Sometimes I like to idly type things into Google Suggest and see what comes up:
why is everything can you eat can you die from where can I go to get is it possible to how would you
From playing with it for a few minutes, it seems that Google is mostly used by women in various stages of pregnancy, people worried that they might be arrested for using Limewire, and people looking for Wiis.
Which would mean that human action would protect its species, redefining what 'evolutionary fitness' means in this context.
Probably not- when we go extinct (after effectively isolating our genomes from the influence of natural selection in just the past few generations) a few of the domestic animals that we've totally screwed up are going with us. Cats might make it, probably horses too. Chickens, no way. If wild turkeys disappear that's it for them too. I suspect technological species don't last long in general.
I was going to say that object code would definitely be won by the zeroes, but if it's compressed the high entropy should split them 50-50. That looks about right.
Females, in my long and varied experience, are generally impressed by a large and well descended sac, and see it as a sign of fecundity.
That's because women are shallow, mortal creatures. A much better approach would be to subject the man to several rounds of interviews followed by a genotype assay using special taste buds with RNA probes. That would produce much better results than looking at scrotums.
But this is still assuming the necessity for natural selection and sex. You are all failing to see past those constraints. Yes, the points you make are good for genomes arrived at via natural selection, but that approach precludes some interesting possibilities. Most people don't appreciate what physics and biochemistry are really capable of supporting- there are a vast number of nucleotide sequences that will simply never be found by natural selection, and some of them must be pretty good. A genome for an animal might exist (violating no physical laws) that could consciously and intelligently edit its own genome and "evolve" that way, but natural selection will never produce such a thing.
Even with survival constraints as the basis for a successful design, it can't be denied that an intelligent designer could have come up with much better designs than the ones you see. Attributing evolutionary designs to an intelligent being is practically an insult when you look at some of the shoddy work evolution has come up with.
I marvel at your belief in human knowledge and our ability to design.
Sorry, I thought everyone understood what an "intelligent designer" is really a euphemism for.
My point was that nature doesn't find the most optimal DNA sequences that are mathematically possible, not that we might actually find them either. We aren't as intelligent as we think.
I'm glad we don't design animals, especially after reading your comment. Animals isn't made for us, or to be used by us, and it would suck to have one which would be even easier to take advantage of. Stop using animals as your slaves damnit.
You feel that way because the animals we enslave were originally evolved to survive on their own. Natural selection doesn't select for animals with instincts for human convenience. Chickens have retained their natural instincts to forage for food. We frustrate that instinct by locking them up in little cages their whole lives. They go nuts and peck at each other so much that we have to keep them in the dark so they can't see each other. I agree with you that this is cruel, but the nature of the chicken itself is partly why. There's nothing especially unnatural about an organism designed or evolved to be eaten- some species have even incorporated cannibalism into a normal part of their life cycle.
Douglas Adams had the right idea:
A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips. 'Good evening', it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, 'I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?' It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them. Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox. 'Something off the shoulder perhaps?' suggested the animal, 'Braised in a white wine sauce?' 'Er, your shoulder?' said Arthur in a horrified whisper. 'But naturally my shoulder, sir,' mooed the animal contentedly, 'nobody else's is mine to offer.' Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively. 'Or the rump is very good,' murmured the animal. 'I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there.' It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again. 'Or a casselore of me perhaps?' it added. 'You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?' whispered Trillian to Ford. 'Me?' said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, 'I don't mean anything.' 'That's absolutely horrible,' exclaimed Arthur, 'the most revolting thing I've ever heard.' 'What's the problem Earthman?' said Zaphod, now transfering his attention to the animal's enormous rump. 'I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to,' said Arthur, 'It's heartless.' 'Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten,' said Zaphod. 'That's not the point,' Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. 'Alright,' he said, 'maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just... er... I think I'll just have a green salad,' he muttered. 'May I urge you to consider my liver?' asked the animal, 'it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months.' 'A green salad,' said Arthur emphatically. 'A green salad?' said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur. 'Are you going to tell me,' said Arthur, 'that I shouldn't have green salad?' 'Well,' said the animal, 'I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.' It managed a very slight bow. 'Glass of water please,' said Arthur. 'Look,' said Zaphod, 'we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and sevebty-six thousand million years.' The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mello
The federal appellate courts have unanimously held that the President has the inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless searches for purposes of gathering foreign intelligence information, which includes information about terrorist threats. Furthermore, since this power is derived from Article II of the Constitution, the FISA Review Court has specifically recognized that it cannot be taken away or limited by Congressional action.
That power would have given him authority to direct the NSA and other federal intelligence agencies to carry out warrantless searches, but he could not legally extend that authority to private entities such as AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest. At the time, acceding to his demands were illegal acts on the part of the telecoms, and his demanding that they do so was also illegal. If they weren't breaking the law then we wouldn't be talking about this stupid immunity bill at all.
We can probably hit maxima that would be outcompeted in nature in a second.
That depends on your definition of "maxima".
Even with survival constraints as the basis for a successful design, it can't be denied that an intelligent designer could have come up with much better designs than the ones you see. Attributing evolutionary designs to an intelligent being is practically an insult when you look at some of the shoddy work evolution has come up with. Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures. Apparently something needs to be redesigned that can't be made to work better with slow incremental improvements. Evolution's fix: make them hurt like hell when struck so you learn not to mess with them. A Microsoft-style hack. If we threw a bunch of supercomputers at the problem we might come up with a completely different protein design that would allow reproduction with undescended testicles.
Disregarding survival constraints as a parameter, a world of possibilities opens up. There is nothing in physics or chemistry that prevents the existence of almost any organism you can imagine, so long as fundamental physical constraints are adhered to such as conservation of energy, rising entropy, etc. I'd like an animal with wheels that I can drive to work, with chlorophyll in its skin so I don't have to feed it. Maybe it can sun itself on the roof while I'm at meetings, and ooze a delicious health drink from a special orifice so I can catch dinner on the way home. (Don't spit up your milk laughing, it's quite possible.) A creature like that would go extinct pretty quickly but it would sure be convenient to have one, and no law of nature prevents such a thing from existing.
I don't like most of this stuff, but Dodd is still getting a check for $100 from me, and I'm going to make it very clear to him that he got it for this filibuster.
I'll send $100 to that fascist bastard Lieberman if he filibusters against telecom immunity.
I'm out of moderator points or I'd give you some. Why the hell is this immunity even being considered by politicians from either party?
For the Democrats (e.g. Dianne Feinstein who can be reached at 202-224-3841), one motive is the obvious one: telecoms contribute to campaigns.
Much more is at stake for the Republicans, since the president broke at least several federal statutes relating to wiretapping. While this is all something that "everybody knows", that has no legal significance and no one bears any meaningful responsibility to do anything about it. But if the EFF lawsuit (among others) doesn't have its legal basis legislated right out from under it, then it will be revealed in a court of law that the president committed federal crimes. The telecom immunity legislation was designed by the executive branch to extend immunity not just to telecoms who broke these laws, but to anyone in the government who asked them to do it (PDF):
[N]o action shall lie or be maintained in any court, and no penalty, sanction, or other form of remedy or relief shall be imposed by any court or any other body, against any person for the alleged provision to an element of the intelligence community of any information (including records or other information pertaining to a customer), facilities, or any other form of assistance, during the period of time beginning on September 11, 2001, and ending on the date that is the effective date of this Act, in connection with any alleged classified communications intelligence activity that the Attorney General or a designee of the Attorney General certifies, in a manner consistent with the protection of State secrets, is, was, would be, or would have been intended to protect the United States from a terrorist attack.
Obviously the EFF lawsuit presents a pickle for the Republicans if it is legally shown that Bush was complicit in lawbreaking, and they don't want the lawsuit to proceed further. But this is a problem for the Democrats too. Once it becomes legally evident that Bush broke the law, it becomes incumbent upon them to do something about it, or they are breaking the law with their inaction. Everyone knows Bush is a criminal, but nobody wants to be responsible for knowing. Politics as currently practiced is a fragile thing, home to a glassy web of unspoken agreements and hard-won compromises. A development like this would come stampeding in on all that like a bull in a china shop. This telecom immunity law will make a lot of headaches go away for a lot of people- the telecoms themselves are actually minor players here.
I read on Slashdot just about every day people saying "Democracy may not be perfect, but if you don't like what your elected officials are doing just vote them out and vote in someone competent!"
I read that on Slashdot every day too, and I'm getting pretty sick of it.
It's not even possible to find "someone competent" if we're going to insist they do things that cannot possibly be done competently.
Also, please consider that racism was much less frowned upon in the 50's of the previous century and that plenty of those oldies just never saw the error of their ways, which is unfortunate but understandable if you look at it from a slightly different perspective.
While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name? How many left such a bad aftertaste in the mouth of history? Maybe a lot of them held those beliefs in private, but Shockley became more famous for his racism than for his Nobel. He was almost like the Barry Bonds of Nobel Prizewinners- he didn't just win a Nobel, he proceeded to tack a big fat asterisk on it. At least Barry needed his asterisk injected in his butt to get his baseball in the first place. Shockley didn't even have that excuse.
Having won a Nobel Prize myself as far as you know, let me tell you how this works.
You will be amazed at how these things change your life- I highly recommend picking one up. Usually it means you're set for life. You get automatic Respect with a capital "R" wherever you go. You're invited to all the banquets and dinners, people want to be photographed standing next to you, anything associated with you gets lavishly funded, and you can pocket a few grand a night by reading crap speeches at podiums. You get your picture taken at Google headquarters (if you have time), and then Larry and Sergey will brag about meeting YOU- not the other way around. As John Cockcroft put it (Physics, 51), "When I look round this great hall I feel that I have been transported into a magical world by the genie of Alfred Nobel." And it really feels like that. Of course, the euphoria never lasts, but whether the Respect remains is up to you. It turns out that winning a Nobel Prize comes with its own list of DOs and DON'Ts.
DO decide on a life path. This is easy. It's perfectly Respectable to score a Nobel and then retire to Boca, languishing in comfortable obscurity and posting to Slashdot (but I repeat myself), with your name held in Respect and high regard for decades, centuries, maybe even millenia if this Nobel thing really catches on. People tend to assume you must be exhausted after winning your Nobel. Most people don't have them; how would they know?
DO decide how you would like to be remembered. If there were one sentence that people would use to sum you up, which sounds better? For example, "the guy who invented the transistor" or "the racist who invented the transistor"? Which one commands more Respect? Even in the 50s, you didn't need to be Nostradamus to figure that out- and this guy had a Nobel Prize.
DON'T venture too far from your field of expertise. Nobel Prizes are like money- they're denominated differently in different fields. If you win one in Chemistry, don't assume you're a genius in Literature too. Your prize isn't money there. Al Gore clearly knows what carbon dioxide is, so he gets a bit of leeway if he ventures from Peace into Chemistry a bit- a bit. He should stay out of Medicine unless he wants to start from the ground up. Shockley wandered out of Physics into eugenics (which is a lower-case field- it doesn't even get you prizes!) and history bitchslapped him for it.
DON'T screw things up for the people with whom you shared your prize. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain had every right to be pissed. Shockley made them lose Respect by association. Can you imagine the conversations? "Yes, I invented the transistor... I won a Nobel Prize for it... heh heh no not that guy."
I've seen all the versions extant, and I agree wholeheartely with gp post. Maybe it is maturity? deep reflection? poetic sensibility on my part
I felt the same way about that scene when I was 12 too. After seeing the director's cut version without the voiceover I realized how condescending it actually is. It really doesn't need to be explained. But of course there's no accounting for taste.
Not the least of which was the missing replicant, one of which "got fried." Some (not I) thought that Deckard was the missing replicant, re-programmed to kill the others. I always thought it was a continuity gaff. (Sorry for the pun)
I seem to remember reading that they had to delete a bunch of scenes with an extra replicant character because of time constraints. Then they had to juggle a bunch of remaining scenes around for it to make sense, but this one still doesn't jibe with the others because of the off-by-one error.
I always thought it was sea beams, which conjures up a slightly more poetic scene.
I always liked "sea beams" better too, but unfortunately if you Google around the consensus seems to be on "C-beams". I guess they must look like the letter "C" and glitter.
If he said "I watched C-plus-plus-beams glitter in the dark" that would settle it.
He's just as entitled to an opinion as you are. Try not to be abusive; there's no point to it.
Abusive? Sorry, I didn't intend for my post to be abusive; I saw it as being passionate about art. And of course there's no accounting for taste. I guess I took away from it something different than you did, but once it's submitted the post is now more than one person's vision and part of the shared Slashdot experience and I hope you and the GP at least found some value in it before YouTube yanks the clip.
IMHO, "I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die." is the best line in just about any film ever.
Arrrgh where were you when Roy Batty uttered his last words as his biological clock killed him right before that in the same scene?
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain... Time to die.
Were you in the theater bathroom taking a piss?
OK granted "C-beams" and the Tannhauser Gate whatever that is sounds like total bullshit but that was way better than the graceless and forgettable voiceover from Harrison Ford that followed.
I thought Tron totally rocked when I was a kid. It was full of stupid stuff, like the Master Control Program's AI, and the laser that digitizes Flynn and sucks him into the computer. The "kiss" scene was gross. (I've written plenty of "ugly chicks" that I hope aren't making out with anybody in the hidden cyberworld.) Even I knew that an arcade game that took quarters wouldn't be interfaced to the Master Control Program at Dillinger's headquarters (this was the early 80s). And while the "bit" was an interesting character, it wouldn't be able to emphasize no as "no no no no" in a tight situation. Talk about TMI.
But what a pretty movie it was, even if it was stupid. The old 3D graphics were actually pretty cool- it was a weird world full of square clouds and straight blue lines. You just don't see stuff like that anymore. The quality of today's CGI is so good and so photorealistic that anything produced now is unimpressive and boring. It's evolved into junk for commercials: whales jumping up out of freshwater lakes where financially secure guys are fishing, expensive cars performing risky ballet moves while cruising down empty superhighways, etc. It's sucked the magic out of almost everything you see- if it looks incredible, you know instantly you're looking at CGI crap. Soon, even pornography will be ruined.
I wanted to see Tron again but my mother didn't care for it, so I dragged my father (mainframe programmer) to see it. He hates movies. But he liked it so much he dragged me there to see it again so I saw it three times. END OF LINE
Slashdot Mirror
Says the calculator.
A general rule of thumb is that one barrel of oil is the energy equivalent of about one year of hard labor for a human.
As long as the organism has a consciousness and doesn't like what someone will do to it
How do you know what it likes?
Sometimes I like to idly type things into Google Suggest and see what comes up:
why is everything
can you eat
can you die from
where can I go to get
is it possible to
how would you
From playing with it for a few minutes, it seems that Google is mostly used by women in various stages of pregnancy, people worried that they might be arrested for using Limewire, and people looking for Wiis.
Which would mean that human action would protect its species, redefining what 'evolutionary fitness' means in this context.
Probably not- when we go extinct (after effectively isolating our genomes from the influence of natural selection in just the past few generations) a few of the domestic animals that we've totally screwed up are going with us. Cats might make it, probably horses too. Chickens, no way. If wild turkeys disappear that's it for them too. I suspect technological species don't last long in general.
I was going to say that object code would definitely be won by the zeroes, but if it's compressed the high entropy should split them 50-50. That looks about right.
Females, in my long and varied experience, are generally impressed by a large and well descended sac, and see it as a sign of fecundity.
That's because women are shallow, mortal creatures. A much better approach would be to subject the man to several rounds of interviews followed by a genotype assay using special taste buds with RNA probes. That would produce much better results than looking at scrotums.
But this is still assuming the necessity for natural selection and sex. You are all failing to see past those constraints. Yes, the points you make are good for genomes arrived at via natural selection, but that approach precludes some interesting possibilities. Most people don't appreciate what physics and biochemistry are really capable of supporting- there are a vast number of nucleotide sequences that will simply never be found by natural selection, and some of them must be pretty good. A genome for an animal might exist (violating no physical laws) that could consciously and intelligently edit its own genome and "evolve" that way, but natural selection will never produce such a thing.
Sorry, I thought everyone understood what an "intelligent designer" is really a euphemism for.
My point was that nature doesn't find the most optimal DNA sequences that are mathematically possible, not that we might actually find them either. We aren't as intelligent as we think.
You feel that way because the animals we enslave were originally evolved to survive on their own. Natural selection doesn't select for animals with instincts for human convenience. Chickens have retained their natural instincts to forage for food. We frustrate that instinct by locking them up in little cages their whole lives. They go nuts and peck at each other so much that we have to keep them in the dark so they can't see each other. I agree with you that this is cruel, but the nature of the chicken itself is partly why. There's nothing especially unnatural about an organism designed or evolved to be eaten- some species have even incorporated cannibalism into a normal part of their life cycle.
Douglas Adams had the right idea:
The federal appellate courts have unanimously held that the President has the inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless searches for purposes of gathering foreign intelligence information, which includes information about terrorist threats. Furthermore, since this power is derived from Article II of the Constitution, the FISA Review Court has specifically recognized that it cannot be taken away or limited by Congressional action.
That power would have given him authority to direct the NSA and other federal intelligence agencies to carry out warrantless searches, but he could not legally extend that authority to private entities such as AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest. At the time, acceding to his demands were illegal acts on the part of the telecoms, and his demanding that they do so was also illegal. If they weren't breaking the law then we wouldn't be talking about this stupid immunity bill at all.
We can probably hit maxima that would be outcompeted in nature in a second.
That depends on your definition of "maxima".
Even with survival constraints as the basis for a successful design, it can't be denied that an intelligent designer could have come up with much better designs than the ones you see. Attributing evolutionary designs to an intelligent being is practically an insult when you look at some of the shoddy work evolution has come up with. Our testicles, for example, hang from our undersides dangerously exposed, just because some protein denatures at core body temperatures. Apparently something needs to be redesigned that can't be made to work better with slow incremental improvements. Evolution's fix: make them hurt like hell when struck so you learn not to mess with them. A Microsoft-style hack. If we threw a bunch of supercomputers at the problem we might come up with a completely different protein design that would allow reproduction with undescended testicles.
Disregarding survival constraints as a parameter, a world of possibilities opens up. There is nothing in physics or chemistry that prevents the existence of almost any organism you can imagine, so long as fundamental physical constraints are adhered to such as conservation of energy, rising entropy, etc. I'd like an animal with wheels that I can drive to work, with chlorophyll in its skin so I don't have to feed it. Maybe it can sun itself on the roof while I'm at meetings, and ooze a delicious health drink from a special orifice so I can catch dinner on the way home. (Don't spit up your milk laughing, it's quite possible.) A creature like that would go extinct pretty quickly but it would sure be convenient to have one, and no law of nature prevents such a thing from existing.
What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make?
[broken image]
Figure I. SCHEMATIC.
Modified design for a low-pH respiratory engine. 1) monobasic phosphate buffer tank. 2) ADP-GDP reservoir. 3) primary ADP-GDP feed line. 4) NAD/FAD reservoir. 5) pyruvate feed line. 6) Deinococcus culture chamber. 7) ADP-GDP return line. 8) NADH-FADH2 return line. 9) pasteurizer. 10) sodium-potassium pump. 11) NaCl/KCl reservoir. 12) actin filament membrane. 13) myosin-hydroxyapetite cylinder. 14) axle. 15) flywheel. 16) dilute H3PO4 reservoir. 17) intake port. 18) myosin generator. 19) proton pump. 20) ATPase membrane. 21) secondary ATP feed line. 22) electrophoresis cartridge. 23) pH regulator. 24) UV sterilizer. 25) transmission. 26) +12VDC battery. 27) radiator coil assembly. 28) CO2 exhaust vent. 29) fan. 30) phosphate return line. 31) brake assembly. 32) generator. 33) amylase generator. 34) glycolysis chamber. 35) fibrolytic culture chamber array. 36) microcontroller. 37) compost chamber. 38) thresher. 39) lid. Cit. L. Xu et al, Cellulosic Artificial Muscle Engines (2057), Biomech. Eng. Letts. 21 599-612
But my expectations were 0 to begin with. Can't disappoint from there.
I was hoping for an install CD completely full of ones myself. I got ripped off- half of them are missing.
I don't like most of this stuff, but Dodd is still getting a check for $100 from me, and I'm going to make it very clear to him that he got it for this filibuster.
I'll send $100 to that fascist bastard Lieberman if he filibusters against telecom immunity.
For the Democrats (e.g. Dianne Feinstein who can be reached at 202-224-3841), one motive is the obvious one: telecoms contribute to campaigns.
Much more is at stake for the Republicans, since the president broke at least several federal statutes relating to wiretapping. While this is all something that "everybody knows", that has no legal significance and no one bears any meaningful responsibility to do anything about it. But if the EFF lawsuit (among others) doesn't have its legal basis legislated right out from under it, then it will be revealed in a court of law that the president committed federal crimes. The telecom immunity legislation was designed by the executive branch to extend immunity not just to telecoms who broke these laws, but to anyone in the government who asked them to do it (PDF): Obviously the EFF lawsuit presents a pickle for the Republicans if it is legally shown that Bush was complicit in lawbreaking, and they don't want the lawsuit to proceed further. But this is a problem for the Democrats too. Once it becomes legally evident that Bush broke the law, it becomes incumbent upon them to do something about it, or they are breaking the law with their inaction. Everyone knows Bush is a criminal, but nobody wants to be responsible for knowing. Politics as currently practiced is a fragile thing, home to a glassy web of unspoken agreements and hard-won compromises. A development like this would come stampeding in on all that like a bull in a china shop. This telecom immunity law will make a lot of headaches go away for a lot of people- the telecoms themselves are actually minor players here.
I read on Slashdot just about every day people saying "Democracy may not be perfect, but if you don't like what your elected officials are doing just vote them out and vote in someone competent!"
I read that on Slashdot every day too, and I'm getting pretty sick of it.
It's not even possible to find "someone competent" if we're going to insist they do things that cannot possibly be done competently.
While this may be true, how many other racist Nobel laureates of that era can you name? How many left such a bad aftertaste in the mouth of history? Maybe a lot of them held those beliefs in private, but Shockley became more famous for his racism than for his Nobel. He was almost like the Barry Bonds of Nobel Prizewinners- he didn't just win a Nobel, he proceeded to tack a big fat asterisk on it. At least Barry needed his asterisk injected in his butt to get his baseball in the first place. Shockley didn't even have that excuse.
Having won a Nobel Prize myself as far as you know, let me tell you how this works.
You will be amazed at how these things change your life- I highly recommend picking one up. Usually it means you're set for life. You get automatic Respect with a capital "R" wherever you go. You're invited to all the banquets and dinners, people want to be photographed standing next to you, anything associated with you gets lavishly funded, and you can pocket a few grand a night by reading crap speeches at podiums. You get your picture taken at Google headquarters (if you have time), and then Larry and Sergey will brag about meeting YOU- not the other way around. As John Cockcroft put it (Physics, 51), "When I look round this great hall I feel that I have been transported into a magical world by the genie of Alfred Nobel." And it really feels like that. Of course, the euphoria never lasts, but whether the Respect remains is up to you. It turns out that winning a Nobel Prize comes with its own list of DOs and DON'Ts.
I've seen all the versions extant, and I agree wholeheartely with gp post. Maybe it is maturity? deep reflection? poetic sensibility on my part
I felt the same way about that scene when I was 12 too. After seeing the director's cut version without the voiceover I realized how condescending it actually is. It really doesn't need to be explained. But of course there's no accounting for taste.
So people don't see the movie you you do and now we're shit for it?
:) >
Missed a closing tag. </
Not the least of which was the missing replicant, one of which "got fried." Some (not I) thought that Deckard was the missing replicant, re-programmed to kill the others. I always thought it was a continuity gaff. (Sorry for the pun)
I seem to remember reading that they had to delete a bunch of scenes with an extra replicant character because of time constraints. Then they had to juggle a bunch of remaining scenes around for it to make sense, but this one still doesn't jibe with the others because of the off-by-one error.
I always thought it was sea beams, which conjures up a slightly more poetic scene.
I always liked "sea beams" better too, but unfortunately if you Google around the consensus seems to be on "C-beams". I guess they must look like the letter "C" and glitter.
If he said "I watched C-plus-plus-beams glitter in the dark" that would settle it.
They are releasing a multiple disk set that includes the original theatrical release, the original "Director's Cut" and this new changed cut.
I hope it comes with a diff viewer so you can merge conflicts and make the perfect movie.
He's just as entitled to an opinion as you are. Try not to be abusive; there's no point to it.
Abusive? Sorry, I didn't intend for my post to be abusive; I saw it as being passionate about art. And of course there's no accounting for taste. I guess I took away from it something different than you did, but once it's submitted the post is now more than one person's vision and part of the shared Slashdot experience and I hope you and the GP at least found some value in it before YouTube yanks the clip.
Heh heh heh... you're just jealous because I rendered your girlfriend on my laptop.
Arrrgh where were you when Roy Batty uttered his last words as his biological clock killed him right before that in the same scene? Were you in the theater bathroom taking a piss?
OK granted "C-beams" and the Tannhauser Gate whatever that is sounds like total bullshit but that was way better than the graceless and forgettable voiceover from Harrison Ford that followed.
I thought Tron totally rocked when I was a kid. It was full of stupid stuff, like the Master Control Program's AI, and the laser that digitizes Flynn and sucks him into the computer. The "kiss" scene was gross. (I've written plenty of "ugly chicks" that I hope aren't making out with anybody in the hidden cyberworld.) Even I knew that an arcade game that took quarters wouldn't be interfaced to the Master Control Program at Dillinger's headquarters (this was the early 80s). And while the "bit" was an interesting character, it wouldn't be able to emphasize no as "no no no no" in a tight situation. Talk about TMI.
But what a pretty movie it was, even if it was stupid. The old 3D graphics were actually pretty cool- it was a weird world full of square clouds and straight blue lines. You just don't see stuff like that anymore. The quality of today's CGI is so good and so photorealistic that anything produced now is unimpressive and boring. It's evolved into junk for commercials: whales jumping up out of freshwater lakes where financially secure guys are fishing, expensive cars performing risky ballet moves while cruising down empty superhighways, etc. It's sucked the magic out of almost everything you see- if it looks incredible, you know instantly you're looking at CGI crap. Soon, even pornography will be ruined.
I wanted to see Tron again but my mother didn't care for it, so I dragged my father (mainframe programmer) to see it. He hates movies. But he liked it so much he dragged me there to see it again so I saw it three times. END OF LINE