You're kinda wrong there, bud. Do you remember who defeated the Nazgul Lord? It was Eowyn, the shieldmaiden. Galadriel also played a useful purpose plotwise, and was a strong character as well. It's true that one of them had parts as major as the Felloship members, but they were there.
LOTR fanatics have been spying on the set, hassling PJ, pestering the casting department, and generally making nuisances of themselves. For that effort, they have yielded the following, which is all over the net:
1) There will be no Tom Bombadil in the movie, that part of the plot will be left out.
2) Arwen's character will be expanded. I'm not sure the implications of this, but some have said Arwen will be more like Xena: Warrior Princess. This is probably an exagerration. In addition, the relationship between Arwen and Aragorn will be seen more often, and sooner than it surfaces in the books.
3) Some of the events that are told about (such as the fight between Saruman and Gandalf) will happen real-time in the movies, rather than 'as told by Gandalf'.
4) a few minor characters will be left out, and a few will be added.
5) the scouring of the shire will be rather different, though it is not certain how.
For more stuff like this, there's about a dozen LotR movie fanatic pages, with all sorts of images and details.
I think you're dead wrong about the nature of value. To say that farming and mining are the only true sources of value is patently absurd.
Value, for these purposes, is a quality of some entity (product or service, for the most part) that does some good. In a market economy most things that have value have some directly proportional price associated with them.
Although it might be true that, to some extent or other, all products ever sold on a market come originally from some farm (food, clothing, etc) or some mine or oil well (metals, plastics, fuel), your assumption that 'the only industries that create value are farming and mining' must be wrong.
First, there is the issue of the value-add. This is where a plethora of industries add value to a raw material by changing or manipulating them in some way. This can be as simple as a forge turning iron ore into hammers. There are many, many ways of adding value to a raw material, from turning it into a product to shipping it to a place where it will be used by someone. When companies do this they are infusing utility into a lump of matter, creating value by smelting the ore into a tool and shipping it to your house.
In fact, one might say that farming and mining, by themselves, create almost no value. After all, how much use is a lump of iron ore sitting in some mining company's bins compared to a hammer sitting in your toolbox?
Even if you ignore this, farming and mining, although essential, still pale next to the value of all the country's (and the world's) service industries. Here, a person creates value every day by availing his expertise to someone else, sometimes with almost no help at all from the acmed farming and mining communities. Teachers fall into this last category, but anyone who uses their knowledge to achieve some good is creating value out of thin air.
The computing industry is an excellent example of this. At the beginning, after the mining companies are completely through with their portion of the effort in making a computer, you have, basically, some sand, some petroleum products, and a few lumps of some random metals. The hardware folks take over, turning that pile of almost useless refuse from a geology class into a computer. Clearly, value from nothing.
After that the software people take over. Using the tools that the hardware mfgers have built for them and their knowledge of math and logic, they create a tremendous amount of value by writing cool software. The funny thing about this in particular is that it's almost irrelevant where the hardware comes from or what it does, because you can write software by scratching in the dust, which last I heard one didn't need miners to dredge up for us.
Heh heh that would be a Zork-style adventure game, really. Just like King's Quest, where you had to take the corn you got from the merchant by selling one of your kidneys (which you had to have removed by the local butcher, who charged you one golden crown which you earned by washing the dishes at the tavern) to the mill and mill it before feeding it to the cow who you can then lure off the path to allow you to walk by to get to the red door that takes the needle-shaped blue key which you found by randomly clicking on the haystack . . .
If you like space and 3D in general, you'd probably really like Homeworld, which is a resource-gathering unit-building real time strategy game, except set in space and entirely 3D. You move your units through a three-dimensional space. I've found it to be a tremendous amount of fun.:)
A note on the web page, Cataclysm is an expansion to Homeworld. Happy hunting.
Turn based strategy games (mostly war games, although there are other kinds) have been around for literally thousands of years. However, the historical wargaming period started to fall off with the advent of computers appearing in the average person's home. For an interesting take on this, read some of James F. Dunnigan's work on the subject (also a good designer).
I'm not so sure about that. I've played some zillion-polygon games that have had excellent gameplay. Take Homeworld, Half Life, the Quakes, etc. I hear games like Thief are excellent as well, although I haven't played it.
I wonder, what about 'massively multiplayer' games? Of course, MUDs and the like have been around for quite some time, but it seems that the graphical kind (like ultima online) are pretty new.
Also on a personal note, my good friend and roommate recently brought his original Nintendo up to our apartment and I started playing Final Fantasy (no bloody VIII, no bloody VII . . . ) and was having a blast, devoting almost all of my cart gaming time to it. A few days later, our house was broken into and all of our shiny new consoles were taken, including a playstation, our Nintendo 64, and (this hurt the most) our new Dreamcast with all my Soul Calibur records with it.
But luckily, the robbers didn't touch the old Nintendo sitting in my room.
As a side note, what kind of party should I be using? I had a fighter and one of each sort of mage (black, red, white) but that didn't seem to be getting too powerful in the later levels.
It's interesting to see the different attitudes about sex in different cultures. In some places in Europe, for example, it's completely legal and accepted for a child to buy pornography from a street vendor.
The problem is, America has an irrational dichotomy about sexuality. On one hand, America is fascinated by sex, behaving like a 14 year old boy on the subject. On the other, sex is still seen, albeit implicitly, as something 'naughty', something dirty to be hidden from the public eye because it is 'inappropriate'.
I think America needs to grow up. I think it's time to ask ourselves, why is sex a taboo topic when it comes to children? For that matter, why is it taboo for anybody? What exactly are we afraid of?
Let's say, for example, that there are no controls on the web browsing in the laundrimat. Middle school kids will come in and look up pornography. Fine. What harm is that to anyone? Will the students be transformed into sex-crazed lunatics as a result of seeing, most likely, a few sets of heaving breasts?
I place the fault of this absurd American attitude squarely on the shoulders of parents who over-shelter their children. It is true that kids need to be protected from harm, but I think the best protection is understanding. I think we should explain 'The Birds and the Bees' to children as young as possible, so that, when the time comes, they will be more comfortable with the changes going on in their bodies, and more likely to be able to handle sexuality more maturely.
Of course, no son of mine is going to look at that perverted, disgusting nonsense! Excuse me for ending this early, but there's a good movie on one of the Nipplevision channels.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the handheld device version, the tackhammer?
You're kinda wrong there, bud. Do you remember who defeated the Nazgul Lord? It was Eowyn, the shieldmaiden. Galadriel also played a useful purpose plotwise, and was a strong character as well. It's true that one of them had parts as major as the Felloship members, but they were there.
1) There will be no Tom Bombadil in the movie, that part of the plot will be left out.
2) Arwen's character will be expanded. I'm not sure the implications of this, but some have said Arwen will be more like Xena: Warrior Princess. This is probably an exagerration. In addition, the relationship between Arwen and Aragorn will be seen more often, and sooner than it surfaces in the books.
3) Some of the events that are told about (such as the fight between Saruman and Gandalf) will happen real-time in the movies, rather than 'as told by Gandalf'.
4) a few minor characters will be left out, and a few will be added.
5) the scouring of the shire will be rather different, though it is not certain how.
For more stuff like this, there's about a dozen LotR movie fanatic pages, with all sorts of images and details.
I think you're dead wrong about the nature of value. To say that farming and mining are the only true sources of value is patently absurd. Value, for these purposes, is a quality of some entity (product or service, for the most part) that does some good. In a market economy most things that have value have some directly proportional price associated with them. Although it might be true that, to some extent or other, all products ever sold on a market come originally from some farm (food, clothing, etc) or some mine or oil well (metals, plastics, fuel), your assumption that 'the only industries that create value are farming and mining' must be wrong. First, there is the issue of the value-add. This is where a plethora of industries add value to a raw material by changing or manipulating them in some way. This can be as simple as a forge turning iron ore into hammers. There are many, many ways of adding value to a raw material, from turning it into a product to shipping it to a place where it will be used by someone. When companies do this they are infusing utility into a lump of matter, creating value by smelting the ore into a tool and shipping it to your house. In fact, one might say that farming and mining, by themselves, create almost no value. After all, how much use is a lump of iron ore sitting in some mining company's bins compared to a hammer sitting in your toolbox? Even if you ignore this, farming and mining, although essential, still pale next to the value of all the country's (and the world's) service industries. Here, a person creates value every day by availing his expertise to someone else, sometimes with almost no help at all from the acmed farming and mining communities. Teachers fall into this last category, but anyone who uses their knowledge to achieve some good is creating value out of thin air. The computing industry is an excellent example of this. At the beginning, after the mining companies are completely through with their portion of the effort in making a computer, you have, basically, some sand, some petroleum products, and a few lumps of some random metals. The hardware folks take over, turning that pile of almost useless refuse from a geology class into a computer. Clearly, value from nothing. After that the software people take over. Using the tools that the hardware mfgers have built for them and their knowledge of math and logic, they create a tremendous amount of value by writing cool software. The funny thing about this in particular is that it's almost irrelevant where the hardware comes from or what it does, because you can write software by scratching in the dust, which last I heard one didn't need miners to dredge up for us.
Yeah, I miss those games.
What MUD is it? I want to play! I've been hunting for a good MUD on mudconnector but have been unsuccessful.
A note on the web page, Cataclysm is an expansion to Homeworld. Happy hunting.
Turn based strategy games (mostly war games, although there are other kinds) have been around for literally thousands of years. However, the historical wargaming period started to fall off with the advent of computers appearing in the average person's home. For an interesting take on this, read some of James F. Dunnigan's work on the subject (also a good designer).
I'm not so sure about that. I've played some zillion-polygon games that have had excellent gameplay. Take Homeworld, Half Life, the Quakes, etc. I hear games like Thief are excellent as well, although I haven't played it.
I wonder, what about 'massively multiplayer' games? Of course, MUDs and the like have been around for quite some time, but it seems that the graphical kind (like ultima online) are pretty new. Also on a personal note, my good friend and roommate recently brought his original Nintendo up to our apartment and I started playing Final Fantasy (no bloody VIII, no bloody VII . . . ) and was having a blast, devoting almost all of my cart gaming time to it. A few days later, our house was broken into and all of our shiny new consoles were taken, including a playstation, our Nintendo 64, and (this hurt the most) our new Dreamcast with all my Soul Calibur records with it. But luckily, the robbers didn't touch the old Nintendo sitting in my room. As a side note, what kind of party should I be using? I had a fighter and one of each sort of mage (black, red, white) but that didn't seem to be getting too powerful in the later levels.
It's interesting to see the different attitudes about sex in different cultures. In some places in Europe, for example, it's completely legal and accepted for a child to buy pornography from a street vendor.
The problem is, America has an irrational dichotomy about sexuality. On one hand, America is fascinated by sex, behaving like a 14 year old boy on the subject. On the other, sex is still seen, albeit implicitly, as something 'naughty', something dirty to be hidden from the public eye because it is 'inappropriate'.
I think America needs to grow up. I think it's time to ask ourselves, why is sex a taboo topic when it comes to children? For that matter, why is it taboo for anybody? What exactly are we afraid of?
Let's say, for example, that there are no controls on the web browsing in the laundrimat. Middle school kids will come in and look up pornography. Fine. What harm is that to anyone? Will the students be transformed into sex-crazed lunatics as a result of seeing, most likely, a few sets of heaving breasts?
I place the fault of this absurd American attitude squarely on the shoulders of parents who over-shelter their children. It is true that kids need to be protected from harm, but I think the best protection is understanding. I think we should explain 'The Birds and the Bees' to children as young as possible, so that, when the time comes, they will be more comfortable with the changes going on in their bodies, and more likely to be able to handle sexuality more maturely.
Of course, no son of mine is going to look at that perverted, disgusting nonsense! Excuse me for ending this early, but there's a good movie on one of the Nipplevision channels.