PAE is fine. It's well implemented, and the speed differences compared to 64bit it hardle measurable.
Well implemented? What, you mean in hardware? Yeah, it's a four entry table containing page table entries. From a hardware standpoint it's faster than 64-bit because reading the "fourth level" page table doesn't require a memory access.
From a software standpoint, the implementation of the feature doesn't matter because the feature is, by today's standards, crap. Dealing with 4GB windows of virtual memory, where anything shared must be mapped in each virtual address space and you can't just keep around pointers to the "other" windows, is a pain in the ass and hinders software at an architectural level.
There's a reason no database or cpu vendor is using PAE for benchmarks even when the database size is less than 64GB. It's because it was a hack, passable for its day but pointless now. 64-bit obviates the hack. You should get a new OS because its much better.
If it's a bad idea, it will die on its own merits;
Clearly not true, because it's a terrible idea that is wrong at the most basic levels, yet here it still is.
It's really sad that a theory called "The Electric Universe" was created by people who don't even understand electricity. They think the solar wind is caused by an electric field. Anyone who knows anything about physics knows that you can't make positive and negative charges move in the same direction with an electric field. Yet, the solar wind is equal numbers of protons and electrons all moving away from the sun. So, there's either no way an electric field can be responsible, or fucking Coulomb's Law isn't just inaccurate but completely and utterly wrong.
Gee, we're claiming to be scientific, so what does experimentation say? Is Coulomb's Law wrong, or is Electric Universe a bunch of ignorant bullshit that won't die?
"The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.
Oh god, this again. NO, idiot, the solar wind is a plasma and consists of equal number of positively and negatively charged particles. It does not represent a net transfer of charge, and thus does not represent a current!
At some point, the independent thinker realizes that "mainstream" does not represent the pinnacle of human knowledge about which we are most certain, though ideally this would be the case. Rather, it unfortunately tends to represent what is most easily demonstrated to the shallowest and least questioning of minds who are all too easily influenced by the authority or the credentials of the person who is speaking.
Yes, and you here represent the "mainstream" of science illiterates, and you are so unquestioning and so easily influenced by this wonderful story of "rebel" science oppressed by the "orthodoxy" that you don't even bother trying to figure out if it makes any sense at all.
It takes all of five fucking seconds to disprove the Electric Universe theory on the basis of it not having even the most basic aspects of science correct. You think the Electric Universe upends our traditional understanding of astronomy and how the universe works? Ha! It upends our traditional understanding of Electricity itself -- only our "traditional understanding" is immensely well supported by experiment, while the "Electric Universe" version of electricity doesn't match reality at all.
Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature.
The only sense in which this dissent is scientific is in the sense that it is falsifiable. And it has been falsified. Ergo, if you had a single scientifically oriented neuron in your brain, you would abandon it, just like Lamarckianism and Caloric Theory were abandoned. But you don't, because while the EU hypothesis may be scientific, its adherents are not.
PAE is a hack. Even if your copy of windows supports it, it still sucks. It doesn't actually grant the ability to access all 64GB at the same time, it only lets you access it in 4GB windows, so your app has to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to actually use that memory. It was a decent solution for having large databases in the 32-bit era, and that was rightly the only place it should be used. Today, 64 bit cpus are completely mainstream and vastly superior for handling large amounts of data.
Frankly, in the era of 64-bit budget computers, I think calling the 4GB limit "architectural" is as fair as saying the 286 had a 1MB limit after the introduction of the 386. Technically not completely accurate, but for most nearly all practical purposes it drives the listener in the right direction, which is getting the product which doesn't have the restriction in any way.
The majority of the film is not in shaky-cam, so don't let that keep you from seeing the movie. It's there, but only as one of a number of tricks used to give the impression that you're watching documentary footage pieced together after the fact. It also uses CCTV footage, and footage from helicopters pursuing the main character, and so on. Shaky-cam is only for those scenes that were literally taken (in-movie) by someone with a camcorder, i.e. where it makes sense, which is only a small subset.
This isn't Cloverfield or Blair Witch. For one, the whole "documentary" isn't supposed to have come from one (shaky hand-held camcorder) recovered video source, but from many. For two, the movie is only a pseudo-documentary, in that only some of the scenes represent footage taken in the movie universe, while some scenes are from a traditional 3rd-person-omniscient viewpoint and filmed both steady and well.
I'm happy to report this includes the big action sequences. No jumbled-what-the-hell-is-happening action filming like in some movies *cough*Batman*cough*. It's usually brutally clear what's happening. Then afterwards the viewpoint will switch to a security cam, or a heli-cam, and you see what everyone on the outside got to see. It was the most effective use of the style I've seen, and definitely where faux-documentary-style movies should go.
Definitely worth seeing in the theater. The special effects were great, and yeah he lets you get a good look at them.:)
Oh, and the message -- it isn't subtle, it's about racism and refugees and xenophobia, but it does anything but keep the movie from being entertaining. I'm not even sure "message" is the right word, more like "subtext". It's just a fact that bigotry and hate lead to shitty things happening, just like it's a fact that refugee slums are shitty. This forms the backdrop to the movie, but it's not like the hero comes to some grand epiphany that only love and respect can lead to peace between aliens and humans or something. The characters and plot develop naturally.
You may have lucked out on server choice then. They do vary. The last few alts I've ran through azeroth on a couple different servers were barren wastelands for instancing outside of SM and maybe ZF. It got a little better in outland -- now there's so many Death Knights running around the place it isn't bad at all.
It is smart, funny, and so obviously about humanity that if the Vogans showed had little tags that read 'post office' or 'DMV' it would go quickly from funny to sadly real.
Sweet Mary Mother of God. Thank you for making me realize how grateful I should be that of all the indignities I've suffered at the hands of DMV workers, at least none of them have ever tried to read poetry at me.
What, you think anyone is going to look that closely? Before you notice a deduction in your account you don't recognize, or realize your checkbook or account number was stolen? It might make it easier to say it's not you after the fact, but that's not the only way to contest fraudulent charges, and in any case it's a huge pain in the ass. I just keep my checkbook and account number safe, watch my transaction history online, and limit my exposure by not keeping all my money in my checking account.
But really, the sad/funny thing I was getting at is that my "meaningless squiggles" are actually my legitimate attempt to sign my name, it's just my penmenship is horrible.
I'm going to disagree with you on this terminology right here. Okay, sure, the total effort is reduced. But the effort per unit time is the same as always (easy), the only thing that's changed is how much time you're spending. In a game genre that is defined by sucking extra monthly fees out of you by wasting as much of your time as possible, this is actually a welcome breath of fresh air. They no longer have any real incentive to make getting to level 60 take 20 days/played, and thus they speed it up. Yay, Blizz.
Seriously, making leveling in Azeroth easier is a great thing.
First, it keeps new players from being that much further behind where everyone else is doing stuff and having fun, Northrend and level 80. They aren't missing anything by leveling faster than they would if leveling was still as slow and painful as when 60 was the level cap. Who cares if they do slightly fewer kill quests or delivery quests? The only good content they'll be missing out on is Old World 5-man instances, like they'd be doing that anyway! I leveled a character just before the first big leveling nerf, and then just like today about the only instance you have a prayer in hell of finding a group for is Scarlet Monestary.
They really aren't missing anything.
Second, it keeps all the old players who want an alt from going insane doing the same content for a 5th time in a row.
Third, it keeps everyone from just rolling a Death Knight to instantly skip Azeroth. Seriously, if you are going to complain about people skipping content, complain about DKs. Keeping the 1-60 grind as long as it used to be would just guarantee that nobody rolled any alt but a DK.
Girlfriend? Where does that drop? I bet its off one of the 25-man hard modes, but I've never even seen one. A guildmate of mine said he heard it's going to be added in the raid after Icecrown Citadel in what will be the most evil raid instance of all, The Outside.
Hehe. It was both. The woman Costner fell in love with in DWW was a white settler adopted by the tribe, and much later she was the President in BsG. I never would have realized they were the same actress if I hadn't seen DWW on TV one random Sunday after watching BsG.
Star Wars is a fairy tale. It's not science fiction. It takes place in an imaginary universe where things work differently. (Why didn't Scalzi include on his list, "It's not actually possible to lift large objects with your mind"?)
Certainly, and Star Wars more than many sci-fi movies never even pretended to be grounded in reality. Most of the technology is made up stuff that might as well be magic, and hey, there's actually magic too. It's space opera, space myth. It's when a movie attempts to make an actual based-on-possible-future-reality claim that their scientific failures are noteworthy. Star Wars never did that, that's why it's a long time ago, and far away, because it's in the land of myth.:)
Speaking for myself, the only sorts of script problems that really bother me are ones of human motivation, because imaginary universe or not, these are supposed to be real people. I don't want to watch a movie and think,
Yeah I'm with you on that.
"Wait, he/she wouldn't do that." (Leia sees that the Empire let them escape from the Death Star. So why does she go straight to the rebels' secret base, when she must know that the only reason for the Empire to let them go is to follow them?)
Giving Leia the benefit of the doubt and full regard for her brass ovaries? For exactly that reason. With the plans in hand, she wanted the Empire to follow and bring the Death Star to the Alliance, before they had time to think about the ramifications of losing them and fix their weaknesses. She had to have a pretty good idea of what they were looking for in the plans already, because by the time the Empire arrived, she'd found the weakness, created a battle plan, briefed her pilots, and had them ready to launch. She knew the temptation to use the Death Star to achieve a quick and symbolic victory over the Alliance would be too much to resist, and was willing to take a huge risk that the Alliance would be able to pull one out of their ass and blow the fucker up while they had the chance.
I realize that's reading a lot into the movie, but it does fit her character.
I think you're on the right track about the appeal, but I'd be a lot more convinced it was *intentional* if you could point to examples of top notch dialog written by Lucas.
[Han Solo is about to be lowered into the carbonite chamber] Leia: I love you! Han: I know.
Short, punchy, dramatic, and perfect for the characters. Oh wait that was an ad-lib cus Ford thought the script's cheesy "I love you too!" was a stupid thing for Han to say!
a human consciousness in an alien body, falling in love with another alien. He had to go with the humanoid look in order to not completely repulse the audience.
i read somewhere james cameron said it was dances with wolves but with aliens. it's what came to my mind when i read the synopsis (dude infiltrates a foreign and somewhat hostile group, falls in love, becomes one of them, is forced to decide whether to betray his former life).
What would make it even more like Dances With Wolves would be if the woman he falls in love with was herself a transplant to the alien culture who adapted, in addition to being the President of the Twelve Colonies.
(hehe sorry I recently saw Dances again and made the connection)
Once you've got control of the galaxy, you don't want an effective fighting force. Who are you going to use them against? What you want is an effective *intimidation* force that is unable to fight effectively against your smaller but more capable praetorian guard. You keep your praetorian guard divided and intimidated by the higher ups too. Everybody in the galaxy is afraid of the guys just above him, except of course *you*.
Yep, exactly. An effective fighting force is just a force that could be turned against you. You can see the same strategy not just in the SS but also the Republican Guard under Saddam.
I've also seen a convincing analysis of the recent major military purchases of Hugo Chavez that indicates that they aren't to prepare for an attack by the U.S. as some suspected, but to create and arm a parallel army and air force that would be loyal to him (as opposed to the existing air force pilots who were largely trained in the States).
I'd never thought about this before in the context of Star Wars but it makes perfect sense. Bravo.
Also, Chewbacca only visited Endor. He never lived there. That guy was a bad lawyer.
The whole point of the Chewbacca Defense is that it does not make any sense. Being based on a faulty premise only enhances it. He even says "I am not making sense." The man was a genius.
The reasoning went along the lines that the path he was taking was littered with black holes preventing any direct route. The faster the ship goes, the closer you can get to the black holes and therefor the shorter the path. So in this particular instance, using a distance as a measure of speed works.
Okay, that at least makes some sense physically... But what still doesn't make sense is describing the outcome in terms of distance. Okay, you took a shortcut. How much time did the shortcut save you? That's still the relevant piece of information. Even if the nature of the shortcut implies that to take it you had to be going very fast, still the ultimate question is "So how fast did you finish the Run?" Running on the inside track in a 10k or sticking your chest out at the end of the 100m dash doesn't do you any good if you still don't cross the line first.
A much better explanation was given by the AC and I agree with it: Han was blowing smoke up Luke and Ben's ass, the "baffle 'em with bullshit" method of impressing potential customers that he considers to be desert-planet hicks.
An even better explanation is that Lucas just picked a "spacey"-sounding unit but didn't know or care what it meant. But that explanation doesn't enhance Han's character.:P
And one of those stupid things, apparently, is to be too poor for health insurance.... Finally, not everybody has the chance to "get an education" that you did. Not everybody was taught how to make "good lifestyle decisions".
Um, yes, he explicitly said he thinks poor people are only poor because they're stupid. Being too poor and ergo stupid to have health insurance is just a natural and just consequence. You think pointing out that not everyone was as lucky and privileged as he is going to sway his opinion, as if he didn't realize when he made that statement? No, he clearly thinks that if he hadn't had any advantage and started in the same situation as any poor person, he'd end up in the same place he is today because his natural awesomeness would just shine through. That lazy or dumb poor people exist is all the proof he needs, while the existence of lazy, dumb, but amazingly arrogant rich people isn't proof of anything at all.
Slashdot Mirror
* four bit, sixteen entry table...
PAE is fine. It's well implemented, and the speed differences compared to 64bit it hardle measurable.
Well implemented? What, you mean in hardware? Yeah, it's a four entry table containing page table entries. From a hardware standpoint it's faster than 64-bit because reading the "fourth level" page table doesn't require a memory access.
From a software standpoint, the implementation of the feature doesn't matter because the feature is, by today's standards, crap. Dealing with 4GB windows of virtual memory, where anything shared must be mapped in each virtual address space and you can't just keep around pointers to the "other" windows, is a pain in the ass and hinders software at an architectural level.
There's a reason no database or cpu vendor is using PAE for benchmarks even when the database size is less than 64GB. It's because it was a hack, passable for its day but pointless now. 64-bit obviates the hack. You should get a new OS because its much better.
If it's a bad idea, it will die on its own merits;
Clearly not true, because it's a terrible idea that is wrong at the most basic levels, yet here it still is.
It's really sad that a theory called "The Electric Universe" was created by people who don't even understand electricity. They think the solar wind is caused by an electric field. Anyone who knows anything about physics knows that you can't make positive and negative charges move in the same direction with an electric field. Yet, the solar wind is equal numbers of protons and electrons all moving away from the sun. So, there's either no way an electric field can be responsible, or fucking Coulomb's Law isn't just inaccurate but completely and utterly wrong.
Gee, we're claiming to be scientific, so what does experimentation say? Is Coulomb's Law wrong, or is Electric Universe a bunch of ignorant bullshit that won't die?
"The flow of charged particles" is the very definition of an electric current but mainstream science doesn't regard the solar wind (or any other celestial phenomena) in those terms.
Oh god, this again. NO, idiot, the solar wind is a plasma and consists of equal number of positively and negatively charged particles. It does not represent a net transfer of charge, and thus does not represent a current!
At some point, the independent thinker realizes that "mainstream" does not represent the pinnacle of human knowledge about which we are most certain, though ideally this would be the case. Rather, it unfortunately tends to represent what is most easily demonstrated to the shallowest and least questioning of minds who are all too easily influenced by the authority or the credentials of the person who is speaking.
Yes, and you here represent the "mainstream" of science illiterates, and you are so unquestioning and so easily influenced by this wonderful story of "rebel" science oppressed by the "orthodoxy" that you don't even bother trying to figure out if it makes any sense at all.
It takes all of five fucking seconds to disprove the Electric Universe theory on the basis of it not having even the most basic aspects of science correct. You think the Electric Universe upends our traditional understanding of astronomy and how the universe works? Ha! It upends our traditional understanding of Electricity itself -- only our "traditional understanding" is immensely well supported by experiment, while the "Electric Universe" version of electricity doesn't match reality at all.
Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature.
The only sense in which this dissent is scientific is in the sense that it is falsifiable. And it has been falsified. Ergo, if you had a single scientifically oriented neuron in your brain, you would abandon it, just like Lamarckianism and Caloric Theory were abandoned. But you don't, because while the EU hypothesis may be scientific, its adherents are not.
Kids will turn into goat slaughtering satanist child molesters INSTANTLY because of this, mark my words!
I say it'll take a week.
Anyone else want to join the pool?
Then get a 64-bit OS and be happy.
PAE is a hack. Even if your copy of windows supports it, it still sucks. It doesn't actually grant the ability to access all 64GB at the same time, it only lets you access it in 4GB windows, so your app has to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to actually use that memory. It was a decent solution for having large databases in the 32-bit era, and that was rightly the only place it should be used. Today, 64 bit cpus are completely mainstream and vastly superior for handling large amounts of data.
Frankly, in the era of 64-bit budget computers, I think calling the 4GB limit "architectural" is as fair as saying the 286 had a 1MB limit after the introduction of the 386. Technically not completely accurate, but for most nearly all practical purposes it drives the listener in the right direction, which is getting the product which doesn't have the restriction in any way.
I don't understand what this has to do with Melinda Gates.
The majority of the film is not in shaky-cam, so don't let that keep you from seeing the movie. It's there, but only as one of a number of tricks used to give the impression that you're watching documentary footage pieced together after the fact. It also uses CCTV footage, and footage from helicopters pursuing the main character, and so on. Shaky-cam is only for those scenes that were literally taken (in-movie) by someone with a camcorder, i.e. where it makes sense, which is only a small subset.
This isn't Cloverfield or Blair Witch. For one, the whole "documentary" isn't supposed to have come from one (shaky hand-held camcorder) recovered video source, but from many. For two, the movie is only a pseudo-documentary, in that only some of the scenes represent footage taken in the movie universe, while some scenes are from a traditional 3rd-person-omniscient viewpoint and filmed both steady and well.
I'm happy to report this includes the big action sequences. No jumbled-what-the-hell-is-happening action filming like in some movies *cough*Batman*cough*. It's usually brutally clear what's happening. Then afterwards the viewpoint will switch to a security cam, or a heli-cam, and you see what everyone on the outside got to see. It was the most effective use of the style I've seen, and definitely where faux-documentary-style movies should go.
Definitely worth seeing in the theater. The special effects were great, and yeah he lets you get a good look at them. :)
Oh, and the message -- it isn't subtle, it's about racism and refugees and xenophobia, but it does anything but keep the movie from being entertaining. I'm not even sure "message" is the right word, more like "subtext". It's just a fact that bigotry and hate lead to shitty things happening, just like it's a fact that refugee slums are shitty. This forms the backdrop to the movie, but it's not like the hero comes to some grand epiphany that only love and respect can lead to peace between aliens and humans or something. The characters and plot develop naturally.
You may have lucked out on server choice then. They do vary. The last few alts I've ran through azeroth on a couple different servers were barren wastelands for instancing outside of SM and maybe ZF. It got a little better in outland -- now there's so many Death Knights running around the place it isn't bad at all.
I hate to break it to you, but it if takes 25 men for you to get a 'girlfriend' she's probably either not a girl or not your friend.
That explains it -- hard to find a Girlfriend when your parties are always sausage fests!
It is smart, funny, and so obviously about humanity that if the Vogans showed had little tags that read 'post office' or 'DMV' it would go quickly from funny to sadly real.
Sweet Mary Mother of God. Thank you for making me realize how grateful I should be that of all the indignities I've suffered at the hands of DMV workers, at least none of them have ever tried to read poetry at me.
The Everlasting Gobstopereas?
What, you think anyone is going to look that closely? Before you notice a deduction in your account you don't recognize, or realize your checkbook or account number was stolen? It might make it easier to say it's not you after the fact, but that's not the only way to contest fraudulent charges, and in any case it's a huge pain in the ass. I just keep my checkbook and account number safe, watch my transaction history online, and limit my exposure by not keeping all my money in my checking account.
But really, the sad/funny thing I was getting at is that my "meaningless squiggles" are actually my legitimate attempt to sign my name, it's just my penmenship is horrible.
reduced effort to level
I'm going to disagree with you on this terminology right here. Okay, sure, the total effort is reduced. But the effort per unit time is the same as always (easy), the only thing that's changed is how much time you're spending. In a game genre that is defined by sucking extra monthly fees out of you by wasting as much of your time as possible, this is actually a welcome breath of fresh air. They no longer have any real incentive to make getting to level 60 take 20 days /played, and thus they speed it up. Yay, Blizz.
Seriously, making leveling in Azeroth easier is a great thing.
First, it keeps new players from being that much further behind where everyone else is doing stuff and having fun, Northrend and level 80. They aren't missing anything by leveling faster than they would if leveling was still as slow and painful as when 60 was the level cap. Who cares if they do slightly fewer kill quests or delivery quests? The only good content they'll be missing out on is Old World 5-man instances, like they'd be doing that anyway! I leveled a character just before the first big leveling nerf, and then just like today about the only instance you have a prayer in hell of finding a group for is Scarlet Monestary.
They really aren't missing anything.
Second, it keeps all the old players who want an alt from going insane doing the same content for a 5th time in a row.
Third, it keeps everyone from just rolling a Death Knight to instantly skip Azeroth. Seriously, if you are going to complain about people skipping content, complain about DKs. Keeping the 1-60 grind as long as it used to be would just guarantee that nobody rolled any alt but a DK.
Have you tried a girlfriend?
Girlfriend? Where does that drop? I bet its off one of the 25-man hard modes, but I've never even seen one. A guildmate of mine said he heard it's going to be added in the raid after Icecrown Citadel in what will be the most evil raid instance of all, The Outside.
(And that sounds like a BSG reference, not DwW.)\
Hehe. It was both. The woman Costner fell in love with in DWW was a white settler adopted by the tribe, and much later she was the President in BsG. I never would have realized they were the same actress if I hadn't seen DWW on TV one random Sunday after watching BsG.
Star Wars is a fairy tale. It's not science fiction. It takes place in an imaginary universe where things work differently. (Why didn't Scalzi include on his list, "It's not actually possible to lift large objects with your mind"?)
Certainly, and Star Wars more than many sci-fi movies never even pretended to be grounded in reality. Most of the technology is made up stuff that might as well be magic, and hey, there's actually magic too. It's space opera, space myth. It's when a movie attempts to make an actual based-on-possible-future-reality claim that their scientific failures are noteworthy. Star Wars never did that, that's why it's a long time ago, and far away, because it's in the land of myth. :)
Speaking for myself, the only sorts of script problems that really bother me are ones of human motivation, because imaginary universe or not, these are supposed to be real people. I don't want to watch a movie and think,
Yeah I'm with you on that.
"Wait, he/she wouldn't do that." (Leia sees that the Empire let them escape from the Death Star. So why does she go straight to the rebels' secret base, when she must know that the only reason for the Empire to let them go is to follow them?)
Giving Leia the benefit of the doubt and full regard for her brass ovaries? For exactly that reason. With the plans in hand, she wanted the Empire to follow and bring the Death Star to the Alliance, before they had time to think about the ramifications of losing them and fix their weaknesses. She had to have a pretty good idea of what they were looking for in the plans already, because by the time the Empire arrived, she'd found the weakness, created a battle plan, briefed her pilots, and had them ready to launch. She knew the temptation to use the Death Star to achieve a quick and symbolic victory over the Alliance would be too much to resist, and was willing to take a huge risk that the Alliance would be able to pull one out of their ass and blow the fucker up while they had the chance.
I realize that's reading a lot into the movie, but it does fit her character.
Oh yeah? Well did you know that Harrison Ford actually ad libbed Han Solo's line there?
I think you're on the right track about the appeal, but I'd be a lot more convinced it was *intentional* if you could point to examples of top notch dialog written by Lucas.
[Han Solo is about to be lowered into the carbonite chamber]
Leia: I love you!
Han: I know.
Short, punchy, dramatic, and perfect for the characters. Oh wait that was an ad-lib cus Ford thought the script's cheesy "I love you too!" was a stupid thing for Han to say!
a human consciousness in an alien body, falling in love with another alien. He had to go with the humanoid look in order to not completely repulse the audience.
Why not? It worked in Galaxy Quest!
i read somewhere james cameron said it was dances with wolves but with aliens. it's what came to my mind when i read the synopsis (dude infiltrates a foreign and somewhat hostile group, falls in love, becomes one of them, is forced to decide whether to betray his former life).
What would make it even more like Dances With Wolves would be if the woman he falls in love with was herself a transplant to the alien culture who adapted, in addition to being the President of the Twelve Colonies.
(hehe sorry I recently saw Dances again and made the connection)
Once you've got control of the galaxy, you don't want an effective fighting force. Who are you going to use them against? What you want is an effective *intimidation* force that is unable to fight effectively against your smaller but more capable praetorian guard. You keep your praetorian guard divided and intimidated by the higher ups too. Everybody in the galaxy is afraid of the guys just above him, except of course *you*.
Yep, exactly. An effective fighting force is just a force that could be turned against you. You can see the same strategy not just in the SS but also the Republican Guard under Saddam.
I've also seen a convincing analysis of the recent major military purchases of Hugo Chavez that indicates that they aren't to prepare for an attack by the U.S. as some suspected, but to create and arm a parallel army and air force that would be loyal to him (as opposed to the existing air force pilots who were largely trained in the States).
I'd never thought about this before in the context of Star Wars but it makes perfect sense. Bravo.
Also, Chewbacca only visited Endor. He never lived there. That guy was a bad lawyer.
The whole point of the Chewbacca Defense is that it does not make any sense. Being based on a faulty premise only enhances it. He even says "I am not making sense." The man was a genius.
The reasoning went along the lines that the path he was taking was littered with black holes preventing any direct route. The faster the ship goes, the closer you can get to the black holes and therefor the shorter the path. So in this particular instance, using a distance as a measure of speed works.
Okay, that at least makes some sense physically... But what still doesn't make sense is describing the outcome in terms of distance. Okay, you took a shortcut. How much time did the shortcut save you? That's still the relevant piece of information. Even if the nature of the shortcut implies that to take it you had to be going very fast, still the ultimate question is "So how fast did you finish the Run?" Running on the inside track in a 10k or sticking your chest out at the end of the 100m dash doesn't do you any good if you still don't cross the line first.
A much better explanation was given by the AC and I agree with it: Han was blowing smoke up Luke and Ben's ass, the "baffle 'em with bullshit" method of impressing potential customers that he considers to be desert-planet hicks.
An even better explanation is that Lucas just picked a "spacey"-sounding unit but didn't know or care what it meant. But that explanation doesn't enhance Han's character. :P
And one of those stupid things, apparently, is to be too poor for health insurance.... Finally, not everybody has the chance to "get an education" that you did. Not everybody was taught how to make "good lifestyle decisions".
Um, yes, he explicitly said he thinks poor people are only poor because they're stupid. Being too poor and ergo stupid to have health insurance is just a natural and just consequence. You think pointing out that not everyone was as lucky and privileged as he is going to sway his opinion, as if he didn't realize when he made that statement? No, he clearly thinks that if he hadn't had any advantage and started in the same situation as any poor person, he'd end up in the same place he is today because his natural awesomeness would just shine through. That lazy or dumb poor people exist is all the proof he needs, while the existence of lazy, dumb, but amazingly arrogant rich people isn't proof of anything at all.