You'll also note they spend almost no time in Aqua (except for the swimming pool), don't really fit the stereotype of Teen, sometimes but not often exhibit Hunger, and cannot really be called a Force.
They also don't do any of the things shown in the opening credits (i.e. fight crime / robots).
Knee-jerk Mac bashers pretty much have to live in the past at this point. Between the wild success of the iPod and the relative cheapness of the Mac Mini, the favorite whipping boys just aren't around anymore. The whole subculture is undergoing a crisis of faith.:)
And I can see guys like you impugning that critic 10,000 years ago because he committed the crime of mentioning that the character detail you mentioned in the first act just plain wasn't there in the third. Then you haughtily compare them to a bunch of mammals from the Precambrian period. Then the people who just wanted to talk about the story walk away from the campfire because you're a pompous ass.
Yet somehow those genes keep recurring. Odd that is.
People, especially sci-fi fans, like the details in their story to fit. This isn't an unreasonable thing, and neither is calling attention to sloppy storytelling.
Don't worry, that will be fixed in the next edition of the Original Trilogy. Lucas will take that line out, or make a CGI Leia who says something else.
Unfortunately, it's not the kind of show you can just watch here and there, or watch the first couple of episodes of, and get any kind of idea about it. The ongoing story arcs and continuity are B5's greatest strength, which you won't get any sense of if you just watch it "here and there, on and off." Unfortunately, your opinion sounds a little uninformed to me.
And yeah, the special effects are pretty dated to a 2005 audience, but in the early 90s they were really pretty decent overall, especially for a low-budget sci-fi show constantly on the edge of cancellation like B5 was.
They also assume that a person who buys an iPod has NO music collection to start with, and must fill their iPod with 10,000 songs solely by purchasing them.
Which is just stupid on so many levels. My mp3 collection, garnered mostly from my own CDs and the salad days of emusic.com, is 6000+ songs by itself. So, cost of filling my iPod up to 60% of capacity: $0.
I certainly think the Lord of the Rings movies will be remembered for a very long time.
And the empty sci-fi movies of today aren't necessarily popular either. Adventures of Pluto Nash perhaps? Alone in the Dark, which took a bath to the tune of $18 million of its $20 million budget?
It's not all "everything old is new again," but I don't think there's that much of a disparity today -- just more volume.
You know, Charles Darwin almost went to seminary school before taking his voyage on the Beagle. References to a divine power as a guiding force behind evolution are all over Origin of Species.
Science and religion are separate, and since the Enlightenment people have held them as very distinct. Even Galileo said that "the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes." i.e. a person can be a scientific genius, and still admit there are things that we as humans don't yet understand.
I know it's hip to deride all faith as some sort of mass delusion that we need to outgrow, and that's fine. I don't have much faith myself. But faith and intelligence are not necessarily mutually exclusive things.
I'm not advocating anyone "get religion," but I do think that judging religion by its highest manifestations (art, literatue, etc.) as well as its lowest (the Inquisition, the Crusades, other favorite whipping boys of Christianity) is more broad-minded than simply dismissing religion across the board.
I also think it's unrealistic to think that human beings are simply going to "outgrow" faith, at least until we've become gods ourselves and can prove some form of life after death.
And personally, while I have no use for organized religion, I do like that Galactica threw it in there. Me, I always had a problem with shows like Trek, in which all human religions had apparently vanished overnight, and religion was presented only in terms of loony fanatics causing a problem for our atheist heroes. Yeah, that's an egalitarian vision of the future.
Most movies have always sucked. For every 2001 or Blade Runner there are two or three Spacehunters or Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity.
There's no reason to have false nostalgia for the sci-fi heydey of yesteryear; it pretty much never existed. Good movies today are as rare as they've always been; there's just far more movies being made now, which means plenty more suck to go around.
Lighthouse makers just need to move to a new "all-lawsuit" model of revenue like the music and movie industry has. GPS is denying lighthouse makers their constitutionally protected right to obscene amounts of profit. If you're using a GPS, you're stealing from lighthouses*. It's as simple as that.
* or, if you prefer, copyright infringing from lighthouses.
Speaking as a board game fanatic, I have to say that I find Monopoly too simplistic, Chess rather a different animal than most board games, and Risk, well, I've played too much for it to be interesting anymore, especially when there are more interesting variants on Risk out there now. So I can see how other, newer, more sophisticated games (not DOOM, necessarily) might get rated higher.
I agree with you about Zombies, which is no fun and should probably be rater lower than it is; however, much as I love Cheapass Games, and I do, Kill Doctor Lucky is junk. I had much more fun with Witch Trial.
What can I tell you? It's a $500 computer. I wouldn't expect it to be terribly powerful. The machine is pretty comparably to a mid-level machine, and is more than capable of handling what an end-user wants, except for gaming -- and no one would buy a Mac to game on it anyway. As for Mac-wannabe users, I know of half a dozen in my circle of friends, either Windows or Linux users themselves, who want one.
What this means for the market at large, I don't know, but I do know that a lot of people for whom Apple's price point was the major obstacle are now seeing that change. I'm not really seeing any sort of contrary evidence from you beyond "well I just don't like it."
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
Actually, I own and operate Windows, Apple and Linux machines. I like OS X a lot, and am not ashamed of it, but neither do I belong to their cult.
Seriously though, if you want to troll, then my suggestion would be to try to put at least some effort into doing so. Otherwise you'll just end-up sounding stupid.
Cheers!
Re:Apple, the VW Bug of computing.
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?
People who hate Windows, don't want to get caught up in the learning curve or zealotry of Linux, and have been waiting for an inexpensive Mac to become available.
Ever since I got my Powerbook, I've had several friends ask to look at it and use it, and said they'd really like to switch to OS X if only the hardware was affordable. Now it is.
Why don't you decide which point you're going to make and make it? Your assertions are just this big mass of contradictions.
"If this had gone to trial, chances are, he'd be in jail now! Because the evidence is so flimsy! In fact, nonexistent! And people are exonerated every day! And apparently, I think 'exonerated' means 'found guilty,' when in fact it means the precise opposite."
I don't mean to be rude, but I don't even know what you're saying here.
TNG wasn't barely avoiding cancellation at the time. Enterprise is. Also, McCoy guest starred in the pilot. Hard to justify that one as an effort to boost flagging ratings.
For the record, I thought the appearances of both guest stars were pretty sub-par.
True, but it wasn't a guest spot, it was an addition to the cast. They also developed Worf's character in ways he could never have hoped for on TNG, and tied him in to the plot.
It may have been a ratings ploy, but it also paid off from a storytelling and character perspective. I have my doubts you'll be able to say the same of this.
The new Galactica is really good, despite my initial misgivings about it -- but it bears no resemblance to Trek at all. Trek is, and has been, about the future, humanity's place in it, and how we will deal with all the issues that make up being human -- with some rubber monsters thrown in. It's "Wagon Train to the Stars" with some Utopian elements added in.
Galactica is essentially a bleak war movie in space. There is none of the technophilia that Trek so prominently features, and the emphasis is on finding and killing an implacable, deadly enemy. It's dark, it's gritty, and very entertaining, but comparing it with Trek is compeltely apples and oranges to me. Nothing against Galactica, but I like a little optimism in my visions of the future sometimes.
I could watch a few more seasons of Galactica, but it seems like it's playing most of its cards in the first season. If Galactica is the "new face" of sci-fi, I think it will get pretty boring pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll also note they spend almost no time in Aqua (except for the swimming pool), don't really fit the stereotype of Teen, sometimes but not often exhibit Hunger, and cannot really be called a Force.
They also don't do any of the things shown in the opening credits (i.e. fight crime / robots).
It's not a discrepancy, it's a theme.
Knee-jerk Mac bashers pretty much have to live in the past at this point. Between the wild success of the iPod and the relative cheapness of the Mac Mini, the favorite whipping boys just aren't around anymore. The whole subculture is undergoing a crisis of faith. :)
And I can see guys like you impugning that critic 10,000 years ago because he committed the crime of mentioning that the character detail you mentioned in the first act just plain wasn't there in the third. Then you haughtily compare them to a bunch of mammals from the Precambrian period. Then the people who just wanted to talk about the story walk away from the campfire because you're a pompous ass.
Yet somehow those genes keep recurring. Odd that is.
People, especially sci-fi fans, like the details in their story to fit. This isn't an unreasonable thing, and neither is calling attention to sloppy storytelling.
Don't worry, that will be fixed in the next edition of the Original Trilogy. Lucas will take that line out, or make a CGI Leia who says something else.
Unfortunately, it's not the kind of show you can just watch here and there, or watch the first couple of episodes of, and get any kind of idea about it. The ongoing story arcs and continuity are B5's greatest strength, which you won't get any sense of if you just watch it "here and there, on and off." Unfortunately, your opinion sounds a little uninformed to me.
And yeah, the special effects are pretty dated to a 2005 audience, but in the early 90s they were really pretty decent overall, especially for a low-budget sci-fi show constantly on the edge of cancellation like B5 was.
They also assume that a person who buys an iPod has NO music collection to start with, and must fill their iPod with 10,000 songs solely by purchasing them.
Which is just stupid on so many levels. My mp3 collection, garnered mostly from my own CDs and the salad days of emusic.com, is 6000+ songs by itself. So, cost of filling my iPod up to 60% of capacity: $0.
I certainly think the Lord of the Rings movies will be remembered for a very long time.
And the empty sci-fi movies of today aren't necessarily popular either. Adventures of Pluto Nash perhaps? Alone in the Dark, which took a bath to the tune of $18 million of its $20 million budget?
It's not all "everything old is new again," but I don't think there's that much of a disparity today -- just more volume.
Ho boy.
You know, Charles Darwin almost went to seminary school before taking his voyage on the Beagle. References to a divine power as a guiding force behind evolution are all over Origin of Species.
Science and religion are separate, and since the Enlightenment people have held them as very distinct. Even Galileo said that "the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes." i.e. a person can be a scientific genius, and still admit there are things that we as humans don't yet understand.
I know it's hip to deride all faith as some sort of mass delusion that we need to outgrow, and that's fine. I don't have much faith myself. But faith and intelligence are not necessarily mutually exclusive things.
I'm not advocating anyone "get religion," but I do think that judging religion by its highest manifestations (art, literatue, etc.) as well as its lowest (the Inquisition, the Crusades, other favorite whipping boys of Christianity) is more broad-minded than simply dismissing religion across the board.
I also think it's unrealistic to think that human beings are simply going to "outgrow" faith, at least until we've become gods ourselves and can prove some form of life after death.
And personally, while I have no use for organized religion, I do like that Galactica threw it in there. Me, I always had a problem with shows like Trek, in which all human religions had apparently vanished overnight, and religion was presented only in terms of loony fanatics causing a problem for our atheist heroes. Yeah, that's an egalitarian vision of the future.
Most movies have always sucked. For every 2001 or Blade Runner there are two or three Spacehunters or Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity.
There's no reason to have false nostalgia for the sci-fi heydey of yesteryear; it pretty much never existed. Good movies today are as rare as they've always been; there's just far more movies being made now, which means plenty more suck to go around.
Lighthouse makers just need to move to a new "all-lawsuit" model of revenue like the music and movie industry has. GPS is denying lighthouse makers their constitutionally protected right to obscene amounts of profit. If you're using a GPS, you're stealing from lighthouses*. It's as simple as that.
* or, if you prefer, copyright infringing from lighthouses.
Speaking as a board game fanatic, I have to say that I find Monopoly too simplistic, Chess rather a different animal than most board games, and Risk, well, I've played too much for it to be interesting anymore, especially when there are more interesting variants on Risk out there now. So I can see how other, newer, more sophisticated games (not DOOM, necessarily) might get rated higher.
I agree with you about Zombies, which is no fun and should probably be rater lower than it is; however, much as I love Cheapass Games, and I do, Kill Doctor Lucky is junk. I had much more fun with Witch Trial.
What can I tell you? It's a $500 computer. I wouldn't expect it to be terribly powerful. The machine is pretty comparably to a mid-level machine, and is more than capable of handling what an end-user wants, except for gaming -- and no one would buy a Mac to game on it anyway. As for Mac-wannabe users, I know of half a dozen in my circle of friends, either Windows or Linux users themselves, who want one.
What this means for the market at large, I don't know, but I do know that a lot of people for whom Apple's price point was the major obstacle are now seeing that change. I'm not really seeing any sort of contrary evidence from you beyond "well I just don't like it."
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
Actually, I own and operate Windows, Apple and Linux machines. I like OS X a lot, and am not ashamed of it, but neither do I belong to their cult.
Seriously though, if you want to troll, then my suggestion would be to try to put at least some effort into doing so. Otherwise you'll just end-up sounding stupid.
Cheers!
Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?
People who hate Windows, don't want to get caught up in the learning curve or zealotry of Linux, and have been waiting for an inexpensive Mac to become available.
Ever since I got my Powerbook, I've had several friends ask to look at it and use it, and said they'd really like to switch to OS X if only the hardware was affordable. Now it is.
Why don't you decide which point you're going to make and make it? Your assertions are just this big mass of contradictions.
"If this had gone to trial, chances are, he'd be in jail now! Because the evidence is so flimsy! In fact, nonexistent! And people are exonerated every day! And apparently, I think 'exonerated' means 'found guilty,' when in fact it means the precise opposite."
I don't mean to be rude, but I don't even know what you're saying here.
Can we mod this whole article -1, Flamebait?
You're getting your troll account off to a pretty poor start, kid. You need to pick your battles a little better.
Whoa, a Hollywood adaptation of a beloved sci-fi classic disappoints and robs the original of most of its joy?
:|
This is my shocked face.
Yeah... hope they don't make it.
I won't buy one till they can print in stereoscopic 3D and holograms.
*looks downthread* Will they also feel silly that over half the comments on this story are about terrorism instead of ecological degeneration?
TNG wasn't barely avoiding cancellation at the time. Enterprise is. Also, McCoy guest starred in the pilot. Hard to justify that one as an effort to boost flagging ratings.
For the record, I thought the appearances of both guest stars were pretty sub-par.
Why would you have to drop one to watch the other? Are they airing at the same time or something?
If they are, Galactica wins in my book, but I'm just curious.
True, but it wasn't a guest spot, it was an addition to the cast. They also developed Worf's character in ways he could never have hoped for on TNG, and tied him in to the plot.
It may have been a ratings ploy, but it also paid off from a storytelling and character perspective. I have my doubts you'll be able to say the same of this.
The new Galactica is really good, despite my initial misgivings about it -- but it bears no resemblance to Trek at all. Trek is, and has been, about the future, humanity's place in it, and how we will deal with all the issues that make up being human -- with some rubber monsters thrown in. It's "Wagon Train to the Stars" with some Utopian elements added in.
Galactica is essentially a bleak war movie in space. There is none of the technophilia that Trek so prominently features, and the emphasis is on finding and killing an implacable, deadly enemy. It's dark, it's gritty, and very entertaining, but comparing it with Trek is compeltely apples and oranges to me. Nothing against Galactica, but I like a little optimism in my visions of the future sometimes.
I could watch a few more seasons of Galactica, but it seems like it's playing most of its cards in the first season. If Galactica is the "new face" of sci-fi, I think it will get pretty boring pretty quickly.