> You might lose power, you might lose running water, you might get hit by a bus. Even if you hole up in a shack to protect yourself from the script kiddies, psychopaths, terrorists and/or government... you're still gonna die!
Yeah, but we don't mind if they pry the internet out of our cold dead fingers. We just don't want to have to do without it while we're still alive!
> Hey, it's not just the power grid and atm's. There are command and control systems used by the department of defense that folks have migrated to Windows. Our Dept of Homeland security has standardized on Windows. [...] The Army's Landwarrior program is using Windows. [...] This should scare the hell out of a lot of people.
> Most networks don't normally air pilots tho, so I don't see how/why that would help.
Most shows don't require the intellectual engagement that Firefly did, and a pilot may have helped set it up for more people.
However, in a commercial sense I suspect FF was doomed to failure from day one, because it did require that intellectual engagement plus regular viewing. IMO it was simply "too good for television". There just aren't that many people out there who want to invest that much in a show when they can surf across dozens of channels to see who's showing the best jiggle at the moment.
> A lot of people just arent interested in fantasies about space monsters and ghosts. It winds up being special effects laden drivel that costs a shitload to produce [...]
But the sad thing is that FF tried to do something different, and got snuffed before it had time to build up a following.
> The difference between Everybody Loves Raymond and Firefly is the cost of producing. Firefly probably had an expensive budget for all the sets costumes etc, but Raymond is what, a couple of hack actors and a redress of the Married with Children set?
Yes, I think cable has all but killed broadcast network television. Look at how much "reality" shows have eaten into the schedule over the past few years, and how much of the rest is sitcoms and talk shows that have to rely on sexual titillation to draw an audience. Hell, in these parts some of the networks broadcast infomercials in the half hour between the evening news and the prime-time trash. It really looks like the networks aren't raking in enough advertising dollars to pay for anything but the most rudimentary shows anymore. Too much of the audience has migrated to premium cable channels, and the advertisers don't want to throw big piles of money at reduced audiences.
> I never really got to watch much, but as far as "getting into it", FOX screwed around with the order of the episodes, so you really weren't introduced to the show in the way the writers inteneded. Maybe that wouldn't have been enough to make a difference, but I know I will be checking out the DVD just to see what the buzz is about.
Yeah, the first episode was IMO probably the least interesting one, modulo one quick gag that everyone loves. But liking the series is surely a YMMV thingy. If you like complex character interactions you'll like this, but if you like laser cannons and the other usual SF fare you probably won't.
> I mean, just because they can fly around in a space ship, and then land on any random planet with a random technology timeline (6 shooters, etc) and do a random plot (that could happen in 1999 on Earth in my backyard) doesn't mean it feels like sci-fi to me. To me, it was a drama. Thinly disguised with sci-fi elements.
Isn't SF - or any other genre - just window dressing anyway? No matter what window dressing you choose, you've still got to make a good story. You can emphasise plot, characterization, themes, atmosphere, or whatever, but you've got to have something, because the window dressing is no substitute for creative substance.
For that matter, wouldn't most Star Trek plots work just as well if set in Medieval Iceland as they do in deep space in the distant future?
Hell, visit Mission Control in Houston, TX, and see how far you have to walk to find a genuine ranch with herds of cows and horses. And shire-reeves wearing 10-gallon hats and toting revolvers.
It baffles me that people had trouble with a suspension of disbelief over Firefly. What do these people say about Star Trek episodes that feature interstellar energy vortexes that have evolved to eat starships, or at least assume human form and seduce their captains? I'm starting to wonder whether Firefly failed because it nearer reality than what SF fans are accustomed to.
> Don't forget Fox's refusal to air the pilot, forcing them to premiere with a regular episode with no exposition.
Bad time slot, postponed pilot, frequent preemptions, preliminary advertisements that misrepresented what the show was actually about, insufficient advertisements when the show resumed after the multi-week Thanksgiving preemptions (after promising a "blitz")... you could hardly do a show greater disservice if you wanted it to fail.
> Were you watching the same Firefly as I did? With 9 evolving characters, with betrayals, redemptions, tensions and disagrements between characters, high and lows in the morale of the crew, personalities that got reveled layers by layers. Incredibly witty humour(Whedon at its best, IMHO), engaging situations and a dark undertone. There no goody-goody characters, no good vs evil plot, just man vs itself, a step above Angel in that direction.
Yeah, the interesting thing about FF was that even the assholes (Jayne) were likeable characters.
> You talk about FOX executives buisness skills, but skilled businessmen would have either not bought Firefly in the first place, or would have treated it better. It makes no business sense to pay to produce a show and then air it in such a way as to ensure that it would not survive. They just threw that money away.
I can't but believe that FF was the victim of some kind of inter-executive politics, like the way managers in big corporations rise and fall with their competing ideas and will often torpedo their rivals' projects just to get a leg up on the company ladder. Are broadcast networks organized in a way that would make this possible?
> Except a large part of the Firefly fans ARE women. They loved the relationship stuff Whedon manages to throw in without the men noticing.
It wasn't merely "Relationship" stuff: though the show was in the guise of a SF series in the guise of a western (or vice versa; I never figured that out), what it was really about was the characters and their interactions. That may not push everyones' buttons, and it demanded a lot more mental investment from the viewer than the standard captain-gets-in-a-jam-and-then-out fare that you expect from SF television, but in some ways it really was a very sophisticated show as compared to, say, Star Trek.
If you watch much SF TV you'll notice that all the plot-based series are really in a rut. How many shows have you seen with the tired old stuck-in-a-time-loop plot? It was high time someone tried a different approach, and IMO it's a damn shame it didn't work out better. I think if FAUX had managed it better and given it time to grow it would have generated a large and very loyal fan base for that very reason.
I always fight worms with bolt or ball spells, though you can clear them out by hand if you you have a potion of speed or a weapon that allows multiple attacks per round.
> Please include Ann Coulter with the people who are trying to silence people. She's openly said that muslims should be forcibly converted to christianity and that the press is a bunch of liberal traitors who should be shut up and sorted out by force.
Let me start by getting an exasperated "That's just fucking stupid!" out of the way. Surely anyone with an IQ > 50 can figure out that such an attempt would lead to a shitstorm of terrorism that would make people long for the bad old days of 2001-2003.
> What the fuck has happened to this country?!
The phenomenon isn't really new; recall the McCarthy Era and Lincoln's high-handed dealings with a wavering Maryland.
But yeah, we've got a real problem with people who mistake their parochial notions of ethical right-and-wrong with a universial metaphysical Rightness that justifies any means to the desired ends. (Witness the final remarks of the executed abortion-doctor murderer this week.)
And as for the "liberal traitors"... well, surely everyone has seen Hermann Goring's notorious words on that topic by now. Some or the people you deplore are probably pursuing a misguided notion of Righteousness, whereas others are surely pursuing raw power and merely find it convenient to dress it up in the same garb.
> Would you rather be debating on whether the President should be held to the same legal standard as anyone else in the country? Like, for instance, if they got on a witness stand in court, and swore, under oath, and blatantly lied? If it was me, I would have been charged with perjury and put in jail...
Not likely. That kind of lying happens day in and day out in US divorce cases, and virtually no one ever gets slapped with a perjury charge for it.
And you do want the President to be held to the same legal stander as anyone else in the country, right?
> On top of this, Neo Conservative is a somewhat biggoted term. It suggests not only that the Republican party truely is a sensational war machine but that those who join the party in time of war are themselves war mongers.
Yes, neocons tend to be Republicans, but Republicans do not tend to be neocons.
The neocon movement is itself quite diverse, including not only the Wolfowitz style advocates of "benevolent hegemony" but also others such as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, which wants to use religion to sheep the masses - right out of Plato's play book. (On Usenet I see a.sig that summarizes that branch of neocon doctrine as "Religion is the opiate of the masses - and that's a good thing.")
Hopefully the blooming clusterfuck in Iraq will discredit at least the "benevolent hegemony" branch of neoconism, though it's a damn shame so many people had to suffer or die to get that result.
> > It was the liberal Democrats who argued that absentee ballots from oversea military personnel shouldn't be counted.
> Wrong. Some of those ballots were postmarked AFTER the final election date, and that was the only point of dispute. The Bush team wanted those late ballots in, and guess who was not following the law?
And the Democrats didn't have the guts to speak out against it, either.
One of the things that disturbed me most about the whole Florida election fiasco is that the "support our troops" meme has become so strong in the USA that a political party would prefer to lose a presidential election rather than risk the political fallout of insisting that illegal military votes not be counted.
Arguably our democracy has already been subverted, without the black-box voting machines.
> She should be more like the Dixie Chicks, who have alienated their whole fan base.
Apparently the press exaggerated that notion greatly by giving so much air time to the complainers. IIRC someone posted a link here several months ago, revealing that the Chicks' concert attendance and album sales actually went up after those comments.
> Imperialism is more the kind of thing that Hussein was into, in his conquest of areas of Iraq not populated by people of his nationality.
Oddly enough, the "multi-national" Iraq was a creation of the Western powers, not of Saddam's conquests. During a couple of recent world wars those powers had a nasty habit of promising everything to everyone in the Middle East in order to tempt them into dancing to our tune instead of the other side's, and then giving them a big shaft when the war was over and we didn't think we needed them anymore. (Speaking of which, we've actually tried democracy in Iraq before, and the system ultimately produced Saddam himself after the usual sequences of coups.)
Saddam did try a land grab along the banks of the Tigris, which resulted in the dreadful Iran-Iraq war with its estimated million combat casualties, and of course he tried to annex Kuwait by force. Strictly speaking these were revanchism rather than imperialism, though the practical diffence is dubious, to say nothing of Saddam's claim to be the man for the job.
And to clarify:
> Imperialism is more the kind of thing that Hussein was into, in his conquest [...]
Imperialism does not always involve direct conquest. The Romans were past masters at setting up "client states", i.e. puppet governments that would dance to their tune instead of their rival's, without actually annexing them. Surely no one needs to point out the parallels with what's going on in Iraq. (E.g., the USA claims to be providing Iraq with democracy, but won't let go of the puppet strings even to get the desperately needed soldiers and money from the UN. Don't pretend the USA doesn't intend to set up a "democratic" government that will dance to the USA's tunes and none other.)
Add "client state" to your vocabulary, and go back to hear what that English professor has to say.
> I'll bet that none of these expensive studies ever include the cost of cleaning up after the virus/worm of the week that comes with running Microsoft NT/2000/XP. Having everyone in your company having 2 or 3 days a year when their desktop/laptop/server/whatever is unavailable because of cleanup activity should have a definite negative impact on TCO or ROI.
Yes, whenever "TCO" is deployed as a marketing ploy there isn't much interest in the total cost of ownership, but rather in the total for that subset of costs that makes yours look better than theirs. Microsoft very reasonably wants to add in costs beyond what it takes to get a legal installation disk in your hand, but they certainly aren't interested in adding in everything.
Slashdot Mirror
> You might lose power, you might lose running water, you might get hit by a bus. Even if you hole up in a shack to protect yourself from the script kiddies, psychopaths, terrorists and/or government... you're still gonna die!
Yeah, but we don't mind if they pry the internet out of our cold dead fingers. We just don't want to have to do without it while we're still alive!
> >
> Hey, it's not just the power grid and atm's. There are command and control systems used by the department of defense that folks have migrated to Windows. Our Dept of Homeland security has standardized on Windows. [...] The Army's Landwarrior program is using Windows. [...] This should scare the hell out of a lot of people.
Yeah, but it's supposed to scare the other guys!
> Most networks don't normally air pilots tho, so I don't see how/why that would help.
Most shows don't require the intellectual engagement that Firefly did, and a pilot may have helped set it up for more people.
However, in a commercial sense I suspect FF was doomed to failure from day one, because it did require that intellectual engagement plus regular viewing. IMO it was simply "too good for television". There just aren't that many people out there who want to invest that much in a show when they can surf across dozens of channels to see who's showing the best jiggle at the moment.
> A lot of people just arent interested in fantasies about space monsters and ghosts. It winds up being special effects laden drivel that costs a shitload to produce [...]
But the sad thing is that FF tried to do something different, and got snuffed before it had time to build up a following.
> The difference between Everybody Loves Raymond and Firefly is the cost of producing. Firefly probably had an expensive budget for all the sets costumes etc, but Raymond is what, a couple of hack actors and a redress of the Married with Children set?
Yes, I think cable has all but killed broadcast network television. Look at how much "reality" shows have eaten into the schedule over the past few years, and how much of the rest is sitcoms and talk shows that have to rely on sexual titillation to draw an audience. Hell, in these parts some of the networks broadcast infomercials in the half hour between the evening news and the prime-time trash. It really looks like the networks aren't raking in enough advertising dollars to pay for anything but the most rudimentary shows anymore. Too much of the audience has migrated to premium cable channels, and the advertisers don't want to throw big piles of money at reduced audiences.
> I never really got to watch much, but as far as "getting into it", FOX screwed around with the order of the episodes, so you really weren't introduced to the show in the way the writers inteneded. Maybe that wouldn't have been enough to make a difference, but I know I will be checking out the DVD just to see what the buzz is about.
Yeah, the first episode was IMO probably the least interesting one, modulo one quick gag that everyone loves. But liking the series is surely a YMMV thingy. If you like complex character interactions you'll like this, but if you like laser cannons and the other usual SF fare you probably won't.
> I mean, just because they can fly around in a space ship, and then land on any random planet with a random technology timeline (6 shooters, etc) and do a random plot (that could happen in 1999 on Earth in my backyard) doesn't mean it feels like sci-fi to me. To me, it was a drama. Thinly disguised with sci-fi elements.
Isn't SF - or any other genre - just window dressing anyway? No matter what window dressing you choose, you've still got to make a good story. You can emphasise plot, characterization, themes, atmosphere, or whatever, but you've got to have something, because the window dressing is no substitute for creative substance.
For that matter, wouldn't most Star Trek plots work just as well if set in Medieval Iceland as they do in deep space in the distant future?
> Or you could just bring manufacturing equipment and build everything you need from the planet's resources.
The difference is how much stuff you have to take along in order to found a self-sustaining technology.
> like fuck japan still uses handcarts.
Hell, visit Mission Control in Houston, TX, and see how far you have to walk to find a genuine ranch with herds of cows and horses. And shire-reeves wearing 10-gallon hats and toting revolvers.
It baffles me that people had trouble with a suspension of disbelief over Firefly. What do these people say about Star Trek episodes that feature interstellar energy vortexes that have evolved to eat starships, or at least assume human form and seduce their captains? I'm starting to wonder whether Firefly failed because it nearer reality than what SF fans are accustomed to.
> Don't forget Fox's refusal to air the pilot, forcing them to premiere with a regular episode with no exposition.
Bad time slot, postponed pilot, frequent preemptions, preliminary advertisements that misrepresented what the show was actually about, insufficient advertisements when the show resumed after the multi-week Thanksgiving preemptions (after promising a "blitz")... you could hardly do a show greater disservice if you wanted it to fail.
> Were you watching the same Firefly as I did? With 9 evolving characters, with betrayals, redemptions, tensions and disagrements between characters, high and lows in the morale of the crew, personalities that got reveled layers by layers. Incredibly witty humour(Whedon at its best, IMHO), engaging situations and a dark undertone. There no goody-goody characters, no good vs evil plot, just man vs itself, a step above Angel in that direction.
Yeah, the interesting thing about FF was that even the assholes (Jayne) were likeable characters.
> Sorry, but I didn't like it. Three big reasons.
> 3. Swearing in Chinese is geeky.
No, swearing in perl is geeky.
> You talk about FOX executives buisness skills, but skilled businessmen would have either not bought Firefly in the first place, or would have treated it better. It makes no business sense to pay to produce a show and then air it in such a way as to ensure that it would not survive. They just threw that money away.
I can't but believe that FF was the victim of some kind of inter-executive politics, like the way managers in big corporations rise and fall with their competing ideas and will often torpedo their rivals' projects just to get a leg up on the company ladder. Are broadcast networks organized in a way that would make this possible?
> Except a large part of the Firefly fans ARE women. They loved the relationship stuff Whedon manages to throw in without the men noticing.
It wasn't merely "Relationship" stuff: though the show was in the guise of a SF series in the guise of a western (or vice versa; I never figured that out), what it was really about was the characters and their interactions. That may not push everyones' buttons, and it demanded a lot more mental investment from the viewer than the standard captain-gets-in-a-jam-and-then-out fare that you expect from SF television, but in some ways it really was a very sophisticated show as compared to, say, Star Trek.
If you watch much SF TV you'll notice that all the plot-based series are really in a rut. How many shows have you seen with the tired old stuck-in-a-time-loop plot? It was high time someone tried a different approach, and IMO it's a damn shame it didn't work out better. I think if FAUX had managed it better and given it time to grow it would have generated a large and very loyal fan base for that very reason.
I always fight worms with bolt or ball spells, though you can clear them out by hand if you you have a potion of speed or a weapon that allows multiple attacks per round.
> Please include Ann Coulter with the people who are trying to silence people. She's openly said that muslims should be forcibly converted to christianity and that the press is a bunch of liberal traitors who should be shut up and sorted out by force.
Let me start by getting an exasperated "That's just fucking stupid!" out of the way. Surely anyone with an IQ > 50 can figure out that such an attempt would lead to a shitstorm of terrorism that would make people long for the bad old days of 2001-2003.
> What the fuck has happened to this country?!
The phenomenon isn't really new; recall the McCarthy Era and Lincoln's high-handed dealings with a wavering Maryland.
But yeah, we've got a real problem with people who mistake their parochial notions of ethical right-and-wrong with a universial metaphysical Rightness that justifies any means to the desired ends. (Witness the final remarks of the executed abortion-doctor murderer this week.)
And as for the "liberal traitors"... well, surely everyone has seen Hermann Goring's notorious words on that topic by now. Some or the people you deplore are probably pursuing a misguided notion of Righteousness, whereas others are surely pursuing raw power and merely find it convenient to dress it up in the same garb.
> Would you rather be debating on whether the President should be held to the same legal standard as anyone else in the country? Like, for instance, if they got on a witness stand in court, and swore, under oath, and blatantly lied? If it was me, I would have been charged with perjury and put in jail...
Not likely. That kind of lying happens day in and day out in US divorce cases, and virtually no one ever gets slapped with a perjury charge for it.
And you do want the President to be held to the same legal stander as anyone else in the country, right?
> On top of this, Neo Conservative is a somewhat biggoted term. It suggests not only that the Republican party truely is a sensational war machine but that those who join the party in time of war are themselves war mongers.
Yes, neocons tend to be Republicans, but Republicans do not tend to be neocons.
The neocon movement is itself quite diverse, including not only the Wolfowitz style advocates of "benevolent hegemony" but also others such as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, which wants to use religion to sheep the masses - right out of Plato's play book. (On Usenet I see a
Hopefully the blooming clusterfuck in Iraq will discredit at least the "benevolent hegemony" branch of neoconism, though it's a damn shame so many people had to suffer or die to get that result.
> > It was the liberal Democrats who argued that absentee ballots from oversea military personnel shouldn't be counted.
> Wrong. Some of those ballots were postmarked AFTER the final election date, and that was the only point of dispute. The Bush team wanted those late ballots in, and guess who was not following the law?
And the Democrats didn't have the guts to speak out against it, either.
One of the things that disturbed me most about the whole Florida election fiasco is that the "support our troops" meme has become so strong in the USA that a political party would prefer to lose a presidential election rather than risk the political fallout of insisting that illegal military votes not be counted.
Arguably our democracy has already been subverted, without the black-box voting machines.
> She should be more like the Dixie Chicks, who have alienated their whole fan base.
Apparently the press exaggerated that notion greatly by giving so much air time to the complainers. IIRC someone posted a link here several months ago, revealing that the Chicks' concert attendance and album sales actually went up after those comments.
> Sure; it's easiest to attack those on top.
It's also easiest to corrupt the system when you're on top.
> Imperialism is more the kind of thing that Hussein was into, in his conquest of areas of Iraq not populated by people of his nationality.
Oddly enough, the "multi-national" Iraq was a creation of the Western powers, not of Saddam's conquests. During a couple of recent world wars those powers had a nasty habit of promising everything to everyone in the Middle East in order to tempt them into dancing to our tune instead of the other side's, and then giving them a big shaft when the war was over and we didn't think we needed them anymore. (Speaking of which, we've actually tried democracy in Iraq before, and the system ultimately produced Saddam himself after the usual sequences of coups.)
Saddam did try a land grab along the banks of the Tigris, which resulted in the dreadful Iran-Iraq war with its estimated million combat casualties, and of course he tried to annex Kuwait by force. Strictly speaking these were revanchism rather than imperialism, though the practical diffence is dubious, to say nothing of Saddam's claim to be the man for the job.
And to clarify:
> Imperialism is more the kind of thing that Hussein was into, in his conquest [...]
Imperialism does not always involve direct conquest. The Romans were past masters at setting up "client states", i.e. puppet governments that would dance to their tune instead of their rival's, without actually annexing them. Surely no one needs to point out the parallels with what's going on in Iraq. (E.g., the USA claims to be providing Iraq with democracy, but won't let go of the puppet strings even to get the desperately needed soldiers and money from the UN. Don't pretend the USA doesn't intend to set up a "democratic" government that will dance to the USA's tunes and none other.)
Add "client state" to your vocabulary, and go back to hear what that English professor has to say.
> If I had mod points, I'd mod you as a troll for making such an uninformed comment about women.
Hey, this is Slashdot - he's not expected to have a clue about women.
Will it butt trolls off the net too?
> I'll bet that none of these expensive studies ever include the cost of cleaning up after the virus/worm of the week that comes with running Microsoft NT/2000/XP. Having everyone in your company having 2 or 3 days a year when their desktop/laptop/server/whatever is unavailable because of cleanup activity should have a definite negative impact on TCO or ROI.
Yes, whenever "TCO" is deployed as a marketing ploy there isn't much interest in the total cost of ownership, but rather in the total for that subset of costs that makes yours look better than theirs. Microsoft very reasonably wants to add in costs beyond what it takes to get a legal installation disk in your hand, but they certainly aren't interested in adding in everything.