Not to be an apologist for Lucas because I think the new trilogy is weak in numerous ways, but... the two main Jedi of focus in the new trilogy are Anakin and Obi-Wan. You'll notice Anakin had the same scene in "Revenge of the Sith" as Luke had in "Return of the Jedi," only with Count Dooku. It's one of those "parellels" Lucas is always talking about. There's Anakin, he's beaten Dooku, there's Chancellor Palpatine in the background saying, "Kill him," and in this case Anakin doesn't throw away his weapon. That's the difference between Luke and Anakin... get it? And as far as the cutting-off of heads, most of those "guys" are spindly little robots.
I agree with you for the most part. The parallel between Anakin and Luke is a good one, however, we EXPECT Anakin to not spare Dooku. After all, he's turning to the dark side. The problem is the others. What about the match-up between Dooku and Yoda? Yoda was a veritable firefly on speed, jumping and flipping and swinging his sword all around. Where is the peace in that? Shouldn't he have been more concernec about keeping himself between Dooku and his friends, rather than showing off?
I always thought of light vs dark side of the force like the differences of Tae Kwon Do and Karate vs Judo or Aikido. In Tae Kwon Do you punch and kick HARD. You move in and deal serious damage. In Aikido you wait calmly for your oponent to make his/her move. When the attack comes you evade or use their attack against them.
Maybe that's why in order to set things right and "restore balance to the force", all the jedi but 2 had to be killed and the entire known universe had to enter a dark age, to get the Jedi order back to its less pugilistic and political roots. I think we're supposed to see something a little wrong with the old Jedi order, and that the new one has different priorities.
I could accept that, if only they had shown people learning and understanding that concept in the movies. At no time during the first two movies (I have yet to see the third. er, sixth. er, whatever) do you see Obiwan, Yoda or Mace Windu understand that maybe the path they are on is wrong. I wish they had. It would have made the movies sit better with me, and maybe have made them more interesting.
One of my gripes with the new vs the old is with the treatment of the Jedi.
In the original trilogy, the Jedi didn't really do much fighting. Yoda even tells Luke in Empire "the force is to be used for knowledge and defence, never for attack." When the Falcon gets pulled into the Death Star, Obiwan doesn't come out swinging, he sneaks around to free the ship. The part that gets me most is when Luke is fighting Vader in Jedi. When does Luke declare himself to be a Jedi? When he throws his weapon away. He STOPS FIGHTING. That was when he claimed is rightful status.
To watch the new movies, you get more of a sense of "Jedi can kill anyone they want! Jedi cut off heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this Jedi who was eating at Mos Eisly Cantina. And when some dude dropped a spoon the Jedi killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw a Jedi totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window."
It just doesn't mesh with: There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no death, there is the Force.
I know it's not canon, but it clearly illustrates to me the Yin/Yang qualities that balance the light and dark sides of the force.
While watching the new movies, it was like a stone in my shoe that kept bothering me. I kept thinking "but a Jedi wouldn't act that way.
I know this may be more of a personal interpretation, but I think the original trilogy mesh with my view.
I have repeatedly said that the whole "Batman is a normal joe without superpowers" thing is BS. Batman DOES have powers. He has the absolute best powers a person can have! THE POWERS OF UNLIMITED FUNDING!
Do you want to drop of the face of the earth and learn with the best martial arts masters? No problem, the trust fund will keep up the house and pay the help as you vacation in Asia.
Do you want a nifty belt that has time warping effects so you can pull an elephant out of your pocket? No problem, you can pay for the design, developement and implimentation.
Do you want a jet that has super-stealth technology that not even the military has? Not a problem, you own a military research company.
Do you want an orbital weapons platform complete with dormitory for thousands of superheros? No worries, it's not even a drop in the bucket for your R&D budget.
Yeah, Batman has no special powers. Sure he doesn't.
I wonder if this is the sametype of 3D that I read articles about years ago.
I forget exactly how it worked, but I thought the glasses had an LCD lens, and it actually blocked one eye at a time, that way they could alternate perspective frame by frame, and synch the glasses so that each eye only saw it's intended perspective.
Or something along those lines, Like I said, I forget exactly.
I'm reminded more of the Michael Crichton book 'Terminal Man'. A person was wired with a similar device that automatically sent a mild shock into his brain when he was having a psychotic episode (or something like that).
He snapped and went on a murderous rampage, despite the device (or because of it).
Lenina Huxley: That is correct, money is out-moded. All transactions are through code.
John Spartan: All right, so he can't buy food or a place to stay for the night. And, it would be a waste of time to mug somebody. Unless he rips off somebody's hand, and let's hope he doesn't figure that one out.
I got one Dec 18th (this last one), at 2:00 in the afternoon, and had to change the tire in sub-zero temperatures. I couldn't get warm for the rest of the day. Then I tried to get it fixed that day so that I didn't have to drive to work the next day on one of those donuts. Unfortunately, noone was open because it was Sunday.
10.) Hold on! You've forgotten the farmers! They can't be four days off in spring planting!
They don't need to be four days off in spring planting. They just check the date on their calendar that is painted on the wall (painted, since it remains identical from year to year), and then they check what the Gregorian Date is, to see if it is planting day yet. The Gregorian Calendar does not cease to exist, it just isn't ordinarily used. Except by hicks.
1). What use is a calender than needs to have you refer to a DIFFERENT calender to be useful?
2). Insulting farmers is not going to help your cause.
I deal with this problem all the time. My manager requires most things to be discussed in e-mail instead of a phone call, because an email keeps a record you can print out. The only problem is we are dealing with physical parts that are sometimes hard to describe without pointing specific things out, and over half the time I'm dealing with a person who doesn't have english as a first language.
My usual M.O. is to attach pictures with 'circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one telling what each one was' or something like that.
I try to be as descriptive and specific as I can, and annotate the drawings as well. The main problem now is that people never read the darned e-mail, and keep asking questions that have already been answered.
I agree with you for the most part. I pretty much think like you do, but recently I've heard things to make me re-evaluate how good polygraphs are.
My girlfriend is a psycology major, and she's interested in the criminology aspect. She's currently taking a class that discussed this very subject.
She was talking about the success/failure rate of polygraphs, and I stated the opinion that polygraphs were nothing more than stress/sweat tests.
She said that is was partially true, but that they look at so many different clues, that it is becoming harder and harder to fool them.
She also told me that they are working on a lie detector that uses a CAT scan of the brain to show when people are lying. Appearantly different parts of the brain are used when you tell a lie, regardless of what kind of stress you are under.
The real eye opener for me was when she told me what the success rate of a polygraph was when compaired to the credibility of an eye witness. The polygraph was actually right more often than the eye witnesses. I'm sorry I don't have the numbers right now. I'm not the one who took the class.
Anyway, just food for thought.
Now I will use my tremendous powers of precognition to predict what the next joke will be:
My girlfriend is a psy*BZZZZ* No, I mean it.*BZZZZ* No, I HAVE a girlfr*BZZZZ* DAMMIT, GET THIS THING OFF ME!!
After reading the headline, I thought, "Wow, for once this makes sense." What I mean is, they are selling an inferior product at a lower cost. This is standard business practice, and as long as they openly admit to the DRM, I've no problem with it.
Then I RTFA and changed my mind. This isn't giving the people a choice of an inferior product for a lower cost, this is a "sale" to try and win people away from iTunes. It's only supposed to last an undefined "limited amount of time." Probably until they feel they've won enough customers from apple. I guess it still makes sense business-wise, but I don't like it as much.
Actually you are both right. The Inquisition started off purely religious and ended political.
The Inquisition started as a way to root out heretics, but once the various political leaders saw it working, they began to take control of it for their own purposes.
Only the focus changed, not the cruelty, but it did change.
We do the same in our office. When the headphones are on, it acts as a "Do not disturb" sign. Everone in the office understands this, and leaves the person alone to get work done, instead of wandering over and attempting to chat with them. We have joked about it on occation. One of my co-workers has a pair of the very large high-quality headphones as opposed to the typical earbuds. We refer to his mammoth headphones as his "cone of silence".
Interesting to see an article on something I see pretty much every day.
Not that the hood is welded shut, but more and more cars (especially "luxury" cars) are coming with a plastic shield over the entire engine, with only gaps for filling the oil and other fluids.
You wouldn't want people to see that ugly engine under the hood, would you?
Creating a true software engineer is different than making them PE's. Right now, most of the engineers that design things in industry don't have PE's and if they do, they don't make it known publicly for the very reasons you mentioned.
The rest of us with out PE's don't need the insurance, as that is supplied by the company.
Also, keep in mind that just because an engineer worked on something doesn't mean that it will be expensive. Most of what I engineer costs less than a dollar.
I always thought that was one of the clever things about Wild Arms 3 (and 2 I think), that it allowed you to avoid random encounters. WA3 has a gauge that tracks how many random encounters you have skipped. Skip an encounter, gauge goes down, fight a battle, gauge goes up allowing you to skip more battles. Fight as little as you want, up to a point.
I work for an auto supplier. In one of the prototype plants, there was a banner for one of the new car's engineering team.
"Failure is NOT and option."
It struck me as odd at the time. It just doesn't sound like motivation. It strikes me as a negative way of looking at things. There was no "We can succeed together!" or "Hard work will pay off in the end!" Nope. Failure is not an option.
Later I saw the perfect response in a magazine, and was disappointed that the banner was taken down before I could add it.
"Failure is not an option; it comes standard with every vehicle."
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be an apologist for Lucas because I think the new trilogy is weak in numerous ways, but ... the two main Jedi of focus in the new trilogy are Anakin and Obi-Wan. You'll notice Anakin had the same scene in "Revenge of the Sith" as Luke had in "Return of the Jedi," only with Count Dooku. It's one of those "parellels" Lucas is always talking about. There's Anakin, he's beaten Dooku, there's Chancellor Palpatine in the background saying, "Kill him," and in this case Anakin doesn't throw away his weapon. That's the difference between Luke and Anakin ... get it?
And as far as the cutting-off of heads, most of those "guys" are spindly little robots.
I agree with you for the most part. The parallel between Anakin and Luke is a good one, however, we EXPECT Anakin to not spare Dooku. After all, he's turning to the dark side. The problem is the others. What about the match-up between Dooku and Yoda? Yoda was a veritable firefly on speed, jumping and flipping and swinging his sword all around. Where is the peace in that? Shouldn't he have been more concernec about keeping himself between Dooku and his friends, rather than showing off?
I always thought of light vs dark side of the force like the differences of Tae Kwon Do and Karate vs Judo or Aikido. In Tae Kwon Do you punch and kick HARD. You move in and deal serious damage. In Aikido you wait calmly for your oponent to make his/her move. When the attack comes you evade or use their attack against them.
Just a thought
Maybe that's why in order to set things right and "restore balance to the force", all the jedi but 2 had to be killed and the entire known universe had to enter a dark age, to get the Jedi order back to its less pugilistic and political roots. I think we're supposed to see something a little wrong with the old Jedi order, and that the new one has different priorities.
I could accept that, if only they had shown people learning and understanding that concept in the movies. At no time during the first two movies (I have yet to see the third. er, sixth. er, whatever) do you see Obiwan, Yoda or Mace Windu understand that maybe the path they are on is wrong. I wish they had. It would have made the movies sit better with me, and maybe have made them more interesting.
That is from RealUltimatePower.com, attributed to Ninja.
It's a pretty funny site, in moderate doses.
One of my gripes with the new vs the old is with the treatment of the Jedi.
In the original trilogy, the Jedi didn't really do much fighting. Yoda even tells Luke in Empire "the force is to be used for knowledge and defence, never for attack." When the Falcon gets pulled into the Death Star, Obiwan doesn't come out swinging, he sneaks around to free the ship. The part that gets me most is when Luke is fighting Vader in Jedi. When does Luke declare himself to be a Jedi? When he throws his weapon away. He STOPS FIGHTING. That was when he claimed is rightful status.
To watch the new movies, you get more of a sense of "Jedi can kill anyone they want! Jedi cut off
heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome
that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this Jedi who was eating at Mos Eisly Cantina. And when some dude dropped a spoon the Jedi killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw a Jedi totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window."
It just doesn't mesh with:
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no death, there is the Force.
I know it's not canon, but it clearly illustrates to me the Yin/Yang qualities that balance the light and dark sides of the force.
While watching the new movies, it was like a stone in my shoe that kept bothering me. I kept thinking "but a Jedi wouldn't act that way.
I know this may be more of a personal interpretation, but I think the original trilogy mesh with my view.
I have repeatedly said that the whole "Batman is a normal joe without superpowers" thing is BS. Batman DOES have powers. He has the absolute best powers a person can have! THE POWERS OF UNLIMITED FUNDING!
Do you want to drop of the face of the earth and learn with the best martial arts masters? No problem, the trust fund will keep up the house and pay the help as you vacation in Asia.
Do you want a nifty belt that has time warping effects so you can pull an elephant out of your pocket? No problem, you can pay for the design, developement and implimentation.
Do you want a jet that has super-stealth technology that not even the military has? Not a problem, you own a military research company.
Do you want an orbital weapons platform complete with dormitory for thousands of superheros? No worries, it's not even a drop in the bucket for your R&D budget.
Yeah, Batman has no special powers. Sure he doesn't.
Quick, somebody get me a pre-schooler to explain that to me. I can't make heads or tails of it.
"active glasses"?
I wonder if this is the sametype of 3D that I read articles about years ago.
I forget exactly how it worked, but I thought the glasses had an LCD lens, and it actually blocked one eye at a time, that way they could alternate perspective frame by frame, and synch the glasses so that each eye only saw it's intended perspective.
Or something along those lines, Like I said, I forget exactly.
Anyone know anything about this?
I'm reminded more of the Michael Crichton book 'Terminal Man'. A person was wired with a similar device that automatically sent a mild shock into his brain when he was having a psychotic episode (or something like that).
He snapped and went on a murderous rampage, despite the device (or because of it).
This sounds disturbingly similar.
Not that reality will follow fiction.
You know with a question like that, you're just begging for a response of "9/11", right?
The truth is though, that's not quite correct.
The infamous "McDonalds Hot Coffee" lawsuit was back in '94, and McDonalds lost that one.
I think MLAW (http://www.mlaw.org/) has been around for at least that long, but I can't really tell from their website.
Please don't blame 9/11 on everyone's lack of personal responsibility.
From Demolition Man:
Lenina Huxley: That is correct, money is out-moded. All transactions are through code.
John Spartan: All right, so he can't buy food or a place to stay for the night. And, it would be a waste of time to mug somebody. Unless he rips off somebody's hand, and let's hope he doesn't figure that one out.
I got one Dec 18th (this last one), at 2:00 in the afternoon, and had to change the tire in sub-zero temperatures. I couldn't get warm for the rest of the day. Then I tried to get it fixed that day so that I didn't have to drive to work the next day on one of those donuts. Unfortunately, noone was open because it was Sunday.
I could do without going through that again.
10.) Hold on! You've forgotten the farmers! They can't be four days off in spring planting!
They don't need to be four days off in spring planting. They just check the date on their calendar that is painted on the wall (painted, since it remains identical from year to year), and then they check what the Gregorian Date is, to see if it is planting day yet. The Gregorian Calendar does not cease to exist, it just isn't ordinarily used. Except by hicks.
1). What use is a calender than needs to have you refer to a DIFFERENT calender to be useful?
2). Insulting farmers is not going to help your cause.
I deal with this problem all the time. My manager requires most things to be discussed in e-mail instead of a phone call, because an email keeps a record you can print out. The only problem is we are dealing with physical parts that are sometimes hard to describe without pointing specific things out, and over half the time I'm dealing with a person who doesn't have english as a first language.
My usual M.O. is to attach pictures with 'circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one telling what each one was' or something like that.
I try to be as descriptive and specific as I can, and annotate the drawings as well. The main problem now is that people never read the darned e-mail, and keep asking questions that have already been answered.
There ain't no winnin' that battle.
I agree with you for the most part. I pretty much think like you do, but recently I've heard things to make me re-evaluate how good polygraphs are.
My girlfriend is a psycology major, and she's interested in the criminology aspect. She's currently taking a class that discussed this very subject.
She was talking about the success/failure rate of polygraphs, and I stated the opinion that polygraphs were nothing more than stress/sweat tests.
She said that is was partially true, but that they look at so many different clues, that it is becoming harder and harder to fool them.
She also told me that they are working on a lie detector that uses a CAT scan of the brain to show when people are lying. Appearantly different parts of the brain are used when you tell a lie, regardless of what kind of stress you are under.
The real eye opener for me was when she told me what the success rate of a polygraph was when compaired to the credibility of an eye witness. The polygraph was actually right more often than the eye witnesses. I'm sorry I don't have the numbers right now. I'm not the one who took the class.
Anyway, just food for thought.
Now I will use my tremendous powers of precognition to predict what the next joke will be:
My girlfriend is a psy*BZZZZ* No, I mean it.*BZZZZ* No, I HAVE a girlfr*BZZZZ* DAMMIT, GET THIS THING OFF ME!!
Which is why he said:
"About the only western developers that I know of that make games that I personally feel the need to play are..."
After reading the headline, I thought, "Wow, for once this makes sense." What I mean is, they are selling an inferior product at a lower cost. This is standard business practice, and as long as they openly admit to the DRM, I've no problem with it.
Then I RTFA and changed my mind. This isn't giving the people a choice of an inferior product for a lower cost, this is a "sale" to try and win people away from iTunes. It's only supposed to last an undefined "limited amount of time." Probably until they feel they've won enough customers from apple. I guess it still makes sense business-wise, but I don't like it as much.
Sorry, that made me think of a Top Secret! line:
Hillary Flammond: Who do you favor in the Virginia Slims tournament?
Blindman: In women's tennis, I always root against the heterosexual.
Actually you are both right. The Inquisition started off purely religious and ended political.
The Inquisition started as a way to root out heretics, but once the various political leaders saw it working, they began to take control of it for their own purposes.
Only the focus changed, not the cruelty, but it did change.
If this is done well, Samus can be sexy and still be a battle-scarred badass in her powersuit. It just takes some style.
I'm not saying I am holding out this hope, but John Woo does have style, and might do this the right way.
Of course, this could also be the greatest travesty ever to grace the movie theater.
We'll just have to wait and see.
We do the same in our office. When the headphones are on, it acts as a "Do not disturb" sign. Everone in the office understands this, and leaves the person alone to get work done, instead of wandering over and attempting to chat with them. We have joked about it on occation. One of my co-workers has a pair of the very large high-quality headphones as opposed to the typical earbuds. We refer to his mammoth headphones as his "cone of silence".
Interesting to see an article on something I see pretty much every day.
Not that the hood is welded shut, but more and more cars (especially "luxury" cars) are coming with a plastic shield over the entire engine, with only gaps for filling the oil and other fluids.
You wouldn't want people to see that ugly engine under the hood, would you?
Just a nitpick,
Creating a true software engineer is different than making them PE's. Right now, most of the engineers that design things in industry don't have PE's and if they do, they don't make it known publicly for the very reasons you mentioned.
The rest of us with out PE's don't need the insurance, as that is supplied by the company.
Also, keep in mind that just because an engineer worked on something doesn't mean that it will be expensive. Most of what I engineer costs less than a dollar.
If you haven't guessed, IAAE (I am an Engineer)
I always thought that was one of the clever things about Wild Arms 3 (and 2 I think), that it allowed you to avoid random encounters. WA3 has a gauge that tracks how many random encounters you have skipped. Skip an encounter, gauge goes down, fight a battle, gauge goes up allowing you to skip more battles. Fight as little as you want, up to a point.
Neat game, clever idea.
...would Murphy's Law be a dictatorship, a democracy, or something else?
Bureaucracy.
It takes the longest amount of time to do anything, spends the most amount of time to do it, and still doesn't accomplish what it set out to do.
I work for an auto supplier. In one of the prototype plants, there was a banner for one of the new car's engineering team.
"Failure is NOT and option."
It struck me as odd at the time. It just doesn't sound like motivation. It strikes me as a negative way of looking at things. There was no "We can succeed together!" or "Hard work will pay off in the end!" Nope. Failure is not an option.
Later I saw the perfect response in a magazine, and was disappointed that the banner was taken down before I could add it.
"Failure is not an option; it comes standard with every vehicle."