I don't know what people want, but I would like to see something where batman at least halfway lives up to his title of world's greatest detective...
That was the number one problem with Batman vs. Superman. Yeah, the movie was trash on multiple levels, but a recurring question that almost everyone who watched it was asking throughout was "why is Batman so dumb?"
So now we have yet another super hero movie with a black cast. Whoop de doo. Is it fun? Possibly, I've not seen it but I'm told its good. Is it any better than, say, the last Marvel movie? Is it better than Deadpool?
Hard to say? They're like.. two different types of movies. Like, different genres except they both have folks with powers in costume.
There's nothing special about this one except that certain groups have gone bananas over it simply because its got black people in it.
I think Black Panther is a fantastic movie. Is it a 'masterpiece?' No, it has some problems, almost all of which has to do with so-so action scenes. Action is pretty important for an action movie, so that downgrades it from 'masterpiece' to 'oh yeah, it's really good.'
I don't think it's relevant because I question the motivation behind the "well actually" brigade. There is an undercurrent of cynicism about representation of under-represented groups in films. And it *always* comes from smug white men in their 30s, who are very perfectly well represented.
Under-represented is a given. But there's a little bit of blowback when hyperbolic claims are presented, like people in this comments section claiming it's the first superhero movie with a black cast. Now, the biggest and best? Sure, I can get behind that. Of course, it's subjective, but because it's subjective it's a claim you can more credibly make, as opposed to something fact-based that will have people saying "well, actually..."
I think this misses bigger problem: the writing for Storm was really bad. She was a completely two-dimensional character, with no development, no story arc. She was just there. I don't mind that being black wasn't portrayed as an important part of her identity, I mind that there were literally no memorable aspects to her identity. The role of the black female X-Man was to stand near the white X-Men and agree with them. She wasn't portrayed as a person with independent agency who was adding a lot to the team, she was portrayed as a cardboard cutout with superpowers.
Well, X-Men was an ensemble series. It was about Magneto, Professor X, Wolverine, and then a bunch of other guys. I'd say Cyclops got the character development shafting even harder than Storm, and the only reason Jean Grey got anything at all was they were setting up her love triangle for Wolverine. One of the primary definitions for Badly Written Female Character is that she's just there as a love interest for a male character. Rogue got a little more, as she was the McGuffin of the movie. Storm got bad lines, and an actress who didn't really try to make it sound believable.
Blade, on the other hand, was the focus, the primary protagonist. It's hard to compare a movie like Blade with a movie like X-Men, because they have two different (intentional) cast types. One ensemble, one not.
Black Panther isn't the first superhero (ensemble or not) with a black cast, but it may be the first mainstream breakout hit with one.
Wonder Woman was good, but not that great. Its nonsensical plot holes worked against its own message it was trying to push. Yeah, it's certainly the best of the DC movies since Nolan's Batman, but that's not a high bar to overcome.
So there has to be real risk of bodily harm to the actors and stuntmen for you to find it entertaining? Wow, that's kind of barbaric of you. How about you just go watch some MMA fights if you want to actually see someone get hurt.
No one is interested in watching a guy in a harness fall back onto a mattress. A well-executed action scene is all about tricking your mind into believing what you're actually seeing. If it's not capable of suspending your disbelief, then it is failing in its intention to impress you. No one has to get hurt in the Real World making the movie for me to think that the action is great. But it does have to trick me.
I do not believe you are correct about all self proclaimed Social Justice Warriors. I have encountered many of them who have simply decided that anything white and male is the enemy. White females are (sometimes) tolerated. That is not justice, nor is it sane. It is merely racist.
Which also was the mindset of the primary antagonist in The Black Panther, and the reason why reconciliation with T'Challa was not going to happen. He had too much hatred for the "colonists" and oppressors to turn away from the race war he was inciting.
The ratio of ads to text was vastly lower in newspapers when they were king than in web viewed news today.
Partly because they were funded by whole sections of ads (like the car section, the movie section, etc) as well as classified sections that charged by the entry. Once the classifieds died out, the newspaper industry was in trouble.
Which brings us to another point. These sites want to "make readers pay". The things is - readers don't want to pay for most of this content. They're happy to read it if it's free, but if it's not - they can live without it. Not wanting to pay includes not just not wanting to pay with their money - but also with their attention (ads blasting) and computing power (cryptocurrency mining).
The ad-infested website has led to some horrible assumptions on the part of the Internet audience -- we now expect that everything should be free. It doesn't matter if it cost money for people to write the stories and for companies to host the content, some folks put up stuff for free, so 'free' is the default assumption for something that costs money. The old saying "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is true. You WILL pay for something that you use one way or another, whether it happens with your attention (side ads/paid stories/crypto mining) or not.
The freeloaders, the people who WANT to use all the websites and want to assume absolutely no cost, well, I don't have a lot of regard for their arguments. But you're doing the right thing by going elsewhere if you don't want to put up with the mining or ads of a website.
and it was only in the last 20 years in the U.S. that the notion that this "personhood" was actually a general like a real natural person, with now free speech, and freedom of religion rights.
What Citizens United decided was NOT that corporations were 'persons.' This is the #1 thing I hear about this decision that is flat-out wrong. They are 'collections' of people. The Supreme Court decision stated that people do not lose their free speech and other constitutional rights because they act in a group instead of an individual. The "companies are people" argument sidesteps the actual ruling.
This said, your phone as a tethering device to the the Internet qualifies as an alternative, and you excluded it
I would not claim that cell phone data plans are Broadband access. They are far too restricted and the phone companies have way too much control. Cell data plans are those things that you have to use at various times when you can't get onto wireless to use a real Internet connection. Tethering, for example, often requires the active allowance by your carrier. They control the data connection, they have policies against tethering unless you pay them. On my phone, the carrier is able to totally block each and every tethering app -- none of them work. At all. Ever. I have yet to find an app in the play store capable of setting up a wifi network. Of course, there is an AT&T-provided system setting that activates tethering in your plan, if you pay for it. I'm pretty sure I would have to root and jailbreak my phone to get around this restriction.
In a more perfect world, the communities would own the poles and the wires and the easements, and you could pick Comcast, Spectrum, or whomever to be your provider, as a few communities now offer.
He also said: "In a more perfect world, the communities would own the poles and the wires and the easements, and you could pick Comcast, Spectrum, or whomever to be your provider, as a few communities now offer."
Don't expect Ajit Pai to ever, EVER recommend that as a serious policy shift.
Cut your TV addiction or at least go to your local library. Mine has more movies and complete TV series available than I ever saw in a Blockbuster.
Talk about damning with faint praise! Blockbuster always had a horrible selection. Any local video store was always better than Blockbuster. Given their poor selection and their customer-hostile policies (which drove me away and got them on the losing end of a class-action lawsuit), it's hard to explain the rise of Blockbuster in the first place. It sure wasn't due to quality.
Yeah, sorry to be "that guy" to remind folks that everything that will happen has happened before, and since we willfully disregard history because it's not as fun as encouraging bubbles to try to exploit for profit. But no, it's so FUN to pretend that this is a total paradigm shift! We're totally rewriting the financial sector, the way money works will change forever!! The bubble grows. It'll burst. It always does.
PS - it's not the mites themselves, mostly, but you should know that...
Yes indeed, I was told (again, I was 10 years old pre-Internet. Didn't really do a lot of original research myself) that the problem was "dust mite droppings."
The deal is there is no deal. Most people don't hate DST; they like daylight extending deep into the "evening". (Southern hemisphere might have issues with this but they lost on the basis of population.)
If we were on DST year-round, it would affect Southern Hemisphere folks exactly the same as it does Northerners. Basically, not at all. But DST is a regional thing anyway -- the Southern Hemisphere is not pinned to our northern DST ways. For an even more local example, Utah and Arizona are on the same Longitude, Utah observes DST while Arizona does not.
Everyone likes DST. Standard Time is the real enemy here, though few realize it. They hate switching to it in the Fall and away from it in the Spring. Get rid of standard time and our problems are solved.
You sound like a total asshole. Why would you use such language? Do you speak that way to your mother? Random people on the street? Your boss? Why would you think that ought to be acceptable here?
Wow, this is breathtakingly ignorant. You realize a lot of people do business with people in other time zones? You don't, do you?
Not many people do, actually, and the current time zone system works JUST as well as the lack of time zone system that ContextSwitch proposed. It would replace the "time zone problem" that only affects a small number of folks (barring DST) and replacing it with a system that would be especially confusing all the time for the majority of people.
It strains the eyes of some people and often gives an unpleasant light compared to an incandescent or these days, an LED. Please don't include personal attacks like that, especially since it has nothing to do with Democrat vs Republican.
I play games all the time and noticed that Linux already has more than a lifetime of games. If you quit your job, eat no-doz for every meal and play games (and do nothing but play games) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you will die of old age before you finish playing games on Linux. Games are made for Linux faster than you can play them, and Linux isn't even the leading platform yet.
Most people want to play GOOD games, not cheap knock-off clones. Most people also want to play the AAA games that their friends play, and very few of those ever come to Linux.
A lot of the people "playing" with this have far better cars than what you drive. Bitcoin has gone up $2000 in a day. Know any other investment that gives this much return? Don't think so.
Yes, with every scam, there are people who will benefit. Quite a few folks got rich before the Holland Tulip prices crashed, too.
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I don't know what people want, but I would like to see something where batman at least halfway lives up to his title of world's greatest detective...
That was the number one problem with Batman vs. Superman. Yeah, the movie was trash on multiple levels, but a recurring question that almost everyone who watched it was asking throughout was "why is Batman so dumb?"
So now we have yet another super hero movie with a black cast. Whoop de doo. Is it fun? Possibly, I've not seen it but I'm told its good. Is it any better than, say, the last Marvel movie? Is it better than Deadpool?
Hard to say? They're like.. two different types of movies. Like, different genres except they both have folks with powers in costume.
There's nothing special about this one except that certain groups have gone bananas over it simply because its got black people in it.
I think Black Panther is a fantastic movie. Is it a 'masterpiece?' No, it has some problems, almost all of which has to do with so-so action scenes. Action is pretty important for an action movie, so that downgrades it from 'masterpiece' to 'oh yeah, it's really good.'
I don't think it's relevant because I question the motivation behind the "well actually" brigade. There is an undercurrent of cynicism about representation of under-represented groups in films. And it *always* comes from smug white men in their 30s, who are very perfectly well represented.
Under-represented is a given. But there's a little bit of blowback when hyperbolic claims are presented, like people in this comments section claiming it's the first superhero movie with a black cast. Now, the biggest and best? Sure, I can get behind that. Of course, it's subjective, but because it's subjective it's a claim you can more credibly make, as opposed to something fact-based that will have people saying "well, actually..."
I think this misses bigger problem: the writing for Storm was really bad. She was a completely two-dimensional character, with no development, no story arc. She was just there. I don't mind that being black wasn't portrayed as an important part of her identity, I mind that there were literally no memorable aspects to her identity. The role of the black female X-Man was to stand near the white X-Men and agree with them. She wasn't portrayed as a person with independent agency who was adding a lot to the team, she was portrayed as a cardboard cutout with superpowers.
Well, X-Men was an ensemble series. It was about Magneto, Professor X, Wolverine, and then a bunch of other guys. I'd say Cyclops got the character development shafting even harder than Storm, and the only reason Jean Grey got anything at all was they were setting up her love triangle for Wolverine. One of the primary definitions for Badly Written Female Character is that she's just there as a love interest for a male character. Rogue got a little more, as she was the McGuffin of the movie. Storm got bad lines, and an actress who didn't really try to make it sound believable.
Blade, on the other hand, was the focus, the primary protagonist. It's hard to compare a movie like Blade with a movie like X-Men, because they have two different (intentional) cast types. One ensemble, one not.
Black Panther isn't the first superhero (ensemble or not) with a black cast, but it may be the first mainstream breakout hit with one.
Wonder Woman was good, but not that great. Its nonsensical plot holes worked against its own message it was trying to push.
Yeah, it's certainly the best of the DC movies since Nolan's Batman, but that's not a high bar to overcome.
So there has to be real risk of bodily harm to the actors and stuntmen for you to find it entertaining? Wow, that's kind of barbaric of you. How about you just go watch some MMA fights if you want to actually see someone get hurt.
No one is interested in watching a guy in a harness fall back onto a mattress. A well-executed action scene is all about tricking your mind into believing what you're actually seeing. If it's not capable of suspending your disbelief, then it is failing in its intention to impress you. No one has to get hurt in the Real World making the movie for me to think that the action is great. But it does have to trick me.
SPOILERS for Black Panther ahead.
I do not believe you are correct about all self proclaimed Social Justice Warriors. I have encountered many of them who have simply decided that anything white and male is the enemy. White females are (sometimes) tolerated. That is not justice, nor is it sane. It is merely racist.
Which also was the mindset of the primary antagonist in The Black Panther, and the reason why reconciliation with T'Challa was not going to happen. He had too much hatred for the "colonists" and oppressors to turn away from the race war he was inciting.
The first Thor was a thoroughly enjoyable fish-out-of-water movie.
The second Thor was pretty forgettable.
The ratio of ads to text was vastly lower in newspapers when they were king than in web viewed news today.
Partly because they were funded by whole sections of ads (like the car section, the movie section, etc) as well as classified sections that charged by the entry. Once the classifieds died out, the newspaper industry was in trouble.
Which brings us to another point. These sites want to "make readers pay". The things is - readers don't want to pay for most of this content. They're happy to read it if it's free, but if it's not - they can live without it. Not wanting to pay includes not just not wanting to pay with their money - but also with their attention (ads blasting) and computing power (cryptocurrency mining).
The ad-infested website has led to some horrible assumptions on the part of the Internet audience -- we now expect that everything should be free. It doesn't matter if it cost money for people to write the stories and for companies to host the content, some folks put up stuff for free, so 'free' is the default assumption for something that costs money. The old saying "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is true. You WILL pay for something that you use one way or another, whether it happens with your attention (side ads/paid stories/crypto mining) or not.
The freeloaders, the people who WANT to use all the websites and want to assume absolutely no cost, well, I don't have a lot of regard for their arguments. But you're doing the right thing by going elsewhere if you don't want to put up with the mining or ads of a website.
and it was only in the last 20 years in the U.S. that the notion that this "personhood" was actually a general like a real natural person, with now free speech, and freedom of religion rights.
What Citizens United decided was NOT that corporations were 'persons.' This is the #1 thing I hear about this decision that is flat-out wrong. They are 'collections' of people. The Supreme Court decision stated that people do not lose their free speech and other constitutional rights because they act in a group instead of an individual. The "companies are people" argument sidesteps the actual ruling.
Corporations are psychotic people.
Yeah whatever, no one is legally obliged to act morally, only legally.
No. To break their fall.
See, one-liners are easy to spin out, but in the end they're meaningless and don't add to the conversation.
Ayn Rand's philosophy never ran any deeper than that, anyway.
This said, your phone as a tethering device to the the Internet qualifies as an alternative, and you excluded it
I would not claim that cell phone data plans are Broadband access. They are far too restricted and the phone companies have way too much control. Cell data plans are those things that you have to use at various times when you can't get onto wireless to use a real Internet connection. Tethering, for example, often requires the active allowance by your carrier. They control the data connection, they have policies against tethering unless you pay them. On my phone, the carrier is able to totally block each and every tethering app -- none of them work. At all. Ever. I have yet to find an app in the play store capable of setting up a wifi network. Of course, there is an AT&T-provided system setting that activates tethering in your plan, if you pay for it. I'm pretty sure I would have to root and jailbreak my phone to get around this restriction.
In a more perfect world, the communities would own the poles and the wires and the easements, and you could pick Comcast, Spectrum, or whomever to be your provider, as a few communities now offer.
That is pretty much my absolute ideal situation.
He also said: "In a more perfect world, the communities would own the poles and the wires and the easements, and you could pick Comcast, Spectrum, or whomever to be your provider, as a few communities now offer."
Don't expect Ajit Pai to ever, EVER recommend that as a serious policy shift.
Cut your TV addiction or at least go to your local library. Mine has more movies and complete TV series available than I ever saw in a Blockbuster.
Talk about damning with faint praise! Blockbuster always had a horrible selection. Any local video store was always better than Blockbuster. Given their poor selection and their customer-hostile policies (which drove me away and got them on the losing end of a class-action lawsuit), it's hard to explain the rise of Blockbuster in the first place. It sure wasn't due to quality.
Yeah, sorry to be "that guy" to remind folks that everything that will happen has happened before, and since we willfully disregard history because it's not as fun as encouraging bubbles to try to exploit for profit. But no, it's so FUN to pretend that this is a total paradigm shift! We're totally rewriting the financial sector, the way money works will change forever!! The bubble grows. It'll burst. It always does.
PS - it's not the mites themselves, mostly, but you should know that...
Yes indeed, I was told (again, I was 10 years old pre-Internet. Didn't really do a lot of original research myself) that the problem was "dust mite droppings."
The deal is there is no deal. Most people don't hate DST; they like daylight extending deep into the "evening". (Southern hemisphere might have issues with this but they lost on the basis of population.)
If we were on DST year-round, it would affect Southern Hemisphere folks exactly the same as it does Northerners. Basically, not at all. But DST is a regional thing anyway -- the Southern Hemisphere is not pinned to our northern DST ways. For an even more local example, Utah and Arizona are on the same Longitude, Utah observes DST while Arizona does not.
Everyone likes DST. Standard Time is the real enemy here, though few realize it. They hate switching to it in the Fall and away from it in the Spring. Get rid of standard time and our problems are solved.
You sound like a total asshole. Why would you use such language? Do you speak that way to your mother? Random people on the street? Your boss? Why would you think that ought to be acceptable here?
Wow, this is breathtakingly ignorant. You realize a lot of people do business with people in other time zones? You don't, do you?
Not many people do, actually, and the current time zone system works JUST as well as the lack of time zone system that ContextSwitch proposed. It would replace the "time zone problem" that only affects a small number of folks (barring DST) and replacing it with a system that would be especially confusing all the time for the majority of people.
It strains the eyes of some people and often gives an unpleasant light compared to an incandescent or these days, an LED.
Please don't include personal attacks like that, especially since it has nothing to do with Democrat vs Republican.
I play games all the time and noticed that Linux already has more than a lifetime of games. If you quit your job, eat no-doz for every meal and play games (and do nothing but play games) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you will die of old age before you finish playing games on Linux. Games are made for Linux faster than you can play them, and Linux isn't even the leading platform yet.
Most people want to play GOOD games, not cheap knock-off clones. Most people also want to play the AAA games that their friends play, and very few of those ever come to Linux.
A lot of the people "playing" with this have far better cars than what you drive. Bitcoin has gone up $2000 in a day. Know any other investment that gives this much return? Don't think so.
Yes, with every scam, there are people who will benefit. Quite a few folks got rich before the Holland Tulip prices crashed, too.