Come on man, I hate "Birdman" as much as the next guy, but you really should give Primer another shot. The time travel scenario in it is literally the only believable one that exists in fiction anywhere. Although 'timecrimes' gets pretty close.
Primer is the greatest time travel movie ever made. It's also the only 'hard sci-fi' movie that's so far been talked about in this thread that actually manages to have characters and a story.
A fair judgement, but maybe not a fair conclusion. It's definitely not 'terrible', but it did undermine its own moral high ground. There's a heartbreaking scene in which one of the aliens attempts to comfort his son, by pointing at the awful photograph of endless refugee tents and wondering if 'this will be our one'. Even if the film sits on shaky ground, that scene alone elevates it above 'terrible'.
Aliens is the greatest action movie ever made, bar none, and features the best kickass female character in cinema, bar none. It is peerless.
What is great about The Martian....
Whereas The Martian is a boring movie made of probably the most boring book I have ever read.
That's what science fiction is about, not blasters and bugs.
The Martian fails appallingly at the 'fiction' part of 'science fiction', which is to say, it fails to tell a compelling story. Whereas Aliens tells a story of greed, of loss (Ripley loses her daughter to old age) of redemption (she finds, and saves Newt, who just happens to be same same age as her lost daughter), of inexperience in the face of terror, of promises kept and broken (Newt : "I knew you'd come"), of male vs. female bravado ('have you ever been mistaken for a man / no, have you?').
Orbit doesn't work like that. You don't boost your spaceship upwards, you accelerate it to make it faster. When it's going faster, it ends up in a higher orbit, due to the fact that an orbit really means that you're going so fast that by the time you've hit the ground, the ground isn't there anymore. As soon as you stop accelerating it, it starts slowing down again, and the orbital height starts falling again. Thus the graph is really a graph of velocity, and it's behaving exactly as you would expect it to.
No offence taken. But this was in the UK, not the US, where up until yesterday shooting people armed with a knife wasn't common practise. Or maybe it is now, I haven't lived there in a while.
Even that response doesn't make any sense, and is exactly the kind of cost that terrorists - to the extent that they even exist as a coherent force - want to visit upon their targets. What good would barriers have done? They'll just drive down a different street next time, it's not like London is suffering from a shortage of sidewalks crowded with pedestrians with a couple of lanes of traffic down the middle.
...they shouldn't have shot him dead then? He was only armed with a knife at that point, and while clearly an extremely dangerous and murderous person, didn't actually need to have been shot three times in the chest in order to stop him.
I'm not suggesting that the police officer who fired on him acted in anything other than the way he was trained to, but if he was still alive, we could have asked him what on earth he thought he was up to. I'd expect that he'd just turn out to be a nutcase, who would have found some other reason to kill people randomly, if he hadn't have found radical Islam first.
but it may not be unreasonable to limit cash to petty-cash levels.
You're talking about people's daily lives. It is unreasonable. I suggest that you talk to people on welfare before you make assumptions about how they'd be happy living their (already very limited) lives.
They believe more in the 'love & embracing' of the downtrodden, meek, weak etc.
That'll explain how the so-called 'Christian Right' are so into welfare, and women's reproductive rights. I guess love and embracing means different things to different people.
I'd love to see your cites and stats re "police standoffs gone wrong" in 2016.
According to the Washington Post, 963 people were killed last year in the U.S by police. I filtered that down to people that had guns, in order to kinda hit your 'standoff' thing, and got 518 people. I assume that if someone has been killed, then it's a standoff 'gone wrong', but I suppose there's no clear definition of what it means for a standoff to 'go wrong'. You might argue that if the bad guy got killed, maybe the standoff went right, so let's instead use the number of police killed in action. That's 46 officers for the year 2016, according to the BBC.
Now, how many people were killed by islamic terrorists in 2016 that arrived here by plane from one of the 'banned' countries?
It's none, isn't it? There were terrorist attacks for sure, but Omar Mateen was 'self-radicalised' and was from New York, Dahir Ahmed Adan was from Somali (the country is on the list), but he didn't kill anyone, Ahmad Khan Rahami was from Afganistan (not on the list) and didn't kill anyone, and Abdul Razak Ali Artan (also from Somali) also didn't kill anyone. Names from here.
So, you are more likely to be a police officer killed in the line of duty, than by a terrorist that's arrived from one of the banned countries.
Furthermore, as you no doubt very well know, Trump himself has publicly stated on more than one occasion that the ban is about religion. This is why it has been struck down in the courts, because there is no other basis for his choices. There's certainly no public safety basis, that's for sure.
This is why I have been for replacing welfare-to-bank-account with a credit card like system where the money isn't capable of being withdrawn from, just spent.
That would achieve nothing, other than making people on welfare's life even more miserable than it already is. You might even drive some people to hate the system enough to want to blow it up...
So, it's not just one. And he's completely right in every point. As has been pointed out elsewhere, since this isn't about public safety, it must be about something else. So, if you crack down on laptops from countries that you don't really care about, you now have more of an excuse to thoroughly search laptops from countries that you do. The countries that aren't on this list are the ones we should be talking about.
None of this makes any sense. Buses, and trains, also seem like pretty good terrorist targets, as do shopping malls, busy markets, schools, universities, etc etc.
It's certainly not about public safety, which means it must be about something else. Some vast conspiracy, I expect.
You have to open the laptop in question up too, and this all costs money. Contrary to popular belief, it's not the case that "even if you save one life" any cost is justified. Of course, if the baggage does contain a bomb inside a laptop, it would probably be set up to go off if you (say) turn the device on, in which case you need a full bomb disposal team, and the only safe way is a controlled explosion. You'll have to evacuate the airport, because it's not safe to move the laptop to a safe area, and you'll presumably end up doing significant damage to the baggage handling area too.
You're slightly confused about what 'left wing' means.
You're also very strangely upset about the teen magazine CoverGirl having a boy on the cover. I don't really want to try to understand why, but you probably should.
You're right of course. But there's a big advantage to bringing a box home that just works, and plays games, and that's all. They work in a lounge context, they're fairly quiet, they turn on really fast, the software is specifically designed to be used with a controller, pairing controllers works really well. Etc etc.
Specs are very far from the whole story. No-one really cares about them. PS one games are still pretty fun to play, even though the resolution is awful.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on man, I hate "Birdman" as much as the next guy, but you really should give Primer another shot. The time travel scenario in it is literally the only believable one that exists in fiction anywhere. Although 'timecrimes' gets pretty close.
Primer is the greatest time travel movie ever made. It's also the only 'hard sci-fi' movie that's so far been talked about in this thread that actually manages to have characters and a story.
A fair judgement, but maybe not a fair conclusion. It's definitely not 'terrible', but it did undermine its own moral high ground. There's a heartbreaking scene in which one of the aliens attempts to comfort his son, by pointing at the awful photograph of endless refugee tents and wondering if 'this will be our one'. Even if the film sits on shaky ground, that scene alone elevates it above 'terrible'.
No, the alien language does fundamentally alter the protagonists experience of linear time. Did you even watch it?
Really? The book must be overwhelmed by the stuff then, because the film is almost completely full of it.
All these will be forgotten, because The Martian is straight-up terrible.
Alien 2 was pretty good
Aliens is the greatest action movie ever made, bar none, and features the best kickass female character in cinema, bar none. It is peerless.
What is great about The Martian....
Whereas The Martian is a boring movie made of probably the most boring book I have ever read.
That's what science fiction is about, not blasters and bugs.
The Martian fails appallingly at the 'fiction' part of 'science fiction', which is to say, it fails to tell a compelling story. Whereas Aliens tells a story of greed, of loss (Ripley loses her daughter to old age) of redemption (she finds, and saves Newt, who just happens to be same same age as her lost daughter), of inexperience in the face of terror, of promises kept and broken (Newt : "I knew you'd come"), of male vs. female bravado ('have you ever been mistaken for a man / no, have you?').
Nothing else has ever even come close.
Orbit doesn't work like that. You don't boost your spaceship upwards, you accelerate it to make it faster. When it's going faster, it ends up in a higher orbit, due to the fact that an orbit really means that you're going so fast that by the time you've hit the ground, the ground isn't there anymore. As soon as you stop accelerating it, it starts slowing down again, and the orbital height starts falling again. Thus the graph is really a graph of velocity, and it's behaving exactly as you would expect it to.
No offence taken. But this was in the UK, not the US, where up until yesterday shooting people armed with a knife wasn't common practise. Or maybe it is now, I haven't lived there in a while.
Even that response doesn't make any sense, and is exactly the kind of cost that terrorists - to the extent that they even exist as a coherent force - want to visit upon their targets. What good would barriers have done? They'll just drive down a different street next time, it's not like London is suffering from a shortage of sidewalks crowded with pedestrians with a couple of lanes of traffic down the middle.
...they shouldn't have shot him dead then? He was only armed with a knife at that point, and while clearly an extremely dangerous and murderous person, didn't actually need to have been shot three times in the chest in order to stop him.
I'm not suggesting that the police officer who fired on him acted in anything other than the way he was trained to, but if he was still alive, we could have asked him what on earth he thought he was up to. I'd expect that he'd just turn out to be a nutcase, who would have found some other reason to kill people randomly, if he hadn't have found radical Islam first.
but it may not be unreasonable to limit cash to petty-cash levels.
You're talking about people's daily lives. It is unreasonable. I suggest that you talk to people on welfare before you make assumptions about how they'd be happy living their (already very limited) lives.
They believe more in the 'love & embracing' of the downtrodden, meek, weak etc.
That'll explain how the so-called 'Christian Right' are so into welfare, and women's reproductive rights. I guess love and embracing means different things to different people.
Intent is a very, very large component of law.
I'd love to see your cites and stats re "police standoffs gone wrong" in 2016.
According to the Washington Post, 963 people were killed last year in the U.S by police. I filtered that down to people that had guns, in order to kinda hit your 'standoff' thing, and got 518 people. I assume that if someone has been killed, then it's a standoff 'gone wrong', but I suppose there's no clear definition of what it means for a standoff to 'go wrong'. You might argue that if the bad guy got killed, maybe the standoff went right, so let's instead use the number of police killed in action. That's 46 officers for the year 2016, according to the BBC.
Now, how many people were killed by islamic terrorists in 2016 that arrived here by plane from one of the 'banned' countries?
It's none, isn't it? There were terrorist attacks for sure, but Omar Mateen was 'self-radicalised' and was from New York, Dahir Ahmed Adan was from Somali (the country is on the list), but he didn't kill anyone, Ahmad Khan Rahami was from Afganistan (not on the list) and didn't kill anyone, and Abdul Razak Ali Artan (also from Somali) also didn't kill anyone. Names from here.
So, you are more likely to be a police officer killed in the line of duty, than by a terrorist that's arrived from one of the banned countries.
Furthermore, as you no doubt very well know, Trump himself has publicly stated on more than one occasion that the ban is about religion. This is why it has been struck down in the courts, because there is no other basis for his choices. There's certainly no public safety basis, that's for sure.
This is why I have been for replacing welfare-to-bank-account with a credit card like system where the money isn't capable of being withdrawn from, just spent.
That would achieve nothing, other than making people on welfare's life even more miserable than it already is. You might even drive some people to hate the system enough to want to blow it up...
He said
multiple suitcase sized bombs
So, it's not just one. And he's completely right in every point. As has been pointed out elsewhere, since this isn't about public safety, it must be about something else. So, if you crack down on laptops from countries that you don't really care about, you now have more of an excuse to thoroughly search laptops from countries that you do. The countries that aren't on this list are the ones we should be talking about.
None of this makes any sense. Buses, and trains, also seem like pretty good terrorist targets, as do shopping malls, busy markets, schools, universities, etc etc.
It's certainly not about public safety, which means it must be about something else. Some vast conspiracy, I expect.
You have to open the laptop in question up too, and this all costs money. Contrary to popular belief, it's not the case that "even if you save one life" any cost is justified. Of course, if the baggage does contain a bomb inside a laptop, it would probably be set up to go off if you (say) turn the device on, in which case you need a full bomb disposal team, and the only safe way is a controlled explosion. You'll have to evacuate the airport, because it's not safe to move the laptop to a safe area, and you'll presumably end up doing significant damage to the baggage handling area too.
So false positives are also a very big concern.
Open Classroom schools of the 1970s
Look out. They're bringing those back over here in NZ. It's a total farce. One disruptive child can bring the whole place to its knees.
You're slightly confused about what 'left wing' means.
You're also very strangely upset about the teen magazine CoverGirl having a boy on the cover. I don't really want to try to understand why, but you probably should.
It may be a synopsis, but it sure ain't brief.
Make a movie of Riddley Walker. I dare them.
You're right of course. But there's a big advantage to bringing a box home that just works, and plays games, and that's all. They work in a lounge context, they're fairly quiet, they turn on really fast, the software is specifically designed to be used with a controller, pairing controllers works really well. Etc etc.
Specs are very far from the whole story. No-one really cares about them. PS one games are still pretty fun to play, even though the resolution is awful.
So his point is that pointless communication is pointless?
There's irony in that, somewhere.