You haven't seen any of my work, yet you grade me between b and c. On what? My low poly work? My high poly work? My animation? Movies (and what part: full package, sound/motion, direction)?
"yet you still don't understand 3D enough to make an informed decision."
Huh? What, you can't beat my argument (a 3d package without certain features might be small and fast, but can't compete with a package which does have certain features needed for production), so now you spew this? In what way is my 3d knowledge not adequate, please telle me? I know enough of the actual work involved (rigging, animating, textureing, modeling, normalmapping, rendering, tracking etc) and have done that work too. Furthermore, I know quite a bit about the mathematics involved (quaternions and other linear algebra to fourier analysis) and different technique's inherrent limitations to say that even though my actual artwork might not be up to guru standards (and it's not bad, if I and my freelance employers do say so), my knowledge of the industry and the techniques are more than adequate to say that Blender just is not ready for prime time (tv, movie or even print work), no matter how fast the program works, if the workflow in the program and the techniques it makes available to me is just plain lacking.
"Let's put it this way, have you seen the recent "Incredibles" movie. Well, that would be at a d) level...."
Funny...the experts I've talked to (guys who have worked and do work on movie and tv fx...there are these intarweb message boards, you know) pretty much say it's expert work. Not surprising, given the amount of groundbreaking research that has gone into the movie, and the cream of the crop, top talent that has worked on it. When industry insiders tell me that the most respected names in the biz have outdone themselves, it pretty well tells me that an AC like you has no idea what he's talking about when he calls the incredibles just 'proficient' work.
BTW: an artist never blames his tools; you can make outstanding work in Blender and Milkshape...but it just takes too long if all you have is the basic tools; and that's just one of the reasons why Blender is not used in production.
When and how do you think radar technology would have been develloped in your perfect world? Without the impetus war gave it, it wasn't really a problem which would have been solved anytime soon. Ditto for a lot of scientific research. A lot of research would have never been done if it didn't have possible wartime uses. In that perfect world where there is no war, this research wouldn't have been done because the immediate puiblic uses arenb't immediately apparent enough. 'People fulfullment' just doesn't drive real innovation, real out-of-the-box thinking, because you don't need that to satisfy people. The internet is a case in point. Who knew we'd like a network-of-networks like that?
"In the media realm, they have their DRM solution, their media formats (both video and audio), tools for generating that media, server and client software, management tools, etc., etc., etc. It's an integrated end to end solution"
Why would I want that for my home movies? Or for the 3d animation I just made?
You could call it innovation...a better word would be 'restriction'.
As for real innovation...what has MS created that the world hasn't seen before (which is the real innovation); an OS? A programming language? Hardware specs for the hardware manufacterers? Tablet pc's? Internet (this is famous non-innovation by MS)? Chat programs? Voip?
Sorry, but the world has seen al that before. MS hasn't done anything innovating since they thought up the 'lets steal this idea and rebrand it and make billions'-scam.
OK; for one, the space race was for one purpose only: to create ICBM's. The dev costs were too high to get the US to fund it out straight, so they created a 'space race'. You'll note that the cancelation/reduction of the 'space race' happened pretty much when ICBM technology was available.
But the thing is, that's the way technology has worked. The technology of war always trickles down to the populace, from the technology to create crossbows and trebuchets, to radar, electronics, robotics...all the result of wartime technology efforts. In a way, those court intellectuals you quote are right; no wartech, no safe plane journeys aided by GPS (wartime tech too), radar and electronics.
Sounds good, really it does. But what can replace DNS? A p2p, bittorrent version of the whole DNS listings on each computer? That's just too much data, and too much accessing of that data, for people to have on their pc's. Plus, something like that seems easy to corrupt.
Which tells me you haven't used this as production software, or even tried to. There is a reason why Blender isn't used as a production platform; it's just not good enough yet.
"Stating that a 3D graphics package can do modeling and animation is like stating that the apples you are selling are, in addition to being delicious and juicy, can also be eaten."
No it isn't. There are questions of workflow and featureset (specifically features which have to do with what the program does [ie model, or in blenders case 'not supporting the full range of modeling paradigms], not just features of the program itself [it's fast, small, etc...just not relevant to a modeler/animator who needs certain features like patch modeling or reverse IK]). It is more like stating that the apples I'm eating are in fact more plump and tasty than the other apple which is small, fast, but doesn't have the pallete/texture that mine do.
Don't forget...there are a hell of a lot of single seat production 'houses'...the guys making magazine covers, short animations, adds etc. The money is always in the massmarket; or so Ford and MS found out. The high end is just to pull in people to the brand.
And I was thinking about a total re-write. It's something which just has to happen every so often, to incorporate the latest and greatest in design philosophies, architecture...hell, every decade or so it's usefull just to eliminate cruft. It's something which pays over the first couple of generations of that re-write, too (version one and two, maybe even v3 of MayaMax will have paid for the re-write, especially if they've done their product segmentation/price elasticity calculations right). Sure, it costs money, and hassle...everything does. Especially when you want to do something right.
But I still believe you're right: I think that Maya will get axed and the Maya engineers will do some minor stuff in 3dsmax v.10. It's easier to do and costs less money and less hassle. Too bad it's not what makes a better product in the end...but we both know it's the money for the CEO's which is what defines the deal.
Sorry, but Zbrush is a league of it's own. There just is no other program out there which even comes close (or even far!) to Zbrush's highpoly workflow/output (for organics, that is). Maya, Softimage and 3dsmax are years behind Zbrush in that department...Blender is decades behind.
Sure, I wouldn't use Zbrush for mechanical stuff, or even anything else....but if you do highpoly organics (like the orcs etc in LotR by WETA), you use Zbrush, period.
AutoCAD is by no means as entrenched as you think it is. And I'm not talking about the smaller shops either...very large corporations don't use it.
Which isn't strange, as Autocad is a horrible clunky thing, which up to a few years ago couldn't even open multiple drawings at once. And it's expensive, and it's workflow sucks, and it's tools make yuou do WAY too much work to get something done.
Although too many people still use it, I will give you that.
Whilst you are correct, and Blender is fun to work with (and it being free and all), none of the features you mentioned have anything to do with what the program is used for, which is modeling, animation and rendering.
That is one way of looking at it, albeit a quite realistic one.
Another way it could play out does so for pretty much the same reasons; Autodesk knows that Maya has a larger penetration, especially in the lucrative and prestigious movie segment. Just a tiny bit of bussiness acumen would also tell them that linux is a much used OS in those realms, and that linux is definitely a growing market (and will explode when Vista gets released with it's mandatory 'buy a new monitor with built in DRM' scheme).
That there will be product consolidation is a forgone conclusion; supporting two competing products is just too expensive. But Autodesk might have bought Alias as a strategic investment; they might want their linux knowledge, as well as their workflow.
So my bestcase scenario would go like this; maybe one or two more small evolutions of the existing packages, and then Autodesk releases an all new MayaMax which consolidates the best features of both programs and is crossplatform (and coincidentally costs more per license than Maya or Max did).
Hmmm...so why am I afraid that your scenario is the one which is actually going to happen?:(
You know, it used to be that people who wrote books like these were called science fiction writers. Only they added an intersting story, and usually used concepts they themselves had thought of. And if they did a near-future extrapolation, they usually thought of the good, the bad and the ambiguous (ie everything).
This guy has just ripped a few idea's from popular sci-fi, penned them down in a 'this will happen' fashion, and is now raking in the bucks. But then again, he is a futurist.
I'll have to explain that last thought. I've seen a few clips from futurist presentations. A couple of the more enlightening ones come from futurist conventions (where the best and brightest futurists speak, so I assume). These guys are freaking aura-loving, really-bad-motivational-speaking, awfull-presentation giving hippies of the most hazy, fingerwaving, dressed-up-in-wierd-shit stripe.
And I like hippies, too.
It just saddens me that a loon without an idea of his own beyond what has already filtered down to the public meme through the likes of Micheal Chrichton (Chrichton, for chissakes! Not Stephenson, Brin or Bova...Chrichton! [I liked Jurrasic Park as a book, ditto Rising Sun...but...I think you know what I mean here]), that a rip-off artist like that can pen down widely known concepts (without even a decent narrative), add nothing new or of value and then get plugged on/..
I'll do you one better; go study applied physics and get to know the subject by using Einstein's equations (among others) in actual calculations in your first year with some commentary from people who are widely respected and published. It's quite obvious that your knowledge comes from pop-sci novels, not the real thing (ie doing the actual calcultions, or even reading scientifioc papers).
"You CANNOT mess with one without messing with the other. If you manage to warp SPACE enough to traverse a given distance faster than light could, then you have also warped TIME enough to allow time travel."
And that's exactly my point (and has been, if you read my comments). The equations are quite clear on how this happens and what exactly the relationship between space and time is.
"C is a constant, an absolute."
WHICH IS WHAT I SAY IN MY POST!
"The actual perceived speed of light can be changed but from what I've seen, it amounts to quantum trickery."
No. It's the actual, real speed of light which is being increased in the exacts same way that time dilates and space contracts. Face it, light travels at different speeds in different media....the only 'constant' about c is the fact that it's the fastest speed out there...which basically means that if you can get c to be higher, you can make other things go faster too (minus the 'quantum trickery' deus ex machina...because I know a bit a bout quantum mechanics and how those experiments were done).
I also didn't send you to wikipedia. It's not something I'd do. I'd start you off at a nice simple special relativity textbook instead, like 'Dynamics and Relativity' by W.D. McComb, ISBN 0 19 850112 9 (my first year's textbook).
Also, I think you need to revise your awe of Hawking's work. Out of a hundred physicists asked who their top ten physicists of the last century was, he only made two lists. Bestseller lists, Hawking does a lot better.
Anyway, I still stand by my original statement; none of the three technologies violate any 'law of physics'.
It's because you think womholes etc. do allow for faster than light travel. They don't. If you let light travel through that wormhole, that light still is the fastes thing trvelling...sure, it would arrive sooner than light which went the long way around, but that's because the former is taking a shortcut...it's traversing less of space-time. Same with warpdrive; you're just compressing spacetime, so light has to travel a smaller 'distance'. All this doesn't change the fact that the speed of light is the fastest speed there is...it just allows the speed of light to change. That's why you nowadays read headlines like 'scientists speed up/slow down light'...they're just changing the medium through which light moves.
Well, fuck it, I tried. You have no conception of what mayor research costs, and you can't be bothered to see the difference between what a government can spend on something (and on what) versus what individuals/companies/states can (which is why governments are attractive...they can fund what the aforementioned can't). You don't have any idea what research entails nowadays, and what teams/costs are involved. Go speak to any scientist you know to get an answer you will beleive. Shit, just do a back of the envelope calculation! That is, if you have any idea what computing power and genetic sequencers cost.
You know, as I started my post with: screw it: you're convinced you know it all, yet you have no fucking clue about the fundamentals, You think that the national highway system could have been payed for by private investors, or that national defense could be payed for by angels. and you likely have no relations who could help you out. Thanks for wasting my time.
"Warp Drive, Hyperspace and Wormholes) all violate most Laws of Physics."
Actually, they don't. Wormholes however would take massive amounts of energy to hold open, and massive amounts of energy to enlarge from their planck lengths to a usable size.
Hyperspace is essentially travel through another set of dimensions than the 3 (+1 for time) we're used to. No violation of physics there, but we have no idea if there are more dimensions (although we do have good indicators). It's something we have very very little knowledge of; hyperspace is the farthest off of the three mentioned technologies, due to our massive lack of knowledge on the subject.
Warp drives are probably the least far off; they depend on warping space in front of you (compressing space-time) so that the journey through that space takes the same amount of time for the observer, but less for the rest of the universe...you travel the same distance, but because that 'distance' is smaller, when you get to your destination it turns out that you spent much less time traveling that distance. Or maybe you comprss space time to the rear, so that that space time ends up 'pushing' you forwards. Again, this is stuff we know little about (the actual geometry of space time, or rather how to influence it), mainly due to our lack of understanding of gravity (which somehow seems to tie in very much with rotation).
But anyway, neither of the technologies you mentioned violate known physics in any way. It's just that wormholes seem unpractical considering the energy requirements (although this might change when we get a better understanding of the structure of the universe), hyperspace is purely theoretical (idem ditto) and warp drive (ditto) which might be concievable when we detect our first gravitational wave.
Correct...however, it's poluting companies and companies exploiting what effectively amounts to slave labour in so called 'free market zones', as well as companies with no scruples about selling defective medicines/products which tell us time and again that total freedom is a really stupid and dangerous thing to aspire to. Total freedom means 'right of the strongest/most powerfull', and I thought that a while back people decided that that isn't what civilisation was about.
Is that knowledge, or just common denominator? Coulda been a Discreet system, considering the cash Whedon's been making. What I'm interested in also is what was used for the special effects...maya, softimage, 3dsmax...ironcad? And what about the comp work? Shake? Combustion?
Uhm...did you mispost? Or wasn't I clear enough in my post that I agree with that sentiment (or should I say the...rediculousness?...of that sentiment.)?
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You haven't seen any of my work, yet you grade me between b and c. On what? My low poly work? My high poly work? My animation? Movies (and what part: full package, sound/motion, direction)?
"yet you still don't understand 3D enough to make an informed decision."
Huh? What, you can't beat my argument (a 3d package without certain features might be small and fast, but can't compete with a package which does have certain features needed for production), so now you spew this? In what way is my 3d knowledge not adequate, please telle me? I know enough of the actual work involved (rigging, animating, textureing, modeling, normalmapping, rendering, tracking etc) and have done that work too. Furthermore, I know quite a bit about the mathematics involved (quaternions and other linear algebra to fourier analysis) and different technique's inherrent limitations to say that even though my actual artwork might not be up to guru standards (and it's not bad, if I and my freelance employers do say so), my knowledge of the industry and the techniques are more than adequate to say that Blender just is not ready for prime time (tv, movie or even print work), no matter how fast the program works, if the workflow in the program and the techniques it makes available to me is just plain lacking.
"Let's put it this way, have you seen the recent "Incredibles" movie. Well, that would be at a d) level...."
Funny...the experts I've talked to (guys who have worked and do work on movie and tv fx...there are these intarweb message boards, you know) pretty much say it's expert work. Not surprising, given the amount of groundbreaking research that has gone into the movie, and the cream of the crop, top talent that has worked on it. When industry insiders tell me that the most respected names in the biz have outdone themselves, it pretty well tells me that an AC like you has no idea what he's talking about when he calls the incredibles just 'proficient' work.
BTW: an artist never blames his tools; you can make outstanding work in Blender and Milkshape...but it just takes too long if all you have is the basic tools; and that's just one of the reasons why Blender is not used in production.
Which is not the same as society-satisfying goods. SUV's are consumer satisfying...but they're unsafe gasguzzlers too.
When and how do you think radar technology would have been develloped in your perfect world? Without the impetus war gave it, it wasn't really a problem which would have been solved anytime soon. Ditto for a lot of scientific research. A lot of research would have never been done if it didn't have possible wartime uses. In that perfect world where there is no war, this research wouldn't have been done because the immediate puiblic uses arenb't immediately apparent enough. 'People fulfullment' just doesn't drive real innovation, real out-of-the-box thinking, because you don't need that to satisfy people. The internet is a case in point. Who knew we'd like a network-of-networks like that?
Implementing something which already exists is not innovation, however.
Which reminds me:
"In the media realm, they have their DRM solution, their media formats (both video and audio), tools for generating that media, server and client software, management tools, etc., etc., etc. It's an integrated end to end solution"
Why would I want that for my home movies? Or for the 3d animation I just made?
You could call it innovation...a better word would be 'restriction'.
As for real innovation...what has MS created that the world hasn't seen before (which is the real innovation); an OS? A programming language? Hardware specs for the hardware manufacterers? Tablet pc's? Internet (this is famous non-innovation by MS)? Chat programs? Voip?
Sorry, but the world has seen al that before. MS hasn't done anything innovating since they thought up the 'lets steal this idea and rebrand it and make billions'-scam.
OK; for one, the space race was for one purpose only: to create ICBM's. The dev costs were too high to get the US to fund it out straight, so they created a 'space race'. You'll note that the cancelation/reduction of the 'space race' happened pretty much when ICBM technology was available.
But the thing is, that's the way technology has worked. The technology of war always trickles down to the populace, from the technology to create crossbows and trebuchets, to radar, electronics, robotics...all the result of wartime technology efforts. In a way, those court intellectuals you quote are right; no wartech, no safe plane journeys aided by GPS (wartime tech too), radar and electronics.
Sounds good, really it does. But what can replace DNS? A p2p, bittorrent version of the whole DNS listings on each computer? That's just too much data, and too much accessing of that data, for people to have on their pc's. Plus, something like that seems easy to corrupt.
One thing I do knwo for sure...I wouldn't want to be an employee at either (ex-Discreet)-Autodesk or Alias right now.
Which tells me you haven't used this as production software, or even tried to. There is a reason why Blender isn't used as a production platform; it's just not good enough yet.
"Stating that a 3D graphics package can do modeling and animation is like stating that the apples you are selling are, in addition to being delicious and juicy, can also be eaten."
No it isn't. There are questions of workflow and featureset (specifically features which have to do with what the program does [ie model, or in blenders case 'not supporting the full range of modeling paradigms], not just features of the program itself [it's fast, small, etc...just not relevant to a modeler/animator who needs certain features like patch modeling or reverse IK]). It is more like stating that the apples I'm eating are in fact more plump and tasty than the other apple which is small, fast, but doesn't have the pallete/texture that mine do.
Don't forget...there are a hell of a lot of single seat production 'houses'...the guys making magazine covers, short animations, adds etc. The money is always in the massmarket; or so Ford and MS found out. The high end is just to pull in people to the brand.
And I was thinking about a total re-write. It's something which just has to happen every so often, to incorporate the latest and greatest in design philosophies, architecture...hell, every decade or so it's usefull just to eliminate cruft. It's something which pays over the first couple of generations of that re-write, too (version one and two, maybe even v3 of MayaMax will have paid for the re-write, especially if they've done their product segmentation/price elasticity calculations right).
Sure, it costs money, and hassle...everything does. Especially when you want to do something right.
But I still believe you're right: I think that Maya will get axed and the Maya engineers will do some minor stuff in 3dsmax v.10. It's easier to do and costs less money and less hassle. Too bad it's not what makes a better product in the end...but we both know it's the money for the CEO's which is what defines the deal.
Sorry, but Zbrush is a league of it's own. There just is no other program out there which even comes close (or even far!) to Zbrush's highpoly workflow/output (for organics, that is). Maya, Softimage and 3dsmax are years behind Zbrush in that department...Blender is decades behind.
Sure, I wouldn't use Zbrush for mechanical stuff, or even anything else....but if you do highpoly organics (like the orcs etc in LotR by WETA), you use Zbrush, period.
AutoCAD is by no means as entrenched as you think it is. And I'm not talking about the smaller shops either...very large corporations don't use it.
Which isn't strange, as Autocad is a horrible clunky thing, which up to a few years ago couldn't even open multiple drawings at once. And it's expensive, and it's workflow sucks, and it's tools make yuou do WAY too much work to get something done.
Although too many people still use it, I will give you that.
Whilst you are correct, and Blender is fun to work with (and it being free and all), none of the features you mentioned have anything to do with what the program is used for, which is modeling, animation and rendering.
That is one way of looking at it, albeit a quite realistic one.
:(
Another way it could play out does so for pretty much the same reasons; Autodesk knows that Maya has a larger penetration, especially in the lucrative and prestigious movie segment. Just a tiny bit of bussiness acumen would also tell them that linux is a much used OS in those realms, and that linux is definitely a growing market (and will explode when Vista gets released with it's mandatory 'buy a new monitor with built in DRM' scheme).
That there will be product consolidation is a forgone conclusion; supporting two competing products is just too expensive. But Autodesk might have bought Alias as a strategic investment; they might want their linux knowledge, as well as their workflow.
So my bestcase scenario would go like this; maybe one or two more small evolutions of the existing packages, and then Autodesk releases an all new MayaMax which consolidates the best features of both programs and is crossplatform (and coincidentally costs more per license than Maya or Max did).
Hmmm...so why am I afraid that your scenario is the one which is actually going to happen?
You know, it used to be that people who wrote books like these were called science fiction writers. Only they added an intersting story, and usually used concepts they themselves had thought of. And if they did a near-future extrapolation, they usually thought of the good, the bad and the ambiguous (ie everything).
/..
This guy has just ripped a few idea's from popular sci-fi, penned them down in a 'this will happen' fashion, and is now raking in the bucks. But then again, he is a futurist.
I'll have to explain that last thought. I've seen a few clips from futurist presentations. A couple of the more enlightening ones come from futurist conventions (where the best and brightest futurists speak, so I assume). These guys are freaking aura-loving, really-bad-motivational-speaking, awfull-presentation giving hippies of the most hazy, fingerwaving, dressed-up-in-wierd-shit stripe.
And I like hippies, too.
It just saddens me that a loon without an idea of his own beyond what has already filtered down to the public meme through the likes of Micheal Chrichton (Chrichton, for chissakes! Not Stephenson, Brin or Bova...Chrichton! [I liked Jurrasic Park as a book, ditto Rising Sun...but...I think you know what I mean here]), that a rip-off artist like that can pen down widely known concepts (without even a decent narrative), add nothing new or of value and then get plugged on
I'll do you one better; go study applied physics and get to know the subject by using Einstein's equations (among others) in actual calculations in your first year with some commentary from people who are widely respected and published. It's quite obvious that your knowledge comes from pop-sci novels, not the real thing (ie doing the actual calcultions, or even reading scientifioc papers).
"You CANNOT mess with one without messing with the other. If you manage to warp SPACE enough to traverse a given distance faster than light could, then you have also warped TIME enough to allow time travel."
And that's exactly my point (and has been, if you read my comments). The equations are quite clear on how this happens and what exactly the relationship between space and time is.
"C is a constant, an absolute."
WHICH IS WHAT I SAY IN MY POST!
"The actual perceived speed of light can be changed but from what I've seen, it amounts to quantum trickery."
No. It's the actual, real speed of light which is being increased in the exacts same way that time dilates and space contracts. Face it, light travels at different speeds in different media....the only 'constant' about c is the fact that it's the fastest speed out there...which basically means that if you can get c to be higher, you can make other things go faster too (minus the 'quantum trickery' deus ex machina...because I know a bit a bout quantum mechanics and how those experiments were done).
I also didn't send you to wikipedia. It's not something I'd do. I'd start you off at a nice simple special relativity textbook instead, like 'Dynamics and Relativity' by W.D. McComb, ISBN 0 19 850112 9 (my first year's textbook).
Also, I think you need to revise your awe of Hawking's work. Out of a hundred physicists asked who their top ten physicists of the last century was, he only made two lists. Bestseller lists, Hawking does a lot better.
Anyway, I still stand by my original statement; none of the three technologies violate any 'law of physics'.
Thanks for those links! Exactly what I was looking for :)
Thanks for that. Check the linkage in the next post...turns out it's Combustion and After Effects :)
It's because you think womholes etc. do allow for faster than light travel. They don't. If you let light travel through that wormhole, that light still is the fastes thing trvelling...sure, it would arrive sooner than light which went the long way around, but that's because the former is taking a shortcut...it's traversing less of space-time. Same with warpdrive; you're just compressing spacetime, so light has to travel a smaller 'distance'. All this doesn't change the fact that the speed of light is the fastest speed there is...it just allows the speed of light to change. That's why you nowadays read headlines like 'scientists speed up/slow down light'...they're just changing the medium through which light moves.
Well, fuck it, I tried. You have no conception of what mayor research costs, and you can't be bothered to see the difference between what a government can spend on something (and on what) versus what individuals/companies/states can (which is why governments are attractive...they can fund what the aforementioned can't).
You don't have any idea what research entails nowadays, and what teams/costs are involved. Go speak to any scientist you know to get an answer you will beleive. Shit, just do a back of the envelope calculation! That is, if you have any idea what computing power and genetic sequencers cost.
You know, as I started my post with: screw it: you're convinced you know it all, yet you have no fucking clue about the fundamentals, You think that the national highway system could have been payed for by private investors, or that national defense could be payed for by angels. and you likely have no relations who could help you out. Thanks for wasting my time.
"Warp Drive, Hyperspace and Wormholes) all violate most Laws of Physics."
Actually, they don't. Wormholes however would take massive amounts of energy to hold open, and massive amounts of energy to enlarge from their planck lengths to a usable size.
Hyperspace is essentially travel through another set of dimensions than the 3 (+1 for time) we're used to. No violation of physics there, but we have no idea if there are more dimensions (although we do have good indicators). It's something we have very very little knowledge of; hyperspace is the farthest off of the three mentioned technologies, due to our massive lack of knowledge on the subject.
Warp drives are probably the least far off; they depend on warping space in front of you (compressing space-time) so that the journey through that space takes the same amount of time for the observer, but less for the rest of the universe...you travel the same distance, but because that 'distance' is smaller, when you get to your destination it turns out that you spent much less time traveling that distance. Or maybe you comprss space time to the rear, so that that space time ends up 'pushing' you forwards. Again, this is stuff we know little about (the actual geometry of space time, or rather how to influence it), mainly due to our lack of understanding of gravity (which somehow seems to tie in very much with rotation).
But anyway, neither of the technologies you mentioned violate known physics in any way. It's just that wormholes seem unpractical considering the energy requirements (although this might change when we get a better understanding of the structure of the universe), hyperspace is purely theoretical (idem ditto) and warp drive (ditto) which might be concievable when we detect our first gravitational wave.
I keep on having to remind myself how she actually joined the crew...and her with such a sweet innocent demeanor :)
Correct...however, it's poluting companies and companies exploiting what effectively amounts to slave labour in so called 'free market zones', as well as companies with no scruples about selling defective medicines/products which tell us time and again that total freedom is a really stupid and dangerous thing to aspire to.
Total freedom means 'right of the strongest/most powerfull', and I thought that a while back people decided that that isn't what civilisation was about.
Is that knowledge, or just common denominator? Coulda been a Discreet system, considering the cash Whedon's been making. What I'm interested in also is what was used for the special effects...maya, softimage, 3dsmax...ironcad? And what about the comp work? Shake? Combustion?
Uhm...did you mispost? Or wasn't I clear enough in my post that I agree with that sentiment (or should I say the ...rediculousness?...of that sentiment.)?