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User: Rakarra

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  1. Re:Not my money, yet on Star Wars Pulls In $1 Billion At Record Speed (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    The story in the prequels was actually better

    Now now, don't mistake the story of the prequels being more ambitious (they were) with being better (they weren't).

    Lucas aimed far higher with the prequels, but he crashed and burned far worse with the plot.

  2. Re:Not my money, yet on Star Wars Pulls In $1 Billion At Record Speed (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    There is one in TFA using some kind of hand weapon sword thing.

    Saw it yesterday. Not a lightsaber.

    I don't think it matters. They're pretty much the same thing. Given that Star Wars actors take sword-fighting lessons to learn how to fight with a light saber, it shouldn't come as a surprise when the combat that appears on screen looks similar to sword fighting. The mass and center of balance is different (I assume), but otherwise it's pretty much the same.

    Han had never used a light saber (that we know of) before using Luke's with no problem in Empire. Fin seemed to use it pretty much as one would use a sword. He didn't do any special Jedi tricks like reflecting blaster shots, it was mostly just "swing this thing in your hand."

    if you were a professional soldier from an early age with nothing else going on I imagine in that 20 odd years you might well have had a chance to learn hand to hand combat skills.

    You imagine, do you? Soldiers - even cloned ones - aren't a homogeneous mass. There are, and always have been, specialists.

    Look at how totally shite Luke was the first time he picked one up.

    I think how good Rey was so quickly was the biggest suspension-of-disbelief problem I had with the movie. That's bothersome.

  3. Re:Not my money, yet on Star Wars Pulls In $1 Billion At Record Speed (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm hoping that in the future there is some explanation for Rey, because as she is right now, she's a total Mary Sue / wish fulfillment character. Literally, she is better than everyone else at almost everything. Her first time flying the Falcon she has no problem flying circles around Tie Fighters, and she can fix up the ship better than Han. She's Forcing and light-sabering without -any- training, enough to beat the Snoke-trained Ren (though at least Ren is mentally-weak enough and injured to partly explain it). Even Luke went through a whole movie of mediocrity and training before he used the Force at the end of Star Wars, and even then he had Obi-Wan on his shoulder.

    The whole "R2 had the map the whole time but he refused to wake up until just the most convenient moment" thing bothered me as well. Other than that, I think the movie was scripted pretty well.

  4. Re:Not my money, yet on Star Wars Pulls In $1 Billion At Record Speed (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Only one movie, in a group of lacklustre movies at beginning of the school holiday seasons, it seems some how, hmm, conspired to be that way, being able to control release dates and production schedules in order to 'share' the various school holiday starts for the major studios/cinema chains

    What really happens is that Lucasfilm announces a date, and it scares everyone else away. Other studios are fine with releasing movies earlier than that (Hunger Games, James Bond, etc), but the only other movies that studios are willing to release on the weekend of a major, major blockbuster are counter-programming. IE, one studio releases Star Wars, a few others release chick flicks or small independent films. No one wants to release something with a big budget or is similar to Star Wars on or just after its opening date, because it'll get crushed, and the release is a waste. Would even be better not to release anything at that point.

  5. Not necessarily the end. When Hillary or Donald mandate that those backdoors be included on all US networking products, then every networking company will be in Juniper's boat!

  6. Costumes were not much of anything. Disney had decades of Frank Frazetta and Michael Whelan art at their disposal, much of which would be ready-made storyboards, and instead decided to go cyberpunk

    Holy smokes, I did not get much of a cyberpunk vibe from those costumes! I actually rather liked the costuming and the look, it was one of the few saving graces when the plot or the actors bored me.

    I wouldn't consider a $250M budget "mid-level", even in this day.

    Oh, absolutely not, but the result was mid-level. The film had to be rewritten and many sequences even reshot, so you got a $100m film for the low, low price of $250m. I still think it's a mid-level film, but the budget was so high that it had to be close to "#1 film of the year" territory to even break even.

  7. Well, perhaps not. But I honestly fail to see how someone proficient in vim is more efficient than someone proficient in something that isn't deliberately as strange as possible. Maybe, in the past, when we didn't have arrow keys on our keyboards, and a mouse was just a rodent, vim made sense.

    Fortunately, I learned vi well after arrow key support was added.

    The mouse is an ergonomic nightmare. And under some cases it can speed things up, but if you become familiar over a long period of time with keyboard shortcuts, they'll usually be faster than just about anything you're doing with a mouse, with the added bonus of less wrist pain.

  8. How does this differ from GNOME 1? IIRC, it really doesn't. Things looked very much the same. But by contrast, what I personally did with GNOME 2 was to not even use the panel, and to augment it with compiz.

    I vaguely remember being disappointed with the Gnome 1 -> 2 transition when power user options were removed, most especially the keybindings for the window manager. "Oh, so I can't set a hotkey to toggle window title bars/decorations at will anymore? That just... can't be done?" Many, many things along that line. Over time, some stuff has gotten added back in, and other parts of the UI, like Nautilus and gvfs are far more feature-rich in later Gnome2 incarnations, and I'm pretty happy with Gnome2 in, say, RHEL6.

    Gnome3, however.. what a disaster. I'm not sure where to begin, not the least which was that Red Hat rushed it as the default interface in Fedora way WAAAY too early when it was very unstable and feature-poor. What a horrible intro to Gnome3! It's only now achieving some sort of stability and flexibility. Unfortunately, none of that stuff is going to make it to RHEL7. They rushed Gnome3 into RHEL as well.

  9. I am actually sick of the HYPOCRISY of people like you. Mozilla copies Chrome because Chrome was cleaner and easier to use for normal people.

    Most of Chrome's interface changes are not better (in just about any way), but Chrome was much lighter and faster than firefox. Much better at memory management as well. People were sick of Firefox's pokiness, slowness, and general instability, but the alternatives also sucked, so when Chrome came out and it was dazzlingly faster than Firefox was, people started to switch over.

    Mozilla, naturally, took away EXACTLY the wrong lessons from all of this; flailing and in a panic adding Chrome's interface without improving Firefox's reliability, CPU usage, memory footprint. Not surprisingly, the pace of users leaving Firefox accelerated even more.

  10. Re: consent to support her? on German Court Orders Man To Destroy Naked Images of Ex-Partner (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    If, after a year, a live-in girlfriend is considered a common-law wife, she can get alimony. Consider the Lee Marvin case.

    The Lee Marvin judgement was always BS, which is why it was overturned in 1981.

  11. Re:Jurisprudence on German Court Orders Man To Destroy Naked Images of Ex-Partner (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    Its the same court, not the same individual judges and lawyers.

    A court is not some static object independent of the people who make up the staff. If it's not the same judges, prosecutors, or defendants, it's not the same court.

  12. Re: Seems pretty reasonable on German Court Orders Man To Destroy Naked Images of Ex-Partner (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    So you think the "private property" concept is more important than right to privacy.

    Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

    Even if the "private property" is something as intimate as recording of a sexual act.

    Never record a sexual act unless you're fine with the other person having the recording forever.

    I disagree. Vehemently. As apparently does the German judge.

    Well thank God there are different countries with different laws.

  13. Re:Still completely contradictory on German Court Orders Man To Destroy Naked Images of Ex-Partner (bbc.com) · · Score: 2

    The man obtained the photo's legally and with consent. The person changing their mind well after the fact is like a person claiming "I was raped for the full duration of our relationship because I no longer consent."

    I think that analogy falls down flat. Past actions are not being criminalized, just future actions that were once legal. Your rape example is an ex post facto issue, but previous possession is not being criminalized. Further possession is, however.

    The man obtained them with consent at the time, therefore, his having the pictures all this time is not a crime.
    There is no consent for the future, so he may not have the photos in the future. Still pretty troubling.

  14. No, speakers pretty much still look like speakers. Well.. we do have a lot of ultra-portable equipment around like our phones and tablets which have flat speakers. Those all sound like shit though. If you open up anything with a half-way decent sound and look inside a speaker is still a cone with a magnet on the end. Don't open your stuff up? Do you have a car? Can't you see the speakers from underneath every time you open your trunk?

    You're touching up against a bigger problem -- many, many people today are perfectly fine with with things that look and sound like shit. "I'll watch the new Star Wars on my phone! That won't degrade the viewing experience at all!"

  15. Re:The real problem is Millennials. on Improving UI and UX: Changing the "Open Source Is Ugly" Perception (opensource.com) · · Score: 1

    Wow now millenials are hipsters? Haha I didn't think the hipster term could be expanded to include any more people after it defaulted to "people who do things I don't like".

    The "hipster" is one who rejects something that was popular for little reason other than it was popular and liked. The UX disasters we've seen over the last decade show an utter rejection of the usability and aesthetic standards of before. Because, uhhh.. they were cool, but people liked them, so they suck.

  16. Let's get something clear: John Carter didn't flop because of the source material. John Carter flopped because it was a terrible movie. From the music choices, the casting, the horribly stilted dialog, the mishmash story, unimpressive sets, this film was Doomed.

    Eh? John Carter's music was great (Film music critics associations agreed that it was the best sci-fi/fantasy soundtrack of the year). Lynn Colins was great as Dejah Thoris. Taylor Kitsch was... ehhh. Bland. Dafoe was great, but I can't say the rest of the cast had much going for them.

    The story was a jumble and definitely overlong. I don't remember the dialog either way. The sets were fantastic. Effects were similarly great. But it was a mid-level film, in a mid-level time slot, and it made mid-level money. But it needed to earn AAA Blockbuster money, so that is what doomed it. Sci-Fi nerds know about Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars series, but no one else knows or even cares when you tell them, so it's hard to say it's an adaptation people were really anticipating either.

  17. Sorry, they lost my vote when they laid off their entire IT department and replaced with H1B's.
    Shame on you Disney!

    Well, not all of Disney I. It was the IT staff at Walt Disney World Florida, and not all of them either. Then there were the Disney/ABC layoffs, but those were strangely halted their layoff efforts, probably in response to the backlash.

  18. John Carter was ok.

    Hell, it would have been considered a success given its box office if it only cost $50 million to make. But the exorbitant cost meant it absolutely needed to earn super-blockbuster numbers, but it was released off-season in March (and wouldn't have been that much more successful if it was a summer film).

  19. The title didn't help either. John Carter. Who?

    They should have used the actual title, A Princess of Mars, or at the very least the working title they had which was John Carter of Mars.

    The title was a misfire from Disney. They were aiming hard at the young boy market who would have been turned off by the princess label. Also, Stanton left off the "of Mars" title because John Carter only becomes of Mars in the last minutes of the film. Also, Mars Needs Moms earlier was such a huge flop that the studio wanted to avoid mentioning the word in any movie title.

  20. Did some SJW have deadlines and no ideas?

    Now, I'm an ornery son of a bitch with no patience for SJWs, but, really, what the fuck does this story have to do with SJWs?

    Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's pretty common now to throw "SJW" around indiscriminately. I don't know who to blame, either. Are these SJW-haters, incompetently trying to raise awareness of the problems with every post? Are they SJWs, masquerading as haters in an attempt to discredit them? I kindof prefer the latter, since the former is sheer idiocy. I suspect that it really is idiocy-related, though.

  21. Anakin joining the Sith ... they had 3 whole movies to show us how Anakin was seduced to the darkside... and I was entirely unconvinced.

    I thought that was fine, I was convinced. What I was NOT convinced was the reactions of everyone around him. In Clones, Anakin tells Padme that he massacred an entire village of sand people... everyone. Every last one. She doesn't seem particularly shocked, and never tells anyone else. Genocide wouldn't be a red flag for someone like Amidala?

    Mace Windu confronting the emperor by himself... ridiculous.

    Oh, he had two other Jedi with him, they just died ridiculously quickly in a lightsaber fight that was poorly choreographed. But the emperor was supposed to be the Sith Lord they'd been looking for 10 years. Why not bring... 10 jedi? 20? And Master Yoda? Had they really all been extinguished?

    Most of the Jedi, including top leaders being trivially executed by Storm Troopers? WTF? In the first one, remember how concerned they were at the beginning when QuiGon and ObiWon show up to 'negotiate'? ... what were they worried about?? Apparently you can just shoot them in the back with storm troopers 99% of the time, no fuss at all.

    I think it would be a pretty good way to assassinate Jedi. Storm troopers would have no chance in a straight up fight, but anyone, Jedi included, could be killed by a surprise blaster shot (why the idiots in Episode 1 didn't just put Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan in a room with a bunch of pipe bombs under the table is beyond me). But don't they have a connection to the force? Wouldn't they have some sort of.. I don't know, spiritual warning? Oh, I know, I'll bet the Dark Side clouded that ability, as it often does for Yoda at crucial times.

  22. Re:wah wah wah clickbait on Writer: Why Watching the Original Star Wars Again Was a Bad Idea (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Shut up, Rick! >|-(

  23. Re:wah wah wah clickbait on Writer: Why Watching the Original Star Wars Again Was a Bad Idea (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    I think the scenes on Endor would have been fine if they'd stuck with the original plan and it was the Wookiee homeworld. Instead, the wookies got aged and shrunk down and became child-friendly Ewoks.

  24. Re:Karma! It IS a bitch! on "Most Hated Man In America" Martin Shkreli Arrested On Suspicion of Fraud (ibtimes.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    The only physical copy in the world, the album comes with a contract that bars the buyer from publicly releaseing [SIC] the songs for 88 years.

    So, because he won't break a contract to let you hear some music, you hate him?

    Buying the only copy of an album for the sole purpose of never allowing anyone else to hear it is a pretty shitty thing to do, yes. Though I disagree with grandparent, it's not "raise a prescription price from $0.99 to $70" sort of dickishness.

  25. Re:Documents that made him look like an stupid jer on Anonymous Goes After Donald Trump · · Score: 1

    who shows by far the least compassion towards the power

    Ugh, I should have proofread.