I thought that my comment about the details of the successful "formula" for Star Wars and Matrix was simply an addition to the "Formula" Theme.
I generously doubt you are stupid enough to believe that. But I do, however, think you hoped there were enough stupid moderators out that you could cut & paste a blurb from an unrelated overanalysis of a nerd issue, change a few words to create an illusion of relevance, and score 2-3 easy "Insightful" points. Maybe trying to follow an "Excellent Karma in 21 Days" booklet? Lucky for us, only 1 AC seems to have swallowed the bait.
Star Wars no more has a "formula" than Godzilla or Rocky. If the definition of "formula" was stretched far enough to apply for your "Hero's Journey" example, then every other piece of fiction could be classified as formulaic too. When a word's definition is abused so it can apply anywhere, it has lost so much focus it's no longer interesting to discuss.
Furthermore, it is quite incorrect to claim (as Lucas and PBS story does) that SW and Matrix were based on Campbell. Rather, all 3 were based on the same nearly-universal ideas. (Note that Lucas ret-conned his Campbell basis after the screenplay was written)
I think your comment is overly critical
I think your comment is overly plagiarist. If you want to advocate or even commit copyright infringement here, fine... but at least use honest labelling when pasting words that aren't yours.
Indeed, the only way I can justify that statement is to say that Good/Evil deals with perception, while Right/Wrong is about reality. An attempted good deed is actually wrong if honest mistakes bring it to a bad outcome.
Wrongness can come from either evil or incompetence.
What's "good" about creating a spirit which will lead a person into doing wrong things to another person?
That's an interesting question, but separate from the topic of "Good!=Right". Because it relates to a supposedly omniscient/omnipotent being, there can be no question of incompetence or inadvertent results, so in that context, "Good" is exactly equal to "Right".
Just as I'm interested in seeing more "noneuclidean" geometry - which is like saying "more nontriangle shapes".
No, "noneuclidean" certainly doesn't mean "nontriangular". Circles and duodecahedrons, for example, are perfectly euclidean. And, noneuclidean triangles exist as a hypothetical math concept, although they are substantially different from triangles as we know them, since the sum of the 3 angles wouldn't equal 360 degrees.
To "see a noneuclidean shape" is the kind of thing that sends Lovecraft's protagonists to Arkham Asylum... it's something that's just not possible in our known physical reality.
With interactivity and the personal intimacy of individual interaction, games are probably the better medium for representing complex morality stories.
Um, no. Games are the worse (or worst?) medium for stories of any type. When has chess, football, poker, or paintball ever told at story?
At best, a game can prehaps enable a player to create their own story... although even that's a stretch. But games can hardly represent a story at all... to the extent that existing games do so, it is by hybridizing with literature or cinema. But in those cases, the game itself is more like an obstacle that drags out the time before the next cutscene comes in to progress the story.
PS. Do you know how nethack inserted Moorcock's Stormbringer into the game? Holding that sword disables the usual confirmation dialog before you enter combat.
If your contention were correct, Idi Amin would have lead Uganda to world domination while Margaret Thatcher tumbled the UK.
No. That only follows if you make other assumptions she didn't mention. In particular, you are acting as if a dictatorship is incompatible with capitalism, when in fact dictatorial capitalism was the style that drove the rapid 1930s growth of Italy, Germany, and Japan.
And doesn't hindsight (The Gipper v. Gorby) show whom to choose in a battle for military might?
No, it doesn't. For comparison, if I beat-up Muhammed Ali, it won't prove that karate is better than boxing... only that he's old and senile.
Going back to the Communist Revolution of 1917, Russia was already at a major disadvantage. Even if they'd had a democratic/capitalist revolution instead, they still couldn't have equalled the USA's military in 1989.
I wish there were a checkbox to mod that Off-Topic with double or triple points. Although "Dead Horse" or "Insipidly Swallowing Inevitable Pretension" would be helpful too.
That's where humor comes from. Primoridally, laughter is a means to defuse a tense situation and signal that things are really still alright.
Fall off a ladder- maybe break his neck? Nope, laughing signals it was OK. Viciously insult someone you didn't know was listening? Laughter shows it wasn't meant to be deadly serious.
Humor is about observing bad situations, and then being relieved that they're either not really bad, or at least not about us. Some people can't laugh at a truck rolling off a bridge... maybe you can't laugh at a worker painfully unable to acknowledge the real meaning of what his boss just said.
However, the other three sitcoms I watch, Family Guy, American Dad & South Park,
Those are cartoons, not sitcoms. What "situational comedy" means is that for cost reasons, they must use the same handful of sets and acting team for all shows. The situation is always the same. Those cartoons are comedy, but not sitcoms, as the animators are free to bring in new settings and characters for every show.
Malcom is also not quite in the sitcom tradition, because it uses 4-walled sets (giving a higher production cost)
I use "class" to mean "economic class", which is the normal interpretation today, although countries older than the USA sometimes consider economic and social class to be partly distinct.
more class-ridden society than modern Britain,
Britain still has strong vestiges in the House of Lords and of course the Queen, but those are more like strong cultural memories than facts of daily life. In practical terms, their policies have slowed the creation of mega-rich, and the oceanic barrier has prevented the influx of unauthorized immigrants which make up the USA's poorest class.
there is almost no representation of this in the shows we see over here.
In the USA, race correlates highly with class, and it is more visually obvious, so it is often what gets discussed first (if the author desires to make social commentary). Easier to simply hire a dark-skinned actor than to write & direct a script providing subtle non-vocal cues of economic background.
For example, many UK shows include as characters both an upper-class family and the servants of the household. The USA stereotype is that the servants must always, always be Mexican immigrants. So you have race and class in one.
Additionally, Britain is a denser country, so multiple classes are more frequently squeezed together (especially if you factor in the tradition of butler service).
Is class a taboo subject in America?
If you're really interested in reading some class anecdotes from the USA, nytimes.com has a series of twelve articles on the subject under the title "Class Matters".
Fred or Daphnie unmask Creature who turns out to be a minor character we met at the beginning of the episode.
You must be thinking of the old Scooby-Doo from around 1970. In the 2000s revival, the "unmasking" elements were removed... now the creatures are real ghosts/dinosaurs/aliens.
This change displeased prominent skeptics in the mold of "Amazing Randi", because it elminated what they saw as a minor educational value... training children not to believe in monsters or superstition.
At least a few "Bugs Bunny w/fanged Japanese monster" ones exist.
Bug's antagonists were always portrayed negatively. The shows involving African, "Indian", and Axis opponents have been hidden away, but you can still watch him face off against an ultra-violent redneck (Sam) or a clueless, obese ouppie (Fudd).
Apparently, "white" stereotypes are still allowed...
We might as well talk about the science of Lord of the Rings, otherwise, which is perhaps a better analogy than the ones I initially proposed.
No. LOTR is obviously non-scientific, while Sex and the City involves only realistic modern science. Neither of them can be confused with science. But both Star Trek and Star Wars attempt a veneer of futuristic plausibility, which might trick the credulous into supposing some fantasy technologies are reasonable.
It is therefore valuable to scientifically question the props from those films, because doing so will slightly improve the public's science-knowledge.
For one particular example of how Sci-Fi movies have steered the public wrong, look at NASA's budget. The preponderance of real scientists agree that, at our stage of technology, manned spaceflight is usually a wasted investment that would've been better spent on unpiloted probes or ground-based research. But as they say, "No bucks without Buck Rogers". The voters and taxpayers want to see flying astronauts, so money goes to STS and ISS.
It's been published that Star Wars battles were modelled on WWII films, which is just one conclusive demonstration of how anti-futuristic they really are. Our space program should be based on R2-D2 instead of Luke Skywalker.
5. I don't think Hoth is right in the asteroid field.
Those thousands of spinning rocks nearby Hoth were unlike any known asteroid field. Rocks bumping off each other several times a minute just wouldn't work out, in terms of scaling. If you were standing on any of the rocks in the Solar system's real asteroid field, no other asteroid would look any bigger than a star or planet.
Stones as close together as portrayed in the movies will gravitationally settle down into a single mass within a few years. The only plausible explanation for their presence is that a bigger object was recently exploded nearby, and the chunks are still settling. That is where the Episode IV asteroids came from, and maybe the Ep V ones had a similar creation.
Pivoting at 3000 miles per hour wouldnt be anymore stressful than pivoting standing still.
Only if you assume there is no gas. If there was a semi-massive medium of any sort, pivoting would probably change to a less streamlined profile, and rip the wings off.
Actuall turning and evasive type maneuvers would put LOADS of stress on the pilot as he maintains the vector and velocity he is currently travelling at,
Completely wrong. The manuver itself will create some stress, maybe even "LOADS"... but whether or not he was already moving fast when it began is completely irrelevant. In a drag-free vacuum, 0 to 120 is exactly as tough as 120 to 240 or 300 to 180.
It's a good thing his "starting velocity" is unimportant to the risk of a manuver- because for the pilot, it's hard to tell if you even HAVE a current velocity at all.
If one was in a starfighter that used its engines to accelerate to even a fraction of "c" then executed a hard evasive maneuver, the pilot would likely become chunky salsa in short order
In a low-gravity, nearly-vacuum context: From the perspective of both the pilot and the enemy he is evading, the evasive manuver is equally hard whether he is travelling at 0c or.9c. In fact, the pilot can't even tell how fast he's moving, or even if he's moving at all. Only if he pauses to doppler-measure a radio-beacon, or has kept an accurate log of his past accelerations, can he have any idea what his "real speed" is.
For practical purposes, there is no "real speed". A pilot deciding to evade will look only at the relative closing speed of the pursuer, and not worry about some theoretical "absolute speed" at all.
No, sci-fi, like all fiction, is ultimately about humanity.
That's one of the most hilariously wrong single sentences I've seen in a long, long time. Sci-fi, by definition, is almost the ONLY kind of fiction that may NOT be about humanity.
Unless, of course, you don't even know what "humanity" means...
AC: of, relating to, or being a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities
AC: That sounds suspiciously like a mechanical mouse or a joystick.
No. Absolutely wrong. Can't you even read the definition you people keep on pasting? "Data represented by continuously variable physical quantities" is not how a modern DIGITAL mouse works. If the voltage level on the wire were proportional to mouse movement, that would be analog. But instead, the wires send out bursts of bits at a fixed rate which can be decoded as discrete units and combined arithmatically to become DIGITS of a number.
Simply because I led you to consult a dictionary which showed that you were wrong? Fair enough, I suppose.
(In case you can't tell, the definition you pasted shows that a mouse is digital, but not analog. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual analog computer... it was probably under the hood of a car)
Also, being able to turn at a constant rate by holding a key let me predict when to fire. You can't make those kinds of predictions on a wildly analog input like a mouse.
If you can't move a mouse across a desk at a constant speed... then your losses at an FPS should come as no suprise, although you may still be eligible for a Special Olympics (tm) Good-Job gold medal.
Next-gen FPS games introduced the Hyper-Ludicrous Turning Speed(TM)
If your opponents in the original Doom didn't have Ludicrous turn rates, then you were taking advantage of newbies with no clue how to configure a mouse.
Typically, when a keyboard Doom player first met a mouse-user, he'd be slaughtered and then angrily stomp across the PC lab to accuse someone of cheating with an "instant 180 turn" button.
I used "digital" and "analog" as synonyms for "discrete" and "continuous."
Yes, that's what you did. And since they're not actually synonyms, that makes it wrong.
I said that Emacs [by virtue of being almost always in insert mode] makes you escape each and every one of the more common navigation operations [using control- meta- or esc- multi-key contortions].
Yes, that's what you said. And since it isn't true, I corrected it. Go into emacs and press a "common navigation key" like PageUp or simply DownArrow. It works without needing an "escape".
(a) I do not agree that Emacs is modeless
Because almost any variable can be intrepreted as a "mode" from some perspective, pure "modelessness" is virtually impossible in real software. Nonetheless, emacs sits in the same "usually modeless" category as mainstream programs like Photoshop and Firefox. (In practice, "usually modeless" really means "one mode is tremendously more important than all the others").
But, next to vi, emacs and the like are virtually modeless by comparison. A new user of vi will need the modes explained to her within a few seconds of sitting down at the program- right after she first types "ck brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
AC: Have you ever tried playing an FPS on a Tablet PC? Difficult stuff.
No. Touchscreen for desktop PC, though.
AC: It doesn't recognize the absolute input from the stylus and so the screen just goes nuts whenever you try to aim.
That is a specific problem of software compatibility. Once fixed (such as by adjusting the pseudo-mouse driver to emulate absolute inputs for a given screen size), you can effortlessly score as many FPS headshots as you desire.
However, as has been pointed out, an aimbot will be even more accurate with even less effort.
Mice are great for analog input, and not so great for digital.
Using the wrong words there... a common mistake, one I make myself. In reality, both the mouse and keyboard are digital of course, but the keyboard is discrete and the mouse is continuous. (And to be more pedantic, it's only "effectively continuous"
Certainly not Emacs, which makes you escape the ordinary thing you do (navigating) in order to facilitate something you do less often (inserting stuff at a new place).
You are using the word "Emacs" but describing the behavior of "vi". That isn't a common mistake at all, and demonstrating an ignorance of BOTH emacs and vi means everyone will be against you in the great war.
One of the critical design choices that separates vi from emacs is that vi is a more "modal" program, where sometimes a "j" means "down" and other times it means just "the letter j". But in emacs, "j" almost always means "insert a j character in the active buffer". HCI dogma holds that heavily modal software is inherently harder to learn.
Counter-strike and similar games typically need three control directions.. pitch, yaw, and movement.
Technically, that "movement" element has two sub-components, either XY or (optimally) angle+speed.
Doing this with a keyboard is near impossible, so we add two dimensions with a mouse.
That's not the reason at all. Each hand on a keyboard OR mouse can easily give inputs in two axes. Typical modern games have the left hand use both A/D for the X axis and W/S for Y axis. It's just as easy to put two more axes under the right hand on the keyboard (probably on numpad pairs of 8/2 and 4/6). That's the same number of axes a mouse provides.
So no, counting axes of input dimensions isn't the explanation at all. The thing is that analog inputs are better than binary. (Also, absolute inputs are better than relative, which is why a touchscreen FPS player can beat a mouse user almost as well as a mouser can defeat someone with a keyboard)
The Falcon actually landed on the inside of a worm-like creature dwelling inside the asteroid. It's quite possible that its interior was pressurized.
Han Solo didn't know it was a worm until later. He thought it was just a barren asteroid with a hole in it, and yet he walked right outside as if he expected atmospheric pressure to be there (the moisture content, however, was odd enough to be noticed) Plus, the worm didn't close it's mouth until the ship was zooming away, so there was no barrier to prevent any internal gases from escaping into space.
(Furthermore, Star Wars biology is typified by large creatures residing in habitats that cannot possibly feed them. That worm is the most blatant example)
In reality, it isn't a "gaseous medium" that imposes the maximum velocity,
The key phrase you can search for in any physics book is "terminal velocity". It is the max speed of an object determined by when the air resistance and ongoing acceleration cancel each other out. Terminal velocity works the same way for a rock falling from a tower as it does for a rocket thrusting through the sky.
In a vacuum, there is no air resistance to counteract the acceleration, so the speed limit comes from fuel limits (which will eventually stop the accelerating) or speed-of-light. (And, other scenes in Star Wars have demostrated that speed-of-light is not insurmountable to them either)
They might be vegeterians and never had a need for hunting anyway.
Vegetarian animals get in fights with each other ALL the time. Look at gerbils, deer, gorillas, whatever. The males smash each other around for the females (who are not always above fighting off an intrusive smaller female either).
Plus, all large vegetarians have behaviors to preemptively attack some classes of predators- even if it's not enough to kill them in self-defense, it can scare them away to eat something else.
So, they might arrive at planet earth and not have as much as a sling shot.
In the real world without the kind of magical FTL "warp speed" popular in scifi, the ability to travel to a distant planet implies the ability to destroy it.
Wrong. The space between stars in Star Wars is not a vacuum. There is evidently some background gas suffusing all of it, although probably not breathable.
Evidence: 1. Vehicles are audible even far from a planet's surface.
2. When the Falcon landed in a "cave" inside a smallish asteroid (1 km radius), Han Solo got out and wandered around without a pressurized space-suit.
3. Small fighter-ships in space combat manuver as if they were airplanes, slicing through a medium which imposes a maximum speed to their movement, rather than being able to accelerate indefinately (until stopped by lightspeed or fuel exhaustion).
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that my comment about the details of the successful "formula" for Star Wars and Matrix was simply an addition to the "Formula" Theme.
I generously doubt you are stupid enough to believe that. But I do, however, think you hoped there were enough stupid moderators out that you could cut & paste a blurb from an unrelated overanalysis of a nerd issue, change a few words to create an illusion of relevance, and score 2-3 easy "Insightful" points. Maybe trying to follow an "Excellent Karma in 21 Days" booklet? Lucky for us, only 1 AC seems to have swallowed the bait.
Star Wars no more has a "formula" than Godzilla or Rocky. If the definition of "formula" was stretched far enough to apply for your "Hero's Journey" example, then every other piece of fiction could be classified as formulaic too. When a word's definition is abused so it can apply anywhere, it has lost so much focus it's no longer interesting to discuss.
Furthermore, it is quite incorrect to claim (as Lucas and PBS story does) that SW and Matrix were based on Campbell. Rather, all 3 were based on the same nearly-universal ideas. (Note that Lucas ret-conned his Campbell basis after the screenplay was written)
I think your comment is overly critical
I think your comment is overly plagiarist. If you want to advocate or even commit copyright infringement here, fine... but at least use honest labelling when pasting words that aren't yours.
The anti-theism argument is always a fun one to watch, although you can't carry it nearly as well as in OCG's epic threads.
But I'm willing to try.
You're not trying to answer the one little thing she asked. That whole biblical self-contradiction thread, while amusing, is just irrelevant to Planesdragon's simple question. You made the counter-intuitive statement that "Good/Evil" != "Right/Wrong", which many people would dispute just as a matter of semantic definitions, regardless of their personal regliosity.
Indeed, the only way I can justify that statement is to say that Good/Evil deals with perception, while Right/Wrong is about reality. An attempted good deed is actually wrong if honest mistakes bring it to a bad outcome.
Wrongness can come from either evil or incompetence.
What's "good" about creating a spirit which will lead a person into doing wrong things to another person?
That's an interesting question, but separate from the topic of "Good!=Right". Because it relates to a supposedly omniscient/omnipotent being, there can be no question of incompetence or inadvertent results, so in that context, "Good" is exactly equal to "Right".
Just as I'm interested in seeing more "noneuclidean" geometry - which is like saying "more nontriangle shapes".
No, "noneuclidean" certainly doesn't mean "nontriangular". Circles and duodecahedrons, for example, are perfectly euclidean. And, noneuclidean triangles exist as a hypothetical math concept, although they are substantially different from triangles as we know them, since the sum of the 3 angles wouldn't equal 360 degrees.
To "see a noneuclidean shape" is the kind of thing that sends Lovecraft's protagonists to Arkham Asylum... it's something that's just not possible in our known physical reality.
With interactivity and the personal intimacy of individual interaction, games are probably the better medium for representing complex morality stories.
Um, no. Games are the worse (or worst?) medium for stories of any type. When has chess, football, poker, or paintball ever told at story?
At best, a game can prehaps enable a player to create their own story... although even that's a stretch. But games can hardly represent a story at all... to the extent that existing games do so, it is by hybridizing with literature or cinema. But in those cases, the game itself is more like an obstacle that drags out the time before the next cutscene comes in to progress the story.
PS. Do you know how nethack inserted Moorcock's Stormbringer into the game? Holding that sword disables the usual confirmation dialog before you enter combat.
No. That only follows if you make other assumptions she didn't mention. In particular, you are acting as if a dictatorship is incompatible with capitalism, when in fact dictatorial capitalism was the style that drove the rapid 1930s growth of Italy, Germany, and Japan.
And doesn't hindsight (The Gipper v. Gorby) show whom to choose in a battle for military might?
No, it doesn't. For comparison, if I beat-up Muhammed Ali, it won't prove that karate is better than boxing... only that he's old and senile.
Going back to the Communist Revolution of 1917, Russia was already at a major disadvantage. Even if they'd had a democratic/capitalist revolution instead, they still couldn't have equalled the USA's military in 1989.
Look at everything that was stacked against them:
I wish there were a checkbox to mod that Off-Topic with double or triple points. Although "Dead Horse" or "Insipidly Swallowing Inevitable Pretension" would be helpful too.
squirmingly excruciating.
That's where humor comes from. Primoridally, laughter is a means to defuse a tense situation and signal that things are really still alright.
Fall off a ladder- maybe break his neck? Nope, laughing signals it was OK.
Viciously insult someone you didn't know was listening? Laughter shows it wasn't meant to be deadly serious.
Humor is about observing bad situations, and then being relieved that they're either not really bad, or at least not about us. Some people can't laugh at a truck rolling off a bridge... maybe you can't laugh at a worker painfully unable to acknowledge the real meaning of what his boss just said.
However, the other three sitcoms I watch, Family Guy, American Dad & South Park,
Those are cartoons, not sitcoms. What "situational comedy" means is that for cost reasons, they must use the same handful of sets and acting team for all shows. The situation is always the same. Those cartoons are comedy, but not sitcoms, as the animators are free to bring in new settings and characters for every show.
Malcom is also not quite in the sitcom tradition, because it uses 4-walled sets (giving a higher production cost)
Not all comedies are sitcoms.
I use "class" to mean "economic class", which is the normal interpretation today, although countries older than the USA sometimes consider economic and social class to be partly distinct.
more class-ridden society than modern Britain,
Britain still has strong vestiges in the House of Lords and of course the Queen, but those are more like strong cultural memories than facts of daily life. In practical terms, their policies have slowed the creation of mega-rich, and the oceanic barrier has prevented the influx of unauthorized immigrants which make up the USA's poorest class.
there is almost no representation of this in the shows we see over here.
In the USA, race correlates highly with class, and it is more visually obvious, so it is often what gets discussed first (if the author desires to make social commentary). Easier to simply hire a dark-skinned actor than to write & direct a script providing subtle non-vocal cues of economic background.
For example, many UK shows include as characters both an upper-class family and the servants of the household. The USA stereotype is that the servants must always, always be Mexican immigrants. So you have race and class in one.
Additionally, Britain is a denser country, so multiple classes are more frequently squeezed together (especially if you factor in the tradition of butler service).
Is class a taboo subject in America?
If you're really interested in reading some class anecdotes from the USA, nytimes.com has a series of twelve articles on the subject under the title "Class Matters".
Fred or Daphnie unmask Creature who turns out to be a minor character we met at the beginning of the episode.
You must be thinking of the old Scooby-Doo from around 1970. In the 2000s revival, the "unmasking" elements were removed... now the creatures are real ghosts/dinosaurs/aliens.
This change displeased prominent skeptics in the mold of "Amazing Randi", because it elminated what they saw as a minor educational value... training children not to believe in monsters or superstition.
At least a few "Bugs Bunny w/fanged Japanese monster" ones exist.
Bug's antagonists were always portrayed negatively. The shows involving African, "Indian", and Axis opponents have been hidden away, but you can still watch him face off against an ultra-violent redneck (Sam) or a clueless, obese ouppie (Fudd).
Apparently, "white" stereotypes are still allowed...
We might as well talk about the science of Lord of the Rings, otherwise, which is perhaps a better analogy than the ones I initially proposed.
No. LOTR is obviously non-scientific, while Sex and the City involves only realistic modern science. Neither of them can be confused with science. But both Star Trek and Star Wars attempt a veneer of futuristic plausibility, which might trick the credulous into supposing some fantasy technologies are reasonable.
It is therefore valuable to scientifically question the props from those films, because doing so will slightly improve the public's science-knowledge.
For one particular example of how Sci-Fi movies have steered the public wrong, look at NASA's budget. The preponderance of real scientists agree that, at our stage of technology, manned spaceflight is usually a wasted investment that would've been better spent on unpiloted probes or ground-based research. But as they say, "No bucks without Buck Rogers". The voters and taxpayers want to see flying astronauts, so money goes to STS and ISS.
It's been published that Star Wars battles were modelled on WWII films, which is just one conclusive demonstration of how anti-futuristic they really are. Our space program should be based on R2-D2 instead of Luke Skywalker.
5. I don't think Hoth is right in the asteroid field.
Those thousands of spinning rocks nearby Hoth were unlike any known asteroid field. Rocks bumping off each other several times a minute just wouldn't work out, in terms of scaling. If you were standing on any of the rocks in the Solar system's real asteroid field, no other asteroid would look any bigger than a star or planet.
Stones as close together as portrayed in the movies will gravitationally settle down into a single mass within a few years. The only plausible explanation for their presence is that a bigger object was recently exploded nearby, and the chunks are still settling. That is where the Episode IV asteroids came from, and maybe the Ep V ones had a similar creation.
Pivoting at 3000 miles per hour wouldnt be anymore stressful than pivoting standing still.
.9c. In fact, the pilot can't even tell how fast he's moving, or even if he's moving at all. Only if he pauses to doppler-measure a radio-beacon, or has kept an accurate log of his past accelerations, can he have any idea what his "real speed" is.
Only if you assume there is no gas. If there was a semi-massive medium of any sort, pivoting would probably change to a less streamlined profile, and rip the wings off.
Actuall turning and evasive type maneuvers would put LOADS of stress on the pilot as he maintains the vector and velocity he is currently travelling at,
Completely wrong. The manuver itself will create some stress, maybe even "LOADS"... but whether or not he was already moving fast when it began is completely irrelevant. In a drag-free vacuum, 0 to 120 is exactly as tough as 120 to 240 or 300 to 180.
It's a good thing his "starting velocity" is unimportant to the risk of a manuver- because for the pilot, it's hard to tell if you even HAVE a current velocity at all.
If one was in a starfighter that used its engines to accelerate to even a fraction of "c" then executed a hard evasive maneuver, the pilot would likely become chunky salsa in short order
In a low-gravity, nearly-vacuum context:
From the perspective of both the pilot and the enemy he is evading, the evasive manuver is equally hard whether he is travelling at 0c or
For practical purposes, there is no "real speed". A pilot deciding to evade will look only at the relative closing speed of the pursuer, and not worry about some theoretical "absolute speed" at all.
No, sci-fi, like all fiction, is ultimately about humanity.
That's one of the most hilariously wrong single sentences I've seen in a long, long time. Sci-fi, by definition, is almost the ONLY kind of fiction that may NOT be about humanity.
Unless, of course, you don't even know what "humanity" means...
Personally I think the laws are fine as they stand. Fifty years is a good number.
Well, which is it? Do you like the existing laws, or would you prefer 50 years?
Because, in case you didn't know, today's copyright lasts closer to 150 years than to 50.
AC: of, relating to, or being a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities
AC: That sounds suspiciously like a mechanical mouse or a joystick.
No. Absolutely wrong. Can't you even read the definition you people keep on pasting? "Data represented by continuously variable physical quantities" is not how a modern DIGITAL mouse works. If the voltage level on the wire were proportional to mouse movement, that would be analog. But instead, the wires send out bursts of bits at a fixed rate which can be decoded as discrete units and combined arithmatically to become DIGITS of a number.
I decline to correspond with you further.
Simply because I led you to consult a dictionary which showed that you were wrong? Fair enough, I suppose.
(In case you can't tell, the definition you pasted shows that a mouse is digital, but not analog. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual analog computer... it was probably under the hood of a car)
Also, being able to turn at a constant rate by holding a key let me predict when to fire. You can't make those kinds of predictions on a wildly analog input like a mouse.
If you can't move a mouse across a desk at a constant speed... then your losses at an FPS should come as no suprise, although you may still be eligible for a Special Olympics (tm) Good-Job gold medal.
Next-gen FPS games introduced the Hyper-Ludicrous Turning Speed(TM)
If your opponents in the original Doom didn't have Ludicrous turn rates, then you were taking advantage of newbies with no clue how to configure a mouse.
Typically, when a keyboard Doom player first met a mouse-user, he'd be slaughtered and then angrily stomp across the PC lab to accuse someone of cheating with an "instant 180 turn" button.
I used "digital" and "analog" as synonyms for "discrete" and "continuous."
Yes, that's what you did. And since they're not actually synonyms, that makes it wrong.
I said that Emacs [by virtue of being almost always in insert mode] makes you escape each and every one of the more common navigation operations [using control- meta- or esc- multi-key contortions].
Yes, that's what you said. And since it isn't true, I corrected it. Go into emacs and press a "common navigation key" like PageUp or simply DownArrow. It works without needing an "escape".
(a) I do not agree that Emacs is modeless
Because almost any variable can be intrepreted as a "mode" from some perspective, pure "modelessness" is virtually impossible in real software. Nonetheless, emacs sits in the same "usually modeless" category as mainstream programs like Photoshop and Firefox. (In practice, "usually modeless" really means "one mode is tremendously more important than all the others").
But, next to vi, emacs and the like are virtually modeless by comparison. A new user of vi will need the modes explained to her within a few seconds of sitting down at the program- right after she first types "ck brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
AC: Have you ever tried playing an FPS on a Tablet PC? Difficult stuff.
No. Touchscreen for desktop PC, though.
AC: It doesn't recognize the absolute input from the stylus and so the screen just goes nuts whenever you try to aim.
That is a specific problem of software compatibility. Once fixed (such as by adjusting the pseudo-mouse driver to emulate absolute inputs for a given screen size), you can effortlessly score as many FPS headshots as you desire.
However, as has been pointed out, an aimbot will be even more accurate with even less effort.
Mice are great for analog input, and not so great for digital.
Using the wrong words there... a common mistake, one I make myself. In reality, both the mouse and keyboard are digital of course, but the keyboard is discrete and the mouse is continuous. (And to be more pedantic, it's only "effectively continuous"
Certainly not Emacs, which makes you escape the ordinary thing you do (navigating) in order to facilitate something you do less often (inserting stuff at a new place).
You are using the word "Emacs" but describing the behavior of "vi". That isn't a common mistake at all, and demonstrating an ignorance of BOTH emacs and vi means everyone will be against you in the great war.
One of the critical design choices that separates vi from emacs is that vi is a more "modal" program, where sometimes a "j" means "down" and other times it means just "the letter j". But in emacs, "j" almost always means "insert a j character in the active buffer". HCI dogma holds that heavily modal software is inherently harder to learn.
Counter-strike and similar games typically need three control directions.. pitch, yaw, and movement.
Technically, that "movement" element has two sub-components, either XY or (optimally) angle+speed.
Doing this with a keyboard is near impossible, so we add two dimensions with a mouse.
That's not the reason at all. Each hand on a keyboard OR mouse can easily give inputs in two axes. Typical modern games have the left hand use both A/D for the X axis and W/S for Y axis. It's just as easy to put two more axes under the right hand on the keyboard (probably on numpad pairs of 8/2 and 4/6). That's the same number of axes a mouse provides.
So no, counting axes of input dimensions isn't the explanation at all. The thing is that analog inputs are better than binary. (Also, absolute inputs are better than relative, which is why a touchscreen FPS player can beat a mouse user almost as well as a mouser can defeat someone with a keyboard)
The Falcon actually landed on the inside of a worm-like creature dwelling inside the asteroid. It's quite possible that its interior was pressurized.
Han Solo didn't know it was a worm until later. He thought it was just a barren asteroid with a hole in it, and yet he walked right outside as if he expected atmospheric pressure to be there (the moisture content, however, was odd enough to be noticed) Plus, the worm didn't close it's mouth until the ship was zooming away, so there was no barrier to prevent any internal gases from escaping into space.
(Furthermore, Star Wars biology is typified by large creatures residing in habitats that cannot possibly feed them. That worm is the most blatant example)
In reality, it isn't a "gaseous medium" that imposes the maximum velocity,
The key phrase you can search for in any physics book is "terminal velocity". It is the max speed of an object determined by when the air resistance and ongoing acceleration cancel each other out. Terminal velocity works the same way for a rock falling from a tower as it does for a rocket thrusting through the sky.
In a vacuum, there is no air resistance to counteract the acceleration, so the speed limit comes from fuel limits (which will eventually stop the accelerating) or speed-of-light. (And, other scenes in Star Wars have demostrated that speed-of-light is not insurmountable to them either)
They might be vegeterians and never had a need for hunting anyway.
Vegetarian animals get in fights with each other ALL the time. Look at gerbils, deer, gorillas, whatever. The males smash each other around for the females (who are not always above fighting off an intrusive smaller female either).
Plus, all large vegetarians have behaviors to preemptively attack some classes of predators- even if it's not enough to kill them in self-defense, it can scare them away to eat something else.
So, they might arrive at planet earth and not have as much as a sling shot.
In the real world without the kind of magical FTL "warp speed" popular in scifi, the ability to travel to a distant planet implies the ability to destroy it.
Fighters make sound in a vacuum.
Wrong. The space between stars in Star Wars is not a vacuum. There is evidently some background gas suffusing all of it, although probably not breathable.
Evidence:
1. Vehicles are audible even far from a planet's surface.
2. When the Falcon landed in a "cave" inside a smallish asteroid (1 km radius), Han Solo got out and wandered around without a pressurized space-suit.
3. Small fighter-ships in space combat manuver as if they were airplanes, slicing through a medium which imposes a maximum speed to their movement, rather than being able to accelerate indefinately (until stopped by lightspeed or fuel exhaustion).