I just don't understand what you mean when you say the film is poorly done. Obviously you don't mean on the technical level; the effects are all but flawless
But poorly conceived. The Gungan/Droid battle was a CGI wet dream, while at the same time being utterly sterile and uninvolving. It was about as exciting as watching small boys moving toy armies around.
The film is very well constructed. Look at the ending: four separate plot threads taking place in separate locations are intricately intercut and interwoven seamlessly
And how many did we care about? Surely I can't be the only person who screamed "Aaargh!" every time they cut away from the genuinely involving lightsabre battle to the (irrelevant) ewok^H^H^H^H Gungan CGI fest, the (annoying) Kid In Spaaace, and the (confused) AmiPadmeDala running around scenes. Yes, the cuts enhanced the tension of the lightsabre thread, but all of the other three threads were dull and unengaging.
Episode 1 wasn't a total washout, but it was disappointing because Lucas did a bunch of stuff just because he could, and he made the mistake of putting in slapstick humour which really only works for the under 7 audience. Episode 1 was aimed at a specific audience at a specific time, and that'll hurt it in the long run.
It probably depends upon the laws in your state, but I've heard of people in Arizona getting out of these tickets if you can't tell if the driver at the time is the registered owner
This is a hot topic right now in the UK and Europe. Under current laws in both Scotland and England (different legal systems, incidentally), it's a offence to refuse to tell the police if you were driving a car at a given time.
Only thing is, that would be incriminating yourself, which you can't be forced to do under Scottish or English law, or the European Human Rights Act.
This has gone through the Scottish courts who (predictably) ruled that social needs outweighed individual rights, blah blah, pay up. AFAIK, the English test case is still ongoing.
In both cases, they can still go to Europe, and (again AFAIK) the Human Rights Act doesn't have a "good of humanity" get-out clause, nor a "we need the money, screw you" clause. It'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.
What has been found in the experiment is that it also has a *rest* mass (ie. a mass at zero velocity).
I wonder (in a casual college physics dropout kind of way) where the line is between zero rest mass (v == c) and very very very small rest mass. (v
It seems vaguely unsettling to have a whole slew of energetic particles spewing out from sub atomic interactions, with a continuum of rest mass right down to this point and no lower, below which you get m==0, v==c photons.
I guess I'm just not comfortable with the idea of absolutes. Can I trade this universe in for a fuzzier one please?;)
This is a test of the Supernova Early Warning System. This is only a test. If there had been an actual supernova within a hundred light years of Earth, you would have been instructed to...
Repent your sins.
Cram in as many sins as possible (for choice, cramming them into a Natalie Portman lookalike.)
Neutrinos don't ordinarily react with matter, but...obviously they have to interact on occasion to be measured at all. I wonder if there would be any way of significantly artificially enhancing the reaction rate?
There must be. I mean, Geordi did it all the time on Next Gen. He could even see "neutrino streams" scattering from the side. And that was years ago! Think what we should be able to do now.
Uhhh, wait, my beeper's going off. I have to take a pill. Don't go away...
An empirical proof has only traditionally been accepted as valid if it can be replicated. Scientists are a sceptical bunch. They don't want to be told what's so, they want to be told how to prove to themselves that it's so. Otherwise they're just taking it on faith.
And this neat high/low energy stuff requires such specialised equipment that it's largely a case of doing the experiment, publishing the results and saying "Believe it or not..."
Are we coming full circle on the whole religion/science thing? I mean, how many of us have personally and quantifiably verified that E=mc^2, let alone the tricky stuff?;)
I saw TR last night and I did like it. It makes me really sad to have you guys just trashing it up and down. I'm not sure what you want.
Uhhh... how about...
One action scene that was actually involving.
One character about whom we could give a damn.
One decent line.
One hint, however small, that this movie wasn't made by guys watching the clock.
Any one of these would do.
Re:As long as I've given up moderation in this sto
on
Review: Tomb Raider
·
· Score: 2
IT'S A FUCKING POPCORN FLICK, GODDAMMIT
It's a fucking bad popcorn flick, goddammit.
It's dull. It's tedious. It's shoddily made. It's about as involving as 4th person gaming, i.e. watching your little brother playing Tomb Raider. I've already seen that. I wanted a little more.
Specifically, I wanted some smart lines. I wanted to be interested in Lara. I wanted a film that didn't look as though it was written by a commitee of twelve year old dateless wonders and shot by Film School 101 dropouts. I wanted a film that looked as though it was made by people who actually gave a damn about what they were doing.
Men In Black was a popcorn flick. Galaxy Quest was a popcorn flick. American Pie was a popcorn flick. Tomb Raider is cheap, dull, uninvolving exploitation rip off.
Do yourself a favour; watch your little brother play Tomb Raider for a couple of hours, then go and whack off to some decent porn. Much cheaper and less painful than this travesty.
No matter where you hear Shakespeare performed, or by whom you see it performed, you'll most likely hear it performed in a generic English lilt
Gaaa! Fakespearean! My other bugbear is Austinese, the sing-song falsetto often employed in Jane Austin adaptations (that were never meant to be performed anyway). Why speak like an Oscar Wilde character when the period accent was more like Yosemite Sam?
And there's - demonstrably - just no need for it. Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth both featured some commendably naturalistic performances.
We're not completely anal about it; British reviewers and audiences have been praising Rene Zellweger's accent in Bridget Jone's Diary. OK, Rene's accent flips inconsistently between different dialects, but they're all British dialects. What she doesn't do is to affect a consistent but utterly imaginary American English dialect like Angelina's. It really is as easy to get it right as to get it wrong.
more than a decade of US gas prices [...] actually falling [...] have encouraged waste and inefficiency.
High prices wouldn't necessarily drive lower usage. In the UK, I pay GPB 0.8 a litre, or $4.97 a gallon. Prices in the UK have risen in real terms over the past decade, and yet our energy usage keeps increasing. We bitch about it, but we soon get used to it. We demand higher wages, we cut back elsewhere, we get our employers to pay, but we still keep driving our cars.
Why? Same story as in the US, I expect. Our public transport is privatised, unreliable and lousy (figuratively and literally). I can commute ten miles from my suburban home in comfort in 15 minutes, or can pay more to make a horrid 1.5 hour, 30 mile meandering trip via 2 busses and 2 trains, if they all feel like showing up that day. I could cycle, I suppose, but I can think of less painful ways of committing suicide.
On the other hand, our domestic energy isn't taxed anywhere near as harshly, so there's no incentive to insulate (other than token gubmint grants to the poorest peons).
It's all very frustrating. I'd like to make a difference, and I don't like being beaten with the fuel stick, but the alternative carrot is a pretty unappetising prospect.
Sure, if you don't mind me dumping 1310 pounds of lead acid cells in your backyard every couple of years. OK, maybe only 1147 pounds if I go for the nickel-metal hydrides.
and their electricity should come from nuclear power plants in the United States
Now here we do agree. We should probably build them now, because given our past record, we'll wait until we're scraping the bottom of the crude barrel before realising that we're screwed and throwing them up in a hurry.
Hey, did you know that a solar cell manufacturing plant powered by solar cells couldn't produce enough energy to replace its own cells, let alone produce cells for anything else? I don't know whether that's funny or scary. Nuclear or biodiesel for me, please.
CA, and some other states have a low or zero emission requirement. Anyone that sells more then X cars must sell some small percent that have very little or no emissions
Any idea if they count the power station emissions and the environmental cost of replacing lead acid cells every couple of years for electric vehicles? Just asking out of interest, I'm guessing not.
So what if he wants to drill the oil out of the ANWR? What is it going to do sitting in the ground?
Ice ages are regular events. There's another one coming RSN in geological terms. Sure, maybe it won't be for thousands of years. But maybe it will be this year. (cue scoffing laugher)
We'll get through it; we're tricksy beasts. But we're talking a massive dieback, resource and land wars, a collapse of anything like a global economy.
When the glaciers recede (or when the asteroid impact or supervolcano crud clouds dissipate), what resources are our descendents going to use to recolonise of the planet?
I'd like us to leave some stuff for them. If not them, won't someone please think of the rats?;)
A PII clocked at the same speed as a PPro was slower [...] the latest and greatest processors in their early incarnation because they don't run that much faster than the previous generation... but eventually will
Er, haven't you got it backwards? This would have been like Intel starting to get the PII up to speed, then instead of phasing out PPro, suddenly ramping the PPro up as well and wiping out the PII's advantage. It makes little sense to do this with PIII/P4 unless there's something wrong with their P4 yields or architecture.
But I'm just bullshitting here. Can anyone think (or does anyone know) of a good reason why they'd throw development effort at PIII instead of P4 or future chips?
Let me quote you a quote: "Unlike some drugs, cocaine is not physiologically addicting."
Where did I come up with this horrendous subversive lie? http://www.ussc.gov. Let's go on from the same source, shall we?
Examples of drugs that cause physiological dependence include:
opiates (e.g., heroin, morphine, codeine, and methadone),
barbiturates (e.g., phenobarbital, secobarbital),
anxiolytics (e.g., diazepam, meprobromate),
nicotine (e.g., tobacco products),
caffeine (e.g., coffee and tea), and
alcohol. Id.
Cocaine is psychologically addicting, as are most drugs. The big danger with cocaine is that it doesn't limit its intake by inducing nausea like alcohol, nicotine and caffiene, all of which are toxic. However, in dilute form, as in early Coca Cola recipies, the dosage is limited, just as caffiene in coffee is.
Even after having the distinction pointed out to you, you use binge abuse as evidence that the abused substance is inherently dangerous. Alcohol and aspirin are just as dangerous as cocaine when abused to the same degree. Caffiene or nicotine, taken in pure form, would kill you at lower dosages than cocaine.
Please try and understand that the problem isn't the drug, it's the binge abuse, a pattern that is dictated by the illegality. The illegality also causes the inflated cost, which encourages crime.
I accept that this is OT, but I'm happy to burn karma on this one.
OK, short answer. Go check the facts for yourself, and please take note of the actual situation in e.g. the Netherlands or Peru, and in US history, before making snap decisions based on a couple of generations of political posturing. Also, don't make the mistake of comparing artificial high concentration drug binges with low concentration habitual use. Drinking Coca Cola with a bit of cocaine in it was a hell of a lot better for you than sniffing concentrated caffiene would be, which is what would happen if it was criminalised.
Physiologically addictive or harmful drugs and substances:
Heroin.
Caffiene.
Nicotine.
Tobacco smoke.
Non physiologically addictive, non debilitating drugs and substances:
Cocaine.
Cannabis (unless smoked with tobacco).
Worst drug of all in terms of the damage that it causes:
Alcohol.
If in doubt, ask a doctor. Grab one of the blood and vomit splattered ones in a casualty department on a Saturday night and ask her to pick one drug to ban. It will be alcohol.
Yes, that's because idiots misuse it. But the same argument applies to any drug. Snorting lines of coke off of a starlet's cleavage isn't the same thing as drinking Coca Cola with a little cocaine in it. Ban them all, or ban none of them, or make reasoned decisions based on actual medical and behavioural evidence, not on the harm caused by artificially high pricing and the binging and crime it engenders.
Howard Gordon, the producer of the American version, is reported as saying that he's after a more 'emotional' content, and wants to give the show a more 'soap opera' feel.
This Howard Gordon, the sometime producer of Angel, Buffy and X Files?
Let's hope he aims closer to X Files than the other two, hey? Thanks for the tip.
There's a bit in "The Invasion of Time" where Tom Baker stops, looks directly at the camera, and says, "Even the sonic screwdriver won't get me out of this one."
Ho ho. I'm picture Rick Berman and Brannon Braga watching that, and going (Beavis and Butthead voices)
Berman: That thucks! Sonic screwdriverth rock.
Braga: Shut up, Berman.
Berman: No, dude, sonic screwdriverth are cool. Let's make a show where all they do is use sonic screwdrivers.
Braga: And we'll have a hot chick in a lycra unitard. That would be cool.
World Productions [did] a nifty job on "Ultraviolet" using only minimal special effects
Nice comparison. Ultraviolet was flawed, but mature, proficiently made and extremely courageous, more so than anything the BBC has done in recent years. I'd be delighted to see a Who revival done to those standards (only with a little less angst and ennui please).
Coincidentally, 1998 brought us both Ultraviolet and the BBC's "Invasion: Earth", which ranks as one of my biggest disappointments ever. The cliched script and one dimensional characters were bad enough, but add to that miserable locations, a shoestring budget and shoddy effects, and a "To be continued" ending that never was, and you have a truly horrid piece of SF. The worst part was that the BBC were inordinately proud of the effects: "Look! We've discovered computers!". It was all very embarrasing. IIRC, 1998 was also the year of Red Dwarf 8. The less said about that, the better.
Franky, the best thing that the BBC could do with Who is to sell the IP, lock stock and barrel, to a production outfit that will actually use it. The Ultraviolet lot would be an interesting choice.
why do the DVD producers need to make a region-based DVD's
Language. For example, a Region 2 disk will have a lot of European language tracks.
It's bullshit of course. The UK and Ireland should be Region 1 on that basis, and RCE was the final admission that regioning isn't for consumer convenience, but to protect the US box office.
Slashdot Mirror
But poorly conceived. The Gungan/Droid battle was a CGI wet dream, while at the same time being utterly sterile and uninvolving. It was about as exciting as watching small boys moving toy armies around.
And how many did we care about? Surely I can't be the only person who screamed "Aaargh!" every time they cut away from the genuinely involving lightsabre battle to the (irrelevant) ewok^H^H^H^H Gungan CGI fest, the (annoying) Kid In Spaaace, and the (confused) AmiPadmeDala running around scenes. Yes, the cuts enhanced the tension of the lightsabre thread, but all of the other three threads were dull and unengaging.
Episode 1 wasn't a total washout, but it was disappointing because Lucas did a bunch of stuff just because he could, and he made the mistake of putting in slapstick humour which really only works for the under 7 audience. Episode 1 was aimed at a specific audience at a specific time, and that'll hurt it in the long run.
This is a hot topic right now in the UK and Europe. Under current laws in both Scotland and England (different legal systems, incidentally), it's a offence to refuse to tell the police if you were driving a car at a given time.
Only thing is, that would be incriminating yourself, which you can't be forced to do under Scottish or English law, or the European Human Rights Act.
This has gone through the Scottish courts who (predictably) ruled that social needs outweighed individual rights, blah blah, pay up. AFAIK, the English test case is still ongoing.
In both cases, they can still go to Europe, and (again AFAIK) the Human Rights Act doesn't have a "good of humanity" get-out clause, nor a "we need the money, screw you" clause. It'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.
I wonder (in a casual college physics dropout kind of way) where the line is between zero rest mass (v == c) and very very very small rest mass. (v
It seems vaguely unsettling to have a whole slew of energetic particles spewing out from sub atomic interactions, with a continuum of rest mass right down to this point and no lower, below which you get m==0, v==c photons.
I guess I'm just not comfortable with the idea of absolutes. Can I trade this universe in for a fuzzier one please? ;)
There must be. I mean, Geordi did it all the time on Next Gen. He could even see "neutrino streams" scattering from the side. And that was years ago! Think what we should be able to do now.
Uhhh, wait, my beeper's going off. I have to take a pill. Don't go away...
An empirical proof has only traditionally been accepted as valid if it can be replicated. Scientists are a sceptical bunch. They don't want to be told what's so, they want to be told how to prove to themselves that it's so. Otherwise they're just taking it on faith.
And this neat high/low energy stuff requires such specialised equipment that it's largely a case of doing the experiment, publishing the results and saying "Believe it or not..."
Are we coming full circle on the whole religion/science thing? I mean, how many of us have personally and quantifiably verified that E=mc^2, let alone the tricky stuff? ;)
Uhhh... how about...
Any one of these would do.
It's a fucking bad popcorn flick, goddammit.
It's dull. It's tedious. It's shoddily made. It's about as involving as 4th person gaming, i.e. watching your little brother playing Tomb Raider. I've already seen that. I wanted a little more.
Specifically, I wanted some smart lines. I wanted to be interested in Lara. I wanted a film that didn't look as though it was written by a commitee of twelve year old dateless wonders and shot by Film School 101 dropouts. I wanted a film that looked as though it was made by people who actually gave a damn about what they were doing.
Men In Black was a popcorn flick. Galaxy Quest was a popcorn flick. American Pie was a popcorn flick. Tomb Raider is cheap, dull, uninvolving exploitation rip off.
Do yourself a favour; watch your little brother play Tomb Raider for a couple of hours, then go and whack off to some decent porn. Much cheaper and less painful than this travesty.
Gaaa! Fakespearean! My other bugbear is Austinese, the sing-song falsetto often employed in Jane Austin adaptations (that were never meant to be performed anyway). Why speak like an Oscar Wilde character when the period accent was more like Yosemite Sam?
And there's - demonstrably - just no need for it. Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth both featured some commendably naturalistic performances.
We're not completely anal about it; British reviewers and audiences have been praising Rene Zellweger's accent in Bridget Jone's Diary. OK, Rene's accent flips inconsistently between different dialects, but they're all British dialects. What she doesn't do is to affect a consistent but utterly imaginary American English dialect like Angelina's. It really is as easy to get it right as to get it wrong.
Remind me, where can I buy an Ogg Vorbis portable player? ;p
High prices wouldn't necessarily drive lower usage. In the UK, I pay GPB 0.8 a litre, or $4.97 a gallon. Prices in the UK have risen in real terms over the past decade, and yet our energy usage keeps increasing. We bitch about it, but we soon get used to it. We demand higher wages, we cut back elsewhere, we get our employers to pay, but we still keep driving our cars.
Why? Same story as in the US, I expect. Our public transport is privatised, unreliable and lousy (figuratively and literally). I can commute ten miles from my suburban home in comfort in 15 minutes, or can pay more to make a horrid 1.5 hour, 30 mile meandering trip via 2 busses and 2 trains, if they all feel like showing up that day. I could cycle, I suppose, but I can think of less painful ways of committing suicide.
On the other hand, our domestic energy isn't taxed anywhere near as harshly, so there's no incentive to insulate (other than token gubmint grants to the poorest peons).
It's all very frustrating. I'd like to make a difference, and I don't like being beaten with the fuel stick, but the alternative carrot is a pretty unappetising prospect.
Sure, if you don't mind me dumping 1310 pounds of lead acid cells in your backyard every couple of years. OK, maybe only 1147 pounds if I go for the nickel-metal hydrides.
Now here we do agree. We should probably build them now, because given our past record, we'll wait until we're scraping the bottom of the crude barrel before realising that we're screwed and throwing them up in a hurry.
Hey, did you know that a solar cell manufacturing plant powered by solar cells couldn't produce enough energy to replace its own cells, let alone produce cells for anything else? I don't know whether that's funny or scary. Nuclear or biodiesel for me, please.
Any idea if they count the power station emissions and the environmental cost of replacing lead acid cells every couple of years for electric vehicles? Just asking out of interest, I'm guessing not.
Just out of interest, how many types of fuel do you get at a typical US gas station? In the UK, we have 3 or 4:
It's getting so you need a map of the station to pick the right pump. ;)
Hey, at some price points, the Celeron whups the P3's ass for some applications.
Ice ages are regular events. There's another one coming RSN in geological terms. Sure, maybe it won't be for thousands of years. But maybe it will be this year. (cue scoffing laugher)
We'll get through it; we're tricksy beasts. But we're talking a massive dieback, resource and land wars, a collapse of anything like a global economy.
When the glaciers recede (or when the asteroid impact or supervolcano crud clouds dissipate), what resources are our descendents going to use to recolonise of the planet?
I'd like us to leave some stuff for them. If not them, won't someone please think of the rats? ;)
Er, haven't you got it backwards? This would have been like Intel starting to get the PII up to speed, then instead of phasing out PPro, suddenly ramping the PPro up as well and wiping out the PII's advantage. It makes little sense to do this with PIII/P4 unless there's something wrong with their P4 yields or architecture.
But I'm just bullshitting here. Can anyone think (or does anyone know) of a good reason why they'd throw development effort at PIII instead of P4 or future chips?
Let me quote you a quote: "Unlike some drugs, cocaine is not physiologically addicting."
Where did I come up with this horrendous subversive lie? http://www.ussc.gov. Let's go on from the same source, shall we?
Examples of drugs that cause physiological dependence include:
Cocaine is psychologically addicting, as are most drugs. The big danger with cocaine is that it doesn't limit its intake by inducing nausea like alcohol, nicotine and caffiene, all of which are toxic. However, in dilute form, as in early Coca Cola recipies, the dosage is limited, just as caffiene in coffee is.
Even after having the distinction pointed out to you, you use binge abuse as evidence that the abused substance is inherently dangerous. Alcohol and aspirin are just as dangerous as cocaine when abused to the same degree. Caffiene or nicotine, taken in pure form, would kill you at lower dosages than cocaine.
Please try and understand that the problem isn't the drug, it's the binge abuse, a pattern that is dictated by the illegality. The illegality also causes the inflated cost, which encourages crime.
I accept that this is OT, but I'm happy to burn karma on this one.
OK, short answer. Go check the facts for yourself, and please take note of the actual situation in e.g. the Netherlands or Peru, and in US history, before making snap decisions based on a couple of generations of political posturing. Also, don't make the mistake of comparing artificial high concentration drug binges with low concentration habitual use. Drinking Coca Cola with a bit of cocaine in it was a hell of a lot better for you than sniffing concentrated caffiene would be, which is what would happen if it was criminalised.
Physiologically addictive or harmful drugs and substances:
Non physiologically addictive, non debilitating drugs and substances:
Worst drug of all in terms of the damage that it causes:
If in doubt, ask a doctor. Grab one of the blood and vomit splattered ones in a casualty department on a Saturday night and ask her to pick one drug to ban. It will be alcohol.
Yes, that's because idiots misuse it. But the same argument applies to any drug. Snorting lines of coke off of a starlet's cleavage isn't the same thing as drinking Coca Cola with a little cocaine in it. Ban them all, or ban none of them, or make reasoned decisions based on actual medical and behavioural evidence, not on the harm caused by artificially high pricing and the binging and crime it engenders.
OK, that wasn't really short. Mod away. ;)
A human eye can't see them?
Why don't people live in glass houses? Only criminals have things to hide, right?
My acid test for any surveillance technique is this: would it be considered reasonable for you to use this technique to surveil a Supreme Court judge.
This Howard Gordon, the sometime producer of Angel, Buffy and X Files?
Let's hope he aims closer to X Files than the other two, hey? Thanks for the tip.
Ho ho. I'm picture Rick Berman and Brannon Braga watching that, and going (Beavis and Butthead voices)
- Berman: That thucks! Sonic screwdriverth rock.
- Braga: Shut up, Berman.
- Berman: No, dude, sonic screwdriverth are cool. Let's make a show where all they do is use sonic screwdrivers.
- Braga: And we'll have a hot chick in a lycra unitard. That would be cool.
- Berman: Uh huh, uh huhuhuh. Uh huhuuhuh.
- Braga: Shut up, Berman.
Uhhh, that's a nasty image.*cough* sonic screwdriver *cough* ;)
Nice comparison. Ultraviolet was flawed, but mature, proficiently made and extremely courageous, more so than anything the BBC has done in recent years. I'd be delighted to see a Who revival done to those standards (only with a little less angst and ennui please).
Coincidentally, 1998 brought us both Ultraviolet and the BBC's "Invasion: Earth", which ranks as one of my biggest disappointments ever. The cliched script and one dimensional characters were bad enough, but add to that miserable locations, a shoestring budget and shoddy effects, and a "To be continued" ending that never was, and you have a truly horrid piece of SF. The worst part was that the BBC were inordinately proud of the effects: "Look! We've discovered computers!". It was all very embarrasing. IIRC, 1998 was also the year of Red Dwarf 8. The less said about that, the better.
Franky, the best thing that the BBC could do with Who is to sell the IP, lock stock and barrel, to a production outfit that will actually use it. The Ultraviolet lot would be an interesting choice.
Language. For example, a Region 2 disk will have a lot of European language tracks.
It's bullshit of course. The UK and Ireland should be Region 1 on that basis, and RCE was the final admission that regioning isn't for consumer convenience, but to protect the US box office.