If you don't want Bethesday to make it - who the hell DO you want? Should the IP just sit unused until everyone forgets about it? And what would be wrong with that? Do you believe that, because the original game was so good, the IP should be pushed more? Just because somebody can come along and use that IP and create a new game in the same fantasy world, or with the same game mechanics, there's no guarantee that you'll get another great game. In fact, given the average quality of sequels, I would say it argues _against_ the next Fallout being any good. I would argue that Fallout would be better remembered now if it hadn't had multiple sequels of continually declining quality.
There's nothing wrong with leaving Fallout on the shelf, and letting game creators work on more original stuff.
(For example, consider the upcoming game "Bioshock"; it is essentially a sequel to the System Shock series, using a similar game engine and strucure; but the folks creating it did not have access to any of the System Shock IP. As such, they had to invent a new world for it, and I think the game has actually benefitted from this.)
Most Apple software today is being produced as "Universal" binaries, meaning it is built to run on both Intel and PPC architectures, and that'll be the case for some time (until they officially drop support for the PPC Macs). As such, it wouldn't seem to be all that hard for them to experiment with adding a PPC-based system back to their lineup, if they wanted...
I guess I'm just trying to point out that, in order to create a baby, you have to have both a sperm and an egg that successfully survived some number of cellular divisions for as long as the parents had lived; and each parent's original sperm and egg came from cells that had divided for at least a couple of decades in their parents, and so forth, and so on.
Every cell in our bodies is a direct descendant of some original cellular organism that appeared some billions of years ago. We may be mortal, but the cells we're made up of have continued to survive and divide continuously for basically as long as life has existed...
Sigh. I hear ideas like this from lots of people, even when it's obviously false. From the article:
The critical gene, already well known for its role in suppressing tumors, seems to mediate a profound balance between life and death. It weighs the generation of new replacement cells, required for continued life, against the risk of death from cancer, which is the inevitable outcome of letting cells divide.
If this were true, every baby born would be one huge cancer tumor. You can't create a sperm or egg without "letting cells divide"; if that inevitably led to cancer, the human race would die out in just a handful of generations.
Personally, I don't believe "immortality" is possible for people; but all life on earth depends upon cellular immortality.
Nope, what I said makes sense. Listen to what you just said:
There is no legitimate reason for believing that someone with less than $1,000 to spend wants a closed box that needs to connect to an external monitor. There's no reason for believing that someone with over $2,000 wants an expandable box that hooks up to an external monitor. There's no reason for believing that someone who has somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 wants an unexpandable box with a built-in monitor.
You're still thinking backwards of the way Apple does. Look at it this way:
You've got less than $1000 to spend. If you want the most powerful, most flexible, most expandable machine you can get, you're going to buy a PC, hands down. Apple isn't even going to try to convince you to buy their product, because they know they can't give you a competitive price, and they know you're not stupid. So what can Apple do? How about offering you a PC that specifically won't be your main PC? Something tiny, quiet, unobtrusive, that will fit into out-of-the-way locations. (Apple specifically mentions on its website that the Mini is a perfect PC for the kitchen.:) )
You've got between $1000 and $2000 to spend. If you want the most powerful, most flexible, most expandable machine you can get, you're again going to buy a PC, hands down. Remember, Apple can't compete on features! You will always be able to buy more powerful features more cheaply on a PC. So what can Apple do? Compete on ease-of-use; give the customer a fairly powerful machine, but make it into a toaster -- integrated video, wireless keyboard & mouse, wireless internet; you literally take it out of the box, plug it in, and turn it on, and you're up and running. (The computer-as-toaster is the original Macintosh concept, and lives on in the iMac.) People who want a general-purpose computer without the hassle of understanding how a general-purpose computer works are perfect for the iMac.
You've got more than $2000 to spend. If you want the most powerful, most flexible, most expandable machine you can get, of course, you're going to get a PC! Apple cannot compete on the hardware! What Apple can do, however, is take some of the more exotic hardware choices out there, and integrate them fully into their architecture and operating system. If you want high-end hardware, but don't want to dive into the complications of trying to integrate that hardware by yourself into your own system, Apple provides a solution for you.
Apple isn't competing in the "PC market", because honestly, it can't compete in that market. Sure, there must be a huge number of people who would love a Mac that looks like a PC; but Apple used to make Macs that looked like PCs, and it's fairly obvious that they were crushed by the competition (just like the good old Amigas that looked like PCs, the Ataris that looked like PCs, and anything else that looked like PCs). You simply can't compete directly against open hardware by using closed hardware.
What Apple can do is what it is doing -- where the PC architecture slowly evolves by committee, Apple can turn on a dime when it really wants. Apple can experiment with different processors, different operating systems, different I/O mechanisms, etc. This doesn't always work out, but when it does, Apple can reap the rewards of its efforts, up until the PC world catches up and beats them at their own game (which will always happen).
Apple's primary concern is about profits, and with such a small percentage of the market, they can get away with ignoring large consumer segments while appearing to do very well. The fact is though that there's a fundamental flaw in their marketing system. They believe that you can segment a market's tastes and requirements through how much they're prepared to spend.
No, actually, you've got it exactly backwards -- they haven't segmented tastes by determining how much a customer is willing to spend, they've instead examined customers willing to spend more and have attempted to build products to their tastes.
Apple is the very last of the PC companies that depends upon a hardware platform with a closed architecture as its business model; the "pc-clone" industry pretty much destroyed everyone else, proving once again that an open market will find more efficient ways to produce goods than a closed market can. Apple has chosen to leverage its proprietary architecture in a different way; rather than attempt to make machines that are exactly the same as the "pc-clones", they attempt to grab the niches that the clone makers haven't yet captured. Apple attempts to make their hardware "stylish" and "upscale" when everybody else is trying to make cheaper gray boxes; Apple goes for the completely-integrated iMac as clones become a jumble of cords and connectors; Apple pushes ease-of-use as life with Windows becomes more complicated.
But people who only buy the cheapest product don't care about these things. Only those willing to spend a little more will be willing to examine the "extras" that Apple adds to their products. Apple has explicitly chosen to market to that crowd, and has given up on the large "percentage of the market" you seem to believe they could participate in. Only an open hardware architecture could truly compete in the pc-clone world, and doing that would probably mean the end of Apple as a company...
Heck, I'm using a 20" screen on my Mini, and I'm even using it rotated (to "portrait" rather than "landscape") -- the GMA950 handles this just fine (unlike other, higher-end graphics cards I've used before). I don't generally push the graphics too hard on the machine, but it is able to play video just fine in this setup.
The Mini is perfect for my needs -- tiny, cool-running, and absolutely silent. I don't mind sacrificing high-end graphics to achieve this result...
Personally, I love the look of the iMac, and it's nice to be able to avoid all those cords lying around. But I've never been able to justify buying one.
On the other hand, I own two Mac Minis, I convinced my Mom to get one, and I'm evangelizing them to friends and family all over the place. It's simply easier to deal with a computer that doesn't have an integrated display (and, to be honest, the price is low enough for me to deal with). (Plus, they're whisper-quiet and cool-running, far more than the iMacs are.)
Anyway, just a note to say there are folks who prefer "headless" machines, and are willing to buy them...
Oh, sorry, I should have figured that you meant BSG, I guess that was what I originally posted about.:)
I guess, I just don't see the point. I think "Mankind is reduced to a fleet of ships" is interesting to think about for a minute or two, but beyond that it's just depressing. So almost everyone is dead -- is there a compelling reason to watch the survivors try to survive? Yeah, you can portray contemporary issues in the context of the survivors, but you can portray contemporary issues in any series (there's no need to resort to science fiction for that).
I guess I'm also not really happy with the way the Cylons are portrayed, although that's probably more my fault than theirs; I guess I shouldn't really expect the writers to know much about computer science. They miss many of the interesting conflicts in machine sentience (although maybe they're only interesting to me). What gets my goat is that they've set up a perfect opportunity to question human identity ala Philip K. Dick or Stanislaw Lem, but they just turn it into a glorified us-vs-them slugfest.
So it's a drama based in space, but it just doesn't feel like science fiction to me. The writers aren't really giving us new concepts to ponder, or puzzles about how to use a variety of new technologies to solve a problem. We're just watching some characters live out their lives. It just doesn't grab me...
I haven't seen any Joss Whedon stories that have a significant multi-year arc like B5, but he does like to put a lot of backstory into his stuff, and a few major arcs that play out over his shows. In Firefly, there were a handful of interesting stories slowly being revealed:
Mal & Zoe survived a terrible losing war, they've got a lot of history...
Shepherd Book was most certainly _not_ a Shepherd at some point in the past.:)
The Alliance has taken over the collected human worlds, and is in the process of consolidating its new holdings (via a significant propaganda campaign)
And, of course, the main arc of the first season -- River Tam and her brother Simon on the run from the Alliance. The season got cut off before the arc really got far underway; the movie probably finished the arc as far as it would have gone in the first season
I'm afraid that we'll never have another attempt at a show like B5; but shows like Firefly do have some depth, and tell stories that take more than just one hour to present.
I'm not sure you're seeing the point here; you state:
Better shows have developed arcs which could cope with being axed after the first year or running indefinitely.
If all you are looking for is a group of characters who will interact with each other, show after show after show, for some undetermined amount of time, then you are correct -- B5 was not optimally set up for that. But then, B5 was not fundamentally a story about a group of characters; it was a story about a particular event (the war between the First Ones and the younger races).
As such, it doesn't necessarily need to follow all the same characters around all the time, or look at the event in the same place all the time, but it _does_ need to advance the plot at a specific rate in order to cover all the interesting items leading up to the event. It was an _extremely_ ambitious design to plot out five years worth of episodes to cover the event, and it suffered because of that. Even so, I personally still rank it above shows like Hill Street Blues.
I can't think of any American shows before or after that have worked this way. You can say that you see "arcs" in modern series, but the writers still just make it up as they go -- the "arc" just means that you build up to some arbitrary cliffhanger at the end of each season, and if you get renewed, you make up some deus ex machina to get out of it at the beginning of the next season, and work towards your next arbitrary cliffhanger.
That's the main difference of B5. The seasons weren't just a collection of arbitrary cliffhangers, they were chapters of a continuing story, leading up to a specific climax.
Yeah, I've gotta agree that BSG seems totally overrated. The space scenes are beautifully drawn, but other than that, I can't seem to find anything of real value in the stories.
Maybe it's a question of motivation; with B5, the station was the "Last, Best Hope for Peace", so you knew there was a huge war coming that the characters would need to avert or attempt to survive. With the original BSG, the remnants of humanity were searching for the fabled 13th colony, so they had an overall goal to achieve.
With the new BSG, it seems like you've just got a handful of survivors of the apocalypse, with no real goal in mind. (I admit that I stopped watching about halfway through the first season, so if a goal developed, I probably missed it.) Things happen in each episode, but why should I care? At the beginning of each episode, the few humans left alive are in a handful of ships somewhere in space. At the end of each episode, the few humans left alive are in a handful of ships somewhere in space. And so far as I can tell, there is no hope that that will ever change...
Much as I disagree with the overbearing and wasteful IP laws in the US, the complete lack of restraint in China (and maybe India too, I don't know as much about them) is equally problematic.
Right now, China is still playing technological catch-up with the rest of the world. China really doesn't need to bother with indigenous innovation today, since they can easily acquire superior technology from outside their borders. At the rate that their industry is advancing, however, they are quickly nearing parity with the West. When that happens, they face a new problem: if IP is held worthless within the borders of China, their indigenous businesses will constantly poach each other's ideas, ensuring that the reward for innovation is very low (and, therefore, research won't get any funding at all).
As much as I hate to say it, the IP mess in America is better than nothing at all, if you want to provide support for innovation. If ideas have no monetary value, and therefore nobody can make a living off of creating new ideas, then you're going to have some trouble encouraging people to create new innovations. China simply won't be able to take the lead without either copying the patent mechanism, or coming up with something similar...
Yes! I too loved The Invincible. It was one of the first Lem stories I read, and drew me into collecting everything I could find of his works. I love how it has the outward appearance of a classic space opera, yet hints at the deep philosopical and social ideas that he would explore more fully in his later works.
Another thing I've realized -- reading Lem's works all the way up to Fiasco, you can tell how he matured as a writer, but he also seemed to become more pessimistic as time went by. His stories are uniformly brilliant, but I find that it's the earlier stories (like "The Invincible") that I go back to and reread, simply because they are more optimistic in tone.
And if any of his stories were appropriate for a Hollywood-style movie, it would be The Invincible, not Solaris.:)
Actually, iTunes does make locating and subscribing to podcasts fairly easy. I started using it to play some public radio podcasts, but I discovered weird and interesting podcasts listed in the iTunes store that I would probably have never tried otherwise (Japanese language lessons, a history of the Byzantine empire, an Anime video podcast, etc.).
I did eventually break down and get an iPod, but iTunes is quite usable without one, and I still play iTunes directly from my computer when I'm at home.
In answer to your complaints, you yourself have already explained some of why you don't like Civ IV. First, you compare Civ IV to "Civ 3 (plus expansions)". Instead, you should compare it to Civ 3 without expansions -- it's quite obvious that Civ IV was built with room for a number of expansions; there's room for plenty more civilizations, leaders, and probably more techs and units in the future. If you try playing the original release of Civ 3, you might be surprised how limited it seems; the later expansions really did add a lot of flavor to the game.
Also, while the underlying game is still fundamentally Civilzation, this release is a much bigger change from Civ 3 than Civ 3 was from Civ 2. Culture is a much bigger part of the game now; the introduction of "religion" (and a variety of other, smaller changes) has really changed the flavor of international relations; and, of course, they've tied everything to this new (and gorgeous!) 3D display.
I do agree that the Civilopedia isn't quite as easy to use as before, and doesn't seem to have as much data. But that seems like something that can be easily updated in one of the future Civ IV expansions. Also, I've had no problem with blurred graphics when zooming out. And although using the 3D interface is somewhat different than the Civ 3 interface, I've found it to be fairly easy to use once you get used to it.
I think they've put most of their effort in this initial release into making the gameplay flow well; I've been putting some hours away against the game for the last few weeks, and I can confirm that it is both enjoyable and addictive. It's certainly a good game!
If you haven't seen it before, you should check out the old BBC sci-fi "Blake's 7" -- now, there was a show full of "bad boys". The concept was that Blake, a freedom fighter up against a corrupt interstellar Federation, gathered together a crew of pirates and thieves to pursue freedom. But the actor playing Blake left the show after the first season; so, one of the thieves took over the ship after that.:)
Now, that became a show without a truly clear sense of good vs. evil. The main characters occasionally did the "right" thing for the right reasons, often for the wrong reasons, and sometimes didn't accomplish anything good at all! It made things quite interesting...
I suspect you'd need to be more of a "Whedon" cult fan than a Firefly cult fan. Yes, Firefly covers much of the same territory that any normal sci-fi B-films cover, but where most writers focus on the starships & firefights, Whedon puts unbelievable amounts of depth into his characters. I'm a latecomer to the whole "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" thing myself -- although the premise of that series was somewhat ridiculous, the interaction between the characters was wonderful, and drew me in despite the overt plot.
So, in Firefly, the action sequences are fun, but it's the banter around the dinner table that really sets the show apart.:)
Do the wolves? Around 1918, the Allies decisively won World War I, beating the Germans after a long war of attrition. We immediately imposed severe war reparations, bankrupting what was left of Germany and making the lives of the populace miserable for decades afterwards. We essentially created an entire generation that was happy to go back to war against us!
The outcome of WWII was quite a bit different; we won the war, but we acted far less like wolves in the aftermath. The former Axis powers were encouraged to choose a new path, even aided in that course (e.g., the famous Marshall plan). The result: the former Axis nations have been far less prone to internal & external strife than they've been in hundreds of years.
So don't knock the sheep. If you kill them all, you'll end up with a planet full of nothing but wolves, and that's just not much fun.
After years of introversion and non-intervention they are trying at last to make the world a better place. I hope they don't listen to the short-term cynics and can stay the course. Let history judge, and I'm sure the world will be belatedly grateful.
Not gonna happen. I'm not saying that the US won't be able to stay the course -- I'm saying that the world will NEVER be grateful, regardless of the outcome.
Personally, I don't believe your analogy with the Mafia is a good one, as the London terrorists seem to have very different motivations. But it doesn't matter; you're right, the US can use its power to control these people. Many times in the past, a single country has been able to use force to impose its will on the populations of other countries: think of Rome's "Pax Romana", or of the British Empire. These efforts do in fact create peace! But, of course, it is at a cost...
You can use military force to stop various groups of people from doing things you don't want them to do. But you can't make them like it. All the histories that I've seen seem to celebrate the end of empires, rather than rue their loss.
You have to take them out. It is the only way. You can't sweet talk terrorists into being nice people. They're brainwashed enough to strap explosives on their bodies and blow up children.
I've seen lots of people around with this notion. So the question is, how and why did these people become brainwashed?
Let's say that you personally had the power to go out and put a bullet in the brain of every single person who is currently brainwashed. Consider that, perhaps, these people are becoming "brainwashed" because they've grown up in an environment where they've lost friends and family members; that maybe other social groups have dominated their group by brutal force. It is quite possible that, given the hundreds (or thousands?) of people that you'll be offing, there'll be hundreds or thousands of their friends and family members who will then be ripe for new brainwashing...
There is no doubt, the people who perpetrated this attack are sick bastards. They do deserve death. But if we simply go out and start killing people in kind, don't we just become terrorists ourselves?
...young people will come with new ideas, new dreams, new problems. They will require the (intellectual) space fat ass rich guys will claim for their eternal life.
Total nonsense. Immortality does not imply omnipotence, nor does mortality assure all creatures an equal share of resources.
At pretty much any time in history, there have been people with power (be they dictators, religious zealots, or even your "fat ass rich guys") who have been able to monopolize much of the resources available to the people at large. The fact that they eventually die is meaningless, if they are simply replaced by someone else. If you want a society that assures a more equal distribution of resources, it needs to enforce that ideal while the powerful people are still alive. Just waiting for them to die is pointless.
I'd also hate to believe that for me to live, someone else must die. For one thing, the total population of humans living on this planet has grown immensely in the last few centuries, which wouldn't have happened if we had to kill an adult for every baby that came into the world. There's a lot of living room on this planet, and eventually there will be room off the planet as well. Moreover, I'd expect that someone who exists as information inside a machine could take up even less space and resources...
In any case, I'd say you shouldn't go kill yourself because you believe it'll help the community at large; instead, an individual contributing to a society is an asset to that society, no matter how long that person lives.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with leaving Fallout on the shelf, and letting game creators work on more original stuff.
(For example, consider the upcoming game "Bioshock"; it is essentially a sequel to the System Shock series, using a similar game engine and strucure; but the folks creating it did not have access to any of the System Shock IP. As such, they had to invent a new world for it, and I think the game has actually benefitted from this.)
--John
Most Apple software today is being produced as "Universal" binaries, meaning it is built to run on both Intel and PPC architectures, and that'll be the case for some time (until they officially drop support for the PPC Macs). As such, it wouldn't seem to be all that hard for them to experiment with adding a PPC-based system back to their lineup, if they wanted...
Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
I guess I'm just trying to point out that, in order to create a baby, you have to have both a sperm and an egg that successfully survived some number of cellular divisions for as long as the parents had lived; and each parent's original sperm and egg came from cells that had divided for at least a couple of decades in their parents, and so forth, and so on.
Every cell in our bodies is a direct descendant of some original cellular organism that appeared some billions of years ago. We may be mortal, but the cells we're made up of have continued to survive and divide continuously for basically as long as life has existed...
If this were true, every baby born would be one huge cancer tumor. You can't create a sperm or egg without "letting cells divide"; if that inevitably led to cancer, the human race would die out in just a handful of generations.
Personally, I don't believe "immortality" is possible for people; but all life on earth depends upon cellular immortality.
You're still thinking backwards of the way Apple does. Look at it this way:
You've got less than $1000 to spend. If you want the most powerful, most flexible, most expandable machine you can get, you're going to buy a PC, hands down. Apple isn't even going to try to convince you to buy their product, because they know they can't give you a competitive price, and they know you're not stupid. So what can Apple do? How about offering you a PC that specifically won't be your main PC? Something tiny, quiet, unobtrusive, that will fit into out-of-the-way locations. (Apple specifically mentions on its website that the Mini is a perfect PC for the kitchen.
You've got between $1000 and $2000 to spend. If you want the most powerful, most flexible, most expandable machine you can get, you're again going to buy a PC, hands down. Remember, Apple can't compete on features! You will always be able to buy more powerful features more cheaply on a PC. So what can Apple do? Compete on ease-of-use; give the customer a fairly powerful machine, but make it into a toaster -- integrated video, wireless keyboard & mouse, wireless internet; you literally take it out of the box, plug it in, and turn it on, and you're up and running. (The computer-as-toaster is the original Macintosh concept, and lives on in the iMac.) People who want a general-purpose computer without the hassle of understanding how a general-purpose computer works are perfect for the iMac.
You've got more than $2000 to spend. If you want the most powerful, most flexible, most expandable machine you can get, of course, you're going to get a PC! Apple cannot compete on the hardware! What Apple can do, however, is take some of the more exotic hardware choices out there, and integrate them fully into their architecture and operating system. If you want high-end hardware, but don't want to dive into the complications of trying to integrate that hardware by yourself into your own system, Apple provides a solution for you.
Apple isn't competing in the "PC market", because honestly, it can't compete in that market. Sure, there must be a huge number of people who would love a Mac that looks like a PC; but Apple used to make Macs that looked like PCs, and it's fairly obvious that they were crushed by the competition (just like the good old Amigas that looked like PCs, the Ataris that looked like PCs, and anything else that looked like PCs). You simply can't compete directly against open hardware by using closed hardware.
What Apple can do is what it is doing -- where the PC architecture slowly evolves by committee, Apple can turn on a dime when it really wants. Apple can experiment with different processors, different operating systems, different I/O mechanisms, etc. This doesn't always work out, but when it does, Apple can reap the rewards of its efforts, up until the PC world catches up and beats them at their own game (which will always happen).
Apple is the very last of the PC companies that depends upon a hardware platform with a closed architecture as its business model; the "pc-clone" industry pretty much destroyed everyone else, proving once again that an open market will find more efficient ways to produce goods than a closed market can. Apple has chosen to leverage its proprietary architecture in a different way; rather than attempt to make machines that are exactly the same as the "pc-clones", they attempt to grab the niches that the clone makers haven't yet captured. Apple attempts to make their hardware "stylish" and "upscale" when everybody else is trying to make cheaper gray boxes; Apple goes for the completely-integrated iMac as clones become a jumble of cords and connectors; Apple pushes ease-of-use as life with Windows becomes more complicated.
But people who only buy the cheapest product don't care about these things. Only those willing to spend a little more will be willing to examine the "extras" that Apple adds to their products. Apple has explicitly chosen to market to that crowd, and has given up on the large "percentage of the market" you seem to believe they could participate in. Only an open hardware architecture could truly compete in the pc-clone world, and doing that would probably mean the end of Apple as a company...
Heck, I'm using a 20" screen on my Mini, and I'm even using it rotated (to "portrait" rather than "landscape") -- the GMA950 handles this just fine (unlike other, higher-end graphics cards I've used before). I don't generally push the graphics too hard on the machine, but it is able to play video just fine in this setup.
The Mini is perfect for my needs -- tiny, cool-running, and absolutely silent. I don't mind sacrificing high-end graphics to achieve this result...
Personally, I love the look of the iMac, and it's nice to be able to avoid all those cords lying around. But I've never been able to justify buying one.
On the other hand, I own two Mac Minis, I convinced my Mom to get one, and I'm evangelizing them to friends and family all over the place. It's simply easier to deal with a computer that doesn't have an integrated display (and, to be honest, the price is low enough for me to deal with). (Plus, they're whisper-quiet and cool-running, far more than the iMacs are.)
Anyway, just a note to say there are folks who prefer "headless" machines, and are willing to buy them...
Oh, sorry, I should have figured that you meant BSG, I guess that was what I originally posted about. :)
I guess, I just don't see the point. I think "Mankind is reduced to a fleet of ships" is interesting to think about for a minute or two, but beyond that it's just depressing. So almost everyone is dead -- is there a compelling reason to watch the survivors try to survive? Yeah, you can portray contemporary issues in the context of the survivors, but you can portray contemporary issues in any series (there's no need to resort to science fiction for that).
I guess I'm also not really happy with the way the Cylons are portrayed, although that's probably more my fault than theirs; I guess I shouldn't really expect the writers to know much about computer science. They miss many of the interesting conflicts in machine sentience (although maybe they're only interesting to me). What gets my goat is that they've set up a perfect opportunity to question human identity ala Philip K. Dick or Stanislaw Lem, but they just turn it into a glorified us-vs-them slugfest.
So it's a drama based in space, but it just doesn't feel like science fiction to me. The writers aren't really giving us new concepts to ponder, or puzzles about how to use a variety of new technologies to solve a problem. We're just watching some characters live out their lives. It just doesn't grab me...
- Mal & Zoe survived a terrible losing war, they've got a lot of history...
- Shepherd Book was most certainly _not_ a Shepherd at some point in the past.
:)
- The Alliance has taken over the collected human worlds, and is in the process of consolidating its new holdings (via a significant propaganda campaign)
- And, of course, the main arc of the first season -- River Tam and her brother Simon on the run from the Alliance. The season got cut off before the arc really got far underway; the movie probably finished the arc as far as it would have gone in the first season
I'm afraid that we'll never have another attempt at a show like B5; but shows like Firefly do have some depth, and tell stories that take more than just one hour to present.If all you are looking for is a group of characters who will interact with each other, show after show after show, for some undetermined amount of time, then you are correct -- B5 was not optimally set up for that. But then, B5 was not fundamentally a story about a group of characters; it was a story about a particular event (the war between the First Ones and the younger races).
As such, it doesn't necessarily need to follow all the same characters around all the time, or look at the event in the same place all the time, but it _does_ need to advance the plot at a specific rate in order to cover all the interesting items leading up to the event. It was an _extremely_ ambitious design to plot out five years worth of episodes to cover the event, and it suffered because of that. Even so, I personally still rank it above shows like Hill Street Blues.
I can't think of any American shows before or after that have worked this way. You can say that you see "arcs" in modern series, but the writers still just make it up as they go -- the "arc" just means that you build up to some arbitrary cliffhanger at the end of each season, and if you get renewed, you make up some deus ex machina to get out of it at the beginning of the next season, and work towards your next arbitrary cliffhanger.
That's the main difference of B5. The seasons weren't just a collection of arbitrary cliffhangers, they were chapters of a continuing story, leading up to a specific climax.
Me, I'm a big Firefly fan. Loved the movie. And for me, BSG is a huge yawn (although the graphics are nice) -- the stories just don't go anywhere.
To each his own.
Yeah, I've gotta agree that BSG seems totally overrated. The space scenes are beautifully drawn, but other than that, I can't seem to find anything of real value in the stories.
Maybe it's a question of motivation; with B5, the station was the "Last, Best Hope for Peace", so you knew there was a huge war coming that the characters would need to avert or attempt to survive. With the original BSG, the remnants of humanity were searching for the fabled 13th colony, so they had an overall goal to achieve.
With the new BSG, it seems like you've just got a handful of survivors of the apocalypse, with no real goal in mind. (I admit that I stopped watching about halfway through the first season, so if a goal developed, I probably missed it.) Things happen in each episode, but why should I care? At the beginning of each episode, the few humans left alive are in a handful of ships somewhere in space. At the end of each episode, the few humans left alive are in a handful of ships somewhere in space. And so far as I can tell, there is no hope that that will ever change...
Much as I disagree with the overbearing and wasteful IP laws in the US, the complete lack of restraint in China (and maybe India too, I don't know as much about them) is equally problematic.
Right now, China is still playing technological catch-up with the rest of the world. China really doesn't need to bother with indigenous innovation today, since they can easily acquire superior technology from outside their borders. At the rate that their industry is advancing, however, they are quickly nearing parity with the West. When that happens, they face a new problem: if IP is held worthless within the borders of China, their indigenous businesses will constantly poach each other's ideas, ensuring that the reward for innovation is very low (and, therefore, research won't get any funding at all).
As much as I hate to say it, the IP mess in America is better than nothing at all, if you want to provide support for innovation. If ideas have no monetary value, and therefore nobody can make a living off of creating new ideas, then you're going to have some trouble encouraging people to create new innovations. China simply won't be able to take the lead without either copying the patent mechanism, or coming up with something similar...
I believe that was one of the first Ijon Tichy stories... It should be in The Star Diaries I think.
Yes! I too loved The Invincible. It was one of the first Lem stories I read, and drew me into collecting everything I could find of his works. I love how it has the outward appearance of a classic space opera, yet hints at the deep philosopical and social ideas that he would explore more fully in his later works.
:)
Another thing I've realized -- reading Lem's works all the way up to Fiasco, you can tell how he matured as a writer, but he also seemed to become more pessimistic as time went by. His stories are uniformly brilliant, but I find that it's the earlier stories (like "The Invincible") that I go back to and reread, simply because they are more optimistic in tone.
And if any of his stories were appropriate for a Hollywood-style movie, it would be The Invincible, not Solaris.
Ah well. Rest in peace, Mr. Lem.
Actually, iTunes does make locating and subscribing to podcasts fairly easy. I started using it to play some public radio podcasts, but I discovered weird and interesting podcasts listed in the iTunes store that I would probably have never tried otherwise (Japanese language lessons, a history of the Byzantine empire, an Anime video podcast, etc.).
I did eventually break down and get an iPod, but iTunes is quite usable without one, and I still play iTunes directly from my computer when I'm at home.
--John
In answer to your complaints, you yourself have already explained some of why you don't like Civ IV. First, you compare Civ IV to "Civ 3 (plus expansions)". Instead, you should compare it to Civ 3 without expansions -- it's quite obvious that Civ IV was built with room for a number of expansions; there's room for plenty more civilizations, leaders, and probably more techs and units in the future. If you try playing the original release of Civ 3, you might be surprised how limited it seems; the later expansions really did add a lot of flavor to the game.
Also, while the underlying game is still fundamentally Civilzation, this release is a much bigger change from Civ 3 than Civ 3 was from Civ 2. Culture is a much bigger part of the game now; the introduction of "religion" (and a variety of other, smaller changes) has really changed the flavor of international relations; and, of course, they've tied everything to this new (and gorgeous!) 3D display.
I do agree that the Civilopedia isn't quite as easy to use as before, and doesn't seem to have as much data. But that seems like something that can be easily updated in one of the future Civ IV expansions. Also, I've had no problem with blurred graphics when zooming out. And although using the 3D interface is somewhat different than the Civ 3 interface, I've found it to be fairly easy to use once you get used to it.
I think they've put most of their effort in this initial release into making the gameplay flow well; I've been putting some hours away against the game for the last few weeks, and I can confirm that it is both enjoyable and addictive. It's certainly a good game!
--John
If you haven't seen it before, you should check out the old BBC sci-fi "Blake's 7" -- now, there was a show full of "bad boys". The concept was that Blake, a freedom fighter up against a corrupt interstellar Federation, gathered together a crew of pirates and thieves to pursue freedom. But the actor playing Blake left the show after the first season; so, one of the thieves took over the ship after that. :)
Now, that became a show without a truly clear sense of good vs. evil. The main characters occasionally did the "right" thing for the right reasons, often for the wrong reasons, and sometimes didn't accomplish anything good at all! It made things quite interesting...
--John
I suspect you'd need to be more of a "Whedon" cult fan than a Firefly cult fan. Yes, Firefly covers much of the same territory that any normal sci-fi B-films cover, but where most writers focus on the starships & firefights, Whedon puts unbelievable amounts of depth into his characters. I'm a latecomer to the whole "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" thing myself -- although the premise of that series was somewhat ridiculous, the interaction between the characters was wonderful, and drew me in despite the overt plot.
So, in Firefly, the action sequences are fun, but it's the banter around the dinner table that really sets the show apart. :)
--JohnDo the wolves? Around 1918, the Allies decisively won World War I, beating the Germans after a long war of attrition. We immediately imposed severe war reparations, bankrupting what was left of Germany and making the lives of the populace miserable for decades afterwards. We essentially created an entire generation that was happy to go back to war against us!
The outcome of WWII was quite a bit different; we won the war, but we acted far less like wolves in the aftermath. The former Axis powers were encouraged to choose a new path, even aided in that course (e.g., the famous Marshall plan). The result: the former Axis nations have been far less prone to internal & external strife than they've been in hundreds of years.
So don't knock the sheep. If you kill them all, you'll end up with a planet full of nothing but wolves, and that's just not much fun.
--John
Not gonna happen. I'm not saying that the US won't be able to stay the course -- I'm saying that the world will NEVER be grateful, regardless of the outcome.
Personally, I don't believe your analogy with the Mafia is a good one, as the London terrorists seem to have very different motivations. But it doesn't matter; you're right, the US can use its power to control these people. Many times in the past, a single country has been able to use force to impose its will on the populations of other countries: think of Rome's "Pax Romana", or of the British Empire. These efforts do in fact create peace! But, of course, it is at a cost...
You can use military force to stop various groups of people from doing things you don't want them to do. But you can't make them like it. All the histories that I've seen seem to celebrate the end of empires, rather than rue their loss.
--John
I've seen lots of people around with this notion. So the question is, how and why did these people become brainwashed?
Let's say that you personally had the power to go out and put a bullet in the brain of every single person who is currently brainwashed. Consider that, perhaps, these people are becoming "brainwashed" because they've grown up in an environment where they've lost friends and family members; that maybe other social groups have dominated their group by brutal force. It is quite possible that, given the hundreds (or thousands?) of people that you'll be offing, there'll be hundreds or thousands of their friends and family members who will then be ripe for new brainwashing...
There is no doubt, the people who perpetrated this attack are sick bastards. They do deserve death. But if we simply go out and start killing people in kind, don't we just become terrorists ourselves?
--John
Total nonsense. Immortality does not imply omnipotence, nor does mortality assure all creatures an equal share of resources.
At pretty much any time in history, there have been people with power (be they dictators, religious zealots, or even your "fat ass rich guys") who have been able to monopolize much of the resources available to the people at large. The fact that they eventually die is meaningless, if they are simply replaced by someone else. If you want a society that assures a more equal distribution of resources, it needs to enforce that ideal while the powerful people are still alive. Just waiting for them to die is pointless.
I'd also hate to believe that for me to live, someone else must die. For one thing, the total population of humans living on this planet has grown immensely in the last few centuries, which wouldn't have happened if we had to kill an adult for every baby that came into the world. There's a lot of living room on this planet, and eventually there will be room off the planet as well. Moreover, I'd expect that someone who exists as information inside a machine could take up even less space and resources...
In any case, I'd say you shouldn't go kill yourself because you believe it'll help the community at large; instead, an individual contributing to a society is an asset to that society, no matter how long that person lives.