Luckily the world is bigger than America (in fact, it's a LOT bigger)
Is it ever:
Area of the World without the United States: 500,903,577 sq km
Area of the United States: 9,161,923 sq km
The rest of the world is 54.7 times bigger than the poor U.S. You should cut us some slack and let us have our proprietary document format.
That being said, we're second in GDP at $13.1 Trillion, behind the United States of Europe (EU) at $15.2 Trillion. Between the two forces (what IS the EU anyway?), we're over half of the world's GDP. So maybe we don't deserve our own document format. But I'll tell you this: we wouldn't have nearly that GDP without it.
Yah, you'd need stricter systems of justice...no being killed, respawning, and then terrorizing the countryside again. I'd like to have a "witness" system where you can log a person's activities and present them to a court. It could be a court of peers created to deal out such justice and punishment, overseen by a GM. The perpetrator would need to be caught by city guards or players, brought to prison, where he'd sit until called for a period of up to one day where he is then released automatically if not called to stand trial.
Complex? Sure. But it'd be a complex world. I'd like to see more player-based controls rather than game mechanics. Build a dungeon to keep captives...it can be populated with "guards" and can be broken into for a rescue attempt, etc.
The challenge is making a game where everyone can "start a merchant empire, overthrow a king, or build a village".
One thing is the point of view. You can look at how the larger guilds do things - build guild towns, share major raiding areas, declare a hierarchy within both their own guild and amongst others, etc. You could easily compare this to merchant empires, kings and villages, but for some reason, people choose to not look at it that way unless the game tells you that's how to look at it.
MMORPG Discussion Board is worth reading and contributing to. Lots of great ideas, both recent and ancient, are on that board.
My idea (never thought you'd ask): A true resource system where everything is related. Kill too many deer herds, not only do the wolves start coming to your farms, but you won't have any meat in your local stores to feed your heroes. You have to defend your farms from orc/wolf raids or food lacks there also. You want arrows for your bow? Go hunt some pheasants for the local fletcher (who may be a PC, an NPC, or an NPC hireling of PC). Your guild builds a city but if it gets invaded, it won't be razed because a city is valuable in and of itself...you need to convince the NPC populace to follow you (so the town guard, local bakers, shopkeepers, etc stay in the city).
Ugh...first thing I thought of was Congress. That would be a case of THz processing in each of the nodes, with a slightly misconfigured 2600 baud modem for the interconnects...
Yes, it's called integrity. You stand for what you believe in, no matter what others do. Not to be confused with stubborness, which is standing for what you may or may not believe in simply to spite others.
They'll just raise that $10/mo (what the hell is that for, anyway? Ten bucks a month to not use their network? WTF)
You nailed it, I believe. It's a trade-off for them: They don't really think they'll lose that much overage revenue because of these phones, but the service they're providing means, if properly exploited, they could lose some...but also gain a ton (or more!) of customers.
CEO of Major Firm: Good news, everyone gets a cellphone to replace their desk phone. Bad news, you can only use it within range of our wireless network.
T-Mobile just gained 5000 new customers but no overages.
The Evil Administration has finally convinced the American People that it is a self-serving entity and they are merely its pawns. It is shown that Evil shall not triumph in a Democracy as voters turned out in droves for the November election. In a landslide victory, a new President is voted into the White House, one whom the People can trust and in which they place their hopes in a New American Dream.
Meanwhile...in a Top Secret Facility in an Undisclosed Location:
I also posted about my concerns on the Apple iPhone discussion forums, but my post was quickly removed.
Dear Apple,
WTF?!! My PC rox with 64 l33tn355 and ur iphone is teh suxx0r! Can't u do anything right?! U b3tt3r not delete this cuz people n33d 2 no!
Regards,
A Concerned Windows XP 64-bit User
(Yes yes...I'm sure the post to the Apple forums was nothing like this. I've just spent too much time on MMORPG boards with disgruntled people and I'm familiar with how "concerns" are expressed there...)
A correction to your correction (you were correcting "Overly Critical Guy" so this is all a bit tongue-in-cheek):
"Piracy is ethically no different than finding a few nice items in a store that you weren't planning to buy for yourself, making an exact replica of those items, and taking the replicas with you, leaving the original items unharmed."
If you originally meant "on the street" to be "in a store" then consider my "correction" a "clarification".
I see the problem. I hadn't found (through lack of looking no doubt) any of the original blog entries that masqueraded as opinion when they were actually paid advertising. I assumed that, somewhere in the copy, was included the fact the blogger was paid to do this. But I suppose that's what all the hubbub is about.
My general philosophy still holds: Get a second opinion.
Not sure how many times I've read a very complete and knowledgeable-sounding slashdot post, followed by another well-sourced reply that completely debunks it (and sometimes even that one is debunked). It can be like we're just creating our own realities (Microsoft products are great! Dell is the best PC vendor! George Bush left Kennedy in the dust!)...the problem is when we try to get others to agree with them.
I realize that any profession where you're touting fact or opinion to the public needs to rest on strong ethics, but I don't see many public speakers acting today without an agenda. It might not be personal profit (considered lowly), but it might bending facts about your political party, your goals both personal and worldly, etc.
Advertisers, which these bloggers at least temporarily became, get paid to produce flattering material for the company who is paying them, whether they like the product or not. As long as the blogger is straightforward in saying, "I'm writing this blurb as both a stint into creativity and to increase my wallet size. The words may or may not relate to my true feelings about the product." I don't see a problem.
That doesn't mean that, if you don't like Microsoft, you shouldn't stop reading their stuff, of course. That's your own prerogative.
One thing that I keep hearing about in my department is shoulder pain...sort of a constant ache around the right shoulder blade (if you're right-mouse-handed). This is due to you having your shoulder raised for hours a day working with the mouse. You don't notice it really -- your shoulder's probably raised only 1/2 and inch or so, but it's all day long so the muscle builds up a mighty knot and can leave people reaching over their shoulders rubbing their back each day. You have to have a great ergonomic chair/desk combo or the ability to focus on relaxing your shoulder all day long (and thereby getting your body into the habit of having it relaxed).
A chair mouse is the way to go. The "pad" sits perpendicular to the floor and hangs off the side of your chair. That way, your arm and shoulder are down all day long. How to keep the mouse on the side of the chair the whole day? Maybe make a normal mouse with a flat bottom edge (that doesn't interfere with your grip). When you're done for the moment with the mouse, you can just set it down into a tray at the bottom of your pad.
I'm tempted to descend into a vitrolic diatribe against such nations, but I don't want to lose track of point; as along as extremist religious interests have influence in these countries, we're going to have a problem with them.
Just remember that it's not a nation or country that's our problem, it's a relatively few individuals causing a big stir. The rest, as the original poster mentioned, just want to live their lives. They may or may not agree with one side or another, but they aren't willing to go that extra mile and send their sons and daughters off to die by bullet or explosive. You can be for a cause but against a particular means to achieve it.
Peace, understanding, and stability in the Middle East? Hell yes. Blowing up ours and theirs to accomplish this? I don't think so.
Reality is that there are a minority (very very small minority) of Muslims that want to destroy the US. The majority just want to be left alone to live as they will.
I think that vocal minority also wants to be left alone and live as they will. People dislike the U.S. for many reasons, but a big one is that our policies and corporations get in their faces. I have a tendency to believe that there are organized units of people with a leadership that feels it has no voice and therefore resorts to violence to make itself heard. Who does it hire to commit the acts of violence? Brain-washable young people and others they can sway by religion which is still a dominant force for coercion in some parts of the world (including the U.S.)
People will fight over anything of course, and our attempts at globalization are just what they're picking on today. Perhaps if we just remained Fortress America, people would hate us because we weren't Muslim/Buddhist/Purple, or didn't allow others into our country, or because we were fat.
But I'll pretty much guarantee you one thing: you're not going to help matters by waging war against these people. You're just going to give them a valid reason to hate you.
I forget who wrote it, but there was this short story about a prediction in the 15th century of a particular star who's supernova light would reach Earth in a certain year in the 20th century. The astronomers would go out night after night trying to find it. Then, past midnight, one person says, "Is it getting warm?" Meanwhile a huge glowing object comes up over the horizon, practically turning night into day. "Is that it?" one asks. "No...that's the Moon. It is the hour and minute of her rising."
And then it begins to get very warm. They begin to realize that this incoming supernova's energy will surpass the Sun. They retreat indoors and, as their side of the Earth revolves to face the supernova, it rises as a furnace to our planet, twice as large as our sun. Anything flammable combusts, oceans grow turbulent as they begin to evaporate, anyone not reaching some sort of shelter dies in the street. Even those that do make it indoors cannot survive for long the 180 degree air. One scientists survives until nightfall where the temperature drops to 140. He muses on what life will survive this on our planet. It won't be humans.
Lawyer: Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, as you can see plainly here, some Pac-Man looking individual who we assume is the victim is being bumped into repeatedly by a dark blue blob....
I don't blame the cable company for acting the way it did though. Everyday, we receive close to 100+ calls of people trying to give every excuse under the sun to get out of paying their cable bill.
I think the main reason people want to not pay their cable bills is because it's so ridiculously expensive and you STILL get grief. For cable (HD, gajillion channels, etc) and broadband we pay about $150/month for two rooms (each has a DVR). That's a large chunk of change to throw out so, when the DVR launches muted, or the signal gets pixelated, or the sound cuts out, or there's no picture (but the guide works), or god forbid it doesn't record Heroes, and lastly, when you schedule a hookup, and you take 4 hours off from work, and their guy doesn't show up and you have to take ANOTHER 4 hours of work off...I don't feel much like paying anyone for anything.
Cable and Cell phone companies make enough money that, if their local tech is delayed by a job in another neighborhood, they could probably helicopter another tech in from the next major metropolitan area and make up the cost with 6 months of my bill. Last time the guy postponed I complained and, after giving 20 minutes of grief, Comcast credited me $20. So for the 4 hours of work I hadn't planned on missing for the 2nd appointment, I'm out about $140.
Time doesn't matter beans in that example... unless you care to just denote when that event occurred.
My point exactly. Time seems to be just a reference...it's important to us because we deal with relative locations and seeing that something is fast or slow is just how the object was relocated in relation to the measurer.
So "time travel" isn't anything really as it would require rolling everything back to some previous state. Not just yourself (though in Sci-Fi, the traveler usually doesn't change much) but the whole universe. Of course, this is just if you take the theory that there is no time, only different states.
I live in California and the few times I've sent e-mails to our Senators (through their self-sanctioned websites...they'll tell you straight out they won't respond to emails from anywhere else) they've responded within a couple weeks with a meaningful reply. Probably an aide wrote it up and they gave it their blessing, but I've always gotten a good response.
Some people think time is just a human construct...a way in which we measure the difference in the state of matter. If you think of reality as a motion picture of individual frames, time doesn't really come into the picture. Time travel doesn't make sense in this case because you can't actually bring everything in your near reality back to the state it was in before, never mind everything in the world, universe, etc.
I can take a paperweight on my desk and move it 6 inches to the left, and then back 6 inches to the right...I've essentially caused the rock to time travel, at least on an easily observable level, because it's in the same easily observable state it was in before. On a quantum level, no...because various things have changed in the rock (the little bit of airflow from movement along with my fingers grabbing it and dragging it on the desk likely scraped some matter off).
Anyway, just another crackpot way of looking at things.
I refuse to debate the subtleties of Tolkien with an Anonymous Coward who cannot differentiate between a fell beast and a Nazgul. Off with you, peasant!
Well, here's the book version, talking about Merry's sword he used to stab the Witch King's leg:
So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of the Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.
So yes, Eowyn with her pretty speech and flowing hair handled the dramatics, but I'd say the technical work was left to the hobbit.
I agree it's a little more realistic, but some people (like me) enjoy a story with a clean ending. What if they had a slow motion Frodo tossing the ring into Mount Doom, then cutting to Aragorn turning just in time to see a troll's hammer come down. You just wouldn't know what happened and you'd likely go mad because of it. It's bad enough that even the movie didn't clarify if the Balrog had wings, or if it was Eowyn (the woman) or Merry (the Hobbit) who finally did in the Witch King (who no man may hinder!). If I wanted obscure endings I'd re-watch Final Fantasy.
Waaay too early in the morning to respond to Slashdot posts...
Slashdot Mirror
Luckily the world is bigger than America (in fact, it's a LOT bigger)
Is it ever:
Area of the World without the United States: 500,903,577 sq km
Area of the United States: 9,161,923 sq km
The rest of the world is 54.7 times bigger than the poor U.S. You should cut us some slack and let us have our proprietary document format.
That being said, we're second in GDP at $13.1 Trillion, behind the United States of Europe (EU) at $15.2 Trillion. Between the two forces (what IS the EU anyway?), we're over half of the world's GDP. So maybe we don't deserve our own document format. But I'll tell you this: we wouldn't have nearly that GDP without it.
Yah, you'd need stricter systems of justice...no being killed, respawning, and then terrorizing the countryside again. I'd like to have a "witness" system where you can log a person's activities and present them to a court. It could be a court of peers created to deal out such justice and punishment, overseen by a GM. The perpetrator would need to be caught by city guards or players, brought to prison, where he'd sit until called for a period of up to one day where he is then released automatically if not called to stand trial.
Complex? Sure. But it'd be a complex world. I'd like to see more player-based controls rather than game mechanics. Build a dungeon to keep captives...it can be populated with "guards" and can be broken into for a rescue attempt, etc.
Lots of possibilities...
The challenge is making a game where everyone can "start a merchant empire, overthrow a king, or build a village".
One thing is the point of view. You can look at how the larger guilds do things - build guild towns, share major raiding areas, declare a hierarchy within both their own guild and amongst others, etc. You could easily compare this to merchant empires, kings and villages, but for some reason, people choose to not look at it that way unless the game tells you that's how to look at it.
MMORPG Discussion Board is worth reading and contributing to. Lots of great ideas, both recent and ancient, are on that board.
My idea (never thought you'd ask): A true resource system where everything is related. Kill too many deer herds, not only do the wolves start coming to your farms, but you won't have any meat in your local stores to feed your heroes. You have to defend your farms from orc/wolf raids or food lacks there also. You want arrows for your bow? Go hunt some pheasants for the local fletcher (who may be a PC, an NPC, or an NPC hireling of PC). Your guild builds a city but if it gets invaded, it won't be razed because a city is valuable in and of itself...you need to convince the NPC populace to follow you (so the town guard, local bakers, shopkeepers, etc stay in the city).
imagine a beowulf cluster of human brains!
Ugh...first thing I thought of was Congress. That would be a case of THz processing in each of the nodes, with a slightly misconfigured 2600 baud modem for the interconnects...
Yes, it's called integrity. You stand for what you believe in, no matter what others do. Not to be confused with stubborness, which is standing for what you may or may not believe in simply to spite others.
They'll just raise that $10/mo (what the hell is that for, anyway? Ten bucks a month to not use their network? WTF)
You nailed it, I believe. It's a trade-off for them: They don't really think they'll lose that much overage revenue because of these phones, but the service they're providing means, if properly exploited, they could lose some...but also gain a ton (or more!) of customers.
CEO of Major Firm: Good news, everyone gets a cellphone to replace their desk phone. Bad news, you can only use it within range of our wireless network.
T-Mobile just gained 5000 new customers but no overages.
Captain America Returns
:-)
Issue #1
Jan 2009
The Evil Administration has finally convinced the American People that it is a self-serving entity and they are merely its pawns. It is shown that Evil shall not triumph in a Democracy as voters turned out in droves for the November election. In a landslide victory, a new President is voted into the White House, one whom the People can trust and in which they place their hopes in a New American Dream.
Meanwhile...in a Top Secret Facility in an Undisclosed Location:
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep...Beep...Beep...Beep...
"Gentlemen. We have a heartbeat..."
You KNOW it's going to happen.
(Winnie the Pooh capitalization intended)
I also posted about my concerns on the Apple iPhone discussion forums, but my post was quickly removed.
Dear Apple,
WTF?!! My PC rox with 64 l33tn355 and ur iphone is teh suxx0r! Can't u do anything right?! U b3tt3r not delete this cuz people n33d 2 no!
Regards,
A Concerned Windows XP 64-bit User
(Yes yes...I'm sure the post to the Apple forums was nothing like this. I've just spent too much time on MMORPG boards with disgruntled people and I'm familiar with how "concerns" are expressed there...)
A correction to your correction (you were correcting "Overly Critical Guy" so this is all a bit tongue-in-cheek):
"Piracy is ethically no different than finding a few nice items in a store that you weren't planning to buy for yourself, making an exact replica of those items, and taking the replicas with you, leaving the original items unharmed."
If you originally meant "on the street" to be "in a store" then consider my "correction" a "clarification".
I see the problem. I hadn't found (through lack of looking no doubt) any of the original blog entries that masqueraded as opinion when they were actually paid advertising. I assumed that, somewhere in the copy, was included the fact the blogger was paid to do this. But I suppose that's what all the hubbub is about.
My general philosophy still holds: Get a second opinion.
Not sure how many times I've read a very complete and knowledgeable-sounding slashdot post, followed by another well-sourced reply that completely debunks it (and sometimes even that one is debunked). It can be like we're just creating our own realities (Microsoft products are great! Dell is the best PC vendor! George Bush left Kennedy in the dust!)...the problem is when we try to get others to agree with them.
I realize that any profession where you're touting fact or opinion to the public needs to rest on strong ethics, but I don't see many public speakers acting today without an agenda. It might not be personal profit (considered lowly), but it might bending facts about your political party, your goals both personal and worldly, etc.
Advertisers, which these bloggers at least temporarily became, get paid to produce flattering material for the company who is paying them, whether they like the product or not. As long as the blogger is straightforward in saying, "I'm writing this blurb as both a stint into creativity and to increase my wallet size. The words may or may not relate to my true feelings about the product." I don't see a problem.
That doesn't mean that, if you don't like Microsoft, you shouldn't stop reading their stuff, of course. That's your own prerogative.
One thing that I keep hearing about in my department is shoulder pain...sort of a constant ache around the right shoulder blade (if you're right-mouse-handed). This is due to you having your shoulder raised for hours a day working with the mouse. You don't notice it really -- your shoulder's probably raised only 1/2 and inch or so, but it's all day long so the muscle builds up a mighty knot and can leave people reaching over their shoulders rubbing their back each day. You have to have a great ergonomic chair/desk combo or the ability to focus on relaxing your shoulder all day long (and thereby getting your body into the habit of having it relaxed).
A chair mouse is the way to go. The "pad" sits perpendicular to the floor and hangs off the side of your chair. That way, your arm and shoulder are down all day long. How to keep the mouse on the side of the chair the whole day? Maybe make a normal mouse with a flat bottom edge (that doesn't interfere with your grip). When you're done for the moment with the mouse, you can just set it down into a tray at the bottom of your pad.
I'm tempted to descend into a vitrolic diatribe against such nations, but I don't want to lose track of point; as along as extremist religious interests have influence in these countries, we're going to have a problem with them.
Just remember that it's not a nation or country that's our problem, it's a relatively few individuals causing a big stir. The rest, as the original poster mentioned, just want to live their lives. They may or may not agree with one side or another, but they aren't willing to go that extra mile and send their sons and daughters off to die by bullet or explosive. You can be for a cause but against a particular means to achieve it.
Peace, understanding, and stability in the Middle East? Hell yes. Blowing up ours and theirs to accomplish this? I don't think so.
Reality is that there are a minority (very very small minority) of Muslims that want to destroy the US.
The majority just want to be left alone to live as they will.
I think that vocal minority also wants to be left alone and live as they will. People dislike the U.S. for many reasons, but a big one is that our policies and corporations get in their faces. I have a tendency to believe that there are organized units of people with a leadership that feels it has no voice and therefore resorts to violence to make itself heard. Who does it hire to commit the acts of violence? Brain-washable young people and others they can sway by religion which is still a dominant force for coercion in some parts of the world (including the U.S.)
People will fight over anything of course, and our attempts at globalization are just what they're picking on today. Perhaps if we just remained Fortress America, people would hate us because we weren't Muslim/Buddhist/Purple, or didn't allow others into our country, or because we were fat.
But I'll pretty much guarantee you one thing: you're not going to help matters by waging war against these people. You're just going to give them a valid reason to hate you.
I forget who wrote it, but there was this short story about a prediction in the 15th century of a particular star who's supernova light would reach Earth in a certain year in the 20th century. The astronomers would go out night after night trying to find it. Then, past midnight, one person says, "Is it getting warm?" Meanwhile a huge glowing object comes up over the horizon, practically turning night into day. "Is that it?" one asks. "No...that's the Moon. It is the hour and minute of her rising."
And then it begins to get very warm. They begin to realize that this incoming supernova's energy will surpass the Sun. They retreat indoors and, as their side of the Earth revolves to face the supernova, it rises as a furnace to our planet, twice as large as our sun. Anything flammable combusts, oceans grow turbulent as they begin to evaporate, anyone not reaching some sort of shelter dies in the street. Even those that do make it indoors cannot survive for long the 180 degree air. One scientists survives until nightfall where the temperature drops to 140. He muses on what life will survive this on our planet. It won't be humans.
Yah...10x digital zoom, not optical.
Lawyer: Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, as you can see plainly here, some Pac-Man looking individual who we assume is the victim is being bumped into repeatedly by a dark blue blob....
I don't blame the cable company for acting the way it did though. Everyday, we receive close to 100+ calls of people trying to give every excuse under the sun to get out of paying their cable bill.
I think the main reason people want to not pay their cable bills is because it's so ridiculously expensive and you STILL get grief. For cable (HD, gajillion channels, etc) and broadband we pay about $150/month for two rooms (each has a DVR). That's a large chunk of change to throw out so, when the DVR launches muted, or the signal gets pixelated, or the sound cuts out, or there's no picture (but the guide works), or god forbid it doesn't record Heroes, and lastly, when you schedule a hookup, and you take 4 hours off from work, and their guy doesn't show up and you have to take ANOTHER 4 hours of work off...I don't feel much like paying anyone for anything.
Cable and Cell phone companies make enough money that, if their local tech is delayed by a job in another neighborhood, they could probably helicopter another tech in from the next major metropolitan area and make up the cost with 6 months of my bill. Last time the guy postponed I complained and, after giving 20 minutes of grief, Comcast credited me $20. So for the 4 hours of work I hadn't planned on missing for the 2nd appointment, I'm out about $140.
Time doesn't matter beans in that example... unless you care to just denote when that event occurred.
My point exactly. Time seems to be just a reference...it's important to us because we deal with relative locations and seeing that something is fast or slow is just how the object was relocated in relation to the measurer.
So "time travel" isn't anything really as it would require rolling everything back to some previous state. Not just yourself (though in Sci-Fi, the traveler usually doesn't change much) but the whole universe. Of course, this is just if you take the theory that there is no time, only different states.
I live in California and the few times I've sent e-mails to our Senators (through their self-sanctioned websites...they'll tell you straight out they won't respond to emails from anywhere else) they've responded within a couple weeks with a meaningful reply. Probably an aide wrote it up and they gave it their blessing, but I've always gotten a good response.
Some people think time is just a human construct...a way in which we measure the difference in the state of matter. If you think of reality as a motion picture of individual frames, time doesn't really come into the picture. Time travel doesn't make sense in this case because you can't actually bring everything in your near reality back to the state it was in before, never mind everything in the world, universe, etc.
I can take a paperweight on my desk and move it 6 inches to the left, and then back 6 inches to the right...I've essentially caused the rock to time travel, at least on an easily observable level, because it's in the same easily observable state it was in before. On a quantum level, no...because various things have changed in the rock (the little bit of airflow from movement along with my fingers grabbing it and dragging it on the desk likely scraped some matter off).
Anyway, just another crackpot way of looking at things.
I refuse to debate the subtleties of Tolkien with an Anonymous Coward who cannot differentiate between a fell beast and a Nazgul. Off with you, peasant!
;-)
I keeed, I keeed.
Well, here's the book version, talking about Merry's sword he used to stab the Witch King's leg:
So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of the Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.
So yes, Eowyn with her pretty speech and flowing hair handled the dramatics, but I'd say the technical work was left to the hobbit.
I agree it's a little more realistic, but some people (like me) enjoy a story with a clean ending. What if they had a slow motion Frodo tossing the ring into Mount Doom, then cutting to Aragorn turning just in time to see a troll's hammer come down. You just wouldn't know what happened and you'd likely go mad because of it. It's bad enough that even the movie didn't clarify if the Balrog had wings, or if it was Eowyn (the woman) or Merry (the Hobbit) who finally did in the Witch King (who no man may hinder!). If I wanted obscure endings I'd re-watch Final Fantasy.
Waaay too early in the morning to respond to Slashdot posts...
Traumedy. Without looking, I'm sure that word's been used somewhere.
"Practice what you preach."
'Nuff said.