As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
Seems simple in theory, but how exactly do you think that is going to play out? Do you expect Intel to announce that they are increasing their prices by (size of fine)/(expected processor sales)? Do you think they adjust prices on that granularity? Do you think that when the cost of some material used in manufacturing increases by some amount, that this price gets directly folded into the cost of their chips?
And here's the key question: how do you figure it is that Intel could raise their prices without harming their competitive position and thus reducing overall revenue, but hasn't. Are they just nice guys who don't really care about maximizing their income? Something tells me that is not the case!
Here's reality: The cost to produce an item (including amortized costs like R&D and fines) does not directly inform the price that item is sold at. It only tells you the minimum price you can sell at without losing money. In the right (or rather wrong) market conditions even that doesn't mean the company won't charge less. And they are certainly happy to charge much more if they can. Look at Intel's earnings, revenue is down, but they're quite a ways from break-even prices. They're operating at a gross margin of 46%, and have a decent profit margin to boot.
So please explain to me how and why Intel -- whose sales, marketing, and accounting teams have decided that they would make the most money selling at the current prices -- would bump up the price to account for the EU fine when it isn't even close to threatening their profitability and raising prices would probably just reduce overall revenue? Doesn't it seem more likely that they'll just take the hit to their earnings, and continue charging whatever the market will bear as always?
The only way this will affect prices in an upward direction is in the short term if some customers were receiving the "Don't buy AMD" discount, and Intel stops offering it out of fear of future anti-trust action. However this will increase AMD's competitive position, which will drive prices down. And the absence of competition is what will really drive costs up. History is clear on the relationship between what Intel charges, and how much competition they have.
You're right on one thing though, this fine isn't going to do enough to stop Intel's behavior. Hopefully continued monitoring, with the threat of further fines or other penalties will be enough.
Somebody below mentioned that according to the laws of the EU, Intel will have to pay now, and appeal later. Can anyone ascribe some truthiness to this?
1) AMD simply lacks the fab capacity to completely serve the market. It is physically impossible for most PC makers to ditch Intel.
2) For better or worse, right now Intel is ~80% of the market. End users (the customers of the PC makers) still want Intel.
3) Not offering the product that 80% of the market uses, while your competitors do, is deliberately putting yourself at a significant disadvantage. There are companies that have done so successfully, but they have been targeted at hobbyists and high-end gamers. They are by definition niche players.
4) Offering the mainstream product, but at higher costs because you didn't receive as good a discount from Intel is also deliberately putting yourself at a disadvantage. You can either further disadvantage yourself by going route (3), or you can play ball. When playing ball means not selling AMD, that's what they do, which is what this is about -- the market leader abusing their position of power to coerce customers into not offering a competitor's product.
5) Dell is not Intel. There are plenty of other games in town, with largely interchangeable product, which is why you can negotiate better prices from them while you'd be laughed at for trying it with Intel.
6) You made a "joke" earlier about Intel abandoning the EU in response to this fine. A major PC manufacturer dropping Intel is about as smart and funny.
Considering that I've gotten so good at automatically compensating for internet misspellings that I have to do a double-take when the word "loose" is used correctly, the word "promiximity" caused me no problems whatsoever.:)
I also assumed (but didn't state -- bad napkin engineer!) that the 110 MW figure was per train. Which would put each tracks cell width at about 3m. But if that was the total power for however many trains on four tracks, then this is vastly more feasible as that lowers not just the length, but the total surface area and thus cost by a lot.
I'm assuming they will want at least one train per track running concurrently (why have multiple tracks otherwise), so that doesn't change the per-track coverage needed. 3m wide cells does, thank you -- the new napkin number is ~367 km.
There's a few other factors. For the argument of Alexander becoming King when young, we've seen infants named king. This does not mean they're up to the task. Alexander was a man of extraordinary ability given the position to fully employ them. But he is an exception, not the rule.
And so is James Tiberius Fucking Kirk. Which the people around him recognized.
Honestly I was a little irked by how quickly he was made captain, and thought they could have at least thrown up another "Three years later..." transition before showing him being officially handed the keys to the Enterprise. But really -- arguing against actual historical examples of young people successfully promoted to positions of power because they are rare and exceptional? When the whole freaking point of the movie is that James T Kirk is destined for greatness no matter what the timeline? That's just silly.
I mean I think its safe to say that they don't do promote cadets to captain normally, and that this timeline's Checkov will still have to wait another 20 years (or whatever) before he gets his own ship. So, exception that proves the rule indeed.
Maybe one of my problems is that I'm too young - I'm in my mid 30's and to me Star Trek *is* TNG. It defined (for me) what good sci-fi should be, a literary device used to explore interesting philosophical and moral issues - with some hard science thrown in.
Eh. I think it did explore those issues at least as well as some other Trek movies, like fitting in with different cultures, destiny, reaching your potential, dealing with rage and grief. It did as well as Wrath and First Contact did at least, my previous favorite Trek movies. There wasn't a lot of exposition surrounding these issues, but excessive exposition was one of the weaknesses of some TNG episodes.
The Klingons would have presented an excellent enemy, there really wasn't any reason to have some mining ship come back from the future.
And speaking of the future: it is a hugely exhausted plot to the point where it has become a cliche.
I might be incorrect, but off the top of my head I can think of three Star Trek movies now that have used time travel as a plot line.
This would be the 4th with Voyage Home, Generations, and First Contact previously.
But there was a reason to have a mining ship from the future: To enable a series reboot that can ignore canon without erasing all of said canon. It was done that way exactly so that they could follow their own path, without this being a "prequel" bogged down with the massive weight of everything that was going to happen. To prevent the fanboy cries of "zomg now [episode X] of [ST series Y] can never happen, JJ Abrams you bastard!" because they did happen in Old Spock's timeline just as they always had, which is how he ended up in the new timeline with knowledge of who Spock and Kirk would become.
Well and it gave a way to get Leonard Nimoy as Spock into the movie. So two reasons.
Not that Reason #1 worked, as we can see in this very thread. It's funny how some trekkies will nitpick over every word and detail, yet miss the several very explicit lines aimed directly at them. Did Spock have to lock eyes with the camera and say "Hey fanboys listen up:" before explaining that everything that happened in the old timeline still happened, but that this was a new parallel timeline caused by the appearance of Nero's ship? No, I doubt that would have helped.
So really, I agree with you, they should have come up with something better than time travel, and said "screw it" to even acknowledging that there was any other 'canon' out there. Do a true reboot, Batman Begins style, that uses the same characters but implicitly undoes all previous films/shows by not mentioning them or caring about them. Create their own "canon" with the same characters and a story that is in the style of Star Trek but which does not respect any of the facts created in previous shows.
Seriously, this is a rather larger undertaking. Generating 110 megawatts (per train, I imagine?) is no small feat. Especially for solar paneling. That's usually the type of thing you need your own power plant for. It's a nice idea, but you'll forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of:
a) Solar Power only above the rails being effective b) The practicality of any design that relied only on the rail footprint
Hmm, well let's do a little napkin engineering here and guestimate the footprint needed. Let's start with standard 1000 W/m^2 solar irradiance, and assume 2m wide cells over the rails. With that you'd need solar panels over 55km of track. Easy-peasy. Now assume inexpensive thin film cells at about 10% efficiency -- then you need 550km of over-rail cells. Which is longer than the rail from Phoenix to Tuscon would be.
If they could afford 30% efficient cells, then it'd be 183km, which is about the distance from Tuscon to Phoenix. For one car. If they have a pair of tracks, then they could have one going in both directions at all times. Is one train every 30 mins, for a 30 min trip, reasonable? Doesn't seem any worse than normal trains today. So I'm going to call this one barely feasible, physically. Economically? That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
I'm sorry for everyone who liked the new Hulk movie more, because I can't just say we have different tastes. It's more a matter of still having a whole brain. Sorry. Can't say it in a more "sensitive" way...
No, you're right, and I'm sorry for whatever accident caused you to lose most of yours. Hitting a tank with another tank is awesome, except for the part where you pick up the first tank by it's barrel, which is idiocy incarnate. Almost as idiotic as tossing a hulkified poodle into the air where it then explodes in a puff of green goo for no reason. Which was almost as dumb as having a main character who is supposed to be a bubbling cauldron of suppressed rage that never shows a single scrap of emotion. "You won't like me when I'm angry, but don't worry that's unlikely to happen"? That's the best of theater -- heinous under-acting? The new Hulk blows the old one out of the water based solely on Ed Norton's performance as a Bruce Banner who wasn't on Valium.
I'll give you Nick Nolte, though. He's the only thing that almost dragged that stinking pile out of the latrine it was born in. Almost.
Your criticisms are valid, and a refreshing change from "it's not Trek because there wasn't enough standing around sharing feelings..." oops sorry, "discussing ideas". Yeah, Kirk getting the Enterprise at his stage of development was highly unlikely and grated a bit. I put it down to script compression due to the need of having the "no-win scenario" scene and Kirk taking the helm in the same film. But at the end, they really should have put Kirk back in the academy, and back on academic probation. There are several possibilities they could use to give him Enterprise at the beginning of the next film, letting time pass between films.
I don't want them to wait until even the opening of the next film to make him Captain, I think the film needed to end there to give any sense of completeness. But it did bother me, and I think they could have handled the transition better with all of two or three changes to dialogue and one piece of editing.
Remember when Pike told Kirk that he could be an officer in four years, and Kirk says "I'll do it in three"? Shortly thereafter, there's a cut and the words "Three Years Later" are emblazoned on the screen. At that point, just say that Kirk succeeded and became a junior officer (I actually assumed this was the intent at first). I'm pretty sure that after graduating from military academy today, officers not on active duty -- especially those gunning for a command position -- will still undergo training and partake in simulations, and would still get in trouble were they to cheat.
At that point all the scenes are intact but you have Kirk at least in the chain of command, so it's not as ludicrous to have Pike put a junior officer as second in command when the rest of the crew are all cadets.
For the permanent promotion to Captain, all they have to do then is prior to the ceremony at the end, flash up "One year later" or "Two years later". Kirk still gets his captaincy, largely on the merits of what he did in the movie, but also gives plenty of time for the viewer to assume he got some more traditional experience, yet still be highly exceptional and the youngest captain ever. Maybe throw in a line earlier by Spock regarding him rethinking no-win scenarios if the cheating still seems like a problem.
But hey, they did make a tight script and it's easy to nitpick the result rather than try to come up with better from scratch.
I actually thought John Cho did a pretty good job. I will admit that I kept expecting him to start talking about getting high and going to White Castle but really... is that his fault?
Why do you think he screwed up the warp procedure? When Spock corrected him, that wasn't just embarrassment on his face. He was thinking "I so shouldn't have gotten baked before class today. Can Spock tell that I'm high? Can Pike? I bet he smoked out when he was in Academy. Oh man I'm so screwed... Why did I let Kumar talk me into this?"
And yes it is his fault for playing Harold so memorably. Just like it's Zachary Quinto's fault that when I saw the look he gave the Vulcan Council after saying his mother was a disadvantage, for a moment I could have sworn I heard a "tic-toc-tic-toc" in the background.
See, the only reason it seemed plausible to me is because I read the prequel comics... which I shouldn't have had to do to get the plot.
Your summary actually satisfies a lot of the problems I had with both Nero as the villain and the backstory that brought him and Old Spock into the movie. And you're right, you shouldn't have to read a piece of secondary material to get that.
The writers, for all their faults, seemed quite capable of packing a lot of story and character into a few lines -- this Trek had a story as complicated as any, more character development than most, but had far less expository dialogue. So I'm thinking they could have added most of that backstory in around five minutes of screen time and a few million dollars. That would have gone a long way to making Nero feel like a real villain, and not some arbitrary challenge Kirk has to overcome just to prove himself like another Kobayashi Maru.
Except as the story says this wasn't even the worse they could do. They tamed down their attacks to the level of the undergraduates.
Exactly. Which is why Linux and Open Source won.
You see, it's true that Open Source is superior and more potent at staving off cyber attacks than Closed Source. However, to defeat the next level of tests you need Secret Reverse Unclosed Source (of Ineffable Primes, +3). However the big boys aren't exactly going to be giving that away, what with it defeating the purpose and all. So far though Open Source is the best we mortals have managed. Maybe through meditation and large amounts of coffee we will be enlightened.
A couple things I have been able to glean, though: The Ultimate OS ends with a 'z', and penguins are important.
'We've been training for this for seven years. We can't wait for this to happen.'
Cue heartbreak and disaster.
Really, is he trying to sabotage the mission? That's like an astronaut saying:
"It's my last mission before retirement. Here's a picture of my wife, and here's the cabin on a lake we just bought to live out our golden years. She can't wait until I get back so we can move in."
I mean you might as well shoot him on the spot once he's said that.
Yes! We must fight! Fight against the epida... the epi... fight the Power! And the Man too!
is for some geek group (slashdot, techcrunch, whoever) to
I'm in several geek subgroups, and I've been waiting for my call to action! I'm with you, my revolutionary brother! Tell me what I must do! I already brought a torch and pitchfork.
hold an annual lemon patent award to the most stupid patents....
Yeah I just remembered that I have to... um, wash my... cat. Yeah that's it. Gotta give the cat a bath, you know how that is. Sorry I can't join you in the grand revolution, brother, but Cornelius is stinky.
Hey um I brought an extra torch, you want it? No? Well I'll just leave it right here in case you change your mind. Later.
Either way, the inverse square law problem goes away
Sadly no it doesn't. Any laser will diverge somewhat, and the area of the base of a cone increases with the square of the distance just like the surface area of a sphere. The coefficient is nicer, but the initial power levels we're talking about (laser vs the sun) means that doesn't help much. Maybe if you used a series of them you could get good power before the beam diverged too much, then fire a new laser at the next one, and so on then finally to the probe? Now there's an orbital mechanics problem I don't even want to think about, but my guess is it'd only work reliably if you had thousands of the things up there to ensure there's always a series of satellites close enough in their orbit to make a path to the probe.
So I guess we'd better get started now!
Or at least we need to start powering something with lasers.
I know what a microkernel is, thanks, that was kinda a prerequisite to understanding all of the research papers. I had just always assumed that the whole point of HURD was to have a GPL-only FSF-copyrighted microkernel (and obviously any services) so you could have an entirely GNU system. So hearing that they ever used Mach or any other non-GNU microkernel was rather surprising.
Then they decided to write their own game engine, uh, microkernel, from scratch.
What the fuck? I thought the whole fucking point of HURD was to write a GNU microkernel to go with the GNU system, you know so it'd be GNU/GNU instead of GNU/Linux. If all you wanted was a UNIX with GNU tools and the Mach microkernel... I'm pretty damn sure I've read a few dozen of the hundreds of research papers based on such a system!
Now I honestly haven't been paying attention, because I've got a nice working kernel thanks, and the whole micro vs macro kernel debate seems as relevant to me as the CISC vs RISC debate. But I thought the whole point -- the only point I could see any, well, point to -- was for them to be writing their own microkernel.
Oh well. I guess you're right. Same development methodology as DNF, same result. Minus the ability to go bankrupt. Yay!
Absolutely false. Newspapers' profit margins have traditionally run upwards of 15 percent (by comparison, ExxonMobil (XOM) has a profit margin of just under 10 percent). The reason newspaper publishers are whining now is because they're no longer making money at rates that make the Mafia envious and are desperate to preserve a profit margin that's possible in no other industry.
Well, I can think of one other*, but the comparison actually makes the point stronger.
* Apparently down quite a lot from the early aughts. Awww. Cue violin music.
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As in, everything sold by intel in effect passes the cost of this judgment to the people buying the product. Since the dollar amount truly is not significant to alter intel's behavior this just becomes and embedded tax.
Seems simple in theory, but how exactly do you think that is going to play out? Do you expect Intel to announce that they are increasing their prices by (size of fine)/(expected processor sales)? Do you think they adjust prices on that granularity? Do you think that when the cost of some material used in manufacturing increases by some amount, that this price gets directly folded into the cost of their chips?
And here's the key question: how do you figure it is that Intel could raise their prices without harming their competitive position and thus reducing overall revenue, but hasn't. Are they just nice guys who don't really care about maximizing their income? Something tells me that is not the case!
Here's reality: The cost to produce an item (including amortized costs like R&D and fines) does not directly inform the price that item is sold at. It only tells you the minimum price you can sell at without losing money. In the right (or rather wrong) market conditions even that doesn't mean the company won't charge less. And they are certainly happy to charge much more if they can. Look at Intel's earnings, revenue is down, but they're quite a ways from break-even prices. They're operating at a gross margin of 46%, and have a decent profit margin to boot.
So please explain to me how and why Intel -- whose sales, marketing, and accounting teams have decided that they would make the most money selling at the current prices -- would bump up the price to account for the EU fine when it isn't even close to threatening their profitability and raising prices would probably just reduce overall revenue? Doesn't it seem more likely that they'll just take the hit to their earnings, and continue charging whatever the market will bear as always?
The only way this will affect prices in an upward direction is in the short term if some customers were receiving the "Don't buy AMD" discount, and Intel stops offering it out of fear of future anti-trust action. However this will increase AMD's competitive position, which will drive prices down. And the absence of competition is what will really drive costs up. History is clear on the relationship between what Intel charges, and how much competition they have.
You're right on one thing though, this fine isn't going to do enough to stop Intel's behavior. Hopefully continued monitoring, with the threat of further fines or other penalties will be enough.
Somebody below mentioned that according to the laws of the EU, Intel will have to pay now, and appeal later. Can anyone ascribe some truthiness to this?
It has a Truthiness factor of 7.
1) AMD simply lacks the fab capacity to completely serve the market. It is physically impossible for most PC makers to ditch Intel.
2) For better or worse, right now Intel is ~80% of the market. End users (the customers of the PC makers) still want Intel.
3) Not offering the product that 80% of the market uses, while your competitors do, is deliberately putting yourself at a significant disadvantage. There are companies that have done so successfully, but they have been targeted at hobbyists and high-end gamers. They are by definition niche players.
4) Offering the mainstream product, but at higher costs because you didn't receive as good a discount from Intel is also deliberately putting yourself at a disadvantage. You can either further disadvantage yourself by going route (3), or you can play ball. When playing ball means not selling AMD, that's what they do, which is what this is about -- the market leader abusing their position of power to coerce customers into not offering a competitor's product.
5) Dell is not Intel. There are plenty of other games in town, with largely interchangeable product, which is why you can negotiate better prices from them while you'd be laughed at for trying it with Intel.
6) You made a "joke" earlier about Intel abandoning the EU in response to this fine. A major PC manufacturer dropping Intel is about as smart and funny.
Considering that I've gotten so good at automatically compensating for internet misspellings that I have to do a double-take when the word "loose" is used correctly, the word "promiximity" caused me no problems whatsoever. :)
I also assumed (but didn't state -- bad napkin engineer!) that the 110 MW figure was per train. Which would put each tracks cell width at about 3m. But if that was the total power for however many trains on four tracks, then this is vastly more feasible as that lowers not just the length, but the total surface area and thus cost by a lot.
Not so much of a concern for solar rail, I wouldn't think.
I'm assuming they will want at least one train per track running concurrently (why have multiple tracks otherwise), so that doesn't change the per-track coverage needed. 3m wide cells does, thank you -- the new napkin number is ~367 km.
There's a few other factors. For the argument of Alexander becoming King when young, we've seen infants named king. This does not mean they're up to the task. Alexander was a man of extraordinary ability given the position to fully employ them. But he is an exception, not the rule.
And so is James Tiberius Fucking Kirk. Which the people around him recognized.
Honestly I was a little irked by how quickly he was made captain, and thought they could have at least thrown up another "Three years later..." transition before showing him being officially handed the keys to the Enterprise. But really -- arguing against actual historical examples of young people successfully promoted to positions of power because they are rare and exceptional? When the whole freaking point of the movie is that James T Kirk is destined for greatness no matter what the timeline? That's just silly.
I mean I think its safe to say that they don't do promote cadets to captain normally, and that this timeline's Checkov will still have to wait another 20 years (or whatever) before he gets his own ship. So, exception that proves the rule indeed.
Maybe one of my problems is that I'm too young - I'm in my mid 30's and to me Star Trek *is* TNG. It defined (for me) what good sci-fi should be, a literary device used to explore interesting philosophical and moral issues - with some hard science thrown in.
Eh. I think it did explore those issues at least as well as some other Trek movies, like fitting in with different cultures, destiny, reaching your potential, dealing with rage and grief. It did as well as Wrath and First Contact did at least, my previous favorite Trek movies. There wasn't a lot of exposition surrounding these issues, but excessive exposition was one of the weaknesses of some TNG episodes.
The Klingons would have presented an excellent enemy, there really wasn't any reason to have some mining ship come back from the future.
And speaking of the future: it is a hugely exhausted plot to the point where it has become a cliche.
I might be incorrect, but off the top of my head I can think of three Star Trek movies now that have used time travel as a plot line.
This would be the 4th with Voyage Home, Generations, and First Contact previously.
But there was a reason to have a mining ship from the future: To enable a series reboot that can ignore canon without erasing all of said canon. It was done that way exactly so that they could follow their own path, without this being a "prequel" bogged down with the massive weight of everything that was going to happen. To prevent the fanboy cries of "zomg now [episode X] of [ST series Y] can never happen, JJ Abrams you bastard!" because they did happen in Old Spock's timeline just as they always had, which is how he ended up in the new timeline with knowledge of who Spock and Kirk would become.
Well and it gave a way to get Leonard Nimoy as Spock into the movie. So two reasons.
Not that Reason #1 worked, as we can see in this very thread. It's funny how some trekkies will nitpick over every word and detail, yet miss the several very explicit lines aimed directly at them. Did Spock have to lock eyes with the camera and say "Hey fanboys listen up:" before explaining that everything that happened in the old timeline still happened, but that this was a new parallel timeline caused by the appearance of Nero's ship? No, I doubt that would have helped.
So really, I agree with you, they should have come up with something better than time travel, and said "screw it" to even acknowledging that there was any other 'canon' out there. Do a true reboot, Batman Begins style, that uses the same characters but implicitly undoes all previous films/shows by not mentioning them or caring about them. Create their own "canon" with the same characters and a story that is in the style of Star Trek but which does not respect any of the facts created in previous shows.
Seriously, this is a rather larger undertaking. Generating 110 megawatts (per train, I imagine?) is no small feat. Especially for solar paneling. That's usually the type of thing you need your own power plant for. It's a nice idea, but you'll forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical of:
a) Solar Power only above the rails being effective
b) The practicality of any design that relied only on the rail footprint
Hmm, well let's do a little napkin engineering here and guestimate the footprint needed. Let's start with standard 1000 W/m^2 solar irradiance, and assume 2m wide cells over the rails. With that you'd need solar panels over 55km of track. Easy-peasy. Now assume inexpensive thin film cells at about 10% efficiency -- then you need 550km of over-rail cells. Which is longer than the rail from Phoenix to Tuscon would be.
If they could afford 30% efficient cells, then it'd be 183km, which is about the distance from Tuscon to Phoenix. For one car. If they have a pair of tracks, then they could have one going in both directions at all times. Is one train every 30 mins, for a 30 min trip, reasonable? Doesn't seem any worse than normal trains today. So I'm going to call this one barely feasible, physically. Economically? That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Ha! Shows what you know. Bet you'll tell me next that trains can't travel through time!
I'm sorry for everyone who liked the new Hulk movie more, because I can't just say we have different tastes. It's more a matter of still having a whole brain. Sorry. Can't say it in a more "sensitive" way...
No, you're right, and I'm sorry for whatever accident caused you to lose most of yours. Hitting a tank with another tank is awesome, except for the part where you pick up the first tank by it's barrel, which is idiocy incarnate. Almost as idiotic as tossing a hulkified poodle into the air where it then explodes in a puff of green goo for no reason. Which was almost as dumb as having a main character who is supposed to be a bubbling cauldron of suppressed rage that never shows a single scrap of emotion. "You won't like me when I'm angry, but don't worry that's unlikely to happen"? That's the best of theater -- heinous under-acting? The new Hulk blows the old one out of the water based solely on Ed Norton's performance as a Bruce Banner who wasn't on Valium.
I'll give you Nick Nolte, though. He's the only thing that almost dragged that stinking pile out of the latrine it was born in. Almost.
Your criticisms are valid, and a refreshing change from "it's not Trek because there wasn't enough standing around sharing feelings..." oops sorry, "discussing ideas". Yeah, Kirk getting the Enterprise at his stage of development was highly unlikely and grated a bit. I put it down to script compression due to the need of having the "no-win scenario" scene and Kirk taking the helm in the same film. But at the end, they really should have put Kirk back in the academy, and back on academic probation. There are several possibilities they could use to give him Enterprise at the beginning of the next film, letting time pass between films.
I don't want them to wait until even the opening of the next film to make him Captain, I think the film needed to end there to give any sense of completeness. But it did bother me, and I think they could have handled the transition better with all of two or three changes to dialogue and one piece of editing.
Remember when Pike told Kirk that he could be an officer in four years, and Kirk says "I'll do it in three"? Shortly thereafter, there's a cut and the words "Three Years Later" are emblazoned on the screen. At that point, just say that Kirk succeeded and became a junior officer (I actually assumed this was the intent at first). I'm pretty sure that after graduating from military academy today, officers not on active duty -- especially those gunning for a command position -- will still undergo training and partake in simulations, and would still get in trouble were they to cheat.
At that point all the scenes are intact but you have Kirk at least in the chain of command, so it's not as ludicrous to have Pike put a junior officer as second in command when the rest of the crew are all cadets.
For the permanent promotion to Captain, all they have to do then is prior to the ceremony at the end, flash up "One year later" or "Two years later". Kirk still gets his captaincy, largely on the merits of what he did in the movie, but also gives plenty of time for the viewer to assume he got some more traditional experience, yet still be highly exceptional and the youngest captain ever. Maybe throw in a line earlier by Spock regarding him rethinking no-win scenarios if the cheating still seems like a problem.
But hey, they did make a tight script and it's easy to nitpick the result rather than try to come up with better from scratch.
I actually thought John Cho did a pretty good job. I will admit that I kept expecting him to start talking about getting high and going to White Castle but really... is that his fault?
Why do you think he screwed up the warp procedure? When Spock corrected him, that wasn't just embarrassment on his face. He was thinking "I so shouldn't have gotten baked before class today. Can Spock tell that I'm high? Can Pike? I bet he smoked out when he was in Academy. Oh man I'm so screwed... Why did I let Kumar talk me into this?"
And yes it is his fault for playing Harold so memorably. Just like it's Zachary Quinto's fault that when I saw the look he gave the Vulcan Council after saying his mother was a disadvantage, for a moment I could have sworn I heard a "tic-toc-tic-toc" in the background.
See, the only reason it seemed plausible to me is because I read the prequel comics... which I shouldn't have had to do to get the plot.
Your summary actually satisfies a lot of the problems I had with both Nero as the villain and the backstory that brought him and Old Spock into the movie. And you're right, you shouldn't have to read a piece of secondary material to get that.
The writers, for all their faults, seemed quite capable of packing a lot of story and character into a few lines -- this Trek had a story as complicated as any, more character development than most, but had far less expository dialogue. So I'm thinking they could have added most of that backstory in around five minutes of screen time and a few million dollars. That would have gone a long way to making Nero feel like a real villain, and not some arbitrary challenge Kirk has to overcome just to prove himself like another Kobayashi Maru.
Except as the story says this wasn't even the worse they could do. They tamed down their attacks to the level of the undergraduates.
Exactly. Which is why Linux and Open Source won.
You see, it's true that Open Source is superior and more potent at staving off cyber attacks than Closed Source. However, to defeat the next level of tests you need Secret Reverse Unclosed Source (of Ineffable Primes, +3). However the big boys aren't exactly going to be giving that away, what with it defeating the purpose and all. So far though Open Source is the best we mortals have managed. Maybe through meditation and large amounts of coffee we will be enlightened.
A couple things I have been able to glean, though: The Ultimate OS ends with a 'z', and penguins are important.
'We've been training for this for seven years. We can't wait for this to happen.'
Cue heartbreak and disaster.
Really, is he trying to sabotage the mission? That's like an astronaut saying:
"It's my last mission before retirement. Here's a picture of my wife, and here's the cabin on a lake we just bought to live out our golden years. She can't wait until I get back so we can move in."
I mean you might as well shoot him on the spot once he's said that.
It was no Quake, and that's for certain. I never did get the Duke Hype, it was outdated as soon as it was released.
The Duke phenomenon isn't hard to explain unless you try to make it that way.
It was the great Nikola Tesla who summoned the comet in the first place!
The only way to fight this epidemy
Yes! We must fight! Fight against the epida... the epi... fight the Power! And the Man too!
is for some geek group (slashdot, techcrunch, whoever) to
I'm in several geek subgroups, and I've been waiting for my call to action! I'm with you, my revolutionary brother! Tell me what I must do! I already brought a torch and pitchfork.
hold an annual lemon patent award to the most stupid patents. ...
Yeah I just remembered that I have to... um, wash my... cat. Yeah that's it. Gotta give the cat a bath, you know how that is. Sorry I can't join you in the grand revolution, brother, but Cornelius is stinky.
Hey um I brought an extra torch, you want it? No? Well I'll just leave it right here in case you change your mind. Later.
Either way, the inverse square law problem goes away
Sadly no it doesn't. Any laser will diverge somewhat, and the area of the base of a cone increases with the square of the distance just like the surface area of a sphere. The coefficient is nicer, but the initial power levels we're talking about (laser vs the sun) means that doesn't help much. Maybe if you used a series of them you could get good power before the beam diverged too much, then fire a new laser at the next one, and so on then finally to the probe? Now there's an orbital mechanics problem I don't even want to think about, but my guess is it'd only work reliably if you had thousands of the things up there to ensure there's always a series of satellites close enough in their orbit to make a path to the probe.
So I guess we'd better get started now!
Or at least we need to start powering something with lasers.
I know what a microkernel is, thanks, that was kinda a prerequisite to understanding all of the research papers. I had just always assumed that the whole point of HURD was to have a GPL-only FSF-copyrighted microkernel (and obviously any services) so you could have an entirely GNU system. So hearing that they ever used Mach or any other non-GNU microkernel was rather surprising.
Then they decided to write their own game engine, uh, microkernel, from scratch.
What the fuck? I thought the whole fucking point of HURD was to write a GNU microkernel to go with the GNU system, you know so it'd be GNU/GNU instead of GNU/Linux. If all you wanted was a UNIX with GNU tools and the Mach microkernel... I'm pretty damn sure I've read a few dozen of the hundreds of research papers based on such a system!
Now I honestly haven't been paying attention, because I've got a nice working kernel thanks, and the whole micro vs macro kernel debate seems as relevant to me as the CISC vs RISC debate. But I thought the whole point -- the only point I could see any, well, point to -- was for them to be writing their own microkernel.
Oh well. I guess you're right. Same development methodology as DNF, same result. Minus the ability to go bankrupt. Yay!
I'll probably ride my unicorn up over the rainbow into the clouds, because that will never happen.
Yeah, but think if it does. Unicorns!
Absolutely false. Newspapers' profit margins have traditionally run upwards of 15 percent (by comparison, ExxonMobil (XOM) has a profit margin of just under 10 percent). The reason newspaper publishers are whining now is because they're no longer making money at rates that make the Mafia envious and are desperate to preserve a profit margin that's possible in no other industry.
Well, I can think of one other*, but the comparison actually makes the point stronger.
* Apparently down quite a lot from the early aughts. Awww. Cue violin music.