Assuming people move into space, then all those people in space would be of the same heritage and desire the same technology
No, not under these rules. The premise behind Firefly isn't that the people who felt like it moved to other planets; the mission statement of the show starts with, "After the Earth got used up." Migrating to other planets wasn't optional. This results in a blindingly diverse universe in which to set one's stories.
All colonies and space-faring civilizations would tend to use as much tech as they could get their hands on & I'm sure companies would be perfectly happy to sell them that tech for a fair price just as they do today.
First of all, imagine being a Bedouin and wanting to buy a DVD player. To you and me, a DVD player costs about $90. To a Bedouin, that's more money-- equivalent exchange value, that is-- than he'll see in five years. Not to mention the fact that he's somehow going to have to get his hands on an electrical generator to power the thing.
And that's just in our world, where getting DVD players to Bedouins is only marginally more difficult than getting them to suburban teenagers. Imagine a setting in which you'd have to send an entire cargo ship across millions of miles of empty space to do the same job. Suddenly the barriers to trade become very real.
Furthermore, how long do you think that DVD player would hold up strapped to the ass-end of a camel in the middle of a desert? The sand alone would turn it into a $90 boat anchor in a few months' time, and boat anchors are of even less use to the Bedouins than DVD players are.
So we have three things: (1) the poorer settlements simply lack the resources to trade for even moderately expensive goods; (2) the moderate cost of these goods is multiplied many times over by the extraordinary cost of transporting them to the outer worlds; and (3) the rough-and-ready lifestyle of the frontier colonists puts serious limits on their demand for technological goods, either because they lack the infrastructure to support them, or because the goods just aren't durable enough.
One of the most durable pieces of electronics I've ever seen is an old Walkman that I've had since the late 80's. That thing has been hauled all around the world, dropped, submerged in water, you name it, and it still works. So I probably could give it to a Bedouin with reasonable confidence that it's not going to fall apart in a week of exposure. But where's he going to get the batteries for it?
In general, when cultures merge, the more primitive one adapts to include the technology of the other. This is evident in the lives of american indians, eskimos (enuit ), numerous tribes in africa, and most in south america that have had contact with the outside world.
Um... actually, in most of those examples you just named, the more "primitive" (for lack of a better word) group has been wiped out by the more "advanced" group, either through active genocide, or through disease. The Europeans became the dominant group on the North American continent because smallpox killed off most of the natives.
But if you look at examples where two groups of wildly disparate technologies meet without war or disease in the mix, a different conclusion presents itself. Consider the native peoples of Siberia, or of Mongolia, or the Australian blackfellas that I mentioned earlier. There's some cultural and technological assimilation along the borders, but for the most part both groups continue to exist as they did before they met. In most cases, of course, the more "advanced" group has grown at a dramatically greater rate than the "primitive" group, so from a certain point of view it looks like the "primitive" group is dying out, but that's not really what happens.
The simple reason that there are areas where people live like they are in the stone age is because they have yet to either meet people more advanced, or have yet to learn how they can trade their goods for more advanced ones.
That's not true. There are stone-age peoples in South America, Australia, Africa, and the Pacific islands, and probably lots of other places that I'm not thinking of right now. They're not living in huts or caves and chipping tools out of flint because they don't know any better; they're doing it because, whatever each member's personal motivation, they want to.
Even tribes in south america that had never previously seen outsiders were more than willing to trade goods for knives made of steel.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that they're clamoring to move into condos and drink inexpensive but charming California chardonnays and rent movies from the Madang Blockbuster.
I imagine if they had seen or heard of a gun, they might have tried to bargain for one so they could use it instead of a spear to hunt with.
Not once they realize that it takes a shitload of infrastructure to supply oneself with bullets. These particular examples we're talking about are called stone-age peoples because they don't typically work with metals at all. They're cool with the idea of a knife made out of carbon steel, because it's useful as long as you rub it against a rock every so often to keep it sharp. But if you try to tell them about gunpowder, and mining minerals to make gunpowder, and melting lead to make bullets, and so forth and so on, their interest will turn rapidly back to the ka-bar on the other table.
If there is a better, faster, cheaper way of doing something (and likely there is)... people will use it over primitive technology anyday.
Yes. But "better, faster, cheaper" means different things in different settings. To an iron- or steam-age group-- say, like a medium-sized town out of the old west-- the idea of manufacturing bullets to use in their expensively bought rifles makes sense. But to a stone-age group, that's about as practical as microwave popcorn.
Joe Shmoe yak herder would be instantly working for acme corporation pushing paperwork after the mojo corporation found a better way to do his job for less $ on his planet.
Except... that's not the way it happens in real life.
Cowboys? please, they'd have electronic collars on all the cattle, robots, and cow kibble instead of real oats and grains for the cows in no time.
Not if electronic collars cost the equivalent of $5,000 each, and cow kibble went for hundreds of bucks per pound. Branding irons are easy enough to make from raw iron, and grass is free.
Dark Angel had Jessica Alba in tight hotpants. It didn't need a freaking plot.
True, kind of. That young lady definitely had the best ass on television at the time, but that, by itself, somehow wasn't enough to hold my attention. I suspect it's because I knew this was a network-- Fox, yeah, but a network nonetheless-- and the chance for a glimpse of thong or, bless my stars, of butt cleavage was precisely zero.
Wanna know how to make the highest-rated show on tee vee? Put Jessica Alba in tight pants and have her run around a lot. Guarantee-- right there in the ads-- that there will be at least one gratuitous shot of Jessica's peekaboo thong per episode. Watch the ratings share for male viewers between 12 and death climb steadily toward 100%.
These are pearls I'm giving away here. Pearls, I tells ya.
There's really not one actor that that should quit his or her day job.
No? That's funny. Nathan Fillion was in Saving Private Ryan. Alan Tudyk was in A Knight's Tale and Wonder Boys. Adam Baldwin was in Full Metal Jacket, and about a hundred well-thought-of movies since. Ron Glass was in "Barney Miller," for chrissakes, and you don't diss any man who's shared the stage with Abe Vigoda.
This isn't an ensemble of nobodies, here. These guys aren't household names, but they're established character actors who've been around the block a few times, and who've got resumes that look a hell of a lot better than yours or mine, dude.
You want art? Paint a fucking picture. Want to be entertained? Watch our shows.
The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, you know.
Although if you're talking about ABC, NBC, or CBS, they probably are. The last time I saw anything risky or artistic on one of those three networks was the pilot episode of ABC's short-lived and shamelessly political 1997 anthology series, "Gun." The pilot episode starred Daniel Stern as a struggling actor who interrupts a robbery at a convenience store and becomes a hero and a celebrity. It's got a "Sixth Sense" style twist to it, years before that movie was made, and it's brilliant. It also featured a subtly ironic theme song: "Happiness is a Warm Gun" performed by U2. None of the "big three" networks have done anything even remotely like it since.
Want to be entertained? Watch their shows. Want to be entertained and challenged? Change the channel. TV like that is out there to be had, but you won't find it on the low-numbered channels in prime-time.
Mmm-uh? Just about the only thing that everybody universally agrees on is that the dialogue-- and the scene-level writing in general-- is some of the best on TV. How is that that this is the first thing you latch on to with which to find fault?
the plots, despite the fact that the show made a painfully obvious effort to not be Star Trek, were so obviously lifted from Star Trek
Which would that be? "The Train Job?" No. "Bushwhacked?" Also no. "Our Mrs. Reynolds?" Hell no. "Jaynestown?" No, most definitely no. "Out of Gas?" Maybe... ship blows gasket, crew abandons ship, heroic captain acquires new gasket and saves the day, but that episode wasn't driven by plot. It was driven by flashbacks, and was more inspired by Pulp Fiction than anything else (there was even an explicit homage). "Shindig?" Heh. No, definitely not. "Safe?" Nuh-uh. "Ariel?" Bite your lying tongue. I don't recall any episode of Star Trek in which Kirk threatened to blow Spock out the airlock... and really meant to do it, too, up to the very last second.
There are a lot of legitimate gripes out there about Firefly. Calling it derivative of Star Trek is definitely not one of 'em.
I REALLY can't believe that human beings will still be having sword fights and rustling cattle two centries from now.
Why the heck not? We are still having sword fights and rustling cattle today, after all. We live in a world where 747s and Bedouins coexist. We have soft-serve ice cream, HDTV, and artificial limbs, but we also have subsistence farmers, yak herders, and those stone-age people they discovered in New Guinea a few years ago.
If you go to Australia, you can drive a couple of days from a 21st century city of four million people into the middle of the desert where people live pretty much the same way they did 40,000 years ago. But once you get there, you'll probably see somebody wearing an Adidas tee shirt or a pair of Reeboks.
The writers of Firefly just expanded this idea. Instead of having a few population groups living pre-modern lifestyles scattered across the globe, they have a few planets full scattered through a solar system. And just like in the real world, those scattered groups of "primitives" will have a few pieces of modern technology at hand, surrounded by whatever they could make themselves.
It's a much more plausible idea than you may realize.
There are solutions where the phone company actually does VoIP transparently
That's not voice-over-IP. That's voice-over-ATM. Voice-over-IP sucks without massive infrastructure at the router level to support it. Voice-over-ATM, though, works perfectly right out of the gate thanks to ATM's cell-switched "virtual circuit" nature.
It's on Friday night. Most Friday night shows seem to fail.
"Lise, when you get a little older, you'll realise that Friday is just another day between NBC's Must-See Thursday and CBS's Saturday night Crap-o-Rama."
Once again, everything I really needed to know about life, I learned from "The Simpsons."
Oh, leave it out. Dark Angel was okay for about six episodes. The concept was entertaining, but they never went anywhere interesting with it. The chemistry between the leads was good, but then they blew it with that incredibly convenient virus subplot or whatever it was. Dark Angel started strong, but just went nowhere.
The audience was supposed to immediatly get all the tounge and cheek humor etc etc right off the back. [...] I could write more about this piece of trash but instead I'll write another letter to SCIFI begging them to keep farscape.
Anybody else catch the irony of this? At its best, Farscape was known to crack pretty wise, Peter.
Look at the view from orbit. Farscape had strong characters, conflict, a little sexual tension, humor, and muppets. Firefly has (had, whatever) strong characters, conflict, a little sexual tension, and humor; it lacked muppets, but it more than made up for them with its strict "no sound in space" policy and absolutely kick-ass production values.
Arguing that Firefly sucked while Farscape rocked just doesn't hold water. You're entitled to your opinion, natch, but don't try to dress it up as anything other than "I liked the Aussie show better."
[Just maybe] the show was not as good as you thought it was.
I think you have it backwards. You're equating good with popular. Sometimes the two go hand-in-hand; "The West Wing" is usually both good and popular. But often they're opposed to one another.
Consider Buffy. By any reasonable measurement, Buffy is not a popular show. But it's widely lauded, and generally considered to be very good. (This season, especially, has had more than its fair share of tight writing and "goddamn!" moments.) Or Sorkin's last show, "Sports Night." These are not examples of wildly popular shows. But they're generally-- not universally, but generally-- considered to be very good shows.
The difference is venue. Buffy has lasted umpty-bump seasons (six or seven, I think) because it lives on a third-tier network that can afford to take what it can get. Sports Night lasted two seasons on ABC out of pure charity; the ratings weren't good enough to justify it, but ABC gave it a shot anyway. Ultimately the show tanked because the numbers just weren't good enough for a top-tier national net.
Firefly is on Fox: a shit network that thinks it's a big network. If Firefly were on any other second- or third-tier net, it would be a small-scale hit with a loyal niche audience in a valuable advertiser demo, and would probably last for five years or longer.
In a perfect world, Mutant Enemy should take the whole thing in-house, produce episodes in DVD-resolution MPEG-4 format, and offer 'em for sale over the net for two bucks apiece. Never happen, though, because there's so fucking much piracy in the world, particularly so among Firefly's target audience, that the company would make about six dollars per episode and would go down faster than a two-bit whore.
the whole show was just a ripoff of Outlaw Star anyway.
That bitch is about five months out of date. Before the show debuted, lots of know-it-alls were comparing it to Outlaw Star. Since the show's been on, the only people to draw that comparison have been people who've never watched Firefly.
Complain all you want, but at least make a passing effort to stay up-to-date.
heck, my wife *quit* her last job because they were going to make her use Outlook
Does your wife show any other recognizable signs of insanity? Jobs are not easy to come by in this economy. I was recently unemployed for a while, after my start-up... well, didn't. The though of quitting a job over a computer program amazes and, frankly, sickens me a little.
[Voice over IP] will replace phones as we know it... why isnt it more widely used?
Just about the worst telephone call you can make-- in my experience-- is the US to Sydney, Oz. The call must be routed over a satellite link or something, because the lag is on the order of half a second. When you're talking to someone in Australia, you get used to saying, "How are you today?" and then waiting while the perceptible lag passes to hear the reply, "Fuck off, you piker! It's three in the bloody mornin'!"
Every VOIP call is like that, only the lag varies from a merely noticeable fraction of a second to between one and two seconds from moment to moment, due to varying net traffic conditions.
VOIP, in other words, is more annoying and less effective than your average instant messaging system.
It looks like they are taking contributions for the effort ala PayPal.
<nitpick style="pedantic" value="trivial">
The expression a la is French for "in the manner or style of." I think the idiom you meant to use was via, which means "by the way of." I think you meant, "they are taking contributions for the effort via PayPal." On the other hand, you could have said, "they are taking contributions for the effort a la the EFF," which would have meant, "they are taking contributions in the same way that the EFF does." Whichever.
Nobody expects the... oh, forget it. Too predicable. Make up your own funny comment about shrubbery, Mr. Neutron, "pinin' for the fijords," or the larch.
At any rate, Apple probably wouldn't push a GNUStep system; it comes too close to being an OS X replacement.
You are kidding, right? There's a hell of a lot more to OS X than Foundation and Application Kit. It won't be possible to talk about an OS X replacement until somebody comes up with a Quartz/Aqua replacement, and that's not even on the horizon.
However I think this is more aimed at the "I want a _computer_ with a preinstalled OS-X-alike" crowd.
The problem is that Darwin doesn't even remotely resemble OS X from the point of view of the user. The vast-- and I mean vast-- majority of Mac users aren't even aware that you can log in to OS X in console mode, without the GUI, and they certainly would never want to do such a thing. Anybody who buys (or downloads, or whatever) a Darwin distribution looking for an "OSX-alike" is going to be sorely disappointed when it drops them into a shell or Gnome or some other damn-fool thing.
I really have no idea who would use this. If you've got a Mac that's capable of running Darwin, you've almost certainly already got OS X, and the upgrade to the most recent version is cheap. If you've got a PC that's capable of running Darwin-- the list of compatible PC configurations is short, short-- you've already got BSD or Linux. It sounds an awful lot like a novelty to me.
In my mind, the Free in Free Software allows you the freedom to use/any/ software you want.
You have just confessed to the crime of GNU/Heresy. Stay where you are; FSF operatives will be at your home shortly to escort you to the nearest GNU/Re-education camp.
All sarcasm aside, yours is by far the more enlightened viewpoint, but it's also in direct opposition to the position of the FSF. I don't know if most people realize this, but the FSF actually asserts that people should not use software that is, by their definition, unacceptable. Doesn't sound very "free" to me.
GNU-Darwin is a distribution of Darwin with some favorite GNU software ported to it, as well as the FreeBSD ports tree. It is not Free Software, as the Darwin part is APSL, and thus considered non-free by the FSF.
No offense, but the FSF can get bent. Apple didn't have to release any source for their OS at all; they could have gone the way of IRIX or HP-UX or Solaris or AIX, or any other commercial UNIX. Instead, they looked at the pros and cons of releasing the source, and decided that open was better than closed. The FSF, though, can't get over the fact that Apple chose the "open for business" interpretation of open source, instead of the "open our fly" one.
The FSF is free to do whatever they want with their software. But if they came from a company instead of a hippie co-op, their complaints that this or that license is "non-Free" (for fuck's sake, talk about loaded language) would be nothing more than marketing and FUD.
In other words, the FSF would rather live in a world where everybody has equal access to really shitty software; they-- and their followers, of course-- are quite alone in this vision.
Re:Religious paranoid idiots will ban anything
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Don't Stymie Nanotech
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So you are saying that the statements in the Bible are arbitrary and subject to the "tastes", as you put it, of the reader?
Sort of, but that wasn't my point. The Bible is a complex document. In order to understand any statement included in it, one must understand the context of that statement. To simply take every sentence in the Bible and accept it as literally true-- without considering the possibilities of mistranslation, allusion, or metaphor-- seems naive to me.
By the way, are you one of those people who find truth in the statement: "That may be true for you, but it is not true for me"?
Obviously that depends on the context. If the object of consideration were the statement, "I am over 40 years old," it could very easily be true for you but not for me. There are some absolutes in the world-- morality, by definition, being an absolute-- but there are also some non-absolutes.
I generally come down on the side of more non-absolutes than absolutes, but the absolutes that do exist are unshakeable.
This was not an injunction against the death penalty, but instruction in the proper way to treat people, and in how NOT to abuse the law to further your own ends.
Lessons are where you find them. I dare say that no man living can know the intent behind Jesus's words. No one can even prove, definitively, that he said them. But is that relevant? No. The Bible is not a book of facts as much as it is a book of wisdom. The neat thing about such cliches as this-- and also the catchy one about judging not lest ye be judged-- is that we can use them as lenses through which to examine our own lives. Arguing that Christ really meant A or B is missing the point.
Also, it is not necessary to know what is in someone's heart when they comit a capital crime. The only thing that is necessary is to ascertain their guilt according to the law.
Interesting that you should say it that way, because what's in a person's heart is very important to the question of whether they committed a capital crime or not. If I get angry at you-- find you in bed with my wife or some such-- and beat you to death, that's not a capital crime. The mere killing of one person by another is not sufficient to warrant a sentence of death, or even of life in prison. The state of mind of the killer is material to the question. A person who kills out of mindless rage does not commit the same crime as a person who carefully plans and carries out a killing. The intent of the accused determines whether a murder is a capital crime, or, indeed, whether a killing is a murder at all.
Did God stop Satan from comitting the first sin in all creation? Did God stop Eve from biting the apple, or Adam? Since the answers are "No" and "no", who are you to force your spiritual beliefs on others when even God does not do this?
By the same token, then, who are you to take another person's life for his crime, when even God Himself does not? It's hubris to put oneself in the mind of God, but it's also fair to assume that if the Lord wanted a man dead, he would see that it happened. God has seen fit to put Person X on this Earth, and to let him live out his appointed days. Who are we to defy God's will by strapping Person X to a gurney and pumping potassium into his veins until he dies?
1) Read from the original languages. 2) remove foot from mouth.
Please, don't be so short. If you would like to correct me, by all means do so. I'm a grown man; I can take it.
However, if your intent is to tell me that the Bible is only infallible in Aramaic-- or Greek or Hebrew, depending-- then I have to respectfully disagree. The question is whether or not the Bible is the divine, infallible word of the Lord God Himself, or not. As I've pointed out, the English translations of the Bible contain factual errors. Again, these are not relevant errors; they're matters of trivia. But they're statements that are technically not correct. So either the Bible, as it was originally written, was erroneous, or the translations are erroneous.
Either theory effectively leads to the same conclusion: that the Bible should not be accepted as a source of factual information, but rather as a collection of wisdom and praise to be used by the reader as inspiration and guidance. Here's how.
If the original works that make up the modern Bible included errors, then the Bible is clearly not perfect. Let me reiterate, this does not mean that the Bible is useless, but rather that it's not an encyclopedia. The purpose of the Bible to modern people, then, is obviously to tell the story of the Jews and their Messiah, with allegory and metaphor where necessary, and to provide inspiration and guidance to the worshippers of the Lord God. Holding the Bible up, then, as a source of fact is misguided.
If, on the other hand, the original works that make up the modern Bible were perfect, but have been mistranscribed or mistranslated since, then the perfect forms of the Biblical books have effectively been lost to us. No man alive today is sufficiently fluent in the Aramaic or Hebrew of 3,500 years ago, or the Greek of 2,000 years ago, to perfectly understand the original Biblical writings, even if we had access to all of them. As I understand it, the oldest known manuscript of the Pentateuch (written in Aramaic with the Estrangela alphabet) dates to 464 AD and is currently in the British Museum. It's a long way from appx. 1,400 BC to 464 AD. We will never know how many errors were introduced to the manuscript in all those centuries.
The result is that we have a Bible, today, which cannot be interpreted literally, for it is the result of millennia of mistranscription and mistranslation by imperfect human scholars. The original texts, furthermore, are lost to us. So the true, perfect words of the Lord God are both unknown, and unknowable.
Which is the exact same situation as if the Bible had never been perfect to begin with.
There are only two other options: one is to believe that all currently extant translations of the Bible are perfect, but that raises nasty questions about cud-chewing rabbits, mustard trees, and the downright bizarre case of the Nephilim.
The last option is to believe that only one modern Bible is perfect... but which one? And once you pick the translation, you have to tackle the question of which books to include. The argument for the inclusion of Ecclesiasticus is strong, yet that book is omitted from Protestant Bibles. All Bibles, though, contain the Canticle of Solomon, which is widely believed to be a love poem included mistakenly by the Council of Trent. Which are divine and which are not? No man can know for certain.
The question of the literal infallibility of the Bible is still very much open for debate, but the debate is essentially moot because all arguments lead to the same conclusion.
Just because someone who was famous once said it dosen't make it true.
Unfortunately, the same can be said of Moses, Joshua, King David, Lemuel, Mordecai, St. Paul, or any of the other 40-odd contributors to the modern Bible. If you accept the overwhelming conclusion that the Bible as we know it today is a flawed-- trivially flawed, but flawed nonetheless-- book, then the Bible as a whole is subject to interpretation. As I've said before, the Bible is not an encyclopedia.
Not trying to make enemies here, but if you compare the Catholic doctrines and the Bible, there are WAY too many discrepancies for me to consider their ideas more than delusions.
Well, you're certainly entitled to have that opinion, but there are about a billion people around the world who would disagree with you. The Mother Church has one thing going for her that no other can claim: an unbroken line of succession, through 2,000 years of history and 256 men, back to St. Peter, who touched the hand of Jesus Christ Himself.
They just made some stuff up out of thin air it seems.
As the story goes, St. Peter was given that right by Christ: "And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven." The bit about "upon this rock" is particularly fascinating; Christ was making a pun. The Aramaic words for "rock" and "Peter" are the same, transliterated as Cepha, or Kipha. Christ said, in essence, "upon this person I will build my church." Now, the Protestants-- particularly the Anglicans-- tend to prefer to interpret this passage as meaning that Peter was primus inter pares to the Apostles, but whether one believes that interpretation or not is a matter of opinion and faith.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a preponderance of people in this world who would rather use the scriptures to reinforce what they already believe, instead of trying to devine what the scriptures actually say.
It is also definatly true the book is very much about the characters development, and not the modern heroism that most current books seem to aspire to.
Character development? What character development? Every character in the books acts and talks in exactly the same way. The hobbits, in particular, are completely interchangeable.
At least in the movie they chose to have Pippin played by a Scottish actor. If they hadn't, it would be completely impossible to tell them apart. Hell, they could have made a running gag out of it.
This isn't a geeky pedant point like the comment about Scratchy's ribs; this is a fundamental physical characteristic of the main character of a major motion picture. Just how tall is Frodo supposed to be?
Somewhere in the documentaries or the commentaries or someplace buried in the ~18 hours of stuff on the extended edition DVD set, somebody makes mention of a really great point. Tolkien wrote (allegedly; see my other posts for my experience with the books) that hobbits are smaller than men a few times, but for the most part didn't keep bringing it up. He didn't keep saying things like, "Frodo looked at Gandalf, craning his neck upward and straining to make out the wizard's features from the approximate level of his belly-button." Instead, he just established that hobbits are shorter than men, and then moved on to talk about Tom Bombadil or some other damn fool way of avoiding getting on with the plot.
Er, sorry. Bit of a digression.
Anyway, the point is that they didn't spend a lot of time trying to get the hobbits exactly right in the films. They used a few tricky and expensive establishing shots to say that hobbits are shorter than men, and used scale doubles in every wide shot, but for the most part they just told the story and didn't make a big deal out of the details.
Actually, there are a few shots in Fellowship where they just didn't care about scale at all, but it works anyway because your eye is already accustomed to thinking of hobbits as small. I'm thinking specifically of the shot where Boromir tackles Frodo just before the big fight on Amon Hen. No scale doubles, no forced perspective, just Sean Bean body-tackling Elijah Wood. On the screen, it really looks like Boromir is twice Frodo's size.
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Assuming people move into space, then all those people in space would be of the same heritage and desire the same technology
No, not under these rules. The premise behind Firefly isn't that the people who felt like it moved to other planets; the mission statement of the show starts with, "After the Earth got used up." Migrating to other planets wasn't optional. This results in a blindingly diverse universe in which to set one's stories.
All colonies and space-faring civilizations would tend to use as much tech as they could get their hands on & I'm sure companies would be perfectly happy to sell them that tech for a fair price just as they do today.
First of all, imagine being a Bedouin and wanting to buy a DVD player. To you and me, a DVD player costs about $90. To a Bedouin, that's more money-- equivalent exchange value, that is-- than he'll see in five years. Not to mention the fact that he's somehow going to have to get his hands on an electrical generator to power the thing.
And that's just in our world, where getting DVD players to Bedouins is only marginally more difficult than getting them to suburban teenagers. Imagine a setting in which you'd have to send an entire cargo ship across millions of miles of empty space to do the same job. Suddenly the barriers to trade become very real.
Furthermore, how long do you think that DVD player would hold up strapped to the ass-end of a camel in the middle of a desert? The sand alone would turn it into a $90 boat anchor in a few months' time, and boat anchors are of even less use to the Bedouins than DVD players are.
So we have three things: (1) the poorer settlements simply lack the resources to trade for even moderately expensive goods; (2) the moderate cost of these goods is multiplied many times over by the extraordinary cost of transporting them to the outer worlds; and (3) the rough-and-ready lifestyle of the frontier colonists puts serious limits on their demand for technological goods, either because they lack the infrastructure to support them, or because the goods just aren't durable enough.
One of the most durable pieces of electronics I've ever seen is an old Walkman that I've had since the late 80's. That thing has been hauled all around the world, dropped, submerged in water, you name it, and it still works. So I probably could give it to a Bedouin with reasonable confidence that it's not going to fall apart in a week of exposure. But where's he going to get the batteries for it?
In general, when cultures merge, the more primitive one adapts to include the technology of the other. This is evident in the lives of american indians, eskimos (enuit ), numerous tribes in africa, and most in south america that have had contact with the outside world.
Um... actually, in most of those examples you just named, the more "primitive" (for lack of a better word) group has been wiped out by the more "advanced" group, either through active genocide, or through disease. The Europeans became the dominant group on the North American continent because smallpox killed off most of the natives.
But if you look at examples where two groups of wildly disparate technologies meet without war or disease in the mix, a different conclusion presents itself. Consider the native peoples of Siberia, or of Mongolia, or the Australian blackfellas that I mentioned earlier. There's some cultural and technological assimilation along the borders, but for the most part both groups continue to exist as they did before they met. In most cases, of course, the more "advanced" group has grown at a dramatically greater rate than the "primitive" group, so from a certain point of view it looks like the "primitive" group is dying out, but that's not really what happens.
The simple reason that there are areas where people live like they are in the stone age is because they have yet to either meet people more advanced, or have yet to learn how they can trade their goods for more advanced ones.
That's not true. There are stone-age peoples in South America, Australia, Africa, and the Pacific islands, and probably lots of other places that I'm not thinking of right now. They're not living in huts or caves and chipping tools out of flint because they don't know any better; they're doing it because, whatever each member's personal motivation, they want to.
Even tribes in south america that had never previously seen outsiders were more than willing to trade goods for knives made of steel.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that they're clamoring to move into condos and drink inexpensive but charming California chardonnays and rent movies from the Madang Blockbuster.
I imagine if they had seen or heard of a gun, they might have tried to bargain for one so they could use it instead of a spear to hunt with.
Not once they realize that it takes a shitload of infrastructure to supply oneself with bullets. These particular examples we're talking about are called stone-age peoples because they don't typically work with metals at all. They're cool with the idea of a knife made out of carbon steel, because it's useful as long as you rub it against a rock every so often to keep it sharp. But if you try to tell them about gunpowder, and mining minerals to make gunpowder, and melting lead to make bullets, and so forth and so on, their interest will turn rapidly back to the ka-bar on the other table.
If there is a better, faster, cheaper way of doing something (and likely there is)... people will use it over primitive technology anyday.
Yes. But "better, faster, cheaper" means different things in different settings. To an iron- or steam-age group-- say, like a medium-sized town out of the old west-- the idea of manufacturing bullets to use in their expensively bought rifles makes sense. But to a stone-age group, that's about as practical as microwave popcorn.
Joe Shmoe yak herder would be instantly working for acme corporation pushing paperwork after the mojo corporation found a better way to do his job for less $ on his planet.
Except... that's not the way it happens in real life.
Cowboys? please, they'd have electronic collars on all the cattle, robots, and cow kibble instead of real oats and grains for the cows in no time.
Not if electronic collars cost the equivalent of $5,000 each, and cow kibble went for hundreds of bucks per pound. Branding irons are easy enough to make from raw iron, and grass is free.
Dark Angel had Jessica Alba in tight hotpants. It didn't need a freaking plot.
True, kind of. That young lady definitely had the best ass on television at the time, but that, by itself, somehow wasn't enough to hold my attention. I suspect it's because I knew this was a network-- Fox, yeah, but a network nonetheless-- and the chance for a glimpse of thong or, bless my stars, of butt cleavage was precisely zero.
Wanna know how to make the highest-rated show on tee vee? Put Jessica Alba in tight pants and have her run around a lot. Guarantee-- right there in the ads-- that there will be at least one gratuitous shot of Jessica's peekaboo thong per episode. Watch the ratings share for male viewers between 12 and death climb steadily toward 100%.
These are pearls I'm giving away here. Pearls, I tells ya.
There's really not one actor that that should quit his or her day job.
No? That's funny. Nathan Fillion was in Saving Private Ryan. Alan Tudyk was in A Knight's Tale and Wonder Boys. Adam Baldwin was in Full Metal Jacket, and about a hundred well-thought-of movies since. Ron Glass was in "Barney Miller," for chrissakes, and you don't diss any man who's shared the stage with Abe Vigoda.
This isn't an ensemble of nobodies, here. These guys aren't household names, but they're established character actors who've been around the block a few times, and who've got resumes that look a hell of a lot better than yours or mine, dude.
You want art? Paint a fucking picture. Want to be entertained? Watch our shows.
The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, you know.
Although if you're talking about ABC, NBC, or CBS, they probably are. The last time I saw anything risky or artistic on one of those three networks was the pilot episode of ABC's short-lived and shamelessly political 1997 anthology series, "Gun." The pilot episode starred Daniel Stern as a struggling actor who interrupts a robbery at a convenience store and becomes a hero and a celebrity. It's got a "Sixth Sense" style twist to it, years before that movie was made, and it's brilliant. It also featured a subtly ironic theme song: "Happiness is a Warm Gun" performed by U2. None of the "big three" networks have done anything even remotely like it since.
Want to be entertained? Watch their shows. Want to be entertained and challenged? Change the channel. TV like that is out there to be had, but you won't find it on the low-numbered channels in prime-time.
My big gripe is that the dialogue was horrible
Mmm-uh? Just about the only thing that everybody universally agrees on is that the dialogue-- and the scene-level writing in general-- is some of the best on TV. How is that that this is the first thing you latch on to with which to find fault?
the plots, despite the fact that the show made a painfully obvious effort to not be Star Trek, were so obviously lifted from Star Trek
Which would that be? "The Train Job?" No. "Bushwhacked?" Also no. "Our Mrs. Reynolds?" Hell no. "Jaynestown?" No, most definitely no. "Out of Gas?" Maybe... ship blows gasket, crew abandons ship, heroic captain acquires new gasket and saves the day, but that episode wasn't driven by plot. It was driven by flashbacks, and was more inspired by Pulp Fiction than anything else (there was even an explicit homage). "Shindig?" Heh. No, definitely not. "Safe?" Nuh-uh. "Ariel?" Bite your lying tongue. I don't recall any episode of Star Trek in which Kirk threatened to blow Spock out the airlock... and really meant to do it, too, up to the very last second.
There are a lot of legitimate gripes out there about Firefly. Calling it derivative of Star Trek is definitely not one of 'em.
I REALLY can't believe that human beings will still be having sword fights and rustling cattle two centries from now.
Why the heck not? We are still having sword fights and rustling cattle today, after all. We live in a world where 747s and Bedouins coexist. We have soft-serve ice cream, HDTV, and artificial limbs, but we also have subsistence farmers, yak herders, and those stone-age people they discovered in New Guinea a few years ago.
If you go to Australia, you can drive a couple of days from a 21st century city of four million people into the middle of the desert where people live pretty much the same way they did 40,000 years ago. But once you get there, you'll probably see somebody wearing an Adidas tee shirt or a pair of Reeboks.
The writers of Firefly just expanded this idea. Instead of having a few population groups living pre-modern lifestyles scattered across the globe, they have a few planets full scattered through a solar system. And just like in the real world, those scattered groups of "primitives" will have a few pieces of modern technology at hand, surrounded by whatever they could make themselves.
It's a much more plausible idea than you may realize.
There are solutions where the phone company actually does VoIP transparently
That's not voice-over-IP. That's voice-over-ATM. Voice-over-IP sucks without massive infrastructure at the router level to support it. Voice-over-ATM, though, works perfectly right out of the gate thanks to ATM's cell-switched "virtual circuit" nature.
It's on Friday night. Most Friday night shows seem to fail.
"Lise, when you get a little older, you'll realise that Friday is just another day between NBC's Must-See Thursday and CBS's Saturday night Crap-o-Rama."
Once again, everything I really needed to know about life, I learned from "The Simpsons."
Oh, leave it out. Dark Angel was okay for about six episodes. The concept was entertaining, but they never went anywhere interesting with it. The chemistry between the leads was good, but then they blew it with that incredibly convenient virus subplot or whatever it was. Dark Angel started strong, but just went nowhere.
The audience was supposed to immediatly get all the tounge and cheek humor etc etc right off the back. [...] I could write more about this piece of trash but instead I'll write another letter to SCIFI begging them to keep farscape.
Anybody else catch the irony of this? At its best, Farscape was known to crack pretty wise, Peter.
Look at the view from orbit. Farscape had strong characters, conflict, a little sexual tension, humor, and muppets. Firefly has (had, whatever) strong characters, conflict, a little sexual tension, and humor; it lacked muppets, but it more than made up for them with its strict "no sound in space" policy and absolutely kick-ass production values.
Arguing that Firefly sucked while Farscape rocked just doesn't hold water. You're entitled to your opinion, natch, but don't try to dress it up as anything other than "I liked the Aussie show better."
[Just maybe] the show was not as good as you thought it was.
I think you have it backwards. You're equating good with popular. Sometimes the two go hand-in-hand; "The West Wing" is usually both good and popular. But often they're opposed to one another.
Consider Buffy. By any reasonable measurement, Buffy is not a popular show. But it's widely lauded, and generally considered to be very good. (This season, especially, has had more than its fair share of tight writing and "goddamn!" moments.) Or Sorkin's last show, "Sports Night." These are not examples of wildly popular shows. But they're generally-- not universally, but generally-- considered to be very good shows.
The difference is venue. Buffy has lasted umpty-bump seasons (six or seven, I think) because it lives on a third-tier network that can afford to take what it can get. Sports Night lasted two seasons on ABC out of pure charity; the ratings weren't good enough to justify it, but ABC gave it a shot anyway. Ultimately the show tanked because the numbers just weren't good enough for a top-tier national net.
Firefly is on Fox: a shit network that thinks it's a big network. If Firefly were on any other second- or third-tier net, it would be a small-scale hit with a loyal niche audience in a valuable advertiser demo, and would probably last for five years or longer.
In a perfect world, Mutant Enemy should take the whole thing in-house, produce episodes in DVD-resolution MPEG-4 format, and offer 'em for sale over the net for two bucks apiece. Never happen, though, because there's so fucking much piracy in the world, particularly so among Firefly's target audience, that the company would make about six dollars per episode and would go down faster than a two-bit whore.
I'll take that ideal DRM system any time, fellas.
the whole show was just a ripoff of Outlaw Star anyway.
That bitch is about five months out of date. Before the show debuted, lots of know-it-alls were comparing it to Outlaw Star. Since the show's been on, the only people to draw that comparison have been people who've never watched Firefly.
Complain all you want, but at least make a passing effort to stay up-to-date.
heck, my wife *quit* her last job because they were going to make her use Outlook
Does your wife show any other recognizable signs of insanity? Jobs are not easy to come by in this economy. I was recently unemployed for a while, after my start-up... well, didn't. The though of quitting a job over a computer program amazes and, frankly, sickens me a little.
[Voice over IP] will replace phones as we know it... why isnt it more widely used?
Just about the worst telephone call you can make-- in my experience-- is the US to Sydney, Oz. The call must be routed over a satellite link or something, because the lag is on the order of half a second. When you're talking to someone in Australia, you get used to saying, "How are you today?" and then waiting while the perceptible lag passes to hear the reply, "Fuck off, you piker! It's three in the bloody mornin'!"
Every VOIP call is like that, only the lag varies from a merely noticeable fraction of a second to between one and two seconds from moment to moment, due to varying net traffic conditions.
VOIP, in other words, is more annoying and less effective than your average instant messaging system.
It looks like they are taking contributions for the effort ala PayPal.
<nitpick style="pedantic" value="trivial">
The expression a la is French for "in the manner or style of." I think the idiom you meant to use was via, which means "by the way of." I think you meant, "they are taking contributions for the effort via PayPal." On the other hand, you could have said, "they are taking contributions for the effort a la the EFF," which would have meant, "they are taking contributions in the same way that the EFF does." Whichever.
</nitpick>
Nobody expects the... oh, forget it. Too predicable. Make up your own funny comment about shrubbery, Mr. Neutron, "pinin' for the fijords," or the larch.
At any rate, Apple probably wouldn't push a GNUStep system; it comes too close to being an OS X replacement.
You are kidding, right? There's a hell of a lot more to OS X than Foundation and Application Kit. It won't be possible to talk about an OS X replacement until somebody comes up with a Quartz/Aqua replacement, and that's not even on the horizon.
However I think this is more aimed at the "I want a _computer_ with a preinstalled OS-X-alike" crowd.
The problem is that Darwin doesn't even remotely resemble OS X from the point of view of the user. The vast-- and I mean vast-- majority of Mac users aren't even aware that you can log in to OS X in console mode, without the GUI, and they certainly would never want to do such a thing. Anybody who buys (or downloads, or whatever) a Darwin distribution looking for an "OSX-alike" is going to be sorely disappointed when it drops them into a shell or Gnome or some other damn-fool thing.
I really have no idea who would use this. If you've got a Mac that's capable of running Darwin, you've almost certainly already got OS X, and the upgrade to the most recent version is cheap. If you've got a PC that's capable of running Darwin-- the list of compatible PC configurations is short, short-- you've already got BSD or Linux. It sounds an awful lot like a novelty to me.
In my mind, the Free in Free Software allows you the freedom to use /any/ software you want.
You have just confessed to the crime of GNU/Heresy. Stay where you are; FSF operatives will be at your home shortly to escort you to the nearest GNU/Re-education camp.
All sarcasm aside, yours is by far the more enlightened viewpoint, but it's also in direct opposition to the position of the FSF. I don't know if most people realize this, but the FSF actually asserts that people should not use software that is, by their definition, unacceptable. Doesn't sound very "free" to me.
Great FAQ.
7. How can I contribute to GNU-Darwin?
Yes!
Ugh.
GNU-Darwin is a distribution of Darwin with some favorite GNU software ported to it, as well as the FreeBSD ports tree. It is not Free Software, as the Darwin part is APSL, and thus considered non-free by the FSF.
No offense, but the FSF can get bent. Apple didn't have to release any source for their OS at all; they could have gone the way of IRIX or HP-UX or Solaris or AIX, or any other commercial UNIX. Instead, they looked at the pros and cons of releasing the source, and decided that open was better than closed. The FSF, though, can't get over the fact that Apple chose the "open for business" interpretation of open source, instead of the "open our fly" one.
The FSF is free to do whatever they want with their software. But if they came from a company instead of a hippie co-op, their complaints that this or that license is "non-Free" (for fuck's sake, talk about loaded language) would be nothing more than marketing and FUD.
In other words, the FSF would rather live in a world where everybody has equal access to really shitty software; they-- and their followers, of course-- are quite alone in this vision.
So you are saying that the statements in the Bible are arbitrary and subject to the "tastes", as you put it, of the reader?
Sort of, but that wasn't my point. The Bible is a complex document. In order to understand any statement included in it, one must understand the context of that statement. To simply take every sentence in the Bible and accept it as literally true-- without considering the possibilities of mistranslation, allusion, or metaphor-- seems naive to me.
By the way, are you one of those people who find truth in the statement: "That may be true for you, but it is not true for me"?
Obviously that depends on the context. If the object of consideration were the statement, "I am over 40 years old," it could very easily be true for you but not for me. There are some absolutes in the world-- morality, by definition, being an absolute-- but there are also some non-absolutes.
I generally come down on the side of more non-absolutes than absolutes, but the absolutes that do exist are unshakeable.
This was not an injunction against the death penalty, but instruction in the proper way to treat people, and in how NOT to abuse the law to further your own ends.
Lessons are where you find them. I dare say that no man living can know the intent behind Jesus's words. No one can even prove, definitively, that he said them. But is that relevant? No. The Bible is not a book of facts as much as it is a book of wisdom. The neat thing about such cliches as this-- and also the catchy one about judging not lest ye be judged-- is that we can use them as lenses through which to examine our own lives. Arguing that Christ really meant A or B is missing the point.
Also, it is not necessary to know what is in someone's heart when they comit a capital crime. The only thing that is necessary is to ascertain their guilt according to the law.
Interesting that you should say it that way, because what's in a person's heart is very important to the question of whether they committed a capital crime or not. If I get angry at you-- find you in bed with my wife or some such-- and beat you to death, that's not a capital crime. The mere killing of one person by another is not sufficient to warrant a sentence of death, or even of life in prison. The state of mind of the killer is material to the question. A person who kills out of mindless rage does not commit the same crime as a person who carefully plans and carries out a killing. The intent of the accused determines whether a murder is a capital crime, or, indeed, whether a killing is a murder at all.
Did God stop Satan from comitting the first sin in all creation? Did God stop Eve from biting the apple, or Adam? Since the answers are "No" and "no", who are you to force your spiritual beliefs on others when even God does not do this?
By the same token, then, who are you to take another person's life for his crime, when even God Himself does not? It's hubris to put oneself in the mind of God, but it's also fair to assume that if the Lord wanted a man dead, he would see that it happened. God has seen fit to put Person X on this Earth, and to let him live out his appointed days. Who are we to defy God's will by strapping Person X to a gurney and pumping potassium into his veins until he dies?
1) Read from the original languages.
2) remove foot from mouth.
Please, don't be so short. If you would like to correct me, by all means do so. I'm a grown man; I can take it.
However, if your intent is to tell me that the Bible is only infallible in Aramaic-- or Greek or Hebrew, depending-- then I have to respectfully disagree. The question is whether or not the Bible is the divine, infallible word of the Lord God Himself, or not. As I've pointed out, the English translations of the Bible contain factual errors. Again, these are not relevant errors; they're matters of trivia. But they're statements that are technically not correct. So either the Bible, as it was originally written, was erroneous, or the translations are erroneous.
Either theory effectively leads to the same conclusion: that the Bible should not be accepted as a source of factual information, but rather as a collection of wisdom and praise to be used by the reader as inspiration and guidance. Here's how.
If the original works that make up the modern Bible included errors, then the Bible is clearly not perfect. Let me reiterate, this does not mean that the Bible is useless, but rather that it's not an encyclopedia. The purpose of the Bible to modern people, then, is obviously to tell the story of the Jews and their Messiah, with allegory and metaphor where necessary, and to provide inspiration and guidance to the worshippers of the Lord God. Holding the Bible up, then, as a source of fact is misguided.
If, on the other hand, the original works that make up the modern Bible were perfect, but have been mistranscribed or mistranslated since, then the perfect forms of the Biblical books have effectively been lost to us. No man alive today is sufficiently fluent in the Aramaic or Hebrew of 3,500 years ago, or the Greek of 2,000 years ago, to perfectly understand the original Biblical writings, even if we had access to all of them. As I understand it, the oldest known manuscript of the Pentateuch (written in Aramaic with the Estrangela alphabet) dates to 464 AD and is currently in the British Museum. It's a long way from appx. 1,400 BC to 464 AD. We will never know how many errors were introduced to the manuscript in all those centuries.
The result is that we have a Bible, today, which cannot be interpreted literally, for it is the result of millennia of mistranscription and mistranslation by imperfect human scholars. The original texts, furthermore, are lost to us. So the true, perfect words of the Lord God are both unknown, and unknowable.
Which is the exact same situation as if the Bible had never been perfect to begin with.
There are only two other options: one is to believe that all currently extant translations of the Bible are perfect, but that raises nasty questions about cud-chewing rabbits, mustard trees, and the downright bizarre case of the Nephilim.
The last option is to believe that only one modern Bible is perfect... but which one? And once you pick the translation, you have to tackle the question of which books to include. The argument for the inclusion of Ecclesiasticus is strong, yet that book is omitted from Protestant Bibles. All Bibles, though, contain the Canticle of Solomon, which is widely believed to be a love poem included mistakenly by the Council of Trent. Which are divine and which are not? No man can know for certain.
The question of the literal infallibility of the Bible is still very much open for debate, but the debate is essentially moot because all arguments lead to the same conclusion.
Just because someone who was famous once said it dosen't make it true.
Unfortunately, the same can be said of Moses, Joshua, King David, Lemuel, Mordecai, St. Paul, or any of the other 40-odd contributors to the modern Bible. If you accept the overwhelming conclusion that the Bible as we know it today is a flawed-- trivially flawed, but flawed nonetheless-- book, then the Bible as a whole is subject to interpretation. As I've said before, the Bible is not an encyclopedia.
Not trying to make enemies here, but if you compare the Catholic doctrines and the Bible, there are WAY too many discrepancies for me to consider their ideas more than delusions.
Well, you're certainly entitled to have that opinion, but there are about a billion people around the world who would disagree with you. The Mother Church has one thing going for her that no other can claim: an unbroken line of succession, through 2,000 years of history and 256 men, back to St. Peter, who touched the hand of Jesus Christ Himself.
They just made some stuff up out of thin air it seems.
As the story goes, St. Peter was given that right by Christ: "And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven." The bit about "upon this rock" is particularly fascinating; Christ was making a pun. The Aramaic words for "rock" and "Peter" are the same, transliterated as Cepha, or Kipha. Christ said, in essence, "upon this person I will build my church." Now, the Protestants-- particularly the Anglicans-- tend to prefer to interpret this passage as meaning that Peter was primus inter pares to the Apostles, but whether one believes that interpretation or not is a matter of opinion and faith.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a preponderance of people in this world who would rather use the scriptures to reinforce what they already believe, instead of trying to devine what the scriptures actually say.
We are in no disagreement on this point.
It is also definatly true the book is very much about the characters development, and not the modern heroism that most current books seem to aspire to.
Character development? What character development? Every character in the books acts and talks in exactly the same way. The hobbits, in particular, are completely interchangeable.
At least in the movie they chose to have Pippin played by a Scottish actor. If they hadn't, it would be completely impossible to tell them apart. Hell, they could have made a running gag out of it.
"Well, I guess this is the end, Merry."
"I'm Pippin. He's Merry."
"Whatever. Just tell Merry I said bye."
This isn't a geeky pedant point like the comment about Scratchy's ribs; this is a fundamental physical characteristic of the main character of a major motion picture. Just how tall is Frodo supposed to be?
Somewhere in the documentaries or the commentaries or someplace buried in the ~18 hours of stuff on the extended edition DVD set, somebody makes mention of a really great point. Tolkien wrote (allegedly; see my other posts for my experience with the books) that hobbits are smaller than men a few times, but for the most part didn't keep bringing it up. He didn't keep saying things like, "Frodo looked at Gandalf, craning his neck upward and straining to make out the wizard's features from the approximate level of his belly-button." Instead, he just established that hobbits are shorter than men, and then moved on to talk about Tom Bombadil or some other damn fool way of avoiding getting on with the plot.
Er, sorry. Bit of a digression.
Anyway, the point is that they didn't spend a lot of time trying to get the hobbits exactly right in the films. They used a few tricky and expensive establishing shots to say that hobbits are shorter than men, and used scale doubles in every wide shot, but for the most part they just told the story and didn't make a big deal out of the details.
Actually, there are a few shots in Fellowship where they just didn't care about scale at all, but it works anyway because your eye is already accustomed to thinking of hobbits as small. I'm thinking specifically of the shot where Boromir tackles Frodo just before the big fight on Amon Hen. No scale doubles, no forced perspective, just Sean Bean body-tackling Elijah Wood. On the screen, it really looks like Boromir is twice Frodo's size.
Makes no difference if you read that or not, because the New Testament is a revamp of it. Alot like knowing C, then trying to learn C++
Hmm. Methinks maybe you haven't read your Bible. It's more like knowing C, then trying to learn cross-country skiing.