The purpose of the game is to argue about the rules, not "play" them.
Ah, you've got me there. It follows that by carefully writing self-contradictory and otherwise incomprehensible rules they're adding value. It further follows that the Psionics Handbook is the greatest ever D&D rulebook.
I finally understand D&D. In D&D the rules are the content. They need to change them frequently because you run out of content. If you're actually interested in stories and "role-playing" (vs. leveling up and trying out new spells and magic items), then D&D's rules get in the way and you play something else... You also prefer your rules not to change constantly.
Well said, but I'd make some allowances. Many of the predecessors of Tolkien weren't setting out to create a setting, mythology, and story from scratch. So I restricted my counter-examples to writers who basically did this, and did it single-handed (e.g. Ariosto).
The problem with Tolkien and Rowling isn't the rich detail, it's the pointless waste of space. Deathly Hallows could cheerfully lose 300 pages between page 100 and 500 with no loss of rich detail.
comparing the two is pretty insulting to Professor Tolkien
Not really. Rowling only wastes about 50% of a typical book with boring garbage. Tolkien wastes more like 80%. A friend of mine used to claim that he could cut Lord of the Rings down in length by 2/3 and most fans would be unable to identify what was missing without referring to the original.
J.R.R. Tolkien more or less invented high fantasy as we know it
Rather less than more. Eddison (The Worm Ourobouros) predates even The Hobbit, and then there's, oh I dunno, Monkey (13th century China), Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (16th century Italy) which itself was a spoof of Le Chanson de Roland -- and contains pretty much every idea and subplot you've ever seen in a fantasy novel (including a ring of invisibility, an "orc") and some you'll never find in LoTR (strong female characters, complex moral arguments).
But Tolkien's work was groundbreaking, in many ways the first of its kind.
Game companies use demos all of the time, AND THEY DON"T WANT YOU TO CONSIDER BUYING THE GAME TO BE OPTIONAL EITHER.
I've never seen a game demo tell me that I had to buy the full game, or my your existing documents and save them in new, incompatible formats without asking, or overwrite older versions of games I had full licenses for. NOT EVEN IN CAPS.
Given the original poster's experience with Office 2003 free trial, I wouldn't be experimenting with the Office 2007 free trial either.
Ummm, because the Wii hasn't got the graphics capability of the XBox? The PS3 and the Wii combined don't have the half of the games portfolio that the Xbox has? That the online gaming for the Xbox is way ahead of the other consoles? That the PS3 costs double that of the Xbox?
Speaking as a Wii owner (and I do love it), the appalling lack of games (and the atrocious quality of most of the available games, most of which are lame movie tie-ins released across platforms with Wii controller support being an afterthought) is hardly ever mentioned.
The XBox 360 has the most compelling set of titles available for any of the current crop of consoles (which isn't saying much) but none of its titles are particularly original; they're just like similar games for earlier platforms with sharper graphics. Meanwhile, the PS3 (which is realistically only slightly more expensive than the XBox when you compare similar setups) is backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1 titles (and there have been more compelling PS2 releases since the XBox 360 came out than there have been for the 360) and is a Blu-ray disc player (and blu-ray seems to be ahead in the format wars).
>> What commercial coding adds is discipline. > Where in the world have you worked?
Commercial coding adds a "need to ship now" discipline that doesn't necessarily lead to good code. I doubt that Donald Knuth was driven by commercial pressures when developing TeX and Metafont. In many cases, good code is a result of the right person becoming interested in the right problem set.
It seems to me that the Open Source movement is driven in part by "commercial pressure" (programs people use are intrinsically more interesting than programs people don't use) but also things like "sexiness" (e.g. 3d animation tools or games are sexier than, say, spreadsheets -- which is why we have far more open source 3d toolkits, libraries, etc. than spreadsheets) and some kind of Je ne sais quoi I'll call "charisma" (e.g. FireFox for various reasons was far more charismatic than Mozilla).
One of the "sexiest" things for computer programmers is writing their own computer language. This is why the Open Source community is blessed and plagued by so many languages. For a programmer, how "fundamental" what you're doing is to the world of computers is a badge of honor, which is why designing languages and operating systems is cooler than writing compilers and editors is cooler than writing word processors and spreadsheets. It's also why anyone coding in an interpreted language secretly or not so secretly feels inferior to folks using compiled languages.
These are all natural phenomena. I think that the only solution would be for a bunch of very smart and egotistical people to swallow their own pride and decide, say, not to fork their own Python variant and instead just help make Python better.
"A Macintosh actually runs free/paid for apps you can download from the Internet..."
and
"I could be running Windows, for all it matters. It's locked down. You can't put your own software on it. Ever."
I agree with all that from a user's perspective, but that's really to the side.
Technically, the iPhone is a Mac running OS X and an iPod. Moving forward this means that they don't need to license anyone else's OS to build iPods. Any cool feature they build into a laptop can potentially benefit iPods and vice versa.
From June 11 onward, Apple is back to building on one major platform. If you want to build iPhone apps or AppleTV apps or iPod apps or Mac apps -- you can use the same tools and skill sets.
If you want to do the same for Microsoft's platforms you need to deal with:
XBox XBox 360 Pocket Windows (or whatever it's called today) Vista Vista 65 Windows XP Windows XP 64 Zune
The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) was originally developed by Digital Research which sold it as LD/F (Lavender screen of Death / Fatal errors). A small Seattle Company wrote an essentially illegal (non-clean-room) clone of DR's BSOD for x86. When Microsoft suddenly found a need for an x86-based fatal error screen they licensed the code from the small company and then incorporated it into Windows NT. Later, when the owner of the developer tried to sell licenses to their cloned BSOD independently, Microsoft sued them and forced them to accept $50,000 for the total rights to the BSOD.
Meanwhile, DR continued to sell its original BSOD (now updated to support x86 and supporting multiple shades of blue) which most users agreed was clearly superior to Microsoft's, but Microsoft made sure that its strategic products were even more incompatible with DR's BSOD than Microsoft's, eventually driving DR under.
It's not fair use if it adversely affects your market, and since your market is students wishing to cheat on their term papers, it's pretty drastic... so there's your damages.
The only problem being that apparently the Supreme Court tends to rule against the side it considers "bad". The question is, how many Supreme Court Justices paid for someone else's term papers?
Even if Dvorak is right about the cellphone market being a bad market for Apple to be in, it would be far worse for Apple to pull the plug on iPhone than to ship it and fail. Anyone can fail with a good product. Only a really boneheaded company will lose nerve after wasting a ton of money on R&D, advertising, and strategic partnerships. Maybe AT&T wants Apple to bug out, but if so I don't think they'd be making press releases about the record number of inquiries they've received for a product they can't sell yet.
In any event, I think he's wrong on all counts simply because the iPhone doesn't represent a dead end for Apple even if the iPhone product itself fails. Eventually, Apple will want advanced touchscreen products, MacOS X running on very small low-powered systems, cellular internet access, and so forth and so on built into its products. iPhone may not be The Killer Product, but each of the technologies in it is core to Apple and important in the long term.
Strategically, the iPhone represents:
A touchscreen Mac
The unification of OSX and iPod
A solid-state ultraportable Mac OS X device
Apple's re-entry into the digital camera market (which it helped create)*
Oh and a really nice phone. A phone so nice most hardened Blackberry users drool when it's mentioned.
* Gee doesn't shipping the first consumer digital cameras count as a new product Mr. Dvorak?
Unlike "real goods" which cost "real money" to make, a Vista product (ie. DVD + packaging) costs virtually nothing.
This is true but irrelevant. A copy of Vista selling in Costco for 20% off normal retail is potentially costing a full-priced sale and/or undermining other retailers in other ways. You won't see successful products that are in high demand -- software or otherwise -- in wholesale discount stores like Costco unless they aren't moving OR they're commodity products anyway.
And, as an aside, most of the high margin goods in the world now are more like software than, say, potting soil (it actually took me several attempts to come up with potting soil; even, say, "corn" has a significant IP/R&D component today).
The marginal cost of a digital camera, or a sachet of Splenda, or a barrel of oil, is relatively small. The R&D and opportunity costs are very large. In the case of oil it's supply vs. demand not production cost. Nikon didn't cut the price of the D40 (relative to the D50) by 30% because digital cameras suddenly got 30% cheaper to make, but because competitors with similar cost structures were costing them more than they stood to lose by cutting their profit margin on each camera.
Last couple of times I've visited Costco there have been huge and nearly full Vista racks. It's pretty early in a product cycle for Vista to be in Costco... let alone in Costco and not moving.
Experience makes these points clear to me. and You need to read some articles on study practices and statistics.
These two statements make my whole point. Experience is an extremely poor guide to determining what is actually statistically probable. The whole point of scientific research is that common sense and experience are not good ways to reach scientific conclusions. A feather will in fact fall as quickly as a cannon ball when you eliminate air resistance.
Thank, get off my nuts, have a great day. When you finally get a clue, and get off your high horse, get back to me.
Umm. What can I say? I don't think my horse is so high; perhaps yours is subterranean.
"Second Variety" is certainly a great idea for an action-flick, and probably would be an action story in any other author's hands, but not Dick's (in my recollection). It's like deciding that John Le Carre's novels are action-flick material because they involve spies.
Similarly, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is a story whose main character is a bounty hunter who kills androids. Again, this may be "action-flick material" but the book is hardly written that way. The "climactic" fight where Deckard kills Baty and Pris is cursorily dealt with in a paragraph or two.
In general, I'd say what defines an action movie is a fascination with action versus the causes and consequences of action. An action movie dwells on the process of shooting and being shot at, say, whereas a more thoughtful movie dwells on why people might shoot someone and what happens afterwards. Philip Dick was never interested in action in the sense that action movies are.
How "retarded" do you have to be to confuse "communications" with "psychology"? The blog is a psychology blog and the researchers are experimental psychologists.
(I actually kind of agree with you about Communications and I hear that most experimental psychologists would too...)
"However, you know damn good and well that person to person is always the way to have a discussion if you want the maximum impact, as it's a lot harder to ignore someone in person, while it is fairly easy to not pay attention or to skim their points via email/phone/etc."
Fascinating as this groundless collection of assumptions and oversimplifications may be, the question remains, if I am forced to persuade someone via medium A vs. medium B, what might the implications be? I can't teleport or be in two places at once, and the holographic person-to-person comms system is down at the moment because it can't run under Vista.
The more technologyically-friendly one is, the easier it is to persuade them by email. The more details-oriented one is, the easier it is to persuade them by email. The more "frat boy and golf games" on is, the harder it is, typically, to persuade them over email.
You need to read TFA.
The point you're making is simply wrong -- the study actually showed no such relationship between technology usage and persuadability via email. On average (according to the studies), persuasion via email works about as well as face-to-face (for men) but not women if the women haven't met. The studies didn't cover cross-sex interactions.
You can ignore the results, assume they're wrong, or make use of the information constructively (e.g. by making an effort to contact a woman more directly to establish a working relationship before trying to influence her via email).
Another implication of the work is that you're more likely to persuade a man via email if you have an adversarial relationship with him. Again, this does not gel with your frat boy golf games assumptions.
Bladerunner is almost the exception that proves the rule.
It's a a good action movie that uses ideas from the book it's based on as texture. It has some excellent dialog, almost none of which comes from the book.
Oddly enough, Philip K. Dick is pretty much the most filmed SF author, and every one of his books, including Bladerunner, ends up being an action movie, despite the fact that none of his books even remotely resemble something that might be made into an action movie.
Bladerunner is perhaps the most faithful rendering of a Dick novel in that the hero of the book is a bounty hunter who shoots androids for a living. That's about the end of the resemblance, since every detail of the book at best is snuck in through a back door. Roy Baty isn't a philosopher poet uber warrior -- he's a victim, gunned down matter-of-factly by a guy who finds it easier to kill people than face his wife's scorn.
The fundamental problem -- as always -- has been economics. SF movies were expensive to make (today, it's almost cheaper to make them since virtual sets are getting to be cheaper than filming on location) and expensive to make means you need a mass audience (including overseas non-English speaking markets) which means dumbing your content down to the lowest common denominator.
Going back to Bladerunner -- it was made very cheaply for what it is, it was mangle by the studio in an effort to reach a mass audience, and it was a commercial disaster anyway. "Gee," thought the studio execs, "we ought to make more of these."
The one hope for SF fans is that Studio Execs will look at Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and think, "maybe it's better to base movies on well-loved books than on something George Lucas pulled out of his ass". More likely they'll produce Eragon. D'oh.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of the game is to argue about the rules, not "play" them.
Ah, you've got me there. It follows that by carefully writing self-contradictory and otherwise incomprehensible rules they're adding value. It further follows that the Psionics Handbook is the greatest ever D&D rulebook.
I finally understand D&D. In D&D the rules are the content. They need to change them frequently because you run out of content. If you're actually interested in stories and "role-playing" (vs. leveling up and trying out new spells and magic items), then D&D's rules get in the way and you play something else... You also prefer your rules not to change constantly.
Well said, but I'd make some allowances. Many of the predecessors of Tolkien weren't setting out to create a setting, mythology, and story from scratch. So I restricted my counter-examples to writers who basically did this, and did it single-handed (e.g. Ariosto).
The problem with Tolkien and Rowling isn't the rich detail, it's the pointless waste of space. Deathly Hallows could cheerfully lose 300 pages between page 100 and 500 with no loss of rich detail.
comparing the two is pretty insulting to Professor Tolkien
Not really. Rowling only wastes about 50% of a typical book with boring garbage. Tolkien wastes more like 80%. A friend of mine used to claim that he could cut Lord of the Rings down in length by 2/3 and most fans would be unable to identify what was missing without referring to the original.
J.R.R. Tolkien more or less invented high fantasy as we know it
Rather less than more. Eddison (The Worm Ourobouros) predates even The Hobbit, and then there's, oh I dunno, Monkey (13th century China), Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (16th century Italy) which itself was a spoof of Le Chanson de Roland -- and contains pretty much every idea and subplot you've ever seen in a fantasy novel (including a ring of invisibility, an "orc") and some you'll never find in LoTR (strong female characters, complex moral arguments).
But Tolkien's work was groundbreaking, in many ways the first of its kind.
Name one.
Game companies use demos all of the time, AND THEY DON"T WANT YOU TO CONSIDER BUYING THE GAME TO BE OPTIONAL EITHER.
I've never seen a game demo tell me that I had to buy the full game, or my your existing documents and save them in new, incompatible formats without asking, or overwrite older versions of games I had full licenses for. NOT EVEN IN CAPS.
Given the original poster's experience with Office 2003 free trial, I wouldn't be experimenting with the Office 2007 free trial either.
From TFA: "Computer science does not need a theory of computation; it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression."
So what the writer of the book is really saying is that Computer Science needs a different kind of mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topos_theory
Bah -- which logical system is abstraction physics living in? It's so far down the tree from Infinite Fun Space that it's not funny.
So Microsoft's sales projections are off 400,000 units on 12 million, suddenly the world seems less bright?
Better researched articles have pointed out that Microsoft hasn't sold the units it claims to have sold, it's just flooded sales channels with them. Wiis are still selling as fast as they appear in stores.
Ummm, because the Wii hasn't got the graphics capability of the XBox? The PS3 and the Wii combined don't have the half of the games portfolio that the Xbox has? That the online gaming for the Xbox is way ahead of the other consoles? That the PS3 costs double that of the Xbox?
Speaking as a Wii owner (and I do love it), the appalling lack of games (and the atrocious quality of most of the available games, most of which are lame movie tie-ins released across platforms with Wii controller support being an afterthought) is hardly ever mentioned.
The XBox 360 has the most compelling set of titles available for any of the current crop of consoles (which isn't saying much) but none of its titles are particularly original; they're just like similar games for earlier platforms with sharper graphics. Meanwhile, the PS3 (which is realistically only slightly more expensive than the XBox when you compare similar setups) is backwards compatible with PS2 and PS1 titles (and there have been more compelling PS2 releases since the XBox 360 came out than there have been for the 360) and is a Blu-ray disc player (and blu-ray seems to be ahead in the format wars).
The real kicker is MS is still profiting off of this because of the people that have to go out and by a copy of XP to make their computer work.
I wonder if they offer special downgrade pricing?
>> What commercial coding adds is discipline.
> Where in the world have you worked?
Commercial coding adds a "need to ship now" discipline that doesn't necessarily lead to good code. I doubt that Donald Knuth was driven by commercial pressures when developing TeX and Metafont. In many cases, good code is a result of the right person becoming interested in the right problem set.
It seems to me that the Open Source movement is driven in part by "commercial pressure" (programs people use are intrinsically more interesting than programs people don't use) but also things like "sexiness" (e.g. 3d animation tools or games are sexier than, say, spreadsheets -- which is why we have far more open source 3d toolkits, libraries, etc. than spreadsheets) and some kind of Je ne sais quoi I'll call "charisma" (e.g. FireFox for various reasons was far more charismatic than Mozilla).
One of the "sexiest" things for computer programmers is writing their own computer language. This is why the Open Source community is blessed and plagued by so many languages. For a programmer, how "fundamental" what you're doing is to the world of computers is a badge of honor, which is why designing languages and operating systems is cooler than writing compilers and editors is cooler than writing word processors and spreadsheets. It's also why anyone coding in an interpreted language secretly or not so secretly feels inferior to folks using compiled languages.
These are all natural phenomena. I think that the only solution would be for a bunch of very smart and egotistical people to swallow their own pride and decide, say, not to fork their own Python variant and instead just help make Python better.
It's a web-browser thing. The same text in the same font (on Mac OS X) in TextEdit will be pair-kerned correctly.
"A Macintosh actually runs free/paid for apps you can download from the Internet..."
and
"I could be running Windows, for all it matters. It's locked down. You can't put your own software on it. Ever."
I agree with all that from a user's perspective, but that's really to the side.
Technically, the iPhone is a Mac running OS X and an iPod. Moving forward this means that they don't need to license anyone else's OS to build iPods. Any cool feature they build into a laptop can potentially benefit iPods and vice versa.
From June 11 onward, Apple is back to building on one major platform. If you want to build iPhone apps or AppleTV apps or iPod apps or Mac apps -- you can use the same tools and skill sets.
If you want to do the same for Microsoft's platforms you need to deal with:
XBox
XBox 360
Pocket Windows (or whatever it's called today)
Vista
Vista 65
Windows XP
Windows XP 64
Zune
And that's just the currently shipping ones.
Please get your "facts" straight.
The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) was originally developed by Digital Research which sold it as LD/F (Lavender screen of Death / Fatal errors). A small Seattle Company wrote an essentially illegal (non-clean-room) clone of DR's BSOD for x86. When Microsoft suddenly found a need for an x86-based fatal error screen they licensed the code from the small company and then incorporated it into Windows NT. Later, when the owner of the developer tried to sell licenses to their cloned BSOD independently, Microsoft sued them and forced them to accept $50,000 for the total rights to the BSOD.
Meanwhile, DR continued to sell its original BSOD (now updated to support x86 and supporting multiple shades of blue) which most users agreed was clearly superior to Microsoft's, but Microsoft made sure that its strategic products were even more incompatible with DR's BSOD than Microsoft's, eventually driving DR under.
Oh wait, that's DOS.
How is the parent insightful? No-one is calling for the abolition of copyright law.
PowerPoint was acquired.
Word was home-grown (word-processors weren't their idea, of course) but largely based on work from Xerox-Parc (they brought Simonyi in).
Excel was home-grown (spreadsheets weren't their idea).
NT Kernel -- not black and white. Essentially a clone of VAX VMS.
Internet Explorer -- based on NCSA Mosaic, read the freaking copyright in the About box.
By my count that's either 2 or 3.
It's not fair use if it adversely affects your market, and since your market is students wishing to cheat on their term papers, it's pretty drastic... so there's your damages.
The only problem being that apparently the Supreme Court tends to rule against the side it considers "bad". The question is, how many Supreme Court Justices paid for someone else's term papers?
In any event, I think he's wrong on all counts simply because the iPhone doesn't represent a dead end for Apple even if the iPhone product itself fails. Eventually, Apple will want advanced touchscreen products, MacOS X running on very small low-powered systems, cellular internet access, and so forth and so on built into its products. iPhone may not be The Killer Product, but each of the technologies in it is core to Apple and important in the long term.
Strategically, the iPhone represents:
* Gee doesn't shipping the first consumer digital cameras count as a new product Mr. Dvorak?
Unlike "real goods" which cost "real money" to make, a Vista product (ie. DVD + packaging) costs virtually nothing.
This is true but irrelevant. A copy of Vista selling in Costco for 20% off normal retail is potentially costing a full-priced sale and/or undermining other retailers in other ways. You won't see successful products that are in high demand -- software or otherwise -- in wholesale discount stores like Costco unless they aren't moving OR they're commodity products anyway.
And, as an aside, most of the high margin goods in the world now are more like software than, say, potting soil (it actually took me several attempts to come up with potting soil; even, say, "corn" has a significant IP/R&D component today).
The marginal cost of a digital camera, or a sachet of Splenda, or a barrel of oil, is relatively small. The R&D and opportunity costs are very large. In the case of oil it's supply vs. demand not production cost. Nikon didn't cut the price of the D40 (relative to the D50) by 30% because digital cameras suddenly got 30% cheaper to make, but because competitors with similar cost structures were costing them more than they stood to lose by cutting their profit margin on each camera.
Last couple of times I've visited Costco there have been huge and nearly full Vista racks. It's pretty early in a product cycle for Vista to be in Costco... let alone in Costco and not moving.
I _did_ RTFA. One study does not a fact make.
TFA refers to at least two studies.
Experience makes these points clear to me. and You need to read some articles on study practices and statistics.
These two statements make my whole point. Experience is an extremely poor guide to determining what is actually statistically probable. The whole point of scientific research is that common sense and experience are not good ways to reach scientific conclusions. A feather will in fact fall as quickly as a cannon ball when you eliminate air resistance.
Thank, get off my nuts, have a great day. When you finally get a clue, and get off your high horse, get back to me.
Umm. What can I say? I don't think my horse is so high; perhaps yours is subterranean.
"Second Variety" is certainly a great idea for an action-flick, and probably would be an action story in any other author's hands, but not Dick's (in my recollection). It's like deciding that John Le Carre's novels are action-flick material because they involve spies.
Similarly, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is a story whose main character is a bounty hunter who kills androids. Again, this may be "action-flick material" but the book is hardly written that way. The "climactic" fight where Deckard kills Baty and Pris is cursorily dealt with in a paragraph or two.
In general, I'd say what defines an action movie is a fascination with action versus the causes and consequences of action. An action movie dwells on the process of shooting and being shot at, say, whereas a more thoughtful movie dwells on why people might shoot someone and what happens afterwards. Philip Dick was never interested in action in the sense that action movies are.
How "retarded" do you have to be to confuse "communications" with "psychology"? The blog is a psychology blog and the researchers are experimental psychologists.
(I actually kind of agree with you about Communications and I hear that most experimental psychologists would too...)
"However, you know damn good and well that person to person is always the way to have a discussion if you want the maximum impact, as it's a lot harder to ignore someone in person, while it is fairly easy to not pay attention or to skim their points via email/phone/etc."
Fascinating as this groundless collection of assumptions and oversimplifications may be, the question remains, if I am forced to persuade someone via medium A vs. medium B, what might the implications be? I can't teleport or be in two places at once, and the holographic person-to-person comms system is down at the moment because it can't run under Vista.
The more technologyically-friendly one is, the easier it is to persuade them by email. The more details-oriented one is, the easier it is to persuade them by email. The more "frat boy and golf games" on is, the harder it is, typically, to persuade them over email.
You need to read TFA.
The point you're making is simply wrong -- the study actually showed no such relationship between technology usage and persuadability via email. On average (according to the studies), persuasion via email works about as well as face-to-face (for men) but not women if the women haven't met. The studies didn't cover cross-sex interactions.
You can ignore the results, assume they're wrong, or make use of the information constructively (e.g. by making an effort to contact a woman more directly to establish a working relationship before trying to influence her via email).
Another implication of the work is that you're more likely to persuade a man via email if you have an adversarial relationship with him. Again, this does not gel with your frat boy golf games assumptions.
Bladerunner is almost the exception that proves the rule.
It's a a good action movie that uses ideas from the book it's based on as texture. It has some excellent dialog, almost none of which comes from the book.
Oddly enough, Philip K. Dick is pretty much the most filmed SF author, and every one of his books, including Bladerunner, ends up being an action movie, despite the fact that none of his books even remotely resemble something that might be made into an action movie.
Bladerunner is perhaps the most faithful rendering of a Dick novel in that the hero of the book is a bounty hunter who shoots androids for a living. That's about the end of the resemblance, since every detail of the book at best is snuck in through a back door. Roy Baty isn't a philosopher poet uber warrior -- he's a victim, gunned down matter-of-factly by a guy who finds it easier to kill people than face his wife's scorn.
The fundamental problem -- as always -- has been economics. SF movies were expensive to make (today, it's almost cheaper to make them since virtual sets are getting to be cheaper than filming on location) and expensive to make means you need a mass audience (including overseas non-English speaking markets) which means dumbing your content down to the lowest common denominator.
Going back to Bladerunner -- it was made very cheaply for what it is, it was mangle by the studio in an effort to reach a mass audience, and it was a commercial disaster anyway. "Gee," thought the studio execs, "we ought to make more of these."
The one hope for SF fans is that Studio Execs will look at Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and think, "maybe it's better to base movies on well-loved books than on something George Lucas pulled out of his ass". More likely they'll produce Eragon. D'oh.