Frodo was 33 when Bilbo was 111 at the birthday party in Fellowship. In the book, Frodo lived at Bag End with the Ring for 17 years before leaving for Rivendell while Gandalf wandered around ME looking for evidence that it was the One Ring.
This worked fine in the book, but Jackson decided, for dramatic purposes, to step up the pace and the threat of the Ring and have Frodo leave soon after the party, so he is 33 in the films (which is the age of maturity for a hobbit, so he would appear to be about 21).
I didn't have a problem with this change (I *like* the movies quite a bit). The only thing that it messed up for me is that, in the films, Saruman apparently went over to the dark side, dug huge dungeons under Isengard, bred an army of orcs, and destroyed the gardens and forests in the time it took the hobbits to go from Bag End to Rivendell (a month?) instead of the years it apparently took in the books.
First of all, my kids (12 and 9) are as fanatical about LOTR as I was about Star Wars at about the same age (I was 11 when the first one came out). They've watched them multiple times and can quote huge stretches of dialogue. I've read the books multiple times and they're always pestering me about what happens next, but my daughter, the oldest, doesn't want to read ROTK until after she sees the movie. They still don't know how the ring gets destroyed, so I hope it doesn't get spoiled for them until they see it in the theater. I fully expect that they will both read the books (but maybe not as many times as they have read and re-read the Harry Potter books).
Secondly, opening night of Fellowship (and opening night of the Harry Potter movies) had to have been the highest concentration of people who had read the source book all in one room watching the film version. When you consider how few adults ever read *any* books (something like 5% have read a book since getting out of school), it was cool to sit in the theater waiting for the movie to start and listening to everyone talking about books.
My wife does this. At first I thought she was trying to be funny or pretentious, but she really can't help it and I worry that someone is going to be offended.
What happens is that if she is talking to someone with a distinct accent for a while, she starts imitating the accent. It happened while we were in Paris, it's happened when we visited with some friends from Australia and other friends from Japan. It also happens when her brother visits from Iowa (we're in Alabama). It also happened when we watched the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries.
Warg battle good, but the Aragorn falling off the cliff was stupid.
I had the same problem with Theoden that I had with Bilbo's ghoulish turn at Rivendell. However, if you go back and read the sections from the book, what is shown on screen is almost exactly what is described in the book. The different is that, in the book, you get the impression that the transformations are more in the perspective of the view (i.e., Frodo sees Bilbo turn creepy, not that Bilbo actually undergoes a physical transformation). Theoden indeed is weak and old when they arrive, but after his dealing with Gandalf, everyone is amazed to see the years fall off of him and his strength return as he grips his sword. A few days later, he is leading troops into battle. The heavy makeup and morphing may be a little over the top, but it may have been the best way to succinctly portray visually something that was internalized in the books.
The elves at Helm's Deep were a great departure, but: the backstory of the other rangers would have been fairly hard to bring into the movie, all of the non-book readers would be wondering why the elves *didn't* participate, and the deaths of the immortal elves in what was essentially a last stand had a nice emotional effect.
The ents were indeed shortchanged, but the extended edition has more of them (including the ent draught scene).
On the bright side, they did explain why Merry and Pippen aren't surprised to see Gandalf later on -- a big plot hole in the book which I think even Tolkein admitted.
While I agree with the above sentiment, I feel that the LOTR movies are different in that Jackson isn't shoveling crap takes from the cutting room floor to make a "Special Edition", but instead is making two movies at a time -- the one that's cut enough to make theater owners happy and the version he wants to do without major time constraints.
My only gripe about the two releases is that the extended edition doesn't repeat the extras from the theatrical release and I'm not going to buy both of them (just the extended), so I just rented the theatrical edition so I could watch the extras.
Someone at Lucasfilm is noticing these goofs -- it just ain't George.
The official Star Wars site had a series of web pages with news stories from the Star Wars universe. One of the blurbs was about the product recall of the leg jets for R2 series astromech droids.
Sorta OT, but why don't they make mouspads and wrist pads that recharge Bluetooth mice and keyboards via induction while they're in their correct places? That would give you the juice to sit back with the keyboard in your lap as long as you put it back on the desk when you went to lunch.
I *don't* think Weight Watchers is a good geek diet -- at least for geeks like me who have a real problem with structured authority.
Any diet that says that I absolutely can never, under any circumstances, eat a particular food or that I can only have a ridiculously small portion of said food is a guarantee that I will break the diet.
Having said that, I've been on pseudo-Atkins since April and have lost 42 pounds. I say "pseudo" because I went through induction, stayed almost pure Atkins for 3 or so months, then started eating more carbs in the form of starches, but still avoiding sugars. Since I've lost weight, its easier to exercise now and it its also easier to eat smaller portions.
I don't do the "eat all the fats you want" anymore. You can do this if you are in or around ketosis because your cholesterol won't go up, but if you are eating carbs and lots of fats, it can cause problems.
Having said that, I do have a big fry-up on Sunday mornings, but that's pretty much my whole week of eggs, bacon, and sausage.
My weight loss has slowed, but I haven't gained any back and I barely feel like I'm dieting anymore.
Michelob Ultra - tastes like beer flavored carbonated water, but it only has 2 or 3 grams of carbs. Actually, most "light" American beers have less than 4 grams.
I've drank beer and wine while on pseudo-Atkins without problems. The main problem with alcohol consumption is that it lowers your willpower. After a few glasses of wine, that garlic bread starts looking real good.
Re:I wonder what the power setting for skin is...
on
More on the Versalaser
·
· Score: 1
FREE IDEA!
I was thinking one day that someone should create a dot matrix tatoo machine. Not only could you get your digital art or photos tatooed on your skin, if the matrix was big enough you could have it all done at once.
While online, you can download interstate repair updates and detours on your route. Their directions are more reasonable than MapQuest or Yahoo (and give you a lot more options -- average speed on different types of roads, etc.).
You can even hook up your GPSr while driving and have (almost) live updates of your position on the route. I say (almost) because they only update every 15 seconds, which sucks (and they're excuse is even lamer).
One thing I wish they would weigh in when choosing roads is the number of red lights and stop signs. I can take road A for 15 miles with 20 red lights and two four way stops, or I can take road B for 20 miles with only 2 stops. Most road route software would treat these roads the same and choose A.
I totally agree with this. I took two quarters of Japanese in college (not enough to be useful without a lot of outside work and practice) because I thought it would be cool. I wish now that I had taken French or Spanish (which I thought to be "boring" at the time).
I now realize that I would rather be able to read Spanish or French or Italian because of the wealth of literature available. Yes, most of it is available translated into English, but it doesn't *feel* right sometimes. I always wonder how much is different in the translation.
I would love to be able to read Borges, Garcia Marquez, or Umberto Eco in their original languages. I've tried reading in parallel and it is interesting, but exhausting (read a paragraph in Spanish, read the same paragraph in English and keep a dictionary handy -- it really improves your vocabulary). Does anyone know of any good web sites or programs for aiding this process?
Anyway, my point is, I think Esperanto is really cool and elegant. I sent off for books and lessons after reading the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison and toyed around with it for a while back in high school. Now, though, I can't really muster the effort to learn it better when I would be better served by learning a language where I could expand my literature knowledge.
Yes, I know there is original literature in Esperanto, but is there any really good original literature in Esperanto? I'm not learning it so I can read The Lord of the Rings translated -- English is fine, thank you.
I had a coworker who told me that on a previous job, an employee got fired because he thought it would be funny to mount two double-edged razor blades to the output path of the punch card reader so that it shredded every deck it read.
The first comment above reminded me of the joke where new souls are being given a tour of heaven. They see, off in a the distance, a group of people and ask the angel, "Who are they?" and the angel says, "Oh, they're [insert fundementalist sect here] and they think they're the only ones here."
So, American Gods could have had a "Where's Jehovah?" scene and one of the other gods says, "Over there, but he's still pretending we're not real."
The situation about there being multiple Jesuses and Jehovahs is similar to Pratchett's Small Gods, where the real Great God Om is possessing a small turtle because all of his followers really aren't worshipping him anymore.
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~voting/CalTech_MIT_R ep ort_Version2.pdf
Ramadan and Jorge Luis Borges
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What an amazing coincidence -- I just bought and read (for the first of many times) Endless Nights today at lunch and now there is a Q&A with Gaiman on Slashdot. Also coincidentally, Slashdot features prominently in the Destruction story in Endless Nights.
My question relates to another coincidence. The first Sandman comic I read was Ramadan and it still one of my favorites. The thing that really clicked for me was the fact that, on the same day I read Ramadan, I read an essay by Jorge Luis Borges on the Arabian Nights tales (in the collection Seven Nights) and was, and still am, convinced that the Borges essay inspired the Ramadan issue of Sandman.
Is this true, or was the writing of Ramadan just an interesting synchronicity I made up by reading the two at the same time?
I know Mr. Gaiman is an admirer of Borges. The Destiny story in Endless Nights is a great tribute to The Garden of Forking Paths and The Library of Babel.
I can handle the DDC just fine, I just think it is weird. Computer books are scattered through several different sections, as are a lot of other technical books. Books about pseudoscience are freely mixed with books debunking pseudoscience. Plus, our libraries can't figure out what books are science fiction, mystery, or general fiction. Sometimes even books in series by the same author are mixed between these sections.
I keep imagining George Lucas filming Episode III, all alone in a huge room with blue walls (like the prison in THX-1138, but blue), panning his super digital camera around and talking to himself. Then, when he gets a few hundred hours of footage, he hands it over to ILM and tells them to add the special effects.
As OSC said, my largest number of CD purchases were when the "changeover" occurred and I replaced quite a few albums/cassettes with their CD equivalents. After that, my CD purchases declined.
I don't think I've bought any CD's in the last year or two where I hadn't listened to a few tracks in MP3 format already. This isn't just new songs -- I've got "old" MP3's that led me to seek out the CD's they were on.
In one case (The Old 97's), I was at a client site in their server room and they were playing a few tracks that I really liked. I asked for a copy of those tracks and listened to them a while longer. I had never heard of the band before. Eventually, I bought all of their CD's.
Yes, I still have a few MP3's to which I don't have a purchased backup, but they are of songs that I *would not purchase* whether I had the MP3 or not. No lost sales there.
Other than that, OSC's (and other/.ers postings) that CD sales are hurt more by (a) people already having what they want of older stuff, (b) music being targeted at the segment of the population most likely to "pirate" it, (c) young people's money being divided up with DVDs, console games, GB games, computer time/software, etc.
I have never been a "file sharer" (in the Napster/Kazaa sense) and I don't intend to be. I've said dozens of times (and I still agree) that if I could buy a high-quality track that I could play on any hardware I have (three computers, a PocketPC, a MP3 player, several CD/DVD players) for ~$0.99 (without a subscription commitment), then that is the way I would buy *ALL* of my music. If I could buy a track for the price of a soft drink (without copy protection) *I'm* not going to upload it to Kazaa or Usenet -- I spent my $0.99 on it, you can go buy your own.
There just needs to be a grand extension of the X-prize:
The government says, "Here is X billion dollars. You get it all as soon as you deliver a [new orbiter|Earth/moon vehicle|Mar's exploration craft|*]. Until it a working vehicle is delivered, you get nothing."
There will exist a suffiently large 'X' for each project so that some company would consider it a worthwhile investment to go for it.
Otherwise, government spending fluctuations and cost plus accounting (see Zubrin's book for this, also) will kill it.
Reluctantly, if they aren't going to do this, I'd rather see the government budget going to pure science and robotic exploration as it is the most "bang for the buck".
The Internet has helped this already in that, if someone has it for sale, somewhere in the world, I can can probably find it and buy it online.
Unfortunately, this is counterproductive for the video store example we are discussing. Jim Bob gets his copy of Bad Boys 2 because Blockbuster (is that an apt name, or what?) has 100 copies. However, I can't (or am unwilling) to go plead with them to order a copy of an obscure film because I can find it on Amazon or eBay or Netflix.
Results: the video and book stores get worse, I get what I want, but I have to wait for it.
I think the best solutions would be print-on-demand services (you know, the one's we've been promised for years now?). If the MPAA thinks that Macrovision and the like adequately protects their films on tape and DVD, why don't they set up a burn-on-demand kiosk at Blockbuster where you get the movie on a "copy protected" DVD-R that you must return to the store to be recycled/destroyed like a regular rental? They could do it with an hour or so turnaround.
Where are the promised book printers at Barnes and Noble where I can have a laser-printed paperback with a color cover of any book in their catalog if they don't have it in the store? Again, I'll browse the shelves and maybe have a Starbucks coffee while it prints -- it beats 3-5 days waiting for the UPS truck.
As for your last suggestion, I think it will take a major cultural shift before that happens. I read quite a few e-books on my iPaq and I like the format just fine. However, when I run across a self-published e-book, I rarely give it a try because I figure it must not have have been good enough to publish on dead trees, otherwise why is it being given away?
Slashdot Mirror
Frodo was 33 when Bilbo was 111 at the birthday party in Fellowship. In the book, Frodo lived at Bag End with the Ring for 17 years before leaving for Rivendell while Gandalf wandered around ME looking for evidence that it was the One Ring.
This worked fine in the book, but Jackson decided, for dramatic purposes, to step up the pace and the threat of the Ring and have Frodo leave soon after the party, so he is 33 in the films (which is the age of maturity for a hobbit, so he would appear to be about 21).
I didn't have a problem with this change (I *like* the movies quite a bit). The only thing that it messed up for me is that, in the films, Saruman apparently went over to the dark side, dug huge dungeons under Isengard, bred an army of orcs, and destroyed the gardens and forests in the time it took the hobbits to go from Bag End to Rivendell (a month?) instead of the years it apparently took in the books.
Isn't our planet covered with deposits of frozen metals, too?
Two points on this:
First of all, my kids (12 and 9) are as fanatical about LOTR as I was about Star Wars at about the same age (I was 11 when the first one came out). They've watched them multiple times and can quote huge stretches of dialogue. I've read the books multiple times and they're always pestering me about what happens next, but my daughter, the oldest, doesn't want to read ROTK until after she sees the movie. They still don't know how the ring gets destroyed, so I hope it doesn't get spoiled for them until they see it in the theater. I fully expect that they will both read the books (but maybe not as many times as they have read and re-read the Harry Potter books).
Secondly, opening night of Fellowship (and opening night of the Harry Potter movies) had to have been the highest concentration of people who had read the source book all in one room watching the film version. When you consider how few adults ever read *any* books (something like 5% have read a book since getting out of school), it was cool to sit in the theater waiting for the movie to start and listening to everyone talking about books.
My wife does this. At first I thought she was trying to be funny or pretentious, but she really can't help it and I worry that someone is going to be offended.
What happens is that if she is talking to someone with a distinct accent for a while, she starts imitating the accent. It happened while we were in Paris, it's happened when we visited with some friends from Australia and other friends from Japan. It also happens when her brother visits from Iowa (we're in Alabama). It also happened when we watched the BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries.
MHO:
Warg battle good, but the Aragorn falling off the cliff was stupid.
I had the same problem with Theoden that I had with Bilbo's ghoulish turn at Rivendell. However, if you go back and read the sections from the book, what is shown on screen is almost exactly what is described in the book. The different is that, in the book, you get the impression that the transformations are more in the perspective of the view (i.e., Frodo sees Bilbo turn creepy, not that Bilbo actually undergoes a physical transformation). Theoden indeed is weak and old when they arrive, but after his dealing with Gandalf, everyone is amazed to see the years fall off of him and his strength return as he grips his sword. A few days later, he is leading troops into battle. The heavy makeup and morphing may be a little over the top, but it may have been the best way to succinctly portray visually something that was internalized in the books.
The elves at Helm's Deep were a great departure, but: the backstory of the other rangers would have been fairly hard to bring into the movie, all of the non-book readers would be wondering why the elves *didn't* participate, and the deaths of the immortal elves in what was essentially a last stand had a nice emotional effect.
The ents were indeed shortchanged, but the extended edition has more of them (including the ent draught scene).
On the bright side, they did explain why Merry and Pippen aren't surprised to see Gandalf later on -- a big plot hole in the book which I think even Tolkein admitted.
While I agree with the above sentiment, I feel that the LOTR movies are different in that Jackson isn't shoveling crap takes from the cutting room floor to make a "Special Edition", but instead is making two movies at a time -- the one that's cut enough to make theater owners happy and the version he wants to do without major time constraints.
My only gripe about the two releases is that the extended edition doesn't repeat the extras from the theatrical release and I'm not going to buy both of them (just the extended), so I just rented the theatrical edition so I could watch the extras.
Someone at Lucasfilm is noticing these goofs -- it just ain't George.
The official Star Wars site had a series of web pages with news stories from the Star Wars universe. One of the blurbs was about the product recall of the leg jets for R2 series astromech droids.
Sorta OT, but why don't they make mouspads and wrist pads that recharge Bluetooth mice and keyboards via induction while they're in their correct places? That would give you the juice to sit back with the keyboard in your lap as long as you put it back on the desk when you went to lunch.
Great, the R.J. Reynold's organ farm!!
"Smoke up! We'll grow more!"
I *don't* think Weight Watchers is a good geek diet -- at least for geeks like me who have a real problem with structured authority.
Any diet that says that I absolutely can never, under any circumstances, eat a particular food or that I can only have a ridiculously small portion of said food is a guarantee that I will break the diet.
Having said that, I've been on pseudo-Atkins since April and have lost 42 pounds. I say "pseudo" because I went through induction, stayed almost pure Atkins for 3 or so months, then started eating more carbs in the form of starches, but still avoiding sugars. Since I've lost weight, its easier to exercise now and it its also easier to eat smaller portions.
I don't do the "eat all the fats you want" anymore. You can do this if you are in or around ketosis because your cholesterol won't go up, but if you are eating carbs and lots of fats, it can cause problems.
Having said that, I do have a big fry-up on Sunday mornings, but that's pretty much my whole week of eggs, bacon, and sausage.
My weight loss has slowed, but I haven't gained any back and I barely feel like I'm dieting anymore.
Other pros:
Stopped snoring
Blood pressure lower
Heart rate lower
Sleeping better
New wardrobe
Michelob Ultra - tastes like beer flavored carbonated water, but it only has 2 or 3 grams of carbs. Actually, most "light" American beers have less than 4 grams.
I've drank beer and wine while on pseudo-Atkins without problems. The main problem with alcohol consumption is that it lowers your willpower. After a few glasses of wine, that garlic bread starts looking real good.
FREE IDEA!
I was thinking one day that someone should create a dot matrix tatoo machine. Not only could you get your digital art or photos tatooed on your skin, if the matrix was big enough you could have it all done at once.
I second this (even if it is from MS)
While online, you can download interstate repair updates and detours on your route. Their directions are more reasonable than MapQuest or Yahoo (and give you a lot more options -- average speed on different types of roads, etc.).
You can even hook up your GPSr while driving and have (almost) live updates of your position on the route. I say (almost) because they only update every 15 seconds, which sucks (and they're excuse is even lamer).
One thing I wish they would weigh in when choosing roads is the number of red lights and stop signs. I can take road A for 15 miles with 20 red lights and two four way stops, or I can take road B for 20 miles with only 2 stops. Most road route software would treat these roads the same and choose A.
I totally agree with this. I took two quarters of Japanese in college (not enough to be useful without a lot of outside work and practice) because I thought it would be cool. I wish now that I had taken French or Spanish (which I thought to be "boring" at the time).
I now realize that I would rather be able to read Spanish or French or Italian because of the wealth of literature available. Yes, most of it is available translated into English, but it doesn't *feel* right sometimes. I always wonder how much is different in the translation.
I would love to be able to read Borges, Garcia Marquez, or Umberto Eco in their original languages. I've tried reading in parallel and it is interesting, but exhausting (read a paragraph in Spanish, read the same paragraph in English and keep a dictionary handy -- it really improves your vocabulary). Does anyone know of any good web sites or programs for aiding this process?
Anyway, my point is, I think Esperanto is really cool and elegant. I sent off for books and lessons after reading the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison and toyed around with it for a while back in high school. Now, though, I can't really muster the effort to learn it better when I would be better served by learning a language where I could expand my literature knowledge.
Yes, I know there is original literature in Esperanto, but is there any really good original literature in Esperanto? I'm not learning it so I can read The Lord of the Rings translated -- English is fine, thank you.
Woody Allen:
I took the Evelyn Wood speed reading course. I read War and Peace in 12 minutes. It was about Russia.
I had a coworker who told me that on a previous job, an employee got fired because he thought it would be funny to mount two double-edged razor blades to the output path of the punch card reader so that it shredded every deck it read.
The first comment above reminded me of the joke where new souls are being given a tour of heaven. They see, off in a the distance, a group of people and ask the angel, "Who are they?" and the angel says, "Oh, they're [insert fundementalist sect here] and they think they're the only ones here."
So, American Gods could have had a "Where's Jehovah?" scene and one of the other gods says, "Over there, but he's still pretending we're not real."
The situation about there being multiple Jesuses and Jehovahs is similar to Pratchett's Small Gods, where the real Great God Om is possessing a small turtle because all of his followers really aren't worshipping him anymore.
Someone may have already posted this, but:
R ep ort_Version2.pdf
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~voting/CalTech_MIT_
What an amazing coincidence -- I just bought and read (for the first of many times) Endless Nights today at lunch and now there is a Q&A with Gaiman on Slashdot. Also coincidentally, Slashdot features prominently in the Destruction story in Endless Nights.
My question relates to another coincidence. The first Sandman comic I read was Ramadan and it still one of my favorites. The thing that really clicked for me was the fact that, on the same day I read Ramadan, I read an essay by Jorge Luis Borges on the Arabian Nights tales (in the collection Seven Nights) and was, and still am, convinced that the Borges essay inspired the Ramadan issue of Sandman.
Is this true, or was the writing of Ramadan just an interesting synchronicity I made up by reading the two at the same time?
I know Mr. Gaiman is an admirer of Borges. The Destiny story in Endless Nights is a great tribute to The Garden of Forking Paths and The Library of Babel.
I can handle the DDC just fine, I just think it is weird. Computer books are scattered through several different sections, as are a lot of other technical books. Books about pseudoscience are freely mixed with books debunking pseudoscience. Plus, our libraries can't figure out what books are science fiction, mystery, or general fiction. Sometimes even books in series by the same author are mixed between these sections.
Yes, but he could go back and add their gushy reunion scene into Eps. 4, 5, or 6 when he releases the Super-Special Jumbo Sized Editions on DVD.
I keep imagining George Lucas filming Episode III, all alone in a huge room with blue walls (like the prison in THX-1138, but blue), panning his super digital camera around and talking to himself. Then, when he gets a few hundred hours of footage, he hands it over to ILM and tells them to add the special effects.
I will have to agree with this.
/.ers postings) that CD sales are hurt more by (a) people already having what they want of older stuff, (b) music being targeted at the segment of the population most likely to "pirate" it, (c) young people's money being divided up with DVDs, console games, GB games, computer time/software, etc.
As OSC said, my largest number of CD purchases were when the "changeover" occurred and I replaced quite a few albums/cassettes with their CD equivalents. After that, my CD purchases declined.
I don't think I've bought any CD's in the last year or two where I hadn't listened to a few tracks in MP3 format already. This isn't just new songs -- I've got "old" MP3's that led me to seek out the CD's they were on.
In one case (The Old 97's), I was at a client site in their server room and they were playing a few tracks that I really liked. I asked for a copy of those tracks and listened to them a while longer. I had never heard of the band before. Eventually, I bought all of their CD's.
Yes, I still have a few MP3's to which I don't have a purchased backup, but they are of songs that I *would not purchase* whether I had the MP3 or not. No lost sales there.
Other than that, OSC's (and other
I have never been a "file sharer" (in the Napster/Kazaa sense) and I don't intend to be. I've said dozens of times (and I still agree) that if I could buy a high-quality track that I could play on any hardware I have (three computers, a PocketPC, a MP3 player, several CD/DVD players) for ~$0.99 (without a subscription commitment), then that is the way I would buy *ALL* of my music. If I could buy a track for the price of a soft drink (without copy protection) *I'm* not going to upload it to Kazaa or Usenet -- I spent my $0.99 on it, you can go buy your own.
There just needs to be a grand extension of the X-prize:
The government says, "Here is X billion dollars. You get it all as soon as you deliver a [new orbiter|Earth/moon vehicle|Mar's exploration craft|*]. Until it a working vehicle is delivered, you get nothing."
There will exist a suffiently large 'X' for each project so that some company would consider it a worthwhile investment to go for it.
Otherwise, government spending fluctuations and cost plus accounting (see Zubrin's book for this, also) will kill it.
Reluctantly, if they aren't going to do this, I'd rather see the government budget going to pure science and robotic exploration as it is the most "bang for the buck".
The Internet has helped this already in that, if someone has it for sale, somewhere in the world, I can can probably find it and buy it online.
Unfortunately, this is counterproductive for the video store example we are discussing. Jim Bob gets his copy of Bad Boys 2 because Blockbuster (is that an apt name, or what?) has 100 copies. However, I can't (or am unwilling) to go plead with them to order a copy of an obscure film because I can find it on Amazon or eBay or Netflix.
Results: the video and book stores get worse, I get what I want, but I have to wait for it.
I think the best solutions would be print-on-demand services (you know, the one's we've been promised for years now?). If the MPAA thinks that Macrovision and the like adequately protects their films on tape and DVD, why don't they set up a burn-on-demand kiosk at Blockbuster where you get the movie on a "copy protected" DVD-R that you must return to the store to be recycled/destroyed like a regular rental? They could do it with an hour or so turnaround.
Where are the promised book printers at Barnes and Noble where I can have a laser-printed paperback with a color cover of any book in their catalog if they don't have it in the store? Again, I'll browse the shelves and maybe have a Starbucks coffee while it prints -- it beats 3-5 days waiting for the UPS truck.
As for your last suggestion, I think it will take a major cultural shift before that happens. I read quite a few e-books on my iPaq and I like the format just fine. However, when I run across a self-published e-book, I rarely give it a try because I figure it must not have have been good enough to publish on dead trees, otherwise why is it being given away?