So he (meaning his character) had bad experiences with VISOR-as-a-camera, and he had a bad experience with a heads-up display device. [memory-alpha.org] No wonder he doesn't like it!
That, and the Klingons hacked into his VISOR in the first NextGen movie to see what he saw, got detailed visuals of consoles in engineering, and immediately used that to blow up (for reals this time) the USS Enterprise. It doesn't get a lot worse than that!
What's pathetic about it? Stephen Hawking has one in front of both eyes all day. Some blind people consider themselves lucky to have one implanted directly in front of both retinas.
They do that because they have to, because their normal, better facilities don't work. I don't want to live like Stephen Hawking, and I don't think any reasonable person does.
Not all technology is great, and questioning what constitutes an appropriate use of technology is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it fair to characterize such people as having "knee-jerk" reactions
I think it's just as "knee-jerk" to say "oh my God, this is awesome, let's do it, let's do it" without really thinking through the possible negative consequences, yet we never classify supporters as knee-jerk, only detractors.
Hey I don't go around asking random meth addicts there life philosophy. Why should I listen to Rand? She was a drug addict and a hypocrite who lived off government aid the latter half of her life. She just give excuse to immoral selfish "asshole-ism".
What's hypocritical about taking government aid? I thought that was in her rational self-interest.
I also get a kick out of those who are adamantly against the LGBT community bringing up polygamy. I think it's a very valid question. Why stop there? Why is polygamy the bridge too far? What about incest?
I think most issues with incest, aside from the whole genetic defects thing, come from issues of consent. That is, it might not be possible to give informed consent at a certain age, which is how incest normally seems to manifest itself.
It makes sense that a brother and sister can't be married due to genetic defects in their offspring. But why can't a gay couple be brothers? There's no chance of lesbian sisters knocking each other up. I mean it's all about being able to love who you want, isn't it? If it's among consenting adults, what's the problem?
Gays and lesbians make up a small fraction of the planet's population, having siblings who want to marry make up a much much smaller fraction, and the intersection of those two circles seems to me like it'd be infinitesimally small. IE, I don't worry about it either way.
Or are you polygaphobic?
I'd be against polygamy just because the legal issues are too complex to wrangle out. Two-partner marriage issues are complex enough, I'm not sure that we -can- put together a fair legal framework for polygamic marriage.
Boycotting the movie does nothing to hurt Card. Paying to see the movie does nothing to support Card. The licensing rights for Ender's Game's IP for a movie was paid out nearly a decade ago, bought and sold by various movie studios until it finally got produced. Card got paid for it already, 10 years ago, and the deal does not include one single penny from revenue or profits.
He licensed it a decade ago, sure. However, he's also a producer on the film. Is that just lip service or did he have a real stake in the film?
I think a -lot- of people have issues with what Polanski did, which is why he can't enter the US anymore. It's only certain elites who -really- like the movies he did who suggest just overlooking what he did (or that what he did was even ok!).
Fair enough. (And very glib. You made me laugh. And you're right, they do tend to take seriousness way to seriously.) And for you, there will always be this version [imdb.com]. Richard Boone is great as the voice of Smaug. But the rest of the film makes my teeth hurt. Your mileage may vary.
I think the Rankin/Bass Hobbit was quite decent given the time constraints (It was required to come in under an hour an a half). Some of the acting was terrible, though I rather liked John Huston as Gandalf, and Brother Theodore did a decent job as Gollum. The water backgrounds are fantastic, but I'm not sure I can forgive them for the character designs of the wood elves.
Agreed. This seems to often be the fate of books translated to film -- there will inevitably be some parts that make you squirm in your seat and check the exits. An argument could be made that The Hobbit had more than its share.
My problems with the Hobbit are three-fold: 1) "Cartoonish" action in a live-action film, mostly the poorly-thought-through escape and chase through the goblin caves. You're right, they take seriousness seriously, and that's fine!:-) The problem comes when you add completely non-serious cartoonish elements to a serious work. It's mood whiplash and it can be unpleasantly jarring. 2) Radagast the Brown. Just about everything about him felt designed for a 6-year-old. Some family entertainment is well made enough so that parents and kids will enjoy it equally, while other films/etc seem like they're just for kids. The Radagast scenes seem designed specifically for the latter. I had one or two eye-rolling moments in the Lord of the Rings films but there was nothing there as bad as what we saw in the Hobbit. 3) It didn't "come together." It felt like a mish-mash of two different films, the Quest for Erabor, and matter of Dol Guldur. The stuff about the rise of Sauron felt superfluous and it's one of the big problems with prequels (like with the Star Wars prequels): you already know what's going on there, it's no big mystery, and it's just not interesting. The White Council is pretty interesting. Gandalf interacting with Saruman and Galadriel was interesting. The rest of that plotline? Not so much. Even though you know that Bilbo will survive the Quest, it's still a much more compelling storyline, especially as it introduces us to characters and settings that are not revisted in LOTR, and therefore still feel fresh. Bilbo's character development is also fairly interesting, in contrast to the non-character-driven Dol Guldur stuff.
The Hobbit did have it's good moments though; the last half hour or 45 minutes (riddles with Gollum, the showdown with the orcs by the cliff, the rescue by the eagles) is fantastic, I'd even say it's as good as anything you'll find in the LOTR movies. Unfortunately LOTR was so so good with the non-action scenes and the character moments, while I can't say the same for the Hobbit. The characterization is just not there, sometimes because it's not well developed and non-organic, and sometimes because it's crowded out by action or worse, somewhat boring exposition that we already know the answers to.
Daughter and I discussed Ender's Game after we saw it, and one thing was that some points, like "third child" and the twist at the end, had become common scifi plot points to the extent that for most people they didn't need to be explained. I think the revelation at the end was needed because it prompts Ender's way way WAY overdue revolt from manipulation by his handlers. But not having read the books, I can't say how it compares.
I disagree with the reviewer in the slashdot story concerning how someone who hadn't read the book would react to the movie.
The revolt had happened once before, so we knew it could still be coming. That wasn't my issue though, I thought the post-battle scenes were rushed in the movie, didn't seem to fit with everything else, and contained a huge, h
nonsense, they were success in early 80s. that business model was what every VHS shop had, except BlockBuster's rates were lower, they had more of the popular movies and the fine was nominal.
Except of course, unless they fined you for the hell of it even when you turned in the movie on time. I stopped going to Blockbuster after they did that to me, and they lost a class-action lawsuit over the issue a few years later. They didn't exactly build consumer loyalty. But really it was Netflix's DVD-by-mail that killed video stores for me.
You realize that these exist on Youtube while the movie is being made now right? Also I don't get compression artifacts or Buffering messages. Your internet must be rather slow my friend.
If you have DSL in the US, yes, it usually is. But despite the slow speeds, the service is usually far better than the cable monopoly (often Comcast, which is uniformly terrible).
What's your moral opinion of this guy, from the perspective of Objectivist ethics? Is he, maybe, an immoral "moocher" parasite, or is he the highest expression of the human ideal, personified? By the way, I'm not specifying for the purposes of the question whether or not his first name is "John".
This is a very good question, and raises further questions from me, since I'll admit I don't know enough about Objectivist theory to really figure it out. Does the man who cannily takes advantage of someone else's foolish charity acting in accordance with Objectivist principles? He is, after all, acting in his own rational self-interest. My guess, given the Nietzsche talk before, is "maybe," but he should still be pushed aside by the better, productive members of society who remove his ability to be a moocher. In an Objectivist society, he wouldn't be able to mooch.
(2) "You can go somewhere else, if you think you're treated unfairly" is the age old reply of tyrants --- even Adolf Hitler used that excuse. Err... one of the things he did was to make it as hard as possible for the "undesirables" to emigrate - to make it easier to round them up and kill them.
In the early 30s the Jews were 'encouraged'* to leave voluntarily so as to further Germany's racial purity, such that 57% of the Jewish population had left by the time World War II came around. At that point it was too late and those who hadn't taken the hint (or had no means to leave earlier) became victims of the Holocaust.
"Encouraged" meaning they were forbidden from participating in many public activities, fined for the damage of Krystallnacht, sometimes attacked in public, Jewish businesses shut out of markets, etc.
Not when you calculate in all the entitlement fueled thugspawn running around the ghettos, and the near future billions of shit covered babies in third world countries.. Of course, I'd rather have two intelligent, educated children than a legion of half-invalid, undernourished, paki-babblers, but the leftists won't have any of that. Everyone's 'equal' after all.
It depends on whether you believe in "Idiocracy" or not.
Most of these proposals come from the idea that humans are tied to the clock. We aren't.
But socially we are, and that's the problem. The notion of 9-5 is so strongly ingrained in our business culture and school culture that now DST is simply a way to work around that. Businesses don't want to change their "open hours" through the year, so the time changes for them. It's become such a hurdle that it's easier for us to change the definition of the hours twice a year than it is for business to change.
First off, farmers get up well before dawn anyway, and second, their schedule is not dictated by a clock. Animals that need attending to don't know or care what time NIST says it is, all they know is the sun's coming up and they're awake and hungry and their udders are full or whatever.
I had thought the point was that children would be able to get out of school "earlier" compared to the sun, leaving more daylight hours for them to do farm chores in the afternoon.
So your idea of reforming welfare is to humiliate the recipients, remove children if there's any failure on weekly drug tests, and throw them off on a fixed schedule. I fail to see anything positive, like trying to help them get useful skills and become employable.
Welfare should not be something that you're ok with staying on. Welfare is a sign that your life sucks. It's often the fault of the recipient but not always, but regardless of the circumstances, the recipient should feel the driving need to get away from it. Some people have that drive due to the way they were raised or due to some innate part of their personality. Some don't. Some have to be pushed by other means.
Do stop your whining already. If your time was that important you wouldn't update willy-nilly before you knew the issues, and you would probably have switched to a long-term release by now. Besides, it's not like the other browsers don't screw things up between releases, often in equally boneheaded ways.
Mmmm, now if only websites wouldn't use the "latest and greatest" whiz-bang features to eventually force upgrades..
Slashdot Mirror
So he (meaning his character) had bad experiences with VISOR-as-a-camera, and he had a bad experience with a heads-up display device. [memory-alpha.org] No wonder he doesn't like it!
That, and the Klingons hacked into his VISOR in the first NextGen movie to see what he saw, got detailed visuals of consoles in engineering, and immediately used that to blow up (for reals this time) the USS Enterprise. It doesn't get a lot worse than that!
What's pathetic about it? Stephen Hawking has one in front of both eyes all day. Some blind people consider themselves lucky to have one implanted directly in front of both retinas.
They do that because they have to, because their normal, better facilities don't work. I don't want to live like Stephen Hawking, and I don't think any reasonable person does.
Not all technology is great, and questioning what constitutes an appropriate use of technology is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it fair to characterize such people as having "knee-jerk" reactions
I think it's just as "knee-jerk" to say "oh my God, this is awesome, let's do it, let's do it" without really thinking through the possible negative consequences, yet we never classify supporters as knee-jerk, only detractors.
Lol. Once again the "starting wars for oil" fiction.
Hey I don't go around asking random meth addicts there life philosophy. Why should I listen to Rand? She was a drug addict and a hypocrite who lived off government aid the latter half of her life. She just give excuse to immoral selfish "asshole-ism".
What's hypocritical about taking government aid? I thought that was in her rational self-interest.
But you cannae change the laws o' economics,
Groundskeeper Willy with his pithy econ-politcal insight?
I'm thinking Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scottie" Scott more likely.
"You cannae change the laws of physics" was one of his catch phrases.
The LGBT bunch are experimenting on real children by using hormone treatments to stop puberty,
"The LGBT bunch?" Care to qualify that statement?
I also get a kick out of those who are adamantly against the LGBT community bringing up polygamy. I think it's a very valid question. Why stop there? Why is polygamy the bridge too far? What about incest?
I think most issues with incest, aside from the whole genetic defects thing, come from issues of consent. That is, it might not be possible to give informed consent at a certain age, which is how incest normally seems to manifest itself.
It makes sense that a brother and sister can't be married due to genetic defects in their offspring. But why can't a gay couple be brothers? There's no chance of lesbian sisters knocking each other up. I mean it's all about being able to love who you want, isn't it? If it's among consenting adults, what's the problem?
Gays and lesbians make up a small fraction of the planet's population, having siblings who want to marry make up a much much smaller fraction, and the intersection of those two circles seems to me like it'd be infinitesimally small. IE, I don't worry about it either way.
Or are you polygaphobic?
I'd be against polygamy just because the legal issues are too complex to wrangle out. Two-partner marriage issues are complex enough, I'm not sure that we -can- put together a fair legal framework for polygamic marriage.
I'm glad after trashing the other authors you didn't recommend Robert Jordan. Must have been hard.
Boycotting the movie does nothing to hurt Card. Paying to see the movie does nothing to support Card. The licensing rights for Ender's Game's IP for a movie was paid out nearly a decade ago, bought and sold by various movie studios until it finally got produced. Card got paid for it already, 10 years ago, and the deal does not include one single penny from revenue or profits.
He licensed it a decade ago, sure.
However, he's also a producer on the film. Is that just lip service or did he have a real stake in the film?
I think a -lot- of people have issues with what Polanski did, which is why he can't enter the US anymore. It's only certain elites who -really- like the movies he did who suggest just overlooking what he did (or that what he did was even ok!).
Fair enough. (And very glib. You made me laugh. And you're right, they do tend to take seriousness way to seriously.) And for you, there will always be this version [imdb.com]. Richard Boone is great as the voice of Smaug. But the rest of the film makes my teeth hurt. Your mileage may vary.
I think the Rankin/Bass Hobbit was quite decent given the time constraints (It was required to come in under an hour an a half). Some of the acting was terrible, though I rather liked John Huston as Gandalf, and Brother Theodore did a decent job as Gollum. The water backgrounds are fantastic, but I'm not sure I can forgive them for the character designs of the wood elves.
Agreed. This seems to often be the fate of books translated to film -- there will inevitably be some parts that make you squirm in your seat and check the exits. An argument could be made that The Hobbit had more than its share.
My problems with the Hobbit are three-fold: :-) The problem comes when you add completely non-serious cartoonish elements to a serious work. It's mood whiplash and it can be unpleasantly jarring.
1) "Cartoonish" action in a live-action film, mostly the poorly-thought-through escape and chase through the goblin caves. You're right, they take seriousness seriously, and that's fine!
2) Radagast the Brown. Just about everything about him felt designed for a 6-year-old. Some family entertainment is well made enough so that parents and kids will enjoy it equally, while other films/etc seem like they're just for kids. The Radagast scenes seem designed specifically for the latter. I had one or two eye-rolling moments in the Lord of the Rings films but there was nothing there as bad as what we saw in the Hobbit.
3) It didn't "come together." It felt like a mish-mash of two different films, the Quest for Erabor, and matter of Dol Guldur. The stuff about the rise of Sauron felt superfluous and it's one of the big problems with prequels (like with the Star Wars prequels): you already know what's going on there, it's no big mystery, and it's just not interesting. The White Council is pretty interesting. Gandalf interacting with Saruman and Galadriel was interesting. The rest of that plotline? Not so much. Even though you know that Bilbo will survive the Quest, it's still a much more compelling storyline, especially as it introduces us to characters and settings that are not revisted in LOTR, and therefore still feel fresh. Bilbo's character development is also fairly interesting, in contrast to the non-character-driven Dol Guldur stuff.
The Hobbit did have it's good moments though; the last half hour or 45 minutes (riddles with Gollum, the showdown with the orcs by the cliff, the rescue by the eagles) is fantastic, I'd even say it's as good as anything you'll find in the LOTR movies. Unfortunately LOTR was so so good with the non-action scenes and the character moments, while I can't say the same for the Hobbit. The characterization is just not there, sometimes because it's not well developed and non-organic, and sometimes because it's crowded out by action or worse, somewhat boring exposition that we already know the answers to.
Daughter and I discussed Ender's Game after we saw it, and one thing was that some points, like "third child" and the twist at the end, had become common scifi plot points to the extent that for most people they didn't need to be explained. I think the revelation at the end was needed because it prompts Ender's way way WAY overdue revolt from manipulation by his handlers. But not having read the books, I can't say how it compares.
I disagree with the reviewer in the slashdot story concerning how someone who hadn't read the book would react to the movie.
The revolt had happened once before, so we knew it could still be coming. That wasn't my issue though, I thought the post-battle scenes were rushed in the movie, didn't seem to fit with everything else, and contained a huge, h
If you're really paranoid about it, you can set your router to disallow Internet access for the television.
nonsense, they were success in early 80s. that business model was what every VHS shop had, except BlockBuster's rates were lower, they had more of the popular movies and the fine was nominal.
Except of course, unless they fined you for the hell of it even when you turned in the movie on time.
I stopped going to Blockbuster after they did that to me, and they lost a class-action lawsuit over the issue a few years later. They didn't exactly build consumer loyalty.
But really it was Netflix's DVD-by-mail that killed video stores for me.
You realize that these exist on Youtube while the movie is being made now right? Also I don't get compression artifacts or Buffering messages. Your internet must be rather slow my friend.
If you have DSL in the US, yes, it usually is.
But despite the slow speeds, the service is usually far better than the cable monopoly (often Comcast, which is uniformly terrible).
Make an account, Dianne.
What's your moral opinion of this guy, from the perspective of Objectivist ethics? Is he, maybe, an immoral "moocher" parasite, or is he the highest expression of the human ideal, personified? By the way, I'm not specifying for the purposes of the question whether or not his first name is "John".
This is a very good question, and raises further questions from me, since I'll admit I don't know enough about Objectivist theory to really figure it out. Does the man who cannily takes advantage of someone else's foolish charity acting in accordance with Objectivist principles? He is, after all, acting in his own rational self-interest. My guess, given the Nietzsche talk before, is "maybe," but he should still be pushed aside by the better, productive members of society who remove his ability to be a moocher. In an Objectivist society, he wouldn't be able to mooch.
(2) "You can go somewhere else, if you think you're treated unfairly" is the age old reply of tyrants --- even Adolf Hitler used that excuse. ... one of the things he did was to make it as hard as possible for the "undesirables" to emigrate - to make it easier to round them up and kill them.
Err
In the early 30s the Jews were 'encouraged'* to leave voluntarily so as to further Germany's racial purity, such that 57% of the Jewish population had left by the time World War II came around. At that point it was too late and those who hadn't taken the hint (or had no means to leave earlier) became victims of the Holocaust.
"Encouraged" meaning they were forbidden from participating in many public activities, fined for the damage of Krystallnacht, sometimes attacked in public, Jewish businesses shut out of markets, etc.
Not when you calculate in all the entitlement fueled thugspawn running around the ghettos, and the near future billions of shit covered babies in third world countries.. Of course, I'd rather have two intelligent, educated children than a legion of half-invalid, undernourished, paki-babblers, but the leftists won't have any of that. Everyone's 'equal' after all.
It depends on whether you believe in "Idiocracy" or not.
Most of these proposals come from the idea that humans are tied to the clock. We aren't.
But socially we are, and that's the problem. The notion of 9-5 is so strongly ingrained in our business culture and school culture that now DST is simply a way to work around that. Businesses don't want to change their "open hours" through the year, so the time changes for them. It's become such a hurdle that it's easier for us to change the definition of the hours twice a year than it is for business to change.
First off, farmers get up well before dawn anyway, and second, their schedule is not dictated by a clock. Animals that need attending to don't know or care what time NIST says it is, all they know is the sun's coming up and they're awake and hungry and their udders are full or whatever.
I had thought the point was that children would be able to get out of school "earlier" compared to the sun, leaving more daylight hours for them to do farm chores in the afternoon.
So your idea of reforming welfare is to humiliate the recipients, remove children if there's any failure on weekly drug tests, and throw them off on a fixed schedule. I fail to see anything positive, like trying to help them get useful skills and become employable.
Welfare should not be something that you're ok with staying on. Welfare is a sign that your life sucks. It's often the fault of the recipient but not always, but regardless of the circumstances, the recipient should feel the driving need to get away from it. Some people have that drive due to the way they were raised or due to some innate part of their personality. Some don't. Some have to be pushed by other means.
Sometimes it's tab hoarding, I'm beginning to roll that back
Same here. The browser can bog down a bit when you load 10 slashdot articles as tabs. In addition to the other BS I might have open.
I don't understand why everyone complains about the Firefox release cycle when it is nearly identical to the Chrome/Chromium release cycle.
Because most people thought the Chrome way was damned silly, and there was a lot of eye-rolling when that "infection" spread to other projects.
Do stop your whining already. If your time was that important you wouldn't update willy-nilly before you knew the issues, and you would probably have switched to a long-term release by now. Besides, it's not like the other browsers don't screw things up between releases, often in equally boneheaded ways.
Mmmm, now if only websites wouldn't use the "latest and greatest" whiz-bang features to eventually force upgrades..