I thought the diner scene was really out of place. Here we are, long long ago in a galaxy far far away, and there is a typical American diner being run by robots and aliens. The robot waitress even has the "How ya doin' hon?" voice and inflection. It was completely out of place and destroyed any sense of fantasy I felt about the Lucas universe.
I think Lucas is basically doing the same thing Shatner did when he said "Get a life people, it's just a show." Lucas is telling us he's not taking this Star Wars thing seriously. It's all a big joke. The title is "Attack of the Clones" for Christ's sake! What it comes down to is George Lucas is a big kid. He never grew up. He never went through puberty. Romance? That's icky! He was forced to put romance scenes in this movie, but boy, was if painful. He just wants funny characters and cool fight scenes. Dialog schmialog. Plot schmlot.
Have you ever wondered why so many creative people produce wonderful material when
they first start out, but when they become rich and famous their material sucks?
In many instances the reason is that when someone is not well known they listen to
other people's advice and criticism, and this limits certain excesses that might spill
out of their work. Once they become big names they get the belief that they can do no
wrong. Worse still, other people become too intimidated to criticize them. Read any recent
Steven King book. Look what Gene Rodenberry did to the first Star Trek movie. He was allowed
to create his complete vision, and it was simply too much of his vision. That's what
happened to Star Wars Episode One.
Maybe I was just lucky, but I had some excellent science teachers who would have us participate in science, have us perform experiments and discuss the various implications of what we learned. And this was in a typical American public school. We had to think creatively in order to finish our assignments.
My original point was that American schools do tend to allow for more creative learning than schools in other developed countries. Apparently your experience wasn't as positive as mine. Also, I agree we need to develope nanotech for the positive as well as the negative.
Surprisingly, the schools in the US teach more creativity than the schools in other developed nations. Go to Japan or England and you will be forced to perform huge amounts of rote memorization and regurgitation. That's part of the reason American students do so poorly in math and science when compared to the rest of the developed world. The average American student can't recite even a single Shakespearean sonnet or list the first line of the periodic table, yet when it comes to technical innovation, the United States leads the world. We must be doing something right.
As for nanotechnology (which is what we are supposed to be talking about), we need to rush ahead blindly into it. Same with genetics. Clones for everyone! We are way behind the technology curve. Hell, we haven't even gone to Mars yet. If we sit around fretting about the negative effects of nanotechnology someone else will beat us to the development of killer nanoprobes, and then we will be at their mercy. Sure, someone might create a nanite that takes all the carbon atoms in the world and joins them into buckyballs, killing all life in the process. That's the risk we have to take.
Re:doesnt seem economical
on
Lunar Power
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· Score: 1
I understand that since she didn't have a rack at the time she was in "Interview with a Vampire", she was overlooked by most of you, but her performance was impressive for a kid.
I agree with you. So where does that leave us? Will the third world be stuck in poverty because of historical circumstances? Is it possible to create a transparent, democratic, legal infrastructure and simultaineously cultivate a respect for the law in the general population that is needed to maintain such an infrastructure? What will it take to accomplish this?
I believe these are the hard questions that need to be answered in order to reduce world poverty and injustice. I certainly don't have the answers.
A legal system is useless without a population that values the law. In order to have a society that can sustain its population in health, wealth, and comfort, you need to have a significant portion of that population believe in the legal system and follow it. In much of the third world this requires a significant cultural change. In the United States there still exists a portion of the population that obeys the law out of respect for it, not just out of fear of getting caught (although I believe this portion is shrinking). If this portion becomes too small the corruption will reach a point where it no longer is profitable to be productive (because your employees are robbing from you, the government is extorting money from you, the trucking company wants little extras, etc.). Look at Russia after the cold war. It interpretted capitalism as a war of all against all for profit. You need a core of honest, law abiding, hard working people in order to make a modern, technologically advanced democracy. The cultural forces that create such a population are difficult to come by.
How could this be moderated "Offtopic"? It's a joke about the topic. The topic is about a bubble boy leaving his bubble. The joke is about a bubble boy leaving his bubble. Ontopic.
The Pan Am spaceliner didn't go all the way to the moon. It just went to the Stanford torus space station that is supposed to be up there now. Why doesn't ISS have a Stanford torus? They are always complaining about the lack of gravity having all sorts of negative health effects. Let it spin baby! Let it spin!
Organized crime is capitalism taken to extremes. It applies capitalism to things that the government wants to prohibit, like prostitution and drugs. If unrestricted capitalism was allowed there would be no organized crime because it would be legal to sell anything, and they wouldn't have a source of income.
I read somewhere that the director of TRON saw Jeff Bridges character as Bill Gates, fighting the evil empire of IBM in order to bring computing to the masses. Ironic, isn't it?
The best mine smasher was made by the Mules on Junkyard Wars. A large, rotating metal cylinder with chains coming off of it. It certainly did a good job thrashing the ground and the mines in the ground. I think we should make a robot based on that design and let it loose.
Evolution by natural selection works by killing off segments of a population that are distinguished by genotype. Evolution by natural selection is no longer a significant factor in human evolution in the developed world because the vast majority of people who are born live to an age where they can reproduce and pass their genes to the next generation. Evolution by sexual selection is still a factor, but this is being mitigated by surgical and chemical enhancements (like breast implants and rogain). One can have sexual characteristics that did not come genetically.
Since evolution by natural selection and sexual selection are becoming less of a factor we will see the rise of a force not mentioned by Darwin -- Evolution by Self Selection. This means that it will be people who REALLY REALLY LOVE children will be the ones who reproduce the most. Along side the Self Selected population we will also have those who reproduce because they are too careless or lack the self control to use birth control. The big question is -- are these genetic traits that will be passed on to the next generation and alter the mental character of the human species?
That is EXACTLY how I remember my early arcade experiences! Except we had long lines for Space Invaders with little towers of quarters piled up on the consoles.
My wife is in an Earth2025 clan. She talks with lots of people from all over the world every night. Her community revolves around virtual wars against other clans. That is her community.
Community depends on having a common goal, a shared sense of purpose. Otherwise it fragments at the first hint of unpleasantness. Games like Earth2025 create common goals, and thus create community. Same thing for EverQuest and the like. This is different from television. Television provides a common folklore, something you can talk about with other people and reference. (Just mention something like "This is like when the guys from Seinfeld were in the parking garage!" and millions of people you've never met will know what you're talking about.)
We have a different kind of community today from what people had a hundred years ago. Usually when people talk about community they talk about the hundred years ago kind. What we have now is the kind of community that works in a modern info-industrial world. It's a fast paced community that is more flexible and thus doesn't provide the kind of psychological comfort and security that the one hundred year old community did. It also doesn't have that stifling aspect of having everyone in town talking about you and ostracizing you if you break the littlest taboos.
It wasn't the average consumer that made Microsoft king, it was the business community. The business community chose IBM clones because they were cheap and didn't come with a bunch of fancy doodads that would distract their workers. When PCs first went on the desktop, the managers wanted them to boot up and then go directly to the word processor or spreadsheet program that the worker was supposed to use, and that's it! They didn't want an easy to use interface that their workers could figure out. DOS was hard enough so that only a few specialist in the office could really set up the machines properly, and management liked it that way. As long as the documents were printed and databases maintained, the business community was happy with IBM clones
When people started buying computers for themselves, many of the purchasers were the more savy users in the office who were familiar with IBM clones. These were the people with jobs and money and who could afford to spend $3000 for a 286 (remember those days). The hip college students who had learned to program on a Mac could not afford to buy the Macs they preferred. When they went into the business community they learned to use the IBM clones, and ended up buying them so they could bring their work home. That's why Microsoft is king.
Ha ha! Jeff Bridges is Bill Gates! Little geek who takes on the huge corporation and wins, spreading computing to the masses! Then, when he gets money and power, he becomes the evil corporation! How ironic! We need a sequel to Tron where Jeff Bridges, now the megalomaniac ruler of a global computer corporation, sends himself into the Internet to destroy a virtual Penguin program nibbling at his empire. We can have him meet his old Tron program (guarding some archaic server somewhere), wistfully remember his idealistic youth, and then DESTROY IT for not being compatible with.NET. See the Penguin riding a motorcycle through the grid, being chased by giant Jeff Bridges. Ha! Think of the possibilities!
I saw Morimoto make a sashimi using one of those. The challanger fought back with a daring squid fondu, but to no avail. Once again, the Iron Chef reigned supreme!
Due to the nature of evolution I doubt that a technological civilization would not want to pursue interstellar travel. In order for a species to take over a planet it probably has some sort of exporation urge. Even rats have an exploration instinct, put a rat in a new environment and it is compelled to search it and make a mental map of it. After a civilization reaches the technology to build interstellar craft someone on their planet will most likely come to the realization that it would be more beneficial for them to own as much of the galaxy as possible rather than wait for some other species to colonize the galaxy. Whatever species colonizes the galaxy first will be able to dictate terms to any other intelligent species. That's why I hope that we are first.
We would not use base ten numbers when communicating with aliens. We would use binary. I don't think any serious plan for first contact uses anything but binary, and then maybe after a couple of centuries of conversation builds up to something like "Binary is nice but we usually use base 10."
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I thought the diner scene was really out of place. Here we are, long long ago in a galaxy far far away, and there is a typical American diner being run by robots and aliens. The robot waitress even has the "How ya doin' hon?" voice and inflection. It was completely out of place and destroyed any sense of fantasy I felt about the Lucas universe.
I think Lucas is basically doing the same thing Shatner did when he said "Get a life people, it's just a show." Lucas is telling us he's not taking this Star Wars thing seriously. It's all a big joke. The title is "Attack of the Clones" for Christ's sake! What it comes down to is George Lucas is a big kid. He never grew up. He never went through puberty. Romance? That's icky! He was forced to put romance scenes in this movie, but boy, was if painful. He just wants funny characters and cool fight scenes. Dialog schmialog. Plot schmlot.
Have you ever wondered why so many creative people produce wonderful material when they first start out, but when they become rich and famous their material sucks? In many instances the reason is that when someone is not well known they listen to other people's advice and criticism, and this limits certain excesses that might spill out of their work. Once they become big names they get the belief that they can do no wrong. Worse still, other people become too intimidated to criticize them. Read any recent Steven King book. Look what Gene Rodenberry did to the first Star Trek movie. He was allowed to create his complete vision, and it was simply too much of his vision. That's what happened to Star Wars Episode One.
Maybe I was just lucky, but I had some excellent science teachers who would have us participate in science, have us perform experiments and discuss the various implications of what we learned. And this was in a typical American public school. We had to think creatively in order to finish our assignments.
My original point was that American schools do tend to allow for more creative learning than schools in other developed countries. Apparently your experience wasn't as positive as mine. Also, I agree we need to develope nanotech for the positive as well as the negative.
Surprisingly, the schools in the US teach more creativity than the schools in other developed nations. Go to Japan or England and you will be forced to perform huge amounts of rote memorization and regurgitation. That's part of the reason American students do so poorly in math and science when compared to the rest of the developed world. The average American student can't recite even a single Shakespearean sonnet or list the first line of the periodic table, yet when it comes to technical innovation, the United States leads the world. We must be doing something right.
As for nanotechnology (which is what we are supposed to be talking about), we need to rush ahead blindly into it. Same with genetics. Clones for everyone! We are way behind the technology curve. Hell, we haven't even gone to Mars yet. If we sit around fretting about the negative effects of nanotechnology someone else will beat us to the development of killer nanoprobes, and then we will be at their mercy. Sure, someone might create a nanite that takes all the carbon atoms in the world and joins them into buckyballs, killing all life in the process. That's the risk we have to take.
Yeah, blame Pink Floyd for that misconception.
I understand that since she didn't have a rack at the time she was in "Interview with a Vampire", she was overlooked by most of you, but her performance was impressive for a kid.
I agree with you. So where does that leave us? Will the third world be stuck in poverty because of historical circumstances? Is it possible to create a transparent, democratic, legal infrastructure and simultaineously cultivate a respect for the law in the general population that is needed to maintain such an infrastructure? What will it take to accomplish this?
I believe these are the hard questions that need to be answered in order to reduce world poverty and injustice. I certainly don't have the answers.
A legal system is useless without a population that values the law. In order to have a society that can sustain its population in health, wealth, and comfort, you need to have a significant portion of that population believe in the legal system and follow it. In much of the third world this requires a significant cultural change. In the United States there still exists a portion of the population that obeys the law out of respect for it, not just out of fear of getting caught (although I believe this portion is shrinking). If this portion becomes too small the corruption will reach a point where it no longer is profitable to be productive (because your employees are robbing from you, the government is extorting money from you, the trucking company wants little extras, etc.). Look at Russia after the cold war. It interpretted capitalism as a war of all against all for profit. You need a core of honest, law abiding, hard working people in order to make a modern, technologically advanced democracy. The cultural forces that create such a population are difficult to come by.
How could this be moderated "Offtopic"? It's a joke about the topic. The topic is about a bubble boy leaving his bubble. The joke is about a bubble boy leaving his bubble. Ontopic.
The Pan Am spaceliner didn't go all the way to the moon. It just went to the Stanford torus space station that is supposed to be up there now. Why doesn't ISS have a Stanford torus? They are always complaining about the lack of gravity having all sorts of negative health effects. Let it spin baby! Let it spin!
Organized crime is capitalism taken to extremes. It applies capitalism to things that the government wants to prohibit, like prostitution and drugs. If unrestricted capitalism was allowed there would be no organized crime because it would be legal to sell anything, and they wouldn't have a source of income.
I read somewhere that the director of TRON saw Jeff Bridges character as Bill Gates, fighting the evil empire of IBM in order to bring computing to the masses. Ironic, isn't it?
...but it never came back. :(
The best mine smasher was made by the Mules on Junkyard Wars. A large, rotating metal cylinder with chains coming off of it. It certainly did a good job thrashing the ground and the mines in the ground. I think we should make a robot based on that design and let it loose.
Pointers are good. Sure, they're dangerous, but sometimes they are the only way out when you are trapped deep in some horribly designed legacy code.
Evolution by natural selection works by killing off segments of a population that are distinguished by genotype. Evolution by natural selection is no longer a significant factor in human evolution in the developed world because the vast majority of people who are born live to an age where they can reproduce and pass their genes to the next generation. Evolution by sexual selection is still a factor, but this is being mitigated by surgical and chemical enhancements (like breast implants and rogain). One can have sexual characteristics that did not come genetically.
Since evolution by natural selection and sexual selection are becoming less of a factor we will see the rise of a force not mentioned by Darwin -- Evolution by Self Selection. This means that it will be people who REALLY REALLY LOVE children will be the ones who reproduce the most. Along side the Self Selected population we will also have those who reproduce because they are too careless or lack the self control to use birth control. The big question is -- are these genetic traits that will be passed on to the next generation and alter the mental character of the human species?
That is EXACTLY how I remember my early arcade experiences! Except we had long lines for Space Invaders with little towers of quarters piled up on the consoles.
Sorry.
My wife is in an Earth2025 clan. She talks with lots of people from all over the world every night. Her community revolves around virtual wars against other clans. That is her community.
Community depends on having a common goal, a shared sense of purpose. Otherwise it fragments at the first hint of unpleasantness. Games like Earth2025 create common goals, and thus create community. Same thing for EverQuest and the like. This is different from television. Television provides a common folklore, something you can talk about with other people and reference. (Just mention something like "This is like when the guys from Seinfeld were in the parking garage!" and millions of people you've never met will know what you're talking about.)
We have a different kind of community today from what people had a hundred years ago. Usually when people talk about community they talk about the hundred years ago kind. What we have now is the kind of community that works in a modern info-industrial world. It's a fast paced community that is more flexible and thus doesn't provide the kind of psychological comfort and security that the one hundred year old community did. It also doesn't have that stifling aspect of having everyone in town talking about you and ostracizing you if you break the littlest taboos.
It wasn't the average consumer that made Microsoft king, it was the business community. The business community chose IBM clones because they were cheap and didn't come with a bunch of fancy doodads that would distract their workers. When PCs first went on the desktop, the managers wanted them to boot up and then go directly to the word processor or spreadsheet program that the worker was supposed to use, and that's it! They didn't want an easy to use interface that their workers could figure out. DOS was hard enough so that only a few specialist in the office could really set up the machines properly, and management liked it that way. As long as the documents were printed and databases maintained, the business community was happy with IBM clones
When people started buying computers for themselves, many of the purchasers were the more savy users in the office who were familiar with IBM clones. These were the people with jobs and money and who could afford to spend $3000 for a 286 (remember those days). The hip college students who had learned to program on a Mac could not afford to buy the Macs they preferred. When they went into the business community they learned to use the IBM clones, and ended up buying them so they could bring their work home. That's why Microsoft is king.
Ha ha! Jeff Bridges is Bill Gates! Little geek who takes on the huge corporation and wins, spreading computing to the masses! Then, when he gets money and power, he becomes the evil corporation! How ironic! We need a sequel to Tron where Jeff Bridges, now the megalomaniac ruler of a global computer corporation, sends himself into the Internet to destroy a virtual Penguin program nibbling at his empire. We can have him meet his old Tron program (guarding some archaic server somewhere), wistfully remember his idealistic youth, and then DESTROY IT for not being compatible with .NET. See the Penguin riding a motorcycle through the grid, being chased by giant Jeff Bridges. Ha! Think of the possibilities!
I saw Morimoto make a sashimi using one of those. The challanger fought back with a daring squid fondu, but to no avail. Once again, the Iron Chef reigned supreme!
What's wrong with the point about evolution?
Due to the nature of evolution I doubt that a technological civilization would not want to pursue interstellar travel. In order for a species to take over a planet it probably has some sort of exporation urge. Even rats have an exploration instinct, put a rat in a new environment and it is compelled to search it and make a mental map of it. After a civilization reaches the technology to build interstellar craft someone on their planet will most likely come to the realization that it would be more beneficial for them to own as much of the galaxy as possible rather than wait for some other species to colonize the galaxy. Whatever species colonizes the galaxy first will be able to dictate terms to any other intelligent species. That's why I hope that we are first.
We would not use base ten numbers when communicating with aliens. We would use binary. I don't think any serious plan for first contact uses anything but binary, and then maybe after a couple of centuries of conversation builds up to something like "Binary is nice but we usually use base 10."