In an era of 2+ GHz computers with 7200+ rpm hard drives, it seems odd that Microsoft would be unable to write an application than can quickly save and open text files that, on average, run well under 50 kilobytes.
Problem is, that's 50 kB for a one-page memo inviting both colleagues in your department for lunch.
To the poster who thought that Pitch Black was nothing more than a horror movie: it combines two classic sf stories, "Nightfall" and "Alien." Both are effectively hard SF. "Nightfall" is the classic hard SF story - just imagine a planet in a multiple-star system that only has night every once in a great while (a few millennia in the story; much less time in Pitch Black). What would night mean to the inhabitants? "Alien" is based upon the simple premise of an alien predator which incubates inside a human host. A few incongruities, certainly, but pretty hard SF really (the main problems are explaining how the alien can get that big with the little amount of food it has had a chance to eat, and with how fast exactly the Nostromo travels - while they have sleep compartments, one gets the idea that normally they traveled rather faster than c).
Some don't like Tarkovsy's film. Those who say they don't like it often point to the relative lack of special effects. This tells me that they probably like action flicks rather than more avant garde films. Lem's dislike of it is based on his own (understandable and forgivable) prejudice in favor of his own story against the changes Tarkovsky made (and Lem's story is better than the film, though not by much); most other people's prejudices are based upon their unwillingness to sit through a film in subtitles with no real special effects and with rather auterish camera work. It is in its way as important a film to SF as 2001. And if you don't like 2001, then I can't help you.
Now to k-0s question:
OK, here are some things I never understood, maybe you can answer them for me. What did the creatures eat/drink for seven years?
Two possibilities: 1. they hibernated, living off the food they ate the last eclipse; 2. there's a whole other ecology underground that we don't get to see.
If the former is true, they must eat a hell of a lot each eclipse cycle. Imagine that they eat five or six times their normal weight in the course of a few days (that was eclipse period I thought was being implied). Of course, now that the planet is deserted (the creatures' population probably exploded until they ate themselves out of a habitat), most of their eating is now probably cannibalism, except for the occassional interstellar snack. So their population, which until they wiped out the planet's ecosystem had increased geometrically, will now continue to decrease geometrically until they go extinct.
I think of them as some kind of predatory alien cicadas; cicadas have a long underground development cycle, effectively a many years hibernation, and live a very, very short active adult life.
Why did the eclipse take so long when the time leading to the eclipse didn't take that long at all?
Guess I'm not sure what this means. The time leading to the eclipse? Do you mean the time from when they look up and realize that the eclipse is coming until the eclipse starts, or the time from partial to full eclipse? If the former, they just didn't pay attention to the celestial mechanics of their situation. If the latter, the planet is imagined as having a pretty clear (and thin) atmosphere, so the terminator would be pretty dramatic.
If it is a desert planet and there were no/zero/zip clouds in the sky up to and during the eclipse, then why did it start raining at the end?
There's water in the atmosphere, that's why the dew collectors and precipitators at the encampment work. The temperature must have dropped quite dramatically during the eclipse (which was total over the whole hemisphere of the moon, if the model is correct), below even the rather low dew point of a "desert" moon, causing the water eventually to precipitate out of the atmosphere. That's the idea, anyway. I'm sure having it rain was a decision on their part based upon the assumption that the temp would drop dramatically; the finding of the water precipiptators at the encampment may have been meant to foreshadow the rain storm. It does rain even in deserts occassionally; just not often (and every 7 years or 22 months or years or however long the period between eclipses is in Pitch Black is a long stretch between rains).
Anyway, that's how I explained it to myself when I saw it. Realistic enough for "willing suspension of disbelief," anyway, and pretty much hard SF.
Re:Okay, I did well on my verbal SATs, but...
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LOTR: The Two Towers
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What the hell does magisterial caesura mean?
A caesura is a breathing in a line of verse. They're a structural property that's fundamental to Anglo-Saxon verse (for instance, Beowulf), more secondary in classical verse, and rather more decorative in modern English verse.
Read it as "pause in the middle." As in, he's saying that The Two Towers is more a stopping point on the way to the "Return of the King," but a spectacular one.
Personally, I am not an anime fan. But Cowboy Beebop is superb. Tylor is ok, though it has some gratuitous stuff in it. Most of the other stuff I've seen has left me cold. The point is, don't make up your mind about the genre until you've seen the best of it. If you still feel that anime is just some kind of "Japanese porno," fine. But base your decisions upon the evidence of your senses, not just third or fourth hand information.
Do yourself a favor. Rent the DVDs, in order. Do NOT watch "The Real Folk Blues" until you've seen the rest of the series. It will be worth it. Even the "bad" episodes (and there are a few) contribute to the experience of the last episode.
I want to see / hear the latest new work by artists I admire. Unfortunately, most of the ones I admire are (because most of the ones I know about are) distributed by MPAA/RIAA member companies. It is not the artists who are responsible for the objectionable parts of the MPAA/RIAA's agenda (usually; and I for one don't think Metallica are artists), it's the management. Sure, I'd like to stick it to the management, but not so badly that I'm going to keep myself from experiencing new work that I want to see or hear. So while I may buy the stuff the RIAA / MPAA are pushing (though less and less as the years go on; there hasn't been as much interesting in the past few years), I'll still support the fight against some of the stuff they'll pulling. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe so; but that's the world I'm living in.
Yeah, the Globe article makes the point that the translation of *Solaris* is horrible (it's unreadable, actually, and I never appreciated the book until I had seen Tarkovsky's film and read *Fiasco*, which is much better served by the translator than *Solaris* - as far as a Polishless reader can determine, that is).
LotR isn't propaganda; it glorifies the villian far too much for any element of propaganda.
Glorifying the victim is actually a technique used in some kinds of (post-victory) propaganda. Roman writers made Cleopatra out to be far more than she probably was, mainly in order to make Augustus look better for having vanquished her.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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Good post, Ronfar.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2
SPOILER ALERT
Here you are. For other Slashdotters, I tried to write this so that I didn't ruin the movie for anyone who accidently came across a line or two. But you have been warned. (Fortunately, I don't think to many people go back and read Friday topics on Monday.)
Could have been worse. Just barely better than the odd numbered flicks. Not up there with the three great films (II, VI, and VIII) nor as wide in its appeal as IV. To give you some idea of the tone: if you liked Voyager better than DS9, you'd like this film better than if you liked DS9 better than Voyager.
All in all, too derivative of Wrath of Khan. There were also allusions to 2001 (Data's leap) and Excalibur (Shinzon's last scene), among others; but they were a little too complete to be mere allusions, and "read" more like Logan was lifting good plot devices from other genre movies to fill out a formula. I won't get into all the parallels with Wrath of Khan, but the battle in the Rift had several points of contact with the Mutara Nebula scene in Wrath of Khan and with the battle at the end of Undiscovered Country (one example related to undiscovered country: the bit where the Scimitar backs away from the Enterprise and the Enterprise just sits there reminded me tonally of the scene where the Enterprise backs away from Chang's Bird of Prey in VI).
The narrative was too messy. The whole thing with Troi and Shinzon was a waste of space, probably intended to motivate the bedroom scene. Folks didn't need that to motivate the bedroom scene; the motivation for that was in Encounter at Farpoint for God's sake! I thought B-4 was too intrusive a device for the narrative problems he resolved. The parallelism (B-4:Data::Shinzon:Picard) was too heavy-handed, the role he played in the Shinzon plot was unnecessary, and the whole "grow as a person" theme didn't need him: if Logan absolutely had to have Data make the analogy he did (the parallelism is brought out explicitly by Data), Data could have just referred to Lore (Paramount seems to think that they'll make more money from the film by playing to a "wider" audience than the Trek fans, forgetting that a really first-rate Trek film will draw the same Trek fans several times). I think B-4 may be a vestige of an earlier plot draft that Logan kept in because he liked the idea (and for one other reason, which I won't mention).
Picard is supposed to be some kind of tactical genius, but he makes the biggest tactical mistake in the history of the Trek films: not foreseeing where Shinzon is going to attack. Stupid, stupid, stupid; the scene with Data should have been at the beginning of their flight from Romulus and Picard should have voiced concern about having to go through the Rift. And why doesn't the Federation come to the rescue? Certainly knowing what Shinzon is up to, violating the Neutral Zone isn't a big concern anymore.
The movie should have had more of the Romulans in it, who could be far and away the most intriguing of the ST aliens if the politics were played right. I liked all the Romulan characters, and wanted to see more of them. The whole buildup to the Romulan coup could have played in parallel with the wedding scene, rather than just being one scene at the beginning, and the bedroom scene could have taken place en route to Betazed, before Enterprise was diverted to Romulus. There should have been a "good" Reman or two.
Character development could have used improvement. Worf, once again, was badly used (continuity issues tend to multiply around Worf).
At least we saw Crusher in the sickbay for once. Geordi was unused as usual. There could have been a throwaway comment about how Mrs. Troi is waiting for them on Betazed, but they preferred to leave the question hanging. Picard finally gets to do his didactic routine from the series, and with Shinzon it's appropriate; that's a lot of what we like about Picard, a lot of what we liked about Roddenberry's Trek: they're better than we are because humanity has grown. Sure, it's a bit much if you include too much of it, but one speech is about right.
The nature vs. nurture stuff was, indeed, overdone - it should have been pretty obvious by the third time Shinzon said "I'm just like you would be if you had lived my life."
The effects were good, though the collision was too violently in contradiction of physics to enable me to give it the "willing suspension of disbelief" it needed (the same with the graphic showing Romulus and Remus - if they got that close, they'd be in mutually captured synchronous orbits like Pluto and Charon [those names are pretty distracting, as I keep expecting to see the two planets suckling from a she-wolf, as myth tells us the real Romulus and Remus did. But those are the names they chose back in 1967 or so, for Balance of Terror; right on the map that Spock shows Kirk]). The lighting on Troi's face in the battle scene was ridiculous; the cinematic equivalent of a giant neon billboard saying "I'M TELEPATHIC!!!" The lighting was very good, though, in the rest of the movie, especially in the Senate and the first encounter with Shinzon.
Good acting by Hardy, Stewart, Spiner, Dorn (when he's allowed to act), and the Romulan bit players save the film from a bad draft of an often good script that should have been cleaned up before filming. I'm guessing that a lot of what I wanted to see (with the Romulans, certainly) ended up on the cutting room floor. Some good jokes (especially the exchange between Worf and Picard about the attire for the Betazed ceremony) and some good lines.
I'll probably see it one more time, and I'll buy the DVD (I'm a sucker like the rest of you). But I don't know if I'd encourage them to make another one if this is the best they can do.
Ok, why am I +3 funny and the person whose joke I'm responding to is a plain old 2? Is "smelled like warmed over Ridley Scott" and "salice salentinio" really worth 3 mod points? (which I'll probably lose for this OT posting).
2001 counts _only_ if you accept Clarke's statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Those monoliths were magic, pure and simple, not hard science.
Weren't monoliths supposed to be von Neumann machines? They aren't supposed to be magic, per se. Is it real hard SF in the sense that say "Mission of Gravity" is? Depends. Ever wonder how they get to other star systems in Hal Clement's book? Clarke's Third Law.
The closest thing I've seen to genuine hard SF is Cowboy Beebop. And the Gate spoils it's "hardness."
Some (not all) of the requirements to makes something hard SF:
No FTL
No teleportation
No telepathy or telekinesis.
No trolls, fairies, or elves.
No alien/human breeding.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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take it you didn't like Forbidden Planet [forbidden-planet.org] then....
Great point, Ronfar. The Tempest is as much SF as LOTR is. (And funny thing, I don't think that fellow Tolkien minded Shakespeare much, though he did prefer his middle English.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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Unfortunately, there isn't a good book on early modern English grammar that I know of (as your other respondent pointed out, Shakespeare's not Middle English - even the much earlier Malory is usually considered "Early Modern," rather than "Middle," English).
The syntax is actually quite similar to ours, it's mostly the vocabulary and idioms that are different, and the heavily annotated editions help you more than a book on the dialect is likely to do. (Nearly everyone I know learned the dialect that way.)
One book to get is Onian's (sp?) Shakespeare dictionary (by one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary), which only covers words whose meanings are different today from they way they were in Shakespeare's day.
Even someone with a graduate degree in Shakespeare will go back to the annotated versions (the Ardens or the Cambridge Shakespeare editions, mostly; and note that when I refer to the Ardens I mean the single volume ones, not the big one-volume edition of all of Shakespeare) when they have problems understanding the text.
Best way to learn Shakespeare is to start off with the easy annotated versions like the Signet editions, then work your way up to the Arden editions, and then finally try reading a First Folio facsimile (see below for an explanation).
The First Folio, or as Shakespeare geeks call it, 1F, was the first "official" edition of Shakespeare's collected plays, "edited" by his friends from the copies of the plays that the Globe theater prepared their performances from.
The other posting also made a good point about tapes. Listening to Shakespeare often makes more sense than reading him; and watching Shakespeare films (particularly the old BBC versions, which while they have about the same production values as Doctor Who were often splendidly acted) is even better. Kenneth Branagh's movies are good, though purists will say that they're not Shakespeare (but they follow Shakespeare about as strictly as most stage productions have, historically, and are a lot closer than say the 18th century theatergoer's experience of Shakespeare). The great thing about seeing Shakespeare performed is that the body language helps you to understand the tone better (the actors are often drawing on a repertory traditiion that helps them to understand better how the plays ought to be performed).
So, no, there isn't really a good way to do it other than piecemeal. It isn't like Perl where you pick up the Camel Book and weeks later, if you have the programming background to begin with, tada! you know Perl; a lot of it is simply the result of a lot of time spent reading, listening, and watching.
Anyway, gotta go, my Nemesis tickets are waiting for me. Sorry this all so off topic: perhaps if I pointed out that reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon is supposedly even better than reading him in the early modern English translation I'd avoid a -1 offtopic?
I think if you're a member of the SAG, they have to pay you scale at a minimum; there are probably different scale rates for mute roles versus lines. Extras don't get paid scale, they get paid a lot less (like around minimum wage). But IANAA. Maybe CleverNickName can correct that (it's not specific to ST:N).
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2
The trouble is, Shakespeare's shit isn't written in English. It's some kind of bizarre pig latin form of English that makes no sense to anyone born after 1600AD. What *I* hate is holier-than-thou fuckheads who think they are better than everyone else because they think they enjoy reading that shit.
Put some effort into it. Read it. Then get back to me about who's holier than whom.
I don't *think* I enjoy reading it, any more than I *think* I enjoy reading Douglas Adams. But I suppose that anyone who thinks that early modern English is that hard to learn should just keep their mouths shut when it comes to evaluating writing, and pray to whatever gods they honor that they never have to learn another language, like Japanese.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2
Coriolanus is superb, man. "There is a world elsewhere." You mean you've never wanted to say that to your boss?
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Say go read Beowulf in the original prose? Read Voltaire in the original French?
Beowulf is verse, not prose. And actually, yeah, I'd recommend the original to anyone who's smart enough to learn the dialect. And you can't diss my boy Geoffrey. Whan that April with his showres sote, the drought of Marche hath perced to the rote
While I do agree that one should broaden thier horizens, some of your choices are a bit lacking.
Absolutely fscking brilliant, man! Alluding to Pope's Essay on Criticism by saying that first rate literature is a bit lacking while imitating the bad spellings of a guy who's never read anything longer than a restaurant menu! Brilliant!
Oh...you thought "horizons" was spelled with an e? Sorry.
That and I would categorize Poe and Shell[e]y as being Science Fiction, or at least some of thier more famous stories are.
Which Shelley? Mrs. Shelley's most famous story, Frankenstein, or, A Modern Prometheus, most certainly was. But Mr. Shelley did not write SF.
While some of Shakespeare is brilliant, some is just twaddle.
Really? What? I've read all the plays, and all the poetry (including the obscure stuff like Pericles and Titus Andronicus), and though not all of it is at the same quality level, certainly none of it is deserving the label "twaddle" relative to a discussion about Star Trek, FGS.
I know I shouldn't feed the troles (that's a pun on trolls and proles, for those of you that don't read twaddle), but this is too much.
You were looking for hard sci-fi in a Trek movie?
Isn't that like looking for filet mignon at McDonalds?
Exactly. More precisely, it's like looking for filet mignon and a nice salice salentino at McDonalds.
The idea behind Trek is that it's supposed to be fun. You want hard SF, or at least serious SF, look to Solaris (no, not that Solaris, Tarkovsky's Solaris), 2001, or Alien (maybe Pitch Black; though a lot of it smelled like warmed over Ridley Scott, it did have a good idea behind it and some very interesting performances). If the SF you want is filet mingon, remember that Trek is junk food. Filling, but lacking in sophistication.
Einstein got a very cushy university professorship out of his work (which, while not enough reward for what he contributed to society, was at least some reward). Newton was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a VERY major academic appointment in his day), and so received funding for his work. Darwin, on the other hand, I don't think did get funding for his work (his job on the Beagle was unfunded). Don't know how much many he made from publishing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it made the point that microwave popcorn was one of the inspirations for the microwave in the first place.
No prob. Cheers.
In an era of 2+ GHz computers with 7200+ rpm hard drives, it seems odd that Microsoft would be unable to write an application than can quickly save and open text files that, on average, run well under 50 kilobytes.
Problem is, that's 50 kB for a one-page memo inviting both colleagues in your department for lunch.
It's one thing to use BSD-licensed software and contribute back to the community (code, support, hardware, whatever).
Apple does.
To the poster who thought that Pitch Black was nothing more than a horror movie: it combines two classic sf stories, "Nightfall" and "Alien." Both are effectively hard SF. "Nightfall" is the classic hard SF story - just imagine a planet in a multiple-star system that only has night every once in a great while (a few millennia in the story; much less time in Pitch Black). What would night mean to the inhabitants? "Alien" is based upon the simple premise of an alien predator which incubates inside a human host. A few incongruities, certainly, but pretty hard SF really (the main problems are explaining how the alien can get that big with the little amount of food it has had a chance to eat, and with how fast exactly the Nostromo travels - while they have sleep compartments, one gets the idea that normally they traveled rather faster than c).
Some don't like Tarkovsy's film. Those who say they don't like it often point to the relative lack of special effects. This tells me that they probably like action flicks rather than more avant garde films. Lem's dislike of it is based on his own (understandable and forgivable) prejudice in favor of his own story against the changes Tarkovsky made (and Lem's story is better than the film, though not by much); most other people's prejudices are based upon their unwillingness to sit through a film in subtitles with no real special effects and with rather auterish camera work. It is in its way as important a film to SF as 2001. And if you don't like 2001, then I can't help you.
Now to k-0s question:
OK, here are some things I never understood, maybe you can answer them for me. What did the creatures eat/drink for seven years?
Two possibilities: 1. they hibernated, living off the food they ate the last eclipse; 2. there's a whole other ecology underground that we don't get to see.
If the former is true, they must eat a hell of a lot each eclipse cycle. Imagine that they eat five or six times their normal weight in the course of a few days (that was eclipse period I thought was being implied). Of course, now that the planet is deserted (the creatures' population probably exploded until they ate themselves out of a habitat), most of their eating is now probably cannibalism, except for the occassional interstellar snack. So their population, which until they wiped out the planet's ecosystem had increased geometrically, will now continue to decrease geometrically until they go extinct.
I think of them as some kind of predatory alien cicadas; cicadas have a long underground development cycle, effectively a many years hibernation, and live a very, very short active adult life.
Why did the eclipse take so long when the time leading to the eclipse didn't take that long at all?
Guess I'm not sure what this means. The time leading to the eclipse? Do you mean the time from when they look up and realize that the eclipse is coming until the eclipse starts, or the time from partial to full eclipse? If the former, they just didn't pay attention to the celestial mechanics of their situation. If the latter, the planet is imagined as having a pretty clear (and thin) atmosphere, so the terminator would be pretty dramatic.
If it is a desert planet and there were no/zero/zip clouds in the sky up to and during the eclipse, then why did it start raining at the end?
There's water in the atmosphere, that's why the dew collectors and precipitators at the encampment work. The temperature must have dropped quite dramatically during the eclipse (which was total over the whole hemisphere of the moon, if the model is correct), below even the rather low dew point of a "desert" moon, causing the water eventually to precipitate out of the atmosphere. That's the idea, anyway. I'm sure having it rain was a decision on their part based upon the assumption that the temp would drop dramatically; the finding of the water precipiptators at the encampment may have been meant to foreshadow the rain storm. It does rain even in deserts occassionally; just not often (and every 7 years or 22 months or years or however long the period between eclipses is in Pitch Black is a long stretch between rains).
Anyway, that's how I explained it to myself when I saw it. Realistic enough for "willing suspension of disbelief," anyway, and pretty much hard SF.
What the hell does magisterial caesura mean?
A caesura is a breathing in a line of verse. They're a structural property that's fundamental to Anglo-Saxon verse (for instance, Beowulf), more secondary in classical verse, and rather more decorative in modern English verse.
Read it as "pause in the middle." As in, he's saying that The Two Towers is more a stopping point on the way to the "Return of the King," but a spectacular one.
Personally, I am not an anime fan. But Cowboy Beebop is superb. Tylor is ok, though it has some gratuitous stuff in it. Most of the other stuff I've seen has left me cold. The point is, don't make up your mind about the genre until you've seen the best of it. If you still feel that anime is just some kind of "Japanese porno," fine. But base your decisions upon the evidence of your senses, not just third or fourth hand information.
Do yourself a favor. Rent the DVDs, in order. Do NOT watch "The Real Folk Blues" until you've seen the rest of the series. It will be worth it. Even the "bad" episodes (and there are a few) contribute to the experience of the last episode.
I want to see / hear the latest new work by artists I admire. Unfortunately, most of the ones I admire are (because most of the ones I know about are) distributed by MPAA/RIAA member companies. It is not the artists who are responsible for the objectionable parts of the MPAA/RIAA's agenda (usually; and I for one don't think Metallica are artists), it's the management. Sure, I'd like to stick it to the management, but not so badly that I'm going to keep myself from experiencing new work that I want to see or hear. So while I may buy the stuff the RIAA / MPAA are pushing (though less and less as the years go on; there hasn't been as much interesting in the past few years), I'll still support the fight against some of the stuff they'll pulling. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe so; but that's the world I'm living in.
Yeah, the Globe article makes the point that the translation of *Solaris* is horrible (it's unreadable, actually, and I never appreciated the book until I had seen Tarkovsky's film and read *Fiasco*, which is much better served by the translator than *Solaris* - as far as a Polishless reader can determine, that is).
LotR isn't propaganda; it glorifies the villian far too much for any element of propaganda.
Glorifying the victim is actually a technique used in some kinds of (post-victory) propaganda. Roman writers made Cleopatra out to be far more than she probably was, mainly in order to make Augustus look better for having vanquished her.
Good post, Ronfar.
SPOILER ALERT
Here you are. For other Slashdotters, I tried to write this so that I didn't ruin the movie for anyone who accidently came across a line or two. But you have been warned. (Fortunately, I don't think to many people go back and read Friday topics on Monday.)
Could have been worse. Just barely better than the odd numbered flicks. Not up there with the three great films (II, VI, and VIII) nor as wide in its appeal as IV. To give you some idea of the tone: if you liked Voyager better than DS9, you'd like this film better than if you liked DS9 better than Voyager.
All in all, too derivative of Wrath of Khan. There were also allusions to 2001 (Data's leap) and Excalibur (Shinzon's last scene), among others; but they were a little too complete to be mere allusions, and "read" more like Logan was lifting good plot devices from other genre movies to fill out a formula. I won't get into all the parallels with Wrath of Khan, but the battle in the Rift had several points of contact with the Mutara Nebula scene in Wrath of Khan and with the battle at the end of Undiscovered Country (one example related to undiscovered country: the bit where the Scimitar backs away from the Enterprise and the Enterprise just sits there reminded me tonally of the scene where the Enterprise backs away from Chang's Bird of Prey in VI).
The narrative was too messy. The whole thing with Troi and Shinzon was a waste of space, probably intended to motivate the bedroom scene. Folks didn't need that to motivate the bedroom scene; the motivation for that was in Encounter at Farpoint for God's sake! I thought B-4 was too intrusive a device for the narrative problems he resolved. The parallelism (B-4:Data::Shinzon:Picard) was too heavy-handed, the role he played in the Shinzon plot was unnecessary, and the whole "grow as a person" theme didn't need him: if Logan absolutely had to have Data make the analogy he did (the parallelism is brought out explicitly by Data), Data could have just referred to Lore (Paramount seems to think that they'll make more money from the film by playing to a "wider" audience than the Trek fans, forgetting that a really first-rate Trek film will draw the same Trek fans several times). I think B-4 may be a vestige of an earlier plot draft that Logan kept in because he liked the idea (and for one other reason, which I won't mention).
Picard is supposed to be some kind of tactical genius, but he makes the biggest tactical mistake in the history of the Trek films: not foreseeing where Shinzon is going to attack. Stupid, stupid, stupid; the scene with Data should have been at the beginning of their flight from Romulus and Picard should have voiced concern about having to go through the Rift. And why doesn't the Federation come to the rescue? Certainly knowing what Shinzon is up to, violating the Neutral Zone isn't a big concern anymore.
The movie should have had more of the Romulans in it, who could be far and away the most intriguing of the ST aliens if the politics were played right. I liked all the Romulan characters, and wanted to see more of them. The whole buildup to the Romulan coup could have played in parallel with the wedding scene, rather than just being one scene at the beginning, and the bedroom scene could have taken place en route to Betazed, before Enterprise was diverted to Romulus. There should have been a "good" Reman or two.
Character development could have used improvement. Worf, once again, was badly used (continuity issues tend to multiply around Worf). At least we saw Crusher in the sickbay for once. Geordi was unused as usual. There could have been a throwaway comment about how Mrs. Troi is waiting for them on Betazed, but they preferred to leave the question hanging. Picard finally gets to do his didactic routine from the series, and with Shinzon it's appropriate; that's a lot of what we like about Picard, a lot of what we liked about Roddenberry's Trek: they're better than we are because humanity has grown. Sure, it's a bit much if you include too much of it, but one speech is about right.
The nature vs. nurture stuff was, indeed, overdone - it should have been pretty obvious by the third time Shinzon said "I'm just like you would be if you had lived my life."
The effects were good, though the collision was too violently in contradiction of physics to enable me to give it the "willing suspension of disbelief" it needed (the same with the graphic showing Romulus and Remus - if they got that close, they'd be in mutually captured synchronous orbits like Pluto and Charon [those names are pretty distracting, as I keep expecting to see the two planets suckling from a she-wolf, as myth tells us the real Romulus and Remus did. But those are the names they chose back in 1967 or so, for Balance of Terror; right on the map that Spock shows Kirk]). The lighting on Troi's face in the battle scene was ridiculous; the cinematic equivalent of a giant neon billboard saying "I'M TELEPATHIC!!!" The lighting was very good, though, in the rest of the movie, especially in the Senate and the first encounter with Shinzon.
Good acting by Hardy, Stewart, Spiner, Dorn (when he's allowed to act), and the Romulan bit players save the film from a bad draft of an often good script that should have been cleaned up before filming. I'm guessing that a lot of what I wanted to see (with the Romulans, certainly) ended up on the cutting room floor. Some good jokes (especially the exchange between Worf and Picard about the attire for the Betazed ceremony) and some good lines.
I'll probably see it one more time, and I'll buy the DVD (I'm a sucker like the rest of you). But I don't know if I'd encourage them to make another one if this is the best they can do.
Ok, why am I +3 funny and the person whose joke I'm responding to is a plain old 2? Is "smelled like warmed over Ridley Scott" and "salice salentinio" really worth 3 mod points? (which I'll probably lose for this OT posting).
2001 counts _only_ if you accept Clarke's statement that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Those monoliths were magic, pure and simple, not hard science.
Weren't monoliths supposed to be von Neumann machines? They aren't supposed to be magic, per se. Is it real hard SF in the sense that say "Mission of Gravity" is? Depends. Ever wonder how they get to other star systems in Hal Clement's book? Clarke's Third Law.
The closest thing I've seen to genuine hard SF is Cowboy Beebop. And the Gate spoils it's "hardness."
Some (not all) of the requirements to makes something hard SF:
take it you didn't like Forbidden Planet [forbidden-planet.org] then....
Great point, Ronfar. The Tempest is as much SF as LOTR is. (And funny thing, I don't think that fellow Tolkien minded Shakespeare much, though he did prefer his middle English.
Unfortunately, there isn't a good book on early modern English grammar that I know of (as your other respondent pointed out, Shakespeare's not Middle English - even the much earlier Malory is usually considered "Early Modern," rather than "Middle," English). The syntax is actually quite similar to ours, it's mostly the vocabulary and idioms that are different, and the heavily annotated editions help you more than a book on the dialect is likely to do. (Nearly everyone I know learned the dialect that way.)
One book to get is Onian's (sp?) Shakespeare dictionary (by one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary), which only covers words whose meanings are different today from they way they were in Shakespeare's day.
Even someone with a graduate degree in Shakespeare will go back to the annotated versions (the Ardens or the Cambridge Shakespeare editions, mostly; and note that when I refer to the Ardens I mean the single volume ones, not the big one-volume edition of all of Shakespeare) when they have problems understanding the text.
Best way to learn Shakespeare is to start off with the easy annotated versions like the Signet editions, then work your way up to the Arden editions, and then finally try reading a First Folio facsimile (see below for an explanation).
The First Folio, or as Shakespeare geeks call it, 1F, was the first "official" edition of Shakespeare's collected plays, "edited" by his friends from the copies of the plays that the Globe theater prepared their performances from.
The other posting also made a good point about tapes. Listening to Shakespeare often makes more sense than reading him; and watching Shakespeare films (particularly the old BBC versions, which while they have about the same production values as Doctor Who were often splendidly acted) is even better. Kenneth Branagh's movies are good, though purists will say that they're not Shakespeare (but they follow Shakespeare about as strictly as most stage productions have, historically, and are a lot closer than say the 18th century theatergoer's experience of Shakespeare). The great thing about seeing Shakespeare performed is that the body language helps you to understand the tone better (the actors are often drawing on a repertory traditiion that helps them to understand better how the plays ought to be performed).
So, no, there isn't really a good way to do it other than piecemeal. It isn't like Perl where you pick up the Camel Book and weeks later, if you have the programming background to begin with, tada! you know Perl; a lot of it is simply the result of a lot of time spent reading, listening, and watching.
Anyway, gotta go, my Nemesis tickets are waiting for me. Sorry this all so off topic: perhaps if I pointed out that reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon is supposedly even better than reading him in the early modern English translation I'd avoid a -1 offtopic?
I think if you're a member of the SAG, they have to pay you scale at a minimum; there are probably different scale rates for mute roles versus lines. Extras don't get paid scale, they get paid a lot less (like around minimum wage). But IANAA. Maybe CleverNickName can correct that (it's not specific to ST:N).
The trouble is, Shakespeare's shit isn't written in English. It's some kind of bizarre pig latin form of English that makes no sense to anyone born after 1600AD. What *I* hate is holier-than-thou fuckheads who think they are better than everyone else because they think they enjoy reading that shit.
Put some effort into it. Read it. Then get back to me about who's holier than whom.
I don't *think* I enjoy reading it, any more than I *think* I enjoy reading Douglas Adams. But I suppose that anyone who thinks that early modern English is that hard to learn should just keep their mouths shut when it comes to evaluating writing, and pray to whatever gods they honor that they never have to learn another language, like Japanese.
A book.
Mod parent +5 insightful.
Coriolanus is superb, man. "There is a world elsewhere." You mean you've never wanted to say that to your boss?
Say go read Beowulf in the original prose? Read Voltaire in the original French?
Beowulf is verse, not prose. And actually, yeah, I'd recommend the original to anyone who's smart enough to learn the dialect. And you can't diss my boy Geoffrey.
Whan that April with his showres sote,
the drought of Marche hath perced to the rote
While I do agree that one should broaden thier horizens, some of your choices are a bit lacking.
Absolutely fscking brilliant, man! Alluding to Pope's Essay on Criticism by saying that first rate literature is a bit lacking while imitating the bad spellings of a guy who's never read anything longer than a restaurant menu! Brilliant!
Oh...you thought "horizons" was spelled with an e? Sorry.
That and I would categorize Poe and Shell[e]y as being Science Fiction, or at least some of thier more famous stories are.
Which Shelley? Mrs. Shelley's most famous story, Frankenstein, or, A Modern Prometheus, most certainly was. But Mr. Shelley did not write SF.
While some of Shakespeare is brilliant, some is just twaddle.
Really? What? I've read all the plays, and all the poetry (including the obscure stuff like Pericles and Titus Andronicus), and though not all of it is at the same quality level, certainly none of it is deserving the label "twaddle" relative to a discussion about Star Trek, FGS.
I know I shouldn't feed the troles (that's a pun on trolls and proles, for those of you that don't read twaddle), but this is too much.
You were looking for hard sci-fi in a Trek movie? Isn't that like looking for filet mignon at McDonalds?
Exactly. More precisely, it's like looking for filet mignon and a nice salice salentino at McDonalds.
The idea behind Trek is that it's supposed to be fun. You want hard SF, or at least serious SF, look to Solaris (no, not that Solaris, Tarkovsky's Solaris), 2001, or Alien (maybe Pitch Black; though a lot of it smelled like warmed over Ridley Scott, it did have a good idea behind it and some very interesting performances). If the SF you want is filet mingon, remember that Trek is junk food. Filling, but lacking in sophistication.
The difference is that Fink is not an emulator. X provides a different video layer, but the underlying system code is Darwin, not that of an emulator.
Einstein got a very cushy university professorship out of his work (which, while not enough reward for what he contributed to society, was at least some reward). Newton was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (a VERY major academic appointment in his day), and so received funding for his work. Darwin, on the other hand, I don't think did get funding for his work (his job on the Beagle was unfunded). Don't know how much many he made from publishing.