Well, I agree that's stupid. But I think you'll find that another reason why nonody outside the northeast rail corridor rides the train is because once you are out of that small slice of America, destinations are far enough apart that it is questionable to spend hours or even days on a train when you can get there in an hour or two on a plane and be working on-site the same day.
Of course we all win. What I mean by "liberals" is actually those Democratic candidates that were hoping to use the war in Iraq and the economy against Bush. Most likely neither of those will be things they can use against Bush by the time the elections come around, so they're going to have to get creative.:)
But I agree, things are better for all of us--even liberals, except for those that want to be president.
But that won't last long if the daily attacks keep happening. The longer we're over there, the more attacks our troops will be subject to. That means their morale will drop again.
Yes, but I'll bet that the fact that Saddam has been caught will make it possible to bring our troops home sooner. No-one felt comfortable pulling out with the Saddam "wildcard" still loose in the country.
Other than Bush's statements (and forged evidence and demonstrable false statements ) there isn't any evidence or reason to believe MWDs exist.
Well, no reason except that Saddam has used them in the past and the U.N. has "found" that Iraq probably posessed them at some point which is why the world (not just the U.S.) insisted on the arms inspectors. They weren't there because the world thought Saddam was innocent.
The fact is, everyone believes he had them at some point. If he no longer has them he should have cooperated fully with U.N. arms inspectors, proven it to the world, and taken the wind out of Bush's arguments for war. Saddam did the exact opposite. He was not cooperative, did not give us (or the U.N.) any reason to believe him, and paid the consequences.
If Saddam didn't have WMDs then he will go down in history as the most inept poker player in the world. If he did have WMDs, they'll be found.
Anyway, only people like you believe that the only reason to believe WMDs exist is because of what you perceive as Bush lies and forged evidence. There is plenty of evidence and history behind why the U.N. believed he had WMDs--or had failed to properly account for missing WMDs. He has used them in the past. If you want to close your eyes to that, feel free, but don't be surprised when people ignore you as just another bitter, anti-Bush-hated without a clue and a very loose grip on reality.
These soldiers aren't as accepting of political propganda as you think. They volunteered to defend America, not engage in imperialist occupation and trade potshots with neighborhood thugs.
That you think that our military is going to be up against huge, conventional battles such as what we prepared for in the Cold War just shows how out-of-date your thinking is. Any soldier who has volunteered to service in the military in the last 10 years knew very well that they might be trading potshots with neighborhood thugs. That's been mostly what our military has done for the last decade.
As for imperialist occupation, you'll find that's more of a liberal stick up your ass rather than reality. Soldiers aren't robots and have minds of their own so not all of them will always agree with American foreign policy. But I'll bet more of them agree with us being in Iraq than agreed with us being in Somalia, and I'll bet the percentage of soldiers that agree with their mission is higher than the percentage of liberals in the U.S. that agree with the mission.
There's a reason morale is in the shitter.
I suspect because they've been subjected to guerilla warfare with no end in sight and no particular achievements since Bagdhad fell. I suspect the capture of Saddam is going to help troop morale tremendously. It's probably going to help our morale back in the states, too. And, yes, it's probably going to score Bush a boost in the polls.
Economy is improving, we've captured Saddam Hussein... Things aren't looking so bad this Christmas. Funny how when things go well in the U.S. the only ones that lose out are the liberals.:)
Same here. I use Win98 under Win4Lin because it's the last OS for which I have an installation CD-ROM. Win98 actually worked more reliably and faster on my Win98 laptop (which now is my wife's) than my WinXP laptop (which is still mine, but now runs Linux).
So when I need to use Windows (mostly for QuickBooks and a very occasional VB project requested by a client) I just run Win4Lin which runs Win98. Works fine and actually runs my Windows applications faster than the same computer did when it had WinXP loaded on it.
Personally, I see no reason to move to WinXP. I have yet to run into a Windows application that will not run under Win98 under Win4Lin. In fact, WinXP is what caused me to finally jump to Linux on my laptop. And I've been happy ever since. At some point I'll need to buy a new laptop and I'll either be loading Linux on that, or it'll be a Mac. My Windows days are done.
So to put it in different terms, why should you watch it when you can let other people make the decision for you on whether it is good or not.
No, to put it in different terms, why should I watch it when I suspected it was going to be garbage and other people here on Slashdot have essentially confirmed that for me.
Your position is completely backwards. People hate the new StarWars ep I&II, and feel it dimishes the original trilogy precisely because it's presented as a continuation of the same story.
No, my position stands.
What you're saying would be true if George Lucas did episodes I, II, and III and--like I mentioned earlier--then proceeded to completely redo ANH, ESB and ROTJ. The new Star Wars films are annoying but at least we have the original trilogy. With BSG, the new BSG is essentially throwing out what WAS good about BSG and starting over with crap.
It's one thing for Lucas to tack on three more useless movies that you can safely ignore. Wouldn't you be more upset if he then threw out the originals and remade the only good part of Star Wars that ever existed?
Preparing a re-make or re-imagining is the next best thing to creating a new original project, and is far superior to tacking on yet more sequels to a concluded series.
If the real Battlestar Galactica had ever really concluded I could agree with you. But since BSG was a series that only lasted one season and was really never concluded the best idea would have been to build on the working series.
STPM and AOTC are much more serious in tone, overall... The avuncular Adama is replaced by the tough-as-nails Adama. No humorous or silly situations.
Which, I think, is why they both suck. There's no Harrison Ford with good lines in I and II and no Starbuck cracking them in the new BSG (or so I hear). Neither Star Wars or the real Battlestar Galactica were comedy, but it's about striking a balance between a serious story and some fun. I don't think either the new Star Wars movies or (apparently) the new BSG found that balance.
Maybe you should actually sit down and watch the new show before you berate it.
Why? People always comment on articles here without reading TFA.:)
The original series (lamely) stole from the stale "evil robots want to wipe out the human race," completely without motivation other than they're "evil."
First, see the reply someone already added explaining the source of Cylons in the real Battlestar Galactica. They were created "a thousand yahrens ago" by another race. I personally didn't know the original Cylon race was lizard, but I did know that the Cylon race created the Cylon machines.
Second, sometimes it's better just to have the enemy "out there and evil" without explanation, or very little explanation. We accepted Darth Vader was evil in ANH, Empire, and ROTJ without any real knowledge of why. We still don't know why, although we'll probably learn in III. But the Star Wars trilogy wasn't any less cool because we didn't know why Darth Vader or the Emperor were evil... they just were.
The new series is more of a "Frankenstein"
premise, where a life form rises up against its creator, and possibly like Frankenstein's monster, we will find ourselves feeling sympathetic towards these Cylons.
Is there any particular reason why I would want to feel sympathetic towards the Cylons? The real Battlestar Galactica was fine with them simply being evil. I think the whole idea of sympathizing with the Cylons just goes along with the whole "fuzzy logic" of political correctness where it's not ok to simply hate someone or something becuase they're evil and without accepting that it's somehow YOUR fault. Heck, we can't even enjoy a simple good vs. evil movie anymore without having to sympathize with the enemy.
I want *escape* in a science fiction movie, not more of the guilt-trip I get from watching the nightly news.
Why not watch it and find out (Sunday night, 7pm-11pm)? It's not like watching a different version of something you like will suck out your soul or something
Why watch it? I intentionally didn't watch it Monday and Tuesday because I had my doubts and knew they'd replay it a dozen times (like they did with Taken). And why would I watch it Sunday now that many people here on Slashdot have confirmed those doubts?
The religion is presented differently in the new version, but you'll have to wait until the end for most of that (or just flip to SciFi at around 10:30pm on Sunday if you want to skip all the character development, battle scenes, moral dilemmas, and sex scenes).
The sad part is that I'd have to wait so late in the program to actually get something I'd want to watch.
It really seems to me that this new Battlestar Galactica is to the Battlestar Galactica franchise what Episodes I and II (and probably III) are to the Star Wars franchise. But at least the new Star Wars crud doesn't act like the real Star Wars trilogy never existed.
I would have been far more interested in watching this new version of Battlestar Galactica if it happened, well, say 25 years later than the real Battlestar Galactica? Apollo and Starbuck could be older men--perhaps the original Apollo (Richard Hatch) would now be fleet commander since Adama (and Lorne Greene) are both dead, and maybe Starbuck would now hold Colonel Ti's position. And you could introduce a whole new line of warriors, plots, special effects, twists, etc. That would have been GREAT. You get a tie-in to the real Battlestar Galactica, don't alienate the original fans, and still can do your new stuff with young, new actors.
But to just pretend the real Battlestar Galactica never happened and just do a complete re-do is absurd. People grudgingly tolerate Episode I and II and III... But what if George Lucas then said, "Well, we're going to redo Star Wars, Empire, and ROTJ using the actors we've groomed in I, II, and III. No more Harrison Ford playing Han Solo, now Han Solo is going to be played by Jennifer Lopez. Oh yeah, by the way, Han Solo is now a hot lady." That's basically what we're talking about here with the new Battlestar Galactica.
They did a re-do when a continuation would have been much, much better. Unfortunately, if the new BSG did/does well then they'll probably want to launch a series based on the new BSG. If it does poorly they'll probably think "Well it was cancelled after one season in the 70's and didn't do well in 2003, so I guess it's just a failure." Either way we won't get to see a continuation of the real Battlestar Galactica.:(
It was only a 2-night show? Wow, I thought it was actually a mini-series. After "Taken" I figured that'd be at least a week or two. I'm even more glad I didn't watch.
It seems to me it really didn't have anything to lure me in. It seems the basis of the story (computers gone bad that want to kill us) was stolen from Terminator. It seems the name and the roles were stolen from the real Battlestar Galatcia. The sex scenes were apparently borrowed from the Spice channel (based on a commercial I saw and seeing comments about gratuitous use of sex).
And what WAS the purpose in this new version? Was there a goal? Or is it just to survive?
I mean, in the real Battlestar Galactica we had evil Cylons trying to exterminate humans and our heroes trying to find earth. Although simple, it was a fun storyline. It had a challenge (finding earth and surviving the Cylons), it had a goal (arriving at earth), it had mystrey along the way slowly putting pieces of a puzzle together (the pyramids at Cobol), a religious touch (the city of lights and Count Ibly), and it had a cool overlap in our worldly reality (the tie-in where Apollo almost sees the Apollo landing at the end of one of the episodes was cool).
In my opinion it really had a very complete background and storyline--if anything, it got the short end of the stick since it was canned after only one season and the writers had to finish things up near the end. They could have slowly developed more and more clues as to the location of earth, further explored the development of the BSG mythology (Lords of Cobol, etc.). There's so much they could have done. Had it lasted just two or three seasons I think we would have seen BSG take its proper place among the science fiction greats.
Personally, I don't think we should call it the "Original Battlestar Galactica." If we're going ot prefix a qualifier to intentionally distinguish the two we should call the 1970's version the "Real Battlestar Galactica." I'm not sure what we should call this new thing, although I'm hopeful it will only amount to the two-night miniseries they did and will not evolve into a full-blown series and also hope this new version is soon filed right along side Galactica 1980.
In the new series, the Cylons will have human form for a good reason: They are made in the image of their creators.
Sounds more like a terminator movie than Battlestar. Was there something wrong with the original "evil aliens against good human" basis? Is it too politically incorrect to imply that someone or something can be evil, so now we have to change the storyline so that we brought the whole problem on ourselves?
I haven't been watching the new series. Can anyone tell me if it's anygood? Making a male role a female and make Cylons into hot chicks and (from what I've heard) not even looking for the planet earth really seems to erase everything about the original story except the name.
So what IS the goal in the storyline? To defeat the Cylons? Are they going to defeat the Cylons then wander throughout the universe with no end in sight? Are they going to settle some planet? It all seems so pointless.
I just saw the BSG episode where Apollo is watching some monitors in an observatory and at the end of the episode he leaves with Starbuck just as the Apollo moon landing is displayed on the monitor. I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking, "No!!" The goal was always to reach earth and that was so much of the fun. There was that "near miss" of seeing the Apollo landing, the message in the inside of the pyramid on Cobol, the coordinates provided by Apollo, Starbuck, and Sheba after returning from the ship of lights... it was just cool to watch them piece together the location of earth.
A Battlestar Galactica where Apollo (or Starbuck, can't remember) is now female, Cylons can be hot chicks having sex with someone (saw it on a commercial), and where earth is no longer a factory in the storyline is not Battlestar and I wish they wouldn't have hijacked the name.
His challenges (hopefully) won't contain porn, viagra ads, pictures of sex with animals, penis enlargement ads, etc. His challenges (hopefully) won't have 50+ bytes of random words just to bypass your spam filter(s). His challenges (hopefully) won't try to use symbols to distort words and bypass your spam filter(s).
So? There's plenty of spam that doesn't contain that particular content, doesn't have random words, nor uses symbols to avoid spam filters. It's still spam and I don't want it.
His challenges will be appropriate for any age, extremely easy to filter out, and hopefully even small in size.
It's not the size of the spam that is time-consuming, it is the quantity. And if it's easy for me to filter out then the whole challenge/response system is bogus--if it's easy for me to filter out then what makes you think a legitimate challenge would get through my spam filter?
The real difference is that it can be filtered out. Where as real spam can not, at least not without taking a good chunk of legitimate email along with it.
If anything, a challenge is harder to filter out than normal spam. Normal spam is actually VERY easy to filter out with a Bayesian filter. So far this month I'm at 99.92% filtered with 0 false positives. Challenges would be more difficult to filter out because they would be less "spammy." Of course, if I start getting flooded with bogus challenges then all the sudden all challenges are going to look spammy and they'll eventually all get filtered--even the legitimate ones!
In most (but not all situations) its possible to weed out bogus challenge responses.
In most (but not all) situations, it's possible to weed out bogus spam--but that doesn't make spam acceptable.
For example, if I get a challenge to an e-mail I allegedly sent but the recipient if not in my address book (or sent mail list) then my e-mail program can just discard it and never bother me.
That's a whitelist approach. But that's a closed system. Many people (myself included) have to be able to receive email from people we've never talked to. They initiate the conversation, not me. So I can't just have my email program reject email as bogus just because it's not whitelisted or in my "sent" folder.
The point is that the challenge/response model depends on sending out a challenge for every spam that comes in. You are assuming that others are using an anti-spam solution to catch your bogus challenges and treat it as spam. That's a bogus approach.
Yes, people can filter out your challenges. But tell me how that is different from filtering out spam and why your automated challenges should be any more acceptable to me than outright spam? Both are email I didn't ask for and don't want.
Not every one has to be using the stamp processing client program. When stamps are not present it defaults to the earthlink system. When they are is skips that nuiscance.
The problem is that when you use the EarthLink system, you become a nuisance to hundreds of others around the world.
I currently am up to about 300 spams per day. Most of those are forged addresses--which means they belong to someome, just not the spammer. If I used the EarthLink system I would be sending "challenge" messages to about 300 innocent people each day. Suddenly *I* am part of the spam problem from the perspective of those 300 people per day.
As long as return addresses can be forged, challenge/response systems should be frowned on at least as much as spam--possibly more than spam since they supposedly solve spam by generating more garbage for others on the network which is just counter-productive and annoying.
That said, I like the rest of your idea. Email must remain free so I'm opposed to a system under which I automatically have to pay a penny to everyone I send email to but only get it back if they decide to credit me.
But if you can set your own "charge" for receiving spam and spammers can embed a token in their email saying "I'm willing to pay a maximum of $1 for someone to read this message" then if a spam comes in that pays the amount you've decided to charge for receiving spam, it goes out to the central payment server and credits you and debits the spammer, fine. Pay me $1 per spam and I'll happily receive 300 per day!
Of course, at $1/spam there won't be any... which is even better!
Biometrics is silly. In the end it converts your retinal scan or fingerprint to a digital number or code which is really the "password." Biometrics makes sense in a secure environment (within a CIA building, FBI building, etc.) but if the environment isn't secure potential hackers are just going to hack the encoded password rather than trying to fake the source biometric. I.e., why try to "fake" the retinal scan or fingerprints when you can just tap into the data transmitted from the biometric scanner before it reaches the authenticating system?
Plus... while you can't "lose" your biometric ID, if someone compromises the "encoded password" (i.e. the data sent from the scanner to the computer) then you are compromised for life.
First, there is nothing preventing spammers from registering their own domains (e.g. legitimatemail1.com, legitimatemail2.com), putting perfectly valid public keys on their nameserver, and sending mail which will be accepted.
It seems to me that all this does is more or less prove that the mail being received is coming from where it purports to come from. So, yes, a spammer can still create a mail server with keys and everything but at least when he sends a spam the message will be signed as having come from their server which makes it easier to filter on their server. It also causes their server to have to spend CPU cycles generating the encrypted key for each spam--which I assume would have to be separately generated for each copy of the spam which increases the cost of sending spam.
Finally, I think this is most useful in that if you know that every message that comes from Yahoo.com is signed with this scheme and you receive a message that purports to be from Yahoo.com that DOESN'T have the signature, it's spam. You can start creating a list of servers that you know use it--and if a message purports to come from one of those servers then you know it's spam. Yahoo probably has an interest in this because there are probably a lot of people and mail servers that are just filtering on Yahoo.com these days, even though we all know most of that spam doesn't actually come from Yahoo.
This mostly looks like an attempt to attack the problem of spammers forging email addresses that don't belong to them in the spam they send. It doesn't solve the spam problem, but it solves an annoying part of it--especially when some spammer forges YOUR email address as the "From" address in a spam sent to millions of people (and bounced from thousands).
No doubt the Democrats will follow suit as soon as they can. But the fact remains: this is a chain of events that didn't need to be set in motion.
Both sides have been guilty, and both sides will gerrymander to the most beneficial extent possible for their party whenever they can. I'm not sure it's entirely bad. The good thing about a polarized Congress is they tend to get less done which is often a GOOD thing.
Personally, I think redistricting should be done automatically by computer using an algorithm that contains only population data from the last census and contains geographic constraints. By geographic constraints I mean logical rules in the programming that creates contiguous districts which minimize zig-zagging and which does not permit two contiguous areas to be linked to form a single district by a skinny area that links them, etc. The rules should be defined by Congress in a law and then used directly to generate the program code.
In my opinion, the Supreme Court should rule that politically-driven redistricting is not legal and should require that a law be passed by Congress that defines the specific parameters to be used to draw districts. This can then be placed into a computer program and it will be automatically done by computer, not by politicians.
I don't see a double standard, I see one raving loony and one bright fellow who strongly supported the development of the internet long before it was popularly recognized as a big idea, and used ambiguous wording to say so.
Well I see Gore as a raving loony based on most of the content of his book "Earth in the Balance." And that, presumably, was Gore in coherent form. I guess we all have different definitions of raving loons. I'm just glad that his Internet creation was embraced while most of his ideas in his book were rejected by society.
Gore's words in a CNN interview, as quoted by Wired News, were as follows: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Gore meaning, obvious to anyone who knew the record, was that he did
the political work and articulated the public vision that made the Internet possible.
I'm not even arguing that point. I don't suggest that he ever meant he went out and designed and created IP protocol, etc.
However, for him to even suggest that his political work amounted to "taking the initiative in creating the Internet" is a distortion of the facts, although I *do* believe he just mispoke. I don't think he was intentionally trying to take credit for the creation of the Internet. He probably just meant to say that he supported bills that helped fund the development of the Internet. He just slipped up and said it in a way that made him sound more critical to the endeavor than he really was.
Basically, I have no problem with what Gore said. It's just as stupid, both in and out of context, as many things folks such as Dan Quayle have said. The annoying thing is that when a liberal such as Gore says something stupid there are a bunch of apologetics trying to make him look less stupid. But when Dan Quayle or George Bush says something stupid it's either evidence of stupidity or an evil conspiracy. It's a double standard.
Face it, Gore said something stupid even in the political context. Don't bother trying to fix it. Everyone makes mistakes, even Gore.
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Of course we all win. What I mean by "liberals" is actually those Democratic candidates that were hoping to use the war in Iraq and the economy against Bush. Most likely neither of those will be things they can use against Bush by the time the elections come around, so they're going to have to get creative. :)
But I agree, things are better for all of us--even liberals, except for those that want to be president.
Point of fact, I didn't blame Clinton. I just said that's what the military has been doing for a decade.
Yes, but I'll bet that the fact that Saddam has been caught will make it possible to bring our troops home sooner. No-one felt comfortable pulling out with the Saddam "wildcard" still loose in the country.
Well, no reason except that Saddam has used them in the past and the U.N. has "found" that Iraq probably posessed them at some point which is why the world (not just the U.S.) insisted on the arms inspectors. They weren't there because the world thought Saddam was innocent.
The fact is, everyone believes he had them at some point. If he no longer has them he should have cooperated fully with U.N. arms inspectors, proven it to the world, and taken the wind out of Bush's arguments for war. Saddam did the exact opposite. He was not cooperative, did not give us (or the U.N.) any reason to believe him, and paid the consequences.
If Saddam didn't have WMDs then he will go down in history as the most inept poker player in the world. If he did have WMDs, they'll be found.
Anyway, only people like you believe that the only reason to believe WMDs exist is because of what you perceive as Bush lies and forged evidence. There is plenty of evidence and history behind why the U.N. believed he had WMDs--or had failed to properly account for missing WMDs. He has used them in the past. If you want to close your eyes to that, feel free, but don't be surprised when people ignore you as just another bitter, anti-Bush-hated without a clue and a very loose grip on reality.
That you think that our military is going to be up against huge, conventional battles such as what we prepared for in the Cold War just shows how out-of-date your thinking is. Any soldier who has volunteered to service in the military in the last 10 years knew very well that they might be trading potshots with neighborhood thugs. That's been mostly what our military has done for the last decade.
As for imperialist occupation, you'll find that's more of a liberal stick up your ass rather than reality. Soldiers aren't robots and have minds of their own so not all of them will always agree with American foreign policy. But I'll bet more of them agree with us being in Iraq than agreed with us being in Somalia, and I'll bet the percentage of soldiers that agree with their mission is higher than the percentage of liberals in the U.S. that agree with the mission.
There's a reason morale is in the shitter.
I suspect because they've been subjected to guerilla warfare with no end in sight and no particular achievements since Bagdhad fell. I suspect the capture of Saddam is going to help troop morale tremendously. It's probably going to help our morale back in the states, too. And, yes, it's probably going to score Bush a boost in the polls.
Economy is improving, we've captured Saddam Hussein... Things aren't looking so bad this Christmas. Funny how when things go well in the U.S. the only ones that lose out are the liberals. :)
So when I need to use Windows (mostly for QuickBooks and a very occasional VB project requested by a client) I just run Win4Lin which runs Win98. Works fine and actually runs my Windows applications faster than the same computer did when it had WinXP loaded on it.
Personally, I see no reason to move to WinXP. I have yet to run into a Windows application that will not run under Win98 under Win4Lin. In fact, WinXP is what caused me to finally jump to Linux on my laptop. And I've been happy ever since. At some point I'll need to buy a new laptop and I'll either be loading Linux on that, or it'll be a Mac. My Windows days are done.
Ok, you convinced me. I'll watch it Sunday. But if it ruins Battlestar for me for the rest of my life I hold you responsible. :)
No, to put it in different terms, why should I watch it when I suspected it was going to be garbage and other people here on Slashdot have essentially confirmed that for me.
No, my position stands.
What you're saying would be true if George Lucas did episodes I, II, and III and--like I mentioned earlier--then proceeded to completely redo ANH, ESB and ROTJ. The new Star Wars films are annoying but at least we have the original trilogy. With BSG, the new BSG is essentially throwing out what WAS good about BSG and starting over with crap.
It's one thing for Lucas to tack on three more useless movies that you can safely ignore. Wouldn't you be more upset if he then threw out the originals and remade the only good part of Star Wars that ever existed?
Preparing a re-make or re-imagining is the next best thing to creating a new original project, and is far superior to tacking on yet more sequels to a concluded series.
If the real Battlestar Galactica had ever really concluded I could agree with you. But since BSG was a series that only lasted one season and was really never concluded the best idea would have been to build on the working series.
Which, I think, is why they both suck. There's no Harrison Ford with good lines in I and II and no Starbuck cracking them in the new BSG (or so I hear). Neither Star Wars or the real Battlestar Galactica were comedy, but it's about striking a balance between a serious story and some fun. I don't think either the new Star Wars movies or (apparently) the new BSG found that balance.
Why? People always comment on articles here without reading TFA. :)
The original series (lamely) stole from the stale "evil robots want to wipe out the human race," completely without motivation other than they're "evil."
First, see the reply someone already added explaining the source of Cylons in the real Battlestar Galactica. They were created "a thousand yahrens ago" by another race. I personally didn't know the original Cylon race was lizard, but I did know that the Cylon race created the Cylon machines.
Second, sometimes it's better just to have the enemy "out there and evil" without explanation, or very little explanation. We accepted Darth Vader was evil in ANH, Empire, and ROTJ without any real knowledge of why. We still don't know why, although we'll probably learn in III. But the Star Wars trilogy wasn't any less cool because we didn't know why Darth Vader or the Emperor were evil... they just were.
The new series is more of a "Frankenstein" premise, where a life form rises up against its creator, and possibly like Frankenstein's monster, we will find ourselves feeling sympathetic towards these Cylons.
Is there any particular reason why I would want to feel sympathetic towards the Cylons? The real Battlestar Galactica was fine with them simply being evil. I think the whole idea of sympathizing with the Cylons just goes along with the whole "fuzzy logic" of political correctness where it's not ok to simply hate someone or something becuase they're evil and without accepting that it's somehow YOUR fault. Heck, we can't even enjoy a simple good vs. evil movie anymore without having to sympathize with the enemy.
I want *escape* in a science fiction movie, not more of the guilt-trip I get from watching the nightly news.
Why watch it? I intentionally didn't watch it Monday and Tuesday because I had my doubts and knew they'd replay it a dozen times (like they did with Taken). And why would I watch it Sunday now that many people here on Slashdot have confirmed those doubts?
The religion is presented differently in the new version, but you'll have to wait until the end for most of that (or just flip to SciFi at around 10:30pm on Sunday if you want to skip all the character development, battle scenes, moral dilemmas, and sex scenes).
The sad part is that I'd have to wait so late in the program to actually get something I'd want to watch.
It really seems to me that this new Battlestar Galactica is to the Battlestar Galactica franchise what Episodes I and II (and probably III) are to the Star Wars franchise. But at least the new Star Wars crud doesn't act like the real Star Wars trilogy never existed.
I would have been far more interested in watching this new version of Battlestar Galactica if it happened, well, say 25 years later than the real Battlestar Galactica? Apollo and Starbuck could be older men--perhaps the original Apollo (Richard Hatch) would now be fleet commander since Adama (and Lorne Greene) are both dead, and maybe Starbuck would now hold Colonel Ti's position. And you could introduce a whole new line of warriors, plots, special effects, twists, etc. That would have been GREAT. You get a tie-in to the real Battlestar Galactica, don't alienate the original fans, and still can do your new stuff with young, new actors.
But to just pretend the real Battlestar Galactica never happened and just do a complete re-do is absurd. People grudgingly tolerate Episode I and II and III... But what if George Lucas then said, "Well, we're going to redo Star Wars, Empire, and ROTJ using the actors we've groomed in I, II, and III. No more Harrison Ford playing Han Solo, now Han Solo is going to be played by Jennifer Lopez. Oh yeah, by the way, Han Solo is now a hot lady." That's basically what we're talking about here with the new Battlestar Galactica.
They did a re-do when a continuation would have been much, much better. Unfortunately, if the new BSG did/does well then they'll probably want to launch a series based on the new BSG. If it does poorly they'll probably think "Well it was cancelled after one season in the 70's and didn't do well in 2003, so I guess it's just a failure." Either way we won't get to see a continuation of the real Battlestar Galactica. :(
It seems to me it really didn't have anything to lure me in. It seems the basis of the story (computers gone bad that want to kill us) was stolen from Terminator. It seems the name and the roles were stolen from the real Battlestar Galatcia. The sex scenes were apparently borrowed from the Spice channel (based on a commercial I saw and seeing comments about gratuitous use of sex).
And what WAS the purpose in this new version? Was there a goal? Or is it just to survive?
I mean, in the real Battlestar Galactica we had evil Cylons trying to exterminate humans and our heroes trying to find earth. Although simple, it was a fun storyline. It had a challenge (finding earth and surviving the Cylons), it had a goal (arriving at earth), it had mystrey along the way slowly putting pieces of a puzzle together (the pyramids at Cobol), a religious touch (the city of lights and Count Ibly), and it had a cool overlap in our worldly reality (the tie-in where Apollo almost sees the Apollo landing at the end of one of the episodes was cool).
In my opinion it really had a very complete background and storyline--if anything, it got the short end of the stick since it was canned after only one season and the writers had to finish things up near the end. They could have slowly developed more and more clues as to the location of earth, further explored the development of the BSG mythology (Lords of Cobol, etc.). There's so much they could have done. Had it lasted just two or three seasons I think we would have seen BSG take its proper place among the science fiction greats.
Personally, I don't think we should call it the "Original Battlestar Galactica." If we're going ot prefix a qualifier to intentionally distinguish the two we should call the 1970's version the "Real Battlestar Galactica." I'm not sure what we should call this new thing, although I'm hopeful it will only amount to the two-night miniseries they did and will not evolve into a full-blown series and also hope this new version is soon filed right along side Galactica 1980.
Just watch Back to the Future II and you'll know.
Sounds more like a terminator movie than Battlestar. Was there something wrong with the original "evil aliens against good human" basis? Is it too politically incorrect to imply that someone or something can be evil, so now we have to change the storyline so that we brought the whole problem on ourselves?
I haven't been watching the new series. Can anyone tell me if it's anygood? Making a male role a female and make Cylons into hot chicks and (from what I've heard) not even looking for the planet earth really seems to erase everything about the original story except the name.
So what IS the goal in the storyline? To defeat the Cylons? Are they going to defeat the Cylons then wander throughout the universe with no end in sight? Are they going to settle some planet? It all seems so pointless.
I just saw the BSG episode where Apollo is watching some monitors in an observatory and at the end of the episode he leaves with Starbuck just as the Apollo moon landing is displayed on the monitor. I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking, "No!!" The goal was always to reach earth and that was so much of the fun. There was that "near miss" of seeing the Apollo landing, the message in the inside of the pyramid on Cobol, the coordinates provided by Apollo, Starbuck, and Sheba after returning from the ship of lights... it was just cool to watch them piece together the location of earth.
A Battlestar Galactica where Apollo (or Starbuck, can't remember) is now female, Cylons can be hot chicks having sex with someone (saw it on a commercial), and where earth is no longer a factory in the storyline is not Battlestar and I wish they wouldn't have hijacked the name.
So? There's plenty of spam that doesn't contain that particular content, doesn't have random words, nor uses symbols to avoid spam filters. It's still spam and I don't want it.
His challenges will be appropriate for any age, extremely easy to filter out, and hopefully even small in size.
It's not the size of the spam that is time-consuming, it is the quantity. And if it's easy for me to filter out then the whole challenge/response system is bogus--if it's easy for me to filter out then what makes you think a legitimate challenge would get through my spam filter?
The real difference is that it can be filtered out. Where as real spam can not, at least not without taking a good chunk of legitimate email along with it.
If anything, a challenge is harder to filter out than normal spam. Normal spam is actually VERY easy to filter out with a Bayesian filter. So far this month I'm at 99.92% filtered with 0 false positives. Challenges would be more difficult to filter out because they would be less "spammy." Of course, if I start getting flooded with bogus challenges then all the sudden all challenges are going to look spammy and they'll eventually all get filtered--even the legitimate ones!
Challenge/response is a non-solution to spam.
In most (but not all) situations, it's possible to weed out bogus spam--but that doesn't make spam acceptable.
For example, if I get a challenge to an e-mail I allegedly sent but the recipient if not in my address book (or sent mail list) then my e-mail program can just discard it and never bother me.
That's a whitelist approach. But that's a closed system. Many people (myself included) have to be able to receive email from people we've never talked to. They initiate the conversation, not me. So I can't just have my email program reject email as bogus just because it's not whitelisted or in my "sent" folder.
The point is that the challenge/response model depends on sending out a challenge for every spam that comes in. You are assuming that others are using an anti-spam solution to catch your bogus challenges and treat it as spam. That's a bogus approach.
Yes, people can filter out your challenges. But tell me how that is different from filtering out spam and why your automated challenges should be any more acceptable to me than outright spam? Both are email I didn't ask for and don't want.
The problem is that when you use the EarthLink system, you become a nuisance to hundreds of others around the world.
I currently am up to about 300 spams per day. Most of those are forged addresses--which means they belong to someome, just not the spammer. If I used the EarthLink system I would be sending "challenge" messages to about 300 innocent people each day. Suddenly *I* am part of the spam problem from the perspective of those 300 people per day.
As long as return addresses can be forged, challenge/response systems should be frowned on at least as much as spam--possibly more than spam since they supposedly solve spam by generating more garbage for others on the network which is just counter-productive and annoying.
That said, I like the rest of your idea. Email must remain free so I'm opposed to a system under which I automatically have to pay a penny to everyone I send email to but only get it back if they decide to credit me.
But if you can set your own "charge" for receiving spam and spammers can embed a token in their email saying "I'm willing to pay a maximum of $1 for someone to read this message" then if a spam comes in that pays the amount you've decided to charge for receiving spam, it goes out to the central payment server and credits you and debits the spammer, fine. Pay me $1 per spam and I'll happily receive 300 per day!
Of course, at $1/spam there won't be any... which is even better!
Plus... while you can't "lose" your biometric ID, if someone compromises the "encoded password" (i.e. the data sent from the scanner to the computer) then you are compromised for life.
It seems to me that all this does is more or less prove that the mail being received is coming from where it purports to come from. So, yes, a spammer can still create a mail server with keys and everything but at least when he sends a spam the message will be signed as having come from their server which makes it easier to filter on their server. It also causes their server to have to spend CPU cycles generating the encrypted key for each spam--which I assume would have to be separately generated for each copy of the spam which increases the cost of sending spam.
Finally, I think this is most useful in that if you know that every message that comes from Yahoo.com is signed with this scheme and you receive a message that purports to be from Yahoo.com that DOESN'T have the signature, it's spam. You can start creating a list of servers that you know use it--and if a message purports to come from one of those servers then you know it's spam. Yahoo probably has an interest in this because there are probably a lot of people and mail servers that are just filtering on Yahoo.com these days, even though we all know most of that spam doesn't actually come from Yahoo.
This mostly looks like an attempt to attack the problem of spammers forging email addresses that don't belong to them in the spam they send. It doesn't solve the spam problem, but it solves an annoying part of it--especially when some spammer forges YOUR email address as the "From" address in a spam sent to millions of people (and bounced from thousands).
Both sides have been guilty, and both sides will gerrymander to the most beneficial extent possible for their party whenever they can. I'm not sure it's entirely bad. The good thing about a polarized Congress is they tend to get less done which is often a GOOD thing.
Personally, I think redistricting should be done automatically by computer using an algorithm that contains only population data from the last census and contains geographic constraints. By geographic constraints I mean logical rules in the programming that creates contiguous districts which minimize zig-zagging and which does not permit two contiguous areas to be linked to form a single district by a skinny area that links them, etc. The rules should be defined by Congress in a law and then used directly to generate the program code.
In my opinion, the Supreme Court should rule that politically-driven redistricting is not legal and should require that a law be passed by Congress that defines the specific parameters to be used to draw districts. This can then be placed into a computer program and it will be automatically done by computer, not by politicians.
Well I see Gore as a raving loony based on most of the content of his book "Earth in the Balance." And that, presumably, was Gore in coherent form. I guess we all have different definitions of raving loons. I'm just glad that his Internet creation was embraced while most of his ideas in his book were rejected by society.
Gore's words in a CNN interview, as quoted by Wired News, were as follows: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Gore meaning, obvious to anyone who knew the record, was that he did the political work and articulated the public vision that made the Internet possible.
I'm not even arguing that point. I don't suggest that he ever meant he went out and designed and created IP protocol, etc.
However, for him to even suggest that his political work amounted to "taking the initiative in creating the Internet" is a distortion of the facts, although I *do* believe he just mispoke. I don't think he was intentionally trying to take credit for the creation of the Internet. He probably just meant to say that he supported bills that helped fund the development of the Internet. He just slipped up and said it in a way that made him sound more critical to the endeavor than he really was.
Basically, I have no problem with what Gore said. It's just as stupid, both in and out of context, as many things folks such as Dan Quayle have said. The annoying thing is that when a liberal such as Gore says something stupid there are a bunch of apologetics trying to make him look less stupid. But when Dan Quayle or George Bush says something stupid it's either evidence of stupidity or an evil conspiracy. It's a double standard.
Face it, Gore said something stupid even in the political context. Don't bother trying to fix it. Everyone makes mistakes, even Gore.