Understand one thing: fairness doesn't matter. Never having them used in war, that's what matters.
Um. But the USA is the only country ever to use them in war. So perhaps you wish to modify your statement to: "Never having them used against us in war, that's what matters."
No, I don't wish. We used twenty kiloton devices against a declared enemy at the end of World War II, and haven't used them that way since. We've certainly been provoked at times, yet we still exercised the necessary restraint. So enough with this "but, but, America is the only nation that ever used atomic weapons in war!" Yes, we know that. Get over it. And, if you're so goddamned concerned about how much damage we did to Japan before they quit, keep in mind that the fire raids that led up to the atom bombings caused many times more devastation than both nukes combined. It's perfectly possible to kill thousands of human beings in perfectly horrible ways without using an atom bomb, and we did. But nobody wants to talk about that because it was just "conventional" warfare: all you hear is "America used nukes in war and is sooooo evil!" So what? Napalm and thermite are a nasty brew, especially when you drop thousands of tons of them on enemy cities made of paper and bamboo. Yeah, so we're not nice guys when we make war on you. I mean, what did you expect... lollipops? Look, the world is full of badasses: just deal with it.
More importantly, I doubt you're bothering to consider (because it would weaken your fantasy of the U.S. as a thermonuclear aggressor who needs to be taken down a notch) the difference in yield between the primitive devices used against Japan, and modern fusion weapons. The things simply can't be allowed to proliferate: it was bad enough when it was just us and the Soviets. You may not like the United States, but you would be dissembling if you claimed there aren't countries who would be far, far more dangerous than the U.S. if they were armed with hydrogen warheads and delivery systems.
Seems like simple nuclear fission just doesn't cause enough mass destruction for some people.
Ironically (in the case of health care at least), countries that have single payer systems pay LESS than we do per capita, on the order of 50% less, and have longer life spans and better quality of life. The idea that single payer health care is some kind of financial sink hole, and leads to "death panels" are fallacies promoted by people who refuse to allow mere "facts" and "evidence" sway them from what their beloved ideology says is impossible.
Do you really want to know what the difference is? Well, I'll tell you. People like to hold up nations like Germany or Canada as examples of how well a so-called "single payer" health care system can work. And there's no question that the average Canadian is as healthy as the average American, probably healthier. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether or not we can trust our lawmakers and, more importantly, our bureaucrats to administer such a system fairly and cost-effectively. Germany, which by all accounts has one of the most trustworthy and efficient bureaucracies on the planet, is able to run their healthcare quite well.
We, on the other hand, have layers of corruption in the medical system that run so deep they are thoroughly institutionalized, and probably will never be rooted out. Hell, we have not even been able to take care of our elderly without massive malfeasance and fraud, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars disappearing into the gaping maw of criminal pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers and medical suppliers of all kinds. It is truly remarkable how many people are living in some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, believing that the United States Federal Government can be trusted with their health. Medicare has been a financial disaster of Biblical proportions, and expecting that matters will somehow improve by extending Federal authority over all our care is ridiculous.
1. I won't come in your mouth.
2. The check is in the mail.
3. I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.
Even if that wasn't the case, there is no doubt in my mind that if one ISP restricted access to certain things (like bittorrent), the others would follow through with it as well to maximize profits. It's been known to happen many, many times in the past. The free market isn't magic.
I agree, which is why I refer to the necessity of good regulation. The problem we're having now is a lack of that, due primarily to so-called "regulatory capture." Those self-same greedy corporations have influenced government at all levels to get what they what, which is unquestioned control of that last mile.
That's pretty much what I was thinking about when I wrote that, and I agree, for the most part the Stargate writers did a damn fine job of integrating some real science into the stories.
Not even close to the same thing. Putting your information on a public web site results in you having zero expectation of privacy. Much like if you put your wifi information in the paper.
Pretty much exactly the same thing. Set up an open WAP, and you have zero expectation of privacy. That's why I referenced "stupid people", i.e. those who are unable or unwilling to configure their access points so that they will have an expectation of privacy. There's no effective difference: in one case you're spreading your crap across the entire Internet, and in the other you're splashing it around your neighborhood. Only a difference of scale, at best. In principle, none at all.
As if I needed another reason to not have a facebook account. If there's not an anonymous option I just create a temporary fake account for whatever forum I'm wanting to comment on and then forget it. I have more hotmail, yahoo and gmail accounts than I can count. In the last 15 years I'll bet I've used hundreds of temp accounts.
I've run my own mail server for, well, probably close to twenty years now, and I just create addresses like "junk0001", "junk0002", etc. whenever I create an account on a site or forum that I don't trust. That also lets me see who is actually selling my personal information, and lets me easily block any spam that results. It's remarkable how many sites that claim "we don't sell or release any of your personal information to any third parties" do exactly that as soon as you click the SUBMIT button. I've literally had spam appear in my inbox from some of these throwaway accounts within minutes of my signing up for some forum or other. Everything from payday loan offers to V!agka. Fuckers.
I agree with you about Facebook. I don't have an account and am not ever likely to have one.
Yes. I remember Lightning, where the gimme didn't come at the beginning of the novel but towards the middle, when you find out that the Nazis had time travel. At that point, I was so involved with the story and the characters that I really didn't care... I just accepted it and rolled with it. Actually, now that I think of it, that was an interesting way to handle the believability aspect: don't just shove it down our throats in the first chapter and hope we can swallow it, instead, wait until we're completely hooked and want to believe it. Haven't seen that done too often elsewhere, but I'll be damned if Koontz didn't pull it off perfectly.
What's great about true hard core science fiction, is that sometimes if you wait long enough, what was written about comes to be.
Yes, and that's always inspiring. I read a story (damned if I can remember what it was or who wrote it) which described the smartphone in remarkable detail. It was written back in the mid-sixties. I remember being fascinated by the idea, as well as the global computing network the author also described. I was only a kid at the time, but here I am now, forty-odd years later, using that writer's invention every day.
I still have to let some things go (that are probably impossible) and just try and enjoy what is fiction after all.. So I guess for me "tech-no babble" is one of those things I can forgive, as long as it's not overdone to the point that we may as well be talking magic.
Yes, the well-known "gimme". I can usually accept a sci-fi gimme, if it's done early on, isn't belabored to the point where I can't ignore it anymore, and if the rest of the work is at least believable, if not plausible.
Also, less allegory would have been had about the torture of faceless, godless enemies, and the realization that they're just the same as us, etc. etc.
It would have been a totally different show, and for the millions who enjoyed the show thoroughly (especially when discounting the ending), it would therefore have been worse.
You get +1 troll.
Captain Kirk: "Well, there's no accounting for taste."
I personally did not care for the show, and from my perspective, if it were different there's a possibility I would have watched it. If that makes me a troll in your mind, well, it's a good thing you aren't moderating because you obviously equate Troll with Disagree.
The right wing goes after the stupid voters.
Part of their platform is anti-intellectualism.
Its pretty fucked up.
The left wing goes after poor people's votes by promising them goodies we can no longer afford (if we ever really could.)
So yeah, it's pretty fucked up, but it's a bi-partisan process.
The right-wing goes after well-connected elite's votes by delivering them massive no-bid military contracts that we could never afford in the first place.
I was making a joke, but if you want to get serious, fine.
Good science fiction can and should also refer to social
sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier
to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world.
That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction
should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about.
Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who
struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it
as fiction based on the core principles of the Age of Enlightenment.
And if you are going to create a universe that is technologically and scientifically more advanced than we are (but not so advanced that their technology might as well be supernatural) then you must project their developments in light of current scientific knowledge. That's why it is science fiction and not fantasy.
The original was vastly superior to this unimaginative remake bullshit. It had a better story, better actors, better music and better cinematography. Even some of the special effects were better.
Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra did the effects for the initial season. So yes, some of those effects were very well done for the time, I agree.
As remakes go, the SyFy Channel's effort just didn't really quite measure up, so far as I'm concerned. They cancelled Stargate in favor of this crap. I know that BSG fans claim it's because BSG was more popular, but I don't believe that. This is also the channel that axed Sliders in favor of First Wave, so I don't trust their judgment. Period.
The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.
The series (like all other Sci-Fi Channel series before it) ended when Bonnie Hammer, or her successor, decided to kill it and not a minute before. Usually it was to put on more wrestling, or some mindless show like "First Wave".
Sci-fi Channel my ass. Pardon me, "SyFy Channel", whatever the FUCK that means. I used to love that channel, back when shows like Sliders and Stargate SG-1 were on. They also tended to show decent movies. They were, in fact, sufficient reason for me to pay my cable bill each month. But that hasn't been true for a long, long time. I wrote a couple of letters to Bonnie Hammer some years ago, didn't even get a form letter in response. They haven't been in touch with their viewership for quite some time.
I liked BSG because they don't bother with all the techno-babble. How does an FTL drive work? They don't tell you and it doesn't matter. It just makes the spaceship go and uses up some fuel. Quite refreshing from Star Trek and their neutrino flux combobulator matrices and anti-gluon snark fields.
Spoken like a true Joss Whedon fan (and yes, Firefly was one of my favorite TV shows but not for the science, because there wasn't any.)
The problem with your perspective is that if you remove the actual science from a work of science-fiction, at best you have a fantasy. Nothing wrong with that, except that for the minority like me who grew up on books by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, George O. Harrison and other masters of hard sci-fi, well, we tend to resent fantasies falsely represented as science fiction. More to the point, it's the how and the why that makes the story interesting. If the only reason you watched Battlestar Galactica was for the (ahem!) "human" element, you might as well just watch re-runs of Wagon Train, or maybe a good soap opera. BSG (and Stargate, and Atlantis, and hell, Star Wars for that matter) are all fantasies with technological trappings, and the lack of any supporting foundation for all the critical technologies depicted simply detracts from the believability of the storyline, so far as I'm concerned. Complain about Star Trek's technobabble if you wish, but the original series, in particular, was about as much of a true sci-fi as the studio heads would allow: Roddenberry used scripts from some of the best science fiction writers of the time, and much of what they wrote was a legitimate projection of existing scientific knowledge (not all, but they tried.)
Stargate was better, well up until Stargate Universe that is.
Yes, I preferred SG-1 to Atlantis, but I have every episode of both. Conversely, I stopped watching Universe after the first few episodes. I mean, taken on its merits it was a decent, well-produced show, but it wasn't a Stargate series. If you use the word Stargate in your show's title, viewers are going to have certain expectations. Universe, so far as I'm concerned, simply didn't meet them.
So was the transporter on Star Trek. Doesn't minimize the effect it's had on real-life science since then.
Sure, because it avoided more expensive Shuttle sequences. But the fact remains that the Transporter, as implemented by Roddenberry's effects people, was way cool and added another plot dimension that otherwise would have been unavailable. I don't know what particular effect the Star Trek Transporter had on real-life science, considering that it was a very, very old idea in science-fiction even then.
Deciding to make the robots in one's production look like humans is a legitimate cost-cutting measure, I suppose, but don't try to justify it on any other terms. It was just cheap, and really added nothing of value. Besides, the original series' Cylons were impressive machines. They were black and silver, very shiny, and had that nifty scanning eye. I wouldn't mind having one, so long as it could be programmed not to try and kill me.
But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.
Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".
No, the term "evolve" fits quite nicely. The presumption that the world only applies to living organisms is incorrect.
Nonsense. Robots were created, not evolved!
So? According to some people, all living creatures on this planet were created, but we still evolve. If the robots are sentient and capable of modifying and or improving themselves, then they are capable of evolving as well, regardless of what point in that evolution they were "created." Even if they are not sentient, but capable of altering their own structure in response to external stimuli, they can still evolve. Not Darwinian evolution, or necessarily anything like it, of course. The fact that the process is not arbitrarily governed by environmental constraints is likewise irrelevant.
We're already capable of artificially modifying our genome. We're not particularly good at it yet, but we will be, and when we are, we'll be directly and consciously affecting our own evolutionary processes. No different from Cylons advancing their own design, when you get right down to it.
Slashdot Mirror
So you think only people who are uneducated and ignorant should have important posts.
A hell of a lot of my fellow Americans do, I'm sad to say. We don't revere knowledge and learning anymore, we treasure sound bites.
Understand one thing: fairness doesn't matter. Never having them used in war, that's what matters.
Um. But the USA is the only country ever to use them in war. So perhaps you wish to modify your statement to: "Never having them used against us in war, that's what matters."
No, I don't wish. We used twenty kiloton devices against a declared enemy at the end of World War II, and haven't used them that way since. We've certainly been provoked at times, yet we still exercised the necessary restraint. So enough with this "but, but, America is the only nation that ever used atomic weapons in war!" Yes, we know that. Get over it. And, if you're so goddamned concerned about how much damage we did to Japan before they quit, keep in mind that the fire raids that led up to the atom bombings caused many times more devastation than both nukes combined. It's perfectly possible to kill thousands of human beings in perfectly horrible ways without using an atom bomb, and we did. But nobody wants to talk about that because it was just "conventional" warfare: all you hear is "America used nukes in war and is sooooo evil!" So what? Napalm and thermite are a nasty brew, especially when you drop thousands of tons of them on enemy cities made of paper and bamboo. Yeah, so we're not nice guys when we make war on you. I mean, what did you expect ... lollipops? Look, the world is full of badasses: just deal with it.
More importantly, I doubt you're bothering to consider (because it would weaken your fantasy of the U.S. as a thermonuclear aggressor who needs to be taken down a notch) the difference in yield between the primitive devices used against Japan, and modern fusion weapons. The things simply can't be allowed to proliferate: it was bad enough when it was just us and the Soviets. You may not like the United States, but you would be dissembling if you claimed there aren't countries who would be far, far more dangerous than the U.S. if they were armed with hydrogen warheads and delivery systems.
Seems like simple nuclear fission just doesn't cause enough mass destruction for some people.
Ironically (in the case of health care at least), countries that have single payer systems pay LESS than we do per capita, on the order of 50% less, and have longer life spans and better quality of life. The idea that single payer health care is some kind of financial sink hole, and leads to "death panels" are fallacies promoted by people who refuse to allow mere "facts" and "evidence" sway them from what their beloved ideology says is impossible.
Do you really want to know what the difference is? Well, I'll tell you. People like to hold up nations like Germany or Canada as examples of how well a so-called "single payer" health care system can work. And there's no question that the average Canadian is as healthy as the average American, probably healthier. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether or not we can trust our lawmakers and, more importantly, our bureaucrats to administer such a system fairly and cost-effectively. Germany, which by all accounts has one of the most trustworthy and efficient bureaucracies on the planet, is able to run their healthcare quite well.
We, on the other hand, have layers of corruption in the medical system that run so deep they are thoroughly institutionalized, and probably will never be rooted out. Hell, we have not even been able to take care of our elderly without massive malfeasance and fraud, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars disappearing into the gaping maw of criminal pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers and medical suppliers of all kinds. It is truly remarkable how many people are living in some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy, believing that the United States Federal Government can be trusted with their health. Medicare has been a financial disaster of Biblical proportions, and expecting that matters will somehow improve by extending Federal authority over all our care is ridiculous.
1. I won't come in your mouth.
2. The check is in the mail.
3. I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you.
Never forget Number 3. It's important.
Even if that wasn't the case, there is no doubt in my mind that if one ISP restricted access to certain things (like bittorrent), the others would follow through with it as well to maximize profits. It's been known to happen many, many times in the past. The free market isn't magic.
I agree, which is why I refer to the necessity of good regulation. The problem we're having now is a lack of that, due primarily to so-called "regulatory capture." Those self-same greedy corporations have influenced government at all levels to get what they what, which is unquestioned control of that last mile.
In fact, your entire attitude is stupid.
You're entitled to your opinion. I won't sink to calling you "stupid", tempting as it is.
The Ascension thing was a bit magical
That's pretty much what I was thinking about when I wrote that, and I agree, for the most part the Stargate writers did a damn fine job of integrating some real science into the stories.
Not even close to the same thing. Putting your information on a public web site results in you having zero expectation of privacy. Much like if you put your wifi information in the paper.
Pretty much exactly the same thing. Set up an open WAP, and you have zero expectation of privacy. That's why I referenced "stupid people", i.e. those who are unable or unwilling to configure their access points so that they will have an expectation of privacy. There's no effective difference: in one case you're spreading your crap across the entire Internet, and in the other you're splashing it around your neighborhood. Only a difference of scale, at best. In principle, none at all.
As if I needed another reason to not have a facebook account. If there's not an anonymous option I just create a temporary fake account for whatever forum I'm wanting to comment on and then forget it. I have more hotmail, yahoo and gmail accounts than I can count. In the last 15 years I'll bet I've used hundreds of temp accounts.
I've run my own mail server for, well, probably close to twenty years now, and I just create addresses like "junk0001", "junk0002", etc. whenever I create an account on a site or forum that I don't trust. That also lets me see who is actually selling my personal information, and lets me easily block any spam that results. It's remarkable how many sites that claim "we don't sell or release any of your personal information to any third parties" do exactly that as soon as you click the SUBMIT button. I've literally had spam appear in my inbox from some of these throwaway accounts within minutes of my signing up for some forum or other. Everything from payday loan offers to V!agka. Fuckers.
I agree with you about Facebook. I don't have an account and am not ever likely to have one.
Explain what law is being broken by reading information that people put out for public consumption.
Probably the same law that someone scanning for hotspots breaks when monitoring wireless access points owned and operated by stupid people.
or Koontz blending science fiction with horror.
Yes. I remember Lightning, where the gimme didn't come at the beginning of the novel but towards the middle, when you find out that the Nazis had time travel. At that point, I was so involved with the story and the characters that I really didn't care ... I just accepted it and rolled with it. Actually, now that I think of it, that was an interesting way to handle the believability aspect: don't just shove it down our throats in the first chapter and hope we can swallow it, instead, wait until we're completely hooked and want to believe it. Haven't seen that done too often elsewhere, but I'll be damned if Koontz didn't pull it off perfectly.
What's great about true hard core science fiction, is that sometimes if you wait long enough, what was written about comes to be.
Yes, and that's always inspiring. I read a story (damned if I can remember what it was or who wrote it) which described the smartphone in remarkable detail. It was written back in the mid-sixties. I remember being fascinated by the idea, as well as the global computing network the author also described. I was only a kid at the time, but here I am now, forty-odd years later, using that writer's invention every day.
I still have to let some things go (that are probably impossible) and just try and enjoy what is fiction after all.. So I guess for me "tech-no babble" is one of those things I can forgive, as long as it's not overdone to the point that we may as well be talking magic.
Yes, the well-known "gimme". I can usually accept a sci-fi gimme, if it's done early on, isn't belabored to the point where I can't ignore it anymore, and if the rest of the work is at least believable, if not plausible.
Also, less allegory would have been had about the torture of faceless, godless enemies, and the realization that they're just the same as us, etc. etc.
It would have been a totally different show, and for the millions who enjoyed the show thoroughly (especially when discounting the ending), it would therefore have been worse.
You get +1 troll.
Captain Kirk: "Well, there's no accounting for taste."
I personally did not care for the show, and from my perspective, if it were different there's a possibility I would have watched it. If that makes me a troll in your mind, well, it's a good thing you aren't moderating because you obviously equate Troll with Disagree.
The right wing goes after the stupid voters. Part of their platform is anti-intellectualism.
Its pretty fucked up.
The left wing goes after poor people's votes by promising them goodies we can no longer afford (if we ever really could.)
So yeah, it's pretty fucked up, but it's a bi-partisan process.
The right-wing goes after well-connected elite's votes by delivering them massive no-bid military contracts that we could never afford in the first place.
I was making a joke, but if you want to get serious, fine.
Whoosh.
Yeah well. It's been a long day. I'll go back to my room now.
It failed because of greedy corporations that just can't seem to get enough money.
Yes, and why were they allowed to do that? Because of the regulatory environment that was specifically crafted to permit it.
That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about. Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it as fiction based on the core principles of the Age of Enlightenment.
And if you are going to create a universe that is technologically and scientifically more advanced than we are (but not so advanced that their technology might as well be supernatural) then you must project their developments in light of current scientific knowledge. That's why it is science fiction and not fantasy.
You definitely had better drugs when you were watching it. The old show has more cheese than a Man Vs Food nacho episode.
Sure, and therein lies the charm. The remake took itself far too seriously, in the same way that Stargate: Universe takes itself too seriously.
And you're right about the drugs.
The original was vastly superior to this unimaginative remake bullshit. It had a better story, better actors, better music and better cinematography. Even some of the special effects were better.
Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra did the effects for the initial season. So yes, some of those effects were very well done for the time, I agree.
As remakes go, the SyFy Channel's effort just didn't really quite measure up, so far as I'm concerned. They cancelled Stargate in favor of this crap. I know that BSG fans claim it's because BSG was more popular, but I don't believe that. This is also the channel that axed Sliders in favor of First Wave, so I don't trust their judgment. Period.
The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.
The series (like all other Sci-Fi Channel series before it) ended when Bonnie Hammer, or her successor, decided to kill it and not a minute before. Usually it was to put on more wrestling, or some mindless show like "First Wave".
Sci-fi Channel my ass. Pardon me, "SyFy Channel", whatever the FUCK that means. I used to love that channel, back when shows like Sliders and Stargate SG-1 were on. They also tended to show decent movies. They were, in fact, sufficient reason for me to pay my cable bill each month. But that hasn't been true for a long, long time. I wrote a couple of letters to Bonnie Hammer some years ago, didn't even get a form letter in response. They haven't been in touch with their viewership for quite some time.
I liked BSG because they don't bother with all the techno-babble. How does an FTL drive work? They don't tell you and it doesn't matter. It just makes the spaceship go and uses up some fuel. Quite refreshing from Star Trek and their neutrino flux combobulator matrices and anti-gluon snark fields.
Spoken like a true Joss Whedon fan (and yes, Firefly was one of my favorite TV shows but not for the science, because there wasn't any.)
The problem with your perspective is that if you remove the actual science from a work of science-fiction, at best you have a fantasy. Nothing wrong with that, except that for the minority like me who grew up on books by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, George O. Harrison and other masters of hard sci-fi, well, we tend to resent fantasies falsely represented as science fiction. More to the point, it's the how and the why that makes the story interesting. If the only reason you watched Battlestar Galactica was for the (ahem!) "human" element, you might as well just watch re-runs of Wagon Train, or maybe a good soap opera. BSG (and Stargate, and Atlantis, and hell, Star Wars for that matter) are all fantasies with technological trappings, and the lack of any supporting foundation for all the critical technologies depicted simply detracts from the believability of the storyline, so far as I'm concerned. Complain about Star Trek's technobabble if you wish, but the original series, in particular, was about as much of a true sci-fi as the studio heads would allow: Roddenberry used scripts from some of the best science fiction writers of the time, and much of what they wrote was a legitimate projection of existing scientific knowledge (not all, but they tried.)
Stargate was better, well up until Stargate Universe that is.
Yes, I preferred SG-1 to Atlantis, but I have every episode of both. Conversely, I stopped watching Universe after the first few episodes. I mean, taken on its merits it was a decent, well-produced show, but it wasn't a Stargate series. If you use the word Stargate in your show's title, viewers are going to have certain expectations. Universe, so far as I'm concerned, simply didn't meet them.
I was confused there for a centon.
You still remember that show? It didn't even last a yarin.
Too much feldergarb. Oh frak, where did my mouse pointer go?
It would have been a totally different show.
Yes, and arguably a better one.
So was the transporter on Star Trek. Doesn't minimize the effect it's had on real-life science since then.
Sure, because it avoided more expensive Shuttle sequences. But the fact remains that the Transporter, as implemented by Roddenberry's effects people, was way cool and added another plot dimension that otherwise would have been unavailable. I don't know what particular effect the Star Trek Transporter had on real-life science, considering that it was a very, very old idea in science-fiction even then.
Deciding to make the robots in one's production look like humans is a legitimate cost-cutting measure, I suppose, but don't try to justify it on any other terms. It was just cheap, and really added nothing of value. Besides, the original series' Cylons were impressive machines. They were black and silver, very shiny, and had that nifty scanning eye. I wouldn't mind having one, so long as it could be programmed not to try and kill me.
But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.
Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".
No, the term "evolve" fits quite nicely. The presumption that the world only applies to living organisms is incorrect.
Nonsense. Robots were created, not evolved!
So? According to some people, all living creatures on this planet were created, but we still evolve. If the robots are sentient and capable of modifying and or improving themselves, then they are capable of evolving as well, regardless of what point in that evolution they were "created." Even if they are not sentient, but capable of altering their own structure in response to external stimuli, they can still evolve. Not Darwinian evolution, or necessarily anything like it, of course. The fact that the process is not arbitrarily governed by environmental constraints is likewise irrelevant.
We're already capable of artificially modifying our genome. We're not particularly good at it yet, but we will be, and when we are, we'll be directly and consciously affecting our own evolutionary processes. No different from Cylons advancing their own design, when you get right down to it.