The only thing about this device which is new is that the water isn't contaminated with heavy metals from the heat exchanger. (One hopes, anyway. ..)
A stainless steel heat sink is worth $1200?
Hmm.
If they could sell it for a lot less, then I could see it being quite useful in some situations. Not a bad way to get pure water. (Certainly better than the treated crud gurgling out of your town pipes!)
I wonder if it's cheaper to run than a steam distillation unit. I'm guessing it's still less expensive to just buy those big carboys of bottled water; about $1 per US gallon and the trouble it takes to haul them home.
We've been having a lot of this sort of thing lately. --Not all of them get this much notice, or accurate coverage. --There was a report of a 'plane' going down over some American town a week or so back, creating a huge aerial show and loud bang, putting the residents and authorities into a tizzy. --The only thing was that no planes were reported missing and they didn't find any wreckage.
I half suspect when we get one of the big ones that the PTB will have chutzpah to call it a terrorist nuke if they can get away with it.
If you had lived in London, England, then I would have said it was another damn Christmass invasion.
Don't complain. --Since the Doctor is partly funded by the CBC, I rather hope Canada will have its turn at being invaded this Christmas. Not getting my hopes up, though. The CN Tower being cast into shadow by a monolithic space vessel might look cool, but wouldn't carry the same emotional impact as any one of a half dozen London landmarks. On the plus side, though, the happy-go-lucky-superhuman Mounties (the fictional ones, anyway), would grasp what the Doctor is all about instantly, so there'd be plenty of enthusiastic ground support.
Well, you get some geek speak around here, but all I'll ever need? Hardly. --And actually, I have to say, I enjoyed Slashdot a lot more ten years ago before everybody got married and their wives pecked the fun out of their lives so that they wouldn't be embarrassed to take their hubbies to muted social gatherings. Now half the geeks I know walk around looking strained, pretending that life isn't fun, while putting on a false show of scowling at those who have the guts to enjoy themselves.
Too bad. I've been lucky. My GF's have dealt with my geek obsessions gracefully. The best part is when I find out their fathers are Star Trek or D&D fans, and then we can rap while the girls head to the kitchen to talk about girl stuff. But the BEST of all is when each side admires the other regardless.
Something went wrong during my session at the brain butchers. The long and short of it was that I had to pull a red, glowing ping pong ball out of my nasal cavity. Bad, bad day.
AP and most news agencies are worse than worthless. I think the only thing going on here is that somebody tried to pass off such an incredibly LAME Photoshop job that even the AP people couldn't swallow it. (Hair lines are hard to cut & paste convincingly, as this picture shows). There are standards to be kept up when lying to people. If terrible jobs like this are allowed to make it through, then the whole thing falls apart. --I mean, heck, even the people at the AP caught this one, and the LAST place you want people suspecting a lie are those actually working within the news agencies. They have to be the most effectively programmed drones in the fleet, because if too many of them can't be sold and if any of them happens to have a conscience, then you'll start having big problems.
On the benefit side, by running a story on the condemnation of false pictures, the public will nod with approval and feel secure in the *cough* impeccability of the press.
That's my take, anyway. I can't place much fault with the military on this one. It looks like a thoughtless bit of half-baked PR to me.
That was never true. Luke wasn't a Jedi when he turned on his fathers blade.
True. Like Batman being able to fly when I was four, however, to my then seven year-old brain, this distinction was confusing. Lightsabers worked for Luke in the same way Wart could pull that sword out of the stone. He was already magical, he just didn't know it yet. And that, right there, is many more times the rationalism I ever used as a kid. I just assumed it. In any case, as we all know, the most pure of the Star Wars purists are all suffering from (enjoying?) arrested development.
You core point is correct, don't explain you magical technology. The Force. Lightsaber, anti-gravity, hair buns. Just enjoy it.
That wasn't my core point at all, though it is one I do agree with sometimes. For the most part, one of the best ways to enjoy things in fact IS to think and ponder and puzzle. Of course, if you happen to be writing story worlds, one needs to make sure the flavor/mood of problem solving doesn't clash with the established environment. I think it is universally agreed that the Force was much happier without a bio-medical explanation. Though, if it had been a Star Trek film. . .
But I don't. --It doesn't stop me from endeavoring to be honest, but there are certain types of cons which honest people fall for, perhaps more easily than the corrupt.
Like this whole sham economy we have running around us. Ideas like, paying back the bank interest feels natural because an honest man doesn't want something for nothing. And yet it's arguably one of the biggest, most willfully destructive scams currently going.
I avoided watching this trailer for about a day. Then I got bored and, after avoiding the QT update virus. . .
Thank-you J.J. for living down to my expectations.
Remember when Star Trek was about clever sci-fi, charisma and high story tension? --Oh yeah, and about humans at least trying to be positive and socially advanced?
Compare this fluff to the first Star Trek movie. --Yes, many thought it was boring, the 2001 of ST, but whenever I watch it, I always forget the ending which makes me tingle in that nice sci-fi way. Wrath of Khan was a real blockbuster film; fun and dramatic and smart and NOT about mindless special effects. Sure, the third film was the fanboyish Spock back from the dead thing, but the next one about the whales was great fun; a real crowd pleaser which managed this without being stupid. Remember when Trek didn't suck?
For science fiction, the characters were wonderful. Sure they weren't Shakespeare, and sure, there were dumb episodes of TOS, but they weren't completely two-dimensional. They were human! Abrams, however, has the fantastic ability to suck the soul out of any character, flattening them out, plasticizing them, making them into idiot caricatures of themselves. --One of the things which drove me nuts about "Lost" was the way any character could be expected to do a 180 degree reversal of motivation and intentions for no reason other than the soapy plot needed a twist. Does he have no understanding of what it means to be human? This idiot was put in charge of Star Trek?
Sometimes I think that there's a concerted effort taking place to squash all the life and light out of Star Trek. --After the public rejected the crapfest "Enterprise" (with it's entire second season made dedicated to torture apologia and thinly veiled war-on-terrorism propaganda), it finally started to get both heartfelt and interesting. And that's when they canceled it. Oh really?
And they put Abrams, the freeking antichrist of script-writing, in charge of Star Trek? Bah. Hollywood sucks.
You take a wooden stick, right? Or a piece of bamboo, I suppose will do. All things resonate with the force, right? Obi Wan said so. So in mundane terms, the stick has an auric signature. 'Kay. Now you record that living energetic signature into the crystal. --And yeah, sure they can do that. Everybody knows that crystals have woo-woo power.
So now you have the auric Force signature of a wooden stick recorded in the crystal. Then through the wonders of Space Technology From A Galaxy FFA, you run power through the crystal so that the auric signature of the stick is multiplied to the point not just where the average space muggle can see it, but where it sizzles and pops and is like, you know, a lightsaber.
And this is why it takes a Jedi to make one; you need to be able to see and manipulate the Force, otherwise you're just a regular Joe with a stick and a crystal looking foolish.
But for the purist. . . Lucas actually got his scripts wrong. The Lightsaber, before the scripts got re-written, (or perhaps before Lucas first thought of it; it's hard to say), could only be operated by a Jedi; the blade was an extension of his/her own energy. (To be fair, this is actually how I thought of lightsabers when I was a kid, and I was mightily upset when Han used Luke's to cut open that Tonton (TawnTawn?)
Of course, in the same way, I believed that Batman could fly because he had a cape. (Though, I was only like four when I thought that. Still, that kind of logic might be a good thing to listen to if you're directing movies for kids.)
Anyway. . , it should be noted that these two ideas are way cooler than any nonsense about mechanical extending bits in lightsabers, or any other idea as to how the blade doesn't shoot off into infinity. I notice the article delicately danced around actually answering this, the ONLY question which really matters to any geek of any worth when it comes to lightsaber science.
Shame on you, "How Stuff Works" people. Stick to dump trucks and CD players where you don't need any imagination.
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Well, he was quoting somebody else, but he DID say it. . .
The point being. . , comics are comics and movies are another animal entirely.
For every comics movie I've seen, I can never help but thinking, "This would have been more satisfying as an episodic TV series." Perhaps it's because comics rely heavily on word balloons and movies are actually quite conservative when it comes to dialogue, most being really just short stories. Episodic television offers enough canvas to do a more satisfying job with stories which are by definition, written as a series of short episodes anyway. A lot of drama and necessary timing can be included with a TV series which must by necessity be cut when planning a film.
I re-read Watchmen a few months ago when I heard about the film project, and it struck me that it was a story which would have done very well as a 6 or 12 part TV series. Not sure how they're going to manage to pack all of that into a movie without it feeling rushed. I guess we'll see.
All of your silly posturing aside, I don't think you're talking to who you think you're talking to. I'm not the OP.
My apologies for mistaking you for somebody else. Sadly though, my silly posturing, (and of course it was silly; that was my point), was evidently required to bump you from name-calling into a more reasonable frame of mind. Dogs can't seem to behave with civility until they've wrangled a bit. Tiresome, but it does the job. So to business. ..
In short, money problems aren't imaginary, and without money our specialized economy would crumble and thousands would die of famine. The system isn't perfect but it's more of a benefit than a detriment. Runaway money printing is a despicable practice, but the money markets correct this sort of abuse rather quickly through exchange rates and price inflation... so on the whole your worries and complaints are just chicken little "the sky is falling" rhetorics.
The bulk of your point, if I am interpreting correctly, is that a money system based on tokens is required for a functioning, complex society, and that while it is not perfect, it is the best we have and is therefore valid.
That's fair enough, and I do in fact agree with this, and insofar as this goes, I also agree that money problems are really are not imaginary.
--But the money itself is an utter charade. The link between 'money' and real energy and real goods of real value has been stretched virtually to the point of science fiction. And just saying that is not nearly enough to get my point across. Let me illustrate. ..
Here in Canada, banks are allowed to lend against only a fraction of the real money they hold. When giving funds to a loan recipient, they create money which didn't exist, and put it into the client's account. When the loan is repaid, the bank takes the interest on that loan and holds it as their fee, putting it into their coffers, and thus the overall money supply of the country increases. Magic! Money from nothing. It is estimated that here in Canada, actual money issued by the government, both in paper form and electronic, represents only about 3% of the Canada's actual money supply. The rest was created virtually, by banks motivated solely by profit. Despite its convolutions, this boils down to, as you put it, "Runaway money printing", which I wholeheartedly agree is a dubious practice.
But this is how it works. --And not just in Canada, but the world over in one manner or another. It's a giant dream machine, with the populace the collective dreamers. --Of course, if managed properly, the dream works, and we all agree to play within its boundaries. That's how it should be. But the dream has become a nightmare driven by sociopaths, and moreover, and this was my original point, the system I believe, is deliberately organized in this manner so that everybody becomes a readily controlled debt slave. --The number of hours people must work to make a living has grown as the decades have passed, pressing the population to their absolute stress points. When one is spent as such, there is no time or energy left over to think and grow in awareness and personal power. Slaves which are not exhausted might get ideas. ..
When one recognizes this, small issues like the OP's anger over how tax dollars are used on the welfare recipients, become recognizable as utter nonsense concerns. Like two slaves fighting over a blanket or a crust of bread when both the quality of their environment and size of their rations have nothing to do with each other and everything to do with the manipulations by the master of the house.
This is where my comments stemmed from. I was perhaps unclear in saying that the money system is make-believe and unimportant. --We both recognize that it is make-believe but very important. Perhaps what I should have said is that the money system is make-believe, but that the people making us believe are evil and/or insane, and that one may benefit mightily from ceasi
I live in a pretty bustling city and I don't encounter TV, ever, aside from maybe your local restaurant lobby.
I find that once the choice is made, it becomes routine to remain in that choice. It's the breaking away/enlarging of perspective which is challenged. Dealers don't like to let go of their addicts.
I wouldn't hand you three pages of howling rhetoric, but I might bust out an old "money & banking" textbook. I'm an economics major and a laurels scholar, you know.
Systems can be studied with a high degree of confidence when they are contained within a box where internal rule systems may remain coherent. Looking at how money behaves between individuals, businesses and banks leaves one with a comforting sense of ordered chaos. It's when one starts looking at outside influences and larger rule systems when those internal rule sets take on a new aspect. What's your take on the Fed's of charging interest on the money it loans to the government for general issuance? Where does the extra money come from required to repay that interest plus the principal?
I used to study yoga, and I'd go out into the backyard and do the lotus meditation thing, except I wasn't in the practice of closing my eyes; rather I'd stare at some fixed object.
Anyway, one of my room mates was out on the front deck working on her bike, and my neighbor, this intense sixty-year old dude, stomped out and plunked himself down on his lawn and glared over the property line at her. He sat there scowling at her, motionless for several minutes. My roomie was understandably weirded out by this, but she kept at what she was doing. After he got tired of sitting and glaring, he stormed up to her and yelled something to the effect of, "There! How do YOU like it?!" --And then he accused her and everybody else in our house of being part of some kind of organization set up to watch his every move. Being yelled at was enough for her, so she came inside to tell us all about it.
It wasn't until later that I put two and two together and realized that he'd seen me doing my sitting meditation the other day. The realization made me both laugh out loud and feel great pity for the guy. No wonder he was freaked; there he was, actually seeing a guy staring intently at his house, which technically I had been, for like thirty minutes straight. I caught him later that week and tried to explain it to him, but I don't think he bought a word of it. The poor guy was sick. --He was also convinced that our landlord was stealing his mail and bugging his phone, among many things. And our landlord, being the selfish child-man he was, took our crazy neighbor's anger personally and so he did in fact sometimes steal his mail and throw crap over the fence just to piss him off and help him along the way to totally crazy.
As messed up as that particular episode was, that sort of weirdness happened all the time when I was living there. I loved it! It was like living in one of those really good sitcom/dramas.
Convenience Food is meant to be just that... convenience.
The funny part is that in retrospect, I realize I was doing Hobbits a grave disservice by lumping our ridiculous fast food industry in with silly Hobbit notions. --I doubt Shire folk would waste their time on Mickey-D's food. At least not Shire folk in their pure form; after a few generations of TV, city living and general stupifying, the Hobbits could, like humans, be made to consume stuff from the clown and actually like it. Of course, that would also mean that the ring war was lost, but that's neither here nor there. . .
While your reasoning is sound, the emissions studies quoted suggest that the process doesn't work entirely as advertised. The original piece does read like PR fluff. I have to wonder if the technology is suitably refined, but no independent studies are apparently available.
Still. . , plasma-blasting garbage into basic atoms sure sounds like a good idea which should work, given proper development.
Yes, next time you are at the drive-thru, don't ask for a cup, just let them pour your Coca Cola into your cupped hands, you dick.
It's not too hard to imagine a world where disposable cups are simply not used. Lots of restaurants use glass and clay-ware and employ dishwashers. Drive thrus are a silly hobbit notion which are only 'essential' because other silly hobbit notions make them so. But hey, if you want to buy a coffee and take it away, why not bring your own mug? Lots of people have travel mugs. It would only take a subtle shift in behavior patterns to do away with disposable cups. Our current systems are by no means chipped in stone, and many of them would sound no more ridiculous to an outsider than the idea of carrying your own mug with you when you travel.
As such, the poster had a valid thought and he isn't a 'dick'. There are lots of ways to reduce waste and everybody knows it. This does not, of course, mean that a plasma waste disposal system can't be useful. There will always be some waste.
Normally, I find un-defined acronyms annoying, but this time I found it REALLY annoying. So in the interests of keeping the annoyance level to a minimum, I spent ten seconds on Google so other people won't have to. . .
You crazy old coot. So what, you live in the woods or something now?
You know. . , it's weird. Every time I respectfully disagree with somebody by being open-handed and polite, I can always mark the ones who are going to take that as a cue to bite back. Don't know what it is. Maybe it's the fact that lower-functioning, dog-pack mentality cases tend to embrace lower-functioning, dog-pack mentality ideas. --People who are more comfortable living in over-simple world views where they can bristle and growl to their heart's content because it's simply better suited to a little doggy brain.
Anyway, you're also making an unwarranted assumption, which is similarly typical.
It's not like the TV can just grow legs and walk into your room and turn itself on.
That is correct. It takes a room mate or family member to turn on a TV. Never watched the thing myself because I didn't want to, and moving away wasn't predicated on whether or not the thing existed. I was just describing an observation of how the world happens to behave.
I won't even touch the idea that money = nothing, I don't have the time to write a 3-page essay.
Three pages of howling rhetoric written based on more assumptions about what I was probably not even saying would likely have been quite tiresome.
Woof, you silly boy! WHO thinks he's a smart boy? WHO? Yeeezzzz. You're a big dumb ball of fur who hasn't managed to clamber up the social ladder to embrace a broader range of human response yet, but we still love you.
I thought, "Oh please. How can they screw it up. It's the Enterprise."
Aieee! That thing stinks of Hollywood's idea of cool; non-creative execs trying to cash in on the latest trend rather than allowing the real creative team to follow its natural instincts. That design has subtle alien qualities about it which spook me. And in any other film, that'd be fine. Sure. Whatever. But we already KNOW what the Enterprise looks like. That's why people want to watch it.
Abrams is a first-rate ass. "Lost" is messed up broken garbage which teaches viewers the poorest social imperatives, illustrating reality as a place where you can't trust anybody and communication must always be choked down to the barest minimum channel needed for survival. And "Alias" was just one big apologist's argument for torture. --That they put this J.J. clown in charge of Star Trek is nothing short of evil. Star Trek is supposed to stand for communication and human dignity. Abrams is nothing but a flashy pimp intent on the degradation of the human spirit.
Abrams, I hope you die very, very soon. Seriously. And I'm not saying that in passion. I just think the world would be better off without your presence and influence.
No offense intended here, but I really don't think the giant corporation needs you to go to bat for them with those canned and, I'm sorry, but worthless sentiments. The whole, "money don't grow on trees" thing. Which, while being technically correct is only barely at that. With a world where money is very literally invented from nowhere, all facets of the economy, everything from taxes and government programs all the way to economic melt-downs, are 100% make-believe events designed to keep people like us running around in circles, preferably getting angry at largely abstract emotional hot-button concepts like the all-mighty, "welfare bum" so that we don't stop to see what's really going on.
Again, no offense, but I find it odd that when such ideas are made plain, (and I've not made it plain here; you'd have to research it a bit to see how it all works), but humanity as a whole seems to prefer to stay angry at the less complicated make-believe ideas, rather than get angry at the slave masters behind the illusion.
Aside from all that, you are correct. Nobody owes anybody a cheap flat screen TV set. The funny thing is, however, that given the state of mind-control these days, if people stopped wanting to buy TV sets, then you'd probably find that the powers that be would find some way to distribute them for free. And that it would be illegal to say "No". Do you have a cable subscription? Try canceling it sometime and see what happens. As a last ditch effort, (if you're really serious about getting rid of it), chances are good that you'll have it offered up for free rather than let you go without. I've lived through that weirdness, and I've seen it happen to others. In the end, I had to move to get away from TV.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing about this device which is new is that the water isn't contaminated with heavy metals from the heat exchanger. (One hopes, anyway. . .)
A stainless steel heat sink is worth $1200?
Hmm.
If they could sell it for a lot less, then I could see it being quite useful in some situations. Not a bad way to get pure water. (Certainly better than the treated crud gurgling out of your town pipes!)
I wonder if it's cheaper to run than a steam distillation unit. I'm guessing it's still less expensive to just buy those big carboys of bottled water; about $1 per US gallon and the trouble it takes to haul them home.
-FL
We've been having a lot of this sort of thing lately. --Not all of them get this much notice, or accurate coverage. --There was a report of a 'plane' going down over some American town a week or so back, creating a huge aerial show and loud bang, putting the residents and authorities into a tizzy. --The only thing was that no planes were reported missing and they didn't find any wreckage.
I half suspect when we get one of the big ones that the PTB will have chutzpah to call it a terrorist nuke if they can get away with it.
A skimming of noted events for October. . .
Astronomy enthusiast Howard Edin reports that he was looking in the opposite direction at the time, but saw the whole observing field light up and at first thought someone had turned on their car headlights.
Reports came from residents from Carmel Valley to Salinas of a fireball shooting through the Tuesday night sky and hitting the Earth. A sheriff's deputy patrolling Carmel Valley saw it and thought enough of it to call for reinforcements.
IT appeared against the early evening sky like a flare - moments later roofs rattled and verandas shook as it crashed to earth.
[...]The Evening Telegraph has been inundated with calls and e-mails from readers who saw a strange fireball cutting a swath across the heavens[...]
For the second time this year, The University of Western Ontario Meteor Group has captured incredibly rare video footage of a meteor falling to Earth.
A bright light sped across the sky, followed by a loud explosion. Osborne County Sheriff Curtis Miner tells KSAL News that it was not an unidentified flying object, or anything sinister. It was a large meteor.
-FL
Paper lanterns.
Venus.
Mass hallucination.
A military jet.
Lens flare.
Two guys with planks.
In a swamp.
-FL
If you had lived in London, England, then I would have said it was another damn Christmass invasion.
Don't complain. --Since the Doctor is partly funded by the CBC, I rather hope Canada will have its turn at being invaded this Christmas. Not getting my hopes up, though. The CN Tower being cast into shadow by a monolithic space vessel might look cool, but wouldn't carry the same emotional impact as any one of a half dozen London landmarks. On the plus side, though, the happy-go-lucky-superhuman Mounties (the fictional ones, anyway), would grasp what the Doctor is all about instantly, so there'd be plenty of enthusiastic ground support.
-FL
All the nerd innuendo you will ever need.
Well, you get some geek speak around here, but all I'll ever need? Hardly. --And actually, I have to say, I enjoyed Slashdot a lot more ten years ago before everybody got married and their wives pecked the fun out of their lives so that they wouldn't be embarrassed to take their hubbies to muted social gatherings. Now half the geeks I know walk around looking strained, pretending that life isn't fun, while putting on a false show of scowling at those who have the guts to enjoy themselves.
Too bad. I've been lucky. My GF's have dealt with my geek obsessions gracefully. The best part is when I find out their fathers are Star Trek or D&D fans, and then we can rap while the girls head to the kitchen to talk about girl stuff. But the BEST of all is when each side admires the other regardless.
-FL
Something went wrong during my session at the brain butchers. The long and short of it was that I had to pull a red, glowing ping pong ball out of my nasal cavity. Bad, bad day.
Thanks, George and Stephen.
-FL
AP and most news agencies are worse than worthless. I think the only thing going on here is that somebody tried to pass off such an incredibly LAME Photoshop job that even the AP people couldn't swallow it. (Hair lines are hard to cut & paste convincingly, as this picture shows). There are standards to be kept up when lying to people. If terrible jobs like this are allowed to make it through, then the whole thing falls apart. --I mean, heck, even the people at the AP caught this one, and the LAST place you want people suspecting a lie are those actually working within the news agencies. They have to be the most effectively programmed drones in the fleet, because if too many of them can't be sold and if any of them happens to have a conscience, then you'll start having big problems.
On the benefit side, by running a story on the condemnation of false pictures, the public will nod with approval and feel secure in the *cough* impeccability of the press.
That's my take, anyway. I can't place much fault with the military on this one. It looks like a thoughtless bit of half-baked PR to me.
-FL
That was never true. Luke wasn't a Jedi when he turned on his fathers blade.
True. Like Batman being able to fly when I was four, however, to my then seven year-old brain, this distinction was confusing. Lightsabers worked for Luke in the same way Wart could pull that sword out of the stone. He was already magical, he just didn't know it yet. And that, right there, is many more times the rationalism I ever used as a kid. I just assumed it. In any case, as we all know, the most pure of the Star Wars purists are all suffering from (enjoying?) arrested development.
You core point is correct, don't explain you magical technology.
The Force. Lightsaber, anti-gravity, hair buns. Just enjoy it.
That wasn't my core point at all, though it is one I do agree with sometimes. For the most part, one of the best ways to enjoy things in fact IS to think and ponder and puzzle. Of course, if you happen to be writing story worlds, one needs to make sure the flavor/mood of problem solving doesn't clash with the established environment. I think it is universally agreed that the Force was much happier without a bio-medical explanation. Though, if it had been a Star Trek film. . .
-FL
But I don't. --It doesn't stop me from endeavoring to be honest, but there are certain types of cons which honest people fall for, perhaps more easily than the corrupt.
Like this whole sham economy we have running around us. Ideas like, paying back the bank interest feels natural because an honest man doesn't want something for nothing. And yet it's arguably one of the biggest, most willfully destructive scams currently going.
Just a thought.
-FL
I avoided watching this trailer for about a day. Then I got bored and, after avoiding the QT update virus. . .
Thank-you J.J. for living down to my expectations.
Remember when Star Trek was about clever sci-fi, charisma and high story tension? --Oh yeah, and about humans at least trying to be positive and socially advanced?
Compare this fluff to the first Star Trek movie. --Yes, many thought it was boring, the 2001 of ST, but whenever I watch it, I always forget the ending which makes me tingle in that nice sci-fi way. Wrath of Khan was a real blockbuster film; fun and dramatic and smart and NOT about mindless special effects. Sure, the third film was the fanboyish Spock back from the dead thing, but the next one about the whales was great fun; a real crowd pleaser which managed this without being stupid. Remember when Trek didn't suck?
For science fiction, the characters were wonderful. Sure they weren't Shakespeare, and sure, there were dumb episodes of TOS, but they weren't completely two-dimensional. They were human! Abrams, however, has the fantastic ability to suck the soul out of any character, flattening them out, plasticizing them, making them into idiot caricatures of themselves. --One of the things which drove me nuts about "Lost" was the way any character could be expected to do a 180 degree reversal of motivation and intentions for no reason other than the soapy plot needed a twist. Does he have no understanding of what it means to be human? This idiot was put in charge of Star Trek?
Sometimes I think that there's a concerted effort taking place to squash all the life and light out of Star Trek. --After the public rejected the crapfest "Enterprise" (with it's entire second season made dedicated to torture apologia and thinly veiled war-on-terrorism propaganda), it finally started to get both heartfelt and interesting. And that's when they canceled it. Oh really?
And they put Abrams, the freeking antichrist of script-writing, in charge of Star Trek? Bah. Hollywood sucks.
-FL
Here's how it really works. . .
You take a wooden stick, right? Or a piece of bamboo, I suppose will do. All things resonate with the force, right? Obi Wan said so. So in mundane terms, the stick has an auric signature. 'Kay. Now you record that living energetic signature into the crystal. --And yeah, sure they can do that. Everybody knows that crystals have woo-woo power.
So now you have the auric Force signature of a wooden stick recorded in the crystal. Then through the wonders of Space Technology From A Galaxy FFA, you run power through the crystal so that the auric signature of the stick is multiplied to the point not just where the average space muggle can see it, but where it sizzles and pops and is like, you know, a lightsaber.
And this is why it takes a Jedi to make one; you need to be able to see and manipulate the Force, otherwise you're just a regular Joe with a stick and a crystal looking foolish.
But for the purist. . . Lucas actually got his scripts wrong. The Lightsaber, before the scripts got re-written, (or perhaps before Lucas first thought of it; it's hard to say), could only be operated by a Jedi; the blade was an extension of his/her own energy. (To be fair, this is actually how I thought of lightsabers when I was a kid, and I was mightily upset when Han used Luke's to cut open that Tonton (TawnTawn?)
Of course, in the same way, I believed that Batman could fly because he had a cape. (Though, I was only like four when I thought that. Still, that kind of logic might be a good thing to listen to if you're directing movies for kids.)
Anyway. . , it should be noted that these two ideas are way cooler than any nonsense about mechanical extending bits in lightsabers, or any other idea as to how the blade doesn't shoot off into infinity. I notice the article delicately danced around actually answering this, the ONLY question which really matters to any geek of any worth when it comes to lightsaber science.
Shame on you, "How Stuff Works" people. Stick to dump trucks and CD players where you don't need any imagination.
-FL
That's really nice. I think I like it better. --It's funny but not sarcastic.
-FL
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
Well, he was quoting somebody else, but he DID say it. . .
The point being. . , comics are comics and movies are another animal entirely.
For every comics movie I've seen, I can never help but thinking, "This would have been more satisfying as an episodic TV series." Perhaps it's because comics rely heavily on word balloons and movies are actually quite conservative when it comes to dialogue, most being really just short stories. Episodic television offers enough canvas to do a more satisfying job with stories which are by definition, written as a series of short episodes anyway. A lot of drama and necessary timing can be included with a TV series which must by necessity be cut when planning a film.
I re-read Watchmen a few months ago when I heard about the film project, and it struck me that it was a story which would have done very well as a 6 or 12 part TV series. Not sure how they're going to manage to pack all of that into a movie without it feeling rushed. I guess we'll see.
-FL
Now just say it happy and manic, and you could apply to be the 11th regeneration or whatever he's at now.
-FL
Yep. You just quoted some of my favorite scenes in one go.
And. . , now I'm hungry. (There's a chip shop just down the road calling to me. . .)
Cheers!
-FL
All of your silly posturing aside, I don't think you're talking to who you think you're talking to. I'm not the OP.
My apologies for mistaking you for somebody else. Sadly though, my silly posturing, (and of course it was silly; that was my point), was evidently required to bump you from name-calling into a more reasonable frame of mind. Dogs can't seem to behave with civility until they've wrangled a bit. Tiresome, but it does the job. So to business. . .
In short, money problems aren't imaginary, and without money our specialized economy would crumble and thousands would die of famine. The system isn't perfect but it's more of a benefit than a detriment. Runaway money printing is a despicable practice, but the money markets correct this sort of abuse rather quickly through exchange rates and price inflation ... so on the whole your worries and complaints are just chicken little "the sky is falling" rhetorics.
The bulk of your point, if I am interpreting correctly, is that a money system based on tokens is required for a functioning, complex society, and that while it is not perfect, it is the best we have and is therefore valid.
That's fair enough, and I do in fact agree with this, and insofar as this goes, I also agree that money problems are really are not imaginary.
--But the money itself is an utter charade. The link between 'money' and real energy and real goods of real value has been stretched virtually to the point of science fiction. And just saying that is not nearly enough to get my point across. Let me illustrate. . .
Here in Canada, banks are allowed to lend against only a fraction of the real money they hold. When giving funds to a loan recipient, they create money which didn't exist, and put it into the client's account. When the loan is repaid, the bank takes the interest on that loan and holds it as their fee, putting it into their coffers, and thus the overall money supply of the country increases. Magic! Money from nothing. It is estimated that here in Canada, actual money issued by the government, both in paper form and electronic, represents only about 3% of the Canada's actual money supply. The rest was created virtually, by banks motivated solely by profit. Despite its convolutions, this boils down to, as you put it, "Runaway money printing", which I wholeheartedly agree is a dubious practice.
But this is how it works. --And not just in Canada, but the world over in one manner or another. It's a giant dream machine, with the populace the collective dreamers. --Of course, if managed properly, the dream works, and we all agree to play within its boundaries. That's how it should be. But the dream has become a nightmare driven by sociopaths, and moreover, and this was my original point, the system I believe, is deliberately organized in this manner so that everybody becomes a readily controlled debt slave. --The number of hours people must work to make a living has grown as the decades have passed, pressing the population to their absolute stress points. When one is spent as such, there is no time or energy left over to think and grow in awareness and personal power. Slaves which are not exhausted might get ideas. . .
When one recognizes this, small issues like the OP's anger over how tax dollars are used on the welfare recipients, become recognizable as utter nonsense concerns. Like two slaves fighting over a blanket or a crust of bread when both the quality of their environment and size of their rations have nothing to do with each other and everything to do with the manipulations by the master of the house.
This is where my comments stemmed from. I was perhaps unclear in saying that the money system is make-believe and unimportant. --We both recognize that it is make-believe but very important. Perhaps what I should have said is that the money system is make-believe, but that the people making us believe are evil and/or insane, and that one may benefit mightily from ceasi
I live in a pretty bustling city and I don't encounter TV, ever, aside from maybe your local restaurant lobby.
I find that once the choice is made, it becomes routine to remain in that choice. It's the breaking away/enlarging of perspective which is challenged. Dealers don't like to let go of their addicts.
I wouldn't hand you three pages of howling rhetoric, but I might bust out an old "money & banking" textbook. I'm an economics major and a laurels scholar, you know.
Systems can be studied with a high degree of confidence when they are contained within a box where internal rule systems may remain coherent. Looking at how money behaves between individuals, businesses and banks leaves one with a comforting sense of ordered chaos. It's when one starts looking at outside influences and larger rule systems when those internal rule sets take on a new aspect. What's your take on the Fed's of charging interest on the money it loans to the government for general issuance? Where does the extra money come from required to repay that interest plus the principal?
-FL
I used to study yoga, and I'd go out into the backyard and do the lotus meditation thing, except I wasn't in the practice of closing my eyes; rather I'd stare at some fixed object.
Anyway, one of my room mates was out on the front deck working on her bike, and my neighbor, this intense sixty-year old dude, stomped out and plunked himself down on his lawn and glared over the property line at her. He sat there scowling at her, motionless for several minutes. My roomie was understandably weirded out by this, but she kept at what she was doing. After he got tired of sitting and glaring, he stormed up to her and yelled something to the effect of, "There! How do YOU like it?!" --And then he accused her and everybody else in our house of being part of some kind of organization set up to watch his every move. Being yelled at was enough for her, so she came inside to tell us all about it.
It wasn't until later that I put two and two together and realized that he'd seen me doing my sitting meditation the other day. The realization made me both laugh out loud and feel great pity for the guy. No wonder he was freaked; there he was, actually seeing a guy staring intently at his house, which technically I had been, for like thirty minutes straight. I caught him later that week and tried to explain it to him, but I don't think he bought a word of it. The poor guy was sick. --He was also convinced that our landlord was stealing his mail and bugging his phone, among many things. And our landlord, being the selfish child-man he was, took our crazy neighbor's anger personally and so he did in fact sometimes steal his mail and throw crap over the fence just to piss him off and help him along the way to totally crazy.
As messed up as that particular episode was, that sort of weirdness happened all the time when I was living there. I loved it! It was like living in one of those really good sitcom/dramas.
-FL
Convenience Food is meant to be just that ... convenience.
The funny part is that in retrospect, I realize I was doing Hobbits a grave disservice by lumping our ridiculous fast food industry in with silly Hobbit notions. --I doubt Shire folk would waste their time on Mickey-D's food. At least not Shire folk in their pure form; after a few generations of TV, city living and general stupifying, the Hobbits could, like humans, be made to consume stuff from the clown and actually like it. Of course, that would also mean that the ring war was lost, but that's neither here nor there. . .
We're so screwed.
-FL
While your reasoning is sound, the emissions studies quoted suggest that the process doesn't work entirely as advertised. The original piece does read like PR fluff. I have to wonder if the technology is suitably refined, but no independent studies are apparently available.
Still. . , plasma-blasting garbage into basic atoms sure sounds like a good idea which should work, given proper development.
-FL
Yes, next time you are at the drive-thru, don't ask for a cup, just let them pour your Coca Cola into your cupped hands, you dick.
It's not too hard to imagine a world where disposable cups are simply not used. Lots of restaurants use glass and clay-ware and employ dishwashers. Drive thrus are a silly hobbit notion which are only 'essential' because other silly hobbit notions make them so. But hey, if you want to buy a coffee and take it away, why not bring your own mug? Lots of people have travel mugs. It would only take a subtle shift in behavior patterns to do away with disposable cups. Our current systems are by no means chipped in stone, and many of them would sound no more ridiculous to an outsider than the idea of carrying your own mug with you when you travel.
As such, the poster had a valid thought and he isn't a 'dick'. There are lots of ways to reduce waste and everybody knows it. This does not, of course, mean that a plasma waste disposal system can't be useful. There will always be some waste.
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Normally, I find un-defined acronyms annoying, but this time I found it REALLY annoying. So in the interests of keeping the annoyance level to a minimum, I spent ten seconds on Google so other people won't have to. . .
Municipal Solid Waste.
You're welcome.
-FL
You crazy old coot. So what, you live in the woods or something now?
You know. . , it's weird. Every time I respectfully disagree with somebody by being open-handed and polite, I can always mark the ones who are going to take that as a cue to bite back. Don't know what it is. Maybe it's the fact that lower-functioning, dog-pack mentality cases tend to embrace lower-functioning, dog-pack mentality ideas. --People who are more comfortable living in over-simple world views where they can bristle and growl to their heart's content because it's simply better suited to a little doggy brain.
Anyway, you're also making an unwarranted assumption, which is similarly typical.
It's not like the TV can just grow legs and walk into your room and turn itself on.
That is correct. It takes a room mate or family member to turn on a TV. Never watched the thing myself because I didn't want to, and moving away wasn't predicated on whether or not the thing existed. I was just describing an observation of how the world happens to behave.
I won't even touch the idea that money = nothing, I don't have the time to write a 3-page essay.
Three pages of howling rhetoric written based on more assumptions about what I was probably not even saying would likely have been quite tiresome.
Woof, you silly boy! WHO thinks he's a smart boy? WHO? Yeeezzzz. You're a big dumb ball of fur who hasn't managed to clamber up the social ladder to embrace a broader range of human response yet, but we still love you.
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I thought, "Oh please. How can they screw it up. It's the Enterprise."
Aieee! That thing stinks of Hollywood's idea of cool; non-creative execs trying to cash in on the latest trend rather than allowing the real creative team to follow its natural instincts. That design has subtle alien qualities about it which spook me. And in any other film, that'd be fine. Sure. Whatever. But we already KNOW what the Enterprise looks like. That's why people want to watch it.
Abrams is a first-rate ass. "Lost" is messed up broken garbage which teaches viewers the poorest social imperatives, illustrating reality as a place where you can't trust anybody and communication must always be choked down to the barest minimum channel needed for survival. And "Alias" was just one big apologist's argument for torture. --That they put this J.J. clown in charge of Star Trek is nothing short of evil. Star Trek is supposed to stand for communication and human dignity. Abrams is nothing but a flashy pimp intent on the degradation of the human spirit.
Abrams, I hope you die very, very soon. Seriously. And I'm not saying that in passion. I just think the world would be better off without your presence and influence.
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No offense intended here, but I really don't think the giant corporation needs you to go to bat for them with those canned and, I'm sorry, but worthless sentiments. The whole, "money don't grow on trees" thing. Which, while being technically correct is only barely at that. With a world where money is very literally invented from nowhere, all facets of the economy, everything from taxes and government programs all the way to economic melt-downs, are 100% make-believe events designed to keep people like us running around in circles, preferably getting angry at largely abstract emotional hot-button concepts like the all-mighty, "welfare bum" so that we don't stop to see what's really going on.
Again, no offense, but I find it odd that when such ideas are made plain, (and I've not made it plain here; you'd have to research it a bit to see how it all works), but humanity as a whole seems to prefer to stay angry at the less complicated make-believe ideas, rather than get angry at the slave masters behind the illusion.
Aside from all that, you are correct. Nobody owes anybody a cheap flat screen TV set. The funny thing is, however, that given the state of mind-control these days, if people stopped wanting to buy TV sets, then you'd probably find that the powers that be would find some way to distribute them for free. And that it would be illegal to say "No". Do you have a cable subscription? Try canceling it sometime and see what happens. As a last ditch effort, (if you're really serious about getting rid of it), chances are good that you'll have it offered up for free rather than let you go without. I've lived through that weirdness, and I've seen it happen to others. In the end, I had to move to get away from TV.
-FL