuff. Kids that find it particularly satisfying, should be given the option to move on to more traditional programming languages and follow that course of study.

Personally, I love programming. I get a huge kick out of it, and even when it's going badly, I'm still enjoying myself despite the frustration. I think of it as "building machines out of ideas," which is awesome. This is hardly true of everyone (even among many of my former Computer Engineering classmates who were just there because it's a solid-choice, job-prospect wise), and I definitely don't think it should be pushed as some sort of curriculum requirement.

Probably like most people in the field, I started out when I was 11 or 12 wanting to write video games, so taught myself C and assembler(which was necessary at the time). The desire to write video games faded before too long, but my love of programming continued on. This was all extra-curricicular, though, and actually in many ways was detrimental to my other studies, which I found tremendously boring. Had I been given the option earlier to follow a CS/SE/CE type curriculum primarily, I probably would have had a much happier early-schooling experience.

I understand schools in the UK tend to follow a more vocational educational arc, whereby you specialize earlier. I find the pigeonholing nature of that a little concerning (so far as I understand it), but it's better than everybody getting the same bland, little-bit-of-everything approach US public schools use.

Your video, Iron Man Arc Reactor Proposal, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.