Agreed on all points - he never should have touched Star Trek, but he did Star Wars as it was supposed to be done, in a manner true to the original trilogies (and as the antithesis to the prequels).
And the Gonk cameos were one of many great touches;)
Really, the only thing that came across as "too CGI-ish" to me were the rapthars. But compared to the prequels, that was nothing.
Actually, there were good reasons given in the movie for why the fighters kept low - in case you're curious, it's because the tie fighters and their tactics are more optimal for combat at altitude, and also later on they were trying to avoid being spotted from a base far away.
I saw it twice. Neither were my plan - I was with family for Christmas, and that's what the family did. I had some things that I like after the first viewing, and some that bothered me. After the second viewing, the things that I had liked before I liked even more, and the things I hadn't liked still bugged me.
Personally, I felt it restored canon and tossed out the canon-breaking of the prequels. Aka, you won't hear a word of "midichlorians" or anything like that in this film.
That comes from Robot Chicken. But it really does work. Act all slapsticky for the benefit of a little kid who you want to eventually become a sith, give power to Palpatine knowing what he's going to do, etc, then basically melt into the background.
Seriously? If you think that this is "a massive string of convenient events" unseen in other Star Wars movies, you really need to watch the other Star Wars movies again. They're entirely built around massive chains of convenient events. Remember the first one, where droids just happen to crash on the planet that just happens to contain Obiwan and Luke, and happen to end up with him and his family, they just happen to end up at the Death Star and then a ton of improbable stuff happens there, etc, and then we get to the end where the guy who's only ever shot at womp rats suddenly learns force control and hits a tiny exhaust port at high speeds without his targeting computer, triggering an explosion that takes out the entire Death Star at literally the last minute?
And as absurdly unlikely as that was, it's nothing compared to the Phantom Menace.. When I saw it in the theatre, during the scene where Anakin accidentally takes off, accidentally flies to the mothership, accidentally destroys it, unintentionally shuts down the droid army and wins the battle for everyone, I swear there were six year olds in the audience saying "come on, don't insult my intelligence"
I didn't expect much from the movie, but actually left generally pleased.
For those who haven't seen it, it's true to all of the original trilogy conventions and has the same general "feel" to it. To the point that they even have things like a background cameo by Gonk, the walking trashcan droid. The Falcon being even more of a piece of junk than it used to be was another nice touch. It was clearly designed by people who were fans of the original trilogy and not fond of the prequils. They also really nailed the "Nazi-reich" feel to the First Order - the original Empire was rather more vague "bad guys", the First Order really seems to have motivation beyond simply "to exist".
As for your specific points:
There's nothing really bold. Yet ANOTHER Death Star? Oh, this one's bigger, whoop dee doo.
And more capable. They show it simultaneously destroying multiple planets and whole massive fleets in entirely different systems.
Rey comes from some hole where she barely manages to eat enough, and suddenly can pilot and repair ships
Did you miss the whole major plot element, the primary characterization of her in the movie, that she's said alive by working as a scavenger, dissecting imperial ships for parts? That's what she's done her entire life to stay alive, finding and extracting the most valuable parts (including gaining access to them) from spacecraft, she better damn well know what's what. And like Luke, whose piloting skill was from riding around on a landspeeder, she has her own junky ride that she uses every day.
use the Force though she thought it was a myth
Luke didn't believe in the force either until he started being taught about it by Obiwan, so I fail to see your point.
and competently use a lightsaber, all without training.
You mean "losing badly with a lightsaber, and only being left alive because Kylo Ren wanted to bring her with to Snoke as per his orders. She has one successful use of the force in combat right at the end, just like Luke in A New Hope. Against a wounded opponent, who is himself just a teenager struggling to get a handle on his powers.
She also instantly takes Han's place, while Chewbacca is oddly ignored.
I don't even know what you're taking about here. Both Chewie and Han liked her, and Han had just offered her a permanent position on the Falcon, with Chewie's approval. So you think Chewie should have suddenly kicked her out after Han died? Really?
Kylo Ren really looks like a parody of Darth Vader. He's like an emo teenager with a high position and access to tech to make himself a cool suit
That's just the point, he *is* an emo teenager who is obsessed with Darth Vader and wants to be just like him. To the point that he basically prays to Vader's mask. He's a wannabe who wants to be like his grandfather. The whole First Order is rather cultlike in that regard, something clearly encouraged by Snoke.
Side point: this is the first time that one actually sees the sith being what we've been constantly told from the beginning that they are: people powerful in the force who've given into their passions, their anger, their rage. When was the last time you ever saw a sith hack the place up in a fit of rage when he was given bad news? Vader choked people, but always seemed cool and in control of his emotions. Let's not get started on prequel-Anakin, who we're constantly told about how angry he is, but it's never more than whiny dialogue. Kylo Ren actually for once shows clear, visible rage.
Maybe that was the point, but how is this guy in a leading position of anything?
He's at best co-second-in-command of the First Order. Snoke listens to his commanders at least as much as he listens to Kylo Ren. And they do generally prove more competent, so he
but in practice, voter Bob would have a letter from government Alice with the passwords that show the real and the fake votes, and a password recovery system. Carol would just demand to see the letter or tell Bob to reset her passwords.
No, he wouldn't. Unless the government for some reason saw fit to implement on purpose a deliberately flawed system. If you want to reset "Y", you have to do it through a trusted channel, such as in person with no provable confirmation given by "Alice" (the government).
The period of a period of open vote changes is interesting, but has a different problem, which is common to all e-voting systems: Carol can pressure Bob to provide the credentials for voting and do the voting herself.
And then Bob can change the vote. Unless you're assuming that Bob can't prove that he's himself in person to Alice, wherein you have much bigger problems than your voting system to deal with.
Anyway, electronic voting systems give a lot of power to people who handle the software,
Once again, far fewer than in current systems. The number of people who have the ability to affect the system is far fewer than the stages at which it could be affected far fewer.
As stated: one doesn't need perfection. One just needs "better than current voting systems, which are pretty crappy".
This is a common misconception - that if Alice can prove X to Bob, then that means that Bob can prove X to Carol. But this is simply not true. If Alice and Bob know a secret Y that Carol doesn't know, and Alice refuses to confirm or deny anything about Y, then Alice can prove X to Bob by means of reversible function f(X, Y), multiple possible values A in the function of f(X, A) are valid. Bob cannot prove anything to Carol about Y because Alice refuses to answer and a valid result from f(X, Y) means nothing. And because Bob cannot prove Y, he cannot prove that the results of f^-1(X, A) are really the results of f^-1(X, Y) - even though he knows that they are because he knows Y.
In short, and in plain English: if there is some secret information between the voter and the registrar confirmed by trusted means at the time of registration (aka, in person), and this secret is used somewhere in the process of looking up a cast vote, and the use of a fake "secret" can yield a fake answer as to how a person voted, then the third party can't know if they're seeing how the person really voted or not. The specific details can be arranged in almost any manner, but the key point is, just because A can prove a secret to B doesn't mean that B can prove it to C, because C doesn't know everything that A and B know, and information can be required in the interpretation of the communication channel.
A rather simple solution unrelated to the above is long voting periods with the ability to change one's vote, with verification shut down near the end of the voting period. Hence even without the requirement of a secret between the voter and the registrar, the "proof" for early voters means nothing (they can always change it), and unless "Carol" in the above is going to hold "Bob" hostage for the entire no-verification period and monitor his every move, she can't know that he hasn't gone in and changed his vote. And if people are going out and doing that, you have a lot bigger problems than voting on your hands! Long voting periods (and multiple means of casting votes, including paper ballots and whatnot for those who want them) are also a defense against DDOS.
A key issue that must be noted: an electronic voting system does not need to be perfect. At all. It only needs to be better than current voting systems, which let's face it, are pretty lousy. Error rates on votes are usually estimated at 0.1-1% or so, voters can't confirm their votes (a far more realistic problem than Carol taking Bob hostage), votes are often poorly secured and left in the hands of (and/or tallied by) small numbers of individuals at numerous locations, software is generally closed and relying on "security through obscurity" and on and on and on. It's pretty terrible.
And honestly, if I had to pick countries in Europe recently that are repeatedly pulling the worst ****, Switzerland would be far from the top of my list. The select cases people bring up about Switzerland don't compare to, say, the sort of stuff repeatedly happening in Hungary or whatnot. And could easily be remedied by a stronger judicial/constitutional review process.
The vote would be based upon the latest headline flashed at the most people. However the latest twitter celeb of the hour felt, would become the law.
Because people choosing representatives based on the latest headline flashed at most people and then having said people govern for 2 to 6 years without restraint is somehow better?
And, of course, being able to "change your vote" means that, somewhere, the way that you voted is recorded... so that you can be tracked down if you voted "the wrong way"
You probably think that hashed passwords are "stored" in a readable manner on the computer that you log into.
This is a serious issue, and why I think that "liquid" democracy - the hybrid of direct and representative democracy - is critical.
There are way too many issues that come up for consideration every day for every citizen to be expected to vote on them. Some people might be that hardcore but few actually ever will. So if you don't want representatives then on the vast majority of votes only a tiny fraction of the public will vote. The smaller the percentage of the population that votes, the easier it will be for vested interests to get basically whatever they want. It's a recipe for basically giving corporations and wealthy individuals everything that they could ever dream of.
In liquid democracy, you can direct-vote whenever you want and choose representatives - who you can change whenever you want, and who can be anyone at all - to fill in for you when you can't. You may even be able to pick different people for different categories of votes. And if a person you pick isn't active enough for every vote, they too can have representatives - votes "flow" in the order of assignment, and if a person ever doesn't like it, they can change it at will.
Direct democracy without something like that would be IMHO one of the worst systems imagineable.
And since when have congressmen been lynched to change policy? Since when wouldn't that be considered terrorism?
The majority - whether directly voting themselves, or whether electing representatives to do it for them - will always pose a risk of the tyrrany of the majority. The way to prevent the tyranny of the majority is to enshrine the basic rights that you never want to see violated in a constitution and have a judicial branch abstracted from the majority who does not get to make laws but does get to void ones that violate said constitution.
I think the point is a bit weak. If he were to try to make this argument in a courtroom to argue that the RIAA's standard for lost sales is unreasonable, the RIAA attorneys would simply say that he's not "making available" copies, that he's akin to a factory churning out knockoff purses and throwing them in a furnace - nobody would say, the attorneys would argue, that those knockoff purses that are immediately destroyed are lost sales. However - back to their standard argument - a person who downloads a song they want is a potential buyer who will no longer buy the song.
The RIAA argument is still of course wrong, but this stunt has no bearing on the wrongness of their argument because it doesn't affect anything that they're actually arguing about - other humans who want a song acquiring it without paying for it.
More specifically, he uses a cord with the wires switched or shorted so that power is flowing through what's supposed to be the ground. So when he "cuts the current" it's not actually cut.
It doesn't take anywhere near losing half of a rocket's capacity to be reusable. Once the lower stage has burned through its propellant and lost its upper stages it's incredibly light and thus very easy to change its direction.
It would have to be far, far colder to support liquid helium at normal atmospheric pressures.
An interesting possibility that I've pondered is that if you have a very distant body (no relevant stellar heat input), small enough to not have relevant internal heat, which is losing helium to a tidally locked partner, it would be experiencing evaporative cooling to below the cosmic microwave background... to the point that the helium becomes a superfluid. My calculations show that you don't need some sort of extreme helium loss rate because radiative heat exhange with the cosmic microwave background is so incredibly slow. That would be an incredibly bizarre world to see...
Further in the future, the cosmic microwave background will drop below helium's triple point, and superfluid He4 will become common in the universe:)
Which, if you had actually read, is what I just said: "If it's designed to create downforce at the cost of increased drag, it's a wing, not a spoiler."
, it spoils lift.
Spoilers on cars have nothing to do with lift. They are about spoiling laminar airflows to reduce drag. Spoilers on airplanes do the exact same thing - spoil laminar airflows - but the side effect is that by pushing air from laminar into turbulent they dramatically lower the wing's LD ratio.
If it's designed to create downforce at the cost of increased drag, it's a wing, not a spoiler. It's literally in the name. A wing is, just like on a plane, a device that creates lift (on a car, it's an upside down wing, so the lift vector is directed downward), at the cost of drag. A spoiler literally spoils unwanted airflows - that is, it takes laminar airflows and makes them turbulent, causing vortices on the surface that help prevent the main laminar stream from overly detaching, or to create localized slowings of the air to direct more of the flow into another direction where it will cause less overall drag.
It's right there in the name.
That said, there are some devices which sort of bridge both bounds, having both spoiler and wing properties, or behaving more like one or the other at different speeds, or being adjustable between being a spoiler and wing.
Really, would it have been that much of the galactic budget anyway? I mean, I get that it was huge. But the Empire was said to be, what, 1 1/2 billion developed worlds and 60 billion colonies, with crazy-advanced manufacturing technology... I think that giant construction projects would be pretty run of the mill for them, even if that one was, individually, rather large. Like a nation building an aircraft carrier or something - a big expense, but not one that's going to bankrupt you.
That's not the difference between a spoiler and a wing. A spoiler is a device designed to "spoil" unwanted air flows and reduce drag, while a wing is a device designed to create downforce (at the cost of drag).
Spoilers are often integrated and wings often on supports, but that's not the difference between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't it 14? ;)
Agreed on all points - he never should have touched Star Trek, but he did Star Wars as it was supposed to be done, in a manner true to the original trilogies (and as the antithesis to the prequels).
And the Gonk cameos were one of many great touches ;)
Really, the only thing that came across as "too CGI-ish" to me were the rapthars. But compared to the prequels, that was nothing.
Actually, there were good reasons given in the movie for why the fighters kept low - in case you're curious, it's because the tie fighters and their tactics are more optimal for combat at altitude, and also later on they were trying to avoid being spotted from a base far away.
I saw it twice. Neither were my plan - I was with family for Christmas, and that's what the family did. I had some things that I like after the first viewing, and some that bothered me. After the second viewing, the things that I had liked before I liked even more, and the things I hadn't liked still bugged me.
Personally, I felt it restored canon and tossed out the canon-breaking of the prequels. Aka, you won't hear a word of "midichlorians" or anything like that in this film.
That comes from Robot Chicken. But it really does work. Act all slapsticky for the benefit of a little kid who you want to eventually become a sith, give power to Palpatine knowing what he's going to do, etc, then basically melt into the background.
Seriously? If you think that this is "a massive string of convenient events" unseen in other Star Wars movies, you really need to watch the other Star Wars movies again. They're entirely built around massive chains of convenient events. Remember the first one, where droids just happen to crash on the planet that just happens to contain Obiwan and Luke, and happen to end up with him and his family, they just happen to end up at the Death Star and then a ton of improbable stuff happens there, etc, and then we get to the end where the guy who's only ever shot at womp rats suddenly learns force control and hits a tiny exhaust port at high speeds without his targeting computer, triggering an explosion that takes out the entire Death Star at literally the last minute?
And as absurdly unlikely as that was, it's nothing compared to the Phantom Menace.. When I saw it in the theatre, during the scene where Anakin accidentally takes off, accidentally flies to the mothership, accidentally destroys it, unintentionally shuts down the droid army and wins the battle for everyone, I swear there were six year olds in the audience saying "come on, don't insult my intelligence"
I didn't expect much from the movie, but actually left generally pleased.
For those who haven't seen it, it's true to all of the original trilogy conventions and has the same general "feel" to it. To the point that they even have things like a background cameo by Gonk, the walking trashcan droid. The Falcon being even more of a piece of junk than it used to be was another nice touch. It was clearly designed by people who were fans of the original trilogy and not fond of the prequils. They also really nailed the "Nazi-reich" feel to the First Order - the original Empire was rather more vague "bad guys", the First Order really seems to have motivation beyond simply "to exist".
As for your specific points:
And more capable. They show it simultaneously destroying multiple planets and whole massive fleets in entirely different systems.
Did you miss the whole major plot element, the primary characterization of her in the movie, that she's said alive by working as a scavenger, dissecting imperial ships for parts? That's what she's done her entire life to stay alive, finding and extracting the most valuable parts (including gaining access to them) from spacecraft, she better damn well know what's what. And like Luke, whose piloting skill was from riding around on a landspeeder, she has her own junky ride that she uses every day.
use the Force though she thought it was a myth
Luke didn't believe in the force either until he started being taught about it by Obiwan, so I fail to see your point.
You mean "losing badly with a lightsaber, and only being left alive because Kylo Ren wanted to bring her with to Snoke as per his orders. She has one successful use of the force in combat right at the end, just like Luke in A New Hope. Against a wounded opponent, who is himself just a teenager struggling to get a handle on his powers.
I don't even know what you're taking about here. Both Chewie and Han liked her, and Han had just offered her a permanent position on the Falcon, with Chewie's approval. So you think Chewie should have suddenly kicked her out after Han died? Really?
That's just the point, he *is* an emo teenager who is obsessed with Darth Vader and wants to be just like him. To the point that he basically prays to Vader's mask. He's a wannabe who wants to be like his grandfather. The whole First Order is rather cultlike in that regard, something clearly encouraged by Snoke.
Side point: this is the first time that one actually sees the sith being what we've been constantly told from the beginning that they are: people powerful in the force who've given into their passions, their anger, their rage. When was the last time you ever saw a sith hack the place up in a fit of rage when he was given bad news? Vader choked people, but always seemed cool and in control of his emotions. Let's not get started on prequel-Anakin, who we're constantly told about how angry he is, but it's never more than whiny dialogue. Kylo Ren actually for once shows clear, visible rage.
He's at best co-second-in-command of the First Order. Snoke listens to his commanders at least as much as he listens to Kylo Ren. And they do generally prove more competent, so he
No, he wouldn't. Unless the government for some reason saw fit to implement on purpose a deliberately flawed system. If you want to reset "Y", you have to do it through a trusted channel, such as in person with no provable confirmation given by "Alice" (the government).
And then Bob can change the vote. Unless you're assuming that Bob can't prove that he's himself in person to Alice, wherein you have much bigger problems than your voting system to deal with.
Once again, far fewer than in current systems. The number of people who have the ability to affect the system is far fewer than the stages at which it could be affected far fewer.
As stated: one doesn't need perfection. One just needs "better than current voting systems, which are pretty crappy".
This is a common misconception - that if Alice can prove X to Bob, then that means that Bob can prove X to Carol. But this is simply not true. If Alice and Bob know a secret Y that Carol doesn't know, and Alice refuses to confirm or deny anything about Y, then Alice can prove X to Bob by means of reversible function f(X, Y), multiple possible values A in the function of f(X, A) are valid. Bob cannot prove anything to Carol about Y because Alice refuses to answer and a valid result from f(X, Y) means nothing. And because Bob cannot prove Y, he cannot prove that the results of f^-1(X, A) are really the results of f^-1(X, Y) - even though he knows that they are because he knows Y.
In short, and in plain English: if there is some secret information between the voter and the registrar confirmed by trusted means at the time of registration (aka, in person), and this secret is used somewhere in the process of looking up a cast vote, and the use of a fake "secret" can yield a fake answer as to how a person voted, then the third party can't know if they're seeing how the person really voted or not. The specific details can be arranged in almost any manner, but the key point is, just because A can prove a secret to B doesn't mean that B can prove it to C, because C doesn't know everything that A and B know, and information can be required in the interpretation of the communication channel.
A rather simple solution unrelated to the above is long voting periods with the ability to change one's vote, with verification shut down near the end of the voting period. Hence even without the requirement of a secret between the voter and the registrar, the "proof" for early voters means nothing (they can always change it), and unless "Carol" in the above is going to hold "Bob" hostage for the entire no-verification period and monitor his every move, she can't know that he hasn't gone in and changed his vote. And if people are going out and doing that, you have a lot bigger problems than voting on your hands! Long voting periods (and multiple means of casting votes, including paper ballots and whatnot for those who want them) are also a defense against DDOS.
A key issue that must be noted: an electronic voting system does not need to be perfect. At all. It only needs to be better than current voting systems, which let's face it, are pretty lousy. Error rates on votes are usually estimated at 0.1-1% or so, voters can't confirm their votes (a far more realistic problem than Carol taking Bob hostage), votes are often poorly secured and left in the hands of (and/or tallied by) small numbers of individuals at numerous locations, software is generally closed and relying on "security through obscurity" and on and on and on. It's pretty terrible.
And honestly, if I had to pick countries in Europe recently that are repeatedly pulling the worst ****, Switzerland would be far from the top of my list. The select cases people bring up about Switzerland don't compare to, say, the sort of stuff repeatedly happening in Hungary or whatnot. And could easily be remedied by a stronger judicial/constitutional review process.
Because people choosing representatives based on the latest headline flashed at most people and then having said people govern for 2 to 6 years without restraint is somehow better?
You probably think that hashed passwords are "stored" in a readable manner on the computer that you log into.
This is a serious issue, and why I think that "liquid" democracy - the hybrid of direct and representative democracy - is critical.
There are way too many issues that come up for consideration every day for every citizen to be expected to vote on them. Some people might be that hardcore but few actually ever will. So if you don't want representatives then on the vast majority of votes only a tiny fraction of the public will vote. The smaller the percentage of the population that votes, the easier it will be for vested interests to get basically whatever they want. It's a recipe for basically giving corporations and wealthy individuals everything that they could ever dream of.
In liquid democracy, you can direct-vote whenever you want and choose representatives - who you can change whenever you want, and who can be anyone at all - to fill in for you when you can't. You may even be able to pick different people for different categories of votes. And if a person you pick isn't active enough for every vote, they too can have representatives - votes "flow" in the order of assignment, and if a person ever doesn't like it, they can change it at will.
Direct democracy without something like that would be IMHO one of the worst systems imagineable.
And since when have congressmen been lynched to change policy? Since when wouldn't that be considered terrorism?
The majority - whether directly voting themselves, or whether electing representatives to do it for them - will always pose a risk of the tyrrany of the majority. The way to prevent the tyranny of the majority is to enshrine the basic rights that you never want to see violated in a constitution and have a judicial branch abstracted from the majority who does not get to make laws but does get to void ones that violate said constitution.
I think the point is a bit weak. If he were to try to make this argument in a courtroom to argue that the RIAA's standard for lost sales is unreasonable, the RIAA attorneys would simply say that he's not "making available" copies, that he's akin to a factory churning out knockoff purses and throwing them in a furnace - nobody would say, the attorneys would argue, that those knockoff purses that are immediately destroyed are lost sales. However - back to their standard argument - a person who downloads a song they want is a potential buyer who will no longer buy the song.
The RIAA argument is still of course wrong, but this stunt has no bearing on the wrongness of their argument because it doesn't affect anything that they're actually arguing about - other humans who want a song acquiring it without paying for it.
Celebrating Star Wars they just are.
More specifically, he uses a cord with the wires switched or shorted so that power is flowing through what's supposed to be the ground. So when he "cuts the current" it's not actually cut.
Obviously I was not talking about literally 100% of its propellant.
It doesn't take anywhere near losing half of a rocket's capacity to be reusable. Once the lower stage has burned through its propellant and lost its upper stages it's incredibly light and thus very easy to change its direction.
** that should read "lambda point", not "triple point"; of course :)
*snicker*
Will he promise to at least learn the difference between a mole and a liter this time?
It would have to be far, far colder to support liquid helium at normal atmospheric pressures.
An interesting possibility that I've pondered is that if you have a very distant body (no relevant stellar heat input), small enough to not have relevant internal heat, which is losing helium to a tidally locked partner, it would be experiencing evaporative cooling to below the cosmic microwave background... to the point that the helium becomes a superfluid. My calculations show that you don't need some sort of extreme helium loss rate because radiative heat exhange with the cosmic microwave background is so incredibly slow. That would be an incredibly bizarre world to see...
Further in the future, the cosmic microwave background will drop below helium's triple point, and superfluid He4 will become common in the universe :)
A spoiler does not create downforce
Which, if you had actually read, is what I just said: "If it's designed to create downforce at the cost of increased drag, it's a wing, not a spoiler."
, it spoils lift.
Spoilers on cars have nothing to do with lift. They are about spoiling laminar airflows to reduce drag. Spoilers on airplanes do the exact same thing - spoil laminar airflows - but the side effect is that by pushing air from laminar into turbulent they dramatically lower the wing's LD ratio.
If it's designed to create downforce at the cost of increased drag, it's a wing, not a spoiler. It's literally in the name. A wing is, just like on a plane, a device that creates lift (on a car, it's an upside down wing, so the lift vector is directed downward), at the cost of drag. A spoiler literally spoils unwanted airflows - that is, it takes laminar airflows and makes them turbulent, causing vortices on the surface that help prevent the main laminar stream from overly detaching, or to create localized slowings of the air to direct more of the flow into another direction where it will cause less overall drag.
It's right there in the name.
That said, there are some devices which sort of bridge both bounds, having both spoiler and wing properties, or behaving more like one or the other at different speeds, or being adjustable between being a spoiler and wing.
Really, would it have been that much of the galactic budget anyway? I mean, I get that it was huge. But the Empire was said to be, what, 1 1/2 billion developed worlds and 60 billion colonies, with crazy-advanced manufacturing technology... I think that giant construction projects would be pretty run of the mill for them, even if that one was, individually, rather large. Like a nation building an aircraft carrier or something - a big expense, but not one that's going to bankrupt you.
That's not the difference between a spoiler and a wing. A spoiler is a device designed to "spoil" unwanted air flows and reduce drag, while a wing is a device designed to create downforce (at the cost of drag).
Spoilers are often integrated and wings often on supports, but that's not the difference between the two.