What does "conforming with the needs of the environment" mean? And why is that more important than the application of technology, judicious or otherwise? My view is that this is a rather big caveat that can be used to justify a mandatory "bones through noses" lifestyle. After all, most of our technology affects the environment in some way. And certainly lots of people affect the environment both directly through where they live and work as well as their food supply. Why shouldn't any human-caused effect on the environment be treated as not conforming with the needs of the environment?
You can boil it down to a question of aesthetics or practicality. A hundred years ago, preserving the environment was seen as a matter of aesthetics. These days, we understand that the environment is our life support system. Actions taken that damage it directly affect our own ability to survive within this system. Cutting down a tree isn't just ruining a pretty view, it's drilling a hole in the lifeboat.
There will certainly be people who have agendas that are driven by articles of faith rather than pragmatic science. Doctors as a whole generally want what's best for people but we have plenty of history of doctors practicing some fairly awful medicine under the guise of scientific method. We had doctors who suggested circumcision to prevent masturbation, who thought a healthy sex drive in a woman was something to fear, that phrenology was viable, trepaning a great way of curing criminal impulses, so on and so forth. But we don't reject all medicine just because of the quacks.
As I see it, a large part of environmentalism is naked hypocrisy. For example, Cameron has a privileged seat where he gets to enjoy the fruits of a technological society, making himself considerably wealthier, while creating myths about utopian non-technological societies. Or the idea that one must "do something" for the environment even if the activity does nothing (washable diapers instead of disposable) or makes things worse for the environment (public recycling of most non-metal items such as paper and plastics). This makes me far less receptive to pro-environmental messages.
How are washable diapers equally harmful with disposable ones? You're comparing the resource extraction, manufacture, distribution, and landfilling of disposables with the one-time cost of manufacture of cloth nappies and the cost of washing after use. How could this not have a lower impact?
Yes, there can be a seeming disconnect between socially-conscious celebrity lifestyles and the causes they champion. I happen to feel this is more of a byproduct of our celebrity worship culture than the worthiness of the cause. We end up needing celebrity spokespeople because the media won't give coverage to non-celebrity advocates. Does then national media pay any attention to New Orleans reconstruction when Brad Pitt isn't talking about it? Not really. African humanitarian missions don't get coverage unless Bono's going over for a visit.
But let's agree with your premise for the moment, that Camreon is an insufferable prat for taking a hypocritical stance in support of something. Does this only mean he's annoying or does it mean that not only is he annoying but the cause itself is also bunk? I can't stand televangelists and the Christian right. They're big proponents of families. Does this mean that I reject families because I reject them? No. I support families and reject their attempts at trying to politicize what it means to be a family and turning the concept into a wedge issue.
Finally, there's already some reactions in the conservative blogs. They don't appear to appreciate this movie.
1. Removable battery 2. Free upload of unsigned software and drivers, not locking the user in to any sort of "app mall." 3. Full physical keyboard since everyone knows software keyboards are annoying 4. Full and open support for third party hardware 5. An affordable, low price-point that even Apple's harshest critics cannot bring themselves to complain about 6. Copy and paste functionality at launch
Unable to obtain 100% accuracy, now optimizing for 100% inaccuracy.
Here's what I want a high quality, fast and truly usable tablet for : medical care. It should be possible to walk into a patient's room carrying a clipboard sized device that resembled a giant iphone. You should be able to call up medical records, imagery, and the rest with no detectable latency. (because the tablet should use push downloading : each tablet is assigned to a particular doctor or nurse. The table would cache all medical records for each patient assigned to that doctor or nurse, and if a new report comes out for one of those patients, the tablet should automatically download it over the hospital's wireless network)
It should use a glass topped display, like the iphone, so that you could use caustic chemicals to sterilize the surface. The medical industry has enough money that if this product cost $1500 it would barely be noticed as an expense. (especially if it could boost efficiency)
Dittos here. I've used Windows Mobile phones. Awful. They feel like a desktop OS was shoehorned into a phone. Slow, awkward, clunky. I've used PC tablets. They're laptops with either no keyboard and a big flat screen or a screen that can be opened and turned around to make for a clunky, delicate device. Spinning drives, whirling fans, they're no different from standard laptops with load times and other difficulties. There are few computers that make me want to smash them just by looking at them. PC tablets are in that category. Even worse when they're running Vista or W7. Skunky, horrid beasts.
The iphone and ipod touch are worlds different from windows mobile phones. The UI is fast, load times are quick, you can turn the thing on and off with a flick of the button. Flash storage, no whirling fans, battery life is ok, especially considering all the glitz it's pushing. While there's room for improvement with those devices, they still kick the shit out of the competition. It's frankly embarrassing. When I first got my hands on one of these I thought it could scale up well to be a tablet. If Apple sticks to their standards on this new device, it's going to be a game-changer. Integrate handwriting recognition which has actually gotten very good these days, this will be as huge in business as the introduction of the PC.
I wouldn't mind a 5 minute highlight video of the best NASA events of the day. I also don't mind the current NASA TV coverage. There's room for improvement without making it MOREAWESOMEHUGER!!! That shouty motorcycle show is a good bad example. There's plenty of interesting stuff that goes into fabricating a bike. You don't really need to punch it up with histrionics and screaming. But that's exactly what they do and the information content rapidly approaches zero. The tech podcasts are a good positive example of how it can go. You've got personable hosts who can present good, solid information in an engaging fashion. Techzilla, Geekbrief, Security Now, This Week in Tech, nice info-nuggets to digest. If you want exacting detail, there's websites to read for the nitty gritty. But those shows are excellent digests that will let you know a topic even exists so that you can then go research it more thoroughly.
Avatar was a fairly amazing movie. I'm comparing and contrasting with the new Star Wars. There was probably even more bluescreen in Avatar than Star Wars but Pandora felt convincing and vibrant, completely alive. You never hear people criticizing the Death Star battle in A New Hope saying it looks like a video game, it was just awesome and exciting. I think part of the video game critique comes from movies that overuse bad CGI and make things look little better than the average page and part of it comes from the audience being unable to connect emotionally with those characters. Compare Pandora with any of the environments from the the new trilogy and it's just a lesson in CGI done wrong and CGI done right.
The false dichotomy most people fall into with environmentalism vs. tech is that it's an either/or proposition. "Look, we're either running around in the boonies with bones through our noses and die of preventable diseases before we're 30 or we have to clearcut the forests and live in sterile concrete and steel towers, there's no middle ground." And that's not really true. What's needed is the judicious application of technology, conforming with the needs of the environment rather than trying to thwart or control it.
I'm interested to see what the conservative backlash against this movie will be. Conservatives have been wanting to chew Al Gore's eyeballs out ever since an Inconvenient Truth. There's a strange kind of glee about destroying environmental sacred cows like the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. It's not like the truck barreling down the road indifferent to whether or not there's an animal in the road, it's the truck deliberately swerving to hit the animal, just for fun. This movie is big, awesome, has s'plosions, is from a director who has made some of the most awesome guy movies ever, and it has a message that could only be seen as environmentalist propaganda. This is a 20th century fox film so that explains why Faux News has been told to keep a lid on it. If this came out from any other studio that network would be frothing. Dunno if Limbaugh had anything to say about it yet. He's not affiliated with Faux and has no financial stake in the project. He'd have to go apeshit over it.
Typically if you take something that's trying to dump waste heat, and install something that recovers power from that heat, it creates an insulating effect, reducing the cooling the object was receiving. Heat can't be turned directly into energy, only difference in heat. Adding a heat reclamation system doesn't help cool something down because the power it's getting is from the temperature difference, not the heat itself. Instead it takes power from the temperature gradient, and as such reduces the temperature gradient, thus reducing cooling efficiency.
This would be the reason why fremen stilsuits would be impossible, right? Even as a kid it struck me that someone was trying to have a free lunch.
What you're saying is along the lines of what I was thinking. I'd mapped out my own take on the prequels. The Clone War is nixed, it's the Colonial War. It's a crisis of empire as colony worlds are struggling under the control of core worlds and want freedom. The Jedi are forced to act to hold the Republic together. The first movie is about trying to stop the nascent rebellion from turning into galactic civil war. Obi-Wan and Anakin are already master/apprentice at the start of the movie. The actions Obi-Wan is forced to take by the Jedi Council alienates him and he renounces his knighthood, fighting for his homeworld of Alderaan as a General (hence the General Kenobi bit). Palpatine is a border world governor, a loyalist distressed at the waste and impetuousness of the rebels. Discovers the secret of the sith -- anyone can use the force and it's a lot easier than you'd think. The Jedi training takes a lifetime so that one can use it responsibly. Palpatine's use of the Force enhances his reputation and makes his name on the galactic scene. There is also a nice sense of surprise at seeing the good guys on the side of the government and the bad guys being the rebels, an inversion of the original sequel.
Second movie is after years of war with seemingly no end in sight. Palpatine is a governor in the Roman sense where he's got a political career, civil and military responsibilities. He sets up a decisive battle trap to nail the rebels, just like we end up seeing in Return of the Jedi. However, the rebels know it's a trap and have setup their own trap using ancient weapons powerful enough to wipe out fleets. Only the intervention of the heroes is able to save the battle plan and break the back of the rebellion. We see Anakin as war hero and he earns the emotional scars that turn him to the dark side by the third movie.
Third movie is political machination/rise of the emperor. Palpatine has grown completely disgusted with people and thinks that the only way to save galactic civilization is to establish an empire with an iron fist. Believes that democracy will end in the tyranny of the small-minded and see everything fall to barbarians. Anakin is likewise feeling disgusted because he sees all the sacrifices of the war years pissed away by corrupt politicians and their cronies and the people are too stupid to know what's good for them. Palpatine's arguments make sense to him and the movie shows his seduction to the dark side. The aloofness and superiority the Jedi demonstrated in the previous two films allows Palpatine to easily create a smear campaign against them like what was used against the Knights Templar. The Obi/Anakin fight that leaves him a crippled wreck forces his plans into place. Anakin is assumed dead and now Palpatine has a new right hand man, a terrifying cyborg with a sith title who leads the pogrom against the Jedi.
We need less obnoxious stereotyping from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
What's needed, as always, are people who can can accurately consolidate complex technical details into information management can use for planning. This is how we can keep our sales people connected on the road? Awesome. What's it cost? This is how much it'll cost to add a branch office? Fine. What are the trade-offs of hosting our own apps versus that colo thing you mentioned?
Business really seems to have trouble properly utilizing technology assets. It's a problem that starts at the top and works its way down. If the top brass doesn't understand or doesn't care enough to understand, middle-management takes their cue from that and on down to the scut worker. IT cannot enforce compliance from the bottom up.
There simply needs to be more communication, cooperation, and respect between departments. Call me a nerd and disrespect me professionally? Go fuck yourself and yes, there's an app for that.
You can already guess how it turns out. I like flashbacks. I've seen many enjoyable stories where the past of certain characters and events is kept a mystery to slowly tease out over the course of the story. But it's never the primary focus of the story. When you go and make a prequel, dedicating an entire movie to going backwards, it feels like retreading old ground, even if we haven't explicitly seen it. Vader starts off as good guy, falls to evil. We caught the gist from Obi-Wan's exposition. Nothing we saw in the prequels added anything to it whatsoever.
Personally, I would have preferred to see the future adventures of Luke. Pretty much all of the expanded universe stuff was crap. But there could have been some great stories to tell as the Rebellion tries to become a Republic and not fall into the very tyrannies they fought against. Luke reforming the Jedi Order would have been awesome. The Jedi Academy stories weren't fit to line the bottom of birdcages. I would fear causing damage to any fireplace I tossed those books into for burning.
Actually, the standard Sci-Fi technique is: - Send big mining robot. - Big mining robot passes through exotic magnetic field and develops conscience. - Big mining robot invades Earth; possibly to mine it.
Or the big mining robot asks to learn of that emotion we humans call love. Possibly becomes turned on watching monster truck rallies, tries to woo Grave Digger.
So are they saying a new heavy lift vehicle is replacing the Ares I? My understanding is Ares I is the simple, cheap, manned crew vehicle stack and the Ares V is the bigger, heavier, not man-rated launcher meant for heavy lifting. They were supposed to reuse shuttle parts and know-how to make things work better. So far it isn't. I have a feeling that shuttle reuse was a political decision to make this sound more economical rather than a proposal from the engineers guaranteeing it would be frugal.
Pigeonhold the players into one of the 3 style is easy.
Letting the players to pick and choose from an array of strength / agility / defense for their own character would be a nighmare for those who program the game.
I always hated the leveling dynamic in rpg's and the idea that you had to be locked into one class. I'm not likely to have the time to play the game again and it would be fun to play different classes.
So, the Batman analogy. Sure, he's got his standard suit he runs around in. Lightweight for acrobatics, bulletproofing on the chest and weights in the cape so he can hit people but his main defense is not taking hits. But if he needs to tank up, he has heavier suits. His anti-superman suit was basically space marine power armor. He has bat spacesuits, bat diving suits, whatever. The point is, all he needs to do to change roles is change equipment. the trick is knowing what to bring.
Strangely enough, Armored Core got this idea right. You can build different mechs specialized for different roles. Some missions you need heavy firepower for crushing hard targets with bolts of energy with low fire rates, sometimes you need autocannons that spam out shells all over the place to hit fast-moving light targets. You equip to suit the mission.
I'd like to see an rpg take that line of reasoning. You need to do sneaking, you carry your light weapons and black tights. Scouting the woods? Longbow, shortsword, cloak. Have to wade into a big melee? Now you bring out the heavy armor.
But what ends up happening in the online games, and I'm sure the publishers don't mind, people will run several accounts specialized in different roles just to make progress. In EVE people will have industrial characters, pvp characters, miners, etc. And the best part is that if you find you have less time to play, you can't consolidate those characters. Bah. It's a cycle best to avoid by not playing.
The point that nukes wouldn't generally be useful is a good one. And the point that kinetic weapons would be ideal also makes sense. However, I'm not completely convinced by the emphasis on orbital mechanics. In order for that make sense, one needs space travel to be cheap enough and convenient enough that one can easily have lots of ships in space. If that's the case, one needs efficient enough propulsion systems that will make orbital mechanics not matter as much. They'll still matter probably (and certainly matter more than they do in standard scifi) but I'm not at all convinced they'll matter as much as he makes it out.
That's all a question of the posited tech for the battle. There's the old question of whether it's better to build bigger ships with bigger weapons or smaller ships with smaller weapons. Bigger ships are assumed to be better-protected. But what's the damage model like for taking a critical hit? In the age of sail, combat effectiveness was whittled away with the cannon fire. The bigger ship always lasted longer in a fight. In the age of battleships, sudden critical hits could happen but armor still ruled the day -- light ships with heavy punches would be destroyed before they could do much good. Torpedo boats threatened that balance with a small plywood boat potentially having the power to sink a ship of the line. This upset continued in the age of the guided missile, a disposable patrol boat has a punch equal to a guided missile cruiser. In Cold War calculations, you're looking at the total number of weapons spread across your fleet so the more hulls the better, especially seeing as any given hit could well destroy a ship.
If the new railgun for navy ships pan out, we'll now be able to fire weapons with the hitting power of a cruise missile up to 200 miles away with very minimal chance of intercept. If it takes a big ship to mount a weapon like that, the battleship has just come back into vogue. That kind of hitting power also hornes in on aircraft carrier territory. Anti-ship missiles like the sunburn threaten to be powerful enough to crack the backs of carriers. Could it be possible to armor a battleship sufficient to counter one, or develop active defenses that could credibly take them down? And how many sunburns would it take to saturate those hypothetical defenses? If it costs you $100 million in missiles to take down a $10 billion carrier (factoring in cost of air wing on top of hull, plus inflation), is it a fair trade? I'd think so.
Also, he doesn't address the issue that long-range kinetic impactors can make most space combat irrelevant if they are going fast enough. There's not much Earth could do if there were large mass drivers on say Demos and Phobos sending fairly small projectiles at targets on the Moon or Earth or targeting large space installations. Again in this situation orbital mechanics would matter. But when the planets are in the correct positions, such setups would render local space combat irrelevant.
In any space combat scenario I can imagine, planets are fucked. Like you said above, the planets can't maneuver. I don't know if you could count on accurately targeting space stations -- I'd think a weapon traveling slow enough to maneuver effectively like that would be slow enough to intercept. But if you have antimatter available you just put enough fuel onboard to push that sucker up to a significant fraction of the speed of light. Assuming you can bring it up to speed far enough away the engine plume is not detected, there's no way to counter such a thing, not unless you have yottawatt lasers that can vaporize the damn thing so completely even relativistic dust particles aren't hitting the planet. As has been said about asteroid impact scenarios, you can't just break the thing apart and let it burn up in the atmosphere. Even if we hit a magic button and the 5km-wide rock turned into free-flying dust, that dust still weighs the same as the full asteroid, still has the same kinetic energy, and wi
Space battles are still the realm of science fiction. Depending on how far out we push the speculative technology, we could stick with relatively hard SF with direct extrapolations of current technology or softer SF with more fanciful tech employed in a plausible and self-consistent fashion.
There are certain things you would expect, regardless of the technology. For example, consider the Starfury from Babylon 5. You have omnidirectional thrusters. This would be expected in a combat ship. It might be considered economical for a civilian ship to have one big thruster in back and for the whole ship to rotate ass-backwards for deceleration. But it might also be the case that a military ship would require the omnidirectional thrusters as well so that it can perform significant delta-v in various directions while keeping a specific attitude. One example I could think of is if the ship's primary armament is a big gun running the length of the ship necessitating the entire ship be maneuvered to aim it. You wouldn't want to have to point it away from the enemy just so the ship could maneuver.
I think the only thing that's really safe to say is that space warships will not be directly analogous to anything in our current or past experience. It's not going to be Horatio Hornblower in space, it's not going to be WWII in space, it's going to be different. I like watching the scifi movies and seeing how fairly contemporary industrial design is simply ported into space. Bulky monochrome CRT's in the 70's, color going into the 80's, flat panels start showing up in the 90's. Star Trek completely missed the idea of brilliant pretty displays though I would have to imagine trying to simulate them with the sfx budget at the time would be difficult. Robots were seen as being able to walk, that's the easy part, but doing math is hard! And those old writers had no idea just how much math something like Asimo has to do just to walk. Likewise, the robot could understand your spoken question of what's 2234*542 but it takes a minute to compute.
In all honesty, I'd put my money on a realistic space warship as driven by expert systems and automation. The humans may give operational guidelines and issue a specific command here and there but everything else is automated. No captain on the bridge shouting commands, no sweating rated crew struggling to load photon torps, no engineer running around the engine room. I think that it would make for fairly boring cinema unless the story is not about the adventure of the fight. Look at drone operations in the current wars. Guys sitting behind monitors blowing up people on the other side of the planet, then going home to the family. You're not going to get people on the edge of their seats describing the fight but there could be fertile ground for exploring the dehumanization of this remote control warfare. Joe Haldman explored it before it was a reality, now we can see how much he got right.
Check out the legal wrangling on 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' as an example. According to the producer, that was an 'unprofitable' film. Welcome to business deals in Hollywood.
Forest Gump still lost money. Unprofitable blockbuster, so sad. Don't know how that could possibly happen, wink nudge etc.
The dropping of barriers to entry is the key. You don't need to get into Blockbuster, netflix is fine. You don't need to get into the theaters, netflix I'm sure will eventually start streaming first-run movies. And with digital distribution, maybe the theaters will start scheduling one-off nights. A physical print is like $17k and only has a limited number of runs before it deteriorates. With the theaters going completely digital, they could have a hundred movies on-hand to run in any of their theaters and can set a theater from one to the other at the press of a button.
I'll be just as happy to see the wheeler-dealers fucked to death with their own severed cocks. The world has no need for them other than compost.
furthermore, there's nothing to say they still can't do that, or aren't actually doing that already. in fact, a big story in the international press about how dumb the military is on these video feeds is a good cover. one can hope, anyways, that the military is smarter than depicted in this story
I feel for that during Gulf War 1. When the war kicked off I was incensed. I could read the papers, I saw leaks talking about how we just weren't read for the deadline, there's no way we could kick off the war, it would have to be postponed. Jr. high war nerd taking what was said at face value. One of my stepdad's friends just smiled and said "Or is that what they wanted the Iraqis to think?" Oooooooooh.
Sometimes the military's smarter than you think, sometimes they're dumber.
Never been a fan of quickslime. There's many videos that just won't work any other way. It's also the only player I use on pc but I believe there are several other worthy options available.
And I do believe I was a minor during that childhood. If someone said it on the net it has to be taken seriously. I'm holding my breath waiting for the police to take Mr. Lucas into custody or, at the very least, Chris Hansen to ask him to have a seat.
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Neither concrete or steel are sterile. In fact there are few places on this Earth that are sterile without lengthy and time consuming procedures.
I meant sterile from the human, emotional sense. Log cabin seems warm, homey, a concrete and steel tower seems cold, sterile.
What does "conforming with the needs of the environment" mean? And why is that more important than the application of technology, judicious or otherwise? My view is that this is a rather big caveat that can be used to justify a mandatory "bones through noses" lifestyle. After all, most of our technology affects the environment in some way. And certainly lots of people affect the environment both directly through where they live and work as well as their food supply. Why shouldn't any human-caused effect on the environment be treated as not conforming with the needs of the environment?
You can boil it down to a question of aesthetics or practicality. A hundred years ago, preserving the environment was seen as a matter of aesthetics. These days, we understand that the environment is our life support system. Actions taken that damage it directly affect our own ability to survive within this system. Cutting down a tree isn't just ruining a pretty view, it's drilling a hole in the lifeboat.
There will certainly be people who have agendas that are driven by articles of faith rather than pragmatic science. Doctors as a whole generally want what's best for people but we have plenty of history of doctors practicing some fairly awful medicine under the guise of scientific method. We had doctors who suggested circumcision to prevent masturbation, who thought a healthy sex drive in a woman was something to fear, that phrenology was viable, trepaning a great way of curing criminal impulses, so on and so forth. But we don't reject all medicine just because of the quacks.
As I see it, a large part of environmentalism is naked hypocrisy. For example, Cameron has a privileged seat where he gets to enjoy the fruits of a technological society, making himself considerably wealthier, while creating myths about utopian non-technological societies. Or the idea that one must "do something" for the environment even if the activity does nothing (washable diapers instead of disposable) or makes things worse for the environment (public recycling of most non-metal items such as paper and plastics). This makes me far less receptive to pro-environmental messages.
How are washable diapers equally harmful with disposable ones? You're comparing the resource extraction, manufacture, distribution, and landfilling of disposables with the one-time cost of manufacture of cloth nappies and the cost of washing after use. How could this not have a lower impact?
Yes, there can be a seeming disconnect between socially-conscious celebrity lifestyles and the causes they champion. I happen to feel this is more of a byproduct of our celebrity worship culture than the worthiness of the cause. We end up needing celebrity spokespeople because the media won't give coverage to non-celebrity advocates. Does then national media pay any attention to New Orleans reconstruction when Brad Pitt isn't talking about it? Not really. African humanitarian missions don't get coverage unless Bono's going over for a visit.
But let's agree with your premise for the moment, that Camreon is an insufferable prat for taking a hypocritical stance in support of something. Does this only mean he's annoying or does it mean that not only is he annoying but the cause itself is also bunk? I can't stand televangelists and the Christian right. They're big proponents of families. Does this mean that I reject families because I reject them? No. I support families and reject their attempts at trying to politicize what it means to be a family and turning the concept into a wedge issue.
Finally, there's already some reactions in the conservative blogs. They don't appear to appreciate this movie.
I figured they'd hate it.
1. Removable battery
2. Free upload of unsigned software and drivers, not locking the user in to any sort of "app mall."
3. Full physical keyboard since everyone knows software keyboards are annoying
4. Full and open support for third party hardware
5. An affordable, low price-point that even Apple's harshest critics cannot bring themselves to complain about
6. Copy and paste functionality at launch
Unable to obtain 100% accuracy, now optimizing for 100% inaccuracy.
Here's what I want a high quality, fast and truly usable tablet for : medical care. It should be possible to walk into a patient's room carrying a clipboard sized device that resembled a giant iphone. You should be able to call up medical records, imagery, and the rest with no detectable latency. (because the tablet should use push downloading : each tablet is assigned to a particular doctor or nurse. The table would cache all medical records for each patient assigned to that doctor or nurse, and if a new report comes out for one of those patients, the tablet should automatically download it over the hospital's wireless network)
It should use a glass topped display, like the iphone, so that you could use caustic chemicals to sterilize the surface. The medical industry has enough money that if this product cost $1500 it would barely be noticed as an expense. (especially if it could boost efficiency)
Dittos here. I've used Windows Mobile phones. Awful. They feel like a desktop OS was shoehorned into a phone. Slow, awkward, clunky. I've used PC tablets. They're laptops with either no keyboard and a big flat screen or a screen that can be opened and turned around to make for a clunky, delicate device. Spinning drives, whirling fans, they're no different from standard laptops with load times and other difficulties. There are few computers that make me want to smash them just by looking at them. PC tablets are in that category. Even worse when they're running Vista or W7. Skunky, horrid beasts.
The iphone and ipod touch are worlds different from windows mobile phones. The UI is fast, load times are quick, you can turn the thing on and off with a flick of the button. Flash storage, no whirling fans, battery life is ok, especially considering all the glitz it's pushing. While there's room for improvement with those devices, they still kick the shit out of the competition. It's frankly embarrassing. When I first got my hands on one of these I thought it could scale up well to be a tablet. If Apple sticks to their standards on this new device, it's going to be a game-changer. Integrate handwriting recognition which has actually gotten very good these days, this will be as huge in business as the introduction of the PC.
I wouldn't mind a 5 minute highlight video of the best NASA events of the day. I also don't mind the current NASA TV coverage. There's room for improvement without making it MOREAWESOMEHUGER!!! That shouty motorcycle show is a good bad example. There's plenty of interesting stuff that goes into fabricating a bike. You don't really need to punch it up with histrionics and screaming. But that's exactly what they do and the information content rapidly approaches zero. The tech podcasts are a good positive example of how it can go. You've got personable hosts who can present good, solid information in an engaging fashion. Techzilla, Geekbrief, Security Now, This Week in Tech, nice info-nuggets to digest. If you want exacting detail, there's websites to read for the nitty gritty. But those shows are excellent digests that will let you know a topic even exists so that you can then go research it more thoroughly.
I'm pro-alcohol but also pro-moderation.
Avatar was a fairly amazing movie. I'm comparing and contrasting with the new Star Wars. There was probably even more bluescreen in Avatar than Star Wars but Pandora felt convincing and vibrant, completely alive. You never hear people criticizing the Death Star battle in A New Hope saying it looks like a video game, it was just awesome and exciting. I think part of the video game critique comes from movies that overuse bad CGI and make things look little better than the average page and part of it comes from the audience being unable to connect emotionally with those characters. Compare Pandora with any of the environments from the the new trilogy and it's just a lesson in CGI done wrong and CGI done right.
The false dichotomy most people fall into with environmentalism vs. tech is that it's an either/or proposition. "Look, we're either running around in the boonies with bones through our noses and die of preventable diseases before we're 30 or we have to clearcut the forests and live in sterile concrete and steel towers, there's no middle ground." And that's not really true. What's needed is the judicious application of technology, conforming with the needs of the environment rather than trying to thwart or control it.
I'm interested to see what the conservative backlash against this movie will be. Conservatives have been wanting to chew Al Gore's eyeballs out ever since an Inconvenient Truth. There's a strange kind of glee about destroying environmental sacred cows like the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. It's not like the truck barreling down the road indifferent to whether or not there's an animal in the road, it's the truck deliberately swerving to hit the animal, just for fun. This movie is big, awesome, has s'plosions, is from a director who has made some of the most awesome guy movies ever, and it has a message that could only be seen as environmentalist propaganda. This is a 20th century fox film so that explains why Faux News has been told to keep a lid on it. If this came out from any other studio that network would be frothing. Dunno if Limbaugh had anything to say about it yet. He's not affiliated with Faux and has no financial stake in the project. He'd have to go apeshit over it.
Typically if you take something that's trying to dump waste heat, and install something that recovers power from that heat, it creates an insulating effect, reducing the cooling the object was receiving. Heat can't be turned directly into energy, only difference in heat. Adding a heat reclamation system doesn't help cool something down because the power it's getting is from the temperature difference, not the heat itself. Instead it takes power from the temperature gradient, and as such reduces the temperature gradient, thus reducing cooling efficiency.
This would be the reason why fremen stilsuits would be impossible, right? Even as a kid it struck me that someone was trying to have a free lunch.
What you're saying is along the lines of what I was thinking. I'd mapped out my own take on the prequels. The Clone War is nixed, it's the Colonial War. It's a crisis of empire as colony worlds are struggling under the control of core worlds and want freedom. The Jedi are forced to act to hold the Republic together. The first movie is about trying to stop the nascent rebellion from turning into galactic civil war. Obi-Wan and Anakin are already master/apprentice at the start of the movie. The actions Obi-Wan is forced to take by the Jedi Council alienates him and he renounces his knighthood, fighting for his homeworld of Alderaan as a General (hence the General Kenobi bit). Palpatine is a border world governor, a loyalist distressed at the waste and impetuousness of the rebels. Discovers the secret of the sith -- anyone can use the force and it's a lot easier than you'd think. The Jedi training takes a lifetime so that one can use it responsibly. Palpatine's use of the Force enhances his reputation and makes his name on the galactic scene. There is also a nice sense of surprise at seeing the good guys on the side of the government and the bad guys being the rebels, an inversion of the original sequel.
Second movie is after years of war with seemingly no end in sight. Palpatine is a governor in the Roman sense where he's got a political career, civil and military responsibilities. He sets up a decisive battle trap to nail the rebels, just like we end up seeing in Return of the Jedi. However, the rebels know it's a trap and have setup their own trap using ancient weapons powerful enough to wipe out fleets. Only the intervention of the heroes is able to save the battle plan and break the back of the rebellion. We see Anakin as war hero and he earns the emotional scars that turn him to the dark side by the third movie.
Third movie is political machination/rise of the emperor. Palpatine has grown completely disgusted with people and thinks that the only way to save galactic civilization is to establish an empire with an iron fist. Believes that democracy will end in the tyranny of the small-minded and see everything fall to barbarians. Anakin is likewise feeling disgusted because he sees all the sacrifices of the war years pissed away by corrupt politicians and their cronies and the people are too stupid to know what's good for them. Palpatine's arguments make sense to him and the movie shows his seduction to the dark side. The aloofness and superiority the Jedi demonstrated in the previous two films allows Palpatine to easily create a smear campaign against them like what was used against the Knights Templar. The Obi/Anakin fight that leaves him a crippled wreck forces his plans into place. Anakin is assumed dead and now Palpatine has a new right hand man, a terrifying cyborg with a sith title who leads the pogrom against the Jedi.
We need less obnoxious stereotyping from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
What's needed, as always, are people who can can accurately consolidate complex technical details into information management can use for planning. This is how we can keep our sales people connected on the road? Awesome. What's it cost? This is how much it'll cost to add a branch office? Fine. What are the trade-offs of hosting our own apps versus that colo thing you mentioned?
Business really seems to have trouble properly utilizing technology assets. It's a problem that starts at the top and works its way down. If the top brass doesn't understand or doesn't care enough to understand, middle-management takes their cue from that and on down to the scut worker. IT cannot enforce compliance from the bottom up.
There simply needs to be more communication, cooperation, and respect between departments. Call me a nerd and disrespect me professionally? Go fuck yourself and yes, there's an app for that.
He's been keeping this stunt up for months. And now I could really go for a pizza.
You can already guess how it turns out. I like flashbacks. I've seen many enjoyable stories where the past of certain characters and events is kept a mystery to slowly tease out over the course of the story. But it's never the primary focus of the story. When you go and make a prequel, dedicating an entire movie to going backwards, it feels like retreading old ground, even if we haven't explicitly seen it. Vader starts off as good guy, falls to evil. We caught the gist from Obi-Wan's exposition. Nothing we saw in the prequels added anything to it whatsoever.
Personally, I would have preferred to see the future adventures of Luke. Pretty much all of the expanded universe stuff was crap. But there could have been some great stories to tell as the Rebellion tries to become a Republic and not fall into the very tyrannies they fought against. Luke reforming the Jedi Order would have been awesome. The Jedi Academy stories weren't fit to line the bottom of birdcages. I would fear causing damage to any fireplace I tossed those books into for burning.
Actually, the standard Sci-Fi technique is:
- Send big mining robot.
- Big mining robot passes through exotic magnetic field and develops conscience.
- Big mining robot invades Earth; possibly to mine it.
Or the big mining robot asks to learn of that emotion we humans call love. Possibly becomes turned on watching monster truck rallies, tries to woo Grave Digger.
> The more you pay for a bicycle the less you get? What on Earth are you talking about?
It works exactly the same for bikinis, really.
But it's soooo worth it.
So are they saying a new heavy lift vehicle is replacing the Ares I? My understanding is Ares I is the simple, cheap, manned crew vehicle stack and the Ares V is the bigger, heavier, not man-rated launcher meant for heavy lifting. They were supposed to reuse shuttle parts and know-how to make things work better. So far it isn't. I have a feeling that shuttle reuse was a political decision to make this sound more economical rather than a proposal from the engineers guaranteeing it would be frugal.
Pigeonhold the players into one of the 3 style is easy.
Letting the players to pick and choose from an array of strength / agility / defense for their own character would be a nighmare for those who program the game.
I always hated the leveling dynamic in rpg's and the idea that you had to be locked into one class. I'm not likely to have the time to play the game again and it would be fun to play different classes.
So, the Batman analogy. Sure, he's got his standard suit he runs around in. Lightweight for acrobatics, bulletproofing on the chest and weights in the cape so he can hit people but his main defense is not taking hits. But if he needs to tank up, he has heavier suits. His anti-superman suit was basically space marine power armor. He has bat spacesuits, bat diving suits, whatever. The point is, all he needs to do to change roles is change equipment. the trick is knowing what to bring.
Strangely enough, Armored Core got this idea right. You can build different mechs specialized for different roles. Some missions you need heavy firepower for crushing hard targets with bolts of energy with low fire rates, sometimes you need autocannons that spam out shells all over the place to hit fast-moving light targets. You equip to suit the mission.
I'd like to see an rpg take that line of reasoning. You need to do sneaking, you carry your light weapons and black tights. Scouting the woods? Longbow, shortsword, cloak. Have to wade into a big melee? Now you bring out the heavy armor.
But what ends up happening in the online games, and I'm sure the publishers don't mind, people will run several accounts specialized in different roles just to make progress. In EVE people will have industrial characters, pvp characters, miners, etc. And the best part is that if you find you have less time to play, you can't consolidate those characters. Bah. It's a cycle best to avoid by not playing.
The point that nukes wouldn't generally be useful is a good one. And the point that kinetic weapons would be ideal also makes sense. However, I'm not completely convinced by the emphasis on orbital mechanics. In order for that make sense, one needs space travel to be cheap enough and convenient enough that one can easily have lots of ships in space. If that's the case, one needs efficient enough propulsion systems that will make orbital mechanics not matter as much. They'll still matter probably (and certainly matter more than they do in standard scifi) but I'm not at all convinced they'll matter as much as he makes it out.
That's all a question of the posited tech for the battle. There's the old question of whether it's better to build bigger ships with bigger weapons or smaller ships with smaller weapons. Bigger ships are assumed to be better-protected. But what's the damage model like for taking a critical hit? In the age of sail, combat effectiveness was whittled away with the cannon fire. The bigger ship always lasted longer in a fight. In the age of battleships, sudden critical hits could happen but armor still ruled the day -- light ships with heavy punches would be destroyed before they could do much good. Torpedo boats threatened that balance with a small plywood boat potentially having the power to sink a ship of the line. This upset continued in the age of the guided missile, a disposable patrol boat has a punch equal to a guided missile cruiser. In Cold War calculations, you're looking at the total number of weapons spread across your fleet so the more hulls the better, especially seeing as any given hit could well destroy a ship.
If the new railgun for navy ships pan out, we'll now be able to fire weapons with the hitting power of a cruise missile up to 200 miles away with very minimal chance of intercept. If it takes a big ship to mount a weapon like that, the battleship has just come back into vogue. That kind of hitting power also hornes in on aircraft carrier territory. Anti-ship missiles like the sunburn threaten to be powerful enough to crack the backs of carriers. Could it be possible to armor a battleship sufficient to counter one, or develop active defenses that could credibly take them down? And how many sunburns would it take to saturate those hypothetical defenses? If it costs you $100 million in missiles to take down a $10 billion carrier (factoring in cost of air wing on top of hull, plus inflation), is it a fair trade? I'd think so.
Also, he doesn't address the issue that long-range kinetic impactors can make most space combat irrelevant if they are going fast enough. There's not much Earth could do if there were large mass drivers on say Demos and Phobos sending fairly small projectiles at targets on the Moon or Earth or targeting large space installations. Again in this situation orbital mechanics would matter. But when the planets are in the correct positions, such setups would render local space combat irrelevant.
In any space combat scenario I can imagine, planets are fucked. Like you said above, the planets can't maneuver. I don't know if you could count on accurately targeting space stations -- I'd think a weapon traveling slow enough to maneuver effectively like that would be slow enough to intercept. But if you have antimatter available you just put enough fuel onboard to push that sucker up to a significant fraction of the speed of light. Assuming you can bring it up to speed far enough away the engine plume is not detected, there's no way to counter such a thing, not unless you have yottawatt lasers that can vaporize the damn thing so completely even relativistic dust particles aren't hitting the planet. As has been said about asteroid impact scenarios, you can't just break the thing apart and let it burn up in the atmosphere. Even if we hit a magic button and the 5km-wide rock turned into free-flying dust, that dust still weighs the same as the full asteroid, still has the same kinetic energy, and wi
Space battles are still the realm of science fiction. Depending on how far out we push the speculative technology, we could stick with relatively hard SF with direct extrapolations of current technology or softer SF with more fanciful tech employed in a plausible and self-consistent fashion.
There are certain things you would expect, regardless of the technology. For example, consider the Starfury from Babylon 5. You have omnidirectional thrusters. This would be expected in a combat ship. It might be considered economical for a civilian ship to have one big thruster in back and for the whole ship to rotate ass-backwards for deceleration. But it might also be the case that a military ship would require the omnidirectional thrusters as well so that it can perform significant delta-v in various directions while keeping a specific attitude. One example I could think of is if the ship's primary armament is a big gun running the length of the ship necessitating the entire ship be maneuvered to aim it. You wouldn't want to have to point it away from the enemy just so the ship could maneuver.
I think the only thing that's really safe to say is that space warships will not be directly analogous to anything in our current or past experience. It's not going to be Horatio Hornblower in space, it's not going to be WWII in space, it's going to be different. I like watching the scifi movies and seeing how fairly contemporary industrial design is simply ported into space. Bulky monochrome CRT's in the 70's, color going into the 80's, flat panels start showing up in the 90's. Star Trek completely missed the idea of brilliant pretty displays though I would have to imagine trying to simulate them with the sfx budget at the time would be difficult. Robots were seen as being able to walk, that's the easy part, but doing math is hard! And those old writers had no idea just how much math something like Asimo has to do just to walk. Likewise, the robot could understand your spoken question of what's 2234*542 but it takes a minute to compute.
In all honesty, I'd put my money on a realistic space warship as driven by expert systems and automation. The humans may give operational guidelines and issue a specific command here and there but everything else is automated. No captain on the bridge shouting commands, no sweating rated crew struggling to load photon torps, no engineer running around the engine room. I think that it would make for fairly boring cinema unless the story is not about the adventure of the fight. Look at drone operations in the current wars. Guys sitting behind monitors blowing up people on the other side of the planet, then going home to the family. You're not going to get people on the edge of their seats describing the fight but there could be fertile ground for exploring the dehumanization of this remote control warfare. Joe Haldman explored it before it was a reality, now we can see how much he got right.
Check out the legal wrangling on 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' as an example. According to the producer, that was an 'unprofitable' film. Welcome to business deals in Hollywood.
Forest Gump still lost money. Unprofitable blockbuster, so sad. Don't know how that could possibly happen, wink nudge etc.
The dropping of barriers to entry is the key. You don't need to get into Blockbuster, netflix is fine. You don't need to get into the theaters, netflix I'm sure will eventually start streaming first-run movies. And with digital distribution, maybe the theaters will start scheduling one-off nights. A physical print is like $17k and only has a limited number of runs before it deteriorates. With the theaters going completely digital, they could have a hundred movies on-hand to run in any of their theaters and can set a theater from one to the other at the press of a button.
I'll be just as happy to see the wheeler-dealers fucked to death with their own severed cocks. The world has no need for them other than compost.
they remake the movie once more.
A computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet
...they probably downloaded it from pirate bay.
furthermore, there's nothing to say they still can't do that, or aren't actually doing that already. in fact, a big story in the international press about how dumb the military is on these video feeds is a good cover. one can hope, anyways, that the military is smarter than depicted in this story
I feel for that during Gulf War 1. When the war kicked off I was incensed. I could read the papers, I saw leaks talking about how we just weren't read for the deadline, there's no way we could kick off the war, it would have to be postponed. Jr. high war nerd taking what was said at face value. One of my stepdad's friends just smiled and said "Or is that what they wanted the Iraqis to think?" Oooooooooh.
Sometimes the military's smarter than you think, sometimes they're dumber.
Never been a fan of quickslime. There's many videos that just won't work any other way. It's also the only player I use on pc but I believe there are several other worthy options available.
And I do believe I was a minor during that childhood. If someone said it on the net it has to be taken seriously. I'm holding my breath waiting for the police to take Mr. Lucas into custody or, at the very least, Chris Hansen to ask him to have a seat.
So they had to shoot down her laptop. With three bullets. Missing her hard drive. That really makes sense now.
So Israeli security forces aren't just acting like stormtroopers, they're shooting like them, too!
My confidence in the airframe is low.