Exactly, wouldn't you call that vapor? If it's still going nowhere, I think it's reasonable to say that it seems unlikely the project will ever be finished.
Yes, women are much more likely to be diagnosed as depressed (as you say, something like 30% vs. 5%). However, it is also fairly clear that men are not as likely to seek psychological help if they feel depressed, which is why suicide rates are 3 times higher for men.
Also, alchoholism is higher in men by a similar proportion (something like 20% vs. 5%). I'm not sure that drunks are any more likely to be better voters than those who are "excessively emotional."
I quite like how the parent immediately started with the assumption that people are forced into (or discouraged from) various roles
No I didn't, did you read my post? The only assumption I made was that the grandparent was advocating such a system. If I misinterpreted him, as many seem to think I did, then I apologize, but I was speaking only to my interpretation of his comments, not to the present state of the world.
to teach people to believe in correlation without causality is wrong.
No, it's not wrong. Correlation does not imply causality. I suppose it implys that there is almost certainly A causality, but it doesn't mean that the cause is either one of the correlated variables. I'm not sure what this comment had to do with any of the discussion anyway, though.
A lot of the negatives of discrimination are not caused by what people say explicitly, but by how they behave on a day to day basis. The fact that career counselors no longer say to girls "you can't be an engineer, you should be a teacher," or whatever, is definately good, but it's not everything. When my girlfriend acted in high school, there was tremendous sexual stereotyping when it came to striking the set. The boys would be given the power tools for disassembling sets and props, while the girls would be expected to put away costumes. I should add, before anyone brings it up, that these were not heavy sets, a bit of extra muscle mass was not significant for the task at hand. Had my girlfriend made a big fuss and demanded to be given a choice of activities in set striking, they probably would have given it to her, but it also would have gotten her labled an extremist feminist and/or a bitch by other students.
I typically find liberal dogmas such as the poster's to be as unpalatable as the conservative dogmas that they oppose; both sides are full of it.
Speaking of false assumptions, who said I was liberal? While I, too, tend to find my political views at odds with the major parties, I'm more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. I merely find the idea of assigning gender roles to people, as I believed the grandparent poster was trying to do, unpalatable.
First of all, 3D Realms did suggest in the early days that it would be out in the not too distant future. They may not have made hard predictions, but it's obvious that they did not intend for it to take as long as it has.
Second, 7 years to develop a game qualifies it as vapor in my book. Not because it's taking longer to release than I think it should, but because it's taking longer to release than anyone could possibly imagine any computer game taking. I would love for them to prove me wrong at this point, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me if they've decided to keep DNF "development" simply as a marketting gimmick to keep people interested in their company.
Okay, call it what you like, but you have to admit that there was a fundamental difference between Half-Life and its predecessors. Maybe you don't want to call it a "story line," but there was a motivation, a goal, and a persistence of world which did not exist in previous games.
Doom, in contrast, just had levels, which had been designed to be fun to play, but the plot, as far as it went, was "kill monsters," and there was never any sense that you were progressing in your objective, any more than in Pacman or Space Invaders. If you read the instruction manual, they make the story a little longer than that, but when you're in the game you really have no idea where you are, or why you're there, except that killing monsters is fun. In Half-Life, there was a story, thin as it was, and the puzzles (though admittedly a tad contrived) fit logically into the reality you were inhabiting.
Maybe story line is the right term. But instead of saying Half-Life had a fantastic story line, a better way would be to say that Half-Life proved that a first person shooter can have a story line. It was fantastic only relative to those games which preceeded it.
Okay, I haven't responded to any of the various people calling me a rabid feminist or whatever, because it's just not worth the effort. But your post really offends me. I would think that on Slashdot, of all places, people would be able to use math correctly.
Markov and Chebychev say nothing about how far individuals stray from the average. Chebychev merely states the probability that a given individual will be more than a certain amount away from the mean expressed proportionally to variance. Since the article didn't mention variance at all, trying to use Chebychev to say that people will behave according to gender norms is absurd. If the averages are different by 20%, but the standard deviations were each 40%, then you'd see large numbers of men less profficient than women, and vice versa. Even if variances were low, your use of Chebychev would still be wrong. In fact, if variance were known, then Chebychev could be used to predict the expected number of women in a given population that would be more profficient than the average man.
I don't think that's clear at all. The quote doesn't specify who "they" refers to. My interpretation of the quote is that "they" referred to the women. If "they" had been meant to refer to all experimental subjects, I think they would have said so.
Instead of trying to say both genders are equal, why not try this radical approach: accept that one gender has advantages over the other in some areas, and vice versa in others, and use those differences for the greater good!
How about an even more radical approach: accept that not all members of a given group are the same, and instead of assigning gender roles, encourage people to do whatever they're good at! If that means that there are more men doing tasks that involve spatial orientation, fine, wonderful. But it's absurd to say that women shouldn't do those tasks because they're not as good at them. People are individuals, not averages. Even your example of bearing children is not universal: some women can't give birth. So cut this evolutionary psychology crap and judge people for who they are, not based how a sample group of the same gender performed in a laboratory setting.
Yeah, I noticed that they didn't say if men experienced similar boosts in performance if they were given larger screens and smoother animations too. It seems to me that it's just as likely that the men were rushing, while the women were taking a more cautious and careful approach. Did they compare accuracy rates? 20% difference in cognitive performance seems pretty high, I'm not sure I buy it.
Also, why divide people based on gender? I'm sure SOME of the men had poor spacial oriention, and SOME of the women must have been good at the task. Why not simply divide people into "fast" and "slow" groups based on performance in the initial set of tests? They don't seem to have done any testing to determine if solutions which seem to work for average women also work for under-performing men.
Over expansion and a power void left by Alexander. After Alexander died, his followers fought vicious civil wars, totally destroying whatever cuture was built up. Macedonian men divorced their foreign wives, and decided that rather than having an integrated nation, they'd prefer to be emperors. Any hope for a long term stable nation was dashed. Feeding into my earlier point, much of the Greek learning was known only to a few academics, and so was lost for centuries, until the printing press enabled (translated) Greek works to be widely distributed.
What about Germany?
Well, when WWI broke out, Germany was stuck with the weakest ally among the major European powers: Austria-Hungary. Given its situation, Germany did about as well as could be imagined in a war of attrition fought against the combined might of the UK, France, and either Russia or the USA (first the former, then the latter). After that, France demanded that Germany be punished severely, so the Weimar Republic was saddled with enormous debts. Hitler was able to use people's resentment at the situation to rise to power, and hence began WWII. This was, perhaps, even more costly than the first war. After such devastation, it's not surprising that Germany lost its edge. However, note that in contrast to the pre-printing press era, none of Germany's advancements were lost, and indeed Germany has rebounded nicely, and is currently one of the major European powers.
All of this is fairly tangential to the point I'm really trying to make. Empires and nations may come and go, but there is one constant. No region in the world showed consistent, steady technological advances until Europe got the movable type printing press. Previously, one dynasty might be more or less advanced than the previous one, and very little learning was retained from one century to the next. After the introduction of Gutenberg's press began a period of technological and scientific innovation such as the world had never seen before, and which has not yet abated. China, though in possesion of the exact same technology, was not able to exploit the power of printed text until Europe broght the industrial revolution to Asia.
I see you're neither a linguist or historian. I'm both. ...
The Chinese of 1300, for whatever reasons, decided that they didn't need to keep going forward in the sciences, so they didn't.
Though I am neither a linguist or a historian, I have heard that explanation. I don't buy it. Frankly, putting on academic airs, and then declaring that the "real" reason China isn't as advanced as Europe is that "they" decided not to be, whoever "they" might be, is pretty pathetic. How do people just decide not to go forward in science? By not spreading knowledge! The movable type printing press was a tremendously powerful tool for spreading learning in Europe. One can argue about the precise magnitude of the impact, but I personally believe that at the very least, the printing press made it nearly impossible to stop scientific progress. By providing a tool to widely disseminate learning, advances were spread across the continent that might otherwise have languished in obscurity.
Just because technology is now advanced enough to accomodate a language with thousands of distinct symbols doesn't mean that it didn't hold them back at the time. Just because the Chinese can build on the European advances of the industrial revolution doesn't mean that the Chinese were capable of advancing to the point of having their own industrial revolution without outside aid.
The chinese DID invent it, they just abandoned it, because as you say, it's not worth the effort. However, I believe that Gutenberg invented his press without ever learning about the Chinese version, and therefore deserves full credit for the invention. The Chinese also deserve credit for having invented a movable type printing press, but deserve derision for sticking with an unbelievably inefficient alphabet, which prevented them from progressing past medieval levels of development for over a thousand years.
Actually, televised news has historically been the biggest scapegoat for declining newspaper readership. Given that TV is even worse than the newspaper for "human interest" stories, I think it's fairly likely that the Internet is just the final nail in the coffin. Big stacks of paper simply aren't an efficient means of distributing news anymore.
First of all, what does it mean that the NYT is now making $8 million on its website? What expenses are we considering here? Given that last year they lost $7.6 million, we're obviously considering more than just bandwidth costs. Presumably we're counting all technical and administrative people that deal specifically with their online presence. But presumably we're not counting the cost of writing the articles in the first place, presumaby that's accounted for in the cost for making the dead tree version. So, in a sense, the paper version of the NYT is still subsidizing the online version.
Second, I'd like to comment on the fact that the news media made the transition to the Internet without too much difficulty. They're now distributing online, without any form of copy protection, what used to be sold as a physical product. Perhaps as notable, the major comic syndicates have done likewise (although as I understand it, artists are not yet being compensated for people who read syndicated comics online). There are a lot of kinks left to iron out, but it looks like this is going to work, and that most of these companies that could have been wiped out by online competition will survive, even flourish, in an online environment. Perhaps the RIAA and MPAA members ought to look to the newspapers for ideas?
Finally, just one note I find amusing: sci-fi authors have been predicting some form of electronic news reader that gets continious or periodic updates for quite some time. I believe such a device was featured in 2001. Nice to see that some predictions do actually come true:)
So if I hire you and allow you to work for me for two weeks, but then deny you a paycheck, I haven't stolen anything from you, have I?
Sorry, but that's a poor example. What if no one liked your music? You'd still be broke, even without piracy. Hence, there is no implied contract here. A more realistic example would be if you put on a fireworks display, and charged people to sit on a grassy field and watch. Then, no one came because they all realized that the fireworks would be just as visible from another park that they could sit in for free.
The point that you're trying to make is that it's immoral to enjoy the fruits of someone's labor without compensating them for it. That's true. However, as Ronald Coase posits in his economic theory of externalities, a victim is rarely a simple innocent bystander. Most victims have put themselves in a situation where they will be victimized (Coase's classic example is that of the person who buys a house by an airport; he is a victim of noise pollution, but this is an issue he should have known about when he bought the house). In this case, the musicians are allowing themselves to be victimized by relying on an oudated economic model: profiting from the sale of pre-recorded music. The solution to this problem is not for people to hysterically shout "Stop pirating music!" The solution is to find a new model for the music industry to follow. Most likely, this will mean depending on live performances and merchandising, rather than recordings, for income. It will also likely mean that musicians of the future will have to accept lower incomes, the field will no longer be dominated by a few superstars, but by a larger number of middle class performers and an even larger number of hobbyists.
Yes, all animation is dubbed, but as you concede, the voice actors for American dubs are not good. And you absolutely can tell if the acting is good even if you don't speak the language.
There was a webpage I ran across once, which unfortunately I can't find now. The webpage was speaking out against a Swedish (IIRC) dubbing company that brought dubbed some anime into Swedish. He had sound clips posted, and it was obvious that the acting was crap, even though I don't speak Swedish.
The simple fact of the matter is that the BEST way to appreciate a work is to watch it with the original language. For most of us, this is impractical, so we have to make a tradeoff. Either we have to live with the sacrifice of trying to read something while watching what's going on onscreen, or we have to live with mangled dialogue (to match lipsyncing) and inferior voice actors (even if highly paid, they're rarely chosen by the director of the original, so it's unlikely they'll fit his artistic vision).
Also, Lawrence of Arabia is not an American movie, it's British.
An enhanced warrior female who does not know anything about her past. That sounds familiar.
Okay, I never watched Dark Angel past the first episode or two, but your description is not unique to Gunnm. There are countless other science fiction and fantasy works that feature similar ideas. Also, one could just as easily argue that going to the top of a tower to think is taken from American superhero comics (Batman and Spider-Man spring to mind as heros that liked to brood on rooftops).
I don't doubt that some of Dark Angel was inspired by Battle Angel Alita, but you have to realize that very few elements of Gunnm were all that original by themselves, it was really the synthesis, in my opinion, that made it unique.
Okay, I really enjoyed the Battle Angel Alita (aka Gunnm) manga. I could even believe that they could make a good Hollywood movie out of it. However, I'm not convinced that James Cameron is the right man to direct it. I generally don't like the way he directs female action stars. They always seem like they're trying too hard. Vasquez, in Aliens, I think is the best example I can point to. It's like he doesn't think we'll believe a woman can be bad-ass unless he "proves" it to us. Look at the Terminator movies and the transformation Sarah Conner underwent. Whereas Kyle, the hero of the first movie, could be a soldier fighting a depserate revolution, but still an otherwise normal guy, Sarah Conner was turned into a nutty, ultraviolent caricature for the second movie.
All that being said, his action movies DO still tend to be pretty good. I just think that Alita has more of a quiet confidence, rather than an in-your-face attitude, than Cameron is really used to dealing with in female action heros. I suppose on the bright side, he can probably reuse some of the costumes from Dark Angel to keep costs down:)
Re:It probably wasn't that bad of an idea
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Nuke-Lobbing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For a combat tactic that would likely be an end of the world situation anyways...
I doubt it. I don't think we had enough nukes in the 1950's to end the world. That's exactly why these sorts of plans were thought up, because it was still entirely feasible to "win" a nuclear war. Sure, there'd be some ecological contamination, but since most of the ordinance would likely be dropped on Eastern Europe, most of the fallout would probably end up over Russia, leaving most of the world (Western Europe, Africa, most of Asia, and the Americas) essentially unharmed.
Ah, the old cold war joke
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Nuke-Lobbing
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· Score: 4, Funny
Q: What's the difference between a tactical and a strategic nuclear weapon?
A: It's a tactical nuke if it lands in Germany.
Seriously though, as others alluded to, by the time we had small tactical nukes, we also had better delivery systems, obsoleting the whole "lobbing" technique. The article suggests that this strategy was doctrine during the 1950's.
But how many of todays popular culture addicts would sit down with a copy of Plato's works and read through it? Yes, it may very well enlighten them, and yes they'd learn a lot from it... But hell, these are the same people that watch WWE wrestling religously.:P
But that doesn't explain why YOU found the philosophy in the Matrix interesting, unless you consider yourself among the legions of WWE watching boobs.
UPS is inferior. Their slogan "When it absolutely has to be there overnight" isn't just hot air. Ask any company that deals with time-sensitive documents, I can almost guarantee you they use FedEx. When I worked at UBS PaineWebber, we shipped most things via Airborne Express, because we had a cheap deal with them. Since Airborne Express is a crappy company, however, we also had an account with FedEx, which brokers could get special permission to use for things that "absolutely have to be there overnight."
Now, if you were talking about FedEx Ground, you have to realize that FedEx Ground is a subsidiary, only somewhat tied to the parent company (it used to be called RPS). I agree that FedEx Ground is not up to the same standards as the rest of FedEx, but I've had my share of problems with UPS, too.
Maybe now people will wait to pirate the movie until the dvd comes out. I hate it when the only copies of a movie available are crappy screener copies. Kazaa(lite) STILL doesn't have any decent copies of the first Harry Potter movie, because people all downloaded the screener copies, and haven't bothered to distribute a version ripped from DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, wouldn't you call that vapor? If it's still going nowhere, I think it's reasonable to say that it seems unlikely the project will ever be finished.
Also, alchoholism is higher in men by a similar proportion (something like 20% vs. 5%). I'm not sure that drunks are any more likely to be better voters than those who are "excessively emotional."
No I didn't, did you read my post? The only assumption I made was that the grandparent was advocating such a system. If I misinterpreted him, as many seem to think I did, then I apologize, but I was speaking only to my interpretation of his comments, not to the present state of the world.
to teach people to believe in correlation without causality is wrong.
No, it's not wrong. Correlation does not imply causality. I suppose it implys that there is almost certainly A causality, but it doesn't mean that the cause is either one of the correlated variables. I'm not sure what this comment had to do with any of the discussion anyway, though.
A lot of the negatives of discrimination are not caused by what people say explicitly, but by how they behave on a day to day basis. The fact that career counselors no longer say to girls "you can't be an engineer, you should be a teacher," or whatever, is definately good, but it's not everything. When my girlfriend acted in high school, there was tremendous sexual stereotyping when it came to striking the set. The boys would be given the power tools for disassembling sets and props, while the girls would be expected to put away costumes. I should add, before anyone brings it up, that these were not heavy sets, a bit of extra muscle mass was not significant for the task at hand. Had my girlfriend made a big fuss and demanded to be given a choice of activities in set striking, they probably would have given it to her, but it also would have gotten her labled an extremist feminist and/or a bitch by other students.
I typically find liberal dogmas such as the poster's to be as unpalatable as the conservative dogmas that they oppose; both sides are full of it.
Speaking of false assumptions, who said I was liberal? While I, too, tend to find my political views at odds with the major parties, I'm more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. I merely find the idea of assigning gender roles to people, as I believed the grandparent poster was trying to do, unpalatable.
Second, 7 years to develop a game qualifies it as vapor in my book. Not because it's taking longer to release than I think it should, but because it's taking longer to release than anyone could possibly imagine any computer game taking. I would love for them to prove me wrong at this point, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me if they've decided to keep DNF "development" simply as a marketting gimmick to keep people interested in their company.
Doom, in contrast, just had levels, which had been designed to be fun to play, but the plot, as far as it went, was "kill monsters," and there was never any sense that you were progressing in your objective, any more than in Pacman or Space Invaders. If you read the instruction manual, they make the story a little longer than that, but when you're in the game you really have no idea where you are, or why you're there, except that killing monsters is fun. In Half-Life, there was a story, thin as it was, and the puzzles (though admittedly a tad contrived) fit logically into the reality you were inhabiting.
Maybe story line is the right term. But instead of saying Half-Life had a fantastic story line, a better way would be to say that Half-Life proved that a first person shooter can have a story line. It was fantastic only relative to those games which preceeded it.
Markov and Chebychev say nothing about how far individuals stray from the average. Chebychev merely states the probability that a given individual will be more than a certain amount away from the mean expressed proportionally to variance. Since the article didn't mention variance at all, trying to use Chebychev to say that people will behave according to gender norms is absurd. If the averages are different by 20%, but the standard deviations were each 40%, then you'd see large numbers of men less profficient than women, and vice versa. Even if variances were low, your use of Chebychev would still be wrong. In fact, if variance were known, then Chebychev could be used to predict the expected number of women in a given population that would be more profficient than the average man.
I don't think that's clear at all. The quote doesn't specify who "they" refers to. My interpretation of the quote is that "they" referred to the women. If "they" had been meant to refer to all experimental subjects, I think they would have said so.
How about an even more radical approach: accept that not all members of a given group are the same, and instead of assigning gender roles, encourage people to do whatever they're good at! If that means that there are more men doing tasks that involve spatial orientation, fine, wonderful. But it's absurd to say that women shouldn't do those tasks because they're not as good at them. People are individuals, not averages. Even your example of bearing children is not universal: some women can't give birth. So cut this evolutionary psychology crap and judge people for who they are, not based how a sample group of the same gender performed in a laboratory setting.
Also, why divide people based on gender? I'm sure SOME of the men had poor spacial oriention, and SOME of the women must have been good at the task. Why not simply divide people into "fast" and "slow" groups based on performance in the initial set of tests? They don't seem to have done any testing to determine if solutions which seem to work for average women also work for under-performing men.
Over expansion and a power void left by Alexander. After Alexander died, his followers fought vicious civil wars, totally destroying whatever cuture was built up. Macedonian men divorced their foreign wives, and decided that rather than having an integrated nation, they'd prefer to be emperors. Any hope for a long term stable nation was dashed. Feeding into my earlier point, much of the Greek learning was known only to a few academics, and so was lost for centuries, until the printing press enabled (translated) Greek works to be widely distributed.
What about Germany?
Well, when WWI broke out, Germany was stuck with the weakest ally among the major European powers: Austria-Hungary. Given its situation, Germany did about as well as could be imagined in a war of attrition fought against the combined might of the UK, France, and either Russia or the USA (first the former, then the latter). After that, France demanded that Germany be punished severely, so the Weimar Republic was saddled with enormous debts. Hitler was able to use people's resentment at the situation to rise to power, and hence began WWII. This was, perhaps, even more costly than the first war. After such devastation, it's not surprising that Germany lost its edge. However, note that in contrast to the pre-printing press era, none of Germany's advancements were lost, and indeed Germany has rebounded nicely, and is currently one of the major European powers.
All of this is fairly tangential to the point I'm really trying to make. Empires and nations may come and go, but there is one constant. No region in the world showed consistent, steady technological advances until Europe got the movable type printing press. Previously, one dynasty might be more or less advanced than the previous one, and very little learning was retained from one century to the next. After the introduction of Gutenberg's press began a period of technological and scientific innovation such as the world had never seen before, and which has not yet abated. China, though in possesion of the exact same technology, was not able to exploit the power of printed text until Europe broght the industrial revolution to Asia.
The Chinese of 1300, for whatever reasons, decided that they didn't need to keep going forward in the sciences, so they didn't.
Though I am neither a linguist or a historian, I have heard that explanation. I don't buy it. Frankly, putting on academic airs, and then declaring that the "real" reason China isn't as advanced as Europe is that "they" decided not to be, whoever "they" might be, is pretty pathetic. How do people just decide not to go forward in science? By not spreading knowledge! The movable type printing press was a tremendously powerful tool for spreading learning in Europe. One can argue about the precise magnitude of the impact, but I personally believe that at the very least, the printing press made it nearly impossible to stop scientific progress. By providing a tool to widely disseminate learning, advances were spread across the continent that might otherwise have languished in obscurity.
Just because technology is now advanced enough to accomodate a language with thousands of distinct symbols doesn't mean that it didn't hold them back at the time. Just because the Chinese can build on the European advances of the industrial revolution doesn't mean that the Chinese were capable of advancing to the point of having their own industrial revolution without outside aid.
Possible, but I doubt it. Usually hardware is depreciated over multiple years.
The chinese DID invent it, they just abandoned it, because as you say, it's not worth the effort. However, I believe that Gutenberg invented his press without ever learning about the Chinese version, and therefore deserves full credit for the invention. The Chinese also deserve credit for having invented a movable type printing press, but deserve derision for sticking with an unbelievably inefficient alphabet, which prevented them from progressing past medieval levels of development for over a thousand years.
Actually, televised news has historically been the biggest scapegoat for declining newspaper readership. Given that TV is even worse than the newspaper for "human interest" stories, I think it's fairly likely that the Internet is just the final nail in the coffin. Big stacks of paper simply aren't an efficient means of distributing news anymore.
Second, I'd like to comment on the fact that the news media made the transition to the Internet without too much difficulty. They're now distributing online, without any form of copy protection, what used to be sold as a physical product. Perhaps as notable, the major comic syndicates have done likewise (although as I understand it, artists are not yet being compensated for people who read syndicated comics online). There are a lot of kinks left to iron out, but it looks like this is going to work, and that most of these companies that could have been wiped out by online competition will survive, even flourish, in an online environment. Perhaps the RIAA and MPAA members ought to look to the newspapers for ideas?
Finally, just one note I find amusing: sci-fi authors have been predicting some form of electronic news reader that gets continious or periodic updates for quite some time. I believe such a device was featured in 2001. Nice to see that some predictions do actually come true :)
Sorry, but that's a poor example. What if no one liked your music? You'd still be broke, even without piracy. Hence, there is no implied contract here. A more realistic example would be if you put on a fireworks display, and charged people to sit on a grassy field and watch. Then, no one came because they all realized that the fireworks would be just as visible from another park that they could sit in for free.
The point that you're trying to make is that it's immoral to enjoy the fruits of someone's labor without compensating them for it. That's true. However, as Ronald Coase posits in his economic theory of externalities, a victim is rarely a simple innocent bystander. Most victims have put themselves in a situation where they will be victimized (Coase's classic example is that of the person who buys a house by an airport; he is a victim of noise pollution, but this is an issue he should have known about when he bought the house). In this case, the musicians are allowing themselves to be victimized by relying on an oudated economic model: profiting from the sale of pre-recorded music. The solution to this problem is not for people to hysterically shout "Stop pirating music!" The solution is to find a new model for the music industry to follow. Most likely, this will mean depending on live performances and merchandising, rather than recordings, for income. It will also likely mean that musicians of the future will have to accept lower incomes, the field will no longer be dominated by a few superstars, but by a larger number of middle class performers and an even larger number of hobbyists.
There was a webpage I ran across once, which unfortunately I can't find now. The webpage was speaking out against a Swedish (IIRC) dubbing company that brought dubbed some anime into Swedish. He had sound clips posted, and it was obvious that the acting was crap, even though I don't speak Swedish.
The simple fact of the matter is that the BEST way to appreciate a work is to watch it with the original language. For most of us, this is impractical, so we have to make a tradeoff. Either we have to live with the sacrifice of trying to read something while watching what's going on onscreen, or we have to live with mangled dialogue (to match lipsyncing) and inferior voice actors (even if highly paid, they're rarely chosen by the director of the original, so it's unlikely they'll fit his artistic vision).
Also, Lawrence of Arabia is not an American movie, it's British.
Okay, I never watched Dark Angel past the first episode or two, but your description is not unique to Gunnm. There are countless other science fiction and fantasy works that feature similar ideas. Also, one could just as easily argue that going to the top of a tower to think is taken from American superhero comics (Batman and Spider-Man spring to mind as heros that liked to brood on rooftops).
I don't doubt that some of Dark Angel was inspired by Battle Angel Alita, but you have to realize that very few elements of Gunnm were all that original by themselves, it was really the synthesis, in my opinion, that made it unique.
All that being said, his action movies DO still tend to be pretty good. I just think that Alita has more of a quiet confidence, rather than an in-your-face attitude, than Cameron is really used to dealing with in female action heros. I suppose on the bright side, he can probably reuse some of the costumes from Dark Angel to keep costs down :)
I doubt it. I don't think we had enough nukes in the 1950's to end the world. That's exactly why these sorts of plans were thought up, because it was still entirely feasible to "win" a nuclear war. Sure, there'd be some ecological contamination, but since most of the ordinance would likely be dropped on Eastern Europe, most of the fallout would probably end up over Russia, leaving most of the world (Western Europe, Africa, most of Asia, and the Americas) essentially unharmed.
A: It's a tactical nuke if it lands in Germany.
Seriously though, as others alluded to, by the time we had small tactical nukes, we also had better delivery systems, obsoleting the whole "lobbing" technique. The article suggests that this strategy was doctrine during the 1950's.
But that doesn't explain why YOU found the philosophy in the Matrix interesting, unless you consider yourself among the legions of WWE watching boobs.
Now, if you were talking about FedEx Ground, you have to realize that FedEx Ground is a subsidiary, only somewhat tied to the parent company (it used to be called RPS). I agree that FedEx Ground is not up to the same standards as the rest of FedEx, but I've had my share of problems with UPS, too.
Maybe now people will wait to pirate the movie until the dvd comes out. I hate it when the only copies of a movie available are crappy screener copies. Kazaa(lite) STILL doesn't have any decent copies of the first Harry Potter movie, because people all downloaded the screener copies, and haven't bothered to distribute a version ripped from DVD.
He said "colonize," not "conquer." You're right, population is often not important for conquest.