I'm sure the vast majority of we Slashdot readers have partners but, let's face it, if we were "getting some", or even "getting enough", would we be on here talking about it?
I guess we're probably of a similar age generation because I still thoroughly enjoy playing the "Build engine" FPSes like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood & Redneck Rampage because all of them have a great degree of humour in them which makes them fun.
To me, the late 90s were the pinnacle of PC gaming when there were still smaller games producers like Apogee and an independent Sierra putting out games that could be innovative for their own sake and didn't just have to make a profit.
Recently, I started playing 3DO's "Heroes Of Might & Magic" series again and am suffering from lack of sleep due to "it's 4 am but I have to have one more go" syndrome - no game released within the past 5 years has managed to have a similar effect on me.
Online games have the potential to transform entertainment into a global-community exercise, breaking down borders, cultural and language barriers, and even political prejudices...
Correct me if I am wrong but most, if not all, on-line games are populated by users who log on with nicknames or anonymously. In other words, unless you were to do some serious analysis work, you probably have no idea of the skin colour, race or location of other people in the same game as you.
I get the impression that 99.9% of the human population just "gets on with it" irrelevant of skin colour and it's the politicians and publicity-seeking quangos like the Christian Science Monitor that feel the need to create racial barriers.
In a kind of related subject, on a UK radio phone in show last week, a topic was discussed concerning one of the UK National Health Service Trusts (= hospitals) that is making a decision to remove the left bibles from the cabinets next to patient beds due to the risks of inciting racial tension from non-Christian, specifically Muslim, patients. Most of the callers to the show were Muslims, all of them said that they have no problems with bibles next to bedsides, in fact most of them said they respect the bible as a "holy book". A few even commented that it's the politicians themselves trying to stir up racial tensions because they themselves have no problem with this.
I suggest the Christian Science Monitor would be better employed looking at the lack of morals and social responsibility amongst a great proportion of people in today's society rather than poking it's fat Christian nose into matters it has no knowledge about.
The existing generation of consoles have already significantly reduced the number of titles that get released on the PC anyway so, extending that logic, they will continue to do so in the future.
There's a number of reasons for this:
1. Piracy - it's more difficult/impossible to copy console games than it is on the PC. Whatever the *real* losses to the gaming industry is, the perception of the games industry is that piracy is losing them money so they'd rather develop for consoles.
2. Windows Limitations - long term, Windows is a poor choice as a gaming platform if you're the type of person into playing lots of games and constantly installing and uninstalling them. The registry bloats, it slows down and eventually needs to be rebuilt.
3. Simplicity - Joe Public wants "easy" meaning he'd rather stick a disk in a drive and play rather than go through the tedious installation process. PCs are fine for long-session FPS or strategy games but for the gamer who just wants to blast round a race track for 20 minutes, consoles are better.
However, I can't say (for me) it's of particular concern - a PC for me is a "Swiss Army Knife" that I use for games, Internet, as a server, etc. And there's more than enough PC games out there to last a lifetime anyway.
Well, I'll say one thing for Rick Berman - he certainly managed to put an end to the "every even numbered Star Trek movie is good" myth with "Nemesis", didn't he?
Now he's planning to give us a *new* crew for the next movie tells me exactly two very important things:
1. Rick Berman does not have a clue about *why* Star Trek is so popular - if he did he would understand that the characters are as important to fans as the storylines and that those characters need to develop within the context of entire TV show seasons, not within a 2-hour movie.
2. Paramount is trying to short-change fans by doing a film using the Star Trek name but using unknown, lower-salaried actors because they're not prepared to pay the salaries Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, etc. would demand.
Star Trek suffered a slow, lingering 7-year death during Voyager (yes, Deep Space 9 was a pretty good series overall although TOS and TNG were much better), Enterprise was IMHO *not* a Star Trek series and so it's time to let the franchise Rest In Peace...
...or to just "feign death" until Rick Berman and Brannon Braga lose interest and walk away from it.
The problem with these kinds of lists is that they're entirely subjective.
For example, I personally find Charlie Chaplin entirely unfunny and his films bore me - but put me in front of a Laurel & Hardy short or movie and I will cry with laughter.
This does not not mean to say that Charlie Chaplin was a bad actor or his films were bad - they just didn't appeal to me.
The usage of these lists is that they're handy to peer through for ideas for rentals or purchases if you have spare time to check out additional movies.
About a year ago, Empire magazine published a list of the "Top 50 DVDs" ever released (might have been a topic on Slashdot also) based on not just movie quality but additional features, commentaries, etc.
I myself picked about 5 from the list that I'd either never seen before or had seen but hadn't particularly rated highly and was actually pleased with what I'd bought - the biggest surprise was the first Chris Reeve Superman movie. I never liked Superman much as a superhero and never thought much of the movie when I saw it the first time - however, the DVD was in the Empire list, I took a risk and bought it and I thoroughly enjoyed it as an entertaining movie with lots of additional interesting DVD content.
It's very easy to take a cynical view of movie lists but they're useful as pointers to broadening your own opinions and enjoyment.
Personally, I was dissapointed the freestyle Ukrainian rap didn't do better.
Speaking as a half-Ukrainian, it was one of the better songs but I was totally embarrassed by it nonetheless - the song was essentially political, praising Ukraine's independence from the USSR but was totally out of place in a meaningless, plastic show about the worst of European pop music.
I know the Ukrainians are keen to show the rest of the world their independence but this was not the platform in which to do it - even the two presenters were totally talentless!
From the outset, I should say that I'm not *that* fanatical about anything to want to queue at wierd times for extended periods - whether it's for a new movie, game or concert.
However, as a Brit, we have problems with violence on our city streets at night due to excessive drinking, we have to heavily police soccer matches to stop rival fans from waging war on each other, we have joyriders stealing cars and endangering themselves and every other user on the road, we have kids believing it's humourous to walk up to someone and just slap them purely to capture the event on a mobile phone camera...
So while the people queuing in the documentary may be seen as "wierdos" or "geeks", they're probably people that also don't get involved in the type of antisocial activities that I described above.
It's the "cool" people, in their constant strive for recognition amongst their peers, who usually end up being the antisocial people, not the geeks who queue for Star Wars and play Dungeons & Dragons.
If anything, geeks demonstrate they're intelligent enough to have enough individuality to just go do their own thing and enjoy it.
So, at this point in the movie, just about all the adult Jedi are dead and Anakin presumably likes kids because he's so overjoyed at Padme's pregnancy.
He also knows that he himself is young, inexperienced and destined to become a Sith apprentice.
On that basis, given a bunch of Jedi kids who are even younger and less inexperienced than he is, wouldn't it have made more sense for Anakin to maybe kidnap the younglings, take them to a remote planet somewhere and do a Darkside conversion job on them also so that he himself can train an apprentice?
Sure, if we need to have all of the Jedi dead by the time of Episode 4, how about he dumps the younglings on a remote planet and they get killed by Tuscan raiders or something? Since he likes kids, he'd be confused, anguished and would feel responsible and this would be a far better way of handling it than just have him suddenly turn to being a murderer.
And are we actually saying that a mass murderer of children is still able to achieve redemption to the good side of the force upon his death in Episode 6?
Accepted. But then look at the fighter Anakin was flying in the first movie (the yellow Starfighter) and compare that to the "prototype" X-Wing we see in episode 3 - a huge difference over a less than 10 year time scale that then doesn't change much over the next 20 years.
Let's face it, Grievous (or however you spell it) was a badly thought up plot device.
I can imagine Lucas having trouble getting Christopher Lee to do the whole movie so he has to settle for having him at the beginning and killing him off quickly. Grievous was therefore a "last minute" filler character and a badly thought out one.
After all, the only organic pieces of Grievous appeared to be his head (beneath the mask) and part of his torso. Assuming enough of his torso was left to contain lungs, movement wouldn't cause him to breath heavier because his limbs are entirely robotic and presumably externally powered by a battery or power source, not from a normal heart respiratory system.
And if we're meant to believe his lungs were so bad, then why weren't they replaced also when his limbs were?
I think we were meant to see Grievous as a cyborg, not just a robot - during his death fight with Obi Wan, we see a closeup of his face and there are organic eyes behind the mask; also, when he dies he sizzles and burns, another clue to his cyborg nature. However, why Lucas didn't have a quick scene where a Jedi explained that fact to us, I don't know.
However, whilst this explains the presence of lungs, it still doesn't explain how he survived in space.
Yeah, apologies, I should have made this clear, especially as work in VoIP.
I'm assuming wireless hotspot coverage increase to allow for this to be practical.
However, it's probably safe to assume that ISPs will become the new telecoms providers and I'm sure there will be a fee to cover the increased bandwidth requirements VoIP brings with it. But I just don't see that being more than a nominal sum based on what Skype can get away with charging currently.
It sure did take them a long time to build that (nearly 20 years!)
The whole timescale thing was totally messed up full stop.
Firstly, how long a timescale did the movie cover? At the beginning of the movie, Padme didn't show particular much from a pregnancy point of view so I guess we assume the whole thing happened over about 6 months from start to finish. Okay, so maybe it took time to find Grievous - but then that wasn't clear in the movie.
Secondly, the whole technology advancement thing is screwed. We see a Corellian freighter at the end of the movie that looks little different to the one at the beginning of episode 4 some 20+ years later. Yet the Republic is already flying fighters that look like X-Wings in Episode 3 that don't look that much different in Episode 4.
Okay, so maybe you would still use a 20 year old freighter by the time episode 4 comes along but why would you send an important "diplomat" (i.e. Princess Leia) on a ship as old as that?
Also, if the Death Star took 20 odd years to build, how come the second Death Star was virtually finished so quickly between the episode 4 and episode 6?
The special effects question is easy: This is quite simply one of the most gorgeous films ever made.
Some of the effects were decidedly ropey - the giant lizard ridden by Obi Wan was not that good (I'm not sure any CGI yet is good enough to create 100% convincing living beings yet) & the bit where several of the clones had their helmets removed so you could see their faces was atrociously bad - why Lucas didn't cut that scene I'll never know.
As to the vehicle animations, I have nothing but admiration for ILMs ability to do what they have shown they can do but the ship battle at the beginning was just too busy. I really get the impression that as many new vehicles as possible were crammed in just to generate toy sales meaning we had a battle scene that was confused and kept drawing your attention all over different parts of the screen.
Lucas however, can do myth very, very well.
I won't argue that he can tell a good story but his pace and directing leaves much to be desired in the first trilogy.
Child Anakin should have been the first half hour of episode 1 and Hayden's Anakin standing on a balcony arm-in-arm with Padme should have been the end of that same episode.
Episode 2 should have shown the gradual fall of Anakin and ended at a point where Palpatine has already placed some doubts in his mind so that he has his first piece of internal struggle at the end of the movie - this would have mirrored Luke's struggles at the end of Empire Strikes Back very well.
Episode 3 should have just been about the fall of Anakin and the rise of Palpatine. This was done far too quickly in episode 3 and lessened the effect as a result. We should have been aching to see Episode 3 just like we were with Episode 6 when Han was left encased in Corbomite.
In summary, the movie is the best of the first trilogy but not a patch on any of the second trilogy movies. And before anyone mentions Ewoks, at least in Return Of The Jedi we were all rooting for the Rebellion and the little bears because we had saw real people.
In the case of "droids vs clones", who really cares how many were killed on each side because more could always be wheeled on - the first trilogy turned warfare into something very sterile and remote whereas in the second trilogy we saw and felt genuine loss, whether it was an X-Wing pilot, Hoth infantryman or an Ewok.
Orange should sort out their coverage first!
on
Television on your Phone
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
As someone who has a company-provided phone, we were recently moved from Vodafone to Orange due to the latter being cheaper.
I just wish Orange would spend less on crap cinema adverts and TV and more on getting their cell coverage right which, at the moment, is crap.
Personally, the mobile providers, at least in the UK, are overpriced rip-off merchants - the sooner we go fully VoIP and say bye bye to the cellular providers, the better as far as I am concerned...
Well, I think it was better than Return of The Jedi which was definitely weaker than ANH and ESB.
ROTJ is definitely the weakest of the original trilogy but far exceeds ROTS. The speeder bike sequence was totally awe inspiring on the cinema screen and you did feel like you sided with the Rebellion, Ewoks or not, during all of the fight sequences.
ROTS was too "plastic" - "Who cares about robots and clones dying? We can always bring more on..."
Plus the battle sequences were far too busy - there was just too much going on at once to take it all in and that weakened the effect considerably.
Having said that, it's very much an age thing anyway - I saw the originals on their first release at around my late teens...
Since when is it Microsoft's fault that people are duped into running this?
Microsoft are partially responsible.
After all, where in all of their glossy ads for Windows XP, Office, etc. etc. does it mention that it's important to apply regular security updates, use a virus checker and never open attachments you don't trust?
They're more than happy to sell the illusion of ease and simplicity to gullible idiots so it is as much their fault as it is Joe Sixpack's ignorance.
Social engineering implies some cleverness on the part of the engineer. That's true, to a degree but it only ever works on people who are too stupid and gullible to fall for it.
Therefore, let's call it social irresponsibility because it's the stupid victims that make these scams work, not the initiators.
Personally, I'm all for two levels of Internet User - those that take the time to learn about security of their PCs and take some personal responsibility (whether they're Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, etc. users) and can demonstrate such through some kind of certification...
...then every other Joe Sixpack who gets charged twice as much for his broadband connection to cover the cost of the sensible users having to clean up their PCs because he doesn't.
And before anyone accuses me of computer snobbery, car insurance works in precisely the same way - if you drive responisbly, you have less accidents, you're less of a liability therefore your premiums cost less.
Sure, Windows has security issues but they're nothing that a sensible user with a bit of knowledge cannot skirt around - and I'm saying that as a mainly Linux user myself.
I saw Episode III yesterday and while I agree it was the best movie of the first trilogy, it was not a patch on the original three movies.
I think George Lucas has completely lost it. The CGI work was impressive but far too busy - most of the time you did not know where on the screen to look. And the acting was far too wooden.
To be perfectly honest, I felt I was watching a two hour long advert for Star Wars toys and computer games that we will see released in future.
It's time to drop Star Wars now, just like it was well beyond time for Star Trek - they're both now just brand names to sell more merchandise, nothing more.
Sorry but the money-pinching movie and music companies are just playing all of us, the consumers, for fools.
Too many of us gladly hand over our rights to fair usage for the sake of a nice shiny new box - that's the reason why this stuff gets thought of in the first place.
The solution is very simple - DON'T BUY IT!
These companies are there to provide us with goods and services we consider value for money that we hand over our cash for - not the other way round.
People need to get their heads out of their asses, stop falling for the pretty advertising and the hype and just not part with good money for poor quality goods.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the vast majority of we Slashdot readers have partners but, let's face it, if we were "getting some", or even "getting enough", would we be on here talking about it?
To me, the late 90s were the pinnacle of PC gaming when there were still smaller games producers like Apogee and an independent Sierra putting out games that could be innovative for their own sake and didn't just have to make a profit.
Recently, I started playing 3DO's "Heroes Of Might & Magic" series again and am suffering from lack of sleep due to "it's 4 am but I have to have one more go" syndrome - no game released within the past 5 years has managed to have a similar effect on me.
Correct me if I am wrong but most, if not all, on-line games are populated by users who log on with nicknames or anonymously. In other words, unless you were to do some serious analysis work, you probably have no idea of the skin colour, race or location of other people in the same game as you.
I get the impression that 99.9% of the human population just "gets on with it" irrelevant of skin colour and it's the politicians and publicity-seeking quangos like the Christian Science Monitor that feel the need to create racial barriers.
In a kind of related subject, on a UK radio phone in show last week, a topic was discussed concerning one of the UK National Health Service Trusts (= hospitals) that is making a decision to remove the left bibles from the cabinets next to patient beds due to the risks of inciting racial tension from non-Christian, specifically Muslim, patients. Most of the callers to the show were Muslims, all of them said that they have no problems with bibles next to bedsides, in fact most of them said they respect the bible as a "holy book". A few even commented that it's the politicians themselves trying to stir up racial tensions because they themselves have no problem with this.
I suggest the Christian Science Monitor would be better employed looking at the lack of morals and social responsibility amongst a great proportion of people in today's society rather than poking it's fat Christian nose into matters it has no knowledge about.
There's a number of reasons for this:
1. Piracy - it's more difficult/impossible to copy console games than it is on the PC. Whatever the *real* losses to the gaming industry is, the perception of the games industry is that piracy is losing them money so they'd rather develop for consoles.
2. Windows Limitations - long term, Windows is a poor choice as a gaming platform if you're the type of person into playing lots of games and constantly installing and uninstalling them. The registry bloats, it slows down and eventually needs to be rebuilt.
3. Simplicity - Joe Public wants "easy" meaning he'd rather stick a disk in a drive and play rather than go through the tedious installation process. PCs are fine for long-session FPS or strategy games but for the gamer who just wants to blast round a race track for 20 minutes, consoles are better.
However, I can't say (for me) it's of particular concern - a PC for me is a "Swiss Army Knife" that I use for games, Internet, as a server, etc. And there's more than enough PC games out there to last a lifetime anyway.
Now he's planning to give us a *new* crew for the next movie tells me exactly two very important things:
1. Rick Berman does not have a clue about *why* Star Trek is so popular - if he did he would understand that the characters are as important to fans as the storylines and that those characters need to develop within the context of entire TV show seasons, not within a 2-hour movie.
2. Paramount is trying to short-change fans by doing a film using the Star Trek name but using unknown, lower-salaried actors because they're not prepared to pay the salaries Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, etc. would demand.
Star Trek suffered a slow, lingering 7-year death during Voyager (yes, Deep Space 9 was a pretty good series overall although TOS and TNG were much better), Enterprise was IMHO *not* a Star Trek series and so it's time to let the franchise Rest In Peace...
For example, I personally find Charlie Chaplin entirely unfunny and his films bore me - but put me in front of a Laurel & Hardy short or movie and I will cry with laughter.
This does not not mean to say that Charlie Chaplin was a bad actor or his films were bad - they just didn't appeal to me.
The usage of these lists is that they're handy to peer through for ideas for rentals or purchases if you have spare time to check out additional movies.
About a year ago, Empire magazine published a list of the "Top 50 DVDs" ever released (might have been a topic on Slashdot also) based on not just movie quality but additional features, commentaries, etc.
I myself picked about 5 from the list that I'd either never seen before or had seen but hadn't particularly rated highly and was actually pleased with what I'd bought - the biggest surprise was the first Chris Reeve Superman movie. I never liked Superman much as a superhero and never thought much of the movie when I saw it the first time - however, the DVD was in the Empire list, I took a risk and bought it and I thoroughly enjoyed it as an entertaining movie with lots of additional interesting DVD content.
It's very easy to take a cynical view of movie lists but they're useful as pointers to broadening your own opinions and enjoyment.
I was aware that there were a few running around the Internet but wasn't aware it was still that extensive.
Are there any centralized lists of Internet BBSes anywhere? Specifically lists that include what the BBS specialises in? (e.g. sci-fi chat, etc.)
Or shall we just strip down to our baggy trousers & have a wrestle on the Steppes in order to settle the argument like *REAL* Cossacks!
Careful now, IBM will opening call-centres there next!
Speaking as a half-Ukrainian, it was one of the better songs but I was totally embarrassed by it nonetheless - the song was essentially political, praising Ukraine's independence from the USSR but was totally out of place in a meaningless, plastic show about the worst of European pop music.
I know the Ukrainians are keen to show the rest of the world their independence but this was not the platform in which to do it - even the two presenters were totally talentless!
However, as a Brit, we have problems with violence on our city streets at night due to excessive drinking, we have to heavily police soccer matches to stop rival fans from waging war on each other, we have joyriders stealing cars and endangering themselves and every other user on the road, we have kids believing it's humourous to walk up to someone and just slap them purely to capture the event on a mobile phone camera...
So while the people queuing in the documentary may be seen as "wierdos" or "geeks", they're probably people that also don't get involved in the type of antisocial activities that I described above.
It's the "cool" people, in their constant strive for recognition amongst their peers, who usually end up being the antisocial people, not the geeks who queue for Star Wars and play Dungeons & Dragons.
If anything, geeks demonstrate they're intelligent enough to have enough individuality to just go do their own thing and enjoy it.
I say good luck to them...
He also knows that he himself is young, inexperienced and destined to become a Sith apprentice.
On that basis, given a bunch of Jedi kids who are even younger and less inexperienced than he is, wouldn't it have made more sense for Anakin to maybe kidnap the younglings, take them to a remote planet somewhere and do a Darkside conversion job on them also so that he himself can train an apprentice?
Sure, if we need to have all of the Jedi dead by the time of Episode 4, how about he dumps the younglings on a remote planet and they get killed by Tuscan raiders or something? Since he likes kids, he'd be confused, anguished and would feel responsible and this would be a far better way of handling it than just have him suddenly turn to being a murderer.
And are we actually saying that a mass murderer of children is still able to achieve redemption to the good side of the force upon his death in Episode 6?
Accepted. But then look at the fighter Anakin was flying in the first movie (the yellow Starfighter) and compare that to the "prototype" X-Wing we see in episode 3 - a huge difference over a less than 10 year time scale that then doesn't change much over the next 20 years.
Let's face it, Grievous (or however you spell it) was a badly thought up plot device.
I can imagine Lucas having trouble getting Christopher Lee to do the whole movie so he has to settle for having him at the beginning and killing him off quickly. Grievous was therefore a "last minute" filler character and a badly thought out one.
After all, the only organic pieces of Grievous appeared to be his head (beneath the mask) and part of his torso. Assuming enough of his torso was left to contain lungs, movement wouldn't cause him to breath heavier because his limbs are entirely robotic and presumably externally powered by a battery or power source, not from a normal heart respiratory system.
And if we're meant to believe his lungs were so bad, then why weren't they replaced also when his limbs were?
However, whilst this explains the presence of lungs, it still doesn't explain how he survived in space.
Yeah, apologies, I should have made this clear, especially as work in VoIP.
I'm assuming wireless hotspot coverage increase to allow for this to be practical.
However, it's probably safe to assume that ISPs will become the new telecoms providers and I'm sure there will be a fee to cover the increased bandwidth requirements VoIP brings with it. But I just don't see that being more than a nominal sum based on what Skype can get away with charging currently.
The whole timescale thing was totally messed up full stop.
Firstly, how long a timescale did the movie cover? At the beginning of the movie, Padme didn't show particular much from a pregnancy point of view so I guess we assume the whole thing happened over about 6 months from start to finish. Okay, so maybe it took time to find Grievous - but then that wasn't clear in the movie.
Secondly, the whole technology advancement thing is screwed. We see a Corellian freighter at the end of the movie that looks little different to the one at the beginning of episode 4 some 20+ years later. Yet the Republic is already flying fighters that look like X-Wings in Episode 3 that don't look that much different in Episode 4.
Okay, so maybe you would still use a 20 year old freighter by the time episode 4 comes along but why would you send an important "diplomat" (i.e. Princess Leia) on a ship as old as that?
Also, if the Death Star took 20 odd years to build, how come the second Death Star was virtually finished so quickly between the episode 4 and episode 6?
Some of the effects were decidedly ropey - the giant lizard ridden by Obi Wan was not that good (I'm not sure any CGI yet is good enough to create 100% convincing living beings yet) & the bit where several of the clones had their helmets removed so you could see their faces was atrociously bad - why Lucas didn't cut that scene I'll never know.
As to the vehicle animations, I have nothing but admiration for ILMs ability to do what they have shown they can do but the ship battle at the beginning was just too busy. I really get the impression that as many new vehicles as possible were crammed in just to generate toy sales meaning we had a battle scene that was confused and kept drawing your attention all over different parts of the screen.
Lucas however, can do myth very, very well.
I won't argue that he can tell a good story but his pace and directing leaves much to be desired in the first trilogy.
Child Anakin should have been the first half hour of episode 1 and Hayden's Anakin standing on a balcony arm-in-arm with Padme should have been the end of that same episode.
Episode 2 should have shown the gradual fall of Anakin and ended at a point where Palpatine has already placed some doubts in his mind so that he has his first piece of internal struggle at the end of the movie - this would have mirrored Luke's struggles at the end of Empire Strikes Back very well.
Episode 3 should have just been about the fall of Anakin and the rise of Palpatine. This was done far too quickly in episode 3 and lessened the effect as a result. We should have been aching to see Episode 3 just like we were with Episode 6 when Han was left encased in Corbomite.
In summary, the movie is the best of the first trilogy but not a patch on any of the second trilogy movies. And before anyone mentions Ewoks, at least in Return Of The Jedi we were all rooting for the Rebellion and the little bears because we had saw real people.
In the case of "droids vs clones", who really cares how many were killed on each side because more could always be wheeled on - the first trilogy turned warfare into something very sterile and remote whereas in the second trilogy we saw and felt genuine loss, whether it was an X-Wing pilot, Hoth infantryman or an Ewok.
I just wish Orange would spend less on crap cinema adverts and TV and more on getting their cell coverage right which, at the moment, is crap.
Personally, the mobile providers, at least in the UK, are overpriced rip-off merchants - the sooner we go fully VoIP and say bye bye to the cellular providers, the better as far as I am concerned...
ROTJ is definitely the weakest of the original trilogy but far exceeds ROTS. The speeder bike sequence was totally awe inspiring on the cinema screen and you did feel like you sided with the Rebellion, Ewoks or not, during all of the fight sequences.
ROTS was too "plastic" - "Who cares about robots and clones dying? We can always bring more on..."
Plus the battle sequences were far too busy - there was just too much going on at once to take it all in and that weakened the effect considerably.
Having said that, it's very much an age thing anyway - I saw the originals on their first release at around my late teens...
Microsoft are partially responsible.
After all, where in all of their glossy ads for Windows XP, Office, etc. etc. does it mention that it's important to apply regular security updates, use a virus checker and never open attachments you don't trust?
They're more than happy to sell the illusion of ease and simplicity to gullible idiots so it is as much their fault as it is Joe Sixpack's ignorance.
Therefore, let's call it social irresponsibility because it's the stupid victims that make these scams work, not the initiators.
And before anyone accuses me of computer snobbery, car insurance works in precisely the same way - if you drive responisbly, you have less accidents, you're less of a liability therefore your premiums cost less.
Sure, Windows has security issues but they're nothing that a sensible user with a bit of knowledge cannot skirt around - and I'm saying that as a mainly Linux user myself.
I think George Lucas has completely lost it. The CGI work was impressive but far too busy - most of the time you did not know where on the screen to look. And the acting was far too wooden.
To be perfectly honest, I felt I was watching a two hour long advert for Star Wars toys and computer games that we will see released in future.
It's time to drop Star Wars now, just like it was well beyond time for Star Trek - they're both now just brand names to sell more merchandise, nothing more.
Too many of us gladly hand over our rights to fair usage for the sake of a nice shiny new box - that's the reason why this stuff gets thought of in the first place.
The solution is very simple - DON'T BUY IT!
These companies are there to provide us with goods and services we consider value for money that we hand over our cash for - not the other way round.
People need to get their heads out of their asses, stop falling for the pretty advertising and the hype and just not part with good money for poor quality goods.