Re:4th Doctor is BEST Doctor. Scientific fact.
on
The 2014 Hugo Awards
·
· Score: 1
It's a Sci-Fi AND Fantasy award.
Science Fiction being a sub-genre of Fantasy. Oh, I went there.
(Well, it all depends on what your definition of "fantasy" is. Are the John Carter books sci-fi? Fantasy? Both? Is any fiction work based on a non-earth "fantasy?")
As I mentioned above, I think the script-writing is fine, but there's a special effects f-up. In wide shots, Bullock is shown to be orbiting the station, and that creates tension on the line. But in closeups, the station is static, even though just a shot earlier, she was shown to still be moving. Why that decision was made, I don't know. Maybe someone forgot. But it seems curious to establish rotational momentum in the wide shots and then just drop that entirely in the closeups.
This is like.. the one scene that everyone talks about. I think the scene should have been handled a little better. When Bullock comes to the end of her tether (before she grab's Clooney's line), she is shown as still being moving.. but it's rotational momentum. Rotational energy is still energy, and that created tension on the parachute lines. I think the movie's mistake is that during the closeups of Clooney and Bullock right after, the station appears static. The rotation that Bullock was shone to be having in the wide shots just vanishes. If the effects department had shown the ISS rotating out of frame behind them, it would have made clear that there was still angular velocity at play, which would explain the tension on the tether.
Either way, it's quite possible that Clooney's character could have hung on and they could have climbed back together. But he didn't want to even take the chance that both of them would die.
Gravity was science fiction. Near-time science fiction, that is, depicting structures that we may not have now, but may have some time in the future. The Tiangong space station featured in the last act of the movie is still in planning stages.
The movie put together a number of space technologies, past, present, and future, that will likely never exist together. The ISS, the Tiangong, a refinement of the 1980s EVA pack, the retired Space Shuttle, etc.
There is a difference between a contributing and non-contributing member of the ecosystem. For instance, one reason hawk imprints can never be released to the wild is that they will never mate (with other hawks, anyway..). Even if they can hunt, they would simply be taking game and territory from breeding birds.
Exactly! Not only will affected people switch providers, but this will cause participating ISPs to become viewed as unreliable. Unreliable internet has become unacceptable.
A free market for ISPs, where people could pick an ISP with the terms they like, would be fantastic. Most people live in an area where you have one, perhaps two broadband providers. I'm lucky enough to live in an area where I have a few more ISPs available, and I chose one which will never let RightsCorp in the door, but I have no allusions that my situation is typical.
This is basically the reason I don't use ebooks - with a paper book, I can buy it and read it, then my wife can read it, I can lend it to friends/family, it can sit on book shelves for years and then my kids can read it, their kids can read it decades later, or I can sell it, etc. All this stuff is considered the "normal" way to use a book. Compare to an ebook: I buy it. Then my wife has to buy it(*). Them my friends/family have to buy it. Then my kids have to buy it. Their kids have to buy it. See the problem?
Oh, and people used to make fun of Stallman's The Right to Read for being so far-fetched. Almost everything in there has already happened, and it only took 20 years, not 100.
How about we put Terms and Conditions in human parseable language first before we start blaming everyone for not reading?
Maybe if we tried to read the agreements that we signed, and we bitched and pestered companies, those Terms and Conditions would shrink. But really, the real reason they're so long is that it's a legal agreement, and legal agreements cannot contain ambiguity. Every edge condition has to be thought of, parsed, and explained.
If I rent a disc from Blockbuster, ermm.... Redbox or whatever, I don't get to keep it and shout "First Sale" if they ask for it back. If you're SOLD something, you can keep it. If you're rented access, you don't get to keep it.
Content industries have been trying to move from a sale model to a pay-per-view model for a number of years, and the "let's stream everything, why would I want a physical disc anymore??" crowd have been helping them along.
"an epidemic of anomalies" ha ha, good one. Falcon 9 had 11/11 primary mission successes on the first 11 flights. That sort of a track record is very, very rare. Space Shuttle did it.
Yeah, but the Space Shuttles had some flawed designs resulting in a few orbiter losses. Completing 11/11 launches isn't a good enough record, they should shoot for 12/11 or 13/11.
No, a lot of people on Slashdot don't use IP in that sense, but at the content creation companies (game/movie/whatever), that phrase gets tossed around pretty often.
three or four WoW expansions to every Starcraft 2 release?
Well, to be fair WoW is much much older and was releasing its 3rd expansion when Starcraft 2 came out. Starcraft 2 expansions have come out at roughly the same rate that that WoW expansions have. WoW: every two years, pretty much like clockwork. Starcraft 2: July 2010 Heart of the Swarm: March 2013 Legacy of the Void: In progress, art and voice assets finished. Game content currently being tuned. Sometime in 2015?
So Starcraft may be every 2 - 2.5 years. I'm not sure where the "each installment was supposed to be available a year afterward" came from, I heard early on that each installment was supposed to be the content size of the initial game, so it's more like buying a full game than an "expansion set."
I like referring to it's in-game name, "the Molten Corgi." I am ashamed that in 10 years of WoW I never thought of that myself, nor did the punster in my guild.
The last time I quit wow was just after mop came out. When they added in the ability to upgrade individual items at the cost of valor points, I just gave up. Having to enchant, gem, reforge, and then upgrade my items before they were considered raid ready was just more then I wanted to put up with
The valor upgrades were just there at the end of the expansion so that players would have something to do with all the valor they no longer had a use for, and the feature was removed for Pandaria, readded in a patch between raid dungeons to give a bit of an upgrade before the new raid came out, removed again when that raid was released, and readded (and later extended) at the end of Pandaria. Basically, it's something that was added for a limited time to give you a way to get a minor upgrade between raid cycles -- after an old raid had been out for awhile but before the new one was in. An item wasn't "not raid ready" if it didn't have a valor upgrade, and a raid who enforced that would have been very misguided. It did have the unintended consequence of inflating the item levels since newer raids had to come out with items better than the upgraded items from the old raid, and with how damage/healing/etc scaled with item levels... well, raiding at the end of Mists feels quite different than at the start.
As someone pointed out, a new piece of gear drops from a raid and you now have to redo your entire gear setup just to fit it into your setup.
Which is pretty much why for Warlords, stats like hit chance and expertise are being dropped, and the reforging system is being removed. No more having to regem and reforge every item to get that perfect 17% hit (or whatever). The developers said that when you need to get an external website like askmrrobot (which they called out by name at Blizzcon) to make all your reforging decisions for you, the system has gotten out of hand. I'm looking forward to its demise.
What the heck was next? I can't remember but it just generic, all thinking ceased
Cataclysm was next, and it actually started out as an improvement, introducing interesting stat combinations (I miss armor pen) and much, much harder starting dungeons. But by the end of the expansion Blizzard had entirely reversed course with the pronouncement that 5-mans should be extremely easy (and therefore disposable).
Pandaria has been a mixed bag.
Warlords might be interesting with the introduction of new secondary stats multistrike and versatility, and tertiary stats which don't count towards the item budgets, like chances of extra item levels or gem slots. The tertiary stats are intended to break the "item X is the best in slot I should always use" practice that has been prevalent in the last several years.
The original players manual stated, for instance, that the mage was the highest damage dealing class, but in exchange, could likely be 1-or-2-shotted by some other classes
A lot of these things DID sound really cool, but playtesting with millions of players over several revealed that hey... being 1-2 shot just isn't very fun. It's not a fun playstyle for either side, whether it's the super-squishy mage himself, or the victim of the "3-minute-mage." For hunters are well, the inventory thing was ridiculous from the start -- the drawback is they have to fill their bags with arrows? Is this supposed to be World of Inventorycraft? Turns out that inventory hassles didn't actually ADD anything to the game. I was glad to see the addition of Void Storage, turning mounts into spells instead of physical objects you carry around, and the upcoming Toy Box, where unequipable toys and doodads go. That sort of inventory management never added to the game, didn't make it any more fun or interesting; it was only an annoyance.
I will say I looked forward to the PvP system promised with Diablo 2 -- that PvE and PvP balancing would be entirely separate, that spells would be balanced completely differently and have different effects in PvP, avoiding WoW's "they nerfed me in PvE because of PvP" problem (which is admittedly, still a really big problem for WoW, and it's only getting worse in the new expansion). But then real PvP for Diablo 2 was scrapped completely. Too bad.
Because "Game" and "IP" mean different things? They can have a new game, but it could be part of the Starcraft universe, as Starcraft 2 and Heart of the Swarm were.
"New IP" is a phrase that has meaning: "containing a new story, characters, and environment not featured in the company's other products." "New game" and "new product" were too vague and generic to get the point across.
Phrases sometimes have multiple meanings, and IP is one of those. Sure, it's an umbrella term for copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. But it's also an industry term for product lines.
you can't trust the client! The problem was that it was slow, not that things were handled by the server
In general, the "correct" way is to allow things to be done in the client, check them, and then deny access if what the client did was impossible or illegal given server constraints. That how you get responsiveness. If you require the server to send approval of every action, then things will indeed seem "sluggish." That's in a number of online games (like wow and FF) you can move freely, but you might "snap back" if a little lag strikes. Or why you can move instantly, but things like spellcasts might be delayed for server verification.
It's not easy to tell where the line should be for what you allow right now, and what you allow only after an ok from the server.
Are you SERIOUSLY saying that England is the one spelling the English language wrong, or was this more tongue-in-cheek than can be conveyed easily in text?
Hey, color (and honor, etc) is the original spelling. If the Normans hadn't conquered England and introduced those frenchified variations, we wouldn't be having this argument.
And no, England and English having the same root word in no way makes England the ultimate arbiter in how language spellings go.
Sure, but the government has to be a broker, since the power companies need to work on property that isn't theirs. We can't have any company tearing up the streets at their leisure. Or any company laying lines underground under a private residence. It requires a government to be a coordinator and arbiter.
I was also sometimes told to call an individual, in which case that individual was never available and never returned calls. I wish I had had recordings of those calls.
Ahhh, I was always happy to hear that when I had Pacbell Internet, as it meant I'd gotten past the clueless front-line and had gotten in touch with a back-end engineer who knew what I was talking about. Those guys always helped me out.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Sci-Fi AND Fantasy award.
Science Fiction being a sub-genre of Fantasy. Oh, I went there.
(Well, it all depends on what your definition of "fantasy" is. Are the John Carter books sci-fi? Fantasy? Both? Is any fiction work based on a non-earth "fantasy?")
As I mentioned above, I think the script-writing is fine, but there's a special effects f-up. In wide shots, Bullock is shown to be orbiting the station, and that creates tension on the line. But in closeups, the station is static, even though just a shot earlier, she was shown to still be moving. Why that decision was made, I don't know. Maybe someone forgot. But it seems curious to establish rotational momentum in the wide shots and then just drop that entirely in the closeups.
This is like.. the one scene that everyone talks about. I think the scene should have been handled a little better. When Bullock comes to the end of her tether (before she grab's Clooney's line), she is shown as still being moving.. but it's rotational momentum. Rotational energy is still energy, and that created tension on the parachute lines. I think the movie's mistake is that during the closeups of Clooney and Bullock right after, the station appears static. The rotation that Bullock was shone to be having in the wide shots just vanishes. If the effects department had shown the ISS rotating out of frame behind them, it would have made clear that there was still angular velocity at play, which would explain the tension on the tether.
Either way, it's quite possible that Clooney's character could have hung on and they could have climbed back together. But he didn't want to even take the chance that both of them would die.
Gravity was science fiction. Near-time science fiction, that is, depicting structures that we may not have now, but may have some time in the future.
The Tiangong space station featured in the last act of the movie is still in planning stages.
The movie put together a number of space technologies, past, present, and future, that will likely never exist together. The ISS, the Tiangong, a refinement of the 1980s EVA pack, the retired Space Shuttle, etc.
The bald eagles will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
That's a depressing image.
Bald eagles are the true symbol of liberty. They've been nigh on extinct since liberty died in America.
Bald eagles aren't endangered since the 90s, and they were even removed from "threatened" status in 2008. Does that mean liberty will make a comeback?
There is a difference between a contributing and non-contributing member of the ecosystem. For instance, one reason hawk imprints can never be released to the wild is that they will never mate (with other hawks, anyway..). Even if they can hunt, they would simply be taking game and territory from breeding birds.
Exactly! Not only will affected people switch providers, but this will cause participating ISPs to become viewed as unreliable. Unreliable internet has become unacceptable.
A free market for ISPs, where people could pick an ISP with the terms they like, would be fantastic. Most people live in an area where you have one, perhaps two broadband providers. I'm lucky enough to live in an area where I have a few more ISPs available, and I chose one which will never let RightsCorp in the door, but I have no allusions that my situation is typical.
This is basically the reason I don't use ebooks - with a paper book, I can buy it and read it, then my wife can read it, I can lend it to friends/family, it can sit on book shelves for years and then my kids can read it, their kids can read it decades later, or I can sell it, etc. All this stuff is considered the "normal" way to use a book. Compare to an ebook: I buy it. Then my wife has to buy it(*). Them my friends/family have to buy it. Then my kids have to buy it. Their kids have to buy it. See the problem?
Oh, and people used to make fun of Stallman's The Right to Read for being so far-fetched. Almost everything in there has already happened, and it only took 20 years, not 100.
How about we put Terms and Conditions in human parseable language first before we start blaming everyone for not reading?
Maybe if we tried to read the agreements that we signed, and we bitched and pestered companies, those Terms and Conditions would shrink.
But really, the real reason they're so long is that it's a legal agreement, and legal agreements cannot contain ambiguity. Every edge condition has to be thought of, parsed, and explained.
If I rent a disc from Blockbuster, ermm.... Redbox or whatever, I don't get to keep it and shout "First Sale" if they ask for it back. If you're SOLD something, you can keep it. If you're rented access, you don't get to keep it.
Content industries have been trying to move from a sale model to a pay-per-view model for a number of years, and the "let's stream everything, why would I want a physical disc anymore??" crowd have been helping them along.
"an epidemic of anomalies" ha ha, good one. Falcon 9 had 11/11 primary mission successes on the first 11 flights. That sort of a track record is very, very rare. Space Shuttle did it.
Yeah, but the Space Shuttles had some flawed designs resulting in a few orbiter losses. Completing 11/11 launches isn't a good enough record, they should shoot for 12/11 or 13/11.
No, a lot of people on Slashdot don't use IP in that sense, but at the content creation companies (game/movie/whatever), that phrase gets tossed around pretty often.
three or four WoW expansions to every Starcraft 2 release?
Well, to be fair WoW is much much older and was releasing its 3rd expansion when Starcraft 2 came out. Starcraft 2 expansions have come out at roughly the same rate that that WoW expansions have.
WoW: every two years, pretty much like clockwork.
Starcraft 2: July 2010
Heart of the Swarm: March 2013
Legacy of the Void: In progress, art and voice assets finished. Game content currently being tuned. Sometime in 2015?
So Starcraft may be every 2 - 2.5 years. I'm not sure where the "each installment was supposed to be available a year afterward" came from, I heard early on that each installment was supposed to be the content size of the initial game, so it's more like buying a full game than an "expansion set."
I like referring to it's in-game name, "the Molten Corgi." I am ashamed that in 10 years of WoW I never thought of that myself, nor did the punster in my guild.
The last time I quit wow was just after mop came out. When they added in the ability to upgrade individual items at the cost of valor points, I just gave up. Having to enchant, gem, reforge, and then upgrade my items before they were considered raid ready was just more then I wanted to put up with
The valor upgrades were just there at the end of the expansion so that players would have something to do with all the valor they no longer had a use for, and the feature was removed for Pandaria, readded in a patch between raid dungeons to give a bit of an upgrade before the new raid came out, removed again when that raid was released, and readded (and later extended) at the end of Pandaria. Basically, it's something that was added for a limited time to give you a way to get a minor upgrade between raid cycles -- after an old raid had been out for awhile but before the new one was in. An item wasn't "not raid ready" if it didn't have a valor upgrade, and a raid who enforced that would have been very misguided. It did have the unintended consequence of inflating the item levels since newer raids had to come out with items better than the upgraded items from the old raid, and with how damage/healing/etc scaled with item levels... well, raiding at the end of Mists feels quite different than at the start.
As someone pointed out, a new piece of gear drops from a raid and you now have to redo your entire gear setup just to fit it into your setup.
Which is pretty much why for Warlords, stats like hit chance and expertise are being dropped, and the reforging system is being removed. No more having to regem and reforge every item to get that perfect 17% hit (or whatever). The developers said that when you need to get an external website like askmrrobot (which they called out by name at Blizzcon) to make all your reforging decisions for you, the system has gotten out of hand. I'm looking forward to its demise.
What the heck was next? I can't remember but it just generic, all thinking ceased
Cataclysm was next, and it actually started out as an improvement, introducing interesting stat combinations (I miss armor pen) and much, much harder starting dungeons. But by the end of the expansion Blizzard had entirely reversed course with the pronouncement that 5-mans should be extremely easy (and therefore disposable).
Pandaria has been a mixed bag.
Warlords might be interesting with the introduction of new secondary stats multistrike and versatility, and tertiary stats which don't count towards the item budgets, like chances of extra item levels or gem slots. The tertiary stats are intended to break the "item X is the best in slot I should always use" practice that has been prevalent in the last several years.
The original players manual stated, for instance, that the mage was the highest damage dealing class, but in exchange, could likely be 1-or-2-shotted by some other classes
A lot of these things DID sound really cool, but playtesting with millions of players over several revealed that hey... being 1-2 shot just isn't very fun. It's not a fun playstyle for either side, whether it's the super-squishy mage himself, or the victim of the "3-minute-mage." For hunters are well, the inventory thing was ridiculous from the start -- the drawback is they have to fill their bags with arrows? Is this supposed to be World of Inventorycraft? Turns out that inventory hassles didn't actually ADD anything to the game. I was glad to see the addition of Void Storage, turning mounts into spells instead of physical objects you carry around, and the upcoming Toy Box, where unequipable toys and doodads go. That sort of inventory management never added to the game, didn't make it any more fun or interesting; it was only an annoyance.
I will say I looked forward to the PvP system promised with Diablo 2 -- that PvE and PvP balancing would be entirely separate, that spells would be balanced completely differently and have different effects in PvP, avoiding WoW's "they nerfed me in PvE because of PvP" problem (which is admittedly, still a really big problem for WoW, and it's only getting worse in the new expansion). But then real PvP for Diablo 2 was scrapped completely. Too bad.
Because "Game" and "IP" mean different things? They can have a new game, but it could be part of the Starcraft universe, as Starcraft 2 and Heart of the Swarm were.
"New IP" is a phrase that has meaning: "containing a new story, characters, and environment not featured in the company's other products."
"New game" and "new product" were too vague and generic to get the point across.
Phrases sometimes have multiple meanings, and IP is one of those. Sure, it's an umbrella term for copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. But it's also an industry term for product lines.
you can't trust the client! The problem was that it was slow, not that things were handled by the server
In general, the "correct" way is to allow things to be done in the client, check them, and then deny access if what the client did was impossible or illegal given server constraints. That how you get responsiveness. If you require the server to send approval of every action, then things will indeed seem "sluggish." That's in a number of online games (like wow and FF) you can move freely, but you might "snap back" if a little lag strikes. Or why you can move instantly, but things like spellcasts might be delayed for server verification.
It's not easy to tell where the line should be for what you allow right now, and what you allow only after an ok from the server.
Are you SERIOUSLY saying that England is the one spelling the English language wrong, or was this more tongue-in-cheek than can be conveyed easily in text?
Hey, color (and honor, etc) is the original spelling. If the Normans hadn't conquered England and introduced those frenchified variations, we wouldn't be having this argument.
And no, England and English having the same root word in no way makes England the ultimate arbiter in how language spellings go.
A plethora.
Resting in an amphora.
One of appropriate size.
Sure, but the government has to be a broker, since the power companies need to work on property that isn't theirs. We can't have any company tearing up the streets at their leisure. Or any company laying lines underground under a private residence. It requires a government to be a coordinator and arbiter.
I was also sometimes told to call an individual, in which case that individual was never available and never returned calls. I wish I had had recordings of those calls.
Ahhh, I was always happy to hear that when I had Pacbell Internet, as it meant I'd gotten past the clueless front-line and had gotten in touch with a back-end engineer who knew what I was talking about. Those guys always helped me out.
To (make sure they( don)'t match to mess ar{oun(d with O)C(D re]ade(rs)
Now that's just cruel.