2) a robot will never refuse a legal yet immoral order.
Nor would they refuse an illegal order.
(or illegal operation, if you prefer..):)
There's the "legal" according to the law order and then there's the one following the proper chain of command with the right permissions. If I'm the general and I'm in charge of this unit and I'm authorized to tell it what to shoot, then telling it to shoot a tank is legal. It may also be legal for the general to tell it to shoot up a group of children walking to school. That's illegal according to the Geneva Conventions and common morality but legal as far as permissions go. I think the military would sooner let the human operator worry about who to shoot and let the robot worry about how to shoot.
1. It was on Fox. They always cancel good shows after one season. 2. That this show wasn't good was why it got a second season. Being scifi was the final nail in the coffin. 3. It wasn't very good and didn't have much direction. Writers wasted too much time on meaningless filler. 4. Most fundamental problem -- the Terminator universe is tapped out. There's not really many more stories to tell, at least not with the current characters. 5. They're trying to follow up a mega-budget best action movie of all time with a small-budget TV series. Never will a budget be more painfully obvious than in that situation. "We can't afford to fight the Romulans, we don't have the budget for it! We'll have to negotiate."
After T2 I felt that there was really no more need for any sequels, the story was done. If they absolutely had to tell a story, the only one left was the future war. Keeping up with the time travel at this point would have just become a paradox wankfest. T3 turned out to be as weak as everyone feared. T4 has the potential of being good but some of the reviews I read are fairly devastating saying it has 'splosions but no heart, no characters to invest in.
As far as a Terminator TV show goes, it has all the weaknesses of a time travel movie sequel. More terminators have to get sent back, it runs the risk of becoming Highlander except instead of immortal of the week we get terminator of the week. You also end up with villain decay. Arnie was terrifying in T1 and it took a whole movie to kill him. In the TV show you have T-800's showing up and getting whacked with a single blow. Granted, in T1 they had access to shitty weapons and a T1 going up against infantry with heavy weapons would actually be at a disadvantage. Arnie never moved fast enough to avoid taking hits in T1, he was just tough enough to absorb the damage. If the cops were armed with 50 cal machine guns, he'd probably have been immobilized. Anti-armor weapons would blow pieces off of him, hyper-alloy combat chassis or no. But this makes a lot of sense. A Terminator isn't designed to be the perfect armored fighting machine, that's what the huge tanks and hunter-killers were for. The Terminator was about infiltration, trading protection for camouflage. It can pass for a human until it gets close enough to do some damage. It can crawl through the warrens the humans live in, places where the larger units can't fit.
The producers really should have gone and invented their own show instead of making a Terminator spin-off. But if they were dead-set on doing Terminator, they should have just set the whole thing in its own continuity and said "Let's do a Terminator where we don't ignore time paradoxes but embrace them." Show the timelines changing over the course of the show, some things the characters recognize and other things are left only to the audience to observe. Ok, so originally Skynet is getting its ass kicked and decides to time travel to stop the resistance. The war was sixty years in the future and there was no John Connor, it was trying to kill someone else. Kyle Reese was sent back in time, couldn't protect the original target but met and fell in love with Sarah Connor and fathers John Connor. Knowing that the war was coming, they can create a resistance movement before Skynet strikes. The war still happens and now Skynet makes the same time travel assassination decision but focuses on John Connor instead. It fails but pieces are left behind from the original Terminator which accelerates the research program that develops Skynet. Skynet itself is unaware of these changes to the timeline. When it tries sending back a T1000, it schisms the timeline and now there are two competing futures with one common past. Only one of these futures can be realized. So now Skynet is at war with itself since each one wants to be the sole victor.
The way that would play out in the show would have been a fucking head trip. Events of previous episodes may or may not have happened. Characters who were killed may end up being alive again no
ive said it before and ill say it again. we dont need any more fighting robots or war robots. we need robots and machines that PREVENT war through simulation and complex analysis. robots and machines that can predict war, formulate resolutions to our current wars, and advance mankind as a civilization.
It won't happen.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, whene we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. -- George Orwell
Hell, you'd think the military would be receptive to lessons learned from things like wargames but they only seek to validate what they already know or have decided upon. You get no brownie points for upsetting the apple cart. You can tell the Pentagon stuff like "carriers have outlived their usefulness and are now floating death traps," you can prove it in wargames and so forth, but nothing will change until we lose a carrier or three to surprise cruise missile attacks. Just look at how long it took to convince the medieval knight his day was over. That's an attack on the very social order!
Technically speaking, a homing missile or torpedo could count as a robot weapon. We tend not to think that way because the gap between pressing the button and impact is short enough it's just like pulling the trigger on a gun and watching someone die.
Landmines and other boobyraps are, intellectually, about the same thing as an autonomous AI weapon -- they kill without human intervention, are impersonal and horrific. Yes, it's more frightening to imagine a T-800 coming after you and taking your leg off with a chainsaw but seriously, the results aren't that much different from a landmine.
When talking about the dangers of taking the human out of the loop, we've already got enough problems with humans in the loop. We took more kills from friendly fire than from the Iraqis in Gulf War 1. The more powerful the weapon, the easier the oops. I don't know how many top generals were accidentally killed by sentries back in the days of Rome -- kinda hard to accidentally run someone through with your gladius -- but just ask Stonewall Jackson how easy that sort of thing became with firearms. We'd never have gone through and killed an entire bunker of civilians by accident if our soldiers were doing the work with knives but that becomes as easy as an oops when dropping LGB's from bombers on the word of some faulty intel. Powerful weapons compound and magnify human errors.
Aside from the typical fear we have at the thought of impersonal killing machines taking us out, I think we have two other big fears -- 1) war becomes easier and less painful when robots are doing the dying and 2) a robot will never refuse a legal yet immoral order.
We've had bad wars historically but the 20th century really had them all beat. Technology allowed for total war, the bending of an entire nation's will to the obliteration of another. Ambitions grew bigger, power could be projected further, and the world became a smaller, more dangerous place. Battlefield robots will be a continuation of this trend.
Re:PLEASE CHANGE THE THUMBNAIL!!!
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Space Vulture
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· Score: 1
I'm sure when the image of the book cover is full sized, it looks like whatever image it is. But when it is lacking details due to its shrunken thumbnail size it rather looks like a flacid penis from the side.
Flip it 180 degrees and it looks like it's saluting the flag.
Re:Heroin? What Kinda Book Reading Do You Do, JR?
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Space Vulture
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· Score: 2, Funny
The book reads like the cereal style stories it imitates.
Once again Space Vulture is after the hero's lucky charms.
If they mandated a device which prevented people driving when fatigued, or had a pint, or when distracted, or when it's raining, the kinds of things that cause most accidents, it'd be a huge civil liberties breach. I mean, there's no legal prohibition to driving when you're a little tired or a little drunk or listening to NPR or there's a bit of drizzle, but you'd make them de facto illegal if you installed a device that prevented people from driving in that state. There is a legal prohibition to driving over the limit, though.
I think it would be awful to install these nanny devices on all cars BUT I think they're an absolutely excellent idea once someone has broken society's trust in them or they are a minor. If I had kids, they'd have to put a lot of money towards the first car and it would be underpowered and have GPS speed monitoring. Kids don't know how to handle the power without getting in a wreck. Anyone with a DUI should have a breathalyzer installed in the car. He has to breathe in it to turn on the car. Stick a camera on it to make sure he's the one breathing.
The other thing is that we need to have greater penalties for people who abuse their situation. How can anyone wrack up four or five DUI's or six charges of driving without a license? They should have had their wheels yanked on the second violation and be in jail for 10 years on the third. Lives are at risk here.
While that would be cool for us, it was really pretty ridiculous for the use it was given in the Terminator movies. I mean, come on... the most efficient way to get information from a cyborg's archives into working memory is by displaying it in English in the visual field? In the peripheral vision, no less?
The original Cylons were even better. What's the best way to pilot a raider? Strap in three robots, give them manual controls! And how do they communicate? By vibrating air molecules inside the ship! Wait, why was it pressurized again? So I take it if Cylons were in a ship that lost atmo, they'd have to communicate with sign language?
That's right up there with Transformers, robots sitting in chairs at control panels, looking at video screens, and talking into telephones.
How, having had our good laugh at this, I wonder how a Terminator-style robot would perceive that kind of information? I suppose any sensory recording from the unit would have a visual component as well as shitloads of onboard and environmental data that would be impossible for a human to fully appreciate. For humans debugging the prototypes of what Skynet eventually refined, I figure we'd probably see all shorts of HUD data that could be overlaid on top of the image for our benefit but Skynet wouldn't need it, nor would the terminator. I remember seeing a few years back an example of what sensory fusion and augmented reality could represent for a pilot. It showed transparent nested bubbles overlaid on the landscape representing the detection and engagement range of SAM's.
If we're talking about technical problems with the basic terminator design, I think the hydraulics and exposed interior of the chassis is probably the worst. To pass for human, a terminator would need to have muscles attaching to the endoskeleton at the right spots and flexing naturally along with the motion of the form. The superhuman strength would come from motors enclosed within the joints so as to keep them from becoming rusty and gunked up with the blood and bodily fluids. Still, thems jus some nitpicks. It still looks badass and terrifying.
Transformers is a well-made movie if you like Michael Bay's style. It's not a well-made movie in the "film as art" sense, but that's not the point. If someone goes to see one of his movies expecting to see Citizen Kane or 2001, they bought the wrong ticket.
It's not a well-made movie for people who want coherent plots, likable characters, quality entertainment.
While I agree it's a -bit- soon to be calling the reboot of the franchise a 'success', they have proven that it's possible. All they have to do is keep doing what they did.
Of course, I make that sound much simpler than it actually is, even assuming they really -know- why it's so successful. I've seen many franchises that get the first one spot-on, but then don't understand why. (Matrix, I'm looking at you!)
I hate the term franchise but I'll make a comparison to comics. Some stories are meant to be told and then they're done. The Sandman is like that. There's other characters who are perennial, everyone wants to have a shot at them. I grew up with the Justice League, Marvel characters. Batman will always be there, so will Spider-Man. But you build up such a backlog of continuity, especially all of the stupid retcons and editorial brainfarts, it gets cumbersome. With stage plays there's the tradition of putting together a new cast and reviving a beloved play. We're talking live theater, watching a recording of a good performance from twenty years ago is nice but is just not the same thing as being there. That's basically the way I see continuity reboots.
Marvel did one of those with their most popular books, Ultimates I think they called it. Saw some at the library. Basically its a reboot for the newer fans, the ones not steeped in the old continuity. Looks like they did it for Avengers, Xmen, Spiderman, not sure how many others. Nobody put the old books in the shredder, they can still be read and enjoyed. But the characters are stripped of the bulky backstory and reinvented for a new generation. This makes a great deal of sense. More accessible for new readers, old readers get to be surprised. So long as they avoid stupid gimmicks like going all dark and angsty, throwing in ridiculous sex appeal characters and so forth, they should be fine.
As far as Trek goes, I think the whole franchise is fucked out and should be put out of its misery. If they want to do something new in the same universe, create a new crew and try something different. My personal druthers would be to create new stuff, surprise us with new characters, settings, ideas.
What gives? In the first movie, I believe, they used props. They looked real enough.
What about the first Hulk movie? I haven't seen the movie, I'll admit. But from the trailer it was obvious the CGI did not fit into the movie at all. Remember Jurassic Park? How fricking old is that movie? How can it be that it looked more realistic than newer movies?
An artist needs both skills and tools. Time as well if it's something complicated.
Jurassic park still impresses the hell out of me. In terms of creature effects I don't think that first movie was eclipsed until Lord of the Rings.
You can sit a master sculptor down with play-dough and he'll come up with something interesting. You can sit me down with the finest tools and marble available and I'll just produce gravel.
We tend to expect that movies will look better and better every succeeding year but we forget that there's still artistry involved and fancy technology won't replace the need for that artistry. We had singers 30 years ago who sounded great and we have singers today who sound even better due to improved recording technology. But if you stack Ella Fitzgerald up against Britney Spears, you'd think music died. No, that's not it. Garbage in, garbage out, that's what's happening.
Some movies are made to entertain people between the ages of 4 and 70 (i.e. spiderman). The wider the age range, the less room there is for typical plot elements, because younger audiences get bored quickly. Some movies are pretty good just because of their CGI alone. I might be risking my geek-card here, but none of the new Star Wars were actually that boring due to all the big-budget CGI/effects.
"A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." -- George Lucas, before the fall
The most essential task of any story is drawing in the audience. The most essential task of any actor is to be interesting. When the audience is engaged, the story is successful.
Special effects are just an example of the distracting fluff poor writers throw at a story to try and make it interesting. It could just have easily been sex or violence.
The Marx Brothers had a very scientific approach to making their movies. They would have a framework for the sketches to hang off of, the loose storyline, and they would experiment with shaking things up as they moved their act around the vaudeville circuit. Sometimes it would be a new skit, sometimes just a punchline. Often times they wouldn't know why one was seen as funnier than another, they just knew which got the better response. By the time they were ready to film, their script was scientifically tested and proven to be a laugh-maker.
I laughed when I read about that because it went along with something I'd already decided for myself -- you know you have a good story and good actors if you can put them on an empty stage, do a reading and have the audience interested. If you have a script and actors that can survive this test, just imagine how good it'll be with costumes and sets and a real movie wrapped around it.
Star Wars A New Hope had us engaged from the start. The music, the title crawl, dropping us right into that story. The special effects blew us away, of course, seeing those huge ships. But when we saw the brutality of the firefight and Darth come out of the smoke, we were hooked. That movie came out the year I was born. When I first saw it I appreciated it for the pretty shapes and sounds. As I got older and had subsequent viewings I could appreciate it on more levels. The hints of galactic politics left room for geeky speculation without getting mired in poorly done senate scenes. Of course, we need only look at a number of good movies to see how senate chamber and court room scenes can be done in an utterly engaging fashion.
I won't comment on the script and plot of the new Star Trek here, I'll just comment on the special effects and cinematography. They Sucked. I'm sick of the hyperkinetic Bourne Identity shakey-cam. It's old. It sucks. I'm over it. I'm sure I would have rated the quality of the CGI work more highly if they'd have bolted the camera down to something so I could tell what the fuck I'm looking at.
A small anecdote, if I may be allowed: During my second year in architecture school I had a professor that gave us absurd amounts of work above and beyond that of the other studio sections. Her justification? So that we would learn work ethics even if it meant staying up all night. She even had a definition for the all-nighter. According to her, if we had time to go home and take a shower, it was not a true all-nighter.
Sleep deprivation removes my inhibitions. If I were in your class, before the end of the semester I'd have chinned the bitch. This is no different from academic hazing.
I don't fault people for not knowing what the blinky bits are. What I fault is when they ask for advice and then don't fucking listen.
I shit you not, I actually had this conversation --
"Why did you buy Vista? We had this discussion last week and I told you you didn't need it, your computer couldn't run it, and you aren't missing anything."
"But I thought I needed Vista to be legal on my computer."
"No, for the fuck of Christ, no. Just make sure you don't open the box and you should be able to return it."
The next day.
"My little one opened the Vista and tried installing it. Now I don't have my stuff where I had my stuff."
"You never made backups of anything, did you?"
"No. The computer is as far back on the desk as it can go. How much further should I push it?"
Except for the fact that only people who are technical seem to use them. All my non technical friends when I watch them browse the Internet it is quite painful. They keep on clicking a new application to open the browser for every page they want open at the same time. Google the URL (which I won't correct them as it is probably safer that way as they don't go to a mistyped URL and get a bunch of junk). When they have a lot of browsers open they Minimize and maximize or move windows around until the find the right one.
What drives me batty is when people open windows explorer windows to get to certain folders, then close them instead of minimize only to have to open them up again a minute later. I have to sit on my hands to keep from ripping the mouse away from them.
For all the venom poured at the feet of Gartner, they are only saying what I have been saying since for months.
Yeah. It's just such a duh statement, though. That's why we're making fun of them, they're either restating the completely obvious or making inaccurate predictions.
In other news, Gartner advises not to upgrade computer to Windows 7 while in the tub.
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So does this mean torture's ok and waterboarding might prevent the heat death of the universe?
Get over yourself, you twat, whoever you are. That was funny.
So does this mean torture's ok and waterboarding might prevent the heat death of the universe?
2) a robot will never refuse a legal yet immoral order.
Nor would they refuse an illegal order.
(or illegal operation, if you prefer..) :)
There's the "legal" according to the law order and then there's the one following the proper chain of command with the right permissions. If I'm the general and I'm in charge of this unit and I'm authorized to tell it what to shoot, then telling it to shoot a tank is legal. It may also be legal for the general to tell it to shoot up a group of children walking to school. That's illegal according to the Geneva Conventions and common morality but legal as far as permissions go. I think the military would sooner let the human operator worry about who to shoot and let the robot worry about how to shoot.
1. It was on Fox. They always cancel good shows after one season.
2. That this show wasn't good was why it got a second season. Being scifi was the final nail in the coffin.
3. It wasn't very good and didn't have much direction. Writers wasted too much time on meaningless filler.
4. Most fundamental problem -- the Terminator universe is tapped out. There's not really many more stories to tell, at least not with the current characters.
5. They're trying to follow up a mega-budget best action movie of all time with a small-budget TV series. Never will a budget be more painfully obvious than in that situation. "We can't afford to fight the Romulans, we don't have the budget for it! We'll have to negotiate."
After T2 I felt that there was really no more need for any sequels, the story was done. If they absolutely had to tell a story, the only one left was the future war. Keeping up with the time travel at this point would have just become a paradox wankfest. T3 turned out to be as weak as everyone feared. T4 has the potential of being good but some of the reviews I read are fairly devastating saying it has 'splosions but no heart, no characters to invest in.
As far as a Terminator TV show goes, it has all the weaknesses of a time travel movie sequel. More terminators have to get sent back, it runs the risk of becoming Highlander except instead of immortal of the week we get terminator of the week. You also end up with villain decay. Arnie was terrifying in T1 and it took a whole movie to kill him. In the TV show you have T-800's showing up and getting whacked with a single blow. Granted, in T1 they had access to shitty weapons and a T1 going up against infantry with heavy weapons would actually be at a disadvantage. Arnie never moved fast enough to avoid taking hits in T1, he was just tough enough to absorb the damage. If the cops were armed with 50 cal machine guns, he'd probably have been immobilized. Anti-armor weapons would blow pieces off of him, hyper-alloy combat chassis or no. But this makes a lot of sense. A Terminator isn't designed to be the perfect armored fighting machine, that's what the huge tanks and hunter-killers were for. The Terminator was about infiltration, trading protection for camouflage. It can pass for a human until it gets close enough to do some damage. It can crawl through the warrens the humans live in, places where the larger units can't fit.
The producers really should have gone and invented their own show instead of making a Terminator spin-off. But if they were dead-set on doing Terminator, they should have just set the whole thing in its own continuity and said "Let's do a Terminator where we don't ignore time paradoxes but embrace them." Show the timelines changing over the course of the show, some things the characters recognize and other things are left only to the audience to observe. Ok, so originally Skynet is getting its ass kicked and decides to time travel to stop the resistance. The war was sixty years in the future and there was no John Connor, it was trying to kill someone else. Kyle Reese was sent back in time, couldn't protect the original target but met and fell in love with Sarah Connor and fathers John Connor. Knowing that the war was coming, they can create a resistance movement before Skynet strikes. The war still happens and now Skynet makes the same time travel assassination decision but focuses on John Connor instead. It fails but pieces are left behind from the original Terminator which accelerates the research program that develops Skynet. Skynet itself is unaware of these changes to the timeline. When it tries sending back a T1000, it schisms the timeline and now there are two competing futures with one common past. Only one of these futures can be realized. So now Skynet is at war with itself since each one wants to be the sole victor.
The way that would play out in the show would have been a fucking head trip. Events of previous episodes may or may not have happened. Characters who were killed may end up being alive again no
ive said it before and ill say it again. we dont need any more fighting robots or war robots. we need robots and machines that PREVENT war through simulation and complex analysis. robots and machines that can predict war, formulate resolutions to our current wars, and advance mankind as a civilization.
It won't happen.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, whene we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, is possible to carry this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. -- George Orwell
Hell, you'd think the military would be receptive to lessons learned from things like wargames but they only seek to validate what they already know or have decided upon. You get no brownie points for upsetting the apple cart. You can tell the Pentagon stuff like "carriers have outlived their usefulness and are now floating death traps," you can prove it in wargames and so forth, but nothing will change until we lose a carrier or three to surprise cruise missile attacks. Just look at how long it took to convince the medieval knight his day was over. That's an attack on the very social order!
He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a 'software glitch.'
"You call that a GLITCH?!"
When conducting a demo in the board room, make sure you don't load the ED-209 with live rounds.
Technically speaking, a homing missile or torpedo could count as a robot weapon. We tend not to think that way because the gap between pressing the button and impact is short enough it's just like pulling the trigger on a gun and watching someone die.
Landmines and other boobyraps are, intellectually, about the same thing as an autonomous AI weapon -- they kill without human intervention, are impersonal and horrific. Yes, it's more frightening to imagine a T-800 coming after you and taking your leg off with a chainsaw but seriously, the results aren't that much different from a landmine.
When talking about the dangers of taking the human out of the loop, we've already got enough problems with humans in the loop. We took more kills from friendly fire than from the Iraqis in Gulf War 1. The more powerful the weapon, the easier the oops. I don't know how many top generals were accidentally killed by sentries back in the days of Rome -- kinda hard to accidentally run someone through with your gladius -- but just ask Stonewall Jackson how easy that sort of thing became with firearms. We'd never have gone through and killed an entire bunker of civilians by accident if our soldiers were doing the work with knives but that becomes as easy as an oops when dropping LGB's from bombers on the word of some faulty intel. Powerful weapons compound and magnify human errors.
Aside from the typical fear we have at the thought of impersonal killing machines taking us out, I think we have two other big fears -- 1) war becomes easier and less painful when robots are doing the dying and 2) a robot will never refuse a legal yet immoral order.
We've had bad wars historically but the 20th century really had them all beat. Technology allowed for total war, the bending of an entire nation's will to the obliteration of another. Ambitions grew bigger, power could be projected further, and the world became a smaller, more dangerous place. Battlefield robots will be a continuation of this trend.
I'm sure when the image of the book cover is full sized, it looks like whatever image it is. But when it is lacking details due to its shrunken thumbnail size it rather looks like a flacid penis from the side.
Flip it 180 degrees and it looks like it's saluting the flag.
The book reads like the cereal style stories it imitates.
Once again Space Vulture is after the hero's lucky charms.
To destroy Paminella's tower, bake the hall in the candle of her brain.
Where does that come from? Can't google it and it's remarkably nonsensical.
If they mandated a device which prevented people driving when fatigued, or had a pint, or when distracted, or when it's raining, the kinds of things that cause most accidents, it'd be a huge civil liberties breach. I mean, there's no legal prohibition to driving when you're a little tired or a little drunk or listening to NPR or there's a bit of drizzle, but you'd make them de facto illegal if you installed a device that prevented people from driving in that state. There is a legal prohibition to driving over the limit, though.
I think it would be awful to install these nanny devices on all cars BUT I think they're an absolutely excellent idea once someone has broken society's trust in them or they are a minor. If I had kids, they'd have to put a lot of money towards the first car and it would be underpowered and have GPS speed monitoring. Kids don't know how to handle the power without getting in a wreck. Anyone with a DUI should have a breathalyzer installed in the car. He has to breathe in it to turn on the car. Stick a camera on it to make sure he's the one breathing.
The other thing is that we need to have greater penalties for people who abuse their situation. How can anyone wrack up four or five DUI's or six charges of driving without a license? They should have had their wheels yanked on the second violation and be in jail for 10 years on the third. Lives are at risk here.
Microsoft's patent practice is crippling the operating system as well as they have patented the process of crippling it.
While that would be cool for us, it was really pretty ridiculous for the use it was given in the Terminator movies. I mean, come on... the most efficient way to get information from a cyborg's archives into working memory is by displaying it in English in the visual field? In the peripheral vision, no less?
The original Cylons were even better. What's the best way to pilot a raider? Strap in three robots, give them manual controls! And how do they communicate? By vibrating air molecules inside the ship! Wait, why was it pressurized again? So I take it if Cylons were in a ship that lost atmo, they'd have to communicate with sign language?
That's right up there with Transformers, robots sitting in chairs at control panels, looking at video screens, and talking into telephones.
How, having had our good laugh at this, I wonder how a Terminator-style robot would perceive that kind of information? I suppose any sensory recording from the unit would have a visual component as well as shitloads of onboard and environmental data that would be impossible for a human to fully appreciate. For humans debugging the prototypes of what Skynet eventually refined, I figure we'd probably see all shorts of HUD data that could be overlaid on top of the image for our benefit but Skynet wouldn't need it, nor would the terminator. I remember seeing a few years back an example of what sensory fusion and augmented reality could represent for a pilot. It showed transparent nested bubbles overlaid on the landscape representing the detection and engagement range of SAM's.
If we're talking about technical problems with the basic terminator design, I think the hydraulics and exposed interior of the chassis is probably the worst. To pass for human, a terminator would need to have muscles attaching to the endoskeleton at the right spots and flexing naturally along with the motion of the form. The superhuman strength would come from motors enclosed within the joints so as to keep them from becoming rusty and gunked up with the blood and bodily fluids. Still, thems jus some nitpicks. It still looks badass and terrifying.
Transformers is a well-made movie if you like Michael Bay's style. It's not a well-made movie in the "film as art" sense, but that's not the point. If someone goes to see one of his movies expecting to see Citizen Kane or 2001, they bought the wrong ticket.
It's not a well-made movie for people who want coherent plots, likable characters, quality entertainment.
While I agree it's a -bit- soon to be calling the reboot of the franchise a 'success', they have proven that it's possible. All they have to do is keep doing what they did.
Of course, I make that sound much simpler than it actually is, even assuming they really -know- why it's so successful. I've seen many franchises that get the first one spot-on, but then don't understand why. (Matrix, I'm looking at you!)
I hate the term franchise but I'll make a comparison to comics. Some stories are meant to be told and then they're done. The Sandman is like that. There's other characters who are perennial, everyone wants to have a shot at them. I grew up with the Justice League, Marvel characters. Batman will always be there, so will Spider-Man. But you build up such a backlog of continuity, especially all of the stupid retcons and editorial brainfarts, it gets cumbersome. With stage plays there's the tradition of putting together a new cast and reviving a beloved play. We're talking live theater, watching a recording of a good performance from twenty years ago is nice but is just not the same thing as being there. That's basically the way I see continuity reboots.
Marvel did one of those with their most popular books, Ultimates I think they called it. Saw some at the library. Basically its a reboot for the newer fans, the ones not steeped in the old continuity. Looks like they did it for Avengers, Xmen, Spiderman, not sure how many others. Nobody put the old books in the shredder, they can still be read and enjoyed. But the characters are stripped of the bulky backstory and reinvented for a new generation. This makes a great deal of sense. More accessible for new readers, old readers get to be surprised. So long as they avoid stupid gimmicks like going all dark and angsty, throwing in ridiculous sex appeal characters and so forth, they should be fine.
As far as Trek goes, I think the whole franchise is fucked out and should be put out of its misery. If they want to do something new in the same universe, create a new crew and try something different. My personal druthers would be to create new stuff, surprise us with new characters, settings, ideas.
What gives? In the first movie, I believe, they used props. They looked real enough.
What about the first Hulk movie? I haven't seen the movie, I'll admit. But from the trailer it was obvious the CGI did not fit into the movie at all. Remember Jurassic Park? How fricking old is that movie? How can it be that it looked more realistic than newer movies?
An artist needs both skills and tools. Time as well if it's something complicated.
Jurassic park still impresses the hell out of me. In terms of creature effects I don't think that first movie was eclipsed until Lord of the Rings.
You can sit a master sculptor down with play-dough and he'll come up with something interesting. You can sit me down with the finest tools and marble available and I'll just produce gravel.
We tend to expect that movies will look better and better every succeeding year but we forget that there's still artistry involved and fancy technology won't replace the need for that artistry. We had singers 30 years ago who sounded great and we have singers today who sound even better due to improved recording technology. But if you stack Ella Fitzgerald up against Britney Spears, you'd think music died. No, that's not it. Garbage in, garbage out, that's what's happening.
Oh come now... Transformers is a decent movie.
You're missing a sarcasm tag I hope?
Some movies are made to entertain people between the ages of 4 and 70 (i.e. spiderman). The wider the age range, the less room there is for typical plot elements, because younger audiences get bored quickly. Some movies are pretty good just because of their CGI alone. I might be risking my geek-card here, but none of the new Star Wars were actually that boring due to all the big-budget CGI/effects.
"A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." -- George Lucas, before the fall
The most essential task of any story is drawing in the audience. The most essential task of any actor is to be interesting. When the audience is engaged, the story is successful.
Special effects are just an example of the distracting fluff poor writers throw at a story to try and make it interesting. It could just have easily been sex or violence.
The Marx Brothers had a very scientific approach to making their movies. They would have a framework for the sketches to hang off of, the loose storyline, and they would experiment with shaking things up as they moved their act around the vaudeville circuit. Sometimes it would be a new skit, sometimes just a punchline. Often times they wouldn't know why one was seen as funnier than another, they just knew which got the better response. By the time they were ready to film, their script was scientifically tested and proven to be a laugh-maker.
I laughed when I read about that because it went along with something I'd already decided for myself -- you know you have a good story and good actors if you can put them on an empty stage, do a reading and have the audience interested. If you have a script and actors that can survive this test, just imagine how good it'll be with costumes and sets and a real movie wrapped around it.
Star Wars A New Hope had us engaged from the start. The music, the title crawl, dropping us right into that story. The special effects blew us away, of course, seeing those huge ships. But when we saw the brutality of the firefight and Darth come out of the smoke, we were hooked. That movie came out the year I was born. When I first saw it I appreciated it for the pretty shapes and sounds. As I got older and had subsequent viewings I could appreciate it on more levels. The hints of galactic politics left room for geeky speculation without getting mired in poorly done senate scenes. Of course, we need only look at a number of good movies to see how senate chamber and court room scenes can be done in an utterly engaging fashion.
I won't comment on the script and plot of the new Star Trek here, I'll just comment on the special effects and cinematography. They Sucked. I'm sick of the hyperkinetic Bourne Identity shakey-cam. It's old. It sucks. I'm over it. I'm sure I would have rated the quality of the CGI work more highly if they'd have bolted the camera down to something so I could tell what the fuck I'm looking at.
He claims prior Dark Art.
A small anecdote, if I may be allowed: During my second year in architecture school I had a professor that gave us absurd amounts of work above and beyond that of the other studio sections. Her justification? So that we would learn work ethics even if it meant staying up all night. She even had a definition for the all-nighter. According to her, if we had time to go home and take a shower, it was not a true all-nighter.
Sleep deprivation removes my inhibitions. If I were in your class, before the end of the semester I'd have chinned the bitch. This is no different from academic hazing.
Sounds like one of those open secrets like "When did the shuttle launch?"
"Sorry, it's carrying a classified military payload and we cannot comment on it."
"I heard a loud rumble at 2pm and saw a pillar of fire rising from the Cape. Was that the shuttle?"
"We can neither confirm nor deny."
"Then I'll post it on the internet."
"ZOMG!!!! Teh tarrists know everything now! Throw this man in prison!"
I don't fault people for not knowing what the blinky bits are. What I fault is when they ask for advice and then don't fucking listen.
I shit you not, I actually had this conversation --
"Why did you buy Vista? We had this discussion last week and I told you you didn't need it, your computer couldn't run it, and you aren't missing anything."
"But I thought I needed Vista to be legal on my computer."
"No, for the fuck of Christ, no. Just make sure you don't open the box and you should be able to return it."
The next day.
"My little one opened the Vista and tried installing it. Now I don't have my stuff where I had my stuff."
"You never made backups of anything, did you?"
"No. The computer is as far back on the desk as it can go. How much further should I push it?"
Except for the fact that only people who are technical seem to use them. All my non technical friends when I watch them browse the Internet it is quite painful. They keep on clicking a new application to open the browser for every page they want open at the same time. Google the URL (which I won't correct them as it is probably safer that way as they don't go to a mistyped URL and get a bunch of junk). When they have a lot of browsers open they Minimize and maximize or move windows around until the find the right one.
What drives me batty is when people open windows explorer windows to get to certain folders, then close them instead of minimize only to have to open them up again a minute later. I have to sit on my hands to keep from ripping the mouse away from them.
For all the venom poured at the feet of Gartner, they are only saying what I have been saying since for months.
Yeah. It's just such a duh statement, though. That's why we're making fun of them, they're either restating the completely obvious or making inaccurate predictions.
In other news, Gartner advises not to upgrade computer to Windows 7 while in the tub.
They have lots of men with thick necks and big guns. Buy some plane tickets and pay a visit. Make 'em an offer they can't refuse.