That's not what you said. You said that cooperation is better than competition. Shall I quote you? You said, "Competition works to a point, but cooperativeness works much better." Then you said, "Fucking grow up you worthless slimebags!" which really made me excited about talking to you.
Now, as for governments and corporations, let's see what we have here. When governments compete, we send men to the moon. The "space race" was essentially a competition between the US and the USSR, and because of it both parties accomplished things that they had not been able to accomplish without that incentive. When governments cooperate-- to choose a comparable example-- you end up with bloated, bureaucratic ballyhoos like the European Space Agency and the International Space Station. Not exactly putting a man on the moon, is it?
And as for corporations... cooperation among corporations is usually called collusion, and it's almost always criminal. Competition between corporations yields better products and services made available on the open market at lower prices to the consumer, whether the consumer be individuals like you and me or other corporations.
It's hard to see how this is possible, seeing as how the series creator is on record as saying he'd never even seen Cowboy Bebop until Firefly was well into production.
For instance, a safe bet is that a FTL drive wouldn't consist of a giant Quaker Oats can, with 3 sprigs of celery sticking out of it wrapped in last year's christmas lights.
Five years ago, I would have assumed that a radio transmitter wouldn't look like a Pringles can, either. I guess I was just insufficiently imaginative.
From that perspective, it only seems practical to staff a ship with a comical stardrive with a prostitute. He should have picked one that would service them though.
You should watch the last episode, entitled "Out of Gas." There's a prostitute aboard the Serenity because she pays rent. The crew of the ship needs the extra cash, and she needs transportation. It's a completely reasonable arrangement.
There are maybe 5-10 bodies in this solar system that are workable.
Bzzt. There are, in fact, 95 moons in this solar system, ranging in size from asteroid-like Phobos all the way to planet-sized Ganymede. If you count Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, that gives us a grand total of 99 worlds in our solar system alone that are suitable, in the broadest sense, for human habitation. How these worlds get terraformed is an issue left for the sci-fi writers, but the basic premise is actually dead-on.
Until further notice, we can all just assume that Firefly is set in a single solar system that includes hundreds-- exactly how many isn't specified-- of terraformed worlds.
Firefly in my book is the sleeper hit of the season
In order for this to be true, Firefly would have to be... a sleeper hit. As of this moment, that's not the case. Which is too bad, because I think it's one of the better shows on TV right now, and one of my favorites. Fox needs to get it off of Friday night and move it to a Monday or something-- some night when there's basically nothing else like it on, and when it won't be preempted left, right, and center. Maybe then it'll get a chance.
Just because it was written in on purpose doesn't make it interesting. I love good character development as much as the next guy, but the last couple of episodes of season 3 and most of season 4 just got so inaccessible that I found myself wondering what else was on.
The purpose of entertainment is, first and foremost, to entertain. If they stop doing that, they've blown it. Since you brought up the Buffy comparison, I am a die-hard Buffy-season-6 defender. Yes, season 6 was by turns silly and dark, dark. But it never quite stopped being entertaining. Farscape's season 4 stopped being entertaining. That's the difference.
Actually, friend, you should have realized by now that we watch (and talk about) shows like Stargate to escape those sorts of aspects of reality.
I hereby christen thee the "Go Outside" troll. Let's see if you can keep it up, and not burn yourself out like the "Get a real computer" troll did a few weeks ago.
Competition works to a point, but cooperativeness works much better.
Please cite examples from history to support this assertion. Any examples will do, but be prepared to have them criticized if they're not representative of what you're saying, or if you're misinterpreting them.
If you study a little, you'll find that competition, while imperfect, yields significantly and consistently better results than cooperation.
As for your relentless and pointless whining about being down-moderated... grow up.
There are 95 moons in our solar system, according to a show I saw on the Discovery Channel last week. Take that number as accurate +/- 10%. If you assume as a fundamental conceit of the show that there's a way to create reliable artificial gravity-- I like another poster's idea of having it work like permanent magnets; hard to manufacture, but singularly easy to use, and virtually indestructible under normal conditions-- then you can imagine increasing the surface gravity of a rock the size of Phobos to the point where it could hold a breathable atmosphere.
Now imagine a bigger solar system than ours. Say it's got a dozen inner planets of the Earth or Mars types, and twenty or thirty outer planets of Neptune's size, all the way out to a cometary halo. Big sun, puts out lots of heat, so the biosphere of the star is very large. It's easy to imagine a system like that with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of usable worlds.
Also, consider that the only place we've gotten the idea of hundreds of new worlds from is the opening narration, which is notably short of detailed information. Maybe "hundreds of new Earths" really means something like 120 worlds. That would still be an awful lot.
Finally, remember that the purpose of the setting is to provide an interesting place in which to tell stories. The Star Trek stories use the entire galaxy as their setting, but doing so requires some serious bending of science. The speed of light makes interstellar travel boring at best, so they had to stipulate the existence of a warp drive. But drama sometimes dictates that it be necessary for it to take hours or days to go from one place to another, so arbitrary limits had to be placed on how fast the warp drive goes. Then, to give the Star Trek stories an "outside" from which to introduce new races and such, they had to stipulate the existence of wormholes allowing instantaneous trans-galactic travel. It just gets more and more complex as you go on, and the rules get more and more convoluted.
If, on the other hand, you assume that the speed of light is absolute, and pick a setting with a solar system containing hundreds of terraformed Earth-sized planets, all those problems go away. Yes, you have to get the views to accept one improbable premise*, but that's easier than getting them to accept a couple dozen improbable premises that wrap around each other, that mutually contradict each other, and the finally end up being arbitrary.
* Or is it? We have no idea how big the average solar system really is, having only our own solar system for comparison. Maybe ours is a runt.
I agree with you that Star Trek has a "my way or the highway" approach to morality
I, for one, look forward to the day, not too long from now, when the idea of moral relativism will have gone the way of communism, free love, slavery, phlogiston, and trephination. There is absolute right and wrong, my friends. It's good to hold true that one might not always be right, but it's bad to deny the existence of absolute good and evil.
In other words, I'm very much in favor of "my way or the highway" approaches to morality in cases where there is a clear line dividing acceptable from unacceptable. The tricky part is being able to identify those cases.
As for the rest of your post, I agree completely. The best description I've heard of Enterprise yet is your phrase: heavy-handed. The sexiest hour of Star Trek ever had to be the Next Generation episode "The Perfect Mate," with Famke Janssen. The red-hot steamy sex scenes in that episode consisted of Picard and Crusher having breakfast, and Picard and Kamala talking through the night. And it was hot stuff. Calvin Klein models smearing jelly on each other in blue-lit rooms is pretty lame by comparison.
I am a bit mystified by the terraformers decision to make all the (hundreds of) planets[?] into semi-arid dustballs rather than fertile paradises
One would presume that the really nice planets would also be the ones with all the people on 'em. Given the ensemble's expressed preference for avoiding big crowds, it seems reasonable that they'd stick to the dry-and-dusties.
By all means, I invite you to fire a projectile weapon inside a rickety old spacecraft. Just be sure you don't miss...
What's your opinion on armed air marshals?
You'd be surprised. From what I've been told-- I'm not well educated in the science of guns, so I can't swear that this is true-- it's pretty unlikely that a bullet will punch through the multiple layers of aluminum and plastic and insulation and stuff that makes up an airplane hull. It's much more likely just to ricochet, which while bad for any passenger in the way, is better than depressurizing the cabin and sending the plane into a panic dive. I imagine the same would be true of even the most primitive (for lack of a better word) spaceship.
Consider the alternative. Security officers on the Enterprise routinely wandered around with sidearms that were fully capable of cutting right through the deck, the deck below, and the outer hull. How much sense did that make?
Yeah, I've gotta admit that I dug the fact that one of his first lines in the pilot episode was spoken to one of the Vulcans, something along the lines of, "You're lucky I don't knock you on your ass."
If only they'd stuck with it. Enterprise disappoints me because everybody gets along so darned well. If you think of some of the great ensemble cast shows-- Buffy, for instance-- there's a lot of friction between and among the characters. Some of the best episodes of Buffy basically involved no supernatural element to speak of, but just some kind of conflict between the characters. The characters on Enterprise are all so... chummy. So darned easy to get along with. It's dull.
I mean, think about it. Put a hundred people-- regular people, not trained Navy submariners-- in close quarters for nine months. Tempers are going to flare, romances are going to form and dissolve and re-form, and some people just aren't going to get along very well. Have the bridge officers break into the occasional shouting match! Fistfights in the crew mess. Put some real human beings, with real personality flaws on the ship for a change.
Their engine is only 3ft DIA, 10ft long. It rotates. And this will push them faster than light?
Seeing as how those engines are plain old turbofans for use in an atmosphere, I'd say no. Check out the whopping big glowy thing at the tail if you ever decide to watch the show again. That's the engine they use in space.
Also, where'd you get the idea that they're going faster than light? While they haven't made a big deal out of it yet, all signs seem to indicate that Firefly is set entirely in one large solar system with some inner planets-- which we haven't seen on any of the broadcast episodes of the show yet-- and hundreds of moons. Seeing as how our own solar system has over 100 moon-sized-or-larger bodies in it, that's hardly implausible.
Yet they don't start floating around because of lack of artificial gravity?
The gravity is magical. How it works is irrelevant to the plot of the show, and about as interesting as whether your pipes are made of copper or PVC. Don't worry about the gravity.
Of course, then you went on to criticize what is widely considered to be among the best storytelling on television in terms so vague as to be utterly meaningless. If you don't like the stories, don't watch. Probably ought to stay away from most other television, too. And movies, don't forget those. Also radio. And almost all books.
How boring it must be to be an entertainment snob.
The quote is, "It took us fifteen years and three supercomputers to MacGyver a way to power the gate." Great one. There are more good ones. I like O'Neill's "You know that "we come in peace" business? Bite me." But my favorite has to be: "I remembered something. There's a man. He is bald and wears a short sleeve shirt. And somehow, he is important to me... I think his name is... Homer."
No, no. Best moment was in the "Carter gets her own pet alien" episode. O'Neill and Teal'c show up at Carter's door with pizza and and Star Wars on video. Teal'c says he's seen it nine times. O'Neill says that if Teal'c likes it, it has to be good. Carter starts to give some excuse about how it's not a very good time, then stops mid-sentence to say, "You mean you've never seen Star Wars?" O'Neill kinda shrugs and says, "Oh, you know me and 'sci-fi.'"
And despite all those loose ends and mysteries, I just can't bring myself to care.
It takes a very special kind of talent to take an otherwise intriguing premise and make it as boring as your average Enterprise episode. Of course, I keep watching it. The first 30 episodes of The Next Generation were pretty bad, too. Who knows? Maybe the horse will learn to sing.
You mean the article that said, "Apple's OS X is without a doubt not an officially sanctioned, UNIX operating system," right? Yes, I've read it. It also said, "Bird also mentioned that the Open Group is aware of Apple's usage of the term and would only go after the company for trademark violation if it (or any company for that matter), used the UNIX specification in such a way that may confuse buyers."
You, on the other hand, said "Then why did the Open Group say they didn't have a problem with Apple calling MacOS X UNIX?" That never happened. Graham Bird said they have no problem with the way Apple is currently using the UNIX brand, which is by saying that Mac OS X is "UNIX-based."
Apple has never said that Mac OS X is a UNIX operating system. They have said that it's based on UNIX, or used such phrases as, "It has the power of UNIX," or other such descriptions. But Mac OS X is not, officially and technically, UNIX.
In this case, the AC was right. (Amazing.) Linux is a registered trademark. Using it in any way that's not expressly authorized by the trademark owner is trademark dilution, and you could get sued for it. The whole "GNU/Linux" thing really has got to stop. If Linus decides to enforce his trademark-- and I certainly hope he does, because if he doesn't, he could lose it-- then things could get pretty ugly.
Actually, I wasn't complaining about the way the sentence parsed-- or failed to-- as much as I was just pointing out that you're an idiot. That's pretty much it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what you said. You said that cooperation is better than competition. Shall I quote you? You said, "Competition works to a point, but cooperativeness works much better." Then you said, "Fucking grow up you worthless slimebags!" which really made me excited about talking to you.
Now, as for governments and corporations, let's see what we have here. When governments compete, we send men to the moon. The "space race" was essentially a competition between the US and the USSR, and because of it both parties accomplished things that they had not been able to accomplish without that incentive. When governments cooperate-- to choose a comparable example-- you end up with bloated, bureaucratic ballyhoos like the European Space Agency and the International Space Station. Not exactly putting a man on the moon, is it?
And as for corporations... cooperation among corporations is usually called collusion, and it's almost always criminal. Competition between corporations yields better products and services made available on the open market at lower prices to the consumer, whether the consumer be individuals like you and me or other corporations.
Competition is better than cooperation.
FireFly is a horrible rip-off [of Cowboy Bebop]
It's hard to see how this is possible, seeing as how the series creator is on record as saying he'd never even seen Cowboy Bebop until Firefly was well into production.
For instance, a safe bet is that a FTL drive wouldn't consist of a giant Quaker Oats can, with 3 sprigs of celery sticking out of it wrapped in last year's christmas lights.
Five years ago, I would have assumed that a radio transmitter wouldn't look like a Pringles can, either. I guess I was just insufficiently imaginative.
From that perspective, it only seems practical to staff a ship with a comical stardrive with a prostitute. He should have picked one that would service them though.
You should watch the last episode, entitled "Out of Gas." There's a prostitute aboard the Serenity because she pays rent. The crew of the ship needs the extra cash, and she needs transportation. It's a completely reasonable arrangement.
There are maybe 5-10 bodies in this solar system that are workable.
Bzzt. There are, in fact, 95 moons in this solar system, ranging in size from asteroid-like Phobos all the way to planet-sized Ganymede. If you count Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, that gives us a grand total of 99 worlds in our solar system alone that are suitable, in the broadest sense, for human habitation. How these worlds get terraformed is an issue left for the sci-fi writers, but the basic premise is actually dead-on.
Until further notice, we can all just assume that Firefly is set in a single solar system that includes hundreds-- exactly how many isn't specified-- of terraformed worlds.
Firefly in my book is the sleeper hit of the season
In order for this to be true, Firefly would have to be... a sleeper hit. As of this moment, that's not the case. Which is too bad, because I think it's one of the better shows on TV right now, and one of my favorites. Fox needs to get it off of Friday night and move it to a Monday or something-- some night when there's basically nothing else like it on, and when it won't be preempted left, right, and center. Maybe then it'll get a chance.
Just because it was written in on purpose doesn't make it interesting. I love good character development as much as the next guy, but the last couple of episodes of season 3 and most of season 4 just got so inaccessible that I found myself wondering what else was on.
The purpose of entertainment is, first and foremost, to entertain. If they stop doing that, they've blown it. Since you brought up the Buffy comparison, I am a die-hard Buffy-season-6 defender. Yes, season 6 was by turns silly and dark, dark. But it never quite stopped being entertaining. Farscape's season 4 stopped being entertaining. That's the difference.
Actually, friend, you should have realized by now that we watch (and talk about) shows like Stargate to escape those sorts of aspects of reality.
I hereby christen thee the "Go Outside" troll. Let's see if you can keep it up, and not burn yourself out like the "Get a real computer" troll did a few weeks ago.
Competition works to a point, but cooperativeness works much better.
Please cite examples from history to support this assertion. Any examples will do, but be prepared to have them criticized if they're not representative of what you're saying, or if you're misinterpreting them.
If you study a little, you'll find that competition, while imperfect, yields significantly and consistently better results than cooperation.
As for your relentless and pointless whining about being down-moderated... grow up.
There are 95 moons in our solar system, according to a show I saw on the Discovery Channel last week. Take that number as accurate +/- 10%. If you assume as a fundamental conceit of the show that there's a way to create reliable artificial gravity-- I like another poster's idea of having it work like permanent magnets; hard to manufacture, but singularly easy to use, and virtually indestructible under normal conditions-- then you can imagine increasing the surface gravity of a rock the size of Phobos to the point where it could hold a breathable atmosphere.
Now imagine a bigger solar system than ours. Say it's got a dozen inner planets of the Earth or Mars types, and twenty or thirty outer planets of Neptune's size, all the way out to a cometary halo. Big sun, puts out lots of heat, so the biosphere of the star is very large. It's easy to imagine a system like that with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of usable worlds.
Also, consider that the only place we've gotten the idea of hundreds of new worlds from is the opening narration, which is notably short of detailed information. Maybe "hundreds of new Earths" really means something like 120 worlds. That would still be an awful lot.
Finally, remember that the purpose of the setting is to provide an interesting place in which to tell stories. The Star Trek stories use the entire galaxy as their setting, but doing so requires some serious bending of science. The speed of light makes interstellar travel boring at best, so they had to stipulate the existence of a warp drive. But drama sometimes dictates that it be necessary for it to take hours or days to go from one place to another, so arbitrary limits had to be placed on how fast the warp drive goes. Then, to give the Star Trek stories an "outside" from which to introduce new races and such, they had to stipulate the existence of wormholes allowing instantaneous trans-galactic travel. It just gets more and more complex as you go on, and the rules get more and more convoluted.
If, on the other hand, you assume that the speed of light is absolute, and pick a setting with a solar system containing hundreds of terraformed Earth-sized planets, all those problems go away. Yes, you have to get the views to accept one improbable premise*, but that's easier than getting them to accept a couple dozen improbable premises that wrap around each other, that mutually contradict each other, and the finally end up being arbitrary.
* Or is it? We have no idea how big the average solar system really is, having only our own solar system for comparison. Maybe ours is a runt.
I agree with you that Star Trek has a "my way or the highway" approach to morality
I, for one, look forward to the day, not too long from now, when the idea of moral relativism will have gone the way of communism, free love, slavery, phlogiston, and trephination. There is absolute right and wrong, my friends. It's good to hold true that one might not always be right, but it's bad to deny the existence of absolute good and evil.
In other words, I'm very much in favor of "my way or the highway" approaches to morality in cases where there is a clear line dividing acceptable from unacceptable. The tricky part is being able to identify those cases.
As for the rest of your post, I agree completely. The best description I've heard of Enterprise yet is your phrase: heavy-handed. The sexiest hour of Star Trek ever had to be the Next Generation episode "The Perfect Mate," with Famke Janssen. The red-hot steamy sex scenes in that episode consisted of Picard and Crusher having breakfast, and Picard and Kamala talking through the night. And it was hot stuff. Calvin Klein models smearing jelly on each other in blue-lit rooms is pretty lame by comparison.
I am a bit mystified by the terraformers decision to make all the (hundreds of) planets[?] into semi-arid dustballs rather than fertile paradises
One would presume that the really nice planets would also be the ones with all the people on 'em. Given the ensemble's expressed preference for avoiding big crowds, it seems reasonable that they'd stick to the dry-and-dusties.
By all means, I invite you to fire a projectile weapon inside a rickety old spacecraft. Just be sure you don't miss...
What's your opinion on armed air marshals?
You'd be surprised. From what I've been told-- I'm not well educated in the science of guns, so I can't swear that this is true-- it's pretty unlikely that a bullet will punch through the multiple layers of aluminum and plastic and insulation and stuff that makes up an airplane hull. It's much more likely just to ricochet, which while bad for any passenger in the way, is better than depressurizing the cabin and sending the plane into a panic dive. I imagine the same would be true of even the most primitive (for lack of a better word) spaceship.
Consider the alternative. Security officers on the Enterprise routinely wandered around with sidearms that were fully capable of cutting right through the deck, the deck below, and the outer hull. How much sense did that make?
I wanted http://fel.lat.io, but the IO TLD sucks.
You can still get http://cunniling.us.
Yeah, I've gotta admit that I dug the fact that one of his first lines in the pilot episode was spoken to one of the Vulcans, something along the lines of, "You're lucky I don't knock you on your ass."
If only they'd stuck with it. Enterprise disappoints me because everybody gets along so darned well. If you think of some of the great ensemble cast shows-- Buffy, for instance-- there's a lot of friction between and among the characters. Some of the best episodes of Buffy basically involved no supernatural element to speak of, but just some kind of conflict between the characters. The characters on Enterprise are all so... chummy. So darned easy to get along with. It's dull.
I mean, think about it. Put a hundred people-- regular people, not trained Navy submariners-- in close quarters for nine months. Tempers are going to flare, romances are going to form and dissolve and re-form, and some people just aren't going to get along very well. Have the bridge officers break into the occasional shouting match! Fistfights in the crew mess. Put some real human beings, with real personality flaws on the ship for a change.
Okay, end of rant.
Their engine is only 3ft DIA, 10ft long. It rotates. And this will push them faster than light?
Seeing as how those engines are plain old turbofans for use in an atmosphere, I'd say no. Check out the whopping big glowy thing at the tail if you ever decide to watch the show again. That's the engine they use in space.
Also, where'd you get the idea that they're going faster than light? While they haven't made a big deal out of it yet, all signs seem to indicate that Firefly is set entirely in one large solar system with some inner planets-- which we haven't seen on any of the broadcast episodes of the show yet-- and hundreds of moons. Seeing as how our own solar system has over 100 moon-sized-or-larger bodies in it, that's hardly implausible.
Yet they don't start floating around because of lack of artificial gravity?
The gravity is magical. How it works is irrelevant to the plot of the show, and about as interesting as whether your pipes are made of copper or PVC. Don't worry about the gravity.
Of course, then you went on to criticize what is widely considered to be among the best storytelling on television in terms so vague as to be utterly meaningless. If you don't like the stories, don't watch. Probably ought to stay away from most other television, too. And movies, don't forget those. Also radio. And almost all books.
How boring it must be to be an entertainment snob.
The quote is, "It took us fifteen years and three supercomputers to MacGyver a way to power the gate." Great one. There are more good ones. I like O'Neill's "You know that "we come in peace" business? Bite me." But my favorite has to be: "I remembered something. There's a man. He is bald and wears a short sleeve shirt. And somehow, he is important to me... I think his name is... Homer."
No, no. Best moment was in the "Carter gets her own pet alien" episode. O'Neill and Teal'c show up at Carter's door with pizza and and Star Wars on video. Teal'c says he's seen it nine times. O'Neill says that if Teal'c likes it, it has to be good. Carter starts to give some excuse about how it's not a very good time, then stops mid-sentence to say, "You mean you've never seen Star Wars?" O'Neill kinda shrugs and says, "Oh, you know me and 'sci-fi.'"
Cracked me up.
And despite all those loose ends and mysteries, I just can't bring myself to care.
It takes a very special kind of talent to take an otherwise intriguing premise and make it as boring as your average Enterprise episode. Of course, I keep watching it. The first 30 episodes of The Next Generation were pretty bad, too. Who knows? Maybe the horse will learn to sing.
His name is Corin Nemec. IMDB is a good thing.
You mean the article that said, "Apple's OS X is without a doubt not an officially sanctioned, UNIX operating system," right? Yes, I've read it. It also said, "Bird also mentioned that the Open Group is aware of Apple's usage of the term and would only go after the company for trademark violation if it (or any company for that matter), used the UNIX specification in such a way that may confuse buyers."
You, on the other hand, said "Then why did the Open Group say they didn't have a problem with Apple calling MacOS X UNIX?" That never happened. Graham Bird said they have no problem with the way Apple is currently using the UNIX brand, which is by saying that Mac OS X is "UNIX-based."
Apple has never said that Mac OS X is a UNIX operating system. They have said that it's based on UNIX, or used such phrases as, "It has the power of UNIX," or other such descriptions. But Mac OS X is not, officially and technically, UNIX.
In this case, the AC was right. (Amazing.) Linux is a registered trademark. Using it in any way that's not expressly authorized by the trademark owner is trademark dilution, and you could get sued for it. The whole "GNU/Linux" thing really has got to stop. If Linus decides to enforce his trademark-- and I certainly hope he does, because if he doesn't, he could lose it-- then things could get pretty ugly.
Let's see how many days it takes for CmdrTaco to notice the problem and fix his cock.
Funniest typo ever.
Me. 'Cause I'm right. If you were right, you'd give a shit, too. Not having ever been right about anything, I wouldn't expect you to grasp this.
Actually, I wasn't complaining about the way the sentence parsed-- or failed to-- as much as I was just pointing out that you're an idiot. That's pretty much it.
Just a pointer: before posting, read a bit of the thread to understand the context. It helps minimize the looking like an idiot.