Millions of people have, and now again do watch it. Now while popularity isn't necessarily quality, it clearly is not "unwatchable".
I don't think it has changed the face of television, very little has. It has entertained millions of people for generations though, which is pretty good going.
You can integrate it with a 2D map so you can go from one to another, make buildings invisible, or have it highlight routes. All of which would make it much easier to find your way.
When DC remade catwoman they turned her into an ex prostitute rape victim. That's pretty heavy for a largely juvenile male readership.
Do comics have a largely juvenile readership? Most comic buyers I see seem to be adults, and it seems to me most superhero comics are pitched at an adult market, certain Catwoman seems to be. Given they regularly tackle things like murder (and have done for years) I don't think this is heavier.
I mean Batman sees his parents shot when he was eight. That isn't heavy? Or is it OK with no sexual angle?
Why does a female superhero now have to be the fontpiece for some kind of gender-related social commentary?
I'd agree if it were common, or overplayed or mishandled. In the 70s the comics companies decided they needed black heroes to be PC (although it wasn't called that back then, and cashing in on blaxplotation must have been on their minds as well). There were some pretty embarrassing results.
Fortunately that mostly seems to have been avoided more recently with female superheroes. OK the new Batgirl and Supergirl have a bit of over-compensation for their older versions by being stronger than their male equivalents now. Apart from Catwomen though I'm not seeing all these female heroes that are some kind of "gender-related social commentary". Maybe Wonder Woman who has been from the start, and was created to bo being written by a guy who though Matriarchy was inevitable. Hardly new there though.
It isn't like they go on about it in Catwoman either, it's just a motivation for her to care about the people on the street in the crumby part of the city she protects, because she can identify with the.
If we were a truly egalitarian society then female superheroes would just be 'around' and it wouldn't be ABOUT them being women.
If it was a truly egalitarian society I guess you wouldn't have many ex prostitute rape victims either (or as many would be men as women so it wouldn't be a female issue). I don't see anything wrong with a bit of social commentary in comics as longs as it doesn't go overboard.
Google doesn't have "ubiquitous control of the search engine market". Sure they get more press, particularly on slashdot but Yahoo! gets its fair share of hits.
The point is that in an isolated group, cultural factors will lead to a genetic difference. Not that the ashkenazim were always more intelligent, but cultural pressured favoured the more intelligent having more offspring (or any), so that affected the genetics.
On the one hand, we as people can talk endlessly about the virtues of various breeds of dogs, but apply the concept to people is taboo.
I think that is becuase ideas about breeding people were used (and mangled to suit their beliefs) by groups such as the Nazis, who then used it to help justify all sorts of evil things.
That has made such ideas taboo, even if they have merit in other circumstances. Also these days it has become un-PC to even suggest having gentic disorders are actually bad, becuase you might upset the feelings of people who have them.
Some people have natural talent, so be it. That doesn't mean I can't learn to whip there ass in something I wish to do with enough HARDWORK & DEDICATION.
Actually it does. You may be able to compensate for a lack of innate talent through hard work, but that will only take you so far. As the parent said, everyone has a range of potential, hard work may get you to the top of your potential, but someone elses potential may be greater, and they can beat you without working as hard.
For example I'm never going to beat Kasperov at chess no matter how much HARDWORK & DEDICATION I have.
Not that we should encourage someone to give up because they lack natural talent, we should encourage kids when push to reach their potential. We shouldn't pretend everyone can do something well if they work hard at it.
If a form of technology is truly alien, we can't think it up. Failing that, trying to sit around and think of way technology can advance, you really don't have many options if you are basing your suppositions on actual known science.
What do you make this 'water tech' with? Biotech sounds nice, but how do you kick start it to get beyond selective breeding?
It would be arrogant to completely dismiss any possibility of stuff we can't conceive. However there doesn't seem much point speculating in a scientific ccontext about this (it is great for telling stories though). You just end up giving them 'magic' powers like your teleporting thing. I know the old saw about any sufficiently advanced technology, but we aren't talking about that, we are talking about basic ones that start the civilisation.
As for Europeans, gun powder and castles, gun powder didn't make either armour or castles obsolete straight away. It was a while before the Europeans figured out how to make increasingly more powerful and more reliable weapons that would actually be useful against an armoured knight or a castle. Then went out and proceeded to kick everyone else's arse with them.
As for the Gungans 'water based tech' it doesn't seem to exist in the movie. Their tech is just like the humans really, apart from the appearance. Even the tech they use under water, and while they live under water, they don't live in the water, but in air. The Gungans only seem to have tech because they can operate out of the water.
Batman is a multi-billion genius scared by childhood trauma. I don't know about you, but much as I think the character is cool I can't relate to someone who is the world's best detective, maybe martial artist, speaks just about every language on the planet, is an expert in just about every field of science and fights crime dressed as an animal.
Over time the writers have made him effectively superheroic. His level of skill and knowledge is really beyong human, and it has become something of a joke that Batman can beat anyone given time to prepare. How many times has he smacked down Superman now, only becuase the writers seem to forget half of Superman's powers most of the time?
But you're probably right that Batman was the FIRST (or nearly so) of the strictly human ones (if you don't count myths and legends, but only comics.)
Batman starts off as a guy in a costume figthing crooks. He really is a continuation of masked mystery man types popular in the Pulps like the Shadow. Later on he gets integrated in a "super" world with supervillains and the like, although most of the rogues gallery remains strictly non-powered with a best a technological gimmick.
Masked crimefighters predate Batman by a lot though, so he isn't really the first of anything, excpet maybe the first masked crimefighter to end up rubbing shoulders with superheros.
People like to see attractive people in their entertainment, just look at Films or TV, or even many books. Comic book heroes are drawn to be attractive, both male and female. In comic books people are usually either attractive or disfigured. Unsexy characters of either sex are rare unless they are just supporting characters. Just like TV, books, films etc.
This isn't about women in comics, it is about people in popular entertainment.
Muscular men are usually considered attractive, muscular women are not. So the men get exaggerated pecs and abs, and the women exaggerated boobs and waist. Equal treatment really, emphasise what is considered attractive. I don't see sexy women in comics demeaning women any more than sexy men in comics demeans men. Cheese/Beef-cake all round.
They are projecting attractive/sexy, not "strong", it's just for men that often translates as "muscular". In the superhero genre though muscular doesn't mean much. Physical strength isn't about how muscular you are but superpowers (some super strong characters are muscular, but some aren't), and real character strength is about, well strength of character which is completely unrelated.
Both lots are put in revealing and/or skin tight costumes. Treatment here seems pretty equal, make them look good. The difference is society put more pressure on women to "look good", so guys reading comics don't feel bad about all these toned hunks.
Now it is true that historically female super heroes have been somewhat second string. The big companies Marvel and DC go back a way, and a lot of their heroes are from a time when attitudes between the sexes were different. When female heroes were introduced they were often knockoffs and often sidekicks of male characters (batwoman, batgirl, supergirl etc).
That hasn't been so true for a while though, check out stuff like Catwomen, or Birds of Prey for strong women in charge. Wasp has been chairperson of the Avengers, Storm field leader of the X-Men. Step outside the big two and you can find more independent and strong super heroines, although yes they will look sexy, becuase we expect that of both sexes in our entertainment.
XBox already does it with XBox Live arcade. Of course it doesn't have a back catalog of sutff like Nintendo, but so far they have copies of a bunch of classic games and some new one, with new games being added.
Going off topic, but it seems to me most conflict is competition and history.
When you get two groups living close together you often get competition. Going right back historically it was for food or land (meaning survival). These days it may well be economic. If you have a city where, say, you have locals and people descended from immigrants (who may be a different skin colour and have a different religion) and there are economic hardship you will see rising conflict. The other group is seen as threatening because they are in competition for resources, jobs and money in this case rather than land and food.
The ultimate expression is Nationalism, and people end up believing they should own a chunk of land because their ancestors once lived (or died) there. I suppose you can chalk this up to "cultural misunderstanding" in the sense that one culture feels it has the right to displace or destroy another. It isn't the sort of thing that is often solved by better communications.
You right that people have common drives and aspirations, and this usually includes a good life for themselves and their family. This leads to people banding together (your odds are better as part of a group) and identifying with similar people. Which can lead to tribalism and its modern forms including things like nationalism.
I don't disagree that collaboration and communication helps, it seems the best way to show someone that another "tribe" (religion, race, sexual preference, whatever) is OK is to meet and hopefully befriend people of that "tribe" in some non-threatening environment.
To come back on topic, I'm not sure online games are going to be of much use. You don't know about the people you game with, and many online game environments seem pretty full of racial or homophobic slurs. Indeed, the anonymous nature makes it easier to insult people, because they aren't "real" people, but just some graphics.
I agree, I'd rather play a good game than an innovative one. Do all the people complaining about lack of innovation in games complain about it in books, or TVs or films?
When games started there was lots of innovation, because it was all new. Like other mediums it takes a while to find what works and then it settles down, with a mainstream of things that are known to work with some evolutionary stuff, and innovation mostly around the edges.
As with other mediums, a lot of the innovative stuff won't actually have much appeal, and those that do will be picked up and copied by the mainstream.
During the browser wars both browsers were producing non-standard extensions, Netscape came up with the Layer tag for example. IE had better non-standard extensions, giving much better control of page elements and could dynamically reflow much better.
When the wars stopped though, so did the development, and standard stuff incomplete and buggy remained that way for years. IE4 was better then NS4, but that hardly excuses problems in IE6.
A lot of people will have a go at IE because it is MS, and the don't like MS. On the other hand, a lot of people will have a go because it deserves it. MS has sat on IE and done nothing until another browser started to get popular. At least the Mozilla guys are working on the memory leaks, I've not seen them mentioned on any IE7 stuff from MS.
IE still massively dominates the market. So if you actually want people to use your site (or your client does), you are going to have to code for it.
It is nice you have an anecdote where you could ignore IE, but try it in another company, or under different circumstances and see what happens. If your boss said it had to work on IE, how much is your principle worth?
I've not seen anything to suggest sitemaps will improve your ranking, just get you indexed more often.
If you claim pages update every day, but they don't, it will be pretty easy for the spider to tell. So you could stop the frequent scans if they aren't really needed, if after say a month the supposed daily updates never happened.
Just about all of Google seems to be in beta. While it is nice to get the stuff early, "beta" is a pretty meaningless term as far as Google stuff is concerned.
Well, maybe if Google stop doing stuff for a while?
Lots of slashdotters seem interested in what Google does, either becuase it tends to be neat, or so they can worry about privacy and the info Google potentially has access to.
Slashdot Mirror
Millions of people have, and now again do watch it. Now while popularity isn't necessarily quality, it clearly is not "unwatchable".
I don't think it has changed the face of television, very little has. It has entertained millions of people for generations though, which is pretty good going.
You can integrate it with a 2D map so you can go from one to another, make buildings invisible, or have it highlight routes. All of which would make it much easier to find your way.
The horribly misnamed Windows Services for Unix can be downloaded for free from the MS site and has korn and C shell for Windows.
When DC remade catwoman they turned her into an ex prostitute rape victim. That's pretty heavy for a largely juvenile male readership.
Do comics have a largely juvenile readership? Most comic buyers I see seem to be adults, and it seems to me most superhero comics are pitched at an adult market, certain Catwoman seems to be. Given they regularly tackle things like murder (and have done for years) I don't think this is heavier.
I mean Batman sees his parents shot when he was eight. That isn't heavy? Or is it OK with no sexual angle?
Why does a female superhero now have to be the fontpiece for some kind of gender-related social commentary?
I'd agree if it were common, or overplayed or mishandled. In the 70s the comics companies decided they needed black heroes to be PC (although it wasn't called that back then, and cashing in on blaxplotation must have been on their minds as well). There were some pretty embarrassing results.
Fortunately that mostly seems to have been avoided more recently with female superheroes. OK the new Batgirl and Supergirl have a bit of over-compensation for their older versions by being stronger than their male equivalents now. Apart from Catwomen though I'm not seeing all these female heroes that are some kind of "gender-related social commentary". Maybe Wonder Woman who has been from the start, and was created to bo being written by a guy who though Matriarchy was inevitable. Hardly new there though.
It isn't like they go on about it in Catwoman either, it's just a motivation for her to care about the people on the street in the crumby part of the city she protects, because she can identify with the.
If we were a truly egalitarian society then female superheroes would just be 'around' and it wouldn't be ABOUT them being women.
If it was a truly egalitarian society I guess you wouldn't have many ex prostitute rape victims either (or as many would be men as women so it wouldn't be a female issue). I don't see anything wrong with a bit of social commentary in comics as longs as it doesn't go overboard.
I mostly read DC but they seem as bad. Then there was Chaos comics, and a lot of Image stuff. It is hardly a Marvel specific thing.
Google doesn't have "ubiquitous control of the search engine market". Sure they get more press, particularly on slashdot but Yahoo! gets its fair share of hits.
The point is that in an isolated group, cultural factors will lead to a genetic difference. Not that the ashkenazim were always more intelligent, but cultural pressured favoured the more intelligent having more offspring (or any), so that affected the genetics.
On the one hand, we as people can talk endlessly about the virtues of various breeds of dogs, but apply the concept to people is taboo.
I think that is becuase ideas about breeding people were used (and mangled to suit their beliefs) by groups such as the Nazis, who then used it to help justify all sorts of evil things.
That has made such ideas taboo, even if they have merit in other circumstances. Also these days it has become un-PC to even suggest having gentic disorders are actually bad, becuase you might upset the feelings of people who have them.
Some people have natural talent, so be it. That doesn't mean I can't learn to whip there ass in something I wish to do with enough HARDWORK & DEDICATION.
Actually it does. You may be able to compensate for a lack of innate talent through hard work, but that will only take you so far. As the parent said, everyone has a range of potential, hard work may get you to the top of your potential, but someone elses potential may be greater, and they can beat you without working as hard.
For example I'm never going to beat Kasperov at chess no matter how much HARDWORK & DEDICATION I have.
Not that we should encourage someone to give up because they lack natural talent, we should encourage kids when push to reach their potential. We shouldn't pretend everyone can do something well if they work hard at it.
If a form of technology is truly alien, we can't think it up. Failing that, trying to sit around and think of way technology can advance, you really don't have many options if you are basing your suppositions on actual known science.
What do you make this 'water tech' with? Biotech sounds nice, but how do you kick start it to get beyond selective breeding?
It would be arrogant to completely dismiss any possibility of stuff we can't conceive. However there doesn't seem much point speculating in a scientific ccontext about this (it is great for telling stories though). You just end up giving them 'magic' powers like your teleporting thing. I know the old saw about any sufficiently advanced technology, but we aren't talking about that, we are talking about basic ones that start the civilisation.
As for Europeans, gun powder and castles, gun powder didn't make either armour or castles obsolete straight away. It was a while before the Europeans figured out how to make increasingly more powerful and more reliable weapons that would actually be useful against an armoured knight or a castle. Then went out and proceeded to kick everyone else's arse with them.
As for the Gungans 'water based tech' it doesn't seem to exist in the movie. Their tech is just like the humans really, apart from the appearance. Even the tech they use under water, and while they live under water, they don't live in the water, but in air. The Gungans only seem to have tech because they can operate out of the water.
Yes
It really depends what about superheroes you are conversing on.
Batman is a multi-billion genius scared by childhood trauma. I don't know about you, but much as I think the character is cool I can't relate to someone who is the world's best detective, maybe martial artist, speaks just about every language on the planet, is an expert in just about every field of science and fights crime dressed as an animal.
Over time the writers have made him effectively superheroic. His level of skill and knowledge is really beyong human, and it has become something of a joke that Batman can beat anyone given time to prepare. How many times has he smacked down Superman now, only becuase the writers seem to forget half of Superman's powers most of the time?
But you're probably right that Batman was the FIRST (or nearly so) of the strictly human ones (if you don't count myths and legends, but only comics.)
Batman starts off as a guy in a costume figthing crooks. He really is a continuation of masked mystery man types popular in the Pulps like the Shadow. Later on he gets integrated in a "super" world with supervillains and the like, although most of the rogues gallery remains strictly non-powered with a best a technological gimmick.
Masked crimefighters predate Batman by a lot though, so he isn't really the first of anything, excpet maybe the first masked crimefighter to end up rubbing shoulders with superheros.
People like to see attractive people in their entertainment, just look at Films or TV, or even many books. Comic book heroes are drawn to be attractive, both male and female. In comic books people are usually either attractive or disfigured. Unsexy characters of either sex are rare unless they are just supporting characters. Just like TV, books, films etc.
This isn't about women in comics, it is about people in popular entertainment.
Muscular men are usually considered attractive, muscular women are not. So the men get exaggerated pecs and abs, and the women exaggerated boobs and waist. Equal treatment really, emphasise what is considered attractive. I don't see sexy women in comics demeaning women any more than sexy men in comics demeans men. Cheese/Beef-cake all round.
They are projecting attractive/sexy, not "strong", it's just for men that often translates as "muscular". In the superhero genre though muscular doesn't mean much. Physical strength isn't about how muscular you are but superpowers (some super strong characters are muscular, but some aren't), and real character strength is about, well strength of character which is completely unrelated.
Both lots are put in revealing and/or skin tight costumes. Treatment here seems pretty equal, make them look good. The difference is society put more pressure on women to "look good", so guys reading comics don't feel bad about all these toned hunks.
Now it is true that historically female super heroes have been somewhat second string. The big companies Marvel and DC go back a way, and a lot of their heroes are from a time when attitudes between the sexes were different. When female heroes were introduced they were often knockoffs and often sidekicks of male characters (batwoman, batgirl, supergirl etc).
That hasn't been so true for a while though, check out stuff like Catwomen, or Birds of Prey for strong women in charge. Wasp has been chairperson of the Avengers, Storm field leader of the X-Men. Step outside the big two and you can find more independent and strong super heroines, although yes they will look sexy, becuase we expect that of both sexes in our entertainment.
Like much on the web frames are often used badly, but they can be useful for navigation.
IE has this issue, want to bet which browser will fix it first? (hint, Mozilla fixed it before)
XBox already does it with XBox Live arcade. Of course it doesn't have a back catalog of sutff like Nintendo, but so far they have copies of a bunch of classic games and some new one, with new games being added.
Going off topic, but it seems to me most conflict is competition and history.
When you get two groups living close together you often get competition. Going right back historically it was for food or land (meaning survival). These days it may well be economic. If you have a city where, say, you have locals and people descended from immigrants (who may be a different skin colour and have a different religion) and there are economic hardship you will see rising conflict. The other group is seen as threatening because they are in competition for resources, jobs and money in this case rather than land and food.
The ultimate expression is Nationalism, and people end up believing they should own a chunk of land because their ancestors once lived (or died) there. I suppose you can chalk this up to "cultural misunderstanding" in the sense that one culture feels it has the right to displace or destroy another. It isn't the sort of thing that is often solved by better communications.
You right that people have common drives and aspirations, and this usually includes a good life for themselves and their family. This leads to people banding together (your odds are better as part of a group) and identifying with similar people. Which can lead to tribalism and its modern forms including things like nationalism.
I don't disagree that collaboration and communication helps, it seems the best way to show someone that another "tribe" (religion, race, sexual preference, whatever) is OK is to meet and hopefully befriend people of that "tribe" in some non-threatening environment.
To come back on topic, I'm not sure online games are going to be of much use. You don't know about the people you game with, and many online game environments seem pretty full of racial or homophobic slurs. Indeed, the anonymous nature makes it easier to insult people, because they aren't "real" people, but just some graphics.
I agree, I'd rather play a good game than an innovative one. Do all the people complaining about lack of innovation in games complain about it in books, or TVs or films?
When games started there was lots of innovation, because it was all new. Like other mediums it takes a while to find what works and then it settles down, with a mainstream of things that are known to work with some evolutionary stuff, and innovation mostly around the edges.
As with other mediums, a lot of the innovative stuff won't actually have much appeal, and those that do will be picked up and copied by the mainstream.
During the browser wars both browsers were producing non-standard extensions, Netscape came up with the Layer tag for example. IE had better non-standard extensions, giving much better control of page elements and could dynamically reflow much better.
When the wars stopped though, so did the development, and standard stuff incomplete and buggy remained that way for years. IE4 was better then NS4, but that hardly excuses problems in IE6.
A lot of people will have a go at IE because it is MS, and the don't like MS. On the other hand, a lot of people will have a go because it deserves it. MS has sat on IE and done nothing until another browser started to get popular. At least the Mozilla guys are working on the memory leaks, I've not seen them mentioned on any IE7 stuff from MS.
IE still massively dominates the market. So if you actually want people to use your site (or your client does), you are going to have to code for it.
It is nice you have an anecdote where you could ignore IE, but try it in another company, or under different circumstances and see what happens. If your boss said it had to work on IE, how much is your principle worth?
I've not seen anything to suggest sitemaps will improve your ranking, just get you indexed more often.
If you claim pages update every day, but they don't, it will be pretty easy for the spider to tell. So you could stop the frequent scans if they aren't really needed, if after say a month the supposed daily updates never happened.
Just about all of Google seems to be in beta. While it is nice to get the stuff early, "beta" is a pretty meaningless term as far as Google stuff is concerned.
Well, maybe if Google stop doing stuff for a while?
Lots of slashdotters seem interested in what Google does, either becuase it tends to be neat, or so they can worry about privacy and the info Google potentially has access to.
Have molecules or atoms in two states at one time is how quantum computing works. It can calucalate all pemutations of all the states in one pass.