Frankly, I don't think you can, as you've already had three shots at it, and your "points" are the same tired arguing-the-general-from-the-specific that fanbois everywhere delight in, and that we've all seen replicated everywhere on the Intarweb.
Whatever. You can't answer the rebuttal so you keep going back to your original "point" which I have clarified time and time again. Move along. My post was one hell of a lot more insightful than what you claim is "i didn't like it". If my reasons for not liking it were not valid reasons to you, by all means, feel free to pat yourself on the back again and feel yourself a big man for failing to read my posts properly and drawing out what shouldn't have even been a debate because you can't keep a statement in context.
How about "The gizmo formerly known as the cellphone"? Maybe we can just steal an old Egyptian symbol and bypass giving it a real name as to confuse honest consumers and make posers think it's meaningful in the Zen sense of the word.
Or maybe we can just keep calling it a cellphone and say to hell with nonsense wording that serves no real purpose and get back to letting the phones do what they do regardless if they're used for actual voice calls or any other number of functions.
A classic example of this would be the character of of Aragorn. The film emphasis his human frailty, while the book makes him almost a superman.
I hate to put it this way, and I'm sure I'll catch shit for saying this but...
The changes made to Aragorn, to me, seemed to be largely to appeal to the female movie-going element. He's a hair short of being the typical sympathetic "chick flick" movie hero. Take into consideration the number of females who were taken in by the movies versus the books. Maybe there is a growing number of females being introduced to and interested in middle-earth styled fantasy but I think this is in large part due to the LOTRs films. Jackson isn't stupid, he knew he'd have to have wide appeal to make a financially successful movie.
So, sell it per mail, a simple jewel case an a piece of paper with the installation instructions only. That should be cheap enough.
That not good for either the producer of the game nor the Linux market.
For the producer you're going to get a load of "They put out this half-assed product" from the customer base when they see the glossy Windows box. Not to mention the cries of not being able to buy it in the local box store. If the game fails to sell you're going to have the entire Linux community pointing fingers at the whomever made the game screaming that they didn't put enough effort into it, they didn't take the time to market it correctly and that they didn't give it a fair shake by poorly distributing it. The producers would have a tough time no matter what they did unless they had some kind of guarantee that they could sell a high number of units
The Linux market, on the other hand, would also suffer if the game flopped due to the same reasons the producers would suffer. The difference is in the Linux market it would make other producers fearful of attempting a Linux release since Linux would have an established bad track record for a product that did very well under the Windows platform.
One potential solution to providing better packaging is to do what game publishers did in the 80s; a single box for a game with stickers to show which platform it was for. This way they could produce 500,000 units and the only cost difference between putting it out for Windows/Apple/Atari/Commodore was a sticker that said "For the Commodore 64. Disk Drive Required."
But as for distribution I don't see any clear solution to getting a product that might sell a thousand units. Amazon? Maybe. I don't even know if Amazon would carry only a thousand units of a product that isn't market proven. I buy from them but I don't know if the game would suffer from not having a store shelf presence. With rare exception my games are normally brick and mortar purchases.
how many musicians started off signing their soul away to the record company to discover that the record company own their work.
So copyright laws are to blame for someone else's bad business dealings? Please.
It's a product. Some products are good and sold short others are crap that come with a high price tag. The buyer and seller need to take it for what it's worth.
When will you Westerners figure out that no matter how great you think you are the entire rest of the world does not have to learn to mimic you to survive
Yeah, and if we'd do nothing to help the "entire rest of the world" we'd be told that we're greedy and stingy. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I happen to like this method.
I think we will have to wait and see. I can understand if these kids pull short of the normal day bullshit that we put up with but being able to create a situation in which you have good food and water and the ability to take care of each other has to be a step up from waiting for handouts and dying a premature death from diseases that are easily dealt with.
In the end even if we only get these communities to the point where they become self-sufficient and not integrated into the over all culture of the world we won't have to continue to throw money at them hoping that eventually they get on their own feet. If there is anything that is clear in a "welfare state" it's that feeding the poor doesn't make them more productive, it just makes fatter poor people. Maybe with an education instead of a bowl of rice and a Twix bar these kids will pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Even if we only really help 3-4% of these people it may be a wise investment.
It takes a world full of nerds and geeks to come up with a project like this where a big bunch of the planet still has NO electricity and NO running water, not to mention little food and illiteracy on a large scale.
While you are correct in part also consider the old saying: give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he will feed himself for the rest of his life.
If people are dying in a village because they have no food they need food first but after that what? Do you expected a never ending trail of planes dropping food forever? The unit could be used to help educate the village into doing what's right for themselves. By teaching better practices to the ignorant we can hope that they become self sufficient. Education is the foundation of a solid society.
It's not like they're shipping these things out with Counter Strike installed. These machines could become a keystone in fighting bullshit like illiteracy. They can learn the dangers of certain water sources and make better decisions on what crops grow best under conditions that these people can directly interact with.
A lot of the third world's problems would become vapor with a bit of the education that you and I take for granted.
Re:How many have a cell phone ring tone....
on
When Beige Won't Do
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Ringtones on a phone can actually serve a purpose tho...
We live in a world where 90% of the people around me at any one point have cells on them. If we all stuck with the default tone we'd have everyone looking at their cells every 3 minutes when any phone rang. For me, unless I hear Tubular Bells I don't even think twice about a phone going off.
My PCs and laptops at home? Who's ever going to see them anyway?
Now, that has changed. Mid level cars offer the same kind of protection and reliability the luxury cars offer. Generic chips are just as crispy as that overhyped brand stuff. And it's the same with computers. Some very, very cheap boards and cards aside, they all offer the same value. It works. Some run faster, some run slower, but they all work.
I take some exception with this...
First, kinda trivial but, there is no way in hell a new Pontiac is going to be as good as a Benz 300. Infact I would go as far as to say I'd sooner trust an older (but well kept) Benz 300 or Volvo 240 over just about newer car (even if it was a newer Benz or Volvo). I think at the time where you were shelling out twice or three times as much for a Benz or Volvo you were really buying a value that, if you could afford it, was worth it from a common sense aspect. Today cars seem to be more of a fashion statement. Why do you think people are so in love with SUVs? Because they plan on going mud bogging or because it looks cooler in their driveway than a Volvo 245 station wagon even though both of them probably have the same passenger and cargo space? When it comes down to it most SUVs are station wagons with lift kits... and that's if you buy a good one. Today's SUVs aren't like the old International Scouts that could really take a beating.
What's turning peoples heads today with the current mid-range auto is solid warranties. I own an Elantra (my second one infact) and while it's a fine car for the price, the bottom line for me was getting a car that I can have paid off before the warranty expires on it. Nothing is feels better than paying on a car that is sitting in your driveway because the engine went 2000 miles after your warranty expires and between the full insurance and the car payment you're SOL as far as getting it back on the road. Joe Sixpack is (or should be) fed up with the "5 minute or 5 miles" type of warranties that go on most premium cars that just don't have the same value as their elders. Outside of being insanely rich I would be hard pressed to find a reason to buy a BMW 318 over just about any respectable 4 banger riceburner.
And the same goes with PCs. Maybe they are all the same on the inside but I feel one hell of a lot better buying a HP than an e-Machine. Even if they're the same hardware I feel better about dealing with HP because of the customer service aspect. I've hear horror stories to be sure but my own dealings with HP have gone very well, even to the point of getting repairs that I'm not legally entitled to by my warranty contract.
While I'm sure there are a ton of people who buy PCs for the looks of a box that no one else will probably ever see, I'm sure companies who make PCs know that the added value of good customer service will continue to make the real money. If the larger PC manufacturers take any hints from the auto industry today it hopefully will be that warranties sell mid-range products. The people who have to buy mid-range (such as myself) for economical reasons aren't going to be hoodwinked by the "Wow!" factor for long.
And refusing to do a damn thing because 'all the data is not in' isn't going to get you anywhere.
Oh, so my point of trying to get us off of fossile fuels by making a different sales pitch is refusing to do "a damn thing"?
Until you read my entire post please refrain from judging it.
It's not too hard to do your part.
Ah, actually, asshat... I do my part and if you would have taken the time to read the entire post you might see that. I guess it's too much to ask for you to do the easy part... like taking time to read.
They laughed at Galileo Galilei, they laughed at Gandhi and they now laugh at everything inconvenient
You have to take into consideration though that these guys weren't alone in their time and situation. There is always a raftload of fools for every insightful guy. Sometimes it's hard to take something seriously because one guy has the right idea but you're trying to listen to a few dozen different voices all screaming at you at the same time.
And think of it what you will but I don't really hear that single voice over the crowd yet. Time will tell.
And suppose Gore is proven wrong in the next 10 or 20 years... when will your opinion be influenced? You've seem to have already decided who's right when all the data is not in. We have a long way to go in the question of global warming.
For those who feel that man made emissions are at the heart of this, why not go an easier route to helping lower them by getting the consumer to embrace other aspects of these pollutants that are far more tangible? Such as weening ourselves off of foreign oil or air quality?
What you're saying, is that you wanted and/or expected a film religious to the original writings.
Nice way to pull my thoughts out of context. What I really said was:
PJ went out of his way when he did stuff like making the Ents look like a bunch of hillbillies. He could have used the same time and resources and made the Ents come out just as Tolkien had written them. Instead it seems like PJ put a comic element into his films ala Jar Jar Binks.
This means that the original Tolkien writings had Ents being one hell of a lot wiser and more intelligent than the PJ version of LOTRs. In PJs version they were a merely wooden buffoons to give 6 year olds something to chuckle about. You'd swear that someone at Disney/Pixar was in on the action.
So the next time you want to slight me at least read what I write instead of finding one sentence and basing everything I said on a single out-of-context statement.
It's all fine and good that you like the books and the films as well. Infact I'm glad you liked them. But this entire "if you don't like it, do it yourself" argument is old and tired and frankly unrealistic.
They could waste all their time on pointless things, and the end-result would absolutely suck.
The main complaints I find about ROTK is not that people wanted more added, they wanted something either taken out or revised. IMHO, PJ went out of his way when he did stuff like making the Ents look like a bunch of hillbillies. He could have used the same time and resources and made the Ents come out just as Tolkien had written them. Instead it seems like PJ put a comic element into his films ala Jar Jar Binks.
I have yet to see anyone say that they wanted or expected a film religious to the original writings.
I agree with you on good old Tom... it would have been hard to put him into the film and keep up with the overall tone and pace that the film had taken on. He wasn't essential and there would have been a good chance that he would have come off as another Jar Jar Binks in the film. Certainly that's something we don't need. As a side note to this FOTR is my favorite of the movies and I feel is the most Tolkien worthy of the three. It invested more time into the characters, Tolkien seemed to have done a lot of this in his writings. By the time we roll around to ROTK it seemed more like I was watching a middle earth version of Saving Private Ryan. Tolkien didn't seem to invest a lot of effort into the battles of LOTRs and I would have been happy to have seen less of it from the films. I know, it made the film exciting for most and cutting the battles probably wasn't going to work well in a large budget epic film but I still think more could have been done with less. I do know where you're coming from in part with your argument but I think you think that the Tolkien fans who are complaining about the films wanted an exact copy of the book. We're not that stupid. Again, for my part I just wish Jackson had not gone out of the way to take Tolkiens work and rework it for no obvious reason.
Peter Jackson has amply demonstrated that his skills match up to Tolkien's complexity.
Really? My impression from most Tolkien fans is that they felt that PJ did an OK job given the limitations of what he had to work with (screen time mostly) but I have yet to find a single Tolkien fan who said he did an excellent job at capturing Tolkien's over all vision. I find a few Tolkien fans who are downright pissed with how badly ROTK came off compared to Tolkien's original work. (I'm one of them to be honest with you)
There were others who tried LOTR and the Hobbit before, and made a mess of it
Yeah, a couple of animated features that were about 2 hours each and that were obviously geared to a younger, less seasoned crowd. I haven't seen the LOTR animations in a long long time but from what I remember of The Hobbit cartoon it did no worse a job than PJ considering the times, the fact it was animation and the fact that it's target audience was under the age of 13. This is by no means to say it was great or even good but if this was my 6 year old nephews introduction to Tolkien I wouldn't think badly of it.
So if Peter Jackson is not involved with the Hobbit or a LOTR prequel, then Newline should save its money because I'm just not interested.
Yeah, because without your money the last time the LOTRs trilogy would have taken a loss... [rolling of the eyes]
Listen, not to dick on you or anything but get over yourself. I'm sure there will be many people to take your empty seat at the theater if you decide not to attend a non-Jackson Hobbit movie. As long as the trailers come off a bit better than The Hulk film I'll be one of them. I hope that you take the time to consider that PJ is not the end all and be all of the Tolkien experience and that others can do well in his place. I think there is room for improvement on the PJ version of LOTRs and that a new director working on The Hobbit may be able to pull off something fantastic. To reject it without even seeing a trailer is short sighted.
It is interesting to me that the USA is one of the worlds most influential christian nations, and one of the few countries on earth with a constitutional separation between church and state
Not really. First, the "separation of church and state" is not in the constitution and, IIRC, is not in any official government document.
Aside from that when you're dealing with a mass of people that are 80-90% christian (even if they are simply sunday christians) you're going to have a base morality that is built on a religion. As we are "for the people and by the people" our laws are going to reflect the majority morality as well.
And to be honest with you, as a non-Christian (but religious) slashdotter, I don't see where the US is so closely associated with the christians in law. I would think in a really serious christian state stuff like violence and sex would be filtered to almost nil in the media along with profanity that is commonplace. Gay marriage? Are you joking? I would think in a true christian state the gays would be (at least) beat down in force and that things like abortion wouldn't stand a chance. I don't find the US to be a very christian country even by sunday christian standards.
the ``Shadout Mapes'' who is sent to summon him...
I haven't actually read dune but I have seen the 80's film. Is "Shadout Mapes" the name of the housekeeper or is this some kind of title?
There is a ton of Dune books out there, should one start with the original Dune or are there better books to be read by someone with the knowledge of the film in mind? I know some stuff was changed but I don't know how much.
Stuff like that gets reengineered or stolen and then its used against the Israeli elite.
It makes you wonder if Israel would be further ahead if they tried to focus on the terrorist's technology core instead of worrying so much about the upper management that is fairly useless without their cronies to do the actual work.
Maybe they already do have some focus on these people as you hear from time to time of a "bomb builder" being a target of an attack. But what about the communications structure that lets terrorists communicate over a wide area? I don't know if working to isolate low level grunts from their leadership would be helpful or not.
Um, what? They may be part of the popular adoption of the format in Joe Sixpacks home but they certainly have nothing to do with the technology behind it.
So I think they'd have a little bit to say about the matter.
Really? This is like saying that Spin magazine has an inside track (or even a reputable take on) the future of optical media because they review CDs.
Let's face facts: OK so Variety is a big hollywood magazine and movies made VCRs a big attraction. Does that mean the technology dies just because of a blurb they wrote says so? How about you look at where the technology really lives and breathes... the market place. Tons of people still make and sell VCRs. A half-assed article in Variety isn't going to change that fact.
Well I'm sure this is a joke, but one bid in particular was up to 9 000 000 000 $USD
You sure that's a joke? Once I got 428035.42 USD for an original Atari 2600 "Haunted House" game cartridge on eBay. How do you think I afford all the whiskey and hookers?
I don't like the cynical tone of your posting, pal.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't think you can, as you've already had three shots at it, and your "points" are the same tired arguing-the-general-from-the-specific that fanbois everywhere delight in, and that we've all seen replicated everywhere on the Intarweb.
Whatever. You can't answer the rebuttal so you keep going back to your original "point" which I have clarified time and time again. Move along. My post was one hell of a lot more insightful than what you claim is "i didn't like it". If my reasons for not liking it were not valid reasons to you, by all means, feel free to pat yourself on the back again and feel yourself a big man for failing to read my posts properly and drawing out what shouldn't have even been a debate because you can't keep a statement in context.
How about "The gizmo formerly known as the cellphone"? Maybe we can just steal an old Egyptian symbol and bypass giving it a real name as to confuse honest consumers and make posers think it's meaningful in the Zen sense of the word.
Or maybe we can just keep calling it a cellphone and say to hell with nonsense wording that serves no real purpose and get back to letting the phones do what they do regardless if they're used for actual voice calls or any other number of functions.
I vote for option 2.
A classic example of this would be the character of of Aragorn. The film emphasis his human frailty, while the book makes him almost a superman.
I hate to put it this way, and I'm sure I'll catch shit for saying this but...
The changes made to Aragorn, to me, seemed to be largely to appeal to the female movie-going element. He's a hair short of being the typical sympathetic "chick flick" movie hero. Take into consideration the number of females who were taken in by the movies versus the books. Maybe there is a growing number of females being introduced to and interested in middle-earth styled fantasy but I think this is in large part due to the LOTRs films. Jackson isn't stupid, he knew he'd have to have wide appeal to make a financially successful movie.
So, sell it per mail, a simple jewel case an a piece of paper with the installation instructions only. That should be cheap enough.
That not good for either the producer of the game nor the Linux market.
For the producer you're going to get a load of "They put out this half-assed product" from the customer base when they see the glossy Windows box. Not to mention the cries of not being able to buy it in the local box store. If the game fails to sell you're going to have the entire Linux community pointing fingers at the whomever made the game screaming that they didn't put enough effort into it, they didn't take the time to market it correctly and that they didn't give it a fair shake by poorly distributing it. The producers would have a tough time no matter what they did unless they had some kind of guarantee that they could sell a high number of units
The Linux market, on the other hand, would also suffer if the game flopped due to the same reasons the producers would suffer. The difference is in the Linux market it would make other producers fearful of attempting a Linux release since Linux would have an established bad track record for a product that did very well under the Windows platform.
One potential solution to providing better packaging is to do what game publishers did in the 80s; a single box for a game with stickers to show which platform it was for. This way they could produce 500,000 units and the only cost difference between putting it out for Windows/Apple/Atari/Commodore was a sticker that said "For the Commodore 64. Disk Drive Required."
But as for distribution I don't see any clear solution to getting a product that might sell a thousand units. Amazon? Maybe. I don't even know if Amazon would carry only a thousand units of a product that isn't market proven. I buy from them but I don't know if the game would suffer from not having a store shelf presence. With rare exception my games are normally brick and mortar purchases.
how many musicians started off signing their soul away to the record company to discover that the record company own their work.
So copyright laws are to blame for someone else's bad business dealings? Please.
It's a product. Some products are good and sold short others are crap that come with a high price tag. The buyer and seller need to take it for what it's worth.
Again, you're taking a single sentence out of context. I'm glad that makes you feel good. Have a blast misrepresenting other people.
When will you Westerners figure out that no matter how great you think you are the entire rest of the world does not have to learn to mimic you to survive
Yeah, and if we'd do nothing to help the "entire rest of the world" we'd be told that we're greedy and stingy. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I happen to like this method.
After I "disconnect" from work for a week I normally need a few weeks at the Betty Ford Clinic to reconnect.
I think we will have to wait and see. I can understand if these kids pull short of the normal day bullshit that we put up with but being able to create a situation in which you have good food and water and the ability to take care of each other has to be a step up from waiting for handouts and dying a premature death from diseases that are easily dealt with.
In the end even if we only get these communities to the point where they become self-sufficient and not integrated into the over all culture of the world we won't have to continue to throw money at them hoping that eventually they get on their own feet. If there is anything that is clear in a "welfare state" it's that feeding the poor doesn't make them more productive, it just makes fatter poor people. Maybe with an education instead of a bowl of rice and a Twix bar these kids will pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Even if we only really help 3-4% of these people it may be a wise investment.
It takes a world full of nerds and geeks to come up with a project like this where a big bunch of the planet still has NO electricity and NO running water, not to mention little food and illiteracy on a large scale.
While you are correct in part also consider the old saying: give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he will feed himself for the rest of his life.
If people are dying in a village because they have no food they need food first but after that what? Do you expected a never ending trail of planes dropping food forever? The unit could be used to help educate the village into doing what's right for themselves. By teaching better practices to the ignorant we can hope that they become self sufficient. Education is the foundation of a solid society.
It's not like they're shipping these things out with Counter Strike installed. These machines could become a keystone in fighting bullshit like illiteracy. They can learn the dangers of certain water sources and make better decisions on what crops grow best under conditions that these people can directly interact with.
A lot of the third world's problems would become vapor with a bit of the education that you and I take for granted.
Ringtones on a phone can actually serve a purpose tho...
We live in a world where 90% of the people around me at any one point have cells on them. If we all stuck with the default tone we'd have everyone looking at their cells every 3 minutes when any phone rang. For me, unless I hear Tubular Bells I don't even think twice about a phone going off.
My PCs and laptops at home? Who's ever going to see them anyway?
Now, that has changed. Mid level cars offer the same kind of protection and reliability the luxury cars offer. Generic chips are just as crispy as that overhyped brand stuff. And it's the same with computers. Some very, very cheap boards and cards aside, they all offer the same value. It works. Some run faster, some run slower, but they all work.
I take some exception with this...
First, kinda trivial but, there is no way in hell a new Pontiac is going to be as good as a Benz 300. Infact I would go as far as to say I'd sooner trust an older (but well kept) Benz 300 or Volvo 240 over just about newer car (even if it was a newer Benz or Volvo). I think at the time where you were shelling out twice or three times as much for a Benz or Volvo you were really buying a value that, if you could afford it, was worth it from a common sense aspect. Today cars seem to be more of a fashion statement. Why do you think people are so in love with SUVs? Because they plan on going mud bogging or because it looks cooler in their driveway than a Volvo 245 station wagon even though both of them probably have the same passenger and cargo space? When it comes down to it most SUVs are station wagons with lift kits... and that's if you buy a good one. Today's SUVs aren't like the old International Scouts that could really take a beating.
What's turning peoples heads today with the current mid-range auto is solid warranties. I own an Elantra (my second one infact) and while it's a fine car for the price, the bottom line for me was getting a car that I can have paid off before the warranty expires on it. Nothing is feels better than paying on a car that is sitting in your driveway because the engine went 2000 miles after your warranty expires and between the full insurance and the car payment you're SOL as far as getting it back on the road. Joe Sixpack is (or should be) fed up with the "5 minute or 5 miles" type of warranties that go on most premium cars that just don't have the same value as their elders. Outside of being insanely rich I would be hard pressed to find a reason to buy a BMW 318 over just about any respectable 4 banger riceburner.
And the same goes with PCs. Maybe they are all the same on the inside but I feel one hell of a lot better buying a HP than an e-Machine. Even if they're the same hardware I feel better about dealing with HP because of the customer service aspect. I've hear horror stories to be sure but my own dealings with HP have gone very well, even to the point of getting repairs that I'm not legally entitled to by my warranty contract.
While I'm sure there are a ton of people who buy PCs for the looks of a box that no one else will probably ever see, I'm sure companies who make PCs know that the added value of good customer service will continue to make the real money. If the larger PC manufacturers take any hints from the auto industry today it hopefully will be that warranties sell mid-range products. The people who have to buy mid-range (such as myself) for economical reasons aren't going to be hoodwinked by the "Wow!" factor for long.
And refusing to do a damn thing because 'all the data is not in' isn't going to get you anywhere.
Oh, so my point of trying to get us off of fossile fuels by making a different sales pitch is refusing to do "a damn thing"?
Until you read my entire post please refrain from judging it.
It's not too hard to do your part.
Ah, actually, asshat... I do my part and if you would have taken the time to read the entire post you might see that. I guess it's too much to ask for you to do the easy part... like taking time to read.
They laughed at Galileo Galilei, they laughed at Gandhi and they now laugh at everything inconvenient
You have to take into consideration though that these guys weren't alone in their time and situation. There is always a raftload of fools for every insightful guy. Sometimes it's hard to take something seriously because one guy has the right idea but you're trying to listen to a few dozen different voices all screaming at you at the same time.
And think of it what you will but I don't really hear that single voice over the crowd yet. Time will tell.
And suppose Gore is proven wrong in the next 10 or 20 years... when will your opinion be influenced? You've seem to have already decided who's right when all the data is not in. We have a long way to go in the question of global warming.
For those who feel that man made emissions are at the heart of this, why not go an easier route to helping lower them by getting the consumer to embrace other aspects of these pollutants that are far more tangible? Such as weening ourselves off of foreign oil or air quality?
Is there really any question that Wii is going to sell a million units if their available? PS3 would do the same at over twice the price...
What you're saying, is that you wanted and/or expected a film religious to the original writings.
Nice way to pull my thoughts out of context. What I really said was:
PJ went out of his way when he did stuff like making the Ents look like a bunch of hillbillies. He could have used the same time and resources and made the Ents come out just as Tolkien had written them. Instead it seems like PJ put a comic element into his films ala Jar Jar Binks.
This means that the original Tolkien writings had Ents being one hell of a lot wiser and more intelligent than the PJ version of LOTRs. In PJs version they were a merely wooden buffoons to give 6 year olds something to chuckle about. You'd swear that someone at Disney/Pixar was in on the action.
So the next time you want to slight me at least read what I write instead of finding one sentence and basing everything I said on a single out-of-context statement.
maybe they should do their own movie then.
Yeah, that's a viable alternative.
It's all fine and good that you like the books and the films as well. Infact I'm glad you liked them. But this entire "if you don't like it, do it yourself" argument is old and tired and frankly unrealistic.
They could waste all their time on pointless things, and the end-result would absolutely suck.
The main complaints I find about ROTK is not that people wanted more added, they wanted something either taken out or revised. IMHO, PJ went out of his way when he did stuff like making the Ents look like a bunch of hillbillies. He could have used the same time and resources and made the Ents come out just as Tolkien had written them. Instead it seems like PJ put a comic element into his films ala Jar Jar Binks.
I have yet to see anyone say that they wanted or expected a film religious to the original writings.
I agree with you on good old Tom... it would have been hard to put him into the film and keep up with the overall tone and pace that the film had taken on. He wasn't essential and there would have been a good chance that he would have come off as another Jar Jar Binks in the film. Certainly that's something we don't need. As a side note to this FOTR is my favorite of the movies and I feel is the most Tolkien worthy of the three. It invested more time into the characters, Tolkien seemed to have done a lot of this in his writings. By the time we roll around to ROTK it seemed more like I was watching a middle earth version of Saving Private Ryan. Tolkien didn't seem to invest a lot of effort into the battles of LOTRs and I would have been happy to have seen less of it from the films. I know, it made the film exciting for most and cutting the battles probably wasn't going to work well in a large budget epic film but I still think more could have been done with less. I do know where you're coming from in part with your argument but I think you think that the Tolkien fans who are complaining about the films wanted an exact copy of the book. We're not that stupid. Again, for my part I just wish Jackson had not gone out of the way to take Tolkiens work and rework it for no obvious reason.
Peter Jackson has amply demonstrated that his skills match up to Tolkien's complexity.
Really? My impression from most Tolkien fans is that they felt that PJ did an OK job given the limitations of what he had to work with (screen time mostly) but I have yet to find a single Tolkien fan who said he did an excellent job at capturing Tolkien's over all vision. I find a few Tolkien fans who are downright pissed with how badly ROTK came off compared to Tolkien's original work. (I'm one of them to be honest with you)
There were others who tried LOTR and the Hobbit before, and made a mess of it
Yeah, a couple of animated features that were about 2 hours each and that were obviously geared to a younger, less seasoned crowd. I haven't seen the LOTR animations in a long long time but from what I remember of The Hobbit cartoon it did no worse a job than PJ considering the times, the fact it was animation and the fact that it's target audience was under the age of 13. This is by no means to say it was great or even good but if this was my 6 year old nephews introduction to Tolkien I wouldn't think badly of it.
So if Peter Jackson is not involved with the Hobbit or a LOTR prequel, then Newline should save its money because I'm just not interested.
Yeah, because without your money the last time the LOTRs trilogy would have taken a loss... [rolling of the eyes]
Listen, not to dick on you or anything but get over yourself. I'm sure there will be many people to take your empty seat at the theater if you decide not to attend a non-Jackson Hobbit movie. As long as the trailers come off a bit better than The Hulk film I'll be one of them. I hope that you take the time to consider that PJ is not the end all and be all of the Tolkien experience and that others can do well in his place. I think there is room for improvement on the PJ version of LOTRs and that a new director working on The Hobbit may be able to pull off something fantastic. To reject it without even seeing a trailer is short sighted.
It is interesting to me that the USA is one of the worlds most influential christian nations, and one of the few countries on earth with a constitutional separation between church and state
Not really. First, the "separation of church and state" is not in the constitution and, IIRC, is not in any official government document.
Aside from that when you're dealing with a mass of people that are 80-90% christian (even if they are simply sunday christians) you're going to have a base morality that is built on a religion. As we are "for the people and by the people" our laws are going to reflect the majority morality as well.
And to be honest with you, as a non-Christian (but religious) slashdotter, I don't see where the US is so closely associated with the christians in law. I would think in a really serious christian state stuff like violence and sex would be filtered to almost nil in the media along with profanity that is commonplace. Gay marriage? Are you joking? I would think in a true christian state the gays would be (at least) beat down in force and that things like abortion wouldn't stand a chance. I don't find the US to be a very christian country even by sunday christian standards.
Pong rocks, jerkoff.
the ``Shadout Mapes'' who is sent to summon him...
I haven't actually read dune but I have seen the 80's film. Is "Shadout Mapes" the name of the housekeeper or is this some kind of title?
There is a ton of Dune books out there, should one start with the original Dune or are there better books to be read by someone with the knowledge of the film in mind? I know some stuff was changed but I don't know how much.
Stuff like that gets reengineered or stolen and then its used against the Israeli elite.
It makes you wonder if Israel would be further ahead if they tried to focus on the terrorist's technology core instead of worrying so much about the upper management that is fairly useless without their cronies to do the actual work.
Maybe they already do have some focus on these people as you hear from time to time of a "bomb builder" being a target of an attack. But what about the communications structure that lets terrorists communicate over a wide area? I don't know if working to isolate low level grunts from their leadership would be helpful or not.
Um, what? They may be part of the popular adoption of the format in Joe Sixpacks home but they certainly have nothing to do with the technology behind it.
So I think they'd have a little bit to say about the matter.
Really? This is like saying that Spin magazine has an inside track (or even a reputable take on) the future of optical media because they review CDs.
Let's face facts: OK so Variety is a big hollywood magazine and movies made VCRs a big attraction. Does that mean the technology dies just because of a blurb they wrote says so? How about you look at where the technology really lives and breathes... the market place. Tons of people still make and sell VCRs. A half-assed article in Variety isn't going to change that fact.
shot one person who wouldn't hand over their money.
You can have my PS3 when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Well I'm sure this is a joke, but one bid in particular was up to 9 000 000 000 $USD
You sure that's a joke? Once I got 428035.42 USD for an original Atari 2600 "Haunted House" game cartridge on eBay. How do you think I afford all the whiskey and hookers?
I don't like the cynical tone of your posting, pal.