Re:Explanation of The Force is A Farce
on
Episode II Rumours
·
· Score: 1
great, the James Randi site was cool. I'm always interested in counterpoint. ( seriously )
and great, another con man asking for your money.
this is all good. and the world is flat, too, right? why is it that you can't imagine that there are things that you don't want to believe in that are true/exist?
nobody yet, including olympic gymnasts, have been able to duplicate the yogic flying feat w/out the technique. they ask for money. i don't agree with that. but they show you how to do something with your mind that you are not likely to find yourself.
i've seen it happen. i have not met anyone yet who is more cynical than i am about such things. i did not marry an idiot. this stuff is real. the flying part is not the goal, anyway-- it is merely a by-product.
i've heard a lot of 'claims' over the years about things MMY has said, but noone has every showed me video of him making any. or quotes, but we all know how much b.s. quotes are.
MMY doesn't promote magic, or UFO's, or fire-walking, or hate or disbelief towards people not like you. . . he promotes only self balance.
Re:Explanation of The Force is A Farce
on
Episode II Rumours
·
· Score: 1
I did, however, find it disappointing that they had to develop a scientific explanation for The Force. Couldn't The Force simply remain something spiritual?
this is a big subject to tackle, but I'll start to give you an idea anyway:
there is one theory by people in the TM movement (transcendental meditation) that goes like this: (Lucas is himself a TM'er)
Many of the TM movement's beliefs and practices come from vedic knowledge. (Ancient India- some 6K yrs ago) The current 'leader' although there is none of the TM movement is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi- who talks about the "unified field". The theory is that all of the universe is made up of vibrations (sounds) and everything we see in the universe are the peaks and valleys of these vibrations.
The unified field is then the plane from which the peaks and valleys erupt. This is actually getting some serious notation from modern physicists, and isn't quite as crazy as it sounds.
So The Force is really the "unified field" of all knowledge (yep, Life, the Universe, and Everything. ..)
There's a whole university in a small town in Iowa devoted to this knowledge- link here. Very interesting place.
They also practice besides meditation something called "Yogic Flying". If you ever get a chance to see this, do, you won't believe your eyes. I've seen it hundreds of times and it still mystifies me.
My ex-wife does it- basically lotus position and suddenly hops into the air repeatedly. It's amazing stuff.
So The Force is a spiritual thing, as well as a scientific one.
Cosource.com will only handle monetary compensation when it launches (because we are aggregating many sponsors, rather than a single sponsor per project). If you want a machine instead of cash, sourceXchange is the one for you, at least initially.
I tend to think that non-monetary compensation will become extremely important for both companies.
For example, it would be awfully hard for me to write a driver for a piece of hardware without first owning it. (Forgive me if I've got the wrong site here, I've just read both. ..)
Also, waiting for a milestone to receive cash to get hardware x would be kind of hard, huh?
Obviously there will be a lot of things to work out after your beta run, but I think this is an important thing to look at up front.
In addition, non-monetary compensation is at least partly responsible for the way in which the OSS movement has flourished, attracting these kinds of attentions.
Red Hat has momentum, there are runner ups(article mentioned TurboLinux as #2- I would have thought Caldera would lay claim to that), but no distribution has an office suite like Corel's.
There are problems with Corel's suite, Paradox is a poor database (but no worse than MSAccess), but the word processor is dynamite.
Yes, there are many dists out there, maybe too many, but they have two good things going:
1> they are basing it on Debian 2> they have real, time-tested, user-friendly GUI applications that the market wants
In one shot we see the proudly displayed logos of at least half a dozen buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken (hungry rascals), several liters of Mountain Dew, a box of Ritz crackers, a cannister of Easy Cheese, and beyond that I simply lost count as the items proceeded straight past my mental defenses into my subconscious.
If I was making movies, I think that I would try to avoid making any social statements by avoiding any visible mention of anything real.
Ok, sarcasm aside, get real! The dinner scene and the long shots of the advertising was a statement of our society. As you said yourself (A gimmick is that, as his show becomes more popular, the advertisers increase in stature from local pizza parlors and the like, to multinational corporations like Pepsi, Maytag, and Nokia. ), the interesting thing here is the social collective conscience. I believe the statement here is that the major advertisers, who *want* to be the bearers of the lowest common denominator, have been dumbed down enough by their own hype that they don't even have the foresight to see what will be popular with the masses.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing your analysis here. There is a lot of advertisement on EDTV. Let's go with the paranoid conspiracy theory, though. Let's say that the products in the movie were paid placement by the real companies. If I could get a company to pay for me to make fun of them in front of millions of viewers, I'd be laughing my butt off. Sure, they would get real advertising, if the common person can't separate the irony. But it would just go to show that the corporations don't even care if they are made fun of, as long as they get their message out.
I know I wasn't looking desperately for easy cheese or KFC after the movie. (ooops. . . I just mentioned the two products. I guess that means they are paying me for this comment. I wish!)
I'm sorry to say this, but I hate the idea of META tags on the web. I have been an avid net user since 93, just before the browser boom. When the browsers first came out, the search engines were still based on the text of a web page. Today, you are lucky to find such a tool. Most popular engines rely on the META tags, as if the general population had some kind of superior abstraction skills.
At one time, you could force AltaVista to only show pages containing certain text or URL's. While those options are still accepted by the engine, they are largely ignored. As a user I am annoyed when I ask a search engine to only show me pages that actually contain certain strings, only to navigate to the page and turn up empty on a find.
I have actually gone from 'portal' surfing (early Yahoo) to search-based surfing, back to 'portal' surfing. The web is hairy enough that I actually *do* want someone to filter out the crap for me, unless I am looking for something extremely specific and unhappy with the portal-based results.
I do agree with some of his other thoughts, about form submission and URL changing. . .
I'm sorry to say this, but I think the time has come for some kind of fund or program to be set up so that lawyers can be hired to defend when needed against stupid lawsuits like this. I'm not sure if the comic strips would qualify for such help, but clearly the Internet is entering a new arena with different rules than what came before.
Theoretically, this is exactly what the ACLU is for. (Anybody out there who doesn't know-- it's the American Civil Liberties Union. They are a prominent group of free speech/bill of rights supporters in the United States)
While the ACLU generally sticks to cases with a large profile, (due mostly because there are enough rights violations to protect, and also because their clients are generally not charged) something like this could easily be covered.
There is a good precedent for parody, as mentioned in some previous replies. And the precedent should be upheld. . . should comics such as Leno, Letterman, etc be sued for making jokes about the companies? I think most would agree, even among the ranks of the company doing the litigation in this case, that such a suit would be ridiculous.
What we're dealing with here is a medium issue, and the rights of this electronic medium seem no different to me than the rights granted a broadcast or print spectrum.
Actually, there is at least one very good model of this that I know of. SBT Accounting systems is a Foxpro application sold by a company whose license goes something like this:
> the source code comes with the purchase > if you don't modify the source code, they provide 100% support for a limited amount of time (I think it is like a year) > if you don't change the source code, you may purchase additional support > as soon as you change even one character in any of the code, it is your code, you own it, and there is no support.
And I actually think this is a pretty good business model. It is the open but not free source, and they are basically saying they will back their code, because they know it works, but they won't back your code, because. . . it's yours!
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great, the James Randi site was cool. I'm always interested in counterpoint. ( seriously )
and great, another con man asking for your money.
this is all good. and the world is flat, too, right? why is it that you can't imagine that there are things that you don't want to believe in that are true/exist?
nobody yet, including olympic gymnasts, have been able to duplicate the yogic flying feat w/out the technique. they ask for money. i don't agree with that. but they show you how to do something with your mind that you are not likely to find yourself.
i've seen it happen. i have not met anyone yet who is more cynical than i am about such things. i did not marry an idiot. this stuff is real. the flying part is not the goal, anyway-- it is merely a by-product.
i've heard a lot of 'claims' over the years about things MMY has said, but noone has every showed me video of him making any. or quotes, but we all know how much b.s. quotes are.
MMY doesn't promote magic, or UFO's, or fire-walking, or hate or disbelief towards people not like you. . . he promotes only self balance.
I did, however, find it disappointing that they had to develop a scientific explanation for The Force. Couldn't The Force simply remain something spiritual?
.)
this is a big subject to tackle, but I'll start to give you an idea anyway:
there is one theory by people in the TM movement (transcendental meditation) that goes like this: (Lucas is himself a TM'er)
Many of the TM movement's beliefs and practices come from vedic knowledge. (Ancient India- some 6K yrs ago) The current 'leader' although there is none of the TM movement is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi- who talks about the "unified field". The theory is that all of the universe is made up of vibrations (sounds) and everything we see in the universe are the peaks and valleys of these vibrations.
The unified field is then the plane from which the peaks and valleys erupt. This is actually getting some serious notation from modern physicists, and isn't quite as crazy as it sounds.
So The Force is really the "unified field" of all knowledge (yep, Life, the Universe, and Everything. .
There's a whole university in a small town in Iowa devoted to this knowledge- link here. Very interesting place.
They also practice besides meditation something called "Yogic Flying". If you ever get a chance to see this, do, you won't believe your eyes. I've seen it hundreds of times and it still mystifies me.
My ex-wife does it- basically lotus position and suddenly hops into the air repeatedly. It's amazing stuff.
So The Force is a spiritual thing, as well as a scientific one.
Cosource.com will only handle monetary compensation when it launches (because we are aggregating many sponsors, rather than a single sponsor per project). If you want a machine instead of cash, sourceXchange is the one for you, at least initially.
.)
I tend to think that non-monetary compensation will become extremely important for both companies.
For example, it would be awfully hard for me to write a driver for a piece of hardware without first owning it. (Forgive me if I've got the wrong site here, I've just read both. .
Also, waiting for a milestone to receive cash to get hardware x would be kind of hard, huh?
Obviously there will be a lot of things to work out after your beta run, but I think this is an important thing to look at up front.
In addition, non-monetary compensation is at least partly responsible for the way in which the OSS movement has flourished, attracting these kinds of attentions.
think about it:
Red Hat has momentum, there are runner ups(article mentioned TurboLinux as #2- I would have thought Caldera would lay claim to that), but no distribution has an office suite like Corel's.
There are problems with Corel's suite, Paradox is a poor database (but no worse than MSAccess), but the word processor is dynamite.
Yes, there are many dists out there, maybe too many, but they have two good things going:
1> they are basing it on Debian
2> they have real, time-tested, user-friendly GUI applications that the market wants
In one shot we see the proudly displayed logos of at least half a dozen buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken (hungry rascals), several liters of Mountain Dew, a box of Ritz crackers, a cannister of Easy Cheese, and beyond that I simply lost count as the items proceeded straight past my mental defenses into my subconscious.
If I was making movies, I think that I would try to avoid making any social statements by avoiding any visible mention of anything real.
Ok, sarcasm aside, get real! The dinner scene and the long shots of the advertising was a statement of our society. As you said yourself (A gimmick is that, as his show becomes more popular, the advertisers increase in stature from local pizza parlors and the like, to multinational corporations like Pepsi, Maytag, and Nokia. ), the interesting thing here is the social collective conscience. I believe the statement here is that the major advertisers, who *want* to be the bearers of the lowest common denominator, have been dumbed down enough by their own hype that they don't even have the foresight to see what will be popular with the masses.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing your analysis here. There is a lot of advertisement on EDTV. Let's go with the paranoid conspiracy theory, though. Let's say that the products in the movie were paid placement by the real companies. If I could get a company to pay for me to make fun of them in front of millions of viewers, I'd be laughing my butt off. Sure, they would get real advertising, if the common person can't separate the irony. But it would just go to show that the corporations don't even care if they are made fun of, as long as they get their message out.
I know I wasn't looking desperately for easy cheese or KFC after the movie. (ooops. . . I just mentioned the two products. I guess that means they are paying me for this comment. I wish!)
at what point in one's success does one become blind to the competition of others?
I'm sorry to say this, but I hate the idea of META tags on the web. I have been an avid net user since 93, just before the browser boom. When the browsers first came out, the search engines were still based on the text of a web page. Today, you are lucky to find such a tool. Most popular engines rely on the META tags, as if the general population had some kind of superior abstraction skills.
At one time, you could force AltaVista to only show pages containing certain text or URL's. While those options are still accepted by the engine, they are largely ignored. As a user I am annoyed when I ask a search engine to only show me pages that actually contain certain strings, only to navigate to the page and turn up empty on a find.
I have actually gone from 'portal' surfing (early Yahoo) to search-based surfing, back to 'portal' surfing. The web is hairy enough that I actually *do* want someone to filter out the crap for me, unless I am looking for something extremely specific and unhappy with the portal-based results.
I do agree with some of his other thoughts, about form submission and URL changing. . .
I'm sorry to say this, but I think the time has come for some kind of fund or program to be set up so that lawyers can be hired to defend when needed against stupid lawsuits like this. I'm not sure if the comic strips would qualify for such help, but clearly the Internet is entering a new arena with different rules than what came before.
Theoretically, this is exactly what the ACLU is for. (Anybody out there who doesn't know-- it's the American Civil Liberties Union. They are a prominent group of free speech/bill of rights supporters in the United States)
While the ACLU generally sticks to cases with a large profile, (due mostly because there are enough rights violations to protect, and also because their clients are generally not charged) something like this could easily be covered.
There is a good precedent for parody, as mentioned in some previous replies. And the precedent should be upheld. . . should comics such as Leno, Letterman, etc be sued for making jokes about the companies? I think most would agree, even among the ranks of the company doing the litigation in this case, that such a suit would be ridiculous.
What we're dealing with here is a medium issue, and the rights of this electronic medium seem no different to me than the rights granted a broadcast or print spectrum.
this just reminds me of the IBM quote that Linux wouldn't take 1M hits a day. . .
MS is getting large enough that they also are in the boat where the right hand doesn't even know there is a left hand.
I think you would know if you were a moderator. . .
I had an idea 2 years ago to do a website where you choose your songs and I write them to disk and mail them. . .
I didn't get very far because I needed to make contacts in the industry for royalties.
And several friends told me that people had tried to do this with cassette and failed.
And now 2 places on the web do this, and a physical vending machine!!!
Actually, there is at least one very good model of this that I know of. SBT Accounting systems is a Foxpro application sold by a company whose license goes something like this:
> the source code comes with the purchase
> if you don't modify the source code, they provide 100% support for a limited amount of time (I think it is like a year)
> if you don't change the source code, you may purchase additional support
> as soon as you change even one character in any of the code, it is your code, you own it, and there is no support.
And I actually think this is a pretty good business model. It is the open but not free source, and they are basically saying they will back their code, because they know it works, but they won't back your code, because. . . it's yours!
yeah, but there will probably be that many porn sites by the end of the year!