because the bands pay production costs most of the time. Here's a better question: when CDs first came out, their outrageous price versus cassettes was justified by the fact that there were only 2 stamping plants in operation. Why didn't they ever go down in price?
Left-wing propaganda? You mean like The Expanse, or "another excuse for George W. Archer to beat up on the bad guys?" For crying out loud, doesn't this just SMELL "September 11 Exploitation" to you morons?
I'm well aware of what a parsec is - it is the distance at which an observed object must be located for observations 1 au apart to show an apparent motion against the background, or parallax, of the object to subtend one second of arc. Unfortunately, when he wrote that line, Lucas wasn't. He now claims that the what Han meant is that he managed to shave a few parsecs off the distance of the Kessel run (apparently unaware that one can almost always travel in a perfectly straight line in space, if you have the unlimited Delta vee science fiction writers always have).
Everything that Owen and Obi-Wan says about Luke's father points to his father having gone on some fool quest with Obi-Wan and gotten himself killed.
Good luck, man. I think when you're dealing with a free license, you're in a position of strength against those who want to make a profit by violating your license. They're taking a risk that you aren't, because you don't have any investment to lose (other than your sweat equity, which you're giving away for solid ideological reasons). JCz on the other hand is in a position to lose an investment, but he's got you cooperating with him, so I'm sure he'll take the black hat down.
A quick marketing suggestion, though, on the website: put your academic qualifications up there! Since you're teaching college level classes, I assume you've got an MA or a PhD from somewhere. Let people know that and know where: write something like "Ben Crowell is on the faculty of Fullerton College in Fullerton, California, he holds an MA/PhD in Physics from _______, and his course books are in use at several institutions of higher education" or some such thing. You need to provide three kinds of validation for the quality of your books: peer endorsements/web of trust, which you already have; traditional academic qualifications (almost like the academic analog to a medical license); and argument from content (especially if you have reviews that talk about your content in depth and what's good and bad about it).
None. The evidence is in Episode V, when Vader says that the Emperor has foreseen that "the son of Skywalker" would be strong in the Force. Thing is, I think Vader knows all along where Luke is. He just doesn't know 1. that Obi-Wan is there too, and 2. that he has a daughter, too, hiding on Alderaan. It seems a little odd that Vader doesn't immediately recognize that Leia (whom he's obviously met before; remember Leia claims she should have recognized Vader's "stench") is his daughter, probably because Lucas had not yet decided that Jedi Knights should be celibate and saw Leia as a love interest for Luke, not a sister. But let's face it, Harrison Ford was a much more believable romantic lead, and making Jedi celibate gave him an explanation for Anakin's slide into darkness (love).
No, the prequels, and ROTJ, too, were not well written, and there are major continuity problems across the board that can only be explained with silliness like the "made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs" explanation. Why did Obi-Wan, when he was trying to be familiar with Vader, call him "Darth." Darth is a title, but Obi-Wan uses it like a first name. Maybe Luke's real name was supposed to be Luke Vader, or maybe Lucas didn't come up with the idea that Vader was Luke's father until after he finished the first movie.
You never actually read Dune, did you? Let's stick with the first two books, Dune and Dune, Messiah; better to ignore Children of Dune and after for now; I get the feeling that while according to Herbert, a few scenes in Children of Dune were written before Dune was published, much more of it was probably written after Dune, Messiah, and he started losing control of continuity after Dune, Messiah (originally Alia did not have ancestral memories, but only the memories of the Fremen Reverend Mothers; that changed in Children of Dune).
1. There was no weirding module in the novel. "The Weirding Way" was merely Stilgar's descriptive term for the kind of martial arts that Bene Gesserit taught (because Bene Gesserit are "weirding women," or "witches"). The whole "name is a killing word" thing in the book means only that the name "Muad'Dib" is chanted by the Fedaykin when they leap into battle, nothing more. The "word" Paul would kill Gaius Helen Mohiam with is merely his ability to shock her into silence, supposedly shock her enough to cause her a heart attack, the only thing he yells at Feyd-Rautha is "I will not say it," which shocks Feyd-Rautha (because Paul has been all but silent for most of the fight, and becuase he thinks Paul is about to die) into a momentary slip that is enough for Paul to kill him. And the Baron does not fly away into the storm, he is simply pricked with the Gom Jabbar and runs away in agony. You don't know for sure that the Guildsmen use melange until a contact lens falls from a navigator's eyes (navigators and steersmen are originally different, I think, one normal, one mildly non-human looking; not like the Guildsmen of the film or the late books). Ignore Lynch's oddities, even though it's clear from Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune that Herbert himself was taken with some of Lynch's ideas, they aren't relevant to the first book.
2. Paul Atreides accepts the Fremen public name, Muad'dib, meaning "Mouse," upon his acceptance as a Fremen; his tribe has a secret tribal name for him, "Usul," "the base of the pillar." "Usul" means that Stilgar expects the martial arts talents he and his mother bring with them to provide a new foundation of strength to the tribe; "Muad'dib" he picks because he's amused by one of the kangaroo mice he hears hopping in the night, not realizing that the kangaroo mouse is held in high esteem in Fremen culture as "the instructor of boys" (which, as a teacher of the martial arts, Paul will of course become).
Paul is a mentat only because he comes from a line bred for intelligence by both the Bene Gesserit and the Atreides themselves, and both of his parents think a mentat Duke would be unstoppable. The fact that he's a mentat isn't coincidental to Paul's status as the Kwisatz Haderach, it's an obvious side effect.
3. The Kwisatz Haderach, "the one who can be many places at once," is the male who can survive the Agony that makes a woman a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. You get the idea that only a very few Bene Gesserit women in a generation attempt the Agony, and only a certain percentage survive it. And no woman in generations had been stupid enough to try it while pregnant; it was rare enough that Jessica, a trained Bene Gesserit, didn't know the effects.
The Bene Gesserit had been manipulating breeding for 90 generations, primarily the Corrino, Atreides, and Harkonnnen lines (all of them related; the Atreides are cousins of the Corrinos on the distaff side, and Count Fenring is a relative of the Corrinos and probably of the Atreides), looking for the talent which will make the Kwisatz Haderach possible. The key is the ability to look into the future, for Reverend Mothers are only able (through Other Memory) to look into the past. While Guild Navigators are able to look into the future, they see it only dimly, where the Kwisatz Haderach sees it very sharply, sharply enough to fit history around his vision.
4. The Missionari Protectiva, an arm of the Bene Gesserit charged with traveling to dangerous planets
Read the prologue to the novel Star Wars. It has the basic Palpatine story arc layed out, and there are hints in all the novelizations that the stormtroopers are clones and that Boba Fett is a clone. The original Star Wars script was entitled "The Journal of the Whills," making it clear that the two droids were the central characters. Most of the broad strokes are there in the backstory to EP 4-6; only the details were added later. (Of course, it is the details which have made the two new movies disappointing.)
Ironically, Star Wars was originally based in part on the Seven Samurai, another Kurosawa great. Lucas never came close in subtlety or grace to Kurosawa's work, never mind Shakespeare.
Hidden Fortress, not Seven Samurai. Plot of Hidden Fortress: a disguised senior General must help a hidden princess survive a crossing through enemy territory from a hidden fortress in their recently defeated kingdom to safety in an allied kingdom with the aid of two fools. The two fools were by Lucas's admission among the inspirations for R2D2 and C3PO. Princess and General seem obvious seeds for Obi-Wan and Leia.
If you've seen Seven Samurai, you'd have a hard time figuring out what about the movie could have inspired Star Wars. Mind you, I think you could have rewritten the big fight scene in AOTC to be a replay of the big fight scene in 7 Samurai (when the bad guys attack the village), but I don't see anything more than minor details suggesting 7 Samurai in Star Wars.
There are elements in the stories that are taken from other Kurosawa films (the bit with Han and Chewy chasing, and then being chased by, the Stormtroopers reminds me of scenes in a couple of Kurosawa films). But the biggest influence from Kurosawa's oeuvre was clearly Hidden Fortress. Anyone who liked Star Was for reasons other than the spaceships ought to watch it.
Take your books, put them on your own cds, charge about the same amount he does - but in your ebay ads, point to a URI where they can download them for free. Pretty quickly his market will dry up for your stuff.
The Internet did not come from NeXT, it was invented on a DARPA grant in the 60s or early 70s by a bunch of scientists from MCI etc. You're thinking of the fact that CERN's own Tim Berners-Lee wrote www, the original web brower and web server, the html language, and the http all on a NeXT box - but he did it specifically to be accessible from all the other hardware (it just looked much cooler on the NeXT box, at least until Mosaic came along).
Actually, there are also treaties on "Peaceful Uses of Outer Space" (http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SpaceLaw/gares/html/ gares_14_1472.html) separate from the orbital nuclear ban. The nuclear ban itself is quite ambiguous:
"States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;"
Note that WMD phrase again (this is from 1966).
There's another one specifically about the moon which I think has not been signed by the US, which prohibits the use of the moon for other than peaceful purposes.
That said, the use of a large explosion for peaceful means probably wouldn't be banned.
Yes, it IS for desktop computers. To read the spec:
IBM PowerPC -- In the Hand, On the Desk, and Everywhere else Lisa Su Director, PowerPC and Emerging Products
PowerPC 970 is the first in a family of new 9xx 64-bit Microprocessors Key Features: Based on award-winning Power4 technology Up to 1.8 GHz Proven 64-bit microprocessor architecture with native 32-bit application compatibility Up to 6.4 GB/s system interface Implements SIMD coprocessor Full Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) support
Target Applications
64-bit Linux Applications Desktop/Workstation Entry Server
1. X11 didn't get a lot of press because only nerds care about X11.
2. The new hardware will not be able to boot OS 9 and earlier.
3. Most speculation says that MS bought VPC for the emulation engine for use with multiple virtual machines on one server.
4. Why would I want to cripple my IBM 970 machine (if one were available) by adding an x86 emulation card, when I can do the same thing in software with VPC (since I have to pay the MS tax for the OS anyway, I might as well pay for VPC, too) and not mod the box?
You're comparing it to an Omnimax film. I'm not sure about whether Omnimax and IMAX can be shown in the same theaters, as I see Omnimax at the Boston MOS and have only seen plain IMAX at the Navy Pier. The Omnimax format is more compelling. (And for other reasons, I just don't like the Navy Pier theater; including their selection, cleanliness, etc.) Search for Omnimax on this page http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/filmformats.ht ml
It sounds like it's basically an elliptical presentation of an image from IMAX film.
Slashdot Mirror
erm... I jwish we could edit posts here
S'alright. I do it all the time, man.
Anyway, this is just another way for the labels to get more money.
Xanadu-Xtroot, not trying to rag you, but you are aware of the concept of a rhetorical question, right? :-)
Don't worry, it would take the combined power of the entire Imperial Star Fleet to Slashdot Google. But only one Rebel scum can Google Slashdot.
And the question is: "Imagine how stupid you'll look holding your wrist up to your head to talk/listen?"
Next time, geniuses, RTFA.
because the bands pay production costs most of the time. Here's a better question: when CDs first came out, their outrageous price versus cassettes was justified by the fact that there were only 2 stamping plants in operation. Why didn't they ever go down in price?
Left-wing propaganda? You mean like The Expanse, or "another excuse for George W. Archer to beat up on the bad guys?" For crying out loud, doesn't this just SMELL "September 11 Exploitation" to you morons?
If it turns out that Camino doesn't block them, it looks like its time to go back to Lynx.
Nor on the AAC files you rip. Read the &^$%#@! help file.
I think that's the point of the cradle.
That's transcoding from compressed format to differing compressed format; it might sound awful.
I'm well aware of what a parsec is - it is the distance at which an observed object must be located for observations 1 au apart to show an apparent motion against the background, or parallax, of the object to subtend one second of arc. Unfortunately, when he wrote that line, Lucas wasn't. He now claims that the what Han meant is that he managed to shave a few parsecs off the distance of the Kessel run (apparently unaware that one can almost always travel in a perfectly straight line in space, if you have the unlimited Delta vee science fiction writers always have).
Everything that Owen and Obi-Wan says about Luke's father points to his father having gone on some fool quest with Obi-Wan and gotten himself killed.
A quick marketing suggestion, though, on the website: put your academic qualifications up there! Since you're teaching college level classes, I assume you've got an MA or a PhD from somewhere. Let people know that and know where: write something like "Ben Crowell is on the faculty of Fullerton College in Fullerton, California, he holds an MA/PhD in Physics from _______, and his course books are in use at several institutions of higher education" or some such thing. You need to provide three kinds of validation for the quality of your books: peer endorsements/web of trust, which you already have; traditional academic qualifications (almost like the academic analog to a medical license); and argument from content (especially if you have reviews that talk about your content in depth and what's good and bad about it).
No, the prequels, and ROTJ, too, were not well written, and there are major continuity problems across the board that can only be explained with silliness like the "made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs" explanation. Why did Obi-Wan, when he was trying to be familiar with Vader, call him "Darth." Darth is a title, but Obi-Wan uses it like a first name. Maybe Luke's real name was supposed to be Luke Vader, or maybe Lucas didn't come up with the idea that Vader was Luke's father until after he finished the first movie.
You never actually read Dune, did you? Let's stick with the first two books, Dune and Dune, Messiah; better to ignore Children of Dune and after for now; I get the feeling that while according to Herbert, a few scenes in Children of Dune were written before Dune was published, much more of it was probably written after Dune, Messiah, and he started losing control of continuity after Dune, Messiah (originally Alia did not have ancestral memories, but only the memories of the Fremen Reverend Mothers; that changed in Children of Dune).
1. There was no weirding module in the novel. "The Weirding Way" was merely Stilgar's descriptive term for the kind of martial arts that Bene Gesserit taught (because Bene Gesserit are "weirding women," or "witches"). The whole "name is a killing word" thing in the book means only that the name "Muad'Dib" is chanted by the Fedaykin when they leap into battle, nothing more. The "word" Paul would kill Gaius Helen Mohiam with is merely his ability to shock her into silence, supposedly shock her enough to cause her a heart attack, the only thing he yells at Feyd-Rautha is "I will not say it," which shocks Feyd-Rautha (because Paul has been all but silent for most of the fight, and becuase he thinks Paul is about to die) into a momentary slip that is enough for Paul to kill him. And the Baron does not fly away into the storm, he is simply pricked with the Gom Jabbar and runs away in agony. You don't know for sure that the Guildsmen use melange until a contact lens falls from a navigator's eyes (navigators and steersmen are originally different, I think, one normal, one mildly non-human looking; not like the Guildsmen of the film or the late books). Ignore Lynch's oddities, even though it's clear from Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune that Herbert himself was taken with some of Lynch's ideas, they aren't relevant to the first book.
2. Paul Atreides accepts the Fremen public name, Muad'dib, meaning "Mouse," upon his acceptance as a Fremen; his tribe has a secret tribal name for him, "Usul," "the base of the pillar." "Usul" means that Stilgar expects the martial arts talents he and his mother bring with them to provide a new foundation of strength to the tribe; "Muad'dib" he picks because he's amused by one of the kangaroo mice he hears hopping in the night, not realizing that the kangaroo mouse is held in high esteem in Fremen culture as "the instructor of boys" (which, as a teacher of the martial arts, Paul will of course become).
Paul is a mentat only because he comes from a line bred for intelligence by both the Bene Gesserit and the Atreides themselves, and both of his parents think a mentat Duke would be unstoppable. The fact that he's a mentat isn't coincidental to Paul's status as the Kwisatz Haderach, it's an obvious side effect.
3. The Kwisatz Haderach, "the one who can be many places at once," is the male who can survive the Agony that makes a woman a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. You get the idea that only a very few Bene Gesserit women in a generation attempt the Agony, and only a certain percentage survive it. And no woman in generations had been stupid enough to try it while pregnant; it was rare enough that Jessica, a trained Bene Gesserit, didn't know the effects.
The Bene Gesserit had been manipulating breeding for 90 generations, primarily the Corrino, Atreides, and Harkonnnen lines (all of them related; the Atreides are cousins of the Corrinos on the distaff side, and Count Fenring is a relative of the Corrinos and probably of the Atreides), looking for the talent which will make the Kwisatz Haderach possible. The key is the ability to look into the future, for Reverend Mothers are only able (through Other Memory) to look into the past. While Guild Navigators are able to look into the future, they see it only dimly, where the Kwisatz Haderach sees it very sharply, sharply enough to fit history around his vision.
4. The Missionari Protectiva, an arm of the Bene Gesserit charged with traveling to dangerous planets
Read the prologue to the novel Star Wars. It has the basic Palpatine story arc layed out, and there are hints in all the novelizations that the stormtroopers are clones and that Boba Fett is a clone. The original Star Wars script was entitled "The Journal of the Whills," making it clear that the two droids were the central characters. Most of the broad strokes are there in the backstory to EP 4-6; only the details were added later. (Of course, it is the details which have made the two new movies disappointing.)
Ironically, Star Wars was originally based in part on the Seven Samurai, another Kurosawa great. Lucas never came close in subtlety or grace to Kurosawa's work, never mind Shakespeare.
Hidden Fortress, not Seven Samurai. Plot of Hidden Fortress: a disguised senior General must help a hidden princess survive a crossing through enemy territory from a hidden fortress in their recently defeated kingdom to safety in an allied kingdom with the aid of two fools. The two fools were by Lucas's admission among the inspirations for R2D2 and C3PO. Princess and General seem obvious seeds for Obi-Wan and Leia.
If you've seen Seven Samurai, you'd have a hard time figuring out what about the movie could have inspired Star Wars. Mind you, I think you could have rewritten the big fight scene in AOTC to be a replay of the big fight scene in 7 Samurai (when the bad guys attack the village), but I don't see anything more than minor details suggesting 7 Samurai in Star Wars.
There are elements in the stories that are taken from other Kurosawa films (the bit with Han and Chewy chasing, and then being chased by, the Stormtroopers reminds me of scenes in a couple of Kurosawa films). But the biggest influence from Kurosawa's oeuvre was clearly Hidden Fortress. Anyone who liked Star Was for reasons other than the spaceships ought to watch it.
Take your books, put them on your own cds, charge about the same amount he does - but in your ebay ads, point to a URI where they can download them for free. Pretty quickly his market will dry up for your stuff.
The Internet did not come from NeXT, it was invented on a DARPA grant in the 60s or early 70s by a bunch of scientists from MCI etc. You're thinking of the fact that CERN's own Tim Berners-Lee wrote www, the original web brower and web server, the html language, and the http all on a NeXT box - but he did it specifically to be accessible from all the other hardware (it just looked much cooler on the NeXT box, at least until Mosaic came along).
I'm just picturing Gore singing Linkin Park...
Good god, no, now I can't get that out of my head, and it's
[head melts like Martians' in Mars Attacks]
Yes, I should have made that clear: thanks.
Actually, there are also treaties on "Peaceful Uses of Outer Space" (http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SpaceLaw/gares/html/ gares_14_1472.html) separate from the orbital nuclear ban. The nuclear ban itself is quite ambiguous:
"States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;"
Note that WMD phrase again (this is from 1966).
There's another one specifically about the moon which I think has not been signed by the US, which prohibits the use of the moon for other than peaceful purposes.
That said, the use of a large explosion for peaceful means probably wouldn't be banned.
Yes, it IS for desktop computers. To read the spec:
IBM PowerPC -- In the Hand, On the Desk,
and Everywhere else
Lisa Su
Director, PowerPC and Emerging Products
PowerPC 970 is the first in a family of new 9xx 64-bit Microprocessors
Key Features:
Based on award-winning Power4 technology
Up to 1.8 GHz
Proven 64-bit microprocessor architecture with native
32-bit application compatibility
Up to 6.4 GB/s system interface
Implements SIMD coprocessor
Full Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP) support
Target Applications
64-bit Linux Applications
Desktop/Workstation
Entry Server
See where it says "Target applications: Desktop?"
http://www.ibm.com/jp/chips/forum0/pdf/05.pdf
1. X11 didn't get a lot of press because only nerds care about X11.
2. The new hardware will not be able to boot OS 9 and earlier.
3. Most speculation says that MS bought VPC for the emulation engine for use with multiple virtual machines on one server.
4. Why would I want to cripple my IBM 970 machine (if one were available) by adding an x86 emulation card, when I can do the same thing in software with VPC (since I have to pay the MS tax for the OS anyway, I might as well pay for VPC, too) and not mod the box?
You're comparing it to an Omnimax film. I'm not sure about whether Omnimax and IMAX can be shown in the same theaters, as I see Omnimax at the Boston MOS and have only seen plain IMAX at the Navy Pier. The Omnimax format is more compelling. (And for other reasons, I just don't like the Navy Pier theater; including their selection, cleanliness, etc.) Search for Omnimax on this page http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/filmformats.ht ml
It sounds like it's basically an elliptical presentation of an image from IMAX film.
(Incidentally, Apple also didn't invent the idea--piles have been in scanning and document management software for Windows for years.)
Read the patent, and tell us if that's what they've had in document management software for Windows for years.