Oh I agree. Lynch did about as good as could be expected but I still feel it a bit lacking. Lynch also had the benefit of working with some great actors who could pull off the little quirks of portraying thoughts. However, in a movie, they become little more than asides. But Lynch also added the weirding device, which was...odd. The Sci-fi mini-series was okay but it felt cheap. Honestly though, Paul seemed too old.
Bottom line on this is any potential movie will never be as good as what I have envisioned in my head...but isn't that always the case.
BTW, everything I said about Kevin J. Anderson and suckitude is still valid.
Sorry, it can't be done. It shouldn't be done. The first book of Dune can hardly be encapsulated by one movie, and I'm not even sure it can be done in three.
What makes Dune great is it's breadth of subject matter enveloping politics, revenge, society (both tribal and "civilized"), power, religion, hierarchical hegemony and other big words. Plus, it is driven by an inner monologue from all of the main characters. How the hell do you portray inner monologue on the big screen, or any screen for that matter?
Nope, it promises to be another suckfest, a pissing on Frank Herbert's grave. And if the writer Kevin J. Anderson is involved in any way, it will be more bag-loads of awful than you can stuff into a stadium.
Mindful of how almost every/. post on politics seems to degrade into "lib/rep" pissing contest, I'm still stupid enough to wade out on this one.
tjstork, you had made some good arguments. The birth control in the lake, for example. That's good questioning. Made me ask to myself "yeah, why isn't someone on this? Why isn't this an issue somewhere?" Not that it would necessarily be Move On's issue as they are strictly political in nature, but Sierra Club, sure, good issue for them to confront.
But then you descend into painting all liberals with the same wide brush...and then go on and say divisive things yourself about people who disagree with you. It's an interesting tactic to call someone out on being divisive and then spout off about how wrong the other side is and start name calling. And on a discussion point of view, it's hardly fair because if you respond in kind, the gotcha of "told-you-so" comes out. Your initial arguments are upheld by straw men, which is a tactic I see often when discussing politics. Get off topic to more familiar political "high ground" as it were. There's no moral superiority in that stance because you are no longer relating to the same argument and have changed the rules to fit your world view. But both sides do this.
The problem is, and I think this can be said for both sides, that there is an innate refusal to recognize the other viewpoint of someone else and understand their position. Once you understand both sides of an issue, that's where a compromise can be found. It's not easy, in fact I would not be surprised if it's not one of the hardest things to do in human existence. You speak of compromise, yet there is no middle ground. It's just your point of view and there are no others.
It is what's wrong with politics as a whole. It is less about doing good than being right./off-soapbox
I have mod points but seeing that the other response got modded for flamebait, I'm compelled to answer.
Too bad that despite eight years of intense scrutiny, multi-million dollar bounties, and boundless efforts to fabricate evidence, no attempt to show that this Administration has flagrantly broken the law, let alone for the purpose of self-enrichment, has succeeded. This idiotic expenditure of congressional calendar and of taxpayer money won't either. Haliburton has received fewer no-bid contracts under Bush than they did under Clinton.
Okay, first of all, as the earlier response mentioned, Congress has only been in the Democrats hands for a couple of years. During the time that the Republicans were in control, there was virtually no oversight of the administration. When the Democrats did gain control, they have razor thin margins in both houses. I will admit that occasionally there is grandstanding, but at least they are trying to do some of the oversight that is spelled out in the Constitution. And I believe that your "efforts to fabricate evidence" needs a big fat citation needed.
Also worth mentioning is the size of those Haliburton no-bid contracts. It means nothing for the pure numbers of contracts if the size of those contracts are not the same. A wartime budget surely is higher in price than the previous contracts they may have gotten.
In fact, 'Bush & Co.' will leave the White House significantly poorer than the previous Administration who received all kinds of payments for things like pardons, government subsidized loans, putting friends up in the White House, and selling White House furniture and flatware. Al Gore alone is worth two hundred million these days, more than the entire administration combined.
Again, citation needed please. Plus, let's just wait to see what "W" does in his last few days in office. That's traditionally when previous Presidents have handed out their bulk of pardons.
I wouldn't oppose this kind of investigation if there were any legal standing for a complaint. But it's been quite clear for years now that what Democrats refer to as 'domestic spying' includes phone calls that route through the US but whose endpoints are both foreign and made by non-citizens. The Constitutional protections of due process were not intended to protect these calls any more than they protected the Soviets and Nazis internal communications.
Once again, please cite where you get this kind of classification for domestic spying. One of the main arguments the Democrats have had against expanded wiretap authority has been the availability of the FISA courts which in the past has worked quickly, efficiently and rarely if ever turns down a legitimate request. It sounds to me that this description of the Democrats stance on domestic spying is the product of the echo chamber of conservative radio and pundits.
Even with all of that, I could accept that it's the prerogative of the party in power to cudgel the party not in power if only Congress wasn't still trying to finish last year's budgets. They've accomplished nothing so far and they're not even doing that well.
First, the nation's business, THEN play self-indignant party apparatchik.
Let's not forget that the Republican congress two years ago, in the final months before they lost control of Congress decided to go into recess early and not finish the budget at all during their calendar year. This action unnecessarily passed responsibility of the previous Congress onto the incoming Congress. They could have done the nation's business, they could have passed budget items the nation needed, but instead decided to pick up camp stakes and go home.
However, the current problem with government is that they have forgotten how to govern. Part of that responsibility is the ability and the necessity to compromise. However, with hard-nose tactics and frequent grandstanding by both parties, the very thought that just this Congressional session is a do-nothing Congress full of grandstanding is just not seeing the Congress over the last fifteen years.
There is nothing wrong with visiting a publicly available URL. No exceptions.
I guess you never stumbled upon a goatse or tubgirl publicly available link, then:P
Wow, reading your post was like watching a train wreck. You don't want to look but you can't tear your eyes away.
I hope somewhere along the line, some sort of irony bat comes along and smacks you in the head after your post. I especially like the mind-bending one where you want your kids to grow up with respect for people and then turn around and call posters on./ "thoughtless shitbags" for having vocal opinions, regardless how informed/uniformed their opinions may be. This was directly after saying that no one in this argument has a horse in this race because they're all childless, which seems contrary to the evidence especially, on the ID side.
Then, the coup de grace where you say about smug, sure of themselves jackasses making fools of themselves--this on a public posting board where the only requirement is rudimentary typing skills. I mean, you can't write this kind of comedy!
There seems to be this misconception that circumstantial evidence is inadmissible and therefore doesn't count. I got corrected on this by my wife and several friends who are lawyers. Circumstantial evidence still counts, there doesn't have to be a smoking gun for a conviction. I think people are swayed too much by the courtroom dramas on TV and see attorneys who yell "Objection! Circumstantial." and think it means something. It doesn't. It's a well-worn theatrical device to draw tension and emotion to the scene.
The fact is all of those things mentioned are evidence, all of them are admissible, all of them can point to a guilty man. One suspicious thing pointing at Reiser may have been passed off, but you can't just throw off all of these things as mere coincidences.
BTW, sorry for the late post, but that's what happens on a long work day without my/. fix.;-)
This is really nothing more than a delaying tactic by the current administration. Looking back into some older articles, Mr. Johnson's (the head of the EPA) own staff had recommended passing the California waver unanimously from both a scientific and legal standpoint. If this goes to litigation, which is only a matter of time, not even the EPA thinks they could win. Part of the PowerPoint presentation mentioned in the link I provided could be the same one they talk about in this discussion and recent AP release.
With the delay of the California waver, the very soonest auto manufacturers are liable for more strict standards would be 2010 models. It buys time for the industry and it's a "thank you" to them for not using their lobbying power against the current, and in my opinion, highly flawed, energy bill.
There must be a contest at the TSA to come up with the most ridiculous ideas for restrictions. Winners get a tote bag, mug and an "I is stoppin' der terrarists" t-shirt.
TorrentSpy lost because they destroyed evidence. It has nothing to do with the validity of any type of copyrights of the artists in question. However, since that was the entire point of your parent post which you then call "irrelevant" seems disingenuous at best.
You have understanding of the nature of the music contracts out there, which would have been explained if you had followed the link. But seeing you didn't read TFA either to glean from it why TorretSpy lost, I shouldn't expect anything beyond simple, knee-jerk pablum.
You really should pay attention more. In fact, here's a little primer from someone who should know the music business: David Byrne talks record companies and the current forms of control and distribution. It's a fascinating read.
Please pay special attention to how much the artist cut is in traditional CD sales compared to the new digital distribution. You will find a huge disparity in what record companies are claiming and what is actually happening.
I don't think TorrentSpy will get much sympathy from/. at all, however your current thoughts of how the business of music is run is, I fear, off base. A great many artists have few rights to their own songs which instead are owned, by and large, by the record companies who are looking for new ways to squeeze blood from a stone.
It's not complete, but if you look at this link here you can see he's in the top two of getting contributions from music/movie industries. This really shouldn't be too much of a surprise as we do live in a country where your money buys your influence.
What's even more ridiculous is that it's a backronym, where the definition is invented after the word is made up. "We owned the other team?" That's the definition. I always thought it to more of a general saying of approval or celebration.
Now all of these posers will have our secret geek password. I vote we get another one. Goatse, anyone?
It's hard to see it in any context but geek culture. I can't imagine that many people will even think it means anything other than some other misspelling.
Ladies and gentlemen, Merriam-Webster has officially jumped the shark.
It does good things for the particular ruler's worldview, yes. The loss of all the outliers is not without its cost, though.
Have you given serious thought to how the opponents might also be right? I realize the whole issue seems so simple to you, but there is a serious and rational counterargument that I'll bet you aren't even aware of. The counterargument is: our time is our most valuable commodity, the source of all other values, and public transportation's real expense is in lost time. Buses and trains seem cheaper when you don't factor in the very high hidden cost of all those people standing around at the station for fifteen minutes.
Again, it seems simple to you because you aren't factoring in all the costs that those "shortsighted" people are weighing. The value of their time, spent sorting and hauling or whatever, vastly outweighs the value of the recycled materials.
You say that like it's a good thing. There is a lot of economic value in stability, even if the current stable point is not the absolute most efficient. Change is very expensive when there are contracts and properties and projects running.
Your cynicism prevents you from seeing the hidden utility of a slow legislature and judiciary. And the exceptions as often as not exist to transform a "It sounds so simple and perfect!" law into one that isn't so costly to implement.
A philosopher king can save us from shortsightedness by delivering us over to narrowmindedness. It's not clear that we should prefer one over the other.
I'll tell you the worse problem with democracy. On the day that the poorest 51% of the population discovers it can vote itself the wealth of the richest 49%, economic collapse is imminent.
Your entire comment is based on economics. All of your replies are your "narrowminded" view that everything should be measured on a cost basis of time and/or materials. Costs of anything should be measured across a broad spectrum and not just dollar amounts. This is why societal investments are so hard to move in a republic because short term thinking (money involved usually) shouts down the benefits of long term investment. In many cases, society is served better by thinking ahead but often pays much more in the future because they didn't act when they could, burdening future generations with their lack of foresight. All you need to do is look around and there is proof of this everywhere: global warming (theorized in the late 19th century), the Social Security impending crisis (talked about in the 80's), the military industrial complex (Ike warned us about this) and nuclear proliferation (just after WWII). I could come up with more, but you get the point.
Our republic already represents economic interests and rarely the actual interests of it's constituency (it is not a democracy, no matter what you actually think). I'd think we'd be happy with a leader who would take a reasoned approach to what society considers are the issues of it's time, but right now we can't get anything but "leaders"--used in the loosest sense of the word--representing their corporate sponsors.
The idea behind a philosopher king would be one who actually confronts the issues, debates them and reasons out a path for society to take, not some kind of militant egotist.
It's not an exaggeration. I was playing last night when the news was coming over the chat channels. Fortunately, it's a pretty quick fix if you can catch it before the reboot and have a Plain-Jane hard drive set up (single drive, no SCSI or RAID).
A few of us in the in-game chat were trying to catch people who were logging on for the first time and walking them through fixing their systems. It baffled all of us why there would even be a boot.ini file that CCP would use to install the premium content (users who chose not to install the premium content were not affected by this, nor were Vista users). I still can't figure out how this missed even basic testing where CCP should have caught this bug pretty easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I agree. Lynch did about as good as could be expected but I still feel it a bit lacking. Lynch also had the benefit of working with some great actors who could pull off the little quirks of portraying thoughts. However, in a movie, they become little more than asides. But Lynch also added the weirding device, which was...odd. The Sci-fi mini-series was okay but it felt cheap. Honestly though, Paul seemed too old.
Bottom line on this is any potential movie will never be as good as what I have envisioned in my head...but isn't that always the case.
BTW, everything I said about Kevin J. Anderson and suckitude is still valid.
Sorry, it can't be done. It shouldn't be done. The first book of Dune can hardly be encapsulated by one movie, and I'm not even sure it can be done in three.
What makes Dune great is it's breadth of subject matter enveloping politics, revenge, society (both tribal and "civilized"), power, religion, hierarchical hegemony and other big words. Plus, it is driven by an inner monologue from all of the main characters. How the hell do you portray inner monologue on the big screen, or any screen for that matter?
Nope, it promises to be another suckfest, a pissing on Frank Herbert's grave. And if the writer Kevin J. Anderson is involved in any way, it will be more bag-loads of awful than you can stuff into a stadium.
C-net couldn't find an obsolete port with two hands, a map and a flashlight.
Mindful of how almost every /. post on politics seems to degrade into "lib/rep" pissing contest, I'm still stupid enough to wade out on this one.
/off-soapbox
tjstork, you had made some good arguments. The birth control in the lake, for example. That's good questioning. Made me ask to myself "yeah, why isn't someone on this? Why isn't this an issue somewhere?" Not that it would necessarily be Move On's issue as they are strictly political in nature, but Sierra Club, sure, good issue for them to confront.
But then you descend into painting all liberals with the same wide brush...and then go on and say divisive things yourself about people who disagree with you. It's an interesting tactic to call someone out on being divisive and then spout off about how wrong the other side is and start name calling. And on a discussion point of view, it's hardly fair because if you respond in kind, the gotcha of "told-you-so" comes out. Your initial arguments are upheld by straw men, which is a tactic I see often when discussing politics. Get off topic to more familiar political "high ground" as it were. There's no moral superiority in that stance because you are no longer relating to the same argument and have changed the rules to fit your world view. But both sides do this.
The problem is, and I think this can be said for both sides, that there is an innate refusal to recognize the other viewpoint of someone else and understand their position. Once you understand both sides of an issue, that's where a compromise can be found. It's not easy, in fact I would not be surprised if it's not one of the hardest things to do in human existence. You speak of compromise, yet there is no middle ground. It's just your point of view and there are no others.
It is what's wrong with politics as a whole. It is less about doing good than being right.
Why? Hey, someone has to rig those voting machines.
Too bad that despite eight years of intense scrutiny, multi-million dollar bounties, and boundless efforts to fabricate evidence, no attempt to show that this Administration has flagrantly broken the law, let alone for the purpose of self-enrichment, has succeeded. This idiotic expenditure of congressional calendar and of taxpayer money won't either. Haliburton has received fewer no-bid contracts under Bush than they did under Clinton.
Okay, first of all, as the earlier response mentioned, Congress has only been in the Democrats hands for a couple of years. During the time that the Republicans were in control, there was virtually no oversight of the administration. When the Democrats did gain control, they have razor thin margins in both houses. I will admit that occasionally there is grandstanding, but at least they are trying to do some of the oversight that is spelled out in the Constitution. And I believe that your "efforts to fabricate evidence" needs a big fat citation needed.
Also worth mentioning is the size of those Haliburton no-bid contracts. It means nothing for the pure numbers of contracts if the size of those contracts are not the same. A wartime budget surely is higher in price than the previous contracts they may have gotten.
In fact, 'Bush & Co.' will leave the White House significantly poorer than the previous Administration who received all kinds of payments for things like pardons, government subsidized loans, putting friends up in the White House, and selling White House furniture and flatware. Al Gore alone is worth two hundred million these days, more than the entire administration combined.
Again, citation needed please. Plus, let's just wait to see what "W" does in his last few days in office. That's traditionally when previous Presidents have handed out their bulk of pardons.
I wouldn't oppose this kind of investigation if there were any legal standing for a complaint. But it's been quite clear for years now that what Democrats refer to as 'domestic spying' includes phone calls that route through the US but whose endpoints are both foreign and made by non-citizens. The Constitutional protections of due process were not intended to protect these calls any more than they protected the Soviets and Nazis internal communications.
Once again, please cite where you get this kind of classification for domestic spying. One of the main arguments the Democrats have had against expanded wiretap authority has been the availability of the FISA courts which in the past has worked quickly, efficiently and rarely if ever turns down a legitimate request. It sounds to me that this description of the Democrats stance on domestic spying is the product of the echo chamber of conservative radio and pundits.
Even with all of that, I could accept that it's the prerogative of the party in power to cudgel the party not in power if only Congress wasn't still trying to finish last year's budgets. They've accomplished nothing so far and they're not even doing that well.
First, the nation's business, THEN play self-indignant party apparatchik.
Let's not forget that the Republican congress two years ago, in the final months before they lost control of Congress decided to go into recess early and not finish the budget at all during their calendar year. This action unnecessarily passed responsibility of the previous Congress onto the incoming Congress. They could have done the nation's business, they could have passed budget items the nation needed, but instead decided to pick up camp stakes and go home.
However, the current problem with government is that they have forgotten how to govern. Part of that responsibility is the ability and the necessity to compromise. However, with hard-nose tactics and frequent grandstanding by both parties, the very thought that just this Congressional session is a do-nothing Congress full of grandstanding is just not seeing the Congress over the last fifteen years.
In Soviet Russia, you... oh wait. That's not right.
Or for that matter, being RickRolled.
Wow, reading your post was like watching a train wreck. You don't want to look but you can't tear your eyes away.
./ "thoughtless shitbags" for having vocal opinions, regardless how informed/uniformed their opinions may be. This was directly after saying that no one in this argument has a horse in this race because they're all childless, which seems contrary to the evidence especially, on the ID side.
I hope somewhere along the line, some sort of irony bat comes along and smacks you in the head after your post. I especially like the mind-bending one where you want your kids to grow up with respect for people and then turn around and call posters on
Then, the coup de grace where you say about smug, sure of themselves jackasses making fools of themselves--this on a public posting board where the only requirement is rudimentary typing skills. I mean, you can't write this kind of comedy!
I bet they partnered with 3dRealms to who needed help finishing Duke Nukem Forever.
I don't understand you. Can you make a car analogy to clarify what you're saying? Or maybe a sports euphemism?
There seems to be this misconception that circumstantial evidence is inadmissible and therefore doesn't count. I got corrected on this by my wife and several friends who are lawyers. Circumstantial evidence still counts, there doesn't have to be a smoking gun for a conviction. I think people are swayed too much by the courtroom dramas on TV and see attorneys who yell "Objection! Circumstantial." and think it means something. It doesn't. It's a well-worn theatrical device to draw tension and emotion to the scene.
/. fix. ;-)
The fact is all of those things mentioned are evidence, all of them are admissible, all of them can point to a guilty man. One suspicious thing pointing at Reiser may have been passed off, but you can't just throw off all of these things as mere coincidences.
BTW, sorry for the late post, but that's what happens on a long work day without my
Anyone else notice this was posted at 2:01pm? Coincidence?
This is really nothing more than a delaying tactic by the current administration. Looking back into some older articles, Mr. Johnson's (the head of the EPA) own staff had recommended passing the California waver unanimously from both a scientific and legal standpoint. If this goes to litigation, which is only a matter of time, not even the EPA thinks they could win. Part of the PowerPoint presentation mentioned in the link I provided could be the same one they talk about in this discussion and recent AP release.
With the delay of the California waver, the very soonest auto manufacturers are liable for more strict standards would be 2010 models. It buys time for the industry and it's a "thank you" to them for not using their lobbying power against the current, and in my opinion, highly flawed, energy bill.
There must be a contest at the TSA to come up with the most ridiculous ideas for restrictions. Winners get a tote bag, mug and an "I is stoppin' der terrarists" t-shirt.
TorrentSpy lost because they destroyed evidence. It has nothing to do with the validity of any type of copyrights of the artists in question. However, since that was the entire point of your parent post which you then call "irrelevant" seems disingenuous at best.
You have understanding of the nature of the music contracts out there, which would have been explained if you had followed the link. But seeing you didn't read TFA either to glean from it why TorretSpy lost, I shouldn't expect anything beyond simple, knee-jerk pablum.
Oh good! Glaciers on Mars. Nice for them to turn up because we're starting to miss a few down here.
Jerry Bruckheimer still thinks that MTV knows what's cool.
You really should pay attention more. In fact, here's a little primer from someone who should know the music business: David Byrne talks record companies and the current forms of control and distribution. It's a fascinating read.
/. at all, however your current thoughts of how the business of music is run is, I fear, off base. A great many artists have few rights to their own songs which instead are owned, by and large, by the record companies who are looking for new ways to squeeze blood from a stone.
Please pay special attention to how much the artist cut is in traditional CD sales compared to the new digital distribution. You will find a huge disparity in what record companies are claiming and what is actually happening.
I don't think TorrentSpy will get much sympathy from
Mod parent up please. Good stuff.
It's not complete, but if you look at this link here you can see he's in the top two of getting contributions from music/movie industries. This really shouldn't be too much of a surprise as we do live in a country where your money buys your influence.
What's even more ridiculous is that it's a backronym, where the definition is invented after the word is made up. "We owned the other team?" That's the definition. I always thought it to more of a general saying of approval or celebration.
Now all of these posers will have our secret geek password. I vote we get another one. Goatse, anyone?
It's hard to see it in any context but geek culture. I can't imagine that many people will even think it means anything other than some other misspelling.
Ladies and gentlemen, Merriam-Webster has officially jumped the shark.
Have you given serious thought to how the opponents might also be right? I realize the whole issue seems so simple to you, but there is a serious and rational counterargument that I'll bet you aren't even aware of. The counterargument is: our time is our most valuable commodity, the source of all other values, and public transportation's real expense is in lost time. Buses and trains seem cheaper when you don't factor in the very high hidden cost of all those people standing around at the station for fifteen minutes.
Again, it seems simple to you because you aren't factoring in all the costs that those "shortsighted" people are weighing. The value of their time, spent sorting and hauling or whatever, vastly outweighs the value of the recycled materials.
You say that like it's a good thing. There is a lot of economic value in stability, even if the current stable point is not the absolute most efficient. Change is very expensive when there are contracts and properties and projects running.
Your cynicism prevents you from seeing the hidden utility of a slow legislature and judiciary. And the exceptions as often as not exist to transform a "It sounds so simple and perfect!" law into one that isn't so costly to implement.
A philosopher king can save us from shortsightedness by delivering us over to narrowmindedness. It's not clear that we should prefer one over the other.
I'll tell you the worse problem with democracy. On the day that the poorest 51% of the population discovers it can vote itself the wealth of the richest 49%, economic collapse is imminent.
Your entire comment is based on economics. All of your replies are your "narrowminded" view that everything should be measured on a cost basis of time and/or materials. Costs of anything should be measured across a broad spectrum and not just dollar amounts. This is why societal investments are so hard to move in a republic because short term thinking (money involved usually) shouts down the benefits of long term investment. In many cases, society is served better by thinking ahead but often pays much more in the future because they didn't act when they could, burdening future generations with their lack of foresight. All you need to do is look around and there is proof of this everywhere: global warming (theorized in the late 19th century), the Social Security impending crisis (talked about in the 80's), the military industrial complex (Ike warned us about this) and nuclear proliferation (just after WWII). I could come up with more, but you get the point.
Our republic already represents economic interests and rarely the actual interests of it's constituency (it is not a democracy, no matter what you actually think). I'd think we'd be happy with a leader who would take a reasoned approach to what society considers are the issues of it's time, but right now we can't get anything but "leaders"--used in the loosest sense of the word--representing their corporate sponsors.
The idea behind a philosopher king would be one who actually confronts the issues, debates them and reasons out a path for society to take, not some kind of militant egotist.
It's not an exaggeration. I was playing last night when the news was coming over the chat channels. Fortunately, it's a pretty quick fix if you can catch it before the reboot and have a Plain-Jane hard drive set up (single drive, no SCSI or RAID).
A few of us in the in-game chat were trying to catch people who were logging on for the first time and walking them through fixing their systems. It baffled all of us why there would even be a boot.ini file that CCP would use to install the premium content (users who chose not to install the premium content were not affected by this, nor were Vista users). I still can't figure out how this missed even basic testing where CCP should have caught this bug pretty easily.