The irresponsibility with which the modern media operates astounds me. The cheerleading tone of this article is unmissable. We are supposed to rise from our seats and applaud this sportsmensch who hunted down the skeeves speaking ill of his daughter. And hey, on one level, I do.
But here's a little perspective that NJ.com apparently can't be counted on to supply. Just because this case is pretty black and white doesn't mean they all will be. The next time, some jackass will create social networking profiles with breadcrumbs leading back to their real target, and with minimal effort will get a Curt Schilling to do the dirty work, and bear the legal liability, for them.
This is why we have police departments. I fully recognize that they've deteriorated in capability and trustworthiness, losing their role as guardians of the real public interest to politics and less esoteric concerns like meeting budgets and justifying headcounts, but that's a reason to fix what's broken about our system, not replace it with every-man-for-himself vigilantism.
Supposing a causal relationship between nukes and peace seems bordering on magical thinking.
I wouldn't totally discount the suppressive effects of mutually assured destruction on conflict between rational powers seeking enlargement of their empires. But those are a lot of qualifiers, and the history of humanity seems to suggest that effective weapons, once developed, will eventually be used.
even if the fuel melted into a large reservoir of water, it could not become critical.
This was not the conclusion of the Soviet scientists and engineers at the time, working with more detailed knowledge than I suspect you are.
even if you somehow made the fuel become critical, it could not explode like a bomb.
Once again, this was not the conclusion of the better-informed Soviet scientists and engineers at the time.
if the fuel mass reached the water table, all that would occur would be another path for contamination in the local area which was already heavily contaminated.
I don't even know what to make of this statement, except that you don't seem to understand what a water table is, as "local area" in reference to one does not make a whole lot of sense.
a power plant contains a couple orders of magnitude more fuel than a bomb.
Granted?
radiation does not spread like a contagion. This is just plain FUD.
You are probably being deliberately being over-literal, but in any event are once again proving a little too determinedly bereft of clue to bother with.
The people in remote rural areas would be the most likely to survive the initial blasts. They would also be the most likely to survive the ensuing economic disruption.
This is an extremely naive and optimistic perspective. I'm not here to rain on your parade, but when you're trying to convince people that nuclear war wouldn't be *so bad*, that it's survivable, I feel like maybe I should. Because nuclear war at scale is not survivable. At all. Like, that's the point of it.
I could tell you stuff about how research indicates that a nation needs to lose only a small fraction (~10%) of its working population in order to become permanently logistically non-functional. I could tell you about how
Instead I will just share this one historical anecdote. You remember Chernobyl, right? What a big mess all that was? Well, what most people don't know at all is that we got very lucky at Chernobyl. The tons of enriched fuel that had melted down was only days away from contacting a large pool of cooling water stored beneath. Scientists ran calculations and warned that, should the zircon-and-graphite-clad fuel mixture contacted the water, it would have created an explosion in the range of several megatons. This, the scientists assured us, would have rendered most of western Europe permanently uninhabitable. Even after this pool was drained, there was still a great risk of rendering the entirety of Russia uninhabitable, because the fuel could have melted through the Earth's surface and contacted the water table that feeds all of Russia and a good deal of Europe.
So that's the risk of a single surface blast in the megaton range, and a single plant's worth of fuel pollution. Now understand that, in war, we are talking about potentially thousands of such warheads. Understand that fatal toxicity of plutonium to the human body is at the nanograms-per-kilogram level. Understand that ionizing radiation contaminates and spreads like a contagion. Understand that apex predators like us require whole ecosystems in order to survive that are fundamentally incompatible with a highly irradiated landscape. Understand that, in their last gasps, spiteful empires may deploy doomsday weapons and techniques *specifically* intended to render the planet permanently uninhabitable.
Some people in downtown Hiroshima, and many more in Nagasaki, survived the blast, and the radiation, and went on to have children and grandchildren.
Hiroshima is to nuclear war as a slap upside the head is to a 12 round bout with Mike Tyson.
And alcohol. And drugs. And cigarettes. And... well, you get my point. Banning something doesn't make that thing unavailable. This is doubly true in reference to sovereign nations dealing in a world lacking a unified system of enforceable international laws.
The genie doesn't go back in the bottle. We are either going to have to figure out how to get along in a world in which each of us has the capability to destroy all of us, or resign ourselves to the extinction of our species.
That's a shame, but I think there are plenty of precedents of male actors who have likewise done stupid shit because of the bottle, but have gotten help to get out of it, and given second and third chances.
Not all celebrities are created equal, it's true, but I don't think that's a gender thing. Plenty of men cant get work, and plenty of men have gotten blackballed over the years by directors for similar shenanigans. And for what it's worth, I agree both from a sentimental and practical perspective: Sean Young, the ultimate tsundere, has a special place in my heart and that of many others who fell in love with her screen presence in the 80s. That is a very bankable thing, but it takes a professional to cash it in, and she hasn't proven up to the task so far. I wish her really well, believe me.
There are many older actresses that still do look great, and who aren't used as much as I think they should be. Like Susan Sarandon, who I think looks so awesome precisely because she has aged naturally
Susan Sarandon is beautiful and one of a kind. I'm not sure I'd class her as hard-up for work, though. Same with Diane Keaton, Sally Fields, Annette Bening, Kathy Bates, and quite a few other great and talented Hollywood ladies. This isn't exactly the 1950s with respect to movie studios' attitudes towards mature women, in fact they're an incredibly reliable, and thus courted, box office demographic.
I think it's sad that Hollywood continues to make so many movies with elderly gents in the lead role, but never do you see an elderly woman in a lead role. Even the great looking ones.
I'm probably going to get dagger-stares for it, but here is my two cents. And that's really all it is, but here goes anyway. Part of the thing here is that older women don't necessarily want to be, or see, themselves in the lead role of a film. Be honest, and focus for a second not on the rag-flying co-ed Boudicas at the outskirts of culture today, but the warm-steel wisdom of real American family matriarchs. By and large, they aren't looking for superheros, they're looking for stories that ring true to them and their own experiences.
He defeats both the pleasure and assassin models without too much trouble. The brute might have beaten him, although we can't know that for sure. We do know that love saved the day. The only one who definitely would have beaten him was Roy, who is a full-on combat model and vastly experienced, not fresh off the assembly line.
It is said in the movie that Rachel was "an experiment, nothing more". That she did not know what it was. This contrasts with the N6s which where in service. Not a mere experiment
I see where you're coming from, but...
It's a pretty big leap to interpret Tyrell's guarded/teasing response to Deckard's question about Rachel as meaning that. The experiment he referred to could have been Rachel's (...and Deckard's) lack of self-knowledge. It could have been that the meeting of Rachel and Deckard itself was the experiment - perhaps Tyrell was exploring the depth of N6 emotional capabilities? It could be that the whole darn thing was a setup right down to the rogue N6s as set pieces. Or maybe he was just lying off-the-cuff as a way to dismiss an unexpectedly piercing query by the detective. Honestly *any* of those possibilities seems to fit the storyline better than that Deckard, who did well to hold his own against any Nexus 6 combat model he faced, was some next generation model.
The storyline in my head goes something like this. Rachel and Deckard were Nexus 6-Xs - experimental models - that Tyrell was using to work out one or both of the line's major design flaws: their emotional instability and/or their limited longevity. This is why Roy and the other N6s are totally aware of their status as replicants, but Rachel and Deckard are not. The experiment that Tyrell is testing is exactly depriving them of the knowledge of their (from the standpoint of individual ego) inferior origin, on the theory that by permitting them to believe themselves human (which, really, they all are) and integrate on an emotional level with the human world. Tyrell suspects this to be true already, but has been in denial heretofore because of what it would mean on a moral level: specifically, that Tyrell is the biggest slave-trader in history, his vaunted empire nothing more than a dark exploitation of life, with his own countless children as debased chattel.
Will Deckard's superior Nexus 6 brain cause him to run perpendicular to the giant ring rolling in his direction in a straight line? If so, at least marginally happier than I was at the end of that stinker.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE PKD, but PKD had basically zero popular legacy to undermine before Ridley Scott got ahold of "Do Androids Dream..." and made it into something rather different. The world has Ridley Scott to thank for waking us up to his works.
It would be interesting to see a Blade Runner 2 with Sean Young.
Sean Young's lack of work has nothing to do with her looks (hope I look half that good at her age), and a lot to do with her being a raging alcoholic and major drama queen. The ravishingly gorgeous and talented lady established a pretty legendary reputation as THE hot mess of the movie industry back in the 80s, and age appears to have done little to mellow things: she got arrested at an Oscars after-party in 2012 for misdemeanor assault on one of the other guests.
You know....I've just never really "gotten" this movie.
It's certainly not Scott's most accessible film. Much is left unspoken and implied, not dumbed down. That's one of the (many) reasons I like it so much: there's always something to discover or analyze.
Here's one that even fans don't seem to have noticed: every human left on Earth, except the replicants, is shown to be somehow unfit for offworld travel (old & infirm, diseased, alcoholic, criminal). This seems like a major, major clue that Deckard is a replicant, but I've never seen any review or analysis of the film mention it, and of course it's never outright stated in the film.
Which version you watch won't matter that much from the standpoint of "getting it". I like the Director's Cut.
All war is ultimately a form of resource contention. It is pretty stupid to destroy all the resources in a fight over who gets this or that resource, but that's the only possible result of "all out war" at this stage in human technological progress.
and the next thing you know, we're waging war with no human casualties.
Why would anyone program their robots to fight other robots? That won't convince the politicians on the other side to start/stop doing this or that thing.
So the net result eventually will be the elimination of human soldiers, but not human targets. So we will have wars fought between killer robots and hapless unsuspecting civilians, with cities as the battlefields.
"Steak" denotes the way the butcher cut the meat, not what animal the meat came from. Cut across the muscle fibers and you have a steak, with the muscle fibers and you have a filet.
Looks like a standard quadcopter to me. That means it will have a pretty limited flight time and even less once you add weight and some wind. Standard is around 10 minutes. So that is 5 minutes distance in flight.
Off the shelf quadcopters can have multi-kilometer ranges. Not the logistical equivalent of cargo ships, but they're capable in "last mile" scenarios.
Add to that the time you need to change the batteries and add the load and you are easily at 15 minutes for a 5 minute flight.
So just mount multiple drones and allow some to work while the others are charging? You're also free to construct drone waypoints for longer range operations, cargo exchanges in the event of malfunctions, etc.
Add some maintenance/setting up to that and you get to 20.
You think commercial drones require five minutes of maintenance for every 10 minutes of flight?!
In a lot of ways geekdom is no longer counterculture.
That's fine, as long as Joe Schmo wearing a dashiki doesn't start demanding a vote in an actual Nigerian village. We can be popular, but don't try to co-opt our shit. No flash photography, keep your hands off the exhibits, pl0x.
That's very much better and more succinctly put, but precisely the idea I was going for. I don't want to discriminate against a female -- in either direction. Jeri Ellsworth is awesome and I don't care what's in her pants, but the cold hard fact is that the industry is suffering from this wave of pity hiring a bunch of college coeds, giving them titles with "communications" or "marketing" in them, and lying to them and everyone else that they're now part of the IT revolution. It's not a solution to anything.
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The irresponsibility with which the modern media operates astounds me. The cheerleading tone of this article is unmissable. We are supposed to rise from our seats and applaud this sportsmensch who hunted down the skeeves speaking ill of his daughter. And hey, on one level, I do.
But here's a little perspective that NJ.com apparently can't be counted on to supply. Just because this case is pretty black and white doesn't mean they all will be. The next time, some jackass will create social networking profiles with breadcrumbs leading back to their real target, and with minimal effort will get a Curt Schilling to do the dirty work, and bear the legal liability, for them.
This is why we have police departments. I fully recognize that they've deteriorated in capability and trustworthiness, losing their role as guardians of the real public interest to politics and less esoteric concerns like meeting budgets and justifying headcounts, but that's a reason to fix what's broken about our system, not replace it with every-man-for-himself vigilantism.
MAD isn't a principle that applies here.
Increasingly anywhere. MAD has always had the attribution problem, and it snowballs with proliferation. :\
Supposing a causal relationship between nukes and peace seems bordering on magical thinking.
I wouldn't totally discount the suppressive effects of mutually assured destruction on conflict between rational powers seeking enlargement of their empires. But those are a lot of qualifiers, and the history of humanity seems to suggest that effective weapons, once developed, will eventually be used.
You just named three cultures and then a technology. But do cultures and technologies obey the same "rules"? Lets see:
The fire civilization died.
The copper civilization died.
The electricity civilization died.
Hmmm.
there is no large pool of water directly below the reactor
You are THIS totally uninformed, and accusing me of posting "hogwash"?
even if the fuel melted into a large reservoir of water, it could not become critical.
This was not the conclusion of the Soviet scientists and engineers at the time, working with more detailed knowledge than I suspect you are.
even if you somehow made the fuel become critical, it could not explode like a bomb.
Once again, this was not the conclusion of the better-informed Soviet scientists and engineers at the time.
if the fuel mass reached the water table, all that would occur would be another path for contamination in the local area which was already heavily contaminated.
I don't even know what to make of this statement, except that you don't seem to understand what a water table is, as "local area" in reference to one does not make a whole lot of sense.
a power plant contains a couple orders of magnitude more fuel than a bomb.
Granted?
radiation does not spread like a contagion. This is just plain FUD.
You are probably being deliberately being over-literal, but in any event are once again proving a little too determinedly bereft of clue to bother with.
Rather than "telling us", why don't you provide a citation.
Because I'm not writing a thesis, but a comment on the internet?
Please provide a citation for this as well.
Feel free to mark my grade down if you dislike that I didn't show my work, teacher.
The people in remote rural areas would be the most likely to survive the initial blasts. They would also be the most likely to survive the ensuing economic disruption.
This is an extremely naive and optimistic perspective. I'm not here to rain on your parade, but when you're trying to convince people that nuclear war wouldn't be *so bad*, that it's survivable, I feel like maybe I should. Because nuclear war at scale is not survivable. At all. Like, that's the point of it.
I could tell you stuff about how research indicates that a nation needs to lose only a small fraction (~10%) of its working population in order to become permanently logistically non-functional. I could tell you about how
Instead I will just share this one historical anecdote. You remember Chernobyl, right? What a big mess all that was? Well, what most people don't know at all is that we got very lucky at Chernobyl. The tons of enriched fuel that had melted down was only days away from contacting a large pool of cooling water stored beneath. Scientists ran calculations and warned that, should the zircon-and-graphite-clad fuel mixture contacted the water, it would have created an explosion in the range of several megatons. This, the scientists assured us, would have rendered most of western Europe permanently uninhabitable. Even after this pool was drained, there was still a great risk of rendering the entirety of Russia uninhabitable, because the fuel could have melted through the Earth's surface and contacted the water table that feeds all of Russia and a good deal of Europe.
So that's the risk of a single surface blast in the megaton range, and a single plant's worth of fuel pollution. Now understand that, in war, we are talking about potentially thousands of such warheads. Understand that fatal toxicity of plutonium to the human body is at the nanograms-per-kilogram level. Understand that ionizing radiation contaminates and spreads like a contagion. Understand that apex predators like us require whole ecosystems in order to survive that are fundamentally incompatible with a highly irradiated landscape. Understand that, in their last gasps, spiteful empires may deploy doomsday weapons and techniques *specifically* intended to render the planet permanently uninhabitable.
Some people in downtown Hiroshima, and many more in Nagasaki, survived the blast, and the radiation, and went on to have children and grandchildren.
Hiroshima is to nuclear war as a slap upside the head is to a 12 round bout with Mike Tyson.
We still need to ban nuclear weapons.
And alcohol. And drugs. And cigarettes. And... well, you get my point. Banning something doesn't make that thing unavailable. This is doubly true in reference to sovereign nations dealing in a world lacking a unified system of enforceable international laws.
The genie doesn't go back in the bottle. We are either going to have to figure out how to get along in a world in which each of us has the capability to destroy all of us, or resign ourselves to the extinction of our species.
That's a shame, but I think there are plenty of precedents of male actors who have likewise done stupid shit because of the bottle, but have gotten help to get out of it, and given second and third chances.
Not all celebrities are created equal, it's true, but I don't think that's a gender thing. Plenty of men cant get work, and plenty of men have gotten blackballed over the years by directors for similar shenanigans. And for what it's worth, I agree both from a sentimental and practical perspective: Sean Young, the ultimate tsundere, has a special place in my heart and that of many others who fell in love with her screen presence in the 80s. That is a very bankable thing, but it takes a professional to cash it in, and she hasn't proven up to the task so far. I wish her really well, believe me.
There are many older actresses that still do look great, and who aren't used as much as I think they should be. Like Susan Sarandon, who I think looks so awesome precisely because she has aged naturally
Susan Sarandon is beautiful and one of a kind. I'm not sure I'd class her as hard-up for work, though. Same with Diane Keaton, Sally Fields, Annette Bening, Kathy Bates, and quite a few other great and talented Hollywood ladies. This isn't exactly the 1950s with respect to movie studios' attitudes towards mature women, in fact they're an incredibly reliable, and thus courted, box office demographic.
I think it's sad that Hollywood continues to make so many movies with elderly gents in the lead role, but never do you see an elderly woman in a lead role. Even the great looking ones.
I'm probably going to get dagger-stares for it, but here is my two cents. And that's really all it is, but here goes anyway. Part of the thing here is that older women don't necessarily want to be, or see, themselves in the lead role of a film. Be honest, and focus for a second not on the rag-flying co-ed Boudicas at the outskirts of culture today, but the warm-steel wisdom of real American family matriarchs. By and large, they aren't looking for superheros, they're looking for stories that ring true to them and their own experiences.
He defeats both the pleasure and assassin models without too much trouble. The brute might have beaten him, although we can't know that for sure. We do know that love saved the day. The only one who definitely would have beaten him was Roy, who is a full-on combat model and vastly experienced, not fresh off the assembly line.
Dick was well known in the same circles as the people who were actually willing to watch (and wound up liking) Blade Runner.
Q: How many Hollywood movies were based on PKD works *prior* to Blade Runner?
A: Zero.
Q: How many Hollywood movies have been based on PKD works *after* Blade Runner?
A: Eleven.
If that's not breaking ground, I don't know what you call breaking ground.
It is said in the movie that Rachel was "an experiment, nothing more". That she did not know what it was. This contrasts with the N6s which where in service. Not a mere experiment
I see where you're coming from, but...
It's a pretty big leap to interpret Tyrell's guarded/teasing response to Deckard's question about Rachel as meaning that. The experiment he referred to could have been Rachel's (...and Deckard's) lack of self-knowledge. It could have been that the meeting of Rachel and Deckard itself was the experiment - perhaps Tyrell was exploring the depth of N6 emotional capabilities? It could be that the whole darn thing was a setup right down to the rogue N6s as set pieces. Or maybe he was just lying off-the-cuff as a way to dismiss an unexpectedly piercing query by the detective. Honestly *any* of those possibilities seems to fit the storyline better than that Deckard, who did well to hold his own against any Nexus 6 combat model he faced, was some next generation model.
The storyline in my head goes something like this. Rachel and Deckard were Nexus 6-Xs - experimental models - that Tyrell was using to work out one or both of the line's major design flaws: their emotional instability and/or their limited longevity. This is why Roy and the other N6s are totally aware of their status as replicants, but Rachel and Deckard are not. The experiment that Tyrell is testing is exactly depriving them of the knowledge of their (from the standpoint of individual ego) inferior origin, on the theory that by permitting them to believe themselves human (which, really, they all are) and integrate on an emotional level with the human world. Tyrell suspects this to be true already, but has been in denial heretofore because of what it would mean on a moral level: specifically, that Tyrell is the biggest slave-trader in history, his vaunted empire nothing more than a dark exploitation of life, with his own countless children as debased chattel.
Will Deckard's superior Nexus 6 brain cause him to run perpendicular to the giant ring rolling in his direction in a straight line? If so, at least marginally happier than I was at the end of that stinker.
undermine Mr. Dick's larger legacy
I LOVE LOVE LOVE PKD, but PKD had basically zero popular legacy to undermine before Ridley Scott got ahold of "Do Androids Dream..." and made it into something rather different. The world has Ridley Scott to thank for waking us up to his works.
But Decker and Rachel where not N6s.
Sorry, what makes you say that?
It would be interesting to see a Blade Runner 2 with Sean Young.
Sean Young's lack of work has nothing to do with her looks (hope I look half that good at her age), and a lot to do with her being a raging alcoholic and major drama queen. The ravishingly gorgeous and talented lady established a pretty legendary reputation as THE hot mess of the movie industry back in the 80s, and age appears to have done little to mellow things: she got arrested at an Oscars after-party in 2012 for misdemeanor assault on one of the other guests.
You know....I've just never really "gotten" this movie.
It's certainly not Scott's most accessible film. Much is left unspoken and implied, not dumbed down. That's one of the (many) reasons I like it so much: there's always something to discover or analyze.
Here's one that even fans don't seem to have noticed: every human left on Earth, except the replicants, is shown to be somehow unfit for offworld travel (old & infirm, diseased, alcoholic, criminal). This seems like a major, major clue that Deckard is a replicant, but I've never seen any review or analysis of the film mention it, and of course it's never outright stated in the film.
Which version you watch won't matter that much from the standpoint of "getting it". I like the Director's Cut.
That was intended to be a joke
Welcome to Slashdot, where the coffee's always hot and the jokes usually missed. :)
All war is ultimately a form of resource contention. It is pretty stupid to destroy all the resources in a fight over who gets this or that resource, but that's the only possible result of "all out war" at this stage in human technological progress.
and the next thing you know, we're waging war with no human casualties.
Why would anyone program their robots to fight other robots? That won't convince the politicians on the other side to start/stop doing this or that thing.
So the net result eventually will be the elimination of human soldiers, but not human targets. So we will have wars fought between killer robots and hapless unsuspecting civilians, with cities as the battlefields.
"Steak" denotes the way the butcher cut the meat, not what animal the meat came from. Cut across the muscle fibers and you have a steak, with the muscle fibers and you have a filet.
Looks like a standard quadcopter to me. That means it will have a pretty limited flight time and even less once you add weight and some wind. Standard is around 10 minutes. So that is 5 minutes distance in flight.
Off the shelf quadcopters can have multi-kilometer ranges. Not the logistical equivalent of cargo ships, but they're capable in "last mile" scenarios.
Add to that the time you need to change the batteries and add the load and you are easily at 15 minutes for a 5 minute flight.
So just mount multiple drones and allow some to work while the others are charging? You're also free to construct drone waypoints for longer range operations, cargo exchanges in the event of malfunctions, etc.
Add some maintenance/setting up to that and you get to 20.
You think commercial drones require five minutes of maintenance for every 10 minutes of flight?!
unlike Debian and Linux, where I'd get a kernel panic around once a month
So... how would you like a job as a fuzzer?
In a lot of ways geekdom is no longer counterculture.
That's fine, as long as Joe Schmo wearing a dashiki doesn't start demanding a vote in an actual Nigerian village. We can be popular, but don't try to co-opt our shit. No flash photography, keep your hands off the exhibits, pl0x.
That's very much better and more succinctly put, but precisely the idea I was going for. I don't want to discriminate against a female -- in either direction. Jeri Ellsworth is awesome and I don't care what's in her pants, but the cold hard fact is that the industry is suffering from this wave of pity hiring a bunch of college coeds, giving them titles with "communications" or "marketing" in them, and lying to them and everyone else that they're now part of the IT revolution. It's not a solution to anything.