Well... it's POSSIBLE to deliver a bit of comeuppance to police who abuse you... just not through official channels. As with too many things in this country, you have to know the right people in order to get justice.
Some years back, a friend of mine was arrested for a crime he didn't commit. Turns out, he bears a physical resemblance (similar height, build, and hair color/style)to a, at the time, fairly well known drug dealer in the party scene. He was at this party that was getting broken up; the pigs were there looking to arrest the drug dealer; and when they couldn't find him, they decided that my friend (Who, other than working as a bartender for a while, has never sold drugs in his life.) was "close enough for government work" and decided to call it a day by arresting and accusing him instead.
Yeah, he was quickly released. But officially, there was no recourse for him. And oh, but did he try... retaining a fairly good lawyer to try to get at the pigs. But no dice. As you point out, they've weaseled quite a few laws into place to shield themselves from recourse when they decide to abuse the innocent.
But there's a light at the end of the tunnel... if it turns out that you know the right people, that is. After about a couple years' worth of working at it; he was able to raise enough hell via his father's and grandfather's Lodge connections to have the arresting officer fired, and his partner demoted out of the narcotics unit all the way back down to traffic patrol. Not quite the prison time that they deserved for trying to frame an innocent person, but I'm told that the fired pig eventually had to sell his house at a loss and move himself and family out of town to start at the bottom of another police department, and the partner, even though not fired, had his career seriously derailed.
Suffice it to say, during that time, my friend recognized the advantages of having "friends in high places", and took his lodge degrees himself.
Terrorism is an inconsequential threat when you actually bother to run the numbers. And find that you are a FAR more likely killed by an inattentive or incompetent driver while you're crossing the street, (or any number of other mundane things that we have no "war on $x" to justify abusing our rights.) than you are to be killed by "the terrorists".
> illegally holding people all the time - including police men who have nearly had store managers arrested
Do you have any links for those? Not doubting you at all, having had run-ins with rent-a-thugs myself. But I'd just LOVE to read the original articles. I'd laugh my fool head off at them getting that sort of comeuppance.
There's a world of difference between your two scenarios, and the appropriate reaction to them.
An unauthorized, but strictly internal, usage of a private network is a concern, yes. But as long as it's not a malicious usage, and it doesn't have a derogatory impact on the network, servers, or other users' computers; then it's a relatively minor concern. And usually (And especially on an academic network.) there are more important issues to be dealt with.
An unauthorized usage that provides access to, or information about, to an outsider, on the other hand, is a serious security issue. And that *does* need to be dealt with swiftly and harshly.
... is not so much that it's taking *money* away from the RIAA/metallica (that can come later), but that it's taking some degree of *POWER* away from the RIAA/metallica. It used to be that the music cartel held all of the cards, so to speak, and technology companies got boned (See the old-school incarnation of Napster.) But online music and iPods are not going away. And Steve Jobs just wrested that much more CONTROL away from the RIAA/metallica types.
A few years down, Apple is going to represent a larger and more important part of the sales pie. That will give Jobs more leverage than ever against the RIAA. He'll be able to, in effect, say to them: "These songs WILL be sold at $.99, or you will NOT be sold through iTMS." And iTunes will have grown that much more that the threat will stick.
And once Jobs has the power and control wrested from the RIAA/metallica, THEN you start diverting the greater share of the money away from them and into Apple's hands....
For the last few years, my roommates and I, we've had a Superbowl party. None of us really care for football though. What do we do? Use it as an excuse to get together and socialize with friends. And after it's been on long enough, we Tivo through the game, and watch the commercials.
Yes, marketing types, we watch the Superbowl commercials ON PURPOSE!!!
I can't remember who won, or even who played in, the Superbowl for the past several years. But I remember the E-Trade monkey, Terry Tate the office linebacker, the pets.com sock puppet, Autobytel, and those Budwiser frogs. Hell, I know the dialogue to the 1984 Macintosh commercial by heart!
What's the difference? During the Superbowl is about the only time the advertisers put out commercials that DON'T FUCKING SUCK!!! Get that you pinheaded marketing drones?!?!? Make your commercials NOT SUCK... make them entertaining... and I WON'T Tivo past them! No tricks, no stunts, no blipverts, no need to try and rig broadcasts so I CAN'T fast-forward; and don't accuse me of being a thief for getting up to go to the bathroom; just stop making your commercials suck ass!
Nice job mindlessly reciting the racist caricature put forth by the military propagandists. You duckspeak doubleplusgood.
Now let me ask: How many real-life Japanese people do you actually know? I bet the answer is: "none". I, on the other hand, know quite a few, tourists and exchange students I've met, and immigrants and their descendants I've gotten to know long-term. (Admittedly, I may have an unfair advantage. I live in San Francisco now, and used to live in Honolulu.) And they are among the nicest, most decent, generous and intelligent people I've known. And they are nothing like the stereotype that people like you try to present.
I'd pretty much concluded long ago that the ideal outcome for microsoft would be for Mt. Rainier to have a truly awesome eruption, and for its lahars to bury all of microsoft under a 200-ft high wall of mud.
> I'd love to see Google win this, but P10 does have a point (even if they are only making it > because they want a piece of Google's pie) - should store owners have to place signs saying > "no stealing" at their door, or expect to give theives free rein on their stuff?
No, they don't have a point. Google doesn't take anything from anybody. The more apt analogy would be if you want your phone & address listing left out of the white pages and 411; in which case you most definitely *DO* have to actively make it known that you want your information to be unlisted. In fact, the last time I checked (It's been a while, admittedly.) the phone company actually makes you *PAY* for the "privilege" of being unlisted. All this is, is a blatant fishing expedition, wrongfully targeting a company with deep pockets, nothing more.
Jesus Christ is a recurring character on South Park... where he is frequently the object of various forms of ridicule and scorn. Now, I'm sure that, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, there are at least a few 'thumpers with a bullet set aside for Matt and Trey, should the opportunity ever present itself. But where are the South-Park-inspired riots and arson of US embassies in the christian nations of the world?
In the episode: "Jewbilee", Moses was portrayed as the evil MCP from Tron. I don't seem to recall any news of the US embassy in Israel burning when that episode aired. (And let's not even get into the things Cartman says and does about jews.)
Don't think, for a second, that I'm a fan of either xtianity or judaism. I think the world would be much better off without all three Abrahamic religions, actually. But in the topic on hand, it's kind of hard to ignore the very dissimilar outputs, given such very similar inputs.
Well, the clumsy oaf poured it into her lap while she was wearing sweatpants which, (duh) held the coffee against her shin for longer than if you just splash some on yourself and wipe it right off.
That doesn't change the fact that the coffee *WAS*, in fact, being served at the proper temperature. Read any book or website aimed at the serious coffee connoisseur. The water for brewing coffee should be just off the boil... about 205 degrees. When it's done brewing, it should be about 185; and served immediately. It's a drink that's meant to be SIPPED, not gulped. Hell, even the much-maligned chains like Starbucks and Petes gets that right.
(Not that anyone who was seriously into coffee would drink that swill they serve at mcdonalds, bet that's entirely beside the point.)
Fact is, the coffee was served at the proper temperature. Fact is, the stupid wench poured it onto her own damn self. She didn't deserve one damn cent; not from mcdonalds, not from anyone else.
> At Disney, Jobs will be just another person at the boardroom table. > Will he be a first among equals? Definitely! Will he be able to call all > of the shots? No.
People said all these exact same things about Jobs back when Apple bought NeXT. In fact, the amount of Apple stock Jobs owned was a pittance compared to the amount of Disney stock he would own, should this deal go through. And he didn't even own that Apple stock for very long. He flipped it for cash not long after joining returning to Apple in that cute little "advisory capacity".
> And in that fact, that he won't be able to call all the shots, is the truth that > Jobs would not likely stay long on the board. Jobs is one who has to control > things completely. If he can't, then he will walk away.
Once again, everyone was saying the exact same thing about Apple and NeXT. And when the board meeting was over? Jobs walked away all right. He walked away with amelio's head under his arm and the board members' resignations in his pocket.
The ability to run a theme park is insignificant next to the power of the RDF.
.... "when you get right down to it", if the human body *is* designed, it most definitely was NOT *intelliently* designed. I could could toss a list longer than your arm of design flaws that *I* would correct, if I were the one given the job of designing "Human Body" version 2.0.
> your assertion of "mini-plagarisms" is pretty funny. How long do you think it takes to storyboard, > draw, ink, voice, edit, and master one of these shows? Are you insinuating that they have spies > in the Simpsons' production unit or something?
Long ass time ago, I read an interview with Matt or Trey or both, of South Park. They mentioned that, on several occasions they knocked shows together in a half-assed manner, and at the last minute. I forget the exact amount of time they cited for each episode, but it was *FAR* short of the oft-cited "six months to a year" figure you hear thrown around about The Simpsons.
But a little research can give a clue. "Osama Bin Laden has Farty Pants" was first aired on November 7, 2001... about seven weeks after 9/11. So there we have a lower limit, at least. The difference is, Comedy Central is happy to be timely with their episodes, where fox likes to have everything wrapped up and to sit on them and plan out a schedule months in advance.
So, with a much bigger budget, and on a network with more resources, than South Park, do you really think that if the Family Guy people *REALLY* wanted to copy something, they couldn't likewise knock it out on the rush?
> I gleefully picked up Civ4, only to my dismay--- it was unstable, hoggish, and > not that much more improved over Civ3...
Hell.... the only reason I upped to Civ 3 in the first place is that I moved, and some of my game CD, including Civ 2, got misplaced and are probably sitting buried in a box in storage somewhere.
I'd have eventually upgraded anyway, just because it's become annoying to have to start Classic, when there's a native OS X version out there. But, other than that, and your worker units finally being smart enough to seek refuge in a friendly city wnen an enemy unit approaches, Civ 3 didn't offer any major improvements over number two.
Actually, the first season of SeaQuest was quite good. It was the changes made for second season that reduced it to utter crap. The third was better than the second, but by then it was too late.
I couldn't agree more. But I'd use a different example.
The movie-era model of the Enterprise.... no bloody A, B, D, or D... is about the most fantastically beautiful model of a spacecraft I've ever seen; easily looking better than anything I can think of before or since. You could tell, from occasional clumsiness, in TMP that motion control camera technology wasn't *quite* there, but by TWOK, it was perfect and convincing. I mean... that was a starSHIP. And the remaining difficulty in working with such a huge model (I think it was eight feet long.) combined with a couple years of refinement of motion control technology meant that it moved like the heavy cruiser that The Enterprise is meant to be.
Contrast that with the CGI Enterprise E from Nemesis. Not only did it not look as good overall, but the way it moved totally destroyed the majesty that should be associated with the name Enterprise. That silly thing was flitting about the screen like something out of Wing Commander. Just totally wrecked the illusion and un-suspended my disbelief. that did.
The actual FTL drive is strictly mechanical, and requires no prescience whatsoever. Travel without a navigator *IS* much slower. But it's still FTL, and there were intestellar civilizations both before the guild's monopoly, and after Leto II made the spice all but impossible to get ahold of (thereby much reducing the abilities of, need for, and power of, the Spacing Guild.
A navigator's prescience makes the journey much safer, faster, and reliable. But it's not *technologically* impossible to trqavel FTL without one.
.... but buy it, even Star Wars doesn't qualify. None of the issues you mention is delt with in SW (Perhaps in the novelizations, but I'm talking on-screen here.) In fact, the entire plot is essentially a copy of Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress"; but set in space instead of medieval Japan.
The force? It's simply a sort of mash-up of the ideas of Chi energy and the code of bushido.
The Death Star? Granted, there's nothing in The Hidden Fortress that can destroy a planet. But the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant to the actual plot. The ramifications are never delt with (As they are to a somewhat greater degree in the Star Wars tech commentaries (I personally like the one about how the destruction of DS#2 all but guaranteed the devestation of Endor and the exterminatio of the Ewoks.). But at the end of the day, the Death Star is simply the fortress from which the princess must be rescued.
The Droids? No issues of robotics are delt with. There's no sence of human workers being displaced my mechanical. There's no discussion of the ethics of the treatment of man-made artificial sentience, as in Asimov's Robots series. R2D2's purpose could just easily be filled by a human hacker/engineer type; and C3P0's by a linguist like Daniel Jackson or Hoshi Sato. The fact that they're robots is irrelevant (especially to their primary role: comic relief).
The clones-troopers/storm-troopers? Generic and expendable foot soldiers. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger delved deeper into the social implications of cloning!
Star Wars may be many things. But by your own criteria, it's NOT SciFi... it's "samurais in space".
> Your average English speaker from 1505 wouldn't even be able to converse with someone.
William Shakespeare was born in 1564. Granted, sixty years after your date. But still within a reasonable part of that era. Shakespearean English sounds weird. hokey, awkward, and very definitely dated. But it's still very much comprehensible. And to keep the 500-year timeframe, I'd bet almost anything that english-speakers will still very much be able to attend and understand the plays of The Bard in 2105. (Not that it wouldn't sound even MORE weird, hokey, awkward, and dated. And definitely not that I'd have an opportunity to collect on that bet.... but still.)
As far back as I can recall, the "dominant gaming platform" has bounced back from consoles to computers and back every few years.
In my first recollection of "gaming", it was *ALL* about the Atari 2600. *EVERYONE* had to have one, and if you talked about games on the *computer*, you were a joke. Then, everyone lost interest in consoles, seemingly overnight, and it was computer games or nothing; as the C64 gained popularity and the Apple ][ series gained a reasonable amount of RAM. Later, the NES, Super NES, and Genesis wrestled the gaming mind-share back to consoles for a while. Then, in the mid-late '90s, and especially as modems became standard equipment; computers came back, and it was all about who had the Voodoo 2, and who was this newcomer Nvidia; and whatever consoles came out were uninspiring "also-rans". Then, in the beginning of this century, the Dreamcast and PS2 re-captured everyone's interest in console gaming; and it's the PC that's the uninspiring "also-ran" of the gaming world.
So, if the pattern holds, it's simply the *TIME* for everyone to forget about consoles, and go back to PC gaming for a while. Nothing to see here, eh?
> it was and is still very popular in Japan, and has a > following around the world.
Ah, but you forget... to a certain kind of person, the US *IS* the entire world. And everything outside its borders is a savage land shrouded in fog and populated by cannibals; which may as well just be marked "Here be Dragons" on the maps.
And since the MiniDisc never really caught in here in the US, it's obviously an abject across-the-world failure.
Slashdot Mirror
cya,
john
> Of course, if that happened now even the bacteria would be *severely* upset about it.
Forget the bacteria. It's the mice that would be absolutely FURIOUS about such a monumental cock-up.
cya,
john
Well... it's POSSIBLE to deliver a bit of comeuppance to police who abuse you... just not through official channels. As with too many things in this country, you have to know the right people in order to get justice.
Some years back, a friend of mine was arrested for a crime he didn't commit. Turns out, he bears a physical resemblance (similar height, build, and hair color/style)to a, at the time, fairly well known drug dealer in the party scene. He was at this party that was getting broken up; the pigs were there looking to arrest the drug dealer; and when they couldn't find him, they decided that my friend (Who, other than working as a bartender for a while, has never sold drugs in his life.) was "close enough for government work" and decided to call it a day by arresting and accusing him instead.
Yeah, he was quickly released. But officially, there was no recourse for him. And oh, but did he try... retaining a fairly good lawyer to try to get at the pigs. But no dice. As you point out, they've weaseled quite a few laws into place to shield themselves from recourse when they decide to abuse the innocent.
But there's a light at the end of the tunnel... if it turns out that you know the right people, that is. After about a couple years' worth of working at it; he was able to raise enough hell via his father's and grandfather's Lodge connections to have the arresting officer fired, and his partner demoted out of the narcotics unit all the way back down to traffic patrol. Not quite the prison time that they deserved for trying to frame an innocent person, but I'm told that the fired pig eventually had to sell his house at a loss and move himself and family out of town to start at the bottom of another police department, and the partner, even though not fired, had his career seriously derailed.
Suffice it to say, during that time, my friend recognized the advantages of having "friends in high places", and took his lodge degrees himself.
cya,
john
No...
Terrorism is an inconsequential threat when you actually bother to run the numbers. And find that you are a FAR more likely killed by an inattentive or incompetent driver while you're crossing the street, (or any number of other mundane things that we have no "war on $x" to justify abusing our rights.) than you are to be killed by "the terrorists".
cya,
john
> illegally holding people all the time - including police men who have nearly had store managers arrested
Do you have any links for those? Not doubting you at all, having had run-ins with rent-a-thugs myself. But I'd just LOVE to read the original articles. I'd laugh my fool head off at them getting that sort of comeuppance.
cya,
john
There's a world of difference between your two scenarios, and the appropriate reaction to them.
An unauthorized, but strictly internal, usage of a private network is a concern, yes. But as long as it's not a malicious usage, and it doesn't have a derogatory impact on the network, servers, or other users' computers; then it's a relatively minor concern. And usually (And especially on an academic network.) there are more important issues to be dealt with.
An unauthorized usage that provides access to, or information about, to an outsider, on the other hand, is a serious security issue. And that *does* need to be dealt with swiftly and harshly.
cya,
john
... is not so much that it's taking *money* away from the RIAA/metallica (that can come later), but that it's taking some degree of *POWER* away from the RIAA/metallica. It used to be that the music cartel held all of the cards, so to speak, and technology companies got boned (See the old-school incarnation of Napster.) But online music and iPods are not going away. And Steve Jobs just wrested that much more CONTROL away from the RIAA/metallica types.
A few years down, Apple is going to represent a larger and more important part of the sales pie. That will give Jobs more leverage than ever against the RIAA. He'll be able to, in effect, say to them: "These songs WILL be sold at $.99, or you will NOT be sold through iTMS." And iTunes will have grown that much more that the threat will stick.
And once Jobs has the power and control wrested from the RIAA/metallica, THEN you start diverting the greater share of the money away from them and into Apple's hands....
cya,
john
For the last few years, my roommates and I, we've had a Superbowl party. None of us really care for football though. What do we do? Use it as an excuse to get together and socialize with friends. And after it's been on long enough, we Tivo through the game, and watch the commercials.
Yes, marketing types, we watch the Superbowl commercials ON PURPOSE!!!
I can't remember who won, or even who played in, the Superbowl for the past several years. But I remember the E-Trade monkey, Terry Tate the office linebacker, the pets.com sock puppet, Autobytel, and those Budwiser frogs. Hell, I know the dialogue to the 1984 Macintosh commercial by heart!
What's the difference? During the Superbowl is about the only time the advertisers put out commercials that DON'T FUCKING SUCK!!! Get that you pinheaded marketing drones?!?!? Make your commercials NOT SUCK... make them entertaining... and I WON'T Tivo past them! No tricks, no stunts, no blipverts, no need to try and rig broadcasts so I CAN'T fast-forward; and don't accuse me of being a thief for getting up to go to the bathroom; just stop making your commercials suck ass!
cya,
john
Nice job mindlessly reciting the racist caricature put forth by the military propagandists. You duckspeak doubleplusgood.
Now let me ask: How many real-life Japanese people do you actually know? I bet the answer is: "none". I, on the other hand, know quite a few, tourists and exchange students I've met, and immigrants and their descendants I've gotten to know long-term. (Admittedly, I may have an unfair advantage. I live in San Francisco now, and used to live in Honolulu.) And they are among the nicest, most decent, generous and intelligent people I've known. And they are nothing like the stereotype that people like you try to present.
In summary, kindly FOAD plz. K thx.
cya,
john
Seriously...
I'd pretty much concluded long ago that the ideal outcome for microsoft would be for Mt. Rainier to have a truly awesome eruption, and for its lahars to bury all of microsoft under a 200-ft high wall of mud.
cya,
john
> I'd love to see Google win this, but P10 does have a point (even if they are only making it
> because they want a piece of Google's pie) - should store owners have to place signs saying
> "no stealing" at their door, or expect to give theives free rein on their stuff?
No, they don't have a point. Google doesn't take anything from anybody. The more apt analogy would be if you want your phone & address listing left out of the white pages and 411; in which case you most definitely *DO* have to actively make it known that you want your information to be unlisted. In fact, the last time I checked (It's been a while, admittedly.) the phone company actually makes you *PAY* for the "privilege" of being unlisted. All this is, is a blatant fishing expedition, wrongfully targeting a company with deep pockets, nothing more.
cya,
john
Jesus Christ is a recurring character on South Park... where he is frequently the object of various forms of ridicule and scorn. Now, I'm sure that, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, there are at least a few 'thumpers with a bullet set aside for Matt and Trey, should the opportunity ever present itself. But where are the South-Park-inspired riots and arson of US embassies in the christian nations of the world?
In the episode: "Jewbilee", Moses was portrayed as the evil MCP from Tron. I don't seem to recall any news of the US embassy in Israel burning when that episode aired. (And let's not even get into the things Cartman says and does about jews.)
Don't think, for a second, that I'm a fan of either xtianity or judaism. I think the world would be much better off without all three Abrahamic religions, actually. But in the topic on hand, it's kind of hard to ignore the very dissimilar outputs, given such very similar inputs.
cya,
john
Well, the clumsy oaf poured it into her lap while she was wearing sweatpants which, (duh) held the coffee against her shin for longer than if you just splash some on yourself and wipe it right off.
That doesn't change the fact that the coffee *WAS*, in fact, being served at the proper temperature. Read any book or website aimed at the serious coffee connoisseur. The water for brewing coffee should be just off the boil... about 205 degrees. When it's done brewing, it should be about 185; and served immediately. It's a drink that's meant to be SIPPED, not gulped. Hell, even the much-maligned chains like Starbucks and Petes gets that right.
(Not that anyone who was seriously into coffee would drink that swill they serve at mcdonalds, bet that's entirely beside the point.)
Fact is, the coffee was served at the proper temperature. Fact is, the stupid wench poured it onto her own damn self. She didn't deserve one damn cent; not from mcdonalds, not from anyone else.
cya,
john
> Wrong dumbfuck. PETA on bees:
> PETA on silkworms, and spiders(probably the least cute insect imagineable):
If you're going to go around someone a "dumbfuck", you probably ought not to make such a grade-school mistake as conflating spiders with insects.
cya,
john
> At Disney, Jobs will be just another person at the boardroom table.
> Will he be a first among equals? Definitely! Will he be able to call all
> of the shots? No.
People said all these exact same things about Jobs back when Apple bought NeXT. In fact, the amount of Apple stock Jobs owned was a pittance compared to the amount of Disney stock he would own, should this deal go through. And he didn't even own that Apple stock for very long. He flipped it for cash not long after joining returning to Apple in that cute little "advisory capacity".
> And in that fact, that he won't be able to call all the shots, is the truth that
> Jobs would not likely stay long on the board. Jobs is one who has to control
> things completely. If he can't, then he will walk away.
Once again, everyone was saying the exact same thing about Apple and NeXT. And when the board meeting was over? Jobs walked away all right. He walked away with amelio's head under his arm and the board members' resignations in his pocket.
The ability to run a theme park is insignificant next to the power of the RDF.
cya,
john
.... "when you get right down to it", if the human body *is* designed, it most definitely was NOT *intelliently* designed. I could could toss a list longer than your arm of design flaws that *I* would correct, if I were the one given the job of designing "Human Body" version 2.0.
cya,
john
> your assertion of "mini-plagarisms" is pretty funny. How long do you think it takes to storyboard,
> draw, ink, voice, edit, and master one of these shows? Are you insinuating that they have spies
> in the Simpsons' production unit or something?
Long ass time ago, I read an interview with Matt or Trey or both, of South Park. They mentioned that, on several occasions they knocked shows together in a half-assed manner, and at the last minute. I forget the exact amount of time they cited for each episode, but it was *FAR* short of the oft-cited "six months to a year" figure you hear thrown around about The Simpsons.
But a little research can give a clue. "Osama Bin Laden has Farty Pants" was first aired on November 7, 2001... about seven weeks after 9/11. So there we have a lower limit, at least. The difference is, Comedy Central is happy to be timely with their episodes, where fox likes to have everything wrapped up and to sit on them and plan out a schedule months in advance.
So, with a much bigger budget, and on a network with more resources, than South Park, do you really think that if the Family Guy people *REALLY* wanted to copy something, they couldn't likewise knock it out on the rush?
cya,
john
> I gleefully picked up Civ4, only to my dismay--- it was unstable, hoggish, and
> not that much more improved over Civ3...
Hell.... the only reason I upped to Civ 3 in the first place is that I moved, and some of my game CD, including Civ 2, got misplaced and are probably sitting buried in a box in storage somewhere.
I'd have eventually upgraded anyway, just because it's become annoying to have to start Classic, when there's a native OS X version out there. But, other than that, and your worker units finally being smart enough to seek refuge in a friendly city wnen an enemy unit approaches, Civ 3 didn't offer any major improvements over number two.
cya,
john
Actually, the first season of SeaQuest was quite good. It was the changes made for second season that reduced it to utter crap. The third was better than the second, but by then it was too late.
cya,
john
I couldn't agree more. But I'd use a different example.
The movie-era model of the Enterprise.... no bloody A, B, D, or D... is about the most fantastically beautiful model of a spacecraft I've ever seen; easily looking better than anything I can think of before or since. You could tell, from occasional clumsiness, in TMP that motion control camera technology wasn't *quite* there, but by TWOK, it was perfect and convincing. I mean... that was a starSHIP. And the remaining difficulty in working with such a huge model (I think it was eight feet long.) combined with a couple years of refinement of motion control technology meant that it moved like the heavy cruiser that The Enterprise is meant to be.
Contrast that with the CGI Enterprise E from Nemesis. Not only did it not look as good overall, but the way it moved totally destroyed the majesty that should be associated with the name Enterprise. That silly thing was flitting about the screen like something out of Wing Commander. Just totally wrecked the illusion and un-suspended my disbelief. that did.
cya,
john
Guild navigators do exactly that: navigate.
The actual FTL drive is strictly mechanical, and requires no prescience whatsoever. Travel without a navigator *IS* much slower. But it's still FTL, and there were intestellar civilizations both before the guild's monopoly, and after Leto II made the spice all but impossible to get ahold of (thereby much reducing the abilities of, need for, and power of, the Spacing Guild.
A navigator's prescience makes the journey much safer, faster, and reliable. But it's not *technologically* impossible to trqavel FTL without one.
cya,
john
The force? It's simply a sort of mash-up of the ideas of Chi energy and the code of bushido.
The Death Star? Granted, there's nothing in The Hidden Fortress that can destroy a planet. But the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant to the actual plot. The ramifications are never delt with (As they are to a somewhat greater degree in the Star Wars tech commentaries (I personally like the one about how the destruction of DS#2 all but guaranteed the devestation of Endor and the exterminatio of the Ewoks.). But at the end of the day, the Death Star is simply the fortress from which the princess must be rescued.
The Droids? No issues of robotics are delt with. There's no sence of human workers being displaced my mechanical. There's no discussion of the ethics of the treatment of man-made artificial sentience, as in Asimov's Robots series. R2D2's purpose could just easily be filled by a human hacker/engineer type; and C3P0's by a linguist like Daniel Jackson or Hoshi Sato. The fact that they're robots is irrelevant (especially to their primary role: comic relief).
The clones-troopers/storm-troopers? Generic and expendable foot soldiers. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger delved deeper into the social implications of cloning!
Star Wars may be many things. But by your own criteria, it's NOT SciFi... it's "samurais in space".
cya,
john
> Your average English speaker from 1505 wouldn't even be able to converse with someone.
William Shakespeare was born in 1564. Granted, sixty years after your date. But still within a reasonable part of that era. Shakespearean English sounds weird. hokey, awkward, and very definitely dated. But it's still very much comprehensible. And to keep the 500-year timeframe, I'd bet almost anything that english-speakers will still very much be able to attend and understand the plays of The Bard in 2105. (Not that it wouldn't sound even MORE weird, hokey, awkward, and dated. And definitely not that I'd have an opportunity to collect on that bet.... but still.)
cya,
john
As far back as I can recall, the "dominant gaming platform" has bounced back from consoles to computers and back every few years.
In my first recollection of "gaming", it was *ALL* about the Atari 2600. *EVERYONE* had to have one, and if you talked about games on the *computer*, you were a joke. Then, everyone lost interest in consoles, seemingly overnight, and it was computer games or nothing; as the C64 gained popularity and the Apple ][ series gained a reasonable amount of RAM. Later, the NES, Super NES, and Genesis wrestled the gaming mind-share back to consoles for a while. Then, in the mid-late '90s, and especially as modems became standard equipment; computers came back, and it was all about who had the Voodoo 2, and who was this newcomer Nvidia; and whatever consoles came out were uninspiring "also-rans". Then, in the beginning of this century, the Dreamcast and PS2 re-captured everyone's interest in console gaming; and it's the PC that's the uninspiring "also-ran" of the gaming world.
So, if the pattern holds, it's simply the *TIME* for everyone to forget about consoles, and go back to PC gaming for a while. Nothing to see here, eh?
cya,
john
> it was and is still very popular in Japan, and has a
> following around the world.
Ah, but you forget... to a certain kind of person, the US *IS* the entire world. And everything outside its borders is a savage land shrouded in fog and populated by cannibals; which may as well just be marked "Here be Dragons" on the maps.
And since the MiniDisc never really caught in here in the US, it's obviously an abject across-the-world failure.
cya,
john