Actually, they're using multiple Vectored Cow Flatulence Propulsion Modules. They have cows suspended in frames that squeeze the cows in the right places producing hugh amounts of thrust. If you've read this far...then it must be true.
Unfortunately, they don't have the kinks worked out in the drive yet. Every once in a while a cow gets badly mutilated by a damaged frame. So they just drop down over some unsuspecting dairy farm and make a quick overnight swap - thereby adding cattle mutilations to the rumors about UFOs.
just a question, from what input does the satalite generate the data to send to the GPS reciever? Or how does the satalite no where to send the data? Odds are, your Receiver is also transmitting something.
Nope. The satellites determine their positions from triangulating ground signals and one another's signals. Each satellite transmits its own position. The receiver determines its own position by triangulating the signals of as many satellites as possible. The GPS receiver is merely a receiver with enough brainpower to do some simple geometry.
I agree. Now should someone who paid full price for 10.0 - 10.1.5 have to pay full price for 10.2?
I wouldn't structure it that way. I'd make OS X say $200, OS X 10.1 $30, OS X 10.2 $100, and anything in between free. Of course, the only difference between that and what Apple is doing is that they charged a lot less for OS X (of course, one could say that was a special promotional pricing to drive early adoption), somewhat more for 10.2, and somewhat less for 10.1.
I didn't pay for 10.1; I will (grudgingly) pay for 10.2.
The sensible thing is to have even-numbered point revisions be major revisions, odd-numbered be minor overhauls, and full digit revisions be new products.
Not necessarily. There's something to be said for extemporaneous writing -- sometimes it's good to publish something before you've had the opportunity to second-guess it. Personally, I like to edit copy to death, but that's my preference. Whether extemporaneous or meticulously edited, I think the work should be judged on its own merits. You can't assume something is bad based on time frame in which it was written.
Johnson's Rasselas was I believe written in about a week - from his mother's death until the time when he had to pay the undertaker's bill! But it is edited, do not doubt that.
Editing does, in fact, affect the quality of written work. Unedited work is usually unreadable. But one can, if one is particularly focused, do a whole lot of editing and rewriting in a short amount of time.
Ultimately a blog novel would be nothing more than a diary novel with more than one person entering information in a diary. Not revolutionary, but an interesting idea. At one point I was working on an email novel - the entire novel would be made up of the emails written among a group of characters. But this is little more than a variation on the epistolary novel.
It's a decent idea, but hardly worth too much fuss about.
If I write my pages to the exact specifications of the W3C, and something doesn't render properly in I.E., then I'll alienate lots of people.
99% of the time, this isn't a problem. Most of the places where IE's support is non-standard is because it either a. rendered malformed code with corrections that may or may not be what the author intended (something Mozilla stays away from), or b. renders things that MS has two ways of doing, either according to standards or according to a proprietary method.
Do you honestly think that new versions of slashcode aren't checked out with I.E. to see if they look right, on the principle of "I.E. is wrong, we shouldn't account for it"? There's my rhetorical question.
Funny thing is, the slash code looks damn good in Mozilla and IE. So what are you afraid of?
199 Canadian, and no, that is the local price, they unfortunatly pay me in CAN$ and as such for me personally the upgrade is 70 Bucks more than for you.
Only if your paycheck in Canadian dollars is the same numerical amount as an American's paycheck in American dollars for the same job and the same hours and benefits. Otherwise, no, CA$199 ~ US$149 or so. A little more, but not bad.
They're cheap as pins, practically, and after all, they do hold 1.44 MB formatted; and most of the stuff that I need to carry around with me will fit on that.
I would think that that commodore 64 was slashdotted by the article poster before it even got to slashdot.
Nope. I looked at it when there were already 30 comments on the thread. Stood up pretty damned well for an ancient video game console with delusions of grandeur.
That's why you get it to all run wirelessly on bluetooth so you have to be within the 20 ft limit (or whatever small number it is) so that fsckage is limited and no script kiddie can hit everything at once.
When you're within 20 ft, the obvious solution is TO PUT A &%$#@*! KNOB ON THE THING, not to put bluetooth, a webserver, and VNC on it.
Who else things that they should have the Hitchhiker's Trilogy Movies (yea 5 movies in a Trillogy would really screw up most people). I think it would be really sucessful, and alot easier to do than LoTR was. It's not quite as complex, or long, easier to condense too...
Oh my. The answer is . . . Douglas Adams did, for one. He wrote what is reportedly a pretty good script for HHGTTG for Disney, which was concerned about the lack of an obvious hero (his workaround for this is hilarious: -paraphrase-well, for we English, just surviving in absurd bizzare circumstances IS herois-endparaphrase; another studio was concerned that sf comedy was not a genre with much of a track record (then Men In Black came out . ..).
As for it not being as complex, well, no, but it's complex enough to be a problem - and there's the whole "how do you actually depict a guy with three arms and two heads?" problem, and the whole issue of how one gets across the narrative bits properly (take a look at the two putrid versions of Dune for examples of how difficult characters' thought processes are to get into a movie in a way that works; for the narration - the stuff that BBC gave to "the Book" the problem would be the same).
And is it really easier to condense? The whole thing is about tone, and someone somewhere will complain about the loss of Bowagger the Infinitely Prolonged, or the dog swallowing the massive alien invasion army launched by Arthur Dent's complaints about not being able to get his lifestyle in order, or complain if the young woman in the cafe at the opening of HHGTTG isn't the same actress in the same pose as the one who plays Fenchurch at the start of the fourth movie.
Free86 4.x versions are a LOT better on this than earlier versions. See the "font de-uglification" HOWTO if you want to get halfway (but only halfway) decent fonts.
Everyone knows that the GUIs on Linux systems aren't impressive, and that the Desktop Metaphor is getting stale. The problem is, no one has come up with an alternative that works. And I don't see any mention of alternatives here, either.
It's a difficult problem. That's way noone has an alternative available (yet).
So no, you're wrong. Pricing 10.2 as a for-sale upgrade only (except for specific price-protection situations) won't "sour anyone who bought 10.1 server." Unless they're pretty unreasonable and unrealistic people with no knowledge of how this sort of thing usually works, they won't be "soured" at all.
Whoops, that paragraph should have been deleted, or at least emphasized as a quote of the parent, in the above posting. The proper conclusion should have been something agreeing with the thrust of the parent article, if disagreeing with some of the details.
For example, Microsoft offers upgrades to Windows XP for owners of '98, ME, NT4, and 2000 only, and that price is $199. If you're still running '95, you can only upgrade to XP by buying the full $299 retail package, or by buying a new computer.
Read all the above as "Professional." For "Home," decrease all prices by $100. Mind you, OS X is more comparable to Windows XP Professional than to any other MS operating system . . .
With SGI you have to pay $500 for each point release of the OS, unless you stay under a support contract.
While this is a far comparandum for Mac OS X Server, it is not reasonable to compare SGI to a consumer home computer operating system like OS X standard.
So the idea that you should get OS X 10.2 for free or almost for free is out of line with the way the industry works. Bug fixes are free: 10.0.[1-4] and 10.1.[1-5] were free downloads to all users, whether they were under AppleCare or not.
Basically, one comparing to Windows or the old MacOS - the only relevant OSes here, as they are the only true home consumer OSes for desktop and laptop machines - would expect all three kinds of upgrade: bug fixes (10.1.5 is a bugfix), for free; minor upgrades (10.1 and e.g. Windows 98 Second Edition) which are basically stable versions of an operating system that still needed work when it came out, for a relatively low upgrade price (say $30), and major upgrades (Windows 98 relative to Windows 95, or OS X 10.2 relative to OS X 10.[0-1]) for a steeper price, but still cheaper than buying the OS separately (around $100 or so). Also, one would expect from MS's pricing policy that a fresh install disk would cost about $100 more than a major upgrade; but Apple don't play that game.
And as new feature releases goes, $129 is the lowest price in the industry, as far as I know.
Well, I don't know; Linuxes are cheaper (e.g., RedHat 7.3 is cheaper), but we all know that the model is completely different for OSOSen.
The thing is, it never really sank inthat Apple was going to an odd-number-minor-upgrade / even-number-major-upgrade release number system until now. Once you think of OS X 10.2 as the Windows 98 to OS X's Windows 95, the pricing makes a lot more sense. (And after all, Windows 98 was just Windows 4.1, and Windows 95 was Windows 4.0).
So no, you're wrong. Pricing 10.2 as a for-sale upgrade only (except for specific price-protection situations) won't "sour anyone who bought 10.1 server." Unless they're pretty unreasonable and unrealistic people with no knowledge of how this sort of thing usually works, they won't be "soured" at all.
Apollo 11 was the first one to land; all the subseequent ones (the program ended with Apollo 17) also landed on the moon, except for Apollo 13, which suffered a meteor collision enroute and had to return to Earth.
The Apollo program ended with 17, but there were four more flights of Apollo hardware, one of them with the Apollo name: the three Skylab missions and Apollo/Soyuz. And the Apollo/Soyuz mission might be designated Apollo 18 (I seem to remember that, but it was a damned long time ago, 27 years: I may be the only one reading this thread who remembers it real-time).
Two things improve the file format changes in Word:
1. Word users are finally sick and tired of not being able to send documents to users of older versions of Word, so the Word file format is much more stable than it was at the height of the WordPerfect / Word rivalry (Corel ought to be banished for what they did to WordPerfect after v. 8 - malicious neglect, I call it).
2. Word is heavily based upon Unicode, which is an open standard; so "accented characters" should no longer be a problem if OpenOffice includes decent Unicode support (which I believe v. 1 does). In fact, since Office v.X does NOT include decent Unicode support, for non-English users OpenOffice might conceivably be a better match to Office for Windows than the MBU product is!
I find this very, very interesting. Also interesting is the fact that one of the brighter bulbs on the Mozilla project now works at Apple, suggesting that Chimera might be getting a more central place in OS X (I don't know if it will be in Jaguar or in OS X 10.3 or some subsequent version).
Hm, there's the dark force that accelerates the universe's expansion, and now there's the "mysterious force" that deccelerates a space probe? What's next: the Irresponsible Force, which is what causes events to take place (interstellar eruptions, interplanetary collisions, graduate students' completion of their dissertations) at the last possible moment before they become impossible?
1. It's basically hard science fiction (ok, they have hyperspace, but it's used entirely in an interplanetary setting in the series, though there are one or two hints of interstellar travel). It's set in a terraformed Solar System infested by gangs, ubiquitous crime, and a somewhat corrupt interplanetary police force.
2. The characterization is excellent, especially of the three main characters (Spike, Jet, Faye).
3. The music is good; some of it is very good.
4. The drawing is very high quality, especially for anime.
5. The whole thing is 24 hours of episodes laying the groundwork for one very, very powerful finale.
6. The early episodes are mediocre. It doesn't really get good until they introduce Radical Edward (it's more the idea of the AI doodling on the Earth's surface to replace the Nazca Lines that were eroded by reentering debris from the gate accident that caught me, than the character of Radical Edward, who's comic relief of a kind that I suspect goes over better in Japan than in the US).
Actually with the XP Pro upgrade CD I believe you needed a 2k cd, you weren't allowed to 'upgrade' from 98, or ME, and maybe not even NT 4 and less.
Wrong. I upgraded from ME to XP Pro at the upgrade price of $199. Of course, it sounds like the price to upgrade from OS X 10.1.5 to OS X 10.2 is going to be a lot lower than that $129 pricetag, so I'm happy with my Mac, too.
I'd say that the grafitti portion has been pasted in from a photo of another device, and the navigation buttons from a third. Just doesn't look real to me. That doesn't mean anything, but we were all treated to somewhat similar photos last year purporting to be the Apple PDA (you know, just before the iPod came out), it's at least 50/50 that it's a fake.
Am I the only person who liked this movie? Yes, it was kind of stupid, but I still liked it. I mean really, it is no more or no less believeable than ANY Star Wars movie.
Besides, it had a young, hot Lea Thompson as an 80's punk rocker.
It wasn't that kind of believability. In those terms, I don't find any science fiction believable (except pure don't-violate-the-laws-of-physics hard SF), but it doesn't necessarily violate my willingness to suspend disbelief as much as Howard the Duck did. And Howard the Duck was just kinda boring.
Lea Thompson as a punk rocker is about as believable (in any terms) as Christian Slater as a Zen monk.
Lucas can be fun, even Howard can be fun, in the same way that Plan 9 can be (and I don't mean the operating system). But I think the movie deserves its bad rap.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they're using multiple Vectored Cow Flatulence Propulsion Modules. They have cows suspended in frames that squeeze the cows in the right places producing hugh amounts of thrust. If you've read this far...then it must be true.
Unfortunately, they don't have the kinks worked out in the drive yet. Every once in a while a cow gets badly mutilated by a damaged frame. So they just drop down over some unsuspecting dairy farm and make a quick overnight swap - thereby adding cattle mutilations to the rumors about UFOs.
just a question, from what input does the satalite generate the data to send to the GPS reciever? Or how does the satalite no where to send the data? Odds are, your Receiver is also transmitting something.
Nope. The satellites determine their positions from triangulating ground signals and one another's signals. Each satellite transmits its own position. The receiver determines its own position by triangulating the signals of as many satellites as possible. The GPS receiver is merely a receiver with enough brainpower to do some simple geometry.
I agree. Now should someone who paid full price for 10.0 - 10.1.5 have to pay full price for 10.2?
I wouldn't structure it that way. I'd make OS X say $200, OS X 10.1 $30, OS X 10.2 $100, and anything in between free. Of course, the only difference between that and what Apple is doing is that they charged a lot less for OS X (of course, one could say that was a special promotional pricing to drive early adoption), somewhat more for 10.2, and somewhat less for 10.1.
I didn't pay for 10.1; I will (grudgingly) pay for 10.2.
The sensible thing is to have even-numbered point revisions be major revisions, odd-numbered be minor overhauls, and full digit revisions be new products.
Not necessarily. There's something to be said for extemporaneous writing -- sometimes it's good to publish something before you've had the opportunity to second-guess it. Personally, I like to edit copy to death, but that's my preference. Whether extemporaneous or meticulously edited, I think the work should be judged on its own merits. You can't assume something is bad based on time frame in which it was written.
Johnson's Rasselas was I believe written in about a week - from his mother's death until the time when he had to pay the undertaker's bill! But it is edited, do not doubt that.
Editing does, in fact, affect the quality of written work. Unedited work is usually unreadable. But one can, if one is particularly focused, do a whole lot of editing and rewriting in a short amount of time.
Ultimately a blog novel would be nothing more than a diary novel with more than one person entering information in a diary. Not revolutionary, but an interesting idea. At one point I was working on an email novel - the entire novel would be made up of the emails written among a group of characters. But this is little more than a variation on the epistolary novel.
It's a decent idea, but hardly worth too much fuss about.
If I write my pages to the exact specifications of the W3C, and something doesn't render properly in I.E., then I'll alienate lots of people.
99% of the time, this isn't a problem. Most of the places where IE's support is non-standard is because it either a. rendered malformed code with corrections that may or may not be what the author intended (something Mozilla stays away from), or b. renders things that MS has two ways of doing, either according to standards or according to a proprietary method.
Do you honestly think that new versions of slashcode aren't checked out with I.E. to see if they look right, on the principle of "I.E. is wrong, we shouldn't account for it"? There's my rhetorical question.
Funny thing is, the slash code looks damn good in Mozilla and IE. So what are you afraid of?
199 Canadian, and no, that is the local price, they unfortunatly pay me in CAN$ and as such for me personally the upgrade is 70 Bucks more than for you.
Only if your paycheck in Canadian dollars is the same numerical amount as an American's paycheck in American dollars for the same job and the same hours and benefits. Otherwise, no, CA$199 ~ US$149 or so. A little more, but not bad.
They're cheap as pins, practically, and after all, they do hold 1.44 MB formatted; and most of the stuff that I need to carry around with me will fit on that.
Windows XP I can't really comment on, as I haven't used it. However, calling it NT5.1 seems a bit absurd to me.
In Windows XP, open up a command line window. It says
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\Documents and Settings\username>OS X 10.2 is as significant an update to OS X 10.0 as Windows XP is an update of Windows 2000, regardless of point release designations.
I would think that that commodore 64 was slashdotted by the article poster before it even got to slashdot.
Nope. I looked at it when there were already 30 comments on the thread. Stood up pretty damned well for an ancient video game console with delusions of grandeur.
That's why you get it to all run wirelessly on bluetooth so you have to be within the 20 ft limit (or whatever small number it is) so that fsckage is limited and no script kiddie can hit everything at once.
When you're within 20 ft, the obvious solution is TO PUT A &%$#@*! KNOB ON THE THING, not to put bluetooth, a webserver, and VNC on it.
Who else things that they should have the Hitchhiker's Trilogy Movies (yea 5 movies in a Trillogy would really screw up most people). I think it would be really sucessful, and alot easier to do than LoTR was. It's not quite as complex, or long, easier to condense too...
Oh my. The answer is . . . Douglas Adams did, for one. He wrote what is reportedly a pretty good script for HHGTTG for Disney, which was concerned about the lack of an obvious hero (his workaround for this is hilarious: -paraphrase-well, for we English, just surviving in absurd bizzare circumstances IS herois-endparaphrase; another studio was concerned that sf comedy was not a genre with much of a track record (then Men In Black came out . . .).
As for it not being as complex, well, no, but it's complex enough to be a problem - and there's the whole "how do you actually depict a guy with three arms and two heads?" problem, and the whole issue of how one gets across the narrative bits properly (take a look at the two putrid versions of Dune for examples of how difficult characters' thought processes are to get into a movie in a way that works; for the narration - the stuff that BBC gave to "the Book" the problem would be the same).
And is it really easier to condense? The whole thing is about tone, and someone somewhere will complain about the loss of Bowagger the Infinitely Prolonged, or the dog swallowing the massive alien invasion army launched by Arthur Dent's complaints about not being able to get his lifestyle in order, or complain if the young woman in the cafe at the opening of HHGTTG isn't the same actress in the same pose as the one who plays Fenchurch at the start of the fourth movie.
Free86 4.x versions are a LOT better on this than earlier versions. See the "font de-uglification" HOWTO if you want to get halfway (but only halfway) decent fonts.
Everyone knows that the GUIs on Linux systems aren't impressive, and that the Desktop Metaphor is getting stale. The problem is, no one has come up with an alternative that works. And I don't see any mention of alternatives here, either.
It's a difficult problem. That's way noone has an alternative available (yet).
So no, you're wrong. Pricing 10.2 as a for-sale upgrade only (except for specific price-protection situations) won't "sour anyone who bought 10.1 server." Unless they're pretty unreasonable and unrealistic people with no knowledge of how this sort of thing usually works, they won't be "soured" at all.
Whoops, that paragraph should have been deleted, or at least emphasized as a quote of the parent, in the above posting. The proper conclusion should have been something agreeing with the thrust of the parent article, if disagreeing with some of the details.
For example, Microsoft offers upgrades to Windows XP for owners of '98, ME, NT4, and 2000 only, and that price is $199. If you're still running '95, you can only upgrade to XP by buying the full $299 retail package, or by buying a new computer.
Read all the above as "Professional." For "Home," decrease all prices by $100. Mind you, OS X is more comparable to Windows XP Professional than to any other MS operating system . . .
With SGI you have to pay $500 for each point release of the OS, unless you stay under a support contract.
While this is a far comparandum for Mac OS X Server, it is not reasonable to compare SGI to a consumer home computer operating system like OS X standard.
So the idea that you should get OS X 10.2 for free or almost for free is out of line with the way the industry works. Bug fixes are free: 10.0.[1-4] and 10.1.[1-5] were free downloads to all users, whether they were under AppleCare or not.
Basically, one comparing to Windows or the old MacOS - the only relevant OSes here, as they are the only true home consumer OSes for desktop and laptop machines - would expect all three kinds of upgrade: bug fixes (10.1.5 is a bugfix), for free; minor upgrades (10.1 and e.g. Windows 98 Second Edition) which are basically stable versions of an operating system that still needed work when it came out, for a relatively low upgrade price (say $30), and major upgrades (Windows 98 relative to Windows 95, or OS X 10.2 relative to OS X 10.[0-1]) for a steeper price, but still cheaper than buying the OS separately (around $100 or so). Also, one would expect from MS's pricing policy that a fresh install disk would cost about $100 more than a major upgrade; but Apple don't play that game.
And as new feature releases goes, $129 is the lowest price in the industry, as far as I know.
Well, I don't know; Linuxes are cheaper (e.g., RedHat 7.3 is cheaper), but we all know that the model is completely different for OSOSen.
The thing is, it never really sank inthat Apple was going to an odd-number-minor-upgrade / even-number-major-upgrade release number system until now. Once you think of OS X 10.2 as the Windows 98 to OS X's Windows 95, the pricing makes a lot more sense. (And after all, Windows 98 was just Windows 4.1, and Windows 95 was Windows 4.0).
So no, you're wrong. Pricing 10.2 as a for-sale upgrade only (except for specific price-protection situations) won't "sour anyone who bought 10.1 server." Unless they're pretty unreasonable and unrealistic people with no knowledge of how this sort of thing usually works, they won't be "soured" at all.Apollo 11 was the first one to land; all the subseequent ones (the program ended with Apollo 17) also landed on the moon, except for Apollo 13, which suffered a meteor collision enroute and had to return to Earth.
The Apollo program ended with 17, but there were four more flights of Apollo hardware, one of them with the Apollo name: the three Skylab missions and Apollo/Soyuz. And the Apollo/Soyuz mission might be designated Apollo 18 (I seem to remember that, but it was a damned long time ago, 27 years: I may be the only one reading this thread who remembers it real-time).
Two things improve the file format changes in Word: 1. Word users are finally sick and tired of not being able to send documents to users of older versions of Word, so the Word file format is much more stable than it was at the height of the WordPerfect / Word rivalry (Corel ought to be banished for what they did to WordPerfect after v. 8 - malicious neglect, I call it). 2. Word is heavily based upon Unicode, which is an open standard; so "accented characters" should no longer be a problem if OpenOffice includes decent Unicode support (which I believe v. 1 does). In fact, since Office v.X does NOT include decent Unicode support, for non-English users OpenOffice might conceivably be a better match to Office for Windows than the MBU product is! I find this very, very interesting. Also interesting is the fact that one of the brighter bulbs on the Mozilla project now works at Apple, suggesting that Chimera might be getting a more central place in OS X (I don't know if it will be in Jaguar or in OS X 10.3 or some subsequent version).
Actually, it might have been worth the $70 to buy that domain just for the joke - see how many folks would believe it . . .
Hm, there's the dark force that accelerates the universe's expansion, and now there's the "mysterious force" that deccelerates a space probe? What's next: the Irresponsible Force, which is what causes events to take place (interstellar eruptions, interplanetary collisions, graduate students' completion of their dissertations) at the last possible moment before they become impossible?
1. It's basically hard science fiction (ok, they have hyperspace, but it's used entirely in an interplanetary setting in the series, though there are one or two hints of interstellar travel). It's set in a terraformed Solar System infested by gangs, ubiquitous crime, and a somewhat corrupt interplanetary police force.
2. The characterization is excellent, especially of the three main characters (Spike, Jet, Faye).
3. The music is good; some of it is very good.
4. The drawing is very high quality, especially for anime.
5. The whole thing is 24 hours of episodes laying the groundwork for one very, very powerful finale.
6. The early episodes are mediocre. It doesn't really get good until they introduce Radical Edward (it's more the idea of the AI doodling on the Earth's surface to replace the Nazca Lines that were eroded by reentering debris from the gate accident that caught me, than the character of Radical Edward, who's comic relief of a kind that I suspect goes over better in Japan than in the US).
Actually with the XP Pro upgrade CD I believe you needed a 2k cd, you weren't allowed to 'upgrade' from 98, or ME, and maybe not even NT 4 and less.
Wrong. I upgraded from ME to XP Pro at the upgrade price of $199. Of course, it sounds like the price to upgrade from OS X 10.1.5 to OS X 10.2 is going to be a lot lower than that $129 pricetag, so I'm happy with my Mac, too.
I have two hopes for v6:
Your wish is their command: Be Inc. completes takeover of Palm. Here's hoping that Be does for Palm what NeXT did for Apple!
I'd say that the grafitti portion has been pasted in from a photo of another device, and the navigation buttons from a third. Just doesn't look real to me. That doesn't mean anything, but we were all treated to somewhat similar photos last year purporting to be the Apple PDA (you know, just before the iPod came out), it's at least 50/50 that it's a fake.
Mind you, at least he never made Howard the Duck.
Am I the only person who liked this movie? Yes, it was kind of stupid, but I still liked it. I mean really, it is no more or no less believeable than ANY Star Wars movie.
Besides, it had a young, hot Lea Thompson as an 80's punk rocker.
It wasn't that kind of believability. In those terms, I don't find any science fiction believable (except pure don't-violate-the-laws-of-physics hard SF), but it doesn't necessarily violate my willingness to suspend disbelief as much as Howard the Duck did. And Howard the Duck was just kinda boring.
Lea Thompson as a punk rocker is about as believable (in any terms) as Christian Slater as a Zen monk.
Lucas can be fun, even Howard can be fun, in the same way that Plan 9 can be (and I don't mean the operating system). But I think the movie deserves its bad rap.