Can't say I like the trolls, but pretending that what happens on the semi-productive section of Slashdot is of some grand importance seems like a bit of a reach.
There's a semi-productive section of this site? Wow. Hey, post the link to it when you get a chance.
Here's my novel legal theory: if you don't like it, quit.
Hear hear! I'm sick of all the complainers around here. If your job tries to force you into a religion, just up and leave. And if you don't like that companies are allowed to do this sort of thing in your state, just move to another state. Same if you don't like that this is allowed in your country: just emigrate to another, more enlightened country.
What? You live in a country that wrongfully imprisoned you on trumped up charges? Don't like prison? Just slit your throat. And stop being such a whiner.
Not in my day! Back in the old days, Slashdot was the same reliable thing all the time. Now get off my lawn you... er... five-digit userID whippersnapper!:)
I think you got that wrong. A hammer usually isn't considered very subtle.
There have been a lot of wooshing noises on this thread since I left it.
Re:That marks my end of use for Python
on
Python 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Besides teh above remark of well thoguth migration paths - it is importante to remakr that support for python 2.x has not ended in any way.
As far as Iam aware, the recomendation is to keep working with python 2.6 - and use the py2to3 script to regularly to make 3.0 releases if you you can...
Are you typing while drunk?
No, he generated that comment with Python 2.6 code but ran it with the new release.
This post was reserved for the Python NT 3.5 joke, but it has been postponed until the next release (along with a database-driven filesystem the Python developers swear they're working on).
Couldn't they just call it something else and keep the old weird print the way it is and thus not break so much? For instance I think Perl 6 uses "say".
As I understand it, having many similar statements and functions is exactly what the architects of Python were trying to avoid. Python 3.0 is somewhat incompatible with earlier versions precisely because they didn't want to litter it with messy hacks and many parallel methods of doing the same thing, but rather to design a new version as if they were getting a clean slate. In a way I wish Perl had done the same thing, as I'd love to be able to read other people's Perl.
I'd add to this that not only isn't a wide assortment of distros not a problem, I'm not even convinced that it's perceived as a problem. The "TOO MANY DISTROS!" myth has been rampant for years, and I think it's a rather tired argument. Anyone reading this site will likely have heard of Slackware, Debian and even GNewsense, but the casual user trying out a Linux distro for the first time will choose between Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora and SuSE. And that's it. Other distros aren't even on the radar. Your average business procurement drone, on the other hand, will likely choose Red Hat, SuSE or maybe Ubuntu LTS with a support plan.
The plethora of other distros is just white noise to the non-guru, and does not constitute a problem for Linux adoption. Linux's biggest hurdles are familiarity, software compability and the rarity of bundling with commodity hardware. Those will be the biggest challenges whether there is only one distro or 6.02x10^23 of them to choose from.
But omission of "The Scouring of the Shire", THE BEST PART of the whole fucking story, was just asinine.
... or would have been in the book. Movies require different considerations, and the omission of that scene from the movie made sense.
In fact, when they first announced the movies many eons ago the two scenes you mentioned were the first ones I was hoping Jackson would cut, the Scouring because it would have rendered the ending even more long and cumbersome than it was in the final film. Remember, the point is not to make a shot-for-shot documentary of what's in the book, but rather to make a good film that shares the book's concepts, plot and characters. Including the Scouring would have been good from a character development and accuracy standpoint, but it would have failed in the sense that the film's ending would have felt egregiously long. Most viewers new to Tolkein's stories, their attention focused on the destruction of the ring and celebrations in Minas Tirith, would have found an extra battle in the Shire as superfluous as the transparent mechas of the frozen future at the end of Spielberg's AI.
I wouldn't have the book any other way. And of course, none of the above explains why Faramir is temporarily a bad guy, nor why half the scenes in Return of the King were in slo-mo despite its already egregious running length. But Scouring's omission always made sense to me.
Re:I always look forward to new Fedora Core's
on
Fedora 10 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I expect this one will be better still.
(No I don't work for Red Hat.)
As a Fedora user perhaps you (and your many cohorts in the community who are reading this) can offer some input.
I used to use Red Hat and Fedora in olden times. I got to know them really well (I'm even an RHCE). But when FC2 came out it really bothered me. While FC1 was basically an evolution of Red Hat 9, FC2 was way too experimental to be an everyday business or personal OS, and it revealed what Red Hat was going to do with its free OS: turn me into a guniea pig. It was the first Fedora to sport the 2.6 kernel, which was pretty neat, but I found it to be unstable. The next couple releases did nothing to restore my confidence, and I've been a very happy Kubuntu user ever since.
Until now. Kubuntu has always been a slightly shoddy implementation of KDE, but the KDE 4.1 that comes with Intrepid Ibex (Kubuntu 8.10) is really getting on my nerves. It's sluggish - the Desktop takes about a minute to load, even when I turn off X.org's composite effects. And it feels incomplete. Even though I've switched to double-click in KDE, the file selection windows (like the one in which I select an image for my Desktop wallpaper) interpret single-clicks as full selections and promptly close the windows, so I can't preview my wallpaper selection in the right pane. When I installed Gnome, KDE started loading the Gnome network management utility to manage my wireless connection, even though KDE's is also open in the panel right next to it. so I've been using Gnome for the last few days.
I absolutely love KDE 4.1's desktop, panel and other Plasma elements, but I can't stand the experience overall, and while I'm open to the idea that it could be due to issues with KDE 4.1 rather than Kubuntu... well, when I saw this announcement for Fedora 10 it got me thinking. So how about it? Am I being unfair and blaming KDE 4.1 issues on my distro? Do any KDE users recommend this distro for KDE over others? Has Fedora improved as much as I've heard it has? Has anyone used both Kubuntu and Fedora/KDE, and thus be able to provide a comparison? Because I'm in a serious distro switchin' mood.
I was hoping that by "porn" the AC parent meant "screenshots of the new OS." But that's not what AC meant: AC meant "porn." Whoever modded this NSFW link +1 Informative should never get mod points again.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you like sci-fi, you owe it to yourself to read The Diamond Age.
As a coincidence I finished The Diamond Age this morning. I also highly recommend it. It has some slow bits in which I wondered where the story was going, but all of them had redeeming purposes and I was not disappointed for long.
However I'm a bit disappointed by this review of Anathem because it sounds suspiciously like I'd agree with it. I base this assertion largely on this passage:
I am under the impression that Stephenson's audience is in large part made of people like me - somewhat geeky, interested in science, and therefore prone to paying close attention to details of the story. In this respect, this book simply fails. The reader is left with so many open questions, so many unfinished lines of inquiry, that the whole thing feels unfinished, even rushed.
I'm exactly that sort of reader. I pay close attention to details and am interested in seeing them be developed. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age definitely reward the reader for paying attention. The dead ends the reviewer describes would ruin such a book for me.
Also, at least a couple people above mention that the first 100 pages are a waste. That reminds me very much of Snow Crash, the beginning of which made me wonder why I'd spent my hard-earned cash on a book about a pizza delivery man in the future and his unlikely friendship with a girl who skates behind cars; it took some time before I understood why these two characters are worth following, and why the world they live in is worthy of having a novel set in it. The Diamond Age, too, is a little slow to start and at times seems to be aimless (one of the first characters to be introduced dies almost immediately). While I haven't read this new book, it strikes me from the Anathem reviews and from the two books I've read that Stephenson invests much effort in showing you around his worlds after his books start, rather than thrusting you into some meaningful action, and I get the impression that while he occasionally manages to make this work, sometimes he doesn't, and that Anathem is in the latter category. Rather a shame, because the man is gifted.
Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
Agreed - these tech pundits were complete tools. O'Gara was shallow enough to stalk Pamela Jones of Groklaw in 2005 and publish alleged photos of her apartment. Only Daniel Lyons (he of the Fake Steve) later admitted he was wrong.
But this gets into a bigger pet peeve of mine: the tendency of people to disregard details in pursuit of what they wish were true. These pundits really wanted Linux to fail massively, either because their bread and butter was covering the developments of Microsoft and other proprietary OS vendors or because they equated Linux and free software with anti-capitalism. This led a lot of these shrills to cling to a very silly, unsubstantiated lawsuit long after it became clear that SCO had no concrete evidence to present in court and clearly hadn't thought through licensing considerations (BSD-licensed code in both Linux and System V, for example).
Many people really don't like delving into the details before forming an opinion and sticking to it. See also: religion, politics.
Easy. If we accept "soul" means "consciousness"...
Ah. Not so easy then.
If you RTFA, though, that's how Kurzweil defines soul for the purposes of this discussion. So yes, we accept that a soul is a consciousness, as that's the way it's definted here. Personally I think the word "soul" is therefore just a hook to make people interested in the topic; it would have been more accurate to ask whether a machine can become conscious (in those words).
As far as her running in 2 years, that would be perfect. Obama, was elected to the senate and right away started running for President. She should do the same.
Obama started his career in the Senate in 2005 and announced his candidacy for president in 2007 (like all the other candidates). I'm surprised to hear that a two-year duration constitutes "right away."
Even so, the argument you propose in Palin's favor makes little sense. Experience in a govermnment office is not the same thing as experience in general, and neither of these ranges of experience can guarantee good judgement in an entirely different office. There's no logic behind the argument that because someone served as long as Obama did they would make a good president. We don't even know if he's a good president yet, so comparing service durations and concluding that Palin shound run in 2012 makes no sense. (Unless one is a fanboy, that is, in which case matters of reason are out the window.)
Personally, when Palin starts speaking about issues without demonizing half the US population, and foreign affairs without hinting that she's a n00b, I'll take her seriously as a presidential candidate.
In Aeonite's defense, he did try to find an alternative to using a reference from another space movie. Honest. I actually saw him out combing the desert.
I saw him chase an alternative 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before he gave it up. To the last he grappled with it; from hell's heart he stabbed at it; for hate's sake he spit his last breath at it.
I wonder how many movies there are going to be? Hopefully I'm still alive when the last one comes out(if they ever wrap the series).
They'll probably start out with a clear story arc and a plan to make six or seven very good films that wow audiences, then just belt out a few extra ones that focus largely on minor characters that viewers don't care about while ignoring the compelling story that got everyone interested in the first place. Universal will then go out of business when there's only one movie left to make, and Paramount will take over and expect us all to believe their conclusion is a valid part of the series.
(If you can't decide whether to mod this funny, mod it insightful or just stomp off and cry into your pile of dead-end hardcovers, you must be a disgruntled Robert Jordan fan.)
... that I'm happy that it will be over at goddamn last.
I'll miss it. I've grown up in this election, and when it's over I'll have no idea what to do. I remember when I was four or five years old, back around the time Reagan was elected and The Empire Stikes Back was drawing crowds, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had just started their campaigns. I remember coming out of the movie theater after seeing Back to the Future and seeing buses go by with competing Huckabee and Clinton banners on the side. I fondly recall during the first Gulf War and after September 11th the moving speeches by McCain and Obama.
Remember the Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" ads where McCain was enjoying a big square burger next to Clara Peller with her miniscule competing burger? Remember Hillary Clinton's break dancing extravaganza? Or when Seattle Grunge Artists for Obama did their tour in the early 90s and Kurt Cobain called Obama "the real spokesman for our generation?" My whole life was shaped by these campaigns. Tomorrow I may have to get a hobby.
Mom, is that you? I love the people who tell me I'm naive but provide no new facts or insights.
I usually find that posts or e-mails prominantly employing the phrases "Oh come on," "Oh please" and the extra-whiny "Oh puh-LEEZE" can be disregarded on sight - no need to reply to the equally whiny points that follow those phrases. Noise tends to follow noise.
Sure, but then as soon as President Bush bings up Slashdot on his Oval Office desktop first thing in the morning he'll see this story, and then he'll be held accountable for the court order by the ever vigilant Justice Department and Congress. With this story so prominantly placed, Bush will be impeached by week's end.
Unless the US government doesn't hold people accountable for crimes, but that seems kind of a stretch.
Oh sure, nothing's really new... and yet, continuing a franchise or doing a remake is even less original than simply reusing archetypes. If a storyteller mines primal, Paleolithic fears of monsters in the form of an Alien movie set on a future ship controlled by The Company, he or she is at least framing a new story with new characters. Yes, the structures and archetypes are repeats, but the fresh approach makes it worth doing.
I'm not trying to dis Star Trek or Star Wars, or remakes like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I enjoy them. But I remember watching Firefly on DVD for the first time and wondering how I'd managed to miss the show when it aired, and I lamented that new and original shows like it didn't happen (and succeed) on a regular basis. Yes, it's just a western in space, and yes, the overbearing government of the Alliance has precursors in other stories, and I know the Reavers are recycled zombies, but the fresh packaging, design and characters were something to admire. I wish they'd happen more often. The main reason they don't is that we vote with our feet: I know I'll head to the cinema when this Star Trek film opens. Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to reward repetition.
In the Lucas edit the Salt Vampire shoots first, misses Kirk by a yard and then gets shot back. There's also a newly-added scene where a CGI Khan meets Spock in the docking bay and rambles on about nothing for a few minutes before Spock steps on him. Also, in Lucas's proposal for this reboot film young Kirk was to have been played by Jake Lloyd.
I agree that First Contact was great and Generations was meh... but it's easy to forget First Contact (IMHO the best recent Star Trek film) came out in 1996, 12 years ago. Even Nemesis, which I enjoyed but thought went a little too far with the Data/Spock parallel, came out six years ago. It's been a while since we had a good Star Trek film. And honestly, looking at the actors and costumes and bridge sets, I'm suddenly excited about this film. It looks like they tried to capture the aesthetic of The Cage (the original series pilot episode) and the first season, without the gray and red color scheme and wobbly walls. This movie is going to have a very eye-catching appearance.
That said, I'd trade a good Star Trek film for something new and original. No one's making the next Alien, the next Blade Runner, the next Firefly. I'm eager to see this, but as a sci-fi fan there's a part of me that's discouraged to see us mining 1966 for ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't say I like the trolls, but pretending that what happens on the semi-productive section of Slashdot is of some grand importance seems like a bit of a reach.
There's a semi-productive section of this site? Wow. Hey, post the link to it when you get a chance.
Here's my novel legal theory: if you don't like it, quit.
Hear hear! I'm sick of all the complainers around here. If your job tries to force you into a religion, just up and leave. And if you don't like that companies are allowed to do this sort of thing in your state, just move to another state. Same if you don't like that this is allowed in your country: just emigrate to another, more enlightened country.
What? You live in a country that wrongfully imprisoned you on trumped up charges? Don't like prison? Just slit your throat. And stop being such a whiner.
Not in my day! Back in the old days, Slashdot was the same reliable thing all the time. Now get off my lawn you ... er ... five-digit userID whippersnapper! :)
sqlite support was added to 2.5.
I think you got that wrong. A hammer usually isn't considered very subtle.
There have been a lot of wooshing noises on this thread since I left it.
Besides teh above remark of well thoguth migration paths - it is importante to remakr that support for python 2.x has not ended in any way.
As far as Iam aware, the recomendation is to keep working with python 2.6 - and use the py2to3 script to regularly to make 3.0 releases if you you can ...
Are you typing while drunk?
No, he generated that comment with Python 2.6 code but ran it with the new release.
This post was reserved for the Python NT 3.5 joke, but it has been postponed until the next release (along with a database-driven filesystem the Python developers swear they're working on).
Couldn't they just call it something else and keep the old weird print the way it is and thus not break so much? For instance I think Perl 6 uses "say".
As I understand it, having many similar statements and functions is exactly what the architects of Python were trying to avoid. Python 3.0 is somewhat incompatible with earlier versions precisely because they didn't want to litter it with messy hacks and many parallel methods of doing the same thing, but rather to design a new version as if they were getting a clean slate. In a way I wish Perl had done the same thing, as I'd love to be able to read other people's Perl.
I think you should use a few more posts to explain the joke. The more you go on the funnier it gets. :)
Exactly. This is "The Free Market" in action.
I'd add to this that not only isn't a wide assortment of distros not a problem, I'm not even convinced that it's perceived as a problem. The "TOO MANY DISTROS!" myth has been rampant for years, and I think it's a rather tired argument. Anyone reading this site will likely have heard of Slackware, Debian and even GNewsense, but the casual user trying out a Linux distro for the first time will choose between Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora and SuSE. And that's it. Other distros aren't even on the radar. Your average business procurement drone, on the other hand, will likely choose Red Hat, SuSE or maybe Ubuntu LTS with a support plan.
The plethora of other distros is just white noise to the non-guru, and does not constitute a problem for Linux adoption. Linux's biggest hurdles are familiarity, software compability and the rarity of bundling with commodity hardware. Those will be the biggest challenges whether there is only one distro or 6.02x10^23 of them to choose from.
But omission of "The Scouring of the Shire", THE BEST PART of the whole fucking story, was just asinine.
... or would have been in the book. Movies require different considerations, and the omission of that scene from the movie made sense.
In fact, when they first announced the movies many eons ago the two scenes you mentioned were the first ones I was hoping Jackson would cut, the Scouring because it would have rendered the ending even more long and cumbersome than it was in the final film. Remember, the point is not to make a shot-for-shot documentary of what's in the book, but rather to make a good film that shares the book's concepts, plot and characters. Including the Scouring would have been good from a character development and accuracy standpoint, but it would have failed in the sense that the film's ending would have felt egregiously long. Most viewers new to Tolkein's stories, their attention focused on the destruction of the ring and celebrations in Minas Tirith, would have found an extra battle in the Shire as superfluous as the transparent mechas of the frozen future at the end of Spielberg's AI.
I wouldn't have the book any other way. And of course, none of the above explains why Faramir is temporarily a bad guy, nor why half the scenes in Return of the King were in slo-mo despite its already egregious running length. But Scouring's omission always made sense to me.
I expect this one will be better still. (No I don't work for Red Hat.)
As a Fedora user perhaps you (and your many cohorts in the community who are reading this) can offer some input.
I used to use Red Hat and Fedora in olden times. I got to know them really well (I'm even an RHCE). But when FC2 came out it really bothered me. While FC1 was basically an evolution of Red Hat 9, FC2 was way too experimental to be an everyday business or personal OS, and it revealed what Red Hat was going to do with its free OS: turn me into a guniea pig. It was the first Fedora to sport the 2.6 kernel, which was pretty neat, but I found it to be unstable. The next couple releases did nothing to restore my confidence, and I've been a very happy Kubuntu user ever since.
Until now. Kubuntu has always been a slightly shoddy implementation of KDE, but the KDE 4.1 that comes with Intrepid Ibex (Kubuntu 8.10) is really getting on my nerves. It's sluggish - the Desktop takes about a minute to load, even when I turn off X.org's composite effects. And it feels incomplete. Even though I've switched to double-click in KDE, the file selection windows (like the one in which I select an image for my Desktop wallpaper) interpret single-clicks as full selections and promptly close the windows, so I can't preview my wallpaper selection in the right pane. When I installed Gnome, KDE started loading the Gnome network management utility to manage my wireless connection, even though KDE's is also open in the panel right next to it. so I've been using Gnome for the last few days.
I absolutely love KDE 4.1's desktop, panel and other Plasma elements, but I can't stand the experience overall, and while I'm open to the idea that it could be due to issues with KDE 4.1 rather than Kubuntu ... well, when I saw this announcement for Fedora 10 it got me thinking. So how about it? Am I being unfair and blaming KDE 4.1 issues on my distro? Do any KDE users recommend this distro for KDE over others? Has Fedora improved as much as I've heard it has? Has anyone used both Kubuntu and Fedora/KDE, and thus be able to provide a comparison? Because I'm in a serious distro switchin' mood.
I was hoping that by "porn" the AC parent meant "screenshots of the new OS." But that's not what AC meant: AC meant "porn." Whoever modded this NSFW link +1 Informative should never get mod points again.
If you like sci-fi, you owe it to yourself to read The Diamond Age.
As a coincidence I finished The Diamond Age this morning. I also highly recommend it. It has some slow bits in which I wondered where the story was going, but all of them had redeeming purposes and I was not disappointed for long.
However I'm a bit disappointed by this review of Anathem because it sounds suspiciously like I'd agree with it. I base this assertion largely on this passage:
I am under the impression that Stephenson's audience is in large part made of people like me - somewhat geeky, interested in science, and therefore prone to paying close attention to details of the story. In this respect, this book simply fails. The reader is left with so many open questions, so many unfinished lines of inquiry, that the whole thing feels unfinished, even rushed.
I'm exactly that sort of reader. I pay close attention to details and am interested in seeing them be developed. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age definitely reward the reader for paying attention. The dead ends the reviewer describes would ruin such a book for me.
Also, at least a couple people above mention that the first 100 pages are a waste. That reminds me very much of Snow Crash, the beginning of which made me wonder why I'd spent my hard-earned cash on a book about a pizza delivery man in the future and his unlikely friendship with a girl who skates behind cars; it took some time before I understood why these two characters are worth following, and why the world they live in is worthy of having a novel set in it. The Diamond Age, too, is a little slow to start and at times seems to be aimless (one of the first characters to be introduced dies almost immediately). While I haven't read this new book, it strikes me from the Anathem reviews and from the two books I've read that Stephenson invests much effort in showing you around his worlds after his books start, rather than thrusting you into some meaningful action, and I get the impression that while he occasionally manages to make this work, sometimes he doesn't, and that Anathem is in the latter category. Rather a shame, because the man is gifted.
Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
Agreed - these tech pundits were complete tools. O'Gara was shallow enough to stalk Pamela Jones of Groklaw in 2005 and publish alleged photos of her apartment. Only Daniel Lyons (he of the Fake Steve) later admitted he was wrong.
But this gets into a bigger pet peeve of mine: the tendency of people to disregard details in pursuit of what they wish were true. These pundits really wanted Linux to fail massively, either because their bread and butter was covering the developments of Microsoft and other proprietary OS vendors or because they equated Linux and free software with anti-capitalism. This led a lot of these shrills to cling to a very silly, unsubstantiated lawsuit long after it became clear that SCO had no concrete evidence to present in court and clearly hadn't thought through licensing considerations (BSD-licensed code in both Linux and System V, for example).
Many people really don't like delving into the details before forming an opinion and sticking to it. See also: religion, politics.
Ah. Not so easy then.
If you RTFA, though, that's how Kurzweil defines soul for the purposes of this discussion. So yes, we accept that a soul is a consciousness, as that's the way it's definted here. Personally I think the word "soul" is therefore just a hook to make people interested in the topic; it would have been more accurate to ask whether a machine can become conscious (in those words).
As far as her running in 2 years, that would be perfect. Obama, was elected to the senate and right away started running for President. She should do the same.
Obama started his career in the Senate in 2005 and announced his candidacy for president in 2007 (like all the other candidates). I'm surprised to hear that a two-year duration constitutes "right away."
Even so, the argument you propose in Palin's favor makes little sense. Experience in a govermnment office is not the same thing as experience in general, and neither of these ranges of experience can guarantee good judgement in an entirely different office. There's no logic behind the argument that because someone served as long as Obama did they would make a good president. We don't even know if he's a good president yet, so comparing service durations and concluding that Palin shound run in 2012 makes no sense. (Unless one is a fanboy, that is, in which case matters of reason are out the window.)
Personally, when Palin starts speaking about issues without demonizing half the US population, and foreign affairs without hinting that she's a n00b, I'll take her seriously as a presidential candidate.
In Aeonite's defense, he did try to find an alternative to using a reference from another space movie. Honest. I actually saw him out combing the desert.
I saw him chase an alternative 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before he gave it up. To the last he grappled with it; from hell's heart he stabbed at it; for hate's sake he spit his last breath at it.
I wonder how many movies there are going to be? Hopefully I'm still alive when the last one comes out(if they ever wrap the series).
They'll probably start out with a clear story arc and a plan to make six or seven very good films that wow audiences, then just belt out a few extra ones that focus largely on minor characters that viewers don't care about while ignoring the compelling story that got everyone interested in the first place. Universal will then go out of business when there's only one movie left to make, and Paramount will take over and expect us all to believe their conclusion is a valid part of the series.
(If you can't decide whether to mod this funny, mod it insightful or just stomp off and cry into your pile of dead-end hardcovers, you must be a disgruntled Robert Jordan fan.)
... that I'm happy that it will be over at goddamn last.
I'll miss it. I've grown up in this election, and when it's over I'll have no idea what to do. I remember when I was four or five years old, back around the time Reagan was elected and The Empire Stikes Back was drawing crowds, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had just started their campaigns. I remember coming out of the movie theater after seeing Back to the Future and seeing buses go by with competing Huckabee and Clinton banners on the side. I fondly recall during the first Gulf War and after September 11th the moving speeches by McCain and Obama.
Remember the Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" ads where McCain was enjoying a big square burger next to Clara Peller with her miniscule competing burger? Remember Hillary Clinton's break dancing extravaganza? Or when Seattle Grunge Artists for Obama did their tour in the early 90s and Kurt Cobain called Obama "the real spokesman for our generation?" My whole life was shaped by these campaigns. Tomorrow I may have to get a hobby.
If the NSA did it, it would have a back door. I'd rather have the Air Force do it and ask the NSA to try to crack it.
Oh, come ON. How can anyone be THAT naive?
Mom, is that you? I love the people who tell me I'm naive but provide no new facts or insights.
I usually find that posts or e-mails prominantly employing the phrases "Oh come on," "Oh please" and the extra-whiny "Oh puh-LEEZE" can be disregarded on sight - no need to reply to the equally whiny points that follow those phrases. Noise tends to follow noise.
Sure, but then as soon as President Bush bings up Slashdot on his Oval Office desktop first thing in the morning he'll see this story, and then he'll be held accountable for the court order by the ever vigilant Justice Department and Congress. With this story so prominantly placed, Bush will be impeached by week's end.
Unless the US government doesn't hold people accountable for crimes, but that seems kind of a stretch.
Oh sure, nothing's really new ... and yet, continuing a franchise or doing a remake is even less original than simply reusing archetypes. If a storyteller mines primal, Paleolithic fears of monsters in the form of an Alien movie set on a future ship controlled by The Company, he or she is at least framing a new story with new characters. Yes, the structures and archetypes are repeats, but the fresh approach makes it worth doing.
I'm not trying to dis Star Trek or Star Wars, or remakes like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I enjoy them. But I remember watching Firefly on DVD for the first time and wondering how I'd managed to miss the show when it aired, and I lamented that new and original shows like it didn't happen (and succeed) on a regular basis. Yes, it's just a western in space, and yes, the overbearing government of the Alliance has precursors in other stories, and I know the Reavers are recycled zombies, but the fresh packaging, design and characters were something to admire. I wish they'd happen more often. The main reason they don't is that we vote with our feet: I know I'll head to the cinema when this Star Trek film opens. Perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to reward repetition.
In the Lucas edit the Salt Vampire shoots first, misses Kirk by a yard and then gets shot back. There's also a newly-added scene where a CGI Khan meets Spock in the docking bay and rambles on about nothing for a few minutes before Spock steps on him. Also, in Lucas's proposal for this reboot film young Kirk was to have been played by Jake Lloyd.
I agree that First Contact was great and Generations was meh ... but it's easy to forget First Contact (IMHO the best recent Star Trek film) came out in 1996, 12 years ago. Even Nemesis, which I enjoyed but thought went a little too far with the Data/Spock parallel, came out six years ago. It's been a while since we had a good Star Trek film. And honestly, looking at the actors and costumes and bridge sets, I'm suddenly excited about this film. It looks like they tried to capture the aesthetic of The Cage (the original series pilot episode) and the first season, without the gray and red color scheme and wobbly walls. This movie is going to have a very eye-catching appearance.
That said, I'd trade a good Star Trek film for something new and original. No one's making the next Alien, the next Blade Runner, the next Firefly. I'm eager to see this, but as a sci-fi fan there's a part of me that's discouraged to see us mining 1966 for ideas.