Though many slashdotters have pointed out that this isn't new, I feel the need to point out that should this begin to succeed, Nintendo and Sony will mop the floor with this thing.
"Maintain." "Veneer." Neither republic nor autocracy are capitalized, and Augustus was not an autocrat. That's not what RE: means. Yes, he was a king (though the Romans used the term Emperor.) "Consulate," "Triumvirate," and none among consulate, triumvirate, censorship, pontificate or president are capitalized. (Yes yes, many history books say consulship. They also think it's ironic that the Senate which created the Caesars also ended up killing them; just because a textbook uses a word doesn't mean it's used correctly, these days, unfortunately.) "Cabinet." There is nothing in the Constitution nor any of its amendments about the cabinet. There's only one Constitution, and it's kind of sad that you didn't capitalize it, when you capitalized so many words which don't deserve it. s/I'd/It would/ , and no, it wouldn't. Maybe you didn't realize this, but the President has to deal with more people than just the Cabinet. Thousands more people, in fact.
Generals cannot be six star, and whereas I'm sure you're going to tell me that that's supposed to be some kind of crafty joke based on some observation that false statements don't suddenly become true just because they're spoken, I think your post has already done quite a neat job of straight manning that point already. Commander in Chief does not actually confer military rank, nor even the ability to give any military orders beyond deployment (for example, Commander in Chief may not reassign military staff.) Besides, it's mostly a ceremonial title since the establishment of the five central command branches in the Goldwater-Nichols defense reorganization act of 1986. It may be time for you to get a basic understanding of the government you're attempting to discuss.
On a more serious note, instead of discussing how you have a flaw in your grammar on average every 3.2 words (throw it in MS Word and check; I'm not making that number up,) let's discuss what horseshit your analogy is.
Republics cannot be veneered in the way you suggest. Either the populace can or it cannot vote. Now, before you go on spouting all these conspiracy theories about how the US doesn't allow its citizens to choose their own show color anymore, let me remind you that the US is a federal republic, not a republic; the two are about as different as a herd of cats and a single cat. Most of the time people spend whining about what their federal government won't allow them to do would be better spent face down in a highschool civics book learning how their state government worked, since their state government is significantly more involved in their lives than their federal government is.
Either a government gives voting power to its people, in which case it is a republic, or it does not, in which case you're a moron trying to make an Orwellian point without actually having a point to make. Now look, I'm usually the first person on the "Bush stole the vote" bandwagon, but let's at least try to pretend to be reasonable: when you come in swinging with no facts, no examples, and nearly literally everything you said wrong both in presentation and content, then really, someone's going to as for you to be modded into the floor.
I am that someone. Please mod parent through the floor and into the very core of the Earth.
And some final nit-picking:
1) Shut up.
2) Wait. You're not going to appoint a cabinet, but you're still going to have joint chiefs of staff? Who do you think makes up the top end of the cabinet?
3) Suit. Jesus, it's called a suit. A suite is a nice room. And who cares how you'd barbie yourself up when you were in the job that you seem to think makes you king of the world?
Personally, if I were President I wouldn't appoint any cabinate officals. The constitutions says I can, not that I have to.
No, we can only infer that if it's not deceptive, then it's not warfare.
You can't infer anything at all from a fallacy. This one is called Argumentum ad Verecundiam which is loosely translated "Appeal to Authority." The general idea (yay for puns) is that it really doesn't matter to whom you refer; witty quotes are not a legitimate basis for argument, and neither is referring to another person's opinion, regardless of their topical status.
The idea that all war is deception is outright silly. Yes, there's quite a bit of deception involved in war, but sometimes (with all apologies to Freud, for once) a fleet of tanks is just a fleet of tanks. Yes yes, hollywood, world war two, knockdown sets, we all know how the Battle of the Bulge worked. (Hear that, Europeans? Americans know about things that happened further away than California!) Nonetheless, just because there are many things in war which are based on misdirection, there are also many things which are not; pretending otherwise, even based on an aesthetically pleasing three thousand year old quote about war from when the avant garde was guys on horses with sharp sticks (because surely all that wisdom applies in the era of the supersonic space bomber,) is nothing better than affected ignorance.
Yes: the United States is the only major nation which requires an accounting of secret projects. Whereas the british are doing some random something, Americans know we're doing exactly $8.1t of random somethings.
Oh well, it's not like the US government cares about little things like their founding charter any more
Yeah, it's easy to make comments like that when you don't know what you're talking about.
The point was... (Score:1)...that we are not collectively obligated as a culture, people, nation, country, etc to help anyone.
Ahem. Once again I openly suggest that you have not in fact read the post you replied to, of with which you are currently arguing my interpretation. Witness the second sentence in the post you just attempted to define by saying its point was that we aren't obliged to help:
When will people realize that we are responsible for all of humanity?
Or maybe the fourth, fifth and sixth will be easier on you:
Let me let you in to a little secret here. The rest of the world *is* under an obligation to help SE Asia. Under a *big* obligation.
'Simple human ethics' don't really exist and are NOT universal.
That's funny, considering as how the very same ethics we've been teaching for almost 3000 years haven't changed a whit. I suspect you're confusing morals and ethics. Nonetheless, even morals are relatively universal: the proscriptions against theft may vary, but the number of cultures in which theft isn't illegal is fantastically small (the whole thing about Native Americans taking one another's posessions is mostly horseshit, spawned by an Onnondego practice and the white man's extremely detailed understanding of his frontier neighbors in the 1800s; please note the puddle the dripping sarcasm is leaving on the floor, I wouldn't want you to slip.)
4000 years ago if another country had a disaster such as this, one might think it would be a great time to invade, pillage, plunder, and conquer while the their chips were down.
Nice hisory, champ. There weren't countries 4000 years ago. Hell, there were only even two human empires that long ago, and if you don't know the difference between a nation and an empire, your qualifications to argue history and the history of morality are sub-zero.
Even so, this is utter horseshit, and confounds individual ambition, the appelations of war, the forgettings of kindness, and your personal ignorance with human tendencies. Have you ever looked at the total collapse of the nations around Charlemagne's empire? Did you know how Hannibal reacted to everyone but Rome? Did you know that Attilla is seen in Asia as a great leader and scholar, except to the Chinese, and even by many of them?
I mean hell, even if you can name either of the large empires that existed back then, can you tell us anything at all about them other than the wars they engaged in and roughly where they were on the map? If they had done anything other than war, would you know about it?
Are you aware that three of Rome's enemies, two of which were at war with Rome at the time, provided support to the area surrounding the important port city Pompeii? Are you aware that both Herkulea/Herakleia and Atlantis were searched for for hundreds of years by various rulers? Are you going to tell us that was about money, when the searches were far more expensive back then (or even today) than what they could have hoped to find?
I mean, shit. I'd be surprised if you could even name two major disasters that far back, much less make any intelligent commentary on the ways in which neighboring powers responded.
During that time period no one would've thought of that act of invasion as unethical - it was called a 'strategic advantage'.
Spoken from utter ignorance. Find examples or stop making shit up. Human kindness and decency are not recent traits, and can easily be found in any well-documented period, both at the personal level and at the magnate level. Sure, Nero and Little Boots were bastards, Alexander was a warmonger, Xerxes a vice, Darius 2 a bully. But, what of Hadrian, Euripides, Pericles, Hatsheput, Meagra?
Don't mistake a lack of knowledge for a lack of evidence. Just because you're aware of wars doesn't mean that that's all there were, and your contempt for all but the most modern of man puts you squarely in with
Ahem. That's not at all what I said. What I was doing was mocking your supposition of a multitude of legitimate uses. The fact of the matter is that it's difficult to come up with any use at all, let alone something which wouldn't be better served with an X-Acto knife or a carbide band saw.
The fact that there are any legal uses for a citizen makes my point.
Horseshit. There are legal and legitimate uses for citizens to have syringes, teflon bullets, automatic weapons, nuclear-pile reactors, fine-grained spectrothermal imagers, weaponized cholera, tanks, 747s, hundreds of industrial poisons, and marijuana.
Just because you can think of a way to use something which doesn't break the law doesn't mean that it's a good idea to put it into the public hands. I could re-caulk cracks without pulling tiles, shatter supporting rock to get rock flakes, take down entire herds of deer, provide massively profitable energy to my neighborhood, scan the street for everything from utility failure to natural disaster to communist infiltration, wipe out my gopher problem (there are strains of cholera which cross that particular species barrier, before you get all pseudo-science "human diseases don't leave humans" on me,) pull out the root stump in my back yard, fly my highschool graduating class to 'Nam, and make and use my own environmentally friendly rope.
Horseshit. There are legal and legitimate uses for citizens to have syringes, teflon bullets, automatic weapons, nuclear-pile reactors, fine-grained spectrothermal imagers, weaponized cholera, tanks, 747s, hundreds of industrial poisons, and marijuana.
Instead, however, the government would like to stop me from extending the drug problem, shooting through police armor, taking down entire herds of people, blowing things up real good-like, sniping through walls, infecting asshats on slashdot, blowing shit up real good, blowing shit up real good, poisoning a city, or getting high.
Y'see, here's the hint that you don't seem to grasp: bad risks are involved in sharing good technologies.
Here's the other hint that you don't seem to grasp: bullshit, you can't think of one single goddamned legitimate thing to do as an average citizen which couldn't be done with $200 of gear from Black and Decker. You don't run raves, you don't cut mass metals or mass plastics, you don't clean buildings, you don't align antennae over multiple miles, etc.
Its not about 'need', its about improper restrictions.
Well, I'm sorry you think that I don't need to be protected from 1) terrorists getting things they shouldn't have any need for in order to blind planes, or more importantly, 2) jackass self-important college kids getting lasers and burning out my tires because they think it's funny.
One doesnt 'need' much of anything, and most things have dual uses.
Don't be an ass. One needs food, transportation, simple tools, a way to cook, a way to refrigerate, a bed, a roof, a job, clothing, etc. You're trying to make this into a false bifurcation.
This isn't about need at all. This is about someone saying "but I want a giant thermal laser and you shouldn't be able to say no!" The fuck do you want it for? Yes, they should be able to say no. Frankly, at this point, I wish your food and clothing vendors could say no, so that you could be forced to sit inside and starve your pasty ass to death.
and most things have dual uses.
Yes, you keep handwaving away its supposedly obvious end-user applications. Need it to cut your tomatoes because that ginsu just won't hold its edge, hm?
But that does not mean they should be restricted.
No, but the appallingly high level of danger combined with the absolute lack of reasonable justification does. I mean, a car is both more useful and far less dangerous than an industrial laser, and we restrict the hell out of them. Do you honestly believe tha
the Screen Savers were the only show on TV that would come close to taking about technology
Apparently nobody's turned you onto PBS, The History Channel, the Learning Channel, the Technology Channel, CNN Tech, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, even the Canadians have a tech channel now, and they don't even have electricity.
Here's a hint: The Daily Show had both more frequent and more in-depth coverage of actual technology news than TechTV or G4 had put together. Quake 6's phong shaded goraud mip-mapped quincunx staggered light/reflection mapping isn't tech news. (I write video games for a living, so kindly stuff the upcoming suggestion that I either dislike games or don't follow game developments with a trained eye.)
Sciencey things your science channel has missed in the last two years: Cloning animals, finalizing the human codon search, new fundamental particles, new states of matter, the stem cell debate, half a dozen governmental-level beliefs about what's going on with our environment, two near-misses from asteroids large enough to threaten the ecosphere, three potential global plagues, the closure of one of the clay institute math problems, two major developments in number theory, a polynomial time algorithm for determining primality, the development of silicon on insulator chip doping, a refactoring of the mechanisms believed to underlie gravity and the suggestion that gravity may be blocked by not one, not two, but three seperate mechanisms in three seperate sets of reproducible studies, the first application of an antiviral agent to humanity as developed by large-scale simulation, various public policy issues regarding monitoring especially but not solely after 9/11, the food shortage on the international space station, the development of transparent transistors, OLED, a solid year of functional transmissions from two seperate self-powered agents on Mars, the experimental suggestion of subatomic-scale selection mechanisms, a robot lab entering the orbit of one of the moons of saturn, rollable solar cells, the commercial development of space, the ESA's support for a space elevator, the first grown and functioning human heart, the Jetson promise of home utility robots, stem-cell based reversal of paralyzing spinal injury, the drop of the home machine fabricator beneath not just the $50k but also beneath the $10k mark, the introduction of the first three major space powers since the 1970s, and the first time Bush has ever come through on one of his grandiose research promises.
Sciencey things your science channel has covered: Zelda, the Segway, and just barely enough CPU theory to make the marketers sound honest.
I once loved watching the show but now I can't. The new hosts are all about gaming, gaming, gaming.
Five minutes of science spread out over three hours of rambling pseudo-news about games does not a science show make; if it did, then the first science channel you ever watched was probably either Nickelodeon (Mr. Wizard,) the Disney channel (half a dozen shows) or NBC (Beakman's World.)
Oh, it doesn't seem kosher to pull saturday morning kid's science shows? Then explain to me how those, which actually make the effort to teach physics, biology and chemistry, are less science show than a channel whose greatest vision of the cutting edge in research is attempting to predict whether the new XBox will use Rambus products.
Hint: the evening local news regularly has more science in one half-hour episode in every single city I've ever lived than G4 has all day.
Aw, don't like a channel about gaming? I'd mock you for whatever G4 stands for, since one of those words is gaming, except that they so coyly chose a name to confuse customers that I can't find anyone explaining what the hell it means between all the talk of cpus, fax specifications and complaints about how badly the channel sucks.
"I hate history, the people on the history channel don't talk about anything but history." Change the channel, dimwit.
Like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and Superman? Here's a hint: TechTV barely got slashdot viewers, which says as much about TechTV as would a brutal and bloody art show failing in Manhattan, a butt naked supermodel catching no eyes on her jog through a remote all boys' boarding school, or the resurrected corpse of Ayn Rand walking into a Princeton lit class preaching the virtues of capitalism and watching the students walk out of the auditorium.
Let's be honest. The average Nintendo Power carries more content than a week on that deservedly dead channel, and just because G4 actually somehow manages to be more awful doesn't mean that TechTV was in retrospect any fucking good at all.
All that's left is good-looking, young hosts
Well, I'll give you young, but if you're really sitting on the internet pretending that you use the TV to look at pretty people (let's not even get into whether you believe anyone is being fooled) then someone ought to point out the WB to you: their schedule is just as vapid, and the people are a hell of a lot prettier.
Because even after g4 bought it and eliminated any "competition" they still only had enough material for half a channel, neatly explaining why an anime fan so proud of his obscurities collection that he'll admit in public to owning Prefectural Earth Defense Force, Ultimate Teacher, and even (cough) Wedding Peach (yay gag gifts: I can't even give it away) doesn't recognize half the crap they play in timeslots where other channels are making lots of money.
I mean, Betterman? Does anyone sober watch that show twice?
Yeah, it's all a joke until someone rubs your nose in who your jokes make you sound like. But Americans are the ignorant xenophobes, right?
Then again, I just spent a half hour reading a bunch of people complaining about the size of the first-day tsunami donations, when by the second day they'd increased by an order of magnitude, and when the US is giving more per person than any populous unaffected nation, peppered with assorted whining about how our media spent less time covering a natural tragedy than a calculated attack to which the appropriate response divided a nation, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised in that these jokes are being made by seemingly the same people which decry them from us, and manage to stumble all over themselves looking for ways to damn us.
Look, you guys are responsible for France, and all we've got is New Jersey. Now you tell me with a straight face who are the real criminals.
2) Had you called a hotel with such a warning they would have called you a kook (or whatever the word for kook is in the various languages) and hung up.
It may surprise you to learn that most people competant enough to rise to a managerial role in a customer-based occupation such as a hotel are able to tell the difference between a prank and a major impending disaster. It may further surprise you to learn that if, as the grandparent post suggests, the caller were to provide instructions for independant verification, that almost no sane individual (let alone someone which was able to rise to managerial status) would fail to at least check.
3) Even had it worked, way to go you just saved all the tourists lives but the natives would have still suffered horribly as most of the areas hit were not tourist attractions.
I sort of wonder if you even read the grandparent post. The reason to call hotels and police stations is not that they're in tourist areas, but because they know the local authority paths and are open 24/7. If an outsider calls 20 hotels, the hotel managers can turn around and notify the local government, police, military, religious organizations, and other local groups which can begin to make a large-scale local effort to move things along.
Besides, five-star hotels tend to be where the population is highest. That means that if you had to choose, those would be the best areas to save simply in flat terms of human life. It shouldn't matter whether you're saving a local or a tourist; a life is a life is a life.
but we still would have seen 100K+ dead.
Count me in for chopping any significant percentage off of a major disaster. Saved 10k in a disaster which wiped out a million? Better than nothing. Don't complain that a solution isn't perfect; either find a better one or implement the one you have. To do otherwise is unethical and outright stupid.
Strangely, I have read that such a system can make things worse as people rush to the shore when a warning is sounded to watch the incoming wave.
That's ridiculous. There's nothing more than a few occasional slashdot posts to back up the assertion that more people believe a tsunami will be fun to watch than needs to be run away from, and the Indonesian populace is neither ignorant nor contemptuous of the mechanisms of nature. I could see a hundred people flocking to the beach to watch or surf while ten thousand fled which otherwise might not have had the chance; even given equal numbers the apparent difference in intelligence would justify the act alone.
It is a beautiful and kind thing to attempt to supplement the governmental system to prevent tragedies like this. It is also a dangerously irresponsible thing to attempt. Whereas the system you describe would effectively mobilize a fair number of individuals, it scales extremely badly, causes an extreme redundancy in information dissemination, and stands a pretty decent chance of overwhelming incoming lines of communication to many of these countries whose information infrastructures are critically underdeveloped.
I applaud your efforts to take a situation which has recently been shown to be unacceptable into your own hands. However, I suggest that a more mature plan be deployed.
To begin with, it was correctly pointed out that hotels are a strong, 24/7 point of staffed alert human presence which tend to be central to dense urban areas. It was also pointed out that the bulk of better hotels planetwide have access to the internet. The internet excels both in verified distribution of data and in scalable information dispersal. The amount of data which actually needs to be sent to warn of impending natural disaster is extremely low by comparison to the amount of traffic which needs to be transmitted in voice communication, and the speed and reliability of large-scale parallel dispatch are near 100%, compared to a far lower number for active human response (consider how often one has to call back to get the front desk in the middle of the night; whereas a five star hotel won't have this problem, even in the US a four star hotel occasionally will, and a three star frequently so; though my personal experience fails I doubt this situation is any better in most parts of the world.) Furthermore, an internet dispatch could easily and safely give near-instantaneous reports on machine-based awareness (the remote system confirms message reciept) and human-based awareness (the remote system confirms that a human has read the message and is now acting upon it.) This would give a centralized bureau a far better chance of quickly and safely reaching areas where the computer wasn't being monitored, had lost connection, et cetera.
By all means, get the word out through a friend-based informal network. By all means, attempt to get a centralized system involved which will notify major 24/7 live human activity centers. But, please be aware of system limitations: even the nearly unmatched information infrastructure of New York City crumbled under a terrorist attack which affected a few thousand directly and about half of a single nation indirectly; the amount of traffic which would come into a system from a major global-scale disaster would absolutely dwarf the amount of traffic generated by 9/11.
Do not attempt to use voice to disseminate disaster warnings. Only a packet network effort has any chance of reaching an acceptable number of people in an acceptable time frame.
No competant businessperson would follow this idea, regardless of the utter contempt it shows for human life, simply because the amortized tourism money is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of rebuilding without the lives which would have been saved.
If you're going to make wide accusations about the state of governmental ethics in a country I suspect you know nothing about, please make sure that your data-absent speculation that someone else is a total monster at least makes sense. I wouldn't want someone to be accused not only of having no compassion, but also being fiscally ignorant.
In the meantime, please have the decency to bury your speculations about the evil of other nations until the grieving is over. Some of us back here in the parts of the world you seem to classify as having the capacity to want to do the right thing are currently grieving, and having someone blindly suppose that there are unnamed horrors running the show certainly won't help.
It is all well and good to feel heartbreak for the victims of this disaster, but to call it one of the worst disasters ever shows an ignorance of tragedy. The spanish attempt to simply set down a colony in Hispaniola (Haiti / Dominican Republic, two very small islands) killed nearly twenty times as many people through smallpox alone. Though estimates of the New World populations vary as high as 80 million, most credible accounts set the number around 30 million; most credible accounts set the population just ten years later, subject to nothing but disease and a hew hundred spaniards - at less than a million.
Don't get me wrong; this tsunami is sickening and tragic. Still, in the greater scheme of things, there are literally thousands of examples of single events with sudden catastrophic results far worse than this one.
Does it matter? Yes: we are just coming to the sort of global economy and transportation infrastructure to attempt to react to these events, and grim as it may seem, budgeting is a very real issue. Whereas no expense may be spared, a buffer must be left as insurance against a second tragedy, and we are in the inkling stages of learning to prepare for such events. Keeping perspective may very well keep us alive through whatever turns out to be our first real species-level crisis (no plague has occurred which threatens the species at a real level since transportation has given them global spread, and no major events have been ice-age quality threats since we arose as sapient beings; we have not yet truly been challenged, and may well make it off the planet before we are.)
Do everything you can for the survivors, but in your rush to provide sympathy do not lose focus on the larger scale.
Amusingly, the entire point of the grandparent post is that governmental, legal, political and international obligations can all take a poison and meet each other on the far side of Hell. It really doesn't matter what our treaties say; we have the moral and ethical obligation to extend our hands to one another in support. In fact, it doesn't even really matter what our religions say, though the bulk of our religions all repeat the duty quite the same. Still, many religions turn a blind eye towards those not of the faith; we cannot.
I'm not sure what you hope to gain by recasting an argument about nothing but human morality mattering in terms other than human morality, but grandparent is right: the rest of our obligations, regardless of their source, simply do not matter under the weight of human life. The only possible justification would be imperative from higher power, and given that nobody seems to agree on a higher power, that's going to be extremely difficult to justify.
It is just the right thing to do
This was the entire purpose of the post with which you decided to take issue.
Please mod parent down for attempting to recast simple human ethics as a function of religion.
I'm not sure if it's the lack of morals, or just the lack of brainpower
I for one am not entirely convinced that these are seperate issues.
Re:God of the Gaps: Glass half-full or half-empty?
on
Subatomic Darwinism
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· Score: 1
Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
Yeah, and if there's one thing a religious person will find it difficult to believe, it's that God's smarter than we are.
Simply the fact that one can make a movie based on and using the title of a copy-written work without consulting the author
That's not frequently true of well-known authors, or in fact of most book contracts with little-known authors. Pretty much the only publishing subindustries with that sort of conjoinder in their contracts standard-issue are science fiction and horror; if you try to run that sort of clause in a fiction contract you will be summarily laughed off of the phone by any typical book agent.
Furthermore, in science fiction and in horror, movies and miniseries are rarely made from the work of little-known authors. So, whereas it is an issue for those two genres, it's less of an issue IMOALE than you suggest.
No author wants to give up rights to their creations, but if they want to be published, they have little choice.
If this is spoken from experience rather than guesses and prejudice, then my friend, you need a better agent. This is a bit like hearing "no programmer wants to use Microsoft tools, but if they want SQL, they have little choice." Well yes, they do, given a simple familiarity with what's available to them.
What gave you the impression that Sci-Fi (or any other non-subscription TV channel) is interested in anything other than mass-appeal, lowest-common-denominator mediocrity?
No. Because they aren't interested in Science Fiction. They want the tech-fantasy crap.
As evidenced by Taken, Peacekeeper Wars, the two Stargate series, Buck Rogers, Andromeda, the constant reruns of Star Trek, the X-Files and the Outer Limits, Five Days to Midnight, and an original movie list that out of about 60 films contains seven (in my opinion) with even a vague fantasy bent.
This isn't even about "low budget". Look at Red Dwarf's first few seasons. They had no budget, yet they had great characters and amusing plots.
Yes, that's exactly the point the parent post was making with the Star Trek comment.
They haven't realized that going with the status quo will always result in mediocrity.
Luckily, a basic familiarity with the SciFi channel library will show very little status quo (you see, that phrase means "keeping things as they currently are," and barely even applies here) and recently a relatively small amount of mediocrity.
In order to produce something memorable, they have to push the envelope.
As was done with Taken, both Dunes, PK Wars, battlestar galactica, etc etc etc. Which channel besides HBO puts this much effort into shows which aren't the same old NBC drivel?
Well, also besides Cartoon Network.
Watching their crap, I get the feeling that the actor's salaries, the FX, everything is calculated to the exact penny and matched against the ad revenues.
This is true of everything in television and film, not just what you're angry at. Attempting to read into an industry you know nothing about and to guess at underlying mechanics is a good way to look stupid in public.
They know exactly how many people will watch another rendition of the same-old same-old
Except when you're talking about the knockoff b horror movies, I'd be interested to know what exactly you suggest Sci-Fi's library is duplicating. You see, giving actual examples is going to make life difficult.
and they're not going to break a profitable formula.
Amusingly, the formula you're making accusations about - sticking to standard issue plots and franchises - was broken about nine years ago when it changed management inside Turner Networks, and that's when the channel began to become as immensely profitable as it now is. The further SciFi steps from traditional televised science fiction, the more profitable it becomes.
Does anyone think that the Sci Fi channel will ever get actual decent Sci Fi authors to do their scripts and come up with series for them?
Apparently you haven't been watching. This is the first miniseries that SciFi has butchered in a couple of years. Taken, Battlestar Galactica, Peacekeeper Wars and the two Dune miniseries were excellent.
I had had high hopes for Earthsea. I'm stunned and disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
Though many slashdotters have pointed out that this isn't new, I feel the need to point out that should this begin to succeed, Nintendo and Sony will mop the floor with this thing.
It's sort of confusing that A is sarcasm and that B isn't. (I really hope A is, at least.)
Oy.
"Maintain." "Veneer." Neither republic nor autocracy are capitalized, and Augustus was not an autocrat. That's not what RE: means. Yes, he was a king (though the Romans used the term Emperor.) "Consulate," "Triumvirate," and none among consulate, triumvirate, censorship, pontificate or president are capitalized. (Yes yes, many history books say consulship. They also think it's ironic that the Senate which created the Caesars also ended up killing them; just because a textbook uses a word doesn't mean it's used correctly, these days, unfortunately.) "Cabinet." There is nothing in the Constitution nor any of its amendments about the cabinet. There's only one Constitution, and it's kind of sad that you didn't capitalize it, when you capitalized so many words which don't deserve it. s/I'd/It would/ , and no, it wouldn't. Maybe you didn't realize this, but the President has to deal with more people than just the Cabinet. Thousands more people, in fact.
Generals cannot be six star, and whereas I'm sure you're going to tell me that that's supposed to be some kind of crafty joke based on some observation that false statements don't suddenly become true just because they're spoken, I think your post has already done quite a neat job of straight manning that point already. Commander in Chief does not actually confer military rank, nor even the ability to give any military orders beyond deployment (for example, Commander in Chief may not reassign military staff.) Besides, it's mostly a ceremonial title since the establishment of the five central command branches in the Goldwater-Nichols defense reorganization act of 1986. It may be time for you to get a basic understanding of the government you're attempting to discuss.
On a more serious note, instead of discussing how you have a flaw in your grammar on average every 3.2 words (throw it in MS Word and check; I'm not making that number up,) let's discuss what horseshit your analogy is.
Republics cannot be veneered in the way you suggest. Either the populace can or it cannot vote. Now, before you go on spouting all these conspiracy theories about how the US doesn't allow its citizens to choose their own show color anymore, let me remind you that the US is a federal republic, not a republic; the two are about as different as a herd of cats and a single cat. Most of the time people spend whining about what their federal government won't allow them to do would be better spent face down in a highschool civics book learning how their state government worked, since their state government is significantly more involved in their lives than their federal government is.
Either a government gives voting power to its people, in which case it is a republic, or it does not, in which case you're a moron trying to make an Orwellian point without actually having a point to make. Now look, I'm usually the first person on the "Bush stole the vote" bandwagon, but let's at least try to pretend to be reasonable: when you come in swinging with no facts, no examples, and nearly literally everything you said wrong both in presentation and content, then really, someone's going to as for you to be modded into the floor.
I am that someone. Please mod parent through the floor and into the very core of the Earth.
And some final nit-picking:
1) Shut up.
2) Wait. You're not going to appoint a cabinet, but you're still going to have joint chiefs of staff? Who do you think makes up the top end of the cabinet?
3) Suit. Jesus, it's called a suit. A suite is a nice room. And who cares how you'd barbie yourself up when you were in the job that you seem to think makes you king of the world?
Personally, if I were President I wouldn't appoint any cabinate officals. The constitutions says I can, not that I have to.
4) Oy
No, we can only infer that if it's not deceptive, then it's not warfare.
You can't infer anything at all from a fallacy. This one is called Argumentum ad Verecundiam which is loosely translated "Appeal to Authority." The general idea (yay for puns) is that it really doesn't matter to whom you refer; witty quotes are not a legitimate basis for argument, and neither is referring to another person's opinion, regardless of their topical status.
The idea that all war is deception is outright silly. Yes, there's quite a bit of deception involved in war, but sometimes (with all apologies to Freud, for once) a fleet of tanks is just a fleet of tanks. Yes yes, hollywood, world war two, knockdown sets, we all know how the Battle of the Bulge worked. (Hear that, Europeans? Americans know about things that happened further away than California!) Nonetheless, just because there are many things in war which are based on misdirection, there are also many things which are not; pretending otherwise, even based on an aesthetically pleasing three thousand year old quote about war from when the avant garde was guys on horses with sharp sticks (because surely all that wisdom applies in the era of the supersonic space bomber,) is nothing better than affected ignorance.
template <class Topic>
volatile float GetSlashdotPostQuality<const AboutLogic>(const Post&) {
return std::numeric_limits<float>::min();
}
Yes: the United States is the only major nation which requires an accounting of secret projects. Whereas the british are doing some random something, Americans know we're doing exactly $8.1t of random somethings.
Oh well, it's not like the US government cares about little things like their founding charter any more
Yeah, it's easy to make comments like that when you don't know what you're talking about.
After all, who needs a pretense of legitimacy?
You, apparently.
The point was... (Score:1) ...that we are not collectively obligated as a culture, people, nation, country, etc to help anyone.
Ahem. Once again I openly suggest that you have not in fact read the post you replied to, of with which you are currently arguing my interpretation. Witness the second sentence in the post you just attempted to define by saying its point was that we aren't obliged to help:
When will people realize that we are responsible for all of humanity?
Or maybe the fourth, fifth and sixth will be easier on you:
Let me let you in to a little secret here. The rest of the world *is* under an obligation to help SE Asia. Under a *big* obligation.
'Simple human ethics' don't really exist and are NOT universal.
That's funny, considering as how the very same ethics we've been teaching for almost 3000 years haven't changed a whit. I suspect you're confusing morals and ethics. Nonetheless, even morals are relatively universal: the proscriptions against theft may vary, but the number of cultures in which theft isn't illegal is fantastically small (the whole thing about Native Americans taking one another's posessions is mostly horseshit, spawned by an Onnondego practice and the white man's extremely detailed understanding of his frontier neighbors in the 1800s; please note the puddle the dripping sarcasm is leaving on the floor, I wouldn't want you to slip.)
4000 years ago if another country had a disaster such as this, one might think it would be a great time to invade, pillage, plunder, and conquer while the their chips were down.
Nice hisory, champ. There weren't countries 4000 years ago. Hell, there were only even two human empires that long ago, and if you don't know the difference between a nation and an empire, your qualifications to argue history and the history of morality are sub-zero.
Even so, this is utter horseshit, and confounds individual ambition, the appelations of war, the forgettings of kindness, and your personal ignorance with human tendencies. Have you ever looked at the total collapse of the nations around Charlemagne's empire? Did you know how Hannibal reacted to everyone but Rome? Did you know that Attilla is seen in Asia as a great leader and scholar, except to the Chinese, and even by many of them?
I mean hell, even if you can name either of the large empires that existed back then, can you tell us anything at all about them other than the wars they engaged in and roughly where they were on the map? If they had done anything other than war, would you know about it?
Are you aware that three of Rome's enemies, two of which were at war with Rome at the time, provided support to the area surrounding the important port city Pompeii? Are you aware that both Herkulea/Herakleia and Atlantis were searched for for hundreds of years by various rulers? Are you going to tell us that was about money, when the searches were far more expensive back then (or even today) than what they could have hoped to find?
I mean, shit. I'd be surprised if you could even name two major disasters that far back, much less make any intelligent commentary on the ways in which neighboring powers responded.
During that time period no one would've thought of that act of invasion as unethical - it was called a 'strategic advantage'.
Spoken from utter ignorance. Find examples or stop making shit up. Human kindness and decency are not recent traits, and can easily be found in any well-documented period, both at the personal level and at the magnate level. Sure, Nero and Little Boots were bastards, Alexander was a warmonger, Xerxes a vice, Darius 2 a bully. But, what of Hadrian, Euripides, Pericles, Hatsheput, Meagra?
Don't mistake a lack of knowledge for a lack of evidence. Just because you're aware of wars doesn't mean that that's all there were, and your contempt for all but the most modern of man puts you squarely in with
While you may not see a legit use, I can.
Ahem. That's not at all what I said. What I was doing was mocking your supposition of a multitude of legitimate uses. The fact of the matter is that it's difficult to come up with any use at all, let alone something which wouldn't be better served with an X-Acto knife or a carbide band saw.
The fact that there are any legal uses for a citizen makes my point.
Horseshit. There are legal and legitimate uses for citizens to have syringes, teflon bullets, automatic weapons, nuclear-pile reactors, fine-grained spectrothermal imagers, weaponized cholera, tanks, 747s, hundreds of industrial poisons, and marijuana.
Just because you can think of a way to use something which doesn't break the law doesn't mean that it's a good idea to put it into the public hands. I could re-caulk cracks without pulling tiles, shatter supporting rock to get rock flakes, take down entire herds of deer, provide massively profitable energy to my neighborhood, scan the street for everything from utility failure to natural disaster to communist infiltration, wipe out my gopher problem (there are strains of cholera which cross that particular species barrier, before you get all pseudo-science "human diseases don't leave humans" on me,) pull out the root stump in my back yard, fly my highschool graduating class to 'Nam, and make and use my own environmentally friendly rope.
Horseshit. There are legal and legitimate uses for citizens to have syringes, teflon bullets, automatic weapons, nuclear-pile reactors, fine-grained spectrothermal imagers, weaponized cholera, tanks, 747s, hundreds of industrial poisons, and marijuana.
Instead, however, the government would like to stop me from extending the drug problem, shooting through police armor, taking down entire herds of people, blowing things up real good-like, sniping through walls, infecting asshats on slashdot, blowing shit up real good, blowing shit up real good, poisoning a city, or getting high.
Y'see, here's the hint that you don't seem to grasp: bad risks are involved in sharing good technologies.
Here's the other hint that you don't seem to grasp: bullshit, you can't think of one single goddamned legitimate thing to do as an average citizen which couldn't be done with $200 of gear from Black and Decker. You don't run raves, you don't cut mass metals or mass plastics, you don't clean buildings, you don't align antennae over multiple miles, etc.
Its not about 'need', its about improper restrictions.
Well, I'm sorry you think that I don't need to be protected from 1) terrorists getting things they shouldn't have any need for in order to blind planes, or more importantly, 2) jackass self-important college kids getting lasers and burning out my tires because they think it's funny.
One doesnt 'need' much of anything, and most things have dual uses.
Don't be an ass. One needs food, transportation, simple tools, a way to cook, a way to refrigerate, a bed, a roof, a job, clothing, etc. You're trying to make this into a false bifurcation.
This isn't about need at all. This is about someone saying "but I want a giant thermal laser and you shouldn't be able to say no!" The fuck do you want it for? Yes, they should be able to say no. Frankly, at this point, I wish your food and clothing vendors could say no, so that you could be forced to sit inside and starve your pasty ass to death.
and most things have dual uses.
Yes, you keep handwaving away its supposedly obvious end-user applications. Need it to cut your tomatoes because that ginsu just won't hold its edge, hm?
But that does not mean they should be restricted.
No, but the appallingly high level of danger combined with the absolute lack of reasonable justification does. I mean, a car is both more useful and far less dangerous than an industrial laser, and we restrict the hell out of them. Do you honestly believe tha
the Screen Savers were the only show on TV that would come close to taking about technology
Apparently nobody's turned you onto PBS, The History Channel, the Learning Channel, the Technology Channel, CNN Tech, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, even the Canadians have a tech channel now, and they don't even have electricity.
Here's a hint: The Daily Show had both more frequent and more in-depth coverage of actual technology news than TechTV or G4 had put together. Quake 6's phong shaded goraud mip-mapped quincunx staggered light/reflection mapping isn't tech news. (I write video games for a living, so kindly stuff the upcoming suggestion that I either dislike games or don't follow game developments with a trained eye.)
Sciencey things your science channel has missed in the last two years: Cloning animals, finalizing the human codon search, new fundamental particles, new states of matter, the stem cell debate, half a dozen governmental-level beliefs about what's going on with our environment, two near-misses from asteroids large enough to threaten the ecosphere, three potential global plagues, the closure of one of the clay institute math problems, two major developments in number theory, a polynomial time algorithm for determining primality, the development of silicon on insulator chip doping, a refactoring of the mechanisms believed to underlie gravity and the suggestion that gravity may be blocked by not one, not two, but three seperate mechanisms in three seperate sets of reproducible studies, the first application of an antiviral agent to humanity as developed by large-scale simulation, various public policy issues regarding monitoring especially but not solely after 9/11, the food shortage on the international space station, the development of transparent transistors, OLED, a solid year of functional transmissions from two seperate self-powered agents on Mars, the experimental suggestion of subatomic-scale selection mechanisms, a robot lab entering the orbit of one of the moons of saturn, rollable solar cells, the commercial development of space, the ESA's support for a space elevator, the first grown and functioning human heart, the Jetson promise of home utility robots, stem-cell based reversal of paralyzing spinal injury, the drop of the home machine fabricator beneath not just the $50k but also beneath the $10k mark, the introduction of the first three major space powers since the 1970s, and the first time Bush has ever come through on one of his grandiose research promises.
Sciencey things your science channel has covered: Zelda, the Segway, and just barely enough CPU theory to make the marketers sound honest.
I once loved watching the show but now I can't. The new hosts are all about gaming, gaming, gaming.
Five minutes of science spread out over three hours of rambling pseudo-news about games does not a science show make; if it did, then the first science channel you ever watched was probably either Nickelodeon (Mr. Wizard,) the Disney channel (half a dozen shows) or NBC (Beakman's World.)
Oh, it doesn't seem kosher to pull saturday morning kid's science shows? Then explain to me how those, which actually make the effort to teach physics, biology and chemistry, are less science show than a channel whose greatest vision of the cutting edge in research is attempting to predict whether the new XBox will use Rambus products.
Hint: the evening local news regularly has more science in one half-hour episode in every single city I've ever lived than G4 has all day.
Aw, don't like a channel about gaming? I'd mock you for whatever G4 stands for, since one of those words is gaming, except that they so coyly chose a name to confuse customers that I can't find anyone explaining what the hell it means between all the talk of cpus, fax specifications and complaints about how badly the channel sucks.
"I hate history, the people on the history channel don't talk about anything but history." Change the channel, dimwit.
+2, Interesting? Mod parent down.
and fired off all of the good TechTV people
Like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and Superman? Here's a hint: TechTV barely got slashdot viewers, which says as much about TechTV as would a brutal and bloody art show failing in Manhattan, a butt naked supermodel catching no eyes on her jog through a remote all boys' boarding school, or the resurrected corpse of Ayn Rand walking into a Princeton lit class preaching the virtues of capitalism and watching the students walk out of the auditorium.
Let's be honest. The average Nintendo Power carries more content than a week on that deservedly dead channel, and just because G4 actually somehow manages to be more awful doesn't mean that TechTV was in retrospect any fucking good at all.
All that's left is good-looking, young hosts
Well, I'll give you young, but if you're really sitting on the internet pretending that you use the TV to look at pretty people (let's not even get into whether you believe anyone is being fooled) then someone ought to point out the WB to you: their schedule is just as vapid, and the people are a hell of a lot prettier.
But I read Smallville for the articles.
Because even after g4 bought it and eliminated any "competition" they still only had enough material for half a channel, neatly explaining why an anime fan so proud of his obscurities collection that he'll admit in public to owning Prefectural Earth Defense Force, Ultimate Teacher, and even (cough) Wedding Peach (yay gag gifts: I can't even give it away) doesn't recognize half the crap they play in timeslots where other channels are making lots of money.
I mean, Betterman? Does anyone sober watch that show twice?
For get the multitude of legal uses
Oh yeah, I know I couldn't survive daily life without my high-powered industrial laser.
A wall should be built
Well seig heil to you too, buddy.
Yeah, it's all a joke until someone rubs your nose in who your jokes make you sound like. But Americans are the ignorant xenophobes, right?
Then again, I just spent a half hour reading a bunch of people complaining about the size of the first-day tsunami donations, when by the second day they'd increased by an order of magnitude, and when the US is giving more per person than any populous unaffected nation, peppered with assorted whining about how our media spent less time covering a natural tragedy than a calculated attack to which the appropriate response divided a nation, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised in that these jokes are being made by seemingly the same people which decry them from us, and manage to stumble all over themselves looking for ways to damn us.
Look, you guys are responsible for France, and all we've got is New Jersey. Now you tell me with a straight face who are the real criminals.
With the powers of your mind.
Totfl? Rotfl.
2) Had you called a hotel with such a warning they would have called you a kook (or whatever the word for kook is in the various languages) and hung up.
It may surprise you to learn that most people competant enough to rise to a managerial role in a customer-based occupation such as a hotel are able to tell the difference between a prank and a major impending disaster. It may further surprise you to learn that if, as the grandparent post suggests, the caller were to provide instructions for independant verification, that almost no sane individual (let alone someone which was able to rise to managerial status) would fail to at least check.
3) Even had it worked, way to go you just saved all the tourists lives but the natives would have still suffered horribly as most of the areas hit were not tourist attractions.
I sort of wonder if you even read the grandparent post. The reason to call hotels and police stations is not that they're in tourist areas, but because they know the local authority paths and are open 24/7. If an outsider calls 20 hotels, the hotel managers can turn around and notify the local government, police, military, religious organizations, and other local groups which can begin to make a large-scale local effort to move things along.
Besides, five-star hotels tend to be where the population is highest. That means that if you had to choose, those would be the best areas to save simply in flat terms of human life. It shouldn't matter whether you're saving a local or a tourist; a life is a life is a life.
but we still would have seen 100K+ dead.
Count me in for chopping any significant percentage off of a major disaster. Saved 10k in a disaster which wiped out a million? Better than nothing. Don't complain that a solution isn't perfect; either find a better one or implement the one you have. To do otherwise is unethical and outright stupid.
Strangely, I have read that such a system can make things worse as people rush to the shore when a warning is sounded to watch the incoming wave.
That's ridiculous. There's nothing more than a few occasional slashdot posts to back up the assertion that more people believe a tsunami will be fun to watch than needs to be run away from, and the Indonesian populace is neither ignorant nor contemptuous of the mechanisms of nature. I could see a hundred people flocking to the beach to watch or surf while ten thousand fled which otherwise might not have had the chance; even given equal numbers the apparent difference in intelligence would justify the act alone.
It is a beautiful and kind thing to attempt to supplement the governmental system to prevent tragedies like this. It is also a dangerously irresponsible thing to attempt. Whereas the system you describe would effectively mobilize a fair number of individuals, it scales extremely badly, causes an extreme redundancy in information dissemination, and stands a pretty decent chance of overwhelming incoming lines of communication to many of these countries whose information infrastructures are critically underdeveloped.
I applaud your efforts to take a situation which has recently been shown to be unacceptable into your own hands. However, I suggest that a more mature plan be deployed.
To begin with, it was correctly pointed out that hotels are a strong, 24/7 point of staffed alert human presence which tend to be central to dense urban areas. It was also pointed out that the bulk of better hotels planetwide have access to the internet. The internet excels both in verified distribution of data and in scalable information dispersal. The amount of data which actually needs to be sent to warn of impending natural disaster is extremely low by comparison to the amount of traffic which needs to be transmitted in voice communication, and the speed and reliability of large-scale parallel dispatch are near 100%, compared to a far lower number for active human response (consider how often one has to call back to get the front desk in the middle of the night; whereas a five star hotel won't have this problem, even in the US a four star hotel occasionally will, and a three star frequently so; though my personal experience fails I doubt this situation is any better in most parts of the world.) Furthermore, an internet dispatch could easily and safely give near-instantaneous reports on machine-based awareness (the remote system confirms message reciept) and human-based awareness (the remote system confirms that a human has read the message and is now acting upon it.) This would give a centralized bureau a far better chance of quickly and safely reaching areas where the computer wasn't being monitored, had lost connection, et cetera.
By all means, get the word out through a friend-based informal network. By all means, attempt to get a centralized system involved which will notify major 24/7 live human activity centers. But, please be aware of system limitations: even the nearly unmatched information infrastructure of New York City crumbled under a terrorist attack which affected a few thousand directly and about half of a single nation indirectly; the amount of traffic which would come into a system from a major global-scale disaster would absolutely dwarf the amount of traffic generated by 9/11.
Do not attempt to use voice to disseminate disaster warnings. Only a packet network effort has any chance of reaching an acceptable number of people in an acceptable time frame.
No competant businessperson would follow this idea, regardless of the utter contempt it shows for human life, simply because the amortized tourism money is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of rebuilding without the lives which would have been saved.
If you're going to make wide accusations about the state of governmental ethics in a country I suspect you know nothing about, please make sure that your data-absent speculation that someone else is a total monster at least makes sense. I wouldn't want someone to be accused not only of having no compassion, but also being fiscally ignorant.
In the meantime, please have the decency to bury your speculations about the evil of other nations until the grieving is over. Some of us back here in the parts of the world you seem to classify as having the capacity to want to do the right thing are currently grieving, and having someone blindly suppose that there are unnamed horrors running the show certainly won't help.
It is all well and good to feel heartbreak for the victims of this disaster, but to call it one of the worst disasters ever shows an ignorance of tragedy. The spanish attempt to simply set down a colony in Hispaniola (Haiti / Dominican Republic, two very small islands) killed nearly twenty times as many people through smallpox alone. Though estimates of the New World populations vary as high as 80 million, most credible accounts set the number around 30 million; most credible accounts set the population just ten years later, subject to nothing but disease and a hew hundred spaniards - at less than a million.
Don't get me wrong; this tsunami is sickening and tragic. Still, in the greater scheme of things, there are literally thousands of examples of single events with sudden catastrophic results far worse than this one.
Does it matter? Yes: we are just coming to the sort of global economy and transportation infrastructure to attempt to react to these events, and grim as it may seem, budgeting is a very real issue. Whereas no expense may be spared, a buffer must be left as insurance against a second tragedy, and we are in the inkling stages of learning to prepare for such events. Keeping perspective may very well keep us alive through whatever turns out to be our first real species-level crisis (no plague has occurred which threatens the species at a real level since transportation has given them global spread, and no major events have been ice-age quality threats since we arose as sapient beings; we have not yet truly been challenged, and may well make it off the planet before we are.)
Do everything you can for the survivors, but in your rush to provide sympathy do not lose focus on the larger scale.
Amusingly, the entire point of the grandparent post is that governmental, legal, political and international obligations can all take a poison and meet each other on the far side of Hell. It really doesn't matter what our treaties say; we have the moral and ethical obligation to extend our hands to one another in support. In fact, it doesn't even really matter what our religions say, though the bulk of our religions all repeat the duty quite the same. Still, many religions turn a blind eye towards those not of the faith; we cannot.
I'm not sure what you hope to gain by recasting an argument about nothing but human morality mattering in terms other than human morality, but grandparent is right: the rest of our obligations, regardless of their source, simply do not matter under the weight of human life. The only possible justification would be imperative from higher power, and given that nobody seems to agree on a higher power, that's going to be extremely difficult to justify.
It is just the right thing to do
This was the entire purpose of the post with which you decided to take issue.
Please mod parent down for attempting to recast simple human ethics as a function of religion.
I'm not sure if it's the lack of morals, or just the lack of brainpower
I for one am not entirely convinced that these are seperate issues.
Without taking a position either way on the existence or non-existence of God, I humbly submit that the more science we do, the smarter the "God of the Gaps" has to be.
Yeah, and if there's one thing a religious person will find it difficult to believe, it's that God's smarter than we are.
What were you pointing out again?
It is ironic
Whereas I agree with the sentiment, that's not what irony means.
Simply the fact that one can make a movie based on and using the title of a copy-written work without consulting the author
That's not frequently true of well-known authors, or in fact of most book contracts with little-known authors. Pretty much the only publishing subindustries with that sort of conjoinder in their contracts standard-issue are science fiction and horror; if you try to run that sort of clause in a fiction contract you will be summarily laughed off of the phone by any typical book agent.
Furthermore, in science fiction and in horror, movies and miniseries are rarely made from the work of little-known authors. So, whereas it is an issue for those two genres, it's less of an issue IMOALE than you suggest.
No author wants to give up rights to their creations, but if they want to be published, they have little choice.
If this is spoken from experience rather than guesses and prejudice, then my friend, you need a better agent. This is a bit like hearing "no programmer wants to use Microsoft tools, but if they want SQL, they have little choice." Well yes, they do, given a simple familiarity with what's available to them.
What gave you the impression that Sci-Fi (or any other non-subscription TV channel) is interested in anything other than mass-appeal, lowest-common-denominator mediocrity?
Their production list.
Free TV isn't about art.
Cable TV isn't free.
No. Because they aren't interested in Science Fiction. They want the tech-fantasy crap.
As evidenced by Taken, Peacekeeper Wars, the two Stargate series, Buck Rogers, Andromeda, the constant reruns of Star Trek, the X-Files and the Outer Limits, Five Days to Midnight, and an original movie list that out of about 60 films contains seven (in my opinion) with even a vague fantasy bent.
This isn't even about "low budget". Look at Red Dwarf's first few seasons. They had no budget, yet they had great characters and amusing plots.
Yes, that's exactly the point the parent post was making with the Star Trek comment.
They haven't realized that going with the status quo will always result in mediocrity.
Luckily, a basic familiarity with the SciFi channel library will show very little status quo (you see, that phrase means "keeping things as they currently are," and barely even applies here) and recently a relatively small amount of mediocrity.
In order to produce something memorable, they have to push the envelope.
As was done with Taken, both Dunes, PK Wars, battlestar galactica, etc etc etc. Which channel besides HBO puts this much effort into shows which aren't the same old NBC drivel?
Well, also besides Cartoon Network.
Watching their crap, I get the feeling that the actor's salaries, the FX, everything is calculated to the exact penny and matched against the ad revenues.
This is true of everything in television and film, not just what you're angry at. Attempting to read into an industry you know nothing about and to guess at underlying mechanics is a good way to look stupid in public.
They know exactly how many people will watch another rendition of the same-old same-old
Except when you're talking about the knockoff b horror movies, I'd be interested to know what exactly you suggest Sci-Fi's library is duplicating. You see, giving actual examples is going to make life difficult.
and they're not going to break a profitable formula.
Amusingly, the formula you're making accusations about - sticking to standard issue plots and franchises - was broken about nine years ago when it changed management inside Turner Networks, and that's when the channel began to become as immensely profitable as it now is. The further SciFi steps from traditional televised science fiction, the more profitable it becomes.
Does anyone think that the Sci Fi channel will ever get actual decent Sci Fi authors to do their scripts and come up with series for them?
Apparently you haven't been watching. This is the first miniseries that SciFi has butchered in a couple of years. Taken, Battlestar Galactica, Peacekeeper Wars and the two Dune miniseries were excellent.
I had had high hopes for Earthsea. I'm stunned and disappointed.