Plot is another reason why there aren't female Jedi...
For main characters, it's obvious that Obi Wan has to be male. Droids are genderless. Jar Jar is an alien, and while I guess he's male, he could very well be hermaphroditic. Anakin has to be male. Qui Gon is the only one I could hazard as being replaced by a female... But in this case I don't think it's a sexist thing for trying to create a father/son thing between Obi Wan and Qui Gon. You mean bit parts and villians who are female?
Wouldn't that be as big a disservice as not having enough women anyway? What about the fact that Amidala/Padme is such a strong character? To the end?
I'm more likely to believe that midi-chlorians as organisms are attracted to and flourish in the bodies of Force strong and sensitive people; it may even impart some level of ability or skill to the host, thus the symbiosis explanation.
I don't think midi-chlorians themselves are causes for the Force talents, just indicators.
Sort of like me having black hair doesn't indicate I'm Chinese, but that being Chinese means I have black hair.
There's no reason to believe(yet) that Obi Wan should remember very much R2D2... Especially since he's just a droid!
It would be like remembering the license plate of your friends car, 15 years ago... Something you may have known once, but forgotten over time because it just isn't relevant.
I'll want to look into this when I see it tomorrow =)
However I hear that Jar Jar was using a live action stand in... so it seems to me you may be looking too deeply for flaws that don't exist. It would be hard to make a mistake like that if it was intentional...
Why should Vader take notice of another protocol droid?
Why would C3P0 know that Vader and Anakin are the same?
Of course there's also the fact that C3P0 wasn't even complete when he's left behind on Tatooine! He doesn't have nearly all the mental and physical components installed that we know and see in the original trilogy.
So the Force is an immeasurable unknown dimensional stuff that permeates and extends throughout all existence.
These midi-cholrian things actually exist within the realm of both dimensions, and in living inside host creatures, allows these host creatures to tap into the Force, which pervades all things, surrounds us, imbues us with life and energy and all that other mysticism crap.
But this is rationalization on my part to reconcile this relatively techy explanation with the much loved mystic explanation of the original trilogy.
So you grab and OC 2 Celery 300As to 450, pop in two PGP(?) linked Ultra TNT2s to further accelerate the system, a 3d PCI sound card to deal with all the sound effects and processing, and pop in Quake3Arena at 1600x1280 or something...
*Should* be playable. Otherwise, just drop down to 1280x1024 or something =)
Sorta like the difference between a DSP and general purpose processor; at some point a processor is complex enough and powerful enough that loading and unloading programs into cache and memories is efficient enough, over dedicated processors for every function, that an OS scheduler is devised and implemented. As the process sees more use and becomes more of a bottleneck, dedicated hardware(like 3d cards, sound cards, SCSI cards, etc) develop to offload the tasks from the general purpose processor, though in a pinch the general purpose processor can do 3d geometry processing, or sound processing, handling device interrupts and stuff.
I'd imagine that people getting side tracked may also be a function of discrimination; the brain fails to value the original task as of higher importance than the secondary task, and thus 'forgets' to switch back.
Regardless if we decide that the human brain is a computer ala turing's machine, the human brain and being can and is already programmable and constantly being programmed...
Look at commercials, advertisements, and marketing as functions of programming a person. Look at movies as ways in which to program a person to act, behave, and believe. Saturday morning cartoons program kids in what is 'right', 'wrong', and 'okay', and our politicians, our news agencies, our TV, they all program us towards what is socially acceptable and unacceptable.
Ills such as racism, sexism, ageism, etc, can all be traced to unwanted side effects of social programming, unless of course you believe those are fundamentally built into the human psyche.
-AS
128 bit version here...
on
Netscape 4.6
·
· Score: 3
For those looking for it... For whatever reason, the link above doesn't work correctly; an extra space is inserted between the 'e' and the 'n' in the term "win32-en-complete"
https://wwwus.netscape.com/usdl-bin/pdms_dnstest .cgi?PRODUCT=communicator4.6-win32-en-comp lete-128&COMPONENTS=CLIENT&TEMPLATES=NSCP Copy the link, paste it into the correct place, delete the extra space, and grab the 128bit copy!
As far as I know, we don't actually have a real model to explain exactly how superconductivity works, other than intuitive guesses...
IIRC, a superconductor is impervious to magnetic fields, and also happens to freeze the magnetic field already around it when it happens to turn superconductive.
There is also a relationship that magnetic fields can induce current flow, and current flow induces magnetic fields, right? I wonder if that is the principle behind this perfect insulator; magnetic flux lines or something frozen in such a way that it actually inhibits current flow, at least in some directions.
That would only disqualify it if the HV source were undirected and just took the path of least resistence, which would actually be the user as you have pointed out. Think lightning, I guess.
However, currently tasers work fine except they are limited by their short range; the taser *I think* completes it's own circuit unless it touches another individual, in which the circuit involving the earth and the other individual is much more attractive.
Essentially if you attached a UV laser in front of a taser, you'd get this effect. Two lasers in parallel is even better for providing an ionized path because it's just so much larger in diameter, but is unnecessary for its functioning.
My dad says its a fine balance between enjoying your life and saving it; on one hand killing yourself for $75,000 a year and saving all of it is worthless compared to a more leisurely life on only $50,000 a year.
Money exists only to be spent. He's told me to sink everything I can into 401k, stock options, etc., to also not to fear spending, especially when I'm young. Of course, he's view is that I will essentially be working for the rest of my life, since there isn't a real value to quitting/retiring if you enjoy what you do.
Thanks again
-AS
Re:Warning! Rocky shores ahead!
on
Linux 2.3.0
·
· Score: 3
What are you talking about? No one is mentioning a lowering of standards; he just mentions and warns the unprepared that playing with devel patches and such is like tinkering with a very unstable bomb, to be handled with care.
Usability has nothing to do with catering to the clueless masses, if that is what you are hinting at, and while it is attractive to the clueless, it is just as important for the newbies; larger installed base is a strength of Linux, and not a detriment.
In a similar vein, would not firing a UV laser at an approaching thundercloud force it to discharge? You'd need a large Faraday cage/lightning rod around the laser to protect it, but otherwise lightning storms could be controlled and directed.
Wouldn't that be neat? Seeing arcs of lightning, as performance art?
My 2 cents, after reading a few of the opinions on this thread...
Sony is very forward thinking, I believe. They have a very strong base, with the PSX, and plan to grow it even further with the PSX2. For the longest time games and consoles were for kids, and it was the era of SNES and Genesis. Enter Playstation, alongside the Jaguar, N64, and Saturn... Of all of them PSX is the biggest slice of the game market now, 5 years later, and by the time PSX2 comes out, will be positioned exactly for all those teens who bought into the PSX, and co-incidentally will have gone through college and are now young adults; they can afford a 300$ gaming device, I think.
Sony can and will definitely leverage its advantages, the large installed user base by utilizing the current games and controllers in their PSX2, while also embracing a new range of technologies. It is not rare to see 2 or 3 CD games now, so DVD will be a welcome addition to their arsenal. Likewise, the PSX is *finally* getting pushed to its limits, and even if Sony has overestimated their performance figures by an order of magnitude, and can only provide 7 million polygons per second, comparable to a V3 system, it will be more than enough; developers like Square will sell the system, and not the number of polygons per second the system pushes.
People complain about the price and such; Sony will probably PLAN on losing money per unit, as long as there remains strong sales of software/games for the unit, and as all the teen-aged gamers of today grow up into consumers of tomorrow, there will be no shortage of buyers for quality games.
DVD movie support is a plus, and will leverage Sony's own DVD market, likewise the FireWire support and their own line of FireWire devices.
It would surprise me if Sony seriously marketed this towards anything other than the home market, as a functional integrated home entertainment device, for movies, games, email, web browsing, and minor computing tasks.
There exists and will not exist anything in the market that will compete at this target price range; Come on, a bunch of Cyrix CPUs and Rage Pros currently inhabit the 300$ PC market, and 2 years from now we will see 300MHz Celerons and Savage4s in that price range; they would still suffer from the complexity of the PC architecture, unless Intel manages to push something drastic through the channels, and they would still suffer from the performance bottlenecks of EIDE drives, low small busses to shuttle data around, and the generally unoptimized nature of their hardware for high performance.
On the flip side, I really doubt Sony will even come close to producing a device that can push 75 million polygons per second, or whatever they are quoting, without the significant help of giants such as Intel or IBM; AMD, NVIDIA, etc and all the other companies have problems manufacturing to high specs, how can I be expected to believe Sony and Toshiba can do so?
Likewise, their sails may be seriously deflated by Dreamcast, esp if Sega has really gotten their act together... The lure of the DC is that it is WinCE compatible, and games targeted towards the DC is much easier to retarget towards desktop PCs than the usual...
Still, Sony has guts and balls, grabbing the market away from Nintendo, with a device that will fit perfectly in the homes in many consumers in the next few years...
I'll probably get one, just so I can play Xenogears2 on it or something =)
They are listed as 'poetry', or something like that, if you see the Apple download listing...
If nothing else, it let me know what these people sounded like.
I so much wish they had done one with Obi-Wan... He's the one I want to hear!
Years of critical analysis in my English classes can't help but applying foreshadowing and contextual analysis to the commercials... and I come up with some really bad feelings...
But Star Wars has universal appeal across all race, gender, ethnic, and social boundaries. You make it seem as all the geeks are pre-teens.
Quite a few of us are probably college and post college, who were born just shy of being able to enjoy the original Star Wars phenomena and want to indulge ourselves in every possible way in the new Star Wars movie.
Myself, I'll be waiting a while since I can't just ditch school, much as I like to, in order to see it.
My friends? They'll be skipping school multiple times to see it, probably.
Ya know, Star Wars is a life, to some people out here; is it any less important than flavor of OS, than favorite sports team, than must see rock idol?
Relax a little, or you'll give yourself a hernia =)
Slashdot Mirror
Plot is another reason why there aren't female Jedi...
For main characters, it's obvious that Obi Wan has to be male. Droids are genderless. Jar Jar is an alien, and while I guess he's male, he could very well be hermaphroditic. Anakin has to be male. Qui Gon is the only one I could hazard as being replaced by a female... But in this case I don't think it's a sexist thing for trying to create a father/son thing between Obi Wan and Qui Gon. You mean bit parts and villians who are female?
Wouldn't that be as big a disservice as not having enough women anyway? What about the fact that Amidala/Padme is such a strong character? To the end?
-AS
Um, I was under the impression that Anakin(and Luke) were talking to R2D2, and not themselves...
So when Anakin is screaming out all these these, it's because R2D2 is telling him one thing, like "Why aren't you in control of the ship?"
and Anakin is saying
"The auto-pilot is on!"
Likewise for Luke...
Perhaps I'm seeing too much, but it makes a lot of sense to me...
AS
-AS
I'm more likely to believe that midi-chlorians as organisms are attracted to and flourish in the bodies of Force strong and sensitive people; it may even impart some level of ability or skill to the host, thus the symbiosis explanation.
I don't think midi-chlorians themselves are causes for the Force talents, just indicators.
Sort of like me having black hair doesn't indicate I'm Chinese, but that being Chinese means I have black hair.
AS
-AS
There's no reason to believe(yet) that Obi Wan should remember very much R2D2... Especially since he's just a droid!
It would be like remembering the license plate of your friends car, 15 years ago... Something you may have known once, but forgotten over time because it just isn't relevant.
AS
-AS
I'll want to look into this when I see it tomorrow =)
However I hear that Jar Jar was using a live action stand in... so it seems to me you may be looking too deeply for flaws that don't exist. It would be hard to make a mistake like that if it was intentional...
But I'll look!
-AS
Why should Vader take notice of another protocol droid?
Why would C3P0 know that Vader and Anakin are the same?
Of course there's also the fact that C3P0 wasn't even complete when he's left behind on Tatooine! He doesn't have nearly all the mental and physical components installed that we know and see in the original trilogy.
-AS
It's not so odd/weird.
So the Force is an immeasurable unknown dimensional stuff that permeates and extends throughout all existence.
These midi-cholrian things actually exist within the realm of both dimensions, and in living inside host creatures, allows these host creatures to tap into the Force, which pervades all things, surrounds us, imbues us with life and energy and all that other mysticism crap.
But this is rationalization on my part to reconcile this relatively techy explanation with the much loved mystic explanation of the original trilogy.
-AS
So you grab and OC 2 Celery 300As to 450, pop in two PGP(?) linked Ultra TNT2s to further accelerate the system, a 3d PCI sound card to deal with all the sound effects and processing, and pop in Quake3Arena at 1600x1280 or something...
*Should* be playable. Otherwise, just drop down to 1280x1024 or something =)
Gosh, but this is so incredibly cool.
-AS
Sorta like the difference between a DSP and general purpose processor; at some point a processor is complex enough and powerful enough that loading and unloading programs into cache and memories is efficient enough, over dedicated processors for every function, that an OS scheduler is devised and implemented. As the process sees more use and becomes more of a bottleneck, dedicated hardware(like 3d cards, sound cards, SCSI cards, etc) develop to offload the tasks from the general purpose processor, though in a pinch the general purpose processor can do 3d geometry processing, or sound processing, handling device interrupts and stuff.
I'd imagine that people getting side tracked may also be a function of discrimination; the brain fails to value the original task as of higher importance than the secondary task, and thus 'forgets' to switch back.
-AS
Regardless if we decide that the human brain is a computer ala turing's machine, the human brain and being can and is already programmable and constantly being programmed...
Look at commercials, advertisements, and marketing as functions of programming a person. Look at movies as ways in which to program a person to act, behave, and believe. Saturday morning cartoons program kids in what is 'right', 'wrong', and 'okay', and our politicians, our news agencies, our TV, they all program us towards what is socially acceptable and unacceptable.
Ills such as racism, sexism, ageism, etc, can all be traced to unwanted side effects of social programming, unless of course you believe those are fundamentally built into the human psyche.
-AS
128 bit version
t .cgi?PRODUCT=communicator4.6-win32-en-comp lete-128&COMPONENTS=CLIENT&TEMPLATES=NSCP
For those looking for it... For whatever reason, the link above doesn't work correctly; an extra space is inserted between the 'e' and the 'n' in the term "win32-en-complete"
https://wwwus.netscape.com/usdl-bin/pdms_dnstes
Copy the link, paste it into the correct place, delete the extra space, and grab the 128bit copy!
Found this at Ars Technica
Hopefully this doesn't get lost in the thread
-AS
As far as I know, we don't actually have a real model to explain exactly how superconductivity works, other than intuitive guesses...
IIRC, a superconductor is impervious to magnetic fields, and also happens to freeze the magnetic field already around it when it happens to turn superconductive.
There is also a relationship that magnetic fields can induce current flow, and current flow induces magnetic fields, right? I wonder if that is the principle behind this perfect insulator; magnetic flux lines or something frozen in such a way that it actually inhibits current flow, at least in some directions.
-AS
I have no clue on the anti-Sony sentiment being suggested...
But give it a couple years, and I might get one just for novelty.
Anyone watch Doctor Who? Remember K9?
Even cooler, if the Aibo could be given Kitt's personality. Assuming you aren't as stupid as Hasslehoff and always getting into trouble.
-AS
That would only disqualify it if the HV source were undirected and just took the path of least resistence, which would actually be the user as you have pointed out. Think lightning, I guess.
However, currently tasers work fine except they are limited by their short range; the taser *I think* completes it's own circuit unless it touches another individual, in which the circuit involving the earth and the other individual is much more attractive.
Essentially if you attached a UV laser in front of a taser, you'd get this effect. Two lasers in parallel is even better for providing an ionized path because it's just so much larger in diameter, but is unnecessary for its functioning.
-AS
Everyone has had some excellent advice...
My dad says its a fine balance between enjoying your life and saving it; on one hand killing yourself for $75,000 a year and saving all of it is worthless compared to a more leisurely life on only $50,000 a year.
Money exists only to be spent. He's told me to sink everything I can into 401k, stock options, etc., to also not to fear spending, especially when I'm young. Of course, he's view is that I will essentially be working for the rest of my life, since there isn't a real value to quitting/retiring if you enjoy what you do.
Thanks again
-AS
What are you talking about?
No one is mentioning a lowering of standards; he just mentions and warns the unprepared that playing with devel patches and such is like tinkering with a very unstable bomb, to be handled with care.
Usability has nothing to do with catering to the clueless masses, if that is what you are hinting at, and while it is attractive to the clueless, it is just as important for the newbies; larger installed base is a strength of Linux, and not a detriment.
-AS
Man you're in a bad mood. Maybe killing yourself would fix all your problems.
Of course, I never read Dr.Seuss; maybe if I had, I'd be hating life too.
Then again, everyone dies, so no need to feel badly because of it.
-AS
Yeah, but standing inside one of those cages would surely be neat, assuming you were wearing ear muffs, had an oxygen tank, and welder's goggles.
Wouldn't want our eardrums to explode, to breath in pure ozone, or to be blinded by zillions of volts, now, would we?
Still... It would be impressive...
I wonder if I could build me a UV laser =)
Look out, I'll prolly be on the evening news for frying myself with lightning.
-AS
That's the best advice I've had yet.
I'll give it a try; I'll keep you posted on how it goes!
Hm, if I happen to kill myself when I'm happy, then everything will be perfect. Why don't more people do this?
Thanks!
-AS
In a similar vein, would not firing a UV laser at an approaching thundercloud force it to discharge? You'd need a large Faraday cage/lightning rod around the laser to protect it, but otherwise lightning storms could be controlled and directed.
Wouldn't that be neat? Seeing arcs of lightning, as performance art?
-AS
Graduating this year, and I see all this talk from friends and /. about burn out...
I approach the work force with trepidation; any hints, suggestions?
Follow passion over paycheck? That's my initial reaction at least.
-AS
My 2 cents, after reading a few of the opinions on this thread...
Sony is very forward thinking, I believe. They have a very strong base, with the PSX, and plan to grow it even further with the PSX2. For the longest time games and consoles were for kids, and it was the era of SNES and Genesis. Enter Playstation, alongside the Jaguar, N64, and Saturn... Of all of them PSX is the biggest slice of the game market now, 5 years later, and by the time PSX2 comes out, will be positioned exactly for all those teens who bought into the PSX, and co-incidentally will have gone through college and are now young adults; they can afford a 300$ gaming device, I think.
Sony can and will definitely leverage its advantages, the large installed user base by utilizing the current games and controllers in their PSX2, while also embracing a new range of technologies. It is not rare to see 2 or 3 CD games now, so DVD will be a welcome addition to their arsenal. Likewise, the PSX is *finally* getting pushed to its limits, and even if Sony has overestimated their performance figures by an order of magnitude, and can only provide 7 million polygons per second, comparable to a V3 system, it will be more than enough; developers like Square will sell the system, and not the number of polygons per second the system pushes.
People complain about the price and such; Sony will probably PLAN on losing money per unit, as long as there remains strong sales of software/games for the unit, and as all the teen-aged gamers of today grow up into consumers of tomorrow, there will be no shortage of buyers for quality games.
DVD movie support is a plus, and will leverage Sony's own DVD market, likewise the FireWire support and their own line of FireWire devices.
It would surprise me if Sony seriously marketed this towards anything other than the home market, as a functional integrated home entertainment device, for movies, games, email, web browsing, and minor computing tasks.
There exists and will not exist anything in the market that will compete at this target price range; Come on, a bunch of Cyrix CPUs and Rage Pros currently inhabit the 300$ PC market, and 2 years from now we will see 300MHz Celerons and Savage4s in that price range; they would still suffer from the complexity of the PC architecture, unless Intel manages to push something drastic through the channels, and they would still suffer from the performance bottlenecks of EIDE drives, low small busses to shuttle data around, and the generally unoptimized nature of their hardware for high performance.
On the flip side, I really doubt Sony will even come close to producing a device that can push 75 million polygons per second, or whatever they are quoting, without the significant help of giants such as Intel or IBM; AMD, NVIDIA, etc and all the other companies have problems manufacturing to high specs, how can I be expected to believe Sony and Toshiba can do so?
Likewise, their sails may be seriously deflated by Dreamcast, esp if Sega has really gotten their act together... The lure of the DC is that it is WinCE compatible, and games targeted towards the DC is much easier to retarget towards desktop PCs than the usual...
Still, Sony has guts and balls, grabbing the market away from Nintendo, with a device that will fit perfectly in the homes in many consumers in the next few years...
I'll probably get one, just so I can play Xenogears2 on it or something =)
-AS
They are listed as 'poetry', or something like that, if you see the Apple download listing...
If nothing else, it let me know what these people sounded like.
I so much wish they had done one with Obi-Wan... He's the one I want to hear!
Years of critical analysis in my English classes can't help but applying foreshadowing and contextual analysis to the commercials... and I come up with some really bad feelings...
I've got a bad feeling about this.
Gosh, what do you have against Star Wars?
Titanic may have been able to draw the women...
But Star Wars has universal appeal across all race, gender, ethnic, and social boundaries. You make it seem as all the geeks are pre-teens.
Quite a few of us are probably college and post college, who were born just shy of being able to enjoy the original Star Wars phenomena and want to indulge ourselves in every possible way in the new Star Wars movie.
Myself, I'll be waiting a while since I can't just ditch school, much as I like to, in order to see it.
My friends? They'll be skipping school multiple times to see it, probably.
Ya know, Star Wars is a life, to some people out here; is it any less important than flavor of OS, than favorite sports team, than must see rock idol?
Relax a little, or you'll give yourself a hernia =)
Argh!
.doc, even .html if it isn't too overly complex...
I have Pagemaker 6.0!
Can you repost in 6.0 format, please?
I can try to get it in other formats once I can open it...
.wpd,
No PDFs, sorry.