In his findings of fact, Jackson said there are no current products that pose a competitive threat to Microsoft 's (MSFT) Windows operating system, and that no such products are on the horizon.
Anything that RHIC can do has already been done many times by Mother Nature without dire consequences.
Fortunately, nature has been doing just these sorts of experiments planned at RHIC for a long time and the universe is just fine.
Umm... I'm sure the universe itself didn't suffer dire consequences, but then, what's another black hole to the universe?
I think the point is that while a black hole or two might not devistate the universe as a whole, it would be bad for any populated planets in the area.
They're trying to strongarm me into using AIM, instead of my preferred ICQ.
Mozilla will include jabber (http://www.jabber.org) which lets you IM to people on AIM, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo, etc.
Development for Jabber is totally open source, as is a lot of the other "add-ons" people are bashing mozilla for "wasting time" on. That is, the IRC client, telnet client, etc. They're all stuff OTHER THIRD PARTIES have put together. W -------------------
Dox & source included. Enjoy, W -------------------
Re:AWESOME!! - ("Our Dumb Century" is too)
on
Return of The Onion
·
· Score: 1
What Monty Python is to television/film, the onion is to the Web.
If you haven't read their book called "OUR DUMB CENTURY", it's a great way to review the last 100 years and remember all that's happened in a way that's much more entertaining than a jr. college american history class.
April 5th, 1999 the New Yorker magazine ran a story about the NSA's campaign (using the UN's inspection people as a cover) against Sadaam Hussain during one of the (many) Clinton bombings:
"The encryption system on Saddam's telephones, made in Sweden, was as sophisticated as any on the international market. The phones had a series of channels, and on each channel were algorithms that chopped the signals into hundreds of bits as the channesl were switched." (p. 32)
"Early in the spring of 1998....the algorithms were unscarambled, and Saddam's most closely protected communications were suddenly pouring into UNSCOM"" (p. 32)
And more...
"In March of 1998, a high-tech team from the National Security Agency. which is responsible for American communications intellegence, flew to Bahrain to revew the telephone intercepts. One official recalls that once the intercepts had been decrypted and transalted the Americans told themselves, "Here's the best intellegence that we ever had!" (p. 35)
"Then in April of 1998, operational control of the Saddam intercepts shifted to one of America's least publicized intellegence unites, the Special Collection Service. The S.C.S., which is jointly operated by teh C.I.A. and the N.S.A. is responsible for, among other things, deploying highly trained teams of electronics specialists in sensitive areas around the world to monitor diplomatic and other kinds of communications. Its operations are often run from secure sites inside American embassies." (p. 35)
All this makes me really suspicious of our bombing of the Chinese embassy-- what that was really about... And also-- it doesn't seem like there's too much the NSA *can't* crack if they want to...
I recommend that article, btw, it was pretty interesting and talked about a lot of sigint stuff in a suprisingly frank way. W -------------------
the most recent iteration of its NT operating system is crash-proof in 99.9% of computing situations
I don't get how you measure 99.9% stability of "computer situaations"? (I hope this doesn't mean one out of every 999 instructions crash the machine...)
Hmmm. This suggests that one out of a thousand users will have Win2k crash, doesn't it? So if they sell a million copies, that's 10,000 angry and unhappy customers who will experience the blue screen o' death... Great.
Not to start up the whole hacker/cracker thing, but even in america I've long heard the term "cracker" to refer to someone who cracks a game's protection ("cracked by xxxx"), rather than someone who hacks into systems. Apparently the old school "hackers" are partially successful in getting their word back, but I dunno...
I regularly skip "windbag" posts. Thoughtful discussion is great, but when people post long, boring repetitious posts, well, I find that I just tend to pass them. We need to encourage people to post shorter, succinct posts, not longer ones. I don't know, maybe it's the intimidating length and mass of multiple paragraphs that gets me; when there are 200+ posts and replies to wade through on a particular subject, often it is the succinct one liner that cuts through the rhetoric, peircing through the tangle of words like a... a.. a big..umm....
(Aww hell, I was going to make my point by going on and on about this for four paragraphs, but I just don't have the heart.)
Jabber's supposed to be working on a chat/internet presence type program that's cross platform AND supports all the popular chat protocols, including IRC, ICQ, PAL, and AIM (lots of three letter acronyms there...)
Don't know what's going on with this, but a few months back I read a ton in their mailing list and it looked pretty cool...
If you're talking about the Cantina song that's a parody of the Copa-Cobana, his name is Mark Davis. He also did a song called "The Phantom Medley" which I guess is getting airplay on Dr. Demento.
My take on the Weird Al song-- Pretty lame. At least "Yoda" had some jokes and some energy behind it.
they didn't really say much of anything about his technical innovations.
Like remember six months ago when Microsoft was puffing itself up over that "font smoothing" technology it "invented" called (I think) ClearText...
I haven't heard anything about it since it was pointed out on SlashDot that "prior art" existed using the same technique years earlier on the Apple II...
And let's see... who invented it first? -------------------
I recall reading on Slashdot maybe a year back that the 150 million deal was an under-the-table type agreement having to do with a Quicktime-related lawsuit Apple was going to file (or had filed).
If I remember right, it had to do with either quicktime code appearing in microsoft products, or maybe something about microsoft making it so that quicktime movies wouldn't play well in Windows...
Haven't seen _Pirates_ yet, but just wanna reminisce just 1 sec about the late 70s/early 80s, being about 10 years old, using my friend's Apple II, and knowing my life would never be the same. I'd later get a Franklin Ace 1000 (Apple II clone w/lower case & 64k!!) and that was it, I was hooked. Jobs may have been running the business, but to us kids "Woz" WAS Apple.
Woz had an attitude which, I can't fully say how, sublimated itself into my young conciousness. He was a cool, almost fatherly role model who set an example of what it meant to do the "Right Thing"... A crazy, bearded silicon Jedi Knight, a Wizard...I'll never forget going to the computer store to check out the IIgs "Woz" limited edition and seeing his handwriting...thinking "how cool!"
Oh, and YES, who can forget (in no particular order) Locksmith, Dalton's Disk Disintigrator, The Beagle Bros., H-Wings in Sneakers, The Novation Apple Cat, Castle Wolfenstein, 80-column cards, GBBS, Ruski Duck, Cat-Fur, G-files, Space Eggs, The Wizard and the Princess, peeks & pokes, "cracked by" splash screens, Ascii Express, Lemonade Stand in lo-res, call -151, 300/202/212, tape drives... ah, those were the days.
The thing I thought of recently is that given Moore's law, eventually even all the long keylength stuff we're using to encrypt stuff is going to be crackable... And that's assuming someone like the NSA doesn't already have a crack, or some other weakness isn't discovered sooner.
So...don't post anything securely on Usenet or any other archived public place that you don't want people reading in ten years (in case a security hole is revealed at a later date).
W
PS - It'll be fun to go back say in 2010 and crack all those PGP'd messages from 1995 and see what people were saying on Usenet and in other public places when they thought it was "safe"...
I was thinking the other day it would be pretty ironic if NSA were using a distributed project on the Internet to get people to unknowingly do their Eschelon dirtywork...
With 500,000 users presently involved, that's a lot of passwords potentially being cracked:)
I could add way more to this list, but it seems to get at a lot of good points.
What a letdown this movie was. Unpolished story, retarded humor, annoying characters, bland dialogue, cheesy cameos, horrible acting, over-reliance on coincidences....where was the magic, the wit, the brilliance, the feeling of "family", of adventure, of danger, of mystery?
America seems to be trying to convince themselves that it was good.
The Emporer was wearing no clothes, and today my heart is broken. W
----- Found this list on Film Threat (www.filmthreat.com)
100 UNFORGIVABLE THINGS ABOUT EPISODE I *** WARNING: MEGA SPOILERS BELOW! *** 1. The Midi-chlorian explanation 2. The Virgin Shmi and the "Immaculate Conception" of Anakin 3. Concept of Jar Jar Binks - Is this one of Joseph Campbell's archetypes? 4. Bad CG shot of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan jumping out of ventilation shaft at beginning 5. Weird, feral kids that are Anakin's friends, especially that weird Greedo kid 6. Prominent featuring of Warwick Davis in what appears to be his costume from Willow 7. Two-headed sports announcer with cliché voice (esp. line "That's gotta hurt in any universe") 8. Watto's wings flapping - very distracting from scene 9. Watto's line "you think you some kind of Jedi" - unnecessary cheap joke - pokes fun at Jedi, who should not be the butt of any jokes 10. Battle droids aren't threatening enough 11. The E.T.s in the senate - (Are the delegates from Duckworld there too?) 12. Lion King song at end of parade 13. Jive-dance by Gungans at parade 14. Ending shot is totally lifted from Star Wars 15. Star Trek touches, like beaming Anakin's blood sample on board 16. Weak "Running Man" plot device of having a transmitter implanted in Anakin and his mom so they can't leave Tatooine 17. Nicknaming Anakin "Annie" 18. Introducing the concept of slavery to the Star Wars universe - what are droids for then? 19. The Gungan City and underwater chase, which look like scenes out of "Little Mermaid", totally incongruous with rest of SW universe 20. Gungan Pidgin Language: "Exsqueeze me!" "You in Big Doo-Doo now!" 21. Bizarre dolly shot with Sidious's hologram talking to Viceroy on weird spider droid 22. Having Anakin be the creator of C-3P0 - adds nothing to other films and introduces an unrealistic coincidence - C-3P0 and Vader are NEVER in a scene together 23. Qui-Gon's wussiness - why doesn't he just take the part from Watto? - because they need a speeder race. He also runs away from Darth Maul and cuts a cool fight short 24. Story point of having to get money to pay for hyperdrive part - more fitting in an adventure game. Why doesn't Qui-Gon commandeer the part? What authority does he have? Aren't the Jedi supposed to be guardians of some kind? 25. Anakin's L.L. Bean knapsack 26. Darth Maul getting chopped in half - was it really necessary? 27. Boss Nass's warbling 28. Jar Jar stepping in poo 29. Jar Jar getting farted at by animal 30. Jar Jar B.O. joke 31. Jar Jar's constant moving and morphing (especially his eyes) distracts the eyes from the real characters 32. Jar Jar accidentally destroying half the battle droid army 33. Gungan bubble shield - this is a device unlike anything we have ever seen in SW. 34. Batman grappling hook sequence in palace 35. Unexciting laser battles in palace 36. Unexciting space battle 37. Anakin's blowing the station up by accident 38. Weak invasion scene - just a couple of tanks rolling into the courtyard 39. Boss Nass' agreeing to help humans just cause they kneel 40. Qui-Gon requesting Jar Jar as a navigator then never even using him to navigate 41. Darth Maul never does anything evil - he just looks cool 42. Fake-looking plastic adobe huts on Tatooine - they looked much more convincing in Star Wars 43. Bad Nimoidian lip-synching 44. "Are you brain-dead?" line uttered by Nimoidian 45. Lack of explanation for the Prophecy of the One Who Will Bring Balance to The Force 46. Dumb-ass ESP test the Jedi give to Anakin 47. Token P.C. female pilot in Naboo fighter 48. Lack of activity for Jedi and Mace Windu - Why don't all the Jedi ever go and kick ass? 49. CG lens flare on Coruscant during sunset 50. Pixilated CG explosion at end when the Battle Droids blow up in the corridor after Anakin hits the core 51. ID4 plot device of having Battle Droids controlled by Space Station 52. Lame-ass foreshadowing, like Ric Olie teaching Anakin to fly fighter 53. Dumb-ass plot device of Anakin's ship being on auto-pilot to suck him into station 54. Confusing plot device of Queen and her double 55. Weird voice they dubbed onto Queen 56. James Bond "Thunderball" scuba mouthpieces that Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan just happen to have -(Why would they bring those to a negotiation on a *spaceship*??? Do they carry them around in their utility belts???) 57. Terence Stamp being completely underused in just one mediocre scene 58. Absolutely no background given about Sith Lords - what was the "Mystery of the Sith"? 59. Lack of interaction between Obi-wan and Padme/Amidala and other handmaidens - Is he gay? 60. Convenient location of blanket near Queen (when Anakin tells her he's cold) 61. Lack of epic cliffhangers (a la trash compactor, space slug escape, walking plank of Jabba's skiff) 62. Lame crowd reactions in pod race 63. Centering a major section of the film around the pod race stalls the story 64. Jar Jar getting kicked in the nuts by pit droid 65. Jar Jar's cartoony dive 66. Yoda's defeatist attitude - no good explanation is given about his fears about Anakin. Wouldn't it be more troubling if Anakin wasn't afraid about his mother??? 67. It's never made clear whether people were being killed on Naboo 68. Slapstick during Gungan battle undercuts drama of final confrontation with Darth Maul 69. Obvious and contrived maneuvering of Anakin into Naboo fighter 70. Leaving C-3PO on Tatooine 71. "Yipppeeee"- twice 72. Goofy, mistaken identity rescue sequence of the Queen by her double, 73. Pathetic attempt to create cool slang for Tatooine residents - "Wizard", "Slime-o", "Worm-o" 74. Jar Jar gets stuck to a Battle Droid's severed arm and shoots several other droids 75. Jar Jar unleashing cannonballs on enemy army would have been more suitable in a Flintstones episode 76. Serious underuse of Ewan McGregor 77. 2 scenes that are centered around Jar Jar's tongue 78. Illogical explanation that Jedi reflexes are based on their ability to see the future 79. Slapstick sequence of Jar Jar trying to eat a rubber fish 80. Underuse of Darth Maul 81. Concept of "Jedi Trials" for Obi-Wan is dropped by the end of the film 82. Extraneous scene about Watto's "chance cube" - and why can't they just call it a die? Han Solo refers to card-playing in Empire. 83. No reason is given for taking Anakin back to Naboo, into the middle of a war 84. Portrayal of Republic as ineffective and bureaucratic will reduce the significance of its collapse in upcoming films. Isn't this the film where we were supposed to see their civilization at its height? 85. Introduction of Battle Droids appears to be an attempt to reduce the number of deaths shown in the film, yet they are killed in an extremely violent and destructive manner. Also, use of such a device is inconsistent with the notion presented in the other films that droids have humanity. 86. Lack of a protagonist 87. Anakin fixes engine and wins pod race by flicking switches, apparently at random (and without any use of the force) 88. Why does Qui-Gon sense such power in Anakin? What does Anakin ever do to suggest he has powers? Wouldn't a demonstration be in order? 89. Design of all CG characters did not match anything we've seen before in the SW universe (except maybe in the Special Editions). They were totally incongruous. 90. Nimoidians' Charlie Chan dialect 91. No explanation for red force shields at end. It was cool, but confusing and contrived. Were the characters controlling them or did they time-on and time-off like in a video game? 92. Watto's stereotypical Jewish Shylock attitude and accent. 93. Captain Panaka's blandness 94. Lack of camaraderie among characters - they didn't seem like a team 95. No one really interacted with Jar Jar - he was in his own movie 96. Lack of conflict among characters (this was a problem in Jedi as well) 97. Enemy droid fighters are not memorable or interesting 98. Anakin's awful dialogue while blowing up the space station: "Take this... and take that!" 99. Jar jar offers to be Qui Gon's slave 100. Lack of any anti-hero to create character tension. Han Solo did this in IV, Lando did this in V, Vader did it in Jedi. In Episode 1, everyone did EXACTLY what was expected of them. No plot twists or surprises. - Didisaurus@aol.com
Slashdot Mirror
I think what they were saying is:
1. They meant January 1, not January 2.
and/or
2. January 1st is not a business day. (It's a Saturday).
W
-------------------
In his findings of fact, Jackson said there are no current products that pose a competitive threat to Microsoft 's (MSFT) Windows operating system, and that no such products are on the horizon.
;)
Not lookin' good for Linux
W
-------------------
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.htm- -------------
-----
I love "don't use your brains" in that sentence...
Fuck.
-------------------
Anything that RHIC can do has already been done many times by Mother Nature without dire consequences.
Fortunately, nature has been doing just these sorts of experiments planned at RHIC for a long time and the universe is just fine.
Umm... I'm sure the universe itself didn't suffer dire consequences, but then, what's another black hole to the universe?
I think the point is that while a black hole or two might not devistate the universe as a whole, it would be bad for any populated planets in the area.
W
-------------------
They're trying to strongarm me into using AIM, instead of my preferred ICQ.
Mozilla will include jabber (http://www.jabber.org) which lets you IM to people on AIM, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo, etc.
Development for Jabber is totally open source, as is a lot of the other "add-ons" people are bashing mozilla for "wasting time" on. That is, the IRC client, telnet client, etc. They're all stuff OTHER THIRD PARTIES have put together.
W
-------------------
The way some people drive, I can't wait till the first pile-up comes crashing down into my backyard...
In fact, this will do wonders for security-- got a barbed wire fence around your property? Hah!
News for nerds indeed,
W
-------------------
Great.. So all these "horror story" reports are going to come out, and what will be the result?
* New laws (which I guarantee
* More regulations and hoops for Internet activity
* New "enforcement" actions, maybe including a new branch of "cyberpolice" to march around the Internet looking for jaywalkers.
Take me back to the days when the Internet was a wide open frontier, before the fences started going up...
W
-------------------
You need to use the RTSP/RTP proxy (run it on the same box as you're masking from). Works perfectly for me. Builds on a few different platforms.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/ developers/rtspproxy.html
Dox & source included. Enjoy,
W
-------------------
What Monty Python is to television/film, the onion is to the Web.
If you haven't read their book called "OUR DUMB CENTURY", it's a great way to review the last 100 years and remember all that's happened in a way that's much more entertaining than a jr. college american history class.
W
-------------------
April 5th, 1999 the New Yorker magazine ran a story about the NSA's campaign (using the UN's inspection people as a cover) against Sadaam Hussain during one of the (many) Clinton bombings:
"The encryption system on Saddam's telephones, made in Sweden, was as sophisticated as any on the international market. The phones had a series of channels, and on each channel were algorithms that chopped the signals into hundreds of bits as the channesl were switched." (p. 32)
"Early in the spring of 1998....the algorithms were unscarambled, and Saddam's most closely protected communications were suddenly pouring into UNSCOM"" (p. 32)
And more...
"In March of 1998, a high-tech team from the National Security Agency. which is responsible for American communications intellegence, flew to Bahrain to revew the telephone intercepts. One official recalls that once the intercepts had been decrypted and transalted the Americans told themselves, "Here's the best intellegence that we ever had!" (p. 35)
"Then in April of 1998, operational control of the Saddam intercepts shifted to one of America's least publicized intellegence unites, the Special Collection Service. The S.C.S., which is jointly operated by teh C.I.A. and the N.S.A. is responsible for, among other things, deploying highly trained teams of electronics specialists in sensitive areas around the world to monitor diplomatic and other kinds of communications. Its operations are often run from secure sites inside American embassies." (p. 35)
All this makes me really suspicious of our bombing of the Chinese embassy-- what that was really about... And also-- it doesn't seem like there's too much the NSA *can't* crack if they want to...
I recommend that article, btw, it was pretty interesting and talked about a lot of sigint stuff in a suprisingly frank way.
W
-------------------
Ok, I don't what that subject means exactly, I just liked the battle cry "hack the lights!!!"
If some cr/hacker dares to break into my toaster and change my settings though, I'll be pissed.
Call me old fashioned, but some things don't need their own IPs.
Now, off to firewall my bread maker,
W
-------------------
the most recent iteration of its NT operating system is crash-proof in 99.9% of computing situations
I don't get how you measure 99.9% stability of "computer situaations"? (I hope this doesn't mean one out of every 999 instructions crash the machine...)
Hmmm. This suggests that one out of a thousand users will have Win2k crash, doesn't it? So if they sell a million copies, that's 10,000 angry and unhappy customers who will experience the blue screen o' death... Great.
W
-------------------
Not to start up the whole hacker/cracker thing, but even in america I've long heard the term "cracker" to refer to someone who cracks a game's protection ("cracked by xxxx"), rather than someone who hacks into systems. Apparently the old school "hackers" are partially successful in getting their word back, but I dunno...
W
-------------------
I hate to just post saying "I agree" but...
I regularly skip "windbag" posts. Thoughtful discussion is great, but when people post long, boring repetitious posts, well, I find that I just tend to pass them. We need to encourage people to post shorter, succinct posts, not longer ones. I don't know, maybe it's the intimidating length and mass of multiple paragraphs that gets me; when there are 200+ posts and replies to wade through on a particular subject, often it is the succinct one liner that cuts through the rhetoric, peircing through the tangle of words like a... a.. a big..umm....
(Aww hell, I was going to make my point by going on and on about this for four paragraphs, but I just don't have the heart.)
W
-------------------
Jabber's supposed to be working on a chat/internet presence type program that's cross platform AND supports all the popular chat protocols, including IRC, ICQ, PAL, and AIM (lots of three letter acronyms there...)
Don't know what's going on with this, but a few months back I read a ton in their mailing list and it looked pretty cool...
http://www.jabber.org I think.
W
-------------------
If you're talking about the Cantina song that's a parody of the Copa-Cobana, his name is Mark Davis. He also did a song called "The Phantom Medley" which I guess is getting airplay on Dr. Demento.
My take on the Weird Al song-- Pretty lame. At least "Yoda" had some jokes and some energy behind it.
W
-------------------
Of course! Shoulda been on my list...
That thing could copy ANYTHING... and fast!
Now who remembers Caztle Smurfenstein?
Or Dung Beetles? ("We Gotcha!")
W
-------------------
Like remember six months ago when Microsoft was puffing itself up over that "font smoothing" technology it "invented" called (I think) ClearText...
I haven't heard anything about it since it was pointed out on SlashDot that "prior art" existed using the same technique years earlier on the Apple II...
And let's see... who invented it first?
-------------------
I recall reading on Slashdot maybe a year back that the 150 million deal was an under-the-table type agreement having to do with a Quicktime-related lawsuit Apple was going to file (or had filed).
If I remember right, it had to do with either quicktime code appearing in microsoft products, or maybe something about microsoft making it so that quicktime movies wouldn't play well in Windows...
Anyone know the exact deal?
W
-------------------
Haven't seen _Pirates_ yet, but just wanna reminisce just 1 sec about the late 70s/early 80s, being about 10 years old, using my friend's Apple II, and knowing my life would never be the same. I'd later get a Franklin Ace 1000 (Apple II clone w/lower case & 64k!!) and that was it, I was hooked. Jobs may have been running the business, but to us kids "Woz" WAS Apple.
Woz had an attitude which, I can't fully say how, sublimated itself into my young conciousness. He was a cool, almost fatherly role model who set an example of what it meant to do the "Right Thing"... A crazy, bearded silicon Jedi Knight, a Wizard...I'll never forget going to the computer store to check out the IIgs "Woz" limited edition and seeing his handwriting...thinking "how cool!"
Oh, and YES, who can forget (in no particular order) Locksmith, Dalton's Disk Disintigrator, The Beagle Bros., H-Wings in Sneakers, The Novation Apple Cat, Castle Wolfenstein, 80-column cards, GBBS, Ruski Duck, Cat-Fur, G-files, Space Eggs, The Wizard and the Princess, peeks & pokes, "cracked by" splash screens, Ascii Express, Lemonade Stand in lo-res, call -151, 300/202/212, tape drives... ah, those were the days.
Thanks Woz!
W
-------------------
The thing I thought of recently is that given Moore's law, eventually even all the long keylength stuff we're using to encrypt stuff is going to be crackable... And that's assuming someone like the NSA doesn't already have a crack, or some other weakness isn't discovered sooner.
So...don't post anything securely on Usenet or any other archived public place that you don't want people reading in ten years (in case a security hole is revealed at a later date).
W
PS - It'll be fun to go back say in 2010 and crack all those PGP'd messages from 1995 and see what people were saying on Usenet and in other public places when they thought it was "safe"...
W
-------------------
I was thinking the other day it would be pretty ironic if NSA were using a distributed project on the Internet to get people to unknowingly do their Eschelon dirtywork...
:)
With 500,000 users presently involved, that's a lot of passwords potentially being cracked
W
-------------------
I think Vader did encounter C3PO in Empire, when C3PO's been disassembled and is on Chewbacca's back. While they're carboniting Han.
W
-------------------
I could add way more to this list, but it seems to get at a lot of good points.
What a letdown this movie was. Unpolished story, retarded humor, annoying characters, bland dialogue, cheesy cameos, horrible acting, over-reliance on coincidences....where was the magic, the wit, the brilliance, the feeling of "family", of adventure, of danger, of mystery?
America seems to be trying to convince themselves that it was good.
The Emporer was wearing no clothes, and today my heart is broken.
W
-----
Found this list on Film Threat (www.filmthreat.com)
100 UNFORGIVABLE THINGS ABOUT EPISODE I
*** WARNING: MEGA SPOILERS BELOW! ***
1. The Midi-chlorian explanation
2. The Virgin Shmi and the "Immaculate Conception" of Anakin
3. Concept of Jar Jar Binks - Is this one of Joseph Campbell's archetypes?
4. Bad CG shot of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan jumping out of ventilation shaft at beginning
5. Weird, feral kids that are Anakin's friends, especially that weird Greedo kid
6. Prominent featuring of Warwick Davis in what appears to be his costume from Willow
7. Two-headed sports announcer with cliché voice (esp. line "That's gotta hurt in any universe")
8. Watto's wings flapping - very distracting from scene
9. Watto's line "you think you some kind of Jedi" - unnecessary cheap joke - pokes fun at Jedi, who should not be the butt of any jokes
10. Battle droids aren't threatening enough
11. The E.T.s in the senate - (Are the delegates from Duckworld there too?)
12. Lion King song at end of parade
13. Jive-dance by Gungans at parade
14. Ending shot is totally lifted from Star Wars
15. Star Trek touches, like beaming Anakin's blood sample on board
16. Weak "Running Man" plot device of having a transmitter implanted in Anakin and his mom so they can't leave Tatooine
17. Nicknaming Anakin "Annie"
18. Introducing the concept of slavery to the Star Wars universe - what are droids for then?
19. The Gungan City and underwater chase, which look like scenes out of "Little Mermaid", totally incongruous with rest of SW universe
20. Gungan Pidgin Language: "Exsqueeze me!" "You in Big Doo-Doo now!"
21. Bizarre dolly shot with Sidious's hologram talking to Viceroy on weird spider droid
22. Having Anakin be the creator of C-3P0 - adds nothing to other films and introduces an unrealistic coincidence - C-3P0 and Vader are NEVER in a scene together
23. Qui-Gon's wussiness - why doesn't he just take the part from Watto? - because they need a speeder race. He also runs away from Darth Maul and cuts a cool fight short
24. Story point of having to get money to pay for hyperdrive part - more fitting in an adventure game. Why doesn't Qui-Gon commandeer the part? What authority does he have? Aren't the Jedi supposed to be guardians of some kind?
25. Anakin's L.L. Bean knapsack
26. Darth Maul getting chopped in half - was it really necessary?
27. Boss Nass's warbling
28. Jar Jar stepping in poo
29. Jar Jar getting farted at by animal
30. Jar Jar B.O. joke
31. Jar Jar's constant moving and morphing (especially his eyes) distracts the eyes from the real
characters
32. Jar Jar accidentally destroying half the battle droid army
33. Gungan bubble shield - this is a device unlike anything we have ever seen in SW.
34. Batman grappling hook sequence in palace
35. Unexciting laser battles in palace
36. Unexciting space battle
37. Anakin's blowing the station up by accident
38. Weak invasion scene - just a couple of tanks rolling into the courtyard
39. Boss Nass' agreeing to help humans just cause they kneel
40. Qui-Gon requesting Jar Jar as a navigator then never even using him to navigate
41. Darth Maul never does anything evil - he just looks cool
42. Fake-looking plastic adobe huts on Tatooine - they looked much more convincing in Star Wars
43. Bad Nimoidian lip-synching
44. "Are you brain-dead?" line uttered by Nimoidian
45. Lack of explanation for the Prophecy of the One Who Will Bring Balance to The Force
46. Dumb-ass ESP test the Jedi give to Anakin
47. Token P.C. female pilot in Naboo fighter
48. Lack of activity for Jedi and Mace Windu - Why don't all the Jedi ever go and kick ass?
49. CG lens flare on Coruscant during sunset
50. Pixilated CG explosion at end when the Battle Droids blow up in the corridor after Anakin hits the core
51. ID4 plot device of having Battle Droids controlled by Space Station
52. Lame-ass foreshadowing, like Ric Olie teaching Anakin to fly fighter
53. Dumb-ass plot device of Anakin's ship being on auto-pilot to suck him into station
54. Confusing plot device of Queen and her double
55. Weird voice they dubbed onto Queen
56. James Bond "Thunderball" scuba mouthpieces that Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan just happen to have -(Why would they bring those to a negotiation on a *spaceship*??? Do they carry them around in their utility belts???)
57. Terence Stamp being completely underused in just one mediocre scene
58. Absolutely no background given about Sith Lords - what was the "Mystery of the Sith"?
59. Lack of interaction between Obi-wan and Padme/Amidala and other handmaidens - Is he gay?
60. Convenient location of blanket near Queen (when Anakin tells her he's cold)
61. Lack of epic cliffhangers (a la trash compactor, space slug escape, walking plank of Jabba's skiff)
62. Lame crowd reactions in pod race
63. Centering a major section of the film around the pod race stalls the story
64. Jar Jar getting kicked in the nuts by pit droid
65. Jar Jar's cartoony dive
66. Yoda's defeatist attitude - no good explanation is given about his fears about Anakin. Wouldn't it be more troubling if Anakin wasn't afraid about his mother???
67. It's never made clear whether people were being killed on Naboo
68. Slapstick during Gungan battle undercuts drama of final confrontation with Darth Maul
69. Obvious and contrived maneuvering of Anakin into Naboo fighter
70. Leaving C-3PO on Tatooine
71. "Yipppeeee"- twice
72. Goofy, mistaken identity rescue sequence of the Queen by her double,
73. Pathetic attempt to create cool slang for Tatooine residents - "Wizard", "Slime-o", "Worm-o"
74. Jar Jar gets stuck to a Battle Droid's severed arm and shoots several other droids
75. Jar Jar unleashing cannonballs on enemy army would have been more suitable in a Flintstones episode
76. Serious underuse of Ewan McGregor
77. 2 scenes that are centered around Jar Jar's tongue
78. Illogical explanation that Jedi reflexes are based on their ability to see the future
79. Slapstick sequence of Jar Jar trying to eat a rubber fish
80. Underuse of Darth Maul
81. Concept of "Jedi Trials" for Obi-Wan is dropped by the end of the film
82. Extraneous scene about Watto's "chance cube" - and why can't they just call it a die? Han Solo refers to card-playing in Empire.
83. No reason is given for taking Anakin back to Naboo, into the middle of a war
84. Portrayal of Republic as ineffective and bureaucratic will reduce the significance of its collapse in upcoming films. Isn't this the film where we were supposed to see their civilization at its height?
85. Introduction of Battle Droids appears to be an attempt to reduce the number of deaths shown in the film, yet they are killed in an extremely violent and destructive manner. Also, use of such a device is inconsistent with the notion presented in the other films that droids have humanity.
86. Lack of a protagonist
87. Anakin fixes engine and wins pod race by flicking switches, apparently at random (and without any use of the force)
88. Why does Qui-Gon sense such power in Anakin? What does Anakin ever do to suggest he has powers? Wouldn't a demonstration be in order?
89. Design of all CG characters did not match anything we've seen before in the SW universe (except maybe in the Special Editions). They were totally incongruous.
90. Nimoidians' Charlie Chan dialect
91. No explanation for red force shields at end. It was cool, but confusing and contrived. Were the characters controlling them or did they time-on and time-off like in a video game?
92. Watto's stereotypical Jewish Shylock attitude and accent.
93. Captain Panaka's blandness
94. Lack of camaraderie among characters - they didn't seem like a team
95. No one really interacted with Jar Jar - he was in his own movie
96. Lack of conflict among characters (this was a problem in Jedi as well)
97. Enemy droid fighters are not memorable or interesting
98. Anakin's awful dialogue while blowing up the space station: "Take this... and take that!"
99. Jar jar offers to be Qui Gon's slave
100. Lack of any anti-hero to create character tension. Han Solo did this in IV, Lando did this in V, Vader did it in Jedi. In Episode 1, everyone did EXACTLY what was expected of them. No plot twists or surprises.
- Didisaurus@aol.com
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