Star Wars: Episode 3: Your Childhood Memories are Raped For Two Solid Hours, then the Orchestral Score and Mood Lighting in the Last Thirty Seconds Tricks You into Thinking that this is a Worthy Prequel to Episode 4.
A little unwieldy, I grant you, but it's only a working title.
if she wants to see episode 2 she's going by herself. Life's too short to watch two more hours of this kind of excrement
We need a support group. Come the advertising blitz, it's going to be damn hard to tough it out.
As a complete aside, there's an insanely slick British sitcom called "Spaced" in which the protagonist is sacked from a comic book store for refusing to sell a Jar Jar doll. Priceless.
Interesting points, but I have to nit pick over a few of them.
And Luke's starting out as a teenager, when even Anakin at 8 (or is it 10? I forget) is thought by Yoda to be too old to begin.
Maybe Luke's midichlorian count is way over 20,000. (BTW, saying that makes me feel like a two bit whore. Thanks for raping my childhood memories, George).
Cliched Dialog:"I can't believe he's gone." (Luke about Obi-Wan. He'd known him, what, a week or less?)
And yet, strangely, we believe him. We feel it. Same for all the other cheesy dialogue, which fits the archetypes that you berate above so well that we can suspend our disbelief.
Shoddy acting
Uh, OK, wait a second. Have you been to see a Hollywood blockbuster recently? George showed us how to make a great films by just shooting scenes over and over and editing our the really bad bits, a tradition that's still going strong today.
There just isn't any enthusiasm left any more
Which is where we agree completely. All your points about episodes 4 through 6 are valid, but (apart from the latter parts of RotJ) the sheer verve makes up for the technical flaws. Episode 1 is just a cynical flashy quota piece, the cinematic equivelant of those 8 bit computer demos that were great technical showcases but ultimately uninvolving. In contrast, Episode 4 was Pong - only as good as it needed to be, but made with flair and gusto, and enjoyed as such.
Sklyarov may simply be a pawn in a game played by the US Department of State.
No, no, I'm sure the DOJ will happily do the following in the near future:
Prosecute a US programmer for cracking the encryption on a Russian company's product.
Intradite and prosecute a Russian programmer for cracking the encryption on a Russian company's product, as long as the resulting product is sold in the USA.
Because of course the DMCA is concerned with justice, not with protecting US companies from foreign competition. No way.
Hey, I've got $10 right here with Dmitry's name on it. Not for his legal defence, because his detention on political/economic grounds is farcial, but $10 that he can put towards recouping his bail, buying a fake passport (illegal, but, hey, pile it on) and skipping this fucked up excuse for a free country and getting back to momma Russia where he can continue pointing out the folly of criminalising the very act of questioning the right of a few CEO's, major shareholders and their Washington lobbyist bitches to make profit from We, the People.
I love sci fi, but Farscape just looks like the Muppet Show. I can't take it seriously enough to give it a chance
I made that mistake too. I prejudged Farscape based on the trailers and the first episode (shown on a mainstream BBC channel) and point blank refused to watch the damn puppet show.
What a mistake that turned out to be. Like CmdrTaco, I only "discovered" it in season 2 after much persuasion, and it's a real treat, and the best antidote to Voyager that I've yet seen ("Spare me the techno babble, gadget girl.").
Seems to me that the savings on FX have all been spent on the actors and the writing. Farcape is an absolute joy, beautifully written, flawlessly acted, consistent, wry and very knowing. Also, the cast seem to have real chemistry and are obviously having a hoot filming it. The protagonist, Crighton, has taken to calling a couple of other characters "Pip" and "Sparky". That's not a cute scriptism, it's what the actor, Ben Browder, started calling them, and it sounded so natural that they decided to just roll with it. That shows a level of confidence and non-control freakery on a par with Stargate.
Do yourself a favour, grit your teeth, ignore the muppets, and sit through an episode. Unlike B5, it's easy to pick up in the middle, and you might be pleasantly surprised.
Never trust any writing that uses the word "consumers"
Well said. One of the most terrifying propositions that I've seen on/. was that in 10 years, the only package you'll be able to get from ISPs is 10Mb/s downstream, 28.8Kb/s upstream, and everything except port 80 blocked.
establishing a "guerilla" wireless network using radio waves
I'd strongly suggest getting some of the overpowered multi-mile 802.11x cards before 2.4Ghz gets regulated out of existence. Open up a machine to the world, and peer to your heart's content.
I'd like to reassure everyone that we have not abandoned the Linux version
Can you assure us that every line of code in the commercial version was written by you in a clean room environment, or by open source contributors who have given their explicit consent for you to make money off of your work?
I ask because I'd like to see this work, so it's vital that everybody involved has happy faces and there's not the slightest suspicion of dodgy dealings.
Gee whizz, really? So is America. Two, even. The original quote was "African-American". If the author has specified from which part of Africa her ancestors were abducted, I would have used that.
Besides, the fact that black Africans were involved doesn't negate the wrong done by white Americans (obviously).
Besides what? If that's your only point, why bother making it if it's so obvious? I neither said nor implied that.
Don't get me wrong, slavery is appaling. But anyone who's griping about being descended from slaves, even by one generation, is looking for special treatment for themselves and nothing more.
So, your great grandparents were taken from Africa against their will. That's horrific - for them. But now you want compensation and special treatment for what happened to them, but you don't want to go back to Africa (no matter how bad your situation in the USA)? Cry me a river.
I'm not buying it. Yes, we have a society of haves and have nots, of opportunity and deprivation, and yes, it's based on a large part on ancestry and skin tone. But you fix that by addressing the situation today, without making futile attempts to fix the past.
Automatons will not be able to easily jump beyond logic by themselves, people will always be needed to teach them how.
Hmm. The trouble is that very, very few humans can actually make intuitive leaps. I can think of the guy (or gal) who figured out fire, Da Vinci, Edison, Einstein, a handful of others. Most of us just make tiny tweaks to other people's ideas.
Bizarrely, given sufficient processing power, it might be more efficient to produce a speculating machine (that can design a random device from the atomic level up, with no preconceptions of usage, then try and find a use for it), rather than try and identify humans who can actually come up with ideas that are genuinely new.
Just require every law, other than the Constitution, to have an expiry date of not more than 5 years from passage
You know, at first glance that looks nutty, but when you think about it, it really does make sense.
It would make for a headache for the the judiciary and penitentiaries though: what if you got handed down a 10 year sentence for a crime, then the law was repealed, you were released, then it was reenstated within your 10 year period? The prisons would have to have revolving doors.:)
I can't notice any difference between Democrat and Republican policies in any areas that interest me, so the best I can do is vote for a Libertarian candidate every four years. That gesture would be drowned out by the masses of senile geriatrics voting the same way they've voted for 70 years, and concerned but uninformed soccer moms voting for whoever screamed "Think of the children!" the loudest this time round. Big whoop.
I will not support a corrupt and broken system. I do not vote, I encourage my friends and family to not vote. I will participate when we either achieve an actual Republic with constant referenda, or when global events wreck our economy and Joe Sixpack nails his representative to the wall (ironically for something he didn't do) and we start over.
Email is rather ineffective against congressional leaders, and neither are threats. A kind, well-worded letter works best for the amount of time it takes.
Alternatively, let's throw all of our politicos into one big room without access to food, water, toilet facilities, phones, net access or law books and get them to write down all the laws that they can remember (50% of them are members of the American Bar Association, they should be up to the job). When the last of them passes out, we hand over their rabid scribblings to the Supreme Court judges and let them vet the whole damn lot (without We, the People having to pay money to argue cases all the way up to that court one at a time). Then we're done. That's the new legal system.
"...I'm an African-American woman whose ancestors survived this country's early participation in the trading, buying, and selling of human flesh - this question is of great concern to me,..."
Perhaps by "this" country she means Africa and not the USA? Or are we now pretending that black Africans didn't supply the slave trade?
I wish the media would vet these so-called 'experts'
Uh, they do. They go through a painstaking process of deciding which one will give the most attention grabbing copy for the least effort. Good old Steve!! even inserts his!! own CAPITALS!! and SHRIEKS!!! for them !!!
Let's face it, anything you read in a medium supported by advertising is designed to grab eyeballs, not impart truth. And yes, that includes/.
A patent allows an individual or company to make money off the R&D for their products
You're right that patents aren't inherently bad, but your argument needs refining.
The purpose of patents isn't to make money for inventors, but to allow and encourage inventors to put their inventions into the public domain (while still retaining rights for a limited time).
If Qualcomm do some original reasearch, they can choose to not patent (and therefore not publish details of) that technology, but can sell the technology to other companies. The recipients, having paid money for it, will protect it as carefully as Qualcomm does. Qualcomm can make as much, or more money that way, especially if they choose to withhold the details from their biggest competitors.
However, because of the patent system, if a competitor invents the same technology and patents it, Qualcomm is screwed. They can claim and prove prior art defence for their own use, but unless they published details, they can't stop the patent from being granted. All their competitors now know how to do it, and Qualcomm can't sell the technology to anyone any more.
Patents aren't designed primarily to protect your right to make money off of an invention (although they do that), they're designed to make it a good idea for you to publish details of the invention.
The flaw, of course, lies in the way the system is working. It's not. Frivilous patents are being claimed, granted, and enforced. The technique is irrelevant, the quality is irrelevant, it's all about quantity of patents, and about having a dreadful court system that means it's cheaper to pay up than to fight it in court - even if you win.
Sure, the patent office is swamped, but I'd fix the legal system first. Laws and proceeding in plain language, courts given the time and resources to investigate claims, and loser pays.
current IP laws [...] result in a huge abuse of the courts
Well, (ab)use of the whole flawed legal system where you pay your own costs to defend yourself and have to counter sue to recover (paying more costs to do so). Patent sharks present that horrid system as the greater of two evils, the lesser being to pay up on a frivilous patent.
If there's one thing that I could change (before even the DMCA), it would be that the legal system is written by and designed to be understood and used by lawyers, not by and for We, The People.
Really, I dream of a day when you and I can defend ourselves in court and not be called a fool by the judge.
Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars: Episode 3: Your Childhood Memories are Raped For Two Solid Hours, then the Orchestral Score and Mood Lighting in the Last Thirty Seconds Tricks You into Thinking that this is a Worthy Prequel to Episode 4.
A little unwieldy, I grant you, but it's only a working title.
We need a support group. Come the advertising blitz, it's going to be damn hard to tough it out.
As a complete aside, there's an insanely slick British sitcom called "Spaced" in which the protagonist is sacked from a comic book store for refusing to sell a Jar Jar doll. Priceless.
Interesting points, but I have to nit pick over a few of them.
Maybe Luke's midichlorian count is way over 20,000. (BTW, saying that makes me feel like a two bit whore. Thanks for raping my childhood memories, George).
And yet, strangely, we believe him. We feel it. Same for all the other cheesy dialogue, which fits the archetypes that you berate above so well that we can suspend our disbelief.
Uh, OK, wait a second. Have you been to see a Hollywood blockbuster recently? George showed us how to make a great films by just shooting scenes over and over and editing our the really bad bits, a tradition that's still going strong today.
Which is where we agree completely. All your points about episodes 4 through 6 are valid, but (apart from the latter parts of RotJ) the sheer verve makes up for the technical flaws. Episode 1 is just a cynical flashy quota piece, the cinematic equivelant of those 8 bit computer demos that were great technical showcases but ultimately uninvolving. In contrast, Episode 4 was Pong - only as good as it needed to be, but made with flair and gusto, and enjoyed as such.
No, no, I'm sure the DOJ will happily do the following in the near future:
Because of course the DMCA is concerned with justice, not with protecting US companies from foreign competition. No way.
Hey, I've got $10 right here with Dmitry's name on it. Not for his legal defence, because his detention on political/economic grounds is farcial, but $10 that he can put towards recouping his bail, buying a fake passport (illegal, but, hey, pile it on) and skipping this fucked up excuse for a free country and getting back to momma Russia where he can continue pointing out the folly of criminalising the very act of questioning the right of a few CEO's, major shareholders and their Washington lobbyist bitches to make profit from We, the People.
Gawd damn but this makes me sick.
I made that mistake too. I prejudged Farscape based on the trailers and the first episode (shown on a mainstream BBC channel) and point blank refused to watch the damn puppet show.
What a mistake that turned out to be. Like CmdrTaco, I only "discovered" it in season 2 after much persuasion, and it's a real treat, and the best antidote to Voyager that I've yet seen ("Spare me the techno babble, gadget girl.").
Seems to me that the savings on FX have all been spent on the actors and the writing. Farcape is an absolute joy, beautifully written, flawlessly acted, consistent, wry and very knowing. Also, the cast seem to have real chemistry and are obviously having a hoot filming it. The protagonist, Crighton, has taken to calling a couple of other characters "Pip" and "Sparky". That's not a cute scriptism, it's what the actor, Ben Browder, started calling them, and it sounded so natural that they decided to just roll with it. That shows a level of confidence and non-control freakery on a par with Stargate.
Do yourself a favour, grit your teeth, ignore the muppets, and sit through an episode. Unlike B5, it's easy to pick up in the middle, and you might be pleasantly surprised.
Well said. One of the most terrifying propositions that I've seen on /. was that in 10 years, the only package you'll be able to get from ISPs is 10Mb/s downstream, 28.8Kb/s upstream, and everything except port 80 blocked.
I'd strongly suggest getting some of the overpowered multi-mile 802.11x cards before 2.4Ghz gets regulated out of existence. Open up a machine to the world, and peer to your heart's content.
Buy overpowered 802.11 cards, open your home LAN up (carefully) to your peers, and build a 2.4Ghz wireless net of users. The way it used to be.
Can you assure us that every line of code in the commercial version was written by you in a clean room environment, or by open source contributors who have given their explicit consent for you to make money off of your work?
I ask because I'd like to see this work, so it's vital that everybody involved has happy faces and there's not the slightest suspicion of dodgy dealings.
Gee whizz, really? So is America. Two, even. The original quote was "African-American". If the author has specified from which part of Africa her ancestors were abducted, I would have used that.
Besides what? If that's your only point, why bother making it if it's so obvious? I neither said nor implied that.
Don't get me wrong, slavery is appaling. But anyone who's griping about being descended from slaves, even by one generation, is looking for special treatment for themselves and nothing more.
So, your great grandparents were taken from Africa against their will. That's horrific - for them. But now you want compensation and special treatment for what happened to them, but you don't want to go back to Africa (no matter how bad your situation in the USA)? Cry me a river.
I'm not buying it. Yes, we have a society of haves and have nots, of opportunity and deprivation, and yes, it's based on a large part on ancestry and skin tone. But you fix that by addressing the situation today, without making futile attempts to fix the past.
Hmm. The trouble is that very, very few humans can actually make intuitive leaps. I can think of the guy (or gal) who figured out fire, Da Vinci, Edison, Einstein, a handful of others. Most of us just make tiny tweaks to other people's ideas.
Bizarrely, given sufficient processing power, it might be more efficient to produce a speculating machine (that can design a random device from the atomic level up, with no preconceptions of usage, then try and find a use for it), rather than try and identify humans who can actually come up with ideas that are genuinely new.
You know, at first glance that looks nutty, but when you think about it, it really does make sense.
It would make for a headache for the the judiciary and penitentiaries though: what if you got handed down a 10 year sentence for a crime, then the law was repealed, you were released, then it was reenstated within your 10 year period? The prisons would have to have revolving doors. :)
The most succinct Vinge quote that I can think of is:
Yes. "Vote against this bill if you hate children."
I can't notice any difference between Democrat and Republican policies in any areas that interest me, so the best I can do is vote for a Libertarian candidate every four years. That gesture would be drowned out by the masses of senile geriatrics voting the same way they've voted for 70 years, and concerned but uninformed soccer moms voting for whoever screamed "Think of the children!" the loudest this time round. Big whoop.
I will not support a corrupt and broken system. I do not vote, I encourage my friends and family to not vote. I will participate when we either achieve an actual Republic with constant referenda, or when global events wreck our economy and Joe Sixpack nails his representative to the wall (ironically for something he didn't do) and we start over.
Feel free to provide references to back that up.
Then vote Libertarian Party, doofus.
Alternatively, let's throw all of our politicos into one big room without access to food, water, toilet facilities, phones, net access or law books and get them to write down all the laws that they can remember (50% of them are members of the American Bar Association, they should be up to the job). When the last of them passes out, we hand over their rabid scribblings to the Supreme Court judges and let them vet the whole damn lot (without We, the People having to pay money to argue cases all the way up to that court one at a time). Then we're done. That's the new legal system.
Perhaps by "this" country she means Africa and not the USA? Or are we now pretending that black Africans didn't supply the slave trade?
Uh, they do. They go through a painstaking process of deciding which one will give the most attention grabbing copy for the least effort. Good old Steve!! even inserts his!! own CAPITALS!! and SHRIEKS!!! for them !!!
Let's face it, anything you read in a medium supported by advertising is designed to grab eyeballs, not impart truth. And yes, that includes /.
The best take on this I've seen today is over at User Friendly.
You're right that patents aren't inherently bad, but your argument needs refining.
The purpose of patents isn't to make money for inventors, but to allow and encourage inventors to put their inventions into the public domain (while still retaining rights for a limited time).
If Qualcomm do some original reasearch, they can choose to not patent (and therefore not publish details of) that technology, but can sell the technology to other companies. The recipients, having paid money for it, will protect it as carefully as Qualcomm does. Qualcomm can make as much, or more money that way, especially if they choose to withhold the details from their biggest competitors.
However, because of the patent system, if a competitor invents the same technology and patents it, Qualcomm is screwed. They can claim and prove prior art defence for their own use, but unless they published details, they can't stop the patent from being granted. All their competitors now know how to do it, and Qualcomm can't sell the technology to anyone any more.
Patents aren't designed primarily to protect your right to make money off of an invention (although they do that), they're designed to make it a good idea for you to publish details of the invention.
The flaw, of course, lies in the way the system is working. It's not. Frivilous patents are being claimed, granted, and enforced. The technique is irrelevant, the quality is irrelevant, it's all about quantity of patents, and about having a dreadful court system that means it's cheaper to pay up than to fight it in court - even if you win.
Sure, the patent office is swamped, but I'd fix the legal system first. Laws and proceeding in plain language, courts given the time and resources to investigate claims, and loser pays.
Well, (ab)use of the whole flawed legal system where you pay your own costs to defend yourself and have to counter sue to recover (paying more costs to do so). Patent sharks present that horrid system as the greater of two evils, the lesser being to pay up on a frivilous patent.
If there's one thing that I could change (before even the DMCA), it would be that the legal system is written by and designed to be understood and used by lawyers, not by and for We, The People.
Really, I dream of a day when you and I can defend ourselves in court and not be called a fool by the judge.
Nice try, but you forgot that Anime women don't have even a minimal amount of pubic hair. ;)
Does it every strike anyone as strange that:
You take that back right this minute, young man!