Back when I played, I honestly tried to role-play. It netted me a lot of confused reactions. The first time I encountered someone with a pet was while waiting at a shuttleport. I told the guy, "I don't think they allow pets on the shuttle," and he thought I was confused about the game mechanics.
I guess my point is that getting any role-playing done is a chicken-and-egg problem, because I can't explain that I'm role-playing without breaking character.
First of all, I thought you were trying to say Morpheus's monologue should be trimmed to 3 minutes, so I apologize for the misunderstanding.
Expanding that bit might be good. Morpheus comes off as a religious zealot in Reloaded, which I think was intended. His faith that Neo is the answer to everything, and The Prophecy is all that matters was fairly obvious, and to me he seemed to put too much faith in the idea that things had to work out in the end, but a lot of people I talked to didn't seem to notice the "blind" part of his blind faith. Letting him rant a little longer like some kind of fire-and-brimstone preacher could have made it more obvious, might drive home the point that his beliefs are perhaps irrational. On the other hand, maybe the goal was to get the audience to buy what Morpheus was selling (he's pretty well established as being a sort of sage in the first film), so maybe subtlety is better. I imagine well-written dialog could be constructed to lead the audience in either direction.
As to the other points:
There's another potential problem with trimming the 5 1/2 minute scene. It includes two "important" pieces of dialog ("Some things do change," and "I'm not letting go"). Both of these lines get repeated by the listener later in the film, which appears to be a kind of shorthand for showing a connection, or something learned (compare to the first film, where Neo copies Morpheus's "come get some" hand gesture). Surely some of that can get trimmed and the point still made, but the rave/sex itself (the contiguous part without any dialogue at all) is under three and a half minutes (I have the DVD handy; sorry if I'm being a fanboy). I agree, it feels like an eternity, but it's really not as long as everyone thinks. The cynical part of me thinks the scene was just an excuse to put another song on the soundtrack, but I'm overall satisfied with the end result.
You said: "This is a movie about the prison of our mind, lets use it."
I don't know that I even agree with this statement, though. The first film was definitely about that, but I don't think the sequels were necessarily about that anymore. I mean, Revolutions? It seemed that more happened outside the Matrix than in it, and by then it felt like Zion and (former) Agent Smith were the center of the story. I'll let somebody else argue about what the trilogy as a whole was or wasn't about. It just seems to me that the individual films had separate agendas to push, and I think that's why a lot of fans of the original have a problem with the sequels.
I do kind of wish I hadn't seen more of Neo's butt than Trinity's, though.:-)
It had a place and it was a good place, but it wasn't a 10 minute place, it was a 2 minute place... And that is how to make it better. 3 minutes of morpheus speechifying/praying/preaching and 2 minutes of dancing.
Morpheus's monologue lasted for two minutes; the sex/rave scene (from the moment Morpheus left the "pulpit" to the dissolve to "lights out" throughout Zion) was just over five and a half minutes.
There's exaggerating to make a point, and then there's just making shit up.
Yes, the neo/trinity sex scene/rave was stupid. Don't let a lame 10 minute trip ruin the subsequent 3 hours.
I'm going to have to tentatively disagree with you on this one. I admit, the instant the drums started, I immediately flashed to the Special Edition version of Jabba's Palace: I was embarassed for myself, for the other theater goers who paid full price on opening day, and for the actors onscreen. Even now, I still get an echo of that embarassment whenever I see it.
The thing of it is, once the film was over, and I was thinking about the film as a whole, I realized the scene actually served a purpose. It put into stark contrast the human element of Zion. The rave was a celebration of all things primal, it was a rebellion against the order, the cleanliness, and the cold emotionlessness of the Matrix.
Was it poorly executed? Perhaps. But I can't think of any way to have made it better. Sweat, dirt, raw sexuality,...
You know, now that I think about it, it's an interesting point that Club Hell had a lot of the same aspects, but still felt less "vital," for lack of a better word.
Don't forget, mail-in rebates are also a way to get you to voluntarily hand over your personal information to a third party so Best Buy can claim it didn't sell it without your knowledge, and the third party can claim it has an existing business relationship with you (calculating the probability of a kickback is left as an exercise for the reader).
I don't know which is more disturbing: that no one questions the assertion that programmers don't give a whit about logic, or that there is compelling evidence that many of them don't.
When desktop and corporate customers are willing to wait 10 years for products that incorporate new technology, we can talk.
Heh. I love it. Imagine Corporate America suddenly demanding Microsoft offer support contracts for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on MS-DOS 6.22 (the best they had for sale as of June 28, 1994, according to Windows History).
I'd rather use those CPU cycles for something worthwhile i think...
First, people say this every damned time an improvement is made to a GUI. If anybody listened, we'd all still be using CLI exclusively. Second, most people using their 3 GHz machine for office work most certainly DO have the spare cycles.
Okay, let me first state that I agree with the sentiment expressed; too many people seem to assume that we're all still running 486s, and that CPU cycles are so valuable that spending a man-month tweaking some C or Assembly to save a dozen cycles is still a reasonable trade-off.
That said, I don't think most people are using 3GHz machines for office work. I'll admit I don't have any evidence for this beyond the fact that developers where I work use 1.8GHz machines. There's no way my workstation could handle this interface, especially since it doesn't have a 3D card. My home PC has a 3D card, but the CPU is even slower, so I don't know how that affects the equation.
Personally, the screenshots don't thrill me all that much. Sweeping through a cityscape is pretty cool in the movies, but I don't fancy having to be the pilot on such a trip every single day.
Fiduciary responsibility incentive = some reason employees have to care about what happens to the company as a whole and make it successful as opposed to doing the minimum to avoid getting fired.
I don't buy it. I already have a reason to ensure my employer's success. It's called a "paycheck." If the company I work for flounders, then it can't pay me.
And as far as this "above and beyond" bullshit goes: If you want me to wear fifteen pieces of flair instead of the minimum thirteen, then make fifteen the minimum and I'll do that.
Tut, tut. I shall ask for only 1% of the first license (rounded down: $0.00), 2% of second license (rounded down: $0.00), 4% of the third license (rounded down: $0.00),...
Clearly, my offer is much more generous than Glonoinha's, so I urge you to take me up on it.
In other words, arguing that privacy is necessary so that you can continue to practice your "perversions" doesn't convince people who want to take it away.
Fair enough. How about this? "I heard the FBI wants to secretly videotape people while they vote/have sex/take a dump/whatever. I assume you have no objections, since you don't have anything to hide."
Privacy is just plain unnatural. It [sic] only in the last centuray [sic] that its [sic] had any real meaning. Before mass transport, everyone knew everyone else in their area, and everyone knew everyone else's buisness.
Popular Rule is just plain unnatural. It's only in the last couple of centuries that it's had any real meaning. Before the American Revolution, everyone lived under the rule of someone who came to power by military force or accident of birth, and everyone just accepted it.
But if you never commit a crime, why do you need (or value) privacy? What do you get out of it?
What about things which are not illegal, but just socially frowned upon? Have you never heard of Matthew Shepard? What happens if there's a coup, and The United States is taken over by a hate-monger? Do all those databases filled with your personal peccadillos suddenly disappear?
He didn't say that the BSD license is public domain.
No, and I probably focused too much of my grief on the issue toward dirk specifically, but the comparison of the BSD license with public domain gets made all the time on Slashdot, and most people who parrot it don't realize the analogy only works on the most superficial level. The limitations imposed by the BSD license are incredibly minor, but failure to conform to them sets oneself up for some serious legal trouble, given the state of copyright law in many WIPO countries.
Finally, and this is a whole other can of worms in itself, I question whether it's possible to release source code into the public domain anymore. The rewrite of copyright laws in the 1970s (I forget which year) made copyright grants automatic at the moment the work was created. There's no clear procedure for getting the legal system to recognize the fact that you don't want that copyright. Now, code written before this law was changed needed to be registered, so some older stuff might be truly public domain (such as--perhaps--the old Unix source code at the heart of the BSD lawsuit).
The question of whether GPL or BSD is more free depends on who we're talking about. BSD is more free if you're a developer, because you can basically do whatever you want with the source. The GPL is more free if you're an end-user, because you're always guaranteed not to get locked in to any particular developer to do your maintenance. It's apples and oranges.
Finally, the BSD license is not public domain, and people really need to stop making that rather ridiculous comparison. If you don't include the proper copyright notice, you are not allowed to redistribute BSD-licensed software.
I know of one 2600 game that was effectively impossible to play on a 7800: Space Shuttle. The problem was a hardware one, though, not software. Space Shuttle was so horrendously complex that they needed to remap both of the difficulty switches, the select switch, and the color/b&w switch to perform in-game functions. The problem is that the 7800 replaced the color/b&w toggle with the pause button. The pause button sent the exact same signal as the color/b&w button (Try it! Put something older like Combat or Space Invaders into a 7800 and press Pause; the game switches to black-and-white); the way it worked, though, was to continuously send a "color" signal except when the button was depressed; it then switched to "black-and-white" until the button was released, at which point it reverted to "color" again.
In order to play Space Shuttle on a 7800, then, there would be points in the game when you'd be required to hold down the pause button for minutes at a time. Unless you had a patient assistant to do this for you, though, you were doomed to lose; there were just too many other controls you had to manipulate to keep a finger thus occupied.
If you're making six figures, then Yes, you're just being greedy. No job that doesn't involve risk to human life deserves that kind of income. The fact that our jobs are going to India, China, etc., prove that.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't bother the local boys with this one; go straight to the FBI. The email crossed state lines to get to you.
Back when I played, I honestly tried to role-play. It netted me a lot of confused reactions. The first time I encountered someone with a pet was while waiting at a shuttleport. I told the guy, "I don't think they allow pets on the shuttle," and he thought I was confused about the game mechanics.
I guess my point is that getting any role-playing done is a chicken-and-egg problem, because I can't explain that I'm role-playing without breaking character.
First of all, I thought you were trying to say Morpheus's monologue should be trimmed to 3 minutes, so I apologize for the misunderstanding.
Expanding that bit might be good. Morpheus comes off as a religious zealot in Reloaded, which I think was intended. His faith that Neo is the answer to everything, and The Prophecy is all that matters was fairly obvious, and to me he seemed to put too much faith in the idea that things had to work out in the end, but a lot of people I talked to didn't seem to notice the "blind" part of his blind faith. Letting him rant a little longer like some kind of fire-and-brimstone preacher could have made it more obvious, might drive home the point that his beliefs are perhaps irrational. On the other hand, maybe the goal was to get the audience to buy what Morpheus was selling (he's pretty well established as being a sort of sage in the first film), so maybe subtlety is better. I imagine well-written dialog could be constructed to lead the audience in either direction.
As to the other points:
There's another potential problem with trimming the 5 1/2 minute scene. It includes two "important" pieces of dialog ("Some things do change," and "I'm not letting go"). Both of these lines get repeated by the listener later in the film, which appears to be a kind of shorthand for showing a connection, or something learned (compare to the first film, where Neo copies Morpheus's "come get some" hand gesture). Surely some of that can get trimmed and the point still made, but the rave/sex itself (the contiguous part without any dialogue at all) is under three and a half minutes (I have the DVD handy; sorry if I'm being a fanboy). I agree, it feels like an eternity, but it's really not as long as everyone thinks. The cynical part of me thinks the scene was just an excuse to put another song on the soundtrack, but I'm overall satisfied with the end result.
You said: "This is a movie about the prison of our mind, lets use it."
I don't know that I even agree with this statement, though. The first film was definitely about that, but I don't think the sequels were necessarily about that anymore. I mean, Revolutions? It seemed that more happened outside the Matrix than in it, and by then it felt like Zion and (former) Agent Smith were the center of the story. I'll let somebody else argue about what the trilogy as a whole was or wasn't about. It just seems to me that the individual films had separate agendas to push, and I think that's why a lot of fans of the original have a problem with the sequels.
I do kind of wish I hadn't seen more of Neo's butt than Trinity's, though. :-)
Morpheus's monologue lasted for two minutes; the sex/rave scene (from the moment Morpheus left the "pulpit" to the dissolve to "lights out" throughout Zion) was just over five and a half minutes.
There's exaggerating to make a point, and then there's just making shit up.
I'm going to have to tentatively disagree with you on this one. I admit, the instant the drums started, I immediately flashed to the Special Edition version of Jabba's Palace: I was embarassed for myself, for the other theater goers who paid full price on opening day, and for the actors onscreen. Even now, I still get an echo of that embarassment whenever I see it.
The thing of it is, once the film was over, and I was thinking about the film as a whole, I realized the scene actually served a purpose. It put into stark contrast the human element of Zion. The rave was a celebration of all things primal, it was a rebellion against the order, the cleanliness, and the cold emotionlessness of the Matrix.
Was it poorly executed? Perhaps. But I can't think of any way to have made it better. Sweat, dirt, raw sexuality,...
You know, now that I think about it, it's an interesting point that Club Hell had a lot of the same aspects, but still felt less "vital," for lack of a better word.
Don't forget, mail-in rebates are also a way to get you to voluntarily hand over your personal information to a third party so Best Buy can claim it didn't sell it without your knowledge, and the third party can claim it has an existing business relationship with you (calculating the probability of a kickback is left as an exercise for the reader).
Sorry, no. I'm running a warez beta version of Sarcasm Detector.
Such as downloading patches for said games?
Dude, this isn't 1991. Everyone needs to connect to a network if they intend to actually use their PCs.
I don't know which is more disturbing: that no one questions the assertion that programmers don't give a whit about logic, or that there is compelling evidence that many of them don't.
Heh. I love it. Imagine Corporate America suddenly demanding Microsoft offer support contracts for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on MS-DOS 6.22 (the best they had for sale as of June 28, 1994, according to Windows History).
Okay, let me first state that I agree with the sentiment expressed; too many people seem to assume that we're all still running 486s, and that CPU cycles are so valuable that spending a man-month tweaking some C or Assembly to save a dozen cycles is still a reasonable trade-off.
That said, I don't think most people are using 3GHz machines for office work. I'll admit I don't have any evidence for this beyond the fact that developers where I work use 1.8GHz machines. There's no way my workstation could handle this interface, especially since it doesn't have a 3D card. My home PC has a 3D card, but the CPU is even slower, so I don't know how that affects the equation.
Personally, the screenshots don't thrill me all that much. Sweeping through a cityscape is pretty cool in the movies, but I don't fancy having to be the pilot on such a trip every single day.
I don't buy it. I already have a reason to ensure my employer's success. It's called a "paycheck." If the company I work for flounders, then it can't pay me.
And as far as this "above and beyond" bullshit goes: If you want me to wear fifteen pieces of flair instead of the minimum thirteen, then make fifteen the minimum and I'll do that.
Tut, tut. I shall ask for only 1% of the first license (rounded down: $0.00), 2% of second license (rounded down: $0.00), 4% of the third license (rounded down: $0.00),...
Clearly, my offer is much more generous than Glonoinha's, so I urge you to take me up on it.
Fair enough. How about this? "I heard the FBI wants to secretly videotape people while they vote/have sex/take a dump/whatever. I assume you have no objections, since you don't have anything to hide."
Popular Rule is just plain unnatural. It's only in the last couple of centuries that it's had any real meaning. Before the American Revolution, everyone lived under the rule of someone who came to power by military force or accident of birth, and everyone just accepted it.
What about things which are not illegal, but just socially frowned upon? Have you never heard of Matthew Shepard? What happens if there's a coup, and The United States is taken over by a hate-monger? Do all those databases filled with your personal peccadillos suddenly disappear?
Just FYI: That was a myth.
No, and I probably focused too much of my grief on the issue toward dirk specifically, but the comparison of the BSD license with public domain gets made all the time on Slashdot, and most people who parrot it don't realize the analogy only works on the most superficial level. The limitations imposed by the BSD license are incredibly minor, but failure to conform to them sets oneself up for some serious legal trouble, given the state of copyright law in many WIPO countries.
Finally, and this is a whole other can of worms in itself, I question whether it's possible to release source code into the public domain anymore. The rewrite of copyright laws in the 1970s (I forget which year) made copyright grants automatic at the moment the work was created. There's no clear procedure for getting the legal system to recognize the fact that you don't want that copyright. Now, code written before this law was changed needed to be registered, so some older stuff might be truly public domain (such as--perhaps--the old Unix source code at the heart of the BSD lawsuit).
The question of whether GPL or BSD is more free depends on who we're talking about. BSD is more free if you're a developer, because you can basically do whatever you want with the source. The GPL is more free if you're an end-user, because you're always guaranteed not to get locked in to any particular developer to do your maintenance. It's apples and oranges.
Finally, the BSD license is not public domain, and people really need to stop making that rather ridiculous comparison. If you don't include the proper copyright notice, you are not allowed to redistribute BSD-licensed software.
Ain't that the truth? It seems anymore that the upgrade treadmill is being replaced with an entire fitness center.
I know of one 2600 game that was effectively impossible to play on a 7800: Space Shuttle. The problem was a hardware one, though, not software. Space Shuttle was so horrendously complex that they needed to remap both of the difficulty switches, the select switch, and the color/b&w switch to perform in-game functions. The problem is that the 7800 replaced the color/b&w toggle with the pause button. The pause button sent the exact same signal as the color/b&w button (Try it! Put something older like Combat or Space Invaders into a 7800 and press Pause; the game switches to black-and-white); the way it worked, though, was to continuously send a "color" signal except when the button was depressed; it then switched to "black-and-white" until the button was released, at which point it reverted to "color" again.
In order to play Space Shuttle on a 7800, then, there would be points in the game when you'd be required to hold down the pause button for minutes at a time. Unless you had a patient assistant to do this for you, though, you were doomed to lose; there were just too many other controls you had to manipulate to keep a finger thus occupied.
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Does this not work?
One's own ignorance is bliss. It's the ignorance of others which is Hell.
I wonder how long until they decide that users need to learn to get used to the Dvorak layout, and just start remapping the keyboard for us.
If you're making six figures, then Yes, you're just being greedy. No job that doesn't involve risk to human life deserves that kind of income. The fact that our jobs are going to India, China, etc., prove that.