I'm promoted to the status of god-like observer. I'm looking down on the solar system perpendicular to the ecliptic, i.e. I'm watching earth circle the sun. Using my magic powers of awesome I wink the sun out of existence. With my magical omniscient eyes I will see the Earth continuing to orbit something that no longer exists for the eight or so minutes it takes for light to move from the sun to the earth. At the time the last ray from the sun hits Earth, the sun's gravity will be cutting out. That's because gravity waves are supposed to move speed of light. That just strikes me as spooky.
Building Services keeps the lights on, AC running, water in the pipes and toilets unstopped but they don't really know all that much about the business process and don't need to. Depending on the structure of the company, IT may operate at that level and super-users in different departments handle the business side of the IT.
For example, IT maintains the servers for file stores, database, etc. The SQL administrator is in IT. There are two big products that run on the SQL server, one for accounting and the other for sales. The accounting product admin is in accounting. I'm the admin for the sales side and straddle IT and sales. I'm not really assigned to either department.
The problem here is sort of similar to what you hear about outsourcing. "Is it a good outsourcing company? Is it a bad one? Is it moral to send the work overseas? Will your outsourcing effort fail?" And the primary question really isn't about outsourcing at all or even IT but is a question of whether the company has its shit together. Do people really understand how they do business? Do they know how, when, why for the important stuff? Do they have business processes documented? Are they capable of putting all that stuff down on paper and not having it change two months later on a whim?
An architect can design a building for a company but if the company isn't sure what it wants or even what sort of business it's in, the architect cannot do anything but fail.
In dysfunctional organizations, a greater premium is placed on ass-covering than problem-solving. Nobody wants to accept responsibility and sticking your neck out is just asking it to get chopped. In this kind of environment, IT will be defensive, not wanting to take on more responsibilities or promise a higher level of service because that just invites more things to go wrong. And this balkanization of the corporate departments prevents the sort of cooperation and cross-training necessary for getting things done successfully. In a healthy company, the operations side knows what the hell it's doing and IT can learn how the business operates and suggest solutions that the operations side might not even know they should ask for. And likewise, operations people will learn more about how their systems operate and the full extend of the features they're not utilizing.
Well, suppose your Mom was at a restaurant having dinner, and it got blown up, killing her and most of the rest of the clientele, and you learned that the restaurant was bombed without warning because a "high value target" was supposed to have been there, but wasn't. (This has happened, and it was no accident.) I assume, based on the above, you would feel that "them's the breaks," but I can assure you that many people would conclude that the people dropping the bombs don't really care much as to whether civilians were killed or not, and you don't have to dig very deep to learn that in reality many of the people at the receiving end of such incidents do indeed feel that the people behind the bombs deserve punishment.
Read for content. I was criticizing that attitude by saying there's no moral distinction between the suicide bombing and the Air Force bombing.
Of course, for thousands of years of recorded history, people did kill each other en masse at arm's length. Alexander's soldiers may have been more honest about what they were doing than somebody today sitting in a bunker pressing a button and killing people on the other side of the globe, but they were no less bloodthirsty. So I don't think you can blame the modern willingness to kill on the impartiality created by modern military technology, because the modern willingness to kill looks remarkably like the ancient willingness to kill, just with different tools.
Part of it is cultural conditioning. People who grow up in times of war like that are more willing to do the whole rape and pillage thing. But just look at the problem modern armies have had conditioning soldiers to shoot to kill. The statistics come from WWI, II, Korea, and Vietnam. Something like one in ten soldiers were shooting for effect when their lives weren't immediately in danger. Not sure exactly how this was determined but the whole kill drill done in boot camp is about breaking that resistance until shooting becomes automatic. The studies said it became 100% by Vietnam.
There's a desensitization that comes with all of this, of course. Take a normal, sane, caring 18-yr old and put him in a fucked situation like Iraq. The first month in, he's not wanting to hurt civilians. After he loses his best friend to a car bomb driven by what looked like "civilians" he's willing to kill all the motherfucking motherfuckers and doesn't care about arguments of guilt or innocence. They're local, they're all guilty. Of course, there's also the guys who shoot up a car they think is running the blockade only to find out it was just a confused father with his family and here's the kids dripping life into the street. That's gonna stick with those guys for the rest of their lives. Might even cause them to eat a bullet.
This is one of the things that makes me think the concern about "friendly AI" is blown out of proportion. The problem isn't making sure teh AI's are "friendly" -- its making sure the NI (natural intelligence) owners of the AI's are "friendly". If half the effort spent on "friendly AI" were spent on examining the ownership of AI's, there might be some hope.
That's just it -- human nature never changes. The general can order genocide but it's up to the soldiers to carry it out. The My Lai Massacre was stopped by a helicopter pilot who put his bird between the civilians and "told his crew that if the U.S. soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers."
Robots aren't really the issue -- distancing humans from killing is the problem. Not many of us could kill another human being with our bare hands. A knife might make the task easier in the doing but does nothing to ease the psychological horror of it. Guns let you do it at a distance. You don't even have to touch the guy. And buttons make it easier still. It's like you're not even responsible. You could convince young men to fly bombers over enemy cities and rain down incendiaries but I don't think you could convince many of them to kill even one of those civilians with a gun, let alone a knife.
This is the strange distinction we make where we find one form of killing a horrible thing, a war crime, terrorism, and another form of killing is a regrettable accident but there's really no blame to be assigned. A suicide bomber walks into a pizzeria and blows himself up, we lose our minds. An Air Force bomber drops an LGB in a bunker filled with civilians instead of top brass, shit happens. We honestly believe there's a distinction between the two. "Americans didn't set out to kill civilians" war hawks will huff. Yes, but they're still dead, aren't they?
Combat robots are simply continuing this process. Right now there is still a man in the loop to order the attack. Hamas kills Israeli targets with suicide bombs, Israelis deliver high explosives via missile into apartment blocks filled with civilians. They're using American-manufactured anti-tank missiles. I think they're still using TOW. Predator drones use hellfires and their operators are sitting in the continental US while Israeli pilots are a few miles away from the target inside their choppers but really, what's the difference? And what happens when drones are given the authority to engage targets on their own? A soldier with a gun can at least see what he's shooting at. Those in the artillery corps are firing their shells off into the unseen distance and have no idea who they're killing. Not that much different from laying land mines, indiscriminate killing. Psychologically no different from what it would be to set a robot on patrol mode, fire-at-will.
If one extrapolates a little further, the problem of the droid army is similar to that of the tradition of unpopular leaders using corps of foreign mercenaries to protect them from the wrath of the people. The mercenaries did not speak the language, did not know the customs, and were counted as immune to palace intrigues. They could be used against the people for they would not the sympathy for fellow countrymen that a native force might feel. What are droids being used for? Only the people operating them could say for sure. Welcome to the age of the push-button assassination.
That is the Print Screen key. Don't ever remove that key from the keyboard! I don't care that the word "SysRq" is written below "Print Screen" on that key. Feel free to remove that "SysRq" word from there, but do NOT remove the handy print screen key! Thanks.
But if we drop the sysrq key we'll finally have room for the any key.
I had a similar idea, only instead of a scanning mirror, I was going to use chunks of neutronium to bend the light beams. I've had a little trouble sourcing the materials, though...
I had a similar idea for a practical application of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field but when I got close to a solution I encountered painful spaghettification and had to abandon my research.
Google has been skirting the edge of their "don't be evil" policy with China since the start. If you have to censor your search results, it's not worth the trouble.
China's new motto: don't be more evil than our business partners.
As in "bugs or missing features that are existing now for years without being addressed."
The biggest shortcoming I see is a lack of proper versioning. Docs will save every stupid edit you make every few seconds creating hundreds and hundreds of divergent versions. Utterly useless for tracking changes in drafts over time. The solution is fairly simple. You get a button up at the top that tells you which draft you're in. Click on it and you can spawn a new draft. So you start with your rough draft. When that's complete, you say "new draft" and here's your second draft. You can invite people to comment on a draft by draft basis. If you'd like, you could saw "I'm spawning off Joe's draft since he's going to make edits." If he's not going to edit, just comment, then you can let him have a go at the second draft. Then you can move on to your third draft, fourth, etc.
At this point in time the only solution is to manually create a new file called second draft, third draft, keep them all in the project folder and then manually compare changes. Kind of defeats the aweseomeness of docs here. Of the features I use in Word, this is the only place where Word has docs beat. Of course, nobody I know can use the comments and revisioning tools worth a damn so I'm not really getting proper mileage out of them. *sigh*
I used to smugly think I caught people being redundant saying DNS server. Comic book guy voice: "Do you say Persional Information Number Number? Do you say Automatic Teller Machine Machine? Fools." And then I found out that DNS is Domain Name System or Domain Name Service, never Domain Name Server. Domain Name Service Server is perfectly acceptable usage. Haven't felt so n00b since I called Wine an emulator.
The first one wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. Worst casting choice was who they got to play Peter Parker. He's not a complicated character! He's a science nerd, yes. He's smart. He's also helplessly introverted. The introduction of the spiderman character to his life creates an alter ego. And this is where he cuts loose, being the irreverent, humorous wall-crawler of page and screen. That Toby McGuire guy could do mumbly and introverted but nothing else. This is not complex storytelling, folks. This is basic heroic mythmaking that goes all the way back to the paleolithic campfire. Hero good. Bad guy bad, but maybe have a beef we could sympathize with. Hero has a girl and he gets her in the end. And given the nature of the character, there should be plenty of laughs.
And for the sequels, all the stuff that was bad about the first movie was expanded upon. Spiderman 3 approached epic awful comic book movie status. Bad for the franchise but great for rifftrax.
The recent Iron Man movie was an example of how to do this. Perfectly crafted popcorn fare. Great characters, great lines, good 'splosions. Hope they don't screw the next one up.
Oh, and one quibble. So the Goblin guy from the first film had a super-serum and so became super-human. He can trade punches with super-human people because he's super-durable. I can buy that. Same goes for Goblin jr. But Doc Oc, he's just a dude with creepy robot arms. Even if those robot arms can kick eight kinds of ass, the guy they're attached to is still a flabby middle-aged science guy. Our friendly neighborhood spiderman is super-strong and a punch from him should cause disfiguring if not immediately fatal injuries. The guy's strong enough to hold up a frickin' cable car. His punch should be like from that freeway accident in Final Destination, where the log truck drops its load and this guy looks up just in time to see a 20 foot log come flying right through his windshield. We're talking a punch from a super-human should cause the head to shatter like a melon dropped from a six story building, a red mist everywhere, the now mostly headless body dropping while blood goes squirting everywhere. Ok, so that would completely screw the PG-13 rating but c'mon, seeing a podgy scientist shrug off those punches makes spiderman look lamer than Toby himself is managing.
People like you voted for Nader and inflicted Bush the Younger on yourselves, our country, and the world. As the first decade of the 21st century has tragically demonstrated, the parties aren't the same.
Voting for a third party does nothing with out simple first-past-the-post voting scheme. Any scenario other than a two party system is unstable, and will eventually decay to that [wikipedia.org]. Every new political party in the United States has been a rebranding of one of the previous two.
I hear you. I thought Gore would win in 2000 and voted Nader as protest to see if we could get some viable third-party action. I live in Florida and helped swing it to Bush. I could vomit. I was proud to vote Kerry and proud to vote Obama. Only now he's in and the motherfucking dems are selling us out every bit as bad as the motherfucking republicans. The republicans sold out to wall street and the war lobby. Now that the dems are in, they're selling out to wall street and the war party. Honestly, what's changed? I want to believe. All of Obama's accomplishments so far have been piddle stuff but the huge, major important stuff is still getting fucked. He's continuing Bush's power grabs with wiretapping. He's trending towards the corporate position on net neutrality. Health care reform is turning into a windfall for the insurance industry. The banks are taking our money and running. There is no regulation, no law enforcement, no consequences for criminal behavior.
And I know this wish is a little less likely but I want the Bush cabal doing jail time. We let Nixon and his cronies get a pass and they came right back for the Bush admin along with a younger generation of evil bastards. I don't care if it's politically difficult, there should have been war crime trials for those motherfuckers who lied us into those wars. Bush should be in jail. Cheney should be in jail. Rove should be in jail. And those are just the top dogs.
Exactly what has voting changed? I grant you that Gidget and Geezer getting elected might have been more embarrassing than Bush but I'm trying to see where Obama has made clear improvements over Bush. Obama gives a mighty fine speech but I want to see action. But I think he's already compromised. He took a ton of money from the small change donors but he also got a lot from the FIRE sector of the economy -- finance, insurance, real estate. And it looks like he's going to be an honest politician, the kind who once bought stays bought. Disappointed.
Rather than remake something, or have some ignorant Hollywood producer create some new but clichéd and/or stupid story, why not go look to the great science fiction writers and put them on the screen (suitably updated)? Now that special effects are no longer any sort of obstacle, how about something based on Cordwainer Smith's stories of the Underpeople? E.E. Smith's classic Lensman series? Why not a TV series based on Pohl's Heechee stories? Maybe an Iain Banks novel, as someone mentioned above. How about Heinlein? Asimov? Charles Stross? Larry Niven? Keith Laumer's Retief (sort of a tongue-in-cheek James Bond-ish diplomat dealing with various troublesome alien species) could be huge, and there are enough stories for a dozen films. Any sf fan could list more.
We actually have the budget and technology to pull off some of the better scifi stories now. A bare minimum of a full season per novel, I should think. Don't mention Lensmen. That was unmitigated shit and was shit when it came out, not just in retrospect. Horrible, nutty shit.
But take a classic like the Fountains of Paradise. You could stretch and adapt that into a fascinating show. There's an anime out called Planetes that's about garbage collectors in space who clear orbital debris. Aside from the bit about collecting the junk physically requiring too much energy and in all likelihood we'd use lasers to ablate the surface of the junk and slow it down to the point where it deorbits and burns up, the rest of the series has very hard science. Reaction-based thrusters, no artificial gravity but spinning, lots of weightless scenes. Made for a hell of a geek show. You could take something like Fountains and really go to town on it. It's a short enough novel that you can expand it for the season run.
I will make few, very few exceptions for good shows/movies whose ideas need revisited. Star Trek did not need a reboot. Batman desperately needed one since he still remained an interesting character and needed divorced from the Schumaker mess. Bond had gotten pretty stale and silly and hadn't been any good for a decade or two. Casino Royale was a real shot in the arm. I've been enjoying the new Dr. Who series for the past few years.
But as far as your traditional scifi goes, make a new goddamn show. You're allowed to show your roots but make it something new. Babylon 5 was new. It was great. JMS hasn't been able to do anything else with it since. Let the show rest in well-deserved peace.
Firefly came out of nowhere. The basic premise was easy enough to elevator pitch. "Hey, you know Han Solo and Chewie? Ever wonder what kind of stuff they were doing before they met Ben and Luke?" But Firefly didn't just look like a rehash of Star Wars, it was a brand new universe with new ideas and clever twists on old ones.
I will go so far as to accept new stories in established universes. The Japanese tend to do this like with Gundam. Same robots, same sides, but different wars and different characters. Some of these are side stories, some are in the main continuity, they're only united by the Gundam bits. Star Trek went this way but has sucked so hard for so long I just can't be arsed to care anymore. Babylon 5's follow-on projects have had hard luck and keeping up at it only risks pushing it to Star Trek territory.
Put me squarely in the "do something new" camp. Show me something I haven't seen before. If you do something that's been seen before, put a twist on it that makes it fresh. If I wanted to see the same shit I've seen before I've got Netflix and a DVD player. I can watch the old ones again.
I think Holographic displays are really the holy grail of 3d displays. But they will have a tremendous impact on the way movies are filmed not just watched. Every set would have to be built to work in 360 degree 3d, well at least hopefully.
I don't know. A lot of people said the holy grail of 2d animation was photorealistic CGI. You look at various animes and so many of them are going to cell shading to use high-tech to replicate the flat 2D look. The early CGI of the 90's looked terribly out of place. The more recent stuff manages to integrate it more naturally. But I don't think one naturally trumps the other any more than color photography invalidates black and white photography; in some applications yes, but not in all, and certainly not where artistic qualities are brought into question. In some cases color would detract from what the photographer was going for.
I'm imagining the 3D displays like from Star Wars and imagining watching Big Bang Theory where the whole apartment is laid out before me like a little doll house with the actors running around in it. No, I don't think that would work. Would be easier to watch and enjoy in standard 2D. But for CAD? Stuff like in Iron Man? Oh, hell, yeah. I'm thinking of what the 3D graphics revolution did for RTS gaming. I think it simply made the whole thing more confusing. Yeah, you can zoom down to the footsoldier level in the battle but you can't tell shit. You're going to spend most of your time zoomed out so everything is flat and 2D so you can see what's going on. Oh, and I'd love to see those floating 2D display screens like they had in EVA. Press a button and boom, there's a high-res 2D screen floating before you in empty space.
This will remain a high-end niche product like Laserdisc. 3D simply won't become mainstream until they can pull it off without glasses. The only question, is that even possible?
DVD offered such a significant advance over VHS adopting it was a no-brainer. Same goes for HDTV over standard def. But 3D TV might also resemble BlueRay where there's just not enough market penetration. People aren't seeing a compelling argument for abandoning regular DVD's. BueRay still sells but is not market-dominant and I don't think will ever be.
touchscreens get absolutely disgusting after a day's use. Looks like I rubbed a pepperoni pizza all over it and this is with clean hands. Humans are oily, disgusting meat sacks. Developing a smudge-phobia where once I had none.
The funny thing is we already have something like this in the UK with the TV license, used to fund the BBC. The thing is, it actually works rather well. When the BBC remember who they are, and stop trying to compete with low-grade commercial TV, they make some very good stuff - everything from News and current affairs (including a very strong web presence) through drama and comedy. And without commercials. Just so long as we give the cash to a bunch of people interested in making good media, rather than the money-grabbing lowlife who are currently destroying music and cinema, it could work well.
I think that's a great model. The trick is to identify the people who fit the mold of corporatist executive and apparatchik and feed them feet first into a wood chipper. I think a good litmus test would be asking them what they think about this idea. If they say it's a good idea, go Fargo on 'em.
Sometimes. Rental places tended to do it. I remember being able to rent a copy of Star Trek Generations 8-10 months before I could find a copy for sale.
I don't know what the current practice is but VHS tapes for rental places used to be $75 a copy. There was a staggered release where the $15 to $25 tapes didn't come out for a while after rental. I remember trying to get the MST3K movie on tape after it came out for rent and it was at the ridiculous price. I think the theory was they could soak the rental places and then mop up the remainder of the market by mass-producing tapes at a lower price point. It's been so long since I've bought a movie I have no idea if they're still doing tiered distribution or if rentals are available before purchase copies. Physical media is so 20th century.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm promoted to the status of god-like observer. I'm looking down on the solar system perpendicular to the ecliptic, i.e. I'm watching earth circle the sun. Using my magic powers of awesome I wink the sun out of existence. With my magical omniscient eyes I will see the Earth continuing to orbit something that no longer exists for the eight or so minutes it takes for light to move from the sun to the earth. At the time the last ray from the sun hits Earth, the sun's gravity will be cutting out. That's because gravity waves are supposed to move speed of light. That just strikes me as spooky.
Building Services keeps the lights on, AC running, water in the pipes and toilets unstopped but they don't really know all that much about the business process and don't need to. Depending on the structure of the company, IT may operate at that level and super-users in different departments handle the business side of the IT.
For example, IT maintains the servers for file stores, database, etc. The SQL administrator is in IT. There are two big products that run on the SQL server, one for accounting and the other for sales. The accounting product admin is in accounting. I'm the admin for the sales side and straddle IT and sales. I'm not really assigned to either department.
The problem here is sort of similar to what you hear about outsourcing. "Is it a good outsourcing company? Is it a bad one? Is it moral to send the work overseas? Will your outsourcing effort fail?" And the primary question really isn't about outsourcing at all or even IT but is a question of whether the company has its shit together. Do people really understand how they do business? Do they know how, when, why for the important stuff? Do they have business processes documented? Are they capable of putting all that stuff down on paper and not having it change two months later on a whim?
An architect can design a building for a company but if the company isn't sure what it wants or even what sort of business it's in, the architect cannot do anything but fail.
In dysfunctional organizations, a greater premium is placed on ass-covering than problem-solving. Nobody wants to accept responsibility and sticking your neck out is just asking it to get chopped. In this kind of environment, IT will be defensive, not wanting to take on more responsibilities or promise a higher level of service because that just invites more things to go wrong. And this balkanization of the corporate departments prevents the sort of cooperation and cross-training necessary for getting things done successfully. In a healthy company, the operations side knows what the hell it's doing and IT can learn how the business operates and suggest solutions that the operations side might not even know they should ask for. And likewise, operations people will learn more about how their systems operate and the full extend of the features they're not utilizing.
The one about the French surrendering again? Bush is out of office, it's ok to make fun of the French again.
Now it is possible to build the perfect woman! Of course, it'll take a few thousand years to get her fully assembled.
Well, suppose your Mom was at a restaurant having dinner, and it got blown up, killing her and most of the rest of the clientele, and you learned that the restaurant was bombed without warning because a "high value target" was supposed to have been there, but wasn't. (This has happened, and it was no accident.) I assume, based on the above, you would feel that "them's the breaks," but I can assure you that many people would conclude that the people dropping the bombs don't really care much as to whether civilians were killed or not, and you don't have to dig very deep to learn that in reality many of the people at the receiving end of such incidents do indeed feel that the people behind the bombs deserve punishment.
Read for content. I was criticizing that attitude by saying there's no moral distinction between the suicide bombing and the Air Force bombing.
Of course, for thousands of years of recorded history, people did kill each other en masse at arm's length. Alexander's soldiers may have been more honest about what they were doing than somebody today sitting in a bunker pressing a button and killing people on the other side of the globe, but they were no less bloodthirsty. So I don't think you can blame the modern willingness to kill on the impartiality created by modern military technology, because the modern willingness to kill looks remarkably like the ancient willingness to kill, just with different tools.
Part of it is cultural conditioning. People who grow up in times of war like that are more willing to do the whole rape and pillage thing. But just look at the problem modern armies have had conditioning soldiers to shoot to kill. The statistics come from WWI, II, Korea, and Vietnam. Something like one in ten soldiers were shooting for effect when their lives weren't immediately in danger. Not sure exactly how this was determined but the whole kill drill done in boot camp is about breaking that resistance until shooting becomes automatic. The studies said it became 100% by Vietnam.
There's a desensitization that comes with all of this, of course. Take a normal, sane, caring 18-yr old and put him in a fucked situation like Iraq. The first month in, he's not wanting to hurt civilians. After he loses his best friend to a car bomb driven by what looked like "civilians" he's willing to kill all the motherfucking motherfuckers and doesn't care about arguments of guilt or innocence. They're local, they're all guilty. Of course, there's also the guys who shoot up a car they think is running the blockade only to find out it was just a confused father with his family and here's the kids dripping life into the street. That's gonna stick with those guys for the rest of their lives. Might even cause them to eat a bullet.
This is one of the things that makes me think the concern about "friendly AI" is blown out of proportion. The problem isn't making sure teh AI's are "friendly" -- its making sure the NI (natural intelligence) owners of the AI's are "friendly".
If half the effort spent on "friendly AI" were spent on examining the ownership of AI's, there might be some hope.
That's just it -- human nature never changes. The general can order genocide but it's up to the soldiers to carry it out. The My Lai Massacre was stopped by a helicopter pilot who put his bird between the civilians and "told his crew that if the U.S. soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Robots aren't really the issue -- distancing humans from killing is the problem. Not many of us could kill another human being with our bare hands. A knife might make the task easier in the doing but does nothing to ease the psychological horror of it. Guns let you do it at a distance. You don't even have to touch the guy. And buttons make it easier still. It's like you're not even responsible. You could convince young men to fly bombers over enemy cities and rain down incendiaries but I don't think you could convince many of them to kill even one of those civilians with a gun, let alone a knife.
This is the strange distinction we make where we find one form of killing a horrible thing, a war crime, terrorism, and another form of killing is a regrettable accident but there's really no blame to be assigned. A suicide bomber walks into a pizzeria and blows himself up, we lose our minds. An Air Force bomber drops an LGB in a bunker filled with civilians instead of top brass, shit happens. We honestly believe there's a distinction between the two. "Americans didn't set out to kill civilians" war hawks will huff. Yes, but they're still dead, aren't they?
Combat robots are simply continuing this process. Right now there is still a man in the loop to order the attack. Hamas kills Israeli targets with suicide bombs, Israelis deliver high explosives via missile into apartment blocks filled with civilians. They're using American-manufactured anti-tank missiles. I think they're still using TOW. Predator drones use hellfires and their operators are sitting in the continental US while Israeli pilots are a few miles away from the target inside their choppers but really, what's the difference? And what happens when drones are given the authority to engage targets on their own? A soldier with a gun can at least see what he's shooting at. Those in the artillery corps are firing their shells off into the unseen distance and have no idea who they're killing. Not that much different from laying land mines, indiscriminate killing. Psychologically no different from what it would be to set a robot on patrol mode, fire-at-will.
If one extrapolates a little further, the problem of the droid army is similar to that of the tradition of unpopular leaders using corps of foreign mercenaries to protect them from the wrath of the people. The mercenaries did not speak the language, did not know the customs, and were counted as immune to palace intrigues. They could be used against the people for they would not the sympathy for fellow countrymen that a native force might feel. What are droids being used for? Only the people operating them could say for sure. Welcome to the age of the push-button assassination.
That is the Print Screen key. Don't ever remove that key from the keyboard! I don't care that the word "SysRq" is written below "Print Screen" on that key. Feel free to remove that "SysRq" word from there, but do NOT remove the handy print screen key! Thanks.
But if we drop the sysrq key we'll finally have room for the any key.
So it's not just me that sees shows like Mythbusters as an intellectual version of Jackass.
Yes, except for the intellectual part.
I had a similar idea, only instead of a scanning mirror, I was going to use chunks of neutronium to bend the light beams. I've had a little trouble sourcing the materials, though...
I had a similar idea for a practical application of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field but when I got close to a solution I encountered painful spaghettification and had to abandon my research.
This is as close to "do no evil" as they have come in years. Way to grow some balls Google!
Don't thank Google, thank the chemical adulterants in the pants it bought from China.
Google has been skirting the edge of their "don't be evil" policy with China since the start. If you have to censor your search results, it's not worth the trouble.
China's new motto: don't be more evil than our business partners.
As in "bugs or missing features that are existing now for years without being addressed."
The biggest shortcoming I see is a lack of proper versioning. Docs will save every stupid edit you make every few seconds creating hundreds and hundreds of divergent versions. Utterly useless for tracking changes in drafts over time. The solution is fairly simple. You get a button up at the top that tells you which draft you're in. Click on it and you can spawn a new draft. So you start with your rough draft. When that's complete, you say "new draft" and here's your second draft. You can invite people to comment on a draft by draft basis. If you'd like, you could saw "I'm spawning off Joe's draft since he's going to make edits." If he's not going to edit, just comment, then you can let him have a go at the second draft. Then you can move on to your third draft, fourth, etc.
At this point in time the only solution is to manually create a new file called second draft, third draft, keep them all in the project folder and then manually compare changes. Kind of defeats the aweseomeness of docs here. Of the features I use in Word, this is the only place where Word has docs beat. Of course, nobody I know can use the comments and revisioning tools worth a damn so I'm not really getting proper mileage out of them. *sigh*
I used to smugly think I caught people being redundant saying DNS server. Comic book guy voice: "Do you say Persional Information Number Number? Do you say Automatic Teller Machine Machine? Fools." And then I found out that DNS is Domain Name System or Domain Name Service, never Domain Name Server. Domain Name Service Server is perfectly acceptable usage. Haven't felt so n00b since I called Wine an emulator.
Can you say show trial? Good baby. I knew you could.
On what possible ground could you jail Rove? He was an ADVISOR, he had no legislative or administrative authority.
We hanged nazis for less.
If I had mod points I'd get you back to 0 at least. Not sure why disagreement = negative mod.
Toby fangirls in the house? People downmod for disagreement simply because they lack the wit to make a cogent counter-argument.
The first one wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. Worst casting choice was who they got to play Peter Parker. He's not a complicated character! He's a science nerd, yes. He's smart. He's also helplessly introverted. The introduction of the spiderman character to his life creates an alter ego. And this is where he cuts loose, being the irreverent, humorous wall-crawler of page and screen. That Toby McGuire guy could do mumbly and introverted but nothing else. This is not complex storytelling, folks. This is basic heroic mythmaking that goes all the way back to the paleolithic campfire. Hero good. Bad guy bad, but maybe have a beef we could sympathize with. Hero has a girl and he gets her in the end. And given the nature of the character, there should be plenty of laughs.
And for the sequels, all the stuff that was bad about the first movie was expanded upon. Spiderman 3 approached epic awful comic book movie status. Bad for the franchise but great for rifftrax.
The recent Iron Man movie was an example of how to do this. Perfectly crafted popcorn fare. Great characters, great lines, good 'splosions. Hope they don't screw the next one up.
Oh, and one quibble. So the Goblin guy from the first film had a super-serum and so became super-human. He can trade punches with super-human people because he's super-durable. I can buy that. Same goes for Goblin jr. But Doc Oc, he's just a dude with creepy robot arms. Even if those robot arms can kick eight kinds of ass, the guy they're attached to is still a flabby middle-aged science guy. Our friendly neighborhood spiderman is super-strong and a punch from him should cause disfiguring if not immediately fatal injuries. The guy's strong enough to hold up a frickin' cable car. His punch should be like from that freeway accident in Final Destination, where the log truck drops its load and this guy looks up just in time to see a 20 foot log come flying right through his windshield. We're talking a punch from a super-human should cause the head to shatter like a melon dropped from a six story building, a red mist everywhere, the now mostly headless body dropping while blood goes squirting everywhere. Ok, so that would completely screw the PG-13 rating but c'mon, seeing a podgy scientist shrug off those punches makes spiderman look lamer than Toby himself is managing.
People like you voted for Nader and inflicted Bush the Younger on yourselves, our country, and the world. As the first decade of the 21st century has tragically demonstrated, the parties aren't the same.
Voting for a third party does nothing with out simple first-past-the-post voting scheme. Any scenario other than a two party system is unstable, and will eventually decay to that [wikipedia.org]. Every new political party in the United States has been a rebranding of one of the previous two.
I hear you. I thought Gore would win in 2000 and voted Nader as protest to see if we could get some viable third-party action. I live in Florida and helped swing it to Bush. I could vomit. I was proud to vote Kerry and proud to vote Obama. Only now he's in and the motherfucking dems are selling us out every bit as bad as the motherfucking republicans. The republicans sold out to wall street and the war lobby. Now that the dems are in, they're selling out to wall street and the war party. Honestly, what's changed? I want to believe. All of Obama's accomplishments so far have been piddle stuff but the huge, major important stuff is still getting fucked. He's continuing Bush's power grabs with wiretapping. He's trending towards the corporate position on net neutrality. Health care reform is turning into a windfall for the insurance industry. The banks are taking our money and running. There is no regulation, no law enforcement, no consequences for criminal behavior.
And I know this wish is a little less likely but I want the Bush cabal doing jail time. We let Nixon and his cronies get a pass and they came right back for the Bush admin along with a younger generation of evil bastards. I don't care if it's politically difficult, there should have been war crime trials for those motherfuckers who lied us into those wars. Bush should be in jail. Cheney should be in jail. Rove should be in jail. And those are just the top dogs.
Exactly what has voting changed? I grant you that Gidget and Geezer getting elected might have been more embarrassing than Bush but I'm trying to see where Obama has made clear improvements over Bush. Obama gives a mighty fine speech but I want to see action. But I think he's already compromised. He took a ton of money from the small change donors but he also got a lot from the FIRE sector of the economy -- finance, insurance, real estate. And it looks like he's going to be an honest politician, the kind who once bought stays bought. Disappointed.
Rather than remake something, or have some ignorant Hollywood producer create some new but clichéd and/or stupid story, why not go look to the great science fiction writers and put them on the screen (suitably updated)? Now that special effects are no longer any sort of obstacle, how about something based on Cordwainer Smith's stories of the Underpeople? E.E. Smith's classic Lensman series? Why not a TV series based on Pohl's Heechee stories? Maybe an Iain Banks novel, as someone mentioned above. How about Heinlein? Asimov? Charles Stross? Larry Niven? Keith Laumer's Retief (sort of a tongue-in-cheek James Bond-ish diplomat dealing with various troublesome alien species) could be huge, and there are enough stories for a dozen films. Any sf fan could list more.
We actually have the budget and technology to pull off some of the better scifi stories now. A bare minimum of a full season per novel, I should think. Don't mention Lensmen. That was unmitigated shit and was shit when it came out, not just in retrospect. Horrible, nutty shit.
But take a classic like the Fountains of Paradise. You could stretch and adapt that into a fascinating show. There's an anime out called Planetes that's about garbage collectors in space who clear orbital debris. Aside from the bit about collecting the junk physically requiring too much energy and in all likelihood we'd use lasers to ablate the surface of the junk and slow it down to the point where it deorbits and burns up, the rest of the series has very hard science. Reaction-based thrusters, no artificial gravity but spinning, lots of weightless scenes. Made for a hell of a geek show. You could take something like Fountains and really go to town on it. It's a short enough novel that you can expand it for the season run.
I will make few, very few exceptions for good shows/movies whose ideas need revisited. Star Trek did not need a reboot. Batman desperately needed one since he still remained an interesting character and needed divorced from the Schumaker mess. Bond had gotten pretty stale and silly and hadn't been any good for a decade or two. Casino Royale was a real shot in the arm. I've been enjoying the new Dr. Who series for the past few years.
But as far as your traditional scifi goes, make a new goddamn show. You're allowed to show your roots but make it something new. Babylon 5 was new. It was great. JMS hasn't been able to do anything else with it since. Let the show rest in well-deserved peace.
Firefly came out of nowhere. The basic premise was easy enough to elevator pitch. "Hey, you know Han Solo and Chewie? Ever wonder what kind of stuff they were doing before they met Ben and Luke?" But Firefly didn't just look like a rehash of Star Wars, it was a brand new universe with new ideas and clever twists on old ones.
I will go so far as to accept new stories in established universes. The Japanese tend to do this like with Gundam. Same robots, same sides, but different wars and different characters. Some of these are side stories, some are in the main continuity, they're only united by the Gundam bits. Star Trek went this way but has sucked so hard for so long I just can't be arsed to care anymore. Babylon 5's follow-on projects have had hard luck and keeping up at it only risks pushing it to Star Trek territory.
Put me squarely in the "do something new" camp. Show me something I haven't seen before. If you do something that's been seen before, put a twist on it that makes it fresh. If I wanted to see the same shit I've seen before I've got Netflix and a DVD player. I can watch the old ones again.
I think Holographic displays are really the holy grail of 3d displays. But they will have a tremendous impact on the way movies are filmed not just watched. Every set would have to be built to work in 360 degree 3d, well at least hopefully.
I don't know. A lot of people said the holy grail of 2d animation was photorealistic CGI. You look at various animes and so many of them are going to cell shading to use high-tech to replicate the flat 2D look. The early CGI of the 90's looked terribly out of place. The more recent stuff manages to integrate it more naturally. But I don't think one naturally trumps the other any more than color photography invalidates black and white photography; in some applications yes, but not in all, and certainly not where artistic qualities are brought into question. In some cases color would detract from what the photographer was going for.
I'm imagining the 3D displays like from Star Wars and imagining watching Big Bang Theory where the whole apartment is laid out before me like a little doll house with the actors running around in it. No, I don't think that would work. Would be easier to watch and enjoy in standard 2D. But for CAD? Stuff like in Iron Man? Oh, hell, yeah. I'm thinking of what the 3D graphics revolution did for RTS gaming. I think it simply made the whole thing more confusing. Yeah, you can zoom down to the footsoldier level in the battle but you can't tell shit. You're going to spend most of your time zoomed out so everything is flat and 2D so you can see what's going on. Oh, and I'd love to see those floating 2D display screens like they had in EVA. Press a button and boom, there's a high-res 2D screen floating before you in empty space.
This will remain a high-end niche product like Laserdisc. 3D simply won't become mainstream until they can pull it off without glasses. The only question, is that even possible?
DVD offered such a significant advance over VHS adopting it was a no-brainer. Same goes for HDTV over standard def. But 3D TV might also resemble BlueRay where there's just not enough market penetration. People aren't seeing a compelling argument for abandoning regular DVD's. BueRay still sells but is not market-dominant and I don't think will ever be.
touchscreens get absolutely disgusting after a day's use. Looks like I rubbed a pepperoni pizza all over it and this is with clean hands. Humans are oily, disgusting meat sacks. Developing a smudge-phobia where once I had none.
The funny thing is we already have something like this in the UK with the TV license, used to fund the BBC. The thing is, it actually works rather well. When the BBC remember who they are, and stop trying to compete with low-grade commercial TV, they make some very good stuff - everything from News and current affairs (including a very strong web presence) through drama and comedy. And without commercials. Just so long as we give the cash to a bunch of people interested in making good media, rather than the money-grabbing lowlife who are currently destroying music and cinema, it could work well.
I think that's a great model. The trick is to identify the people who fit the mold of corporatist executive and apparatchik and feed them feet first into a wood chipper. I think a good litmus test would be asking them what they think about this idea. If they say it's a good idea, go Fargo on 'em.
Sometimes. Rental places tended to do it. I remember being able to rent a copy of Star Trek Generations 8-10 months before I could find a copy for sale.
I don't know what the current practice is but VHS tapes for rental places used to be $75 a copy. There was a staggered release where the $15 to $25 tapes didn't come out for a while after rental. I remember trying to get the MST3K movie on tape after it came out for rent and it was at the ridiculous price. I think the theory was they could soak the rental places and then mop up the remainder of the market by mass-producing tapes at a lower price point. It's been so long since I've bought a movie I have no idea if they're still doing tiered distribution or if rentals are available before purchase copies. Physical media is so 20th century.