If you're unfortunate enough to live in a rural area as I and my henchmen do, most of the towns simply do not offer broadband regardless of what you are willing to pay. The phone lines are outdated, the infrastructure has to be completely redone, and we can't offer them enough of a customer base to make it profitable.
I suppose that ties in with the point made elsewhere about how the sheer land mass of the USA makes connectivity difficult... there are MILLIONS of us scattered out here in cornfield country with simply no choice for broadband, period.
(You know you're in the sticks when AOL doesn't even offer a local dialup # for you...)
I think it's time we had a good, healthy debate on whether or not America is a good country. That matter has been swept under the rug for FAR TOO LONG on the internet.
As a side note, I defy anyone out there to give me a single good reason to buy a $70.00/month broadband connection (the cheapest that's available out here in the boonies). For what? Download songs? I can do that on a dialup. Download movies? I can pay less per month and get them on DVD. None of my favorite sites require broadband.
So what's the point? I can think of a hell of a lot more things to do with that money...
Going a step further, the truth is in the end we as a society get what we want. I see a parallel here to the Wal-Mart phenomenon, people screaming and crying because we lost "Main Street America" and all the quaint little shops ran by friendly old people, now run out of business by the huge, cold, evil product-dispensing Wal-Mart juggernaut.
Why did it happen? With evil corporate tricks? Smoke and mirrors? No; it was because people like it better this way. We like getting everything we need in one place, getting it quick, getting it cheap. Those little mom and pop shopkeepers screwed me over far more often than Wal-Mart ever could. You think Old Man Funkle from down the street had Wal-Mart's "return anything for any reason for a refund" policy? Hell no. He smiled at us as we came into his little shop, place smelling like cigar smoke, and he gouged the hell out of us. His selection sucked, it took forever to get checked out...
We have moved on. We need toothpaste, diapers, aspirin. We don't see getting those necessities as some wonderful opportunity to make new friends. If we could snap our fingers and make that stuff magically appear in our cabinets, we'd do it.
With the machine, we've taken the next step. There is no line (or at least less of one), there is none of that annoyance we get with humanity. When I want a conversation I'll talk to a friend. When I want a box of kleenex, I'll go to the Kleenex machine. If something has been lost, it is solely because we chose to lose it.
1) Referring to every bit of government monitoring as "Big Brother" is starting to get on my nerves. 1984 was an okay book and a mediocre movie and a bitchin' Apple commercial, but did we need to make it a part of our EVERYDAY language?
2) and more importantly, can we discuss each of these issues of government monitoring separately rather than flapping our arms and screeching the fear-inducing incantation of "Big Brother!" every time?
There is good monitoring and there is bad; there are sensible policies and foolish ones, necessary and unecessary. But by attaching emotionally charged words to a policy like "Third Reich" and "Big Brother" and "Hitleriffic" we kill any sensible debate, like every time we think about starting a war someone screams "it'll be the next Vietnam" without offering sensible reasons why it will or will not be similar to that conflict.
So put all that aside and simply ask: what are the benefits of this monitoring vs. what are the losses of privacy. Is it worth it? Either it is or it isn't; but no need to bring emotion into it.
Compare it to old-fashioned junk mail via the US post office. Even at bulk rates they're still paying about $.20 JUST IN POSTAGE. Figure in printing costs, envelopes, labor, etc and you'll see that e-mail spam is about 90% cheaper... and has about the same response rate.
Then compare that to the cost of advertising via TV or Radio. What percentage of listeners are listening to the ad? What percentage respond to it? It's miniscule.
And not that many people use spam filters. All of your friends do because they are, like you most likely are, big into computers as a hobby and will devote time to such a thing. The average internet user is not. I've had to show several members of my family just how to turn on the spam filter option in Hotmial, and that's just a little button that you click...
...Or somebody who runs a website like me. I want readers to be able to get through, even though they're not each on my approved list. In the same way, a business who uses a customer feedback e-mail address needs to keep it open to everyone.
I actually had to close down my hotmail account; the spam would exceed the 2MB within 24 hours after being cleaned (and that's with the wonderful MS spam filter set on "high.")
BTW, these days I'm getting individual spams that are 170 KB in size. Talk about rude...
It was with the help of spam that with just a simple herbal supplement I was able to add three inches to my penis (an increase of over 20%). I had assumed it was just a scam, and nobody was more suprised than me that it worked.
Why is it so much more comfortable for us to see massive orchestrated conspiracy where there is really nothing but 1) random chance or 2) stupidity.
As in, a lone crazy man slips through some very sloppy secret service security and puts a bullet in the president, 30 years later we're still speculating about secret mafia/cuban/communist/military-instrustrial complex theories. We actually bend the facts to make it fit. Visit the Book Depository in Dallas; if you look out that window down into the street, Oswald's shot looks rather easy to make. It's right there.
Why can't we just accept that? If there's a crime to be investigated, investigate it. Fine. But twenty years from now some conspiracy nut will still be speculating about who or what killed those scientists. Probably the same guy who did Vince Foster and Ron Brown...
I've tried playing Madden online on the PC. Half the guys just go sit in some darkened, protected corner of the field and then jump out and make the tackle as I run past. The other half have hacks, like the guy I played last night who turned all of my players into Ryan Leaf. Forget it.
Oh, you'll buy a PS3. Haven't you heard the news that it will be powerful enough to watch your body's movements via digital cameras and translate them into hyper-realistic digital virtual worlds on a processor 1,000 times more powerful than the PS2?
I think it also says somewhere in the article that you'll be able to strap it to your back and it will fly you to the moon.
"This will provide content holders and distributors with the bigger opportunities to widen the ways of secure content distribution to various devices while consumers will enjoy more entertaining and exciting content, which will enlarge and vitalize the entire digital content distribution market."
This will make your movies and music MORE EXCITING AND ENTERTAINING. Say goodbye to Britney and awful Elvis remixes. Say goodbye to slap-together Austin Powers' sequels crammed with product placements. THIS TECHNOLOGY WILL CURE US OF THAT.
I have yet to determine exactly how, but I happen to trust Sony. They told me the PS2 would be 1,000 times more powerful than the PS1, and dammit, we've all seen the results.
Why you guys can't get over your whining and just accept this new more exciting and entertaining future is beyond me.
There was a time when water was free. You could go get it right out of the river and drink it. Now I see people (like Evian) selling bottles of it for $2.00 apiece.
Because it was free before from another source, I am absolutely within my right to steal the bottles of water off the shelf. Us freewater users were here first. If the bottled water companies go out of business because of it, I can simply go back to drinking it out of the river.
Slashdot owes us free content at their own expense. Owes us.
It's not a black-and-white issue, of annoy vs. not annoy.
As in, it would annoy me less if McDonalds would give away their hamburgers for free. It would annoy me more if they suddenly charged $500.00 for them.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle, finding out how much annoyance the reader will take, and time after time it's been proven that it's just a little bit more annoyance than the reader says they will take.
(One of the reasons I signed up with FastClick, by the way, is that their popups are programmed to run only once per 24 hours per user; no spawning popups, no onclose popups, no multiple popups. Actually they're all popunders, but you get the idea.)
Traffic didn't fall when I started the popunders, traffic didn't pick up when I took them off for a time.
As for banners and product awareness, as God as my witness I wish we lived in a world where advertisers would be satisfied with a simple red banner that says "drink coke!" and would pay money for it that would cover bandwidth costs. Hell, maybe even play a little coke theme song with it. Get the brand out there, call the job done. That's how pretty much all advertising works.
But for some reason on the internet they decided that if an ad didn't get clickthrough, that ad was a failure.
Banners get horrible clickthrough. So banners are dead. 80% of my revenue comes from popunders, even though I display far more banners.
Why did they arrive at that conclusion? They don't consider a billboard ad to be a failure just because I didn't IMMEDIATELY drive my car to the restaurant being advertised. No; they're satisfied to get the name and logo out there, and hope I remember it the next time I get hungry. Why can't internet advertising work the same way? Their research must have told them that it didn't work that way. So now only the annoying ads pay.
I tried that once. I had a blowout article six months ago called LATEST WARCRAFT III SCREENSHOTS and then did the whole thing in plain text, only describing the screenshots.
Bandwidth was way down but my research shows that reader satisfaction went down with it. I'm not sure why.
I once went 2 years without buying a single 3.5 inch floppy (you know, back when people used them) because I had gotten so many AOL disks in my mailbox. Just format those bastards and throw a clean label on 'em. Ready to go.
The fee you pay monthly for internet access goes to a company called an Internet Service Provider, or ISP. This allows you physical access to the network of computers and routers called the internet.
The World Wide Web sits on the internet, and is made up of content pages called websites. But understand that the ISP does not write or administer the websites on the World Wide Web. So paying your ISP does not equal paying your friendly content providers, like the fine folks at Slashdot or Mr. Lowtax at Something Awful. They are not affiliated with the ISP's and do not receive any money from them.
Therefore the individual website operators must be funded separately, not so much for their time (though that would be nice) but for the expenses it takes to run a website. In order to run a website that can be viewed, there must be a server and another internet connection, only a much higher speed one than what you probably have. These connections are expensive. The servers are expensive. The staff hired to maintain the servers are expensive. The money must come from somewhere.
Or at least they did for me. It eventually came down to either displaying popunders or begging for Paypal donations for the rest of my site's life.
Clickthrough is spectacular on popups and popunders. You can say it's due to all the accidental clicks, but the sales figures say you're wrong. It's one of the first effective internet advertising techniques... though it can't match that other, much more effective technique called spam.
As for the editor's question, when will content providers learn that readers don't like being diverted from the content?
I don't know, but last night I tried watching the Simpsons and was diverted from the content entirely for up to two minutes at a time while commercials ran.
Hell, if that happened on the internet there would be a rebellion.
Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Someone has to pay; either the readers or the advertisers. Advertisers won't pay unless we allow them to annoy our readers. So in the end you, the reader, will pay in money or in annoyance. Which do you prefer?
...to use the World Trade Center to destroy innocent planets with it's massive planet-destroying deathray. I'm an American but I cannot defend my own government in these genocidal actions and I understand your point of view.
Clearly the World Trade Center was a military installation, armed to the teeth with laser turrets and weapons of mass destruction and thus was a legitimate target for the loveable ragtag group of muslim rebels.
The Vietnam comparisons are also striking, though the 1,000,000 vietnamese who died in that war may disagree about how much "creaming" went on. Also those of you who have seen the Jedi DVD extras know there is that one deleted scene where the Ewoks capture a storm trooper, starve him and pierce his eardrum with a sharpened stick of bamboo in order to get him to talk about troop movements. Clearly a parallel there.
The link I posted mentioned that it should be fine on a smaller screen (like you get at many cinaplexes) but the reviewers saw it on big-ass screens and the graininess apparently gets worse with it... whereas with movies shot on film the size doesn't seriously decrease the clarity.
There's simply more visual information stored on a piece of film than can currently be stored in a digital format. That degredation gets worse with size...
But that said, the same reviewers claimed the picture was crystal-clear on a digital projector. Are digital projection screens smaller? IF not, wouldn't they suffer the same losses? Like playing a little 3x3 inch compressed mpeg movie at full screen on my monitor? Or are digital projection screens always the same size, thus allowing the filmmakers to plan around it?
I guess it's a moot point for me; I don't have a digital projection screen within 200 miles.
"...so they were unable to resist command, or basically think for themselves...they were made to think more as a whole then individually..."
At this point I think we should have a lengthy discussion about whether or not this is a metaphor for socialism, and whether or not semi-human beings' lives are as sacred as completely human beings. Or not.
That's the thing about a Star Wars movie... you never really get to ask whether or not everyone aboard the Death Stars deserved to die (as Kevin Smith so eloquently spelled out), whether or not the clones are actually human and therefore deserving of our pity, whether or not a sentient robot deserves the same rights as a human being.
It seems like a pointless tangent but I've often felt like Lucas, with the droids and now the clones, has tried to portray all the fire and "fun" of warfare without all the ugly parts, that is, human dying. It's sort of a cop-out but, hey, it's just a movie.
But the C-3PO thing is the one that always rubs me the wrong way... he clearly comes off as a shiny bureaucrat in the first films, a prissy droid with a cushy government paycheck (or however droids are compensated; you get the idea). We see other models walking around; he's clearly come from an assembly line.
That's the nature of his character. He winds up getting dragged all around the galaxy when he would rather be back at his robot desk filing robot forms or whatever. That's where the comedy comes from.
Now Lucas has turned that around 180 degrees, made him the crude invention of a moisture farming child on a rural desert planet... ah, don't get me started.
That AOTC script that was floating around at Prequelspoilers.com had a bit where they said the clones were specially altered to make them unable to resist or think or whatever... to make them robotic.
I don't know if that line made it into the final cut of the film (had to work today, dammit) but that would explain their robotic behavior.
The film that eliminated the cruel outdated stereotype of the Scottish kilt-wearing bagpiper, and replaced it with the stereotype of the Scottish amoral and AIDS-ridden heroin fiend.
I keep hearing about problems with the transfer from digital media to celluloid, saying the projection is downright fuzzy in places. The best article is HERE quoting Roger Ebert and others, saying that even George Lucas wasn't happy that there is such a huge loss between digital projection and traditional. Has anybody noticed this? Is it irritating? Should I wait for the DVD?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're unfortunate enough to live in a rural area as I and my henchmen do, most of the towns simply do not offer broadband regardless of what you are willing to pay. The phone lines are outdated, the infrastructure has to be completely redone, and we can't offer them enough of a customer base to make it profitable.
I suppose that ties in with the point made elsewhere about how the sheer land mass of the USA makes connectivity difficult... there are MILLIONS of us scattered out here in cornfield
country with simply no choice for broadband, period.
(You know you're in the sticks when AOL doesn't even offer a local dialup # for you...)
I think it's time we had a good, healthy debate on whether or not America is a good country. That matter has been swept under the rug for FAR TOO LONG on the internet.
As a side note, I defy anyone out there to give me a single good reason to buy a $70.00/month broadband connection (the cheapest that's available out here in the boonies). For what? Download songs? I can do that on a dialup. Download movies? I can pay less per month and get them on DVD. None of my favorite sites require broadband.
So what's the point? I can think of a hell of a lot more things to do with that money...
Going a step further, the truth is in the end we as a society get what we want. I see a parallel here to the Wal-Mart phenomenon, people screaming and crying because we lost "Main Street America" and all the quaint little shops ran by friendly old people, now run out of business by the huge, cold, evil product-dispensing Wal-Mart juggernaut.
Why did it happen? With evil corporate tricks? Smoke and mirrors? No; it was because people like it better this way. We like getting everything we need in one place, getting it quick, getting it cheap. Those little mom and pop shopkeepers screwed me over far more often than Wal-Mart ever could. You think Old Man Funkle from down the street had Wal-Mart's "return anything for any reason for a refund" policy? Hell no. He smiled at us as we came into his little shop, place smelling like cigar smoke, and he gouged the hell out of us. His selection sucked, it took forever to get checked out...
We have moved on. We need toothpaste, diapers, aspirin. We don't see getting those necessities as some wonderful opportunity to make new friends. If we could snap our fingers and make that stuff magically appear in our cabinets, we'd do it.
With the machine, we've taken the next step. There is no line (or at least less of one), there is none of that annoyance we get with humanity. When I want a conversation I'll talk to a friend. When I want a box of kleenex, I'll go to the Kleenex machine. If something has been lost, it is solely because we chose to lose it.
1) Referring to every bit of government monitoring as "Big Brother" is starting to get on my nerves. 1984 was an okay book and a mediocre movie and a bitchin' Apple commercial, but did we need to make it a part of our EVERYDAY language?
2) and more importantly, can we discuss each of these issues of government monitoring separately rather than flapping our arms and screeching the fear-inducing incantation of "Big Brother!" every time?
There is good monitoring and there is bad; there are sensible policies and foolish ones, necessary and unecessary. But by attaching emotionally charged words to a policy like "Third Reich" and "Big Brother" and "Hitleriffic" we kill any sensible debate, like every time we think about starting a war someone screams "it'll be the next Vietnam" without offering sensible reasons why it will or will not be similar to that conflict.
So put all that aside and simply ask: what are the benefits of this monitoring vs. what are the losses of privacy. Is it worth it? Either it is or it isn't; but no need to bring emotion into it.
Forgive me for being dense, but what the hell are they talking about here?
My pacemaker is hidden and electronic and digital but I don't see why these bastards need to go hunting for it.
Seriously, though. What are they looking for?
Compare it to old-fashioned junk mail via the US post office. Even at bulk rates they're still paying about $.20 JUST IN POSTAGE. Figure in printing costs, envelopes, labor, etc and you'll see that e-mail spam is about 90% cheaper... and has about the same response rate.
Then compare that to the cost of advertising via TV or Radio. What percentage of listeners are listening to the ad? What percentage respond to it? It's miniscule.
And not that many people use spam filters. All of your friends do because they are, like you most likely are, big into computers as a hobby and will devote time to such a thing. The average internet user is not. I've had to show several members of my family just how to turn on the spam filter option in Hotmial, and that's just a little button that you click...
I actually had to close down my hotmail account; the spam would exceed the 2MB within 24 hours after being cleaned (and that's with the wonderful MS spam filter set on "high.")
BTW, these days I'm getting individual spams that are 170 KB in size. Talk about rude...
It was with the help of spam that with just a simple herbal supplement I was able to add three inches to my penis (an increase of over 20%). I had assumed it was just a scam, and nobody was more suprised than me that it worked.
Well, except my wife.
Why is it so much more comfortable for us to see massive orchestrated conspiracy where there is really nothing but 1) random chance or 2) stupidity.
As in, a lone crazy man slips through some very sloppy secret service security and puts a bullet in the president, 30 years later we're still speculating about secret mafia/cuban/communist/military-instrustrial complex theories. We actually bend the facts to make it fit. Visit the Book Depository in Dallas; if you look out that window down into the street, Oswald's shot looks rather easy to make. It's right there.
Why can't we just accept that? If there's a crime to be investigated, investigate it. Fine. But twenty years from now some conspiracy nut will still be speculating about who or what killed those scientists. Probably the same guy who did Vince Foster and Ron Brown...
I've tried playing Madden online on the PC. Half the guys just go sit in some darkened, protected corner of the field and then jump out and make the tackle as I run past. The other half have hacks, like the guy I played last night who turned all of my players into Ryan Leaf. Forget it.
Oh, you'll buy a PS3. Haven't you heard the news that it will be powerful enough to watch your body's movements via digital cameras and translate them into hyper-realistic digital virtual worlds on a processor 1,000 times more powerful than the PS2?
I think it also says somewhere in the article that you'll be able to strap it to your back and it will fly you to the moon.
It says RIGHT IN THE RELEASE that:
"This will provide content holders and distributors with the bigger opportunities to widen the ways of secure content distribution to various devices while consumers will enjoy more entertaining and exciting content, which will enlarge and vitalize the entire digital content distribution market."
This will make your movies and music MORE EXCITING AND ENTERTAINING. Say goodbye to Britney and awful Elvis remixes. Say goodbye to slap-together Austin Powers' sequels crammed with product placements. THIS TECHNOLOGY WILL CURE US OF THAT.
I have yet to determine exactly how, but I happen to trust Sony. They told me the PS2 would be 1,000 times more powerful than the PS1, and dammit, we've all seen the results.
Why you guys can't get over your whining and just accept this new more exciting and entertaining future is beyond me.
There was a time when water was free. You could go get it right out of the river and drink it. Now I see people (like Evian) selling bottles of it for $2.00 apiece.
Because it was free before from another source, I am absolutely within my right to steal the bottles of water off the shelf. Us freewater users were here first. If the bottled water companies go out of business because of it, I can simply go back to drinking it out of the river.
Slashdot owes us free content at their own expense. Owes us.
It's not a black-and-white issue, of annoy vs. not annoy.
As in, it would annoy me less if McDonalds would give away their hamburgers for free. It would annoy me more if they suddenly charged $500.00 for them.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle, finding out how much annoyance the reader will take, and time after time it's been proven that it's just a little bit more annoyance than the reader says they will take.
(One of the reasons I signed up with FastClick, by the way, is that their popups are programmed to run only once per 24 hours per user; no spawning popups, no onclose popups, no multiple popups. Actually they're all popunders, but you get the idea.)
Traffic didn't fall when I started the popunders, traffic didn't pick up when I took them off for a time.
As for banners and product awareness, as God as my witness I wish we lived in a world where advertisers would be satisfied with a simple red banner that says "drink coke!" and would pay money for it that would cover bandwidth costs.
Hell, maybe even play a little coke theme song with it. Get the brand out there, call the job done. That's how pretty much all advertising works.
But for some reason on the internet they decided that if an ad didn't get clickthrough, that ad was a failure.
Banners get horrible clickthrough. So banners are dead. 80% of my revenue comes from popunders, even though I display far more banners.
Why did they arrive at that conclusion? They don't consider a billboard ad to be a failure just because I didn't IMMEDIATELY drive my car to the restaurant being advertised. No; they're satisfied to get the name and logo out there, and hope I remember it the next time I get hungry. Why can't internet advertising work the same way?
Their research must have told them that it didn't work that way. So now only the annoying ads pay.
All pages run in PLAIN TEXT
I tried that once. I had a blowout article six months ago called LATEST WARCRAFT III SCREENSHOTS and then did the whole thing in plain text, only describing the screenshots.
Bandwidth was way down but my research shows that reader satisfaction went down with it. I'm not sure why.
I once went 2 years without buying a single 3.5 inch floppy (you know, back when people used them) because I had gotten so many AOL disks in my mailbox. Just format those bastards and throw a clean label on 'em. Ready to go.
Ah, the magic of recycling...
The fee you pay monthly for internet access goes to a company called an Internet Service Provider, or ISP. This allows you physical access to the network of computers and routers called the internet.
The World Wide Web sits on the internet, and is made up of content pages called websites. But understand that the ISP does not write or administer the websites on the World Wide Web. So paying your ISP does not equal paying your friendly content providers, like the fine folks at Slashdot or Mr. Lowtax at Something Awful. They are not affiliated with the ISP's and do not receive any money from them.
Therefore the individual website operators must be funded separately, not so much for their time (though that would be nice) but for the expenses it takes to run a website. In order to run a website that can be viewed, there must be a server and another internet connection, only a much higher speed one than what you probably have. These connections are expensive. The servers are expensive. The staff hired to maintain the servers are expensive. The money must come from somewhere.
Make sense?
Or at least they did for me. It eventually came down to either displaying popunders or begging for Paypal donations for the rest of my site's life.
Clickthrough is spectacular on popups and popunders. You can say it's due to all the accidental clicks, but the sales figures say you're wrong. It's one of the first effective internet advertising techniques... though it can't match that other, much more effective technique called spam.
As for the editor's question, when will content providers learn that readers don't like being diverted from the content?
I don't know, but last night I tried watching the Simpsons and was diverted from the content entirely for up to two minutes at a time while commercials ran.
Hell, if that happened on the internet there would be a rebellion.
Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Someone has to pay; either the readers or the advertisers. Advertisers won't pay unless we allow them to annoy our readers. So in the end you, the reader, will pay in money or in annoyance. Which do you prefer?
...to use the World Trade Center to destroy innocent planets with it's massive planet-destroying deathray. I'm an American but I cannot defend my own government in these genocidal actions and I understand your point of view.
Clearly the World Trade Center was a military installation, armed to the teeth with laser turrets and weapons of mass destruction and thus was a legitimate target for the loveable ragtag group of muslim rebels.
The Vietnam comparisons are also striking, though the 1,000,000 vietnamese who died in that war may disagree about how much "creaming" went on. Also those of you who have seen the Jedi DVD extras know there is that one deleted scene where the Ewoks capture a storm trooper, starve him and pierce his eardrum with a sharpened stick of bamboo in order to get him to talk about troop movements. Clearly a parallel there.
The link I posted mentioned that it should be fine on a smaller screen (like you get at many cinaplexes) but the reviewers saw it on big-ass screens and the graininess apparently gets worse with it... whereas with movies shot on film the size doesn't seriously decrease the clarity.
There's simply more visual information stored on a piece of film than can currently be stored in a digital format. That degredation gets worse with size...
But that said, the same reviewers claimed the picture was crystal-clear on a digital projector. Are digital projection screens smaller? IF not, wouldn't they suffer the same losses? Like playing a little 3x3 inch compressed mpeg movie at full screen on my monitor? Or are digital projection screens always the same size, thus allowing the filmmakers to plan around it?
I guess it's a moot point for me; I don't have a digital projection screen within 200 miles.
"...so they were unable to resist command, or basically think for themselves...they were made to think more as a whole then individually..."
At this point I think we should have a lengthy discussion about whether or not this is a metaphor for socialism, and whether or not semi-human beings' lives are as sacred as completely human beings. Or not.
That's the thing about a Star Wars movie... you never really get to ask whether or not everyone aboard the Death Stars deserved to die (as Kevin Smith so eloquently spelled out), whether or not the clones are actually human and therefore deserving of our pity, whether or not a sentient robot deserves the same rights as a human being.
It seems like a pointless tangent but I've often felt like Lucas, with the droids and now the clones, has tried to portray all the fire and "fun" of warfare without all the ugly parts, that is, human dying. It's sort of a cop-out but, hey, it's just a movie.
But the C-3PO thing is the one that always rubs me the wrong way... he clearly comes off as a shiny bureaucrat in the first films, a prissy droid with a cushy government paycheck (or however droids are compensated; you get the idea). We see other models walking around; he's clearly come from an assembly line.
That's the nature of his character. He winds up getting dragged all around the galaxy when he would rather be back at his robot desk filing robot forms or whatever. That's where the comedy comes from.
Now Lucas has turned that around 180 degrees, made him the crude invention of a moisture farming child on a rural desert planet... ah, don't get me started.
That AOTC script that was floating around at Prequelspoilers.com had a bit where they said the clones were specially altered to make them unable to resist or think or whatever... to make them robotic.
I don't know if that line made it into the final cut of the film (had to work today, dammit) but that would explain their robotic behavior.
So there.
The film that eliminated the cruel outdated stereotype of the Scottish kilt-wearing bagpiper, and replaced it with the stereotype of the Scottish amoral and AIDS-ridden heroin fiend.
"Well Sickboy lacks a certain moral fiber."
"He does know a lot about Sean Connery though."
"That's hardly a substitute!"
I keep hearing about problems with the transfer from digital media to celluloid, saying the projection is downright fuzzy in places. The best article is HERE quoting Roger Ebert and others, saying that even George Lucas wasn't happy that there is such a huge loss between digital projection and traditional. Has anybody noticed this? Is it irritating? Should I wait for the DVD?