Guinness, one of the grand figures of British film with more than 60 cinematic appearances to his credit, told the new chatter magazine Talk that he convinced series creator Lucas that Kenobi would be a more effective mystical mentor if he appeared to Luke as a ghost. Lucas liked the idea, rewriting the first film to include the Jedi Knight's death in combat with former protégé Darth Vader.
However, Guinness said he had less purely artistic goals at heart.
"What I didn't tell him was that I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo," he told Talk interviewer Fintan O'Toole.
Sounds like BS to me. As a ghost, Guinness would still have to speak those banal lines. In fact, that's all he'd do. And as a ghost, they'd be even more awful and banal.
I think Sir Guinness just made that up to pretend to be better than the adolescent fare that paid him most of his money. He wanted to look classy. After all, he was a great actor.
Hey, whatever happened to that Anthrax Bomber? They must be pretty crafty to survive the greater part of a decade's "Global War on Terror" without even being identified, after striking directly at Congress.
we're going to expose them to things slowly from an early-ish age, so that everything doesn't slam them full on in the face when they get to school.
The V-Chip makes it easy to control the rate at which your kids will be getting the full blast of 2010 TV. Which will make your childhood's "unrestricted" TV look like a _Sesame Street_ episode. Because the server-side constraints you're used to will all be gone, as the media corps sending it to you will have rewritten all the government rules to their fancy. And because the "TV" will tune in all the Internet multimedia in that brave new world.
And it's not just your kids who will benefit from their parents' universal access to V-Chip (including at friends' homes, and everywhere else they go). All your neighbors' kids, around the country, will have the same advantage in easy parenting. So your kids won't have as much bad influences. And you won't have to live in a world surrounded by kids as barraged by troublesome content.
It's like public education. Do your kids need to learn in kindergarten how to wash their hands and brush their teeth every day? Probably not, if you're a good parent. But if the lazy parent down the street doesn't pull it off, your kid will more likely get sick from them. Either in kindergarten, or sometime before they move out of your house as an adult. So spending the extra money for universal education compensates for a lot of bad parenting, even protecting good parents.
It also occurs to me that the V-Chip, by 2010, will also be a way for consumers to lock down all our own private content from display. Which works both ways: I don't want visitors using my TV to watch my arguments with my wife on my security camera. And I don't want to accidentally watch your home porno when I just dropped by for dinner - no matter how beautiful is your wife.
The basics are clear: every TV should have client-side content lockout. So it's cheap and consistent enough that everyone can, and does, do it. It's not for just the children, though they're the first people to need someone else to lock out content from them.
That kind of bad training doesn't happen overnight. Where is the US Cybersecurity chief, who should be making sure that government agencies use proper security practices? Do we even have one, after every other one since Bush created the department has resigned in disgust?
I fear a Democratic trifecta (House/Senate/WHouse) in January 2009. Without even Iraq War blame to get them caught, and a bigger majority than Republicans had.
The two parties are not the same. Republicans are worse. But absolute power corrupts everyone absolutely. Democrats, like anyone else, are bad enough without being Republicans. Absolutely powerful Democrats is scary. And here they are giving themselves the power, late enough that it will also be blamed on Bush. But when they catch it in 2009 for themselves, it won't matter who gave it to them. Only that they have it.
The CIA/NSA is using the spying they've already done (illegally, massively for at least 5 years) to blackmail Congress into granting the Unitary Executive ("dictator") any powers he wants, under cover of a "struggle with Congress" that signs over war authorizations, spying authorizations, anything the dictator wants.
Blackmailing not just Democrats. Blackmailing Republicans, too, to enforce their lockstep rubber stamps. But Republicans also get the offer of getting cut in on some power (as long as it doesn't cross Cheney/Bush). Democrats just get cut in on cosmetic power sharing, so they can be the decoy party in our soviet politburo.
Most of Earth's telecom passes through the US. Your distinction is meaningless. Also, dropping the FISA restrictions means Bush/Cheney/Gonzales can spy on Americans who are "incidentally" part of the communications.
Communications with anyone. There is practically no need for any evidence that anyone being spied on has commited any crime, is a terrorist, or is of any value in getting any evidence of crime or terrorism. Our human rights to protection from unreasonable searches, to presumption of innocence, to due process, are out the window.
So Cheney/Bush can spy on us. On you. Feel safer? Feel American? Or do you feel more like an East German under their Stasi police state?
It's hard to take someone called "Baba Ram Dass" seriously when you don't accept how we're all connected. For about a dollar.
How many other features of your TV do you never use, but you pay about a dollar (or more) for them to include in every TV? Do you complain about paying for those?
The Republicans are already full of cunts like you who are destroying our country because you're deeply broken, and projecting your major malfunction on people like me who care about fixing it.
Thanks for posting the comment most certain to confirm just what a stupid shit you really are. And reflecting so perfectly on the rest of you sociopathic "Libertarian" posers. Now tell me you'll fix the country by shooting someone. Then go start the latest incarnation of the "Schmuck Party".
Right, "Libertarian": Republicans who want to shoot someone and get away with it. Now you're just an apathetic loser who doesn't deserve the chance to talk about American politics, because you're not even doing the least you can do: your duty to vote. Republican corporate anarchy will suit you.
I'm not a Democrat, snappy. I've never registered for a party, and I don't support their pathetic system you're still trapped in. As part of the people who don't vote, so they don't have to worry about.
But then, you think Democrats just snap fingers and the Republican legacy disappears. That's the kind of naivete I expect from "Libertarians" who think not voting is an acceptable response to a broken system, instead of doing at least your minimum obligation to help fix it.
You don't care about America, you don't understand it. Who cares what you think about it, or the V-Chip?
Anonymous Slashdotter Coward is posting from the Republican fallout bunker.
The "situation at hand" is that Republicans have destroyed any integrity government had before they controlled its power monopoly for 6 rotten years after controlling Congress for 6, after controlling the White House for 12, after a 4 year break before which they controlled the White House for another 8. During which time, Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Frist turned the government into a spying operation inspired by the East German Stasi secret police (and recruited directly from them).
Republicans are to blame, by the same token Republicans like the AC tried to take credit for the illusions of security you built on our robbed liberties.
I linked to a Democratic blog because that's where people are reasonably discussing the story. Which links to the story. But Republicans like the AC kneejerk to "kill the messenger", rather than get crushed by its message.
I arrived at a conclusion that the legacy Republican government we'll have to tear down for years, generations, will spy on us because I'm living in the real world. Not the fantasy Republican world where they terrorize us, deny it, destroy our freedom, and leave us exposed to greater threats, just so they can have all the power.
Who is this Anonymous Republican Coward still partying like it's 2003? Karl Rove, is that you?
You're such a Republican that you're ignoring that I agree with the V-Chip the Democrat proposes. Which part of "I Want One" in the title don't you understand?
You're such a Republican that you're ignoring that the problem is that Republicans created the government that would implement it, even though that's exactly why I said I wouldn't want one right now.
You Republicans are so partisan that you ignore parties when the party is Republican, but whenever it's not, there's a Democratic strawman handy to burn in effigy.
Countdown to your response "But Clinton..." in 10, 9, 8...
I looked in the configs of my DLP TV, and it has a V-Chip. It's not currently mandatory. If it were any extra expense that could stop consumers from buying the model/brand with one, the manufacturer would drop it.
However, consumers do not make rational decisions about products they don't understand, that solve a problem they will face in several years (when they have kids), that have been demonized as a brand in their youth, that they've heard has been "fixed" somewhere else (like maybe their cable box). They get a vague feeling of discomfort that crushes any occasional rational consideration, and the solution dies before it can be accepted, or embraded, by the market.
There is, however, a middle ground. All TVs could be required to be "V-Chip ready", and by default include them as a module. If you understand them enough to skip them, you can "opt-out". Make the savings include the cost of the TV's interface to the missing chip, and only people who default to the chip will pay for the whole subsystem. People who don't understand the V-Chip are more likely to need it, rather than just discipline their kids, because they also default to letting their kids watch just anything.
OTOH, there isn't a single Congressmember who both understands that kind of tech/economics/freedom compromise, and can convince any others of it. So while that opt-out requirement is the right tech solution, it isn't a practical political solution. Of the cruder alternatives, the one that works best overall is requiring every TV to include one.
Which a clever manufacturer could implement with opt-in. And thereby also satisfy their market's desire for choice. So even under the actual coming FCC requirement, we can see whether the choice can be managed by the market, as decided by the manufacturers who have the most interest in serving it properly.
No, that's the dichotomy: consumers screen the content (including no screening) or government/providers screen it (which always includes screening, like the status quo).
We might even agree, Anonymous ambiguous Coward, in finer detail. But you've got to say something meaningful, not just sarcastically obnoxious.
If the actual V-Chip functions are OK (and not spyware), then why not require every TV to have one? Otherwise, most consumers will trade away "yet another incomprehensible tech feature I'll never use" for a few bucks saved. Which will drive up the cost of the chip for everyone else. While leaving room for competing UIs, which will totally (and probably finally) kill the effort.
This is coming from an administration that is more secretive than Nixon's. What are the odds that anything will be open?
That's why we have to get involved. Because the Republican government has already started to close up shop. Accommodating our involvement will take a while, probably longer than Bush has in power. So we have a chance to force this open, and make it universal: the only combo that actually works.
I note that the problem is exactly like that of verifiable/secret elections. If we can get Americans to care about this kind of TV, we can probably get them to care about that kind of voting booth. And then make openness and security the default, rather than the exception. To complete the circle, we need to get the campaign on TV.
I never understood the opposition to the V-Chip. Why shouldn't the multimedia client (TV) come with a network screening app? In HW, so it's harder to crack, especially by literal "script kiddies".
The alternative is that the government and providers screen content at the server, without consumer choice.
The only problem is that today's FCC, coming at the tail end of the Republican covert government, will probably install spyware on their "Super" V-Chip. So instead of all your TV signals of all they offer coming down your wire or over the air, for you to privately select from, their "Super" V-Chip will send a log to the NSA. Crossreferenced to all your personal data, including email, phone, surveillance video, and all the electronic/digital transactions that profile your life.
Eventually the NSA will convince us to implant an RFID V-Chip "so we can easily tune our TVs wherever we go".
But if we get a private V-Chip now, before they do it, then we can satisfy the demand for convenience before that convenience is exploited to mask total privacy invasion. If the V-Chip specs and HW/firmware/SW are open, then we can get both safety and convenience. That's known as "freedom": the (traditional) American Way.
To me the most exciting part is that they're putting 2x10Gb ethernet ports directly on the CPU. The crypto is cool too: I hope it's not encapsulated entirely in the ethernet, so apps can call it directly.
If they made these CPUs cheap enough, we could put them on PCI-e cards in a Xeon, and run a Linux cluster over the PCI-e, coordinated by apps running on the Xeon. Or maybe stuff a Niagara/PCI-e box with extras, like we used to do with Mac Quadra 950/NuBus cards. But this time with 20Gbps ethernet per node, for a networked grid of nodes.
Ha ha, I can post right back at your delusional posts. This is fun. And easier than having to actually analyze your posts! Tell me more about your homosexual fantasies about me, now that you've got me "cornered".
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Sounds like BS to me. As a ghost, Guinness would still have to speak those banal lines. In fact, that's all he'd do. And as a ghost, they'd be even more awful and banal.
I think Sir Guinness just made that up to pretend to be better than the adolescent fare that paid him most of his money. He wanted to look classy. After all, he was a great actor.
Only a Republican could respond to an overload of bad laws and politicians by saying there's nowhere with perfect laws and politicians.
No wonder you loved Rumsfeld's hyperbolic denial so much for so long. And promote the Drudge Lies Report with your every post.
A humorous page about these British scientists' work by St Andrews physics Professor Leonhardt explains their work on Casimir "levitation".
Hey, whatever happened to that Anthrax Bomber? They must be pretty crafty to survive the greater part of a decade's "Global War on Terror" without even being identified, after striking directly at Congress.
The V-Chip makes it easy to control the rate at which your kids will be getting the full blast of 2010 TV. Which will make your childhood's "unrestricted" TV look like a _Sesame Street_ episode. Because the server-side constraints you're used to will all be gone, as the media corps sending it to you will have rewritten all the government rules to their fancy. And because the "TV" will tune in all the Internet multimedia in that brave new world.
And it's not just your kids who will benefit from their parents' universal access to V-Chip (including at friends' homes, and everywhere else they go). All your neighbors' kids, around the country, will have the same advantage in easy parenting. So your kids won't have as much bad influences. And you won't have to live in a world surrounded by kids as barraged by troublesome content.
It's like public education. Do your kids need to learn in kindergarten how to wash their hands and brush their teeth every day? Probably not, if you're a good parent. But if the lazy parent down the street doesn't pull it off, your kid will more likely get sick from them. Either in kindergarten, or sometime before they move out of your house as an adult. So spending the extra money for universal education compensates for a lot of bad parenting, even protecting good parents.
It also occurs to me that the V-Chip, by 2010, will also be a way for consumers to lock down all our own private content from display. Which works both ways: I don't want visitors using my TV to watch my arguments with my wife on my security camera. And I don't want to accidentally watch your home porno when I just dropped by for dinner - no matter how beautiful is your wife.
The basics are clear: every TV should have client-side content lockout. So it's cheap and consistent enough that everyone can, and does, do it. It's not for just the children, though they're the first people to need someone else to lock out content from them.
That kind of bad training doesn't happen overnight. Where is the US Cybersecurity chief, who should be making sure that government agencies use proper security practices? Do we even have one, after every other one since Bush created the department has resigned in disgust?
And is the current one as fired as is the clueless one in _Live Free or Die Hard_?
It'll protect your kids (or the neighbors) if you haven't trained them properly not to watch just anything coming down the cable wire.
I mean, come on. Don't you know how to understand an analogy? Or were you raised on TV?
I totally agree.
I fear a Democratic trifecta (House/Senate/WHouse) in January 2009. Without even Iraq War blame to get them caught, and a bigger majority than Republicans had.
The two parties are not the same. Republicans are worse. But absolute power corrupts everyone absolutely. Democrats, like anyone else, are bad enough without being Republicans. Absolutely powerful Democrats is scary. And here they are giving themselves the power, late enough that it will also be blamed on Bush. But when they catch it in 2009 for themselves, it won't matter who gave it to them. Only that they have it.
And once you're gone, you can never come back.
The CIA/NSA is using the spying they've already done (illegally, massively for at least 5 years) to blackmail Congress into granting the Unitary Executive ("dictator") any powers he wants, under cover of a "struggle with Congress" that signs over war authorizations, spying authorizations, anything the dictator wants.
Blackmailing not just Democrats. Blackmailing Republicans, too, to enforce their lockstep rubber stamps. But Republicans also get the offer of getting cut in on some power (as long as it doesn't cross Cheney/Bush). Democrats just get cut in on cosmetic power sharing, so they can be the decoy party in our soviet politburo.
Most of Earth's telecom passes through the US. Your distinction is meaningless. Also, dropping the FISA restrictions means Bush/Cheney/Gonzales can spy on Americans who are "incidentally" part of the communications.
Communications with anyone. There is practically no need for any evidence that anyone being spied on has commited any crime, is a terrorist, or is of any value in getting any evidence of crime or terrorism. Our human rights to protection from unreasonable searches, to presumption of innocence, to due process, are out the window.
So Cheney/Bush can spy on us. On you. Feel safer? Feel American? Or do you feel more like an East German under their Stasi police state?
It's hard to take someone called "Baba Ram Dass" seriously when you don't accept how we're all connected. For about a dollar.
How many other features of your TV do you never use, but you pay about a dollar (or more) for them to include in every TV? Do you complain about paying for those?
Seat belts. Airbags. Rearview mirror anti-highbeam flip up. But the V-Chip costs like a dollar.
The Republicans are already full of cunts like you who are destroying our country because you're deeply broken, and projecting your major malfunction on people like me who care about fixing it.
Thanks for posting the comment most certain to confirm just what a stupid shit you really are. And reflecting so perfectly on the rest of you sociopathic "Libertarian" posers. Now tell me you'll fix the country by shooting someone. Then go start the latest incarnation of the "Schmuck Party".
Right, "Libertarian": Republicans who want to shoot someone and get away with it. Now you're just an apathetic loser who doesn't deserve the chance to talk about American politics, because you're not even doing the least you can do: your duty to vote. Republican corporate anarchy will suit you.
I'm not a Democrat, snappy. I've never registered for a party, and I don't support their pathetic system you're still trapped in. As part of the people who don't vote, so they don't have to worry about.
But then, you think Democrats just snap fingers and the Republican legacy disappears. That's the kind of naivete I expect from "Libertarians" who think not voting is an acceptable response to a broken system, instead of doing at least your minimum obligation to help fix it.
You don't care about America, you don't understand it. Who cares what you think about it, or the V-Chip?
Anonymous Slashdotter Coward is posting from the Republican fallout bunker.
The "situation at hand" is that Republicans have destroyed any integrity government had before they controlled its power monopoly for 6 rotten years after controlling Congress for 6, after controlling the White House for 12, after a 4 year break before which they controlled the White House for another 8. During which time, Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Frist turned the government into a spying operation inspired by the East German Stasi secret police (and recruited directly from them).
Republicans are to blame, by the same token Republicans like the AC tried to take credit for the illusions of security you built on our robbed liberties.
I linked to a Democratic blog because that's where people are reasonably discussing the story. Which links to the story. But Republicans like the AC kneejerk to "kill the messenger", rather than get crushed by its message.
Republicans rely on denial of tyrannies like government spyware while terrorizing us into accepting them. Carnivore? ECHELON? Warrantless domestic wiretapping? New spying on us revealed at every turn? Hello, is this thing on?
I arrived at a conclusion that the legacy Republican government we'll have to tear down for years, generations, will spy on us because I'm living in the real world. Not the fantasy Republican world where they terrorize us, deny it, destroy our freedom, and leave us exposed to greater threats, just so they can have all the power.
Who is this Anonymous Republican Coward still partying like it's 2003? Karl Rove, is that you?
You're such a Republican that you're ignoring that I agree with the V-Chip the Democrat proposes. Which part of "I Want One" in the title don't you understand?
You're such a Republican that you're ignoring that the problem is that Republicans created the government that would implement it, even though that's exactly why I said I wouldn't want one right now.
You Republicans are so partisan that you ignore parties when the party is Republican, but whenever it's not, there's a Democratic strawman handy to burn in effigy.
Countdown to your response "But Clinton..." in 10, 9, 8...
I looked in the configs of my DLP TV, and it has a V-Chip. It's not currently mandatory. If it were any extra expense that could stop consumers from buying the model/brand with one, the manufacturer would drop it.
However, consumers do not make rational decisions about products they don't understand, that solve a problem they will face in several years (when they have kids), that have been demonized as a brand in their youth, that they've heard has been "fixed" somewhere else (like maybe their cable box). They get a vague feeling of discomfort that crushes any occasional rational consideration, and the solution dies before it can be accepted, or embraded, by the market.
There is, however, a middle ground. All TVs could be required to be "V-Chip ready", and by default include them as a module. If you understand them enough to skip them, you can "opt-out". Make the savings include the cost of the TV's interface to the missing chip, and only people who default to the chip will pay for the whole subsystem. People who don't understand the V-Chip are more likely to need it, rather than just discipline their kids, because they also default to letting their kids watch just anything.
OTOH, there isn't a single Congressmember who both understands that kind of tech/economics/freedom compromise, and can convince any others of it. So while that opt-out requirement is the right tech solution, it isn't a practical political solution. Of the cruder alternatives, the one that works best overall is requiring every TV to include one.
Which a clever manufacturer could implement with opt-in. And thereby also satisfy their market's desire for choice. So even under the actual coming FCC requirement, we can see whether the choice can be managed by the market, as decided by the manufacturers who have the most interest in serving it properly.
No, that's the dichotomy: consumers screen the content (including no screening) or government/providers screen it (which always includes screening, like the status quo).
We might even agree, Anonymous ambiguous Coward, in finer detail. But you've got to say something meaningful, not just sarcastically obnoxious.
You're an anarchist. Corporations love the power vacuum your ideology demands.
That's why we have to get involved. Because the Republican government has already started to close up shop. Accommodating our involvement will take a while, probably longer than Bush has in power. So we have a chance to force this open, and make it universal: the only combo that actually works.
I note that the problem is exactly like that of verifiable/secret elections. If we can get Americans to care about this kind of TV, we can probably get them to care about that kind of voting booth. And then make openness and security the default, rather than the exception. To complete the circle, we need to get the campaign on TV.
I never understood the opposition to the V-Chip. Why shouldn't the multimedia client (TV) come with a network screening app? In HW, so it's harder to crack, especially by literal "script kiddies".
The alternative is that the government and providers screen content at the server, without consumer choice.
The only problem is that today's FCC, coming at the tail end of the Republican covert government, will probably install spyware on their "Super" V-Chip. So instead of all your TV signals of all they offer coming down your wire or over the air, for you to privately select from, their "Super" V-Chip will send a log to the NSA. Crossreferenced to all your personal data, including email, phone, surveillance video, and all the electronic/digital transactions that profile your life.
Eventually the NSA will convince us to implant an RFID V-Chip "so we can easily tune our TVs wherever we go".
But if we get a private V-Chip now, before they do it, then we can satisfy the demand for convenience before that convenience is exploited to mask total privacy invasion. If the V-Chip specs and HW/firmware/SW are open, then we can get both safety and convenience. That's known as "freedom": the (traditional) American Way.
To me the most exciting part is that they're putting 2x10Gb ethernet ports directly on the CPU. The crypto is cool too: I hope it's not encapsulated entirely in the ethernet, so apps can call it directly.
If they made these CPUs cheap enough, we could put them on PCI-e cards in a Xeon, and run a Linux cluster over the PCI-e, coordinated by apps running on the Xeon. Or maybe stuff a Niagara/PCI-e box with extras, like we used to do with Mac Quadra 950/NuBus cards. But this time with 20Gbps ethernet per node, for a networked grid of nodes.
There's only one of you. Don't get started on multiple personalities when you're just a sockpuppet.
Ha ha, I can post right back at your delusional posts. This is fun. And easier than having to actually analyze your posts! Tell me more about your homosexual fantasies about me, now that you've got me "cornered".
Stupid homophobe virgin.