Because the mods haven't realised that Lucas has put Greebo, Jar-Jar, Yoda and a bunch of other computer-generated 'Star Wars' characters into this movie so he can claim that it was always part of his 'vision'.
Just like he's adding fart jokes and Jabba the Hut to the Super-Duper Edition of 'American Graffiti' and replacing the car race with pod racing.
"Seriously though, do you not expect the agency reponsible for anti-terrorism efforts to actually do its job well?"
How is picking 120,000 people as potential terrorists based on some arbitrary algorithm "doing its job well"? Do you really think there are 120,000 terrorists in America? Do you really think that the government will do better to harass 120,000 people, most of whom are not terrorists, than to, say, infiltrate terrorist groups and find out who really, actually, is a terrorist?
"If this could have stopped those planes from killing thousands of civilians, people would be screaming in outrage about how we didn't use it when we should have"
Once the terrorists know how the system works they can easily avoid being spotted: and the government will be too busy chasing those 120,000 non-terrorists to do anything about the real ones. This is the most basic and obvious flaw of any such arbitrary flagging scheme... anyone who knows the algorithm knows how _not_ to get flagged.
I hope you realise that being seen wearing a tin-foil hat will immediately add 15,000,000,000 points to your Terrorist Quotient: after all, if you're paranoid, you must be doing something illegal.
And what difference will that make? You don't honestly think that Kerry will roll back the US police state, do you?
The amusing thing is that Americans are seeing their freedom rapidly destroyed yet still believe they're free because they can vote for one of two almost identical candidates. If only the USSR had offered people two voting choices rather than one, they'd still be around today.
Yeah, but the main problem with that movie was that there weren't enough nude scenes (i.e. none)... they could probably recoup the money they lost by releasing a 'Final Fantasy XXX' movie:).
"The super success of Finding Nemo was BECAUSE it was aimed at children and adults."
Actually, I'd say that 'Finding Nemo' was the least adult movie that Pixar have made. I've watched 'Toy Story 1/2' and 'Monsters Inc' numerous times, but have no great desire to see 'Finding Nemo' again.
Maybe this is why they quit Disney, so their movies weren't dumbed down for kids.
LOL. The average teacher in the UK earns not much less than I do, is far less useful, and probably works far fewer hours, even including work outside school time.
"Vouchers are stupid and don't solve any problems."
Of course they do. They allow parents to remove kids from bad schools and send them to good schools. How can that not be a solution to those parents' problems?
""Performance" based teaching is totally moronic."
Why should teachers who can't teach continue to be paid the same amount as teachers who can? Why should they even be employed? What's so special about teaching that the same kind of performance-based pay that applies to most other jobs shouldn't be applied to them?
"Give teachers the money the deserve,"
$5 an hour?
"fund classrooms and education properly,"
But we've been doing that forever. Every year the teachers whine that they don't have enough money and that's why they're crap, so we give them more money and the schools become even more crap. The solution is to give them less money and make them work for it.
"all those countries that totally kick our ass when it comes to the education of thier children don't do it with privatized voucher systems."
And how many countries, exactly, have such systems to compare against?
"can an unregulated market in effect regulate itself?"
Uh, ebay is a long way from unregulated: it's a market run as a monopoly by one company. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but its success or failure tells you nothing about the merits or problems of a free market.
Who for? Do you really think it makes a difference whether Bush or Whatsisname get elected?
The great thing about democracy is that the people who choose the candidates get to choose the result: you just put two indistinguishable candidates on the ballot and laugh while the proles argue about which one is better.
"That should have been followed up with "you're fired"."
Which would have been followed by a lawsuit for unfair dismissal: being stupid probaby qualifies under the 'Americans with disabilities act' these days.
"Music and art are about as essential to education as the core. Do we really want to become an even bigger mass of uncultured people."
Then feel free to pay for 'culture' out of your own pocket. Don't expect other people to pay for it.
"We need the diversity many high schools offer in order to push students towards the right college degrees."
How many students, exactly, _need_ a college degree? I suspect that other than specialised areas, the vast majority rarely use anything they studied at college in their working life afterwards. Certainly I don't, after spending years studying Physics at a top university: the whole thing was an utter waste of my time other than giving me a piece of paper that gets me interviews for decently-paid jobs.
'Education' has become a total scam to keep teachers employed. It serves very little purpose in actually educating people.
"Public schools doesn't exist to educate. They exist to contain kids while parents are at work."
Exactly. Education is easy: it doesn't take long to teach kids the basics of reading, writing and math, then with a good library and Internet connection they can educate themselves.
Schools exist to keep kids out of the parents' hair, to teach them to be mindless drones who do what they're told, and keep teachers in comfy, well-paid jobs when many would otherwise be lucky to qualify for burger-flipping, and universities exist to charge kids for a piece of paper that will qualify them for highly-paid middle-class jobs.
The sooner tax-funded schools are eliminated, the better off we'll all be. They benefit no-one other than control freaks and the schooling bureaucracy.
"However, I think "brainwashing" may be too strong of a word. Brainwashing, to me, means forcibly removing ALL other messages other than they one you are promoting,"
Well, it's not as though any of the 'bad guys' in the Tom Clancy games I've played are ever given a chance to put their message across... in my experience everything is always very black and white with the US government as the good guys (and, for example, I don't remember ever being sent to bump off US-funded Irish terrorists).
Which, again, is probably inevitable in a very linear game like that, but it's hard to deny that it's unrealistic politically-correct propaganda.
Interesting: I was playing 'Raven Shield' last night and thinking about the whacko politically correct politics it's based around.
For example, in one of the early missions I had to rescue some hostages who worked for the IMF, as though they provided some benefit to society worth risking your life for: again, it's a very linear game where saying no or shooting them is not an option you can choose. Personally I much prefered 'Strike Commander' from years back, where a mission or two involved destroying planes belonging to the evil IRS.
"I hate to tell you this but it actually sort of does this already."
Maybe 2.4 does, but my 2.2 system has never suffered from this problem (haven't got around to upgrading it yet). Small amounts get swapped out, but nothing noticeable in interactive use.
"Why waste ram that could be used for live data?"
Because when I want to use my web browser again after playing a game for an hour, I don't want to have to sit there for two minutes watching it slowly swap back in... interactivity is far more important to me than small performance benefits from an extra 64MB of disk cache.
"You really don't want hundreds of megabytes of BloatyApp's untouched memory floating about in the machine. Get it out on the disk, use the memory for something useful."
I absolutely despise the way that XP swaps out applications in order to make the disk cache larger. I have 1GB of RAM on my machine precisely so I don't have to wait two minutes for it to swap my web browser back in after it's swapped out... yet if I copy a 2GB file from one drive to another, the stupid operating system will swap out all the applications it can just to make the cache larger.
Please, please, don't take Linux down the same braindead route as Microsoft has done for XP. It's utterly insane to swap out my browser so that a 2GB file can be copied two seconds faster when I then have to wait two minutes for the browser to swap back in. Or at least provide some kind of '#define STOP_VM_SWAPPING_STUPIDITY' so that I can disable it.
"I mean, if invading Iraq or national defense in general were actually useful, the government wouldn't have to steal money from taxpayers, now, would it?"
Exactly. Invading Iraq is not useful in any sense, except, perhaps, to create more terrorists so that the government can justify more control and higher taxes.
Equally, tax-funded manned spaceflight is not useful... and the switch from manned maintenance flights for Hubble to umanned is a clear example of that. It's pretty funny to read above that NASA are planning robotic maintenace for ISS, when human occupancy of space is supposed to be the whole justification for ISS now.
As to why my original post was labelled 'flamebait', I have no idea.
"I happen to work in a bio lab and actually like it when the sales reps come by. I need their stuff and they're constantly filling me in on their new products."
But that's sales, not marketing. Marketing is trying to persuade people to buy stuff they don't want, sales is trying to persuade people to buy the stuff they want from you, not your competitors.
There are very, very few cases where popup ads are being used for sales, rather than marketing crap that I have no interest in: people who waste my time trying to convince me to buy their crap that I don't want are just scum.
"These people actually believe that NASA is a complete waste of time."
If NASA was actually useful, the government wouldn't have to steal money from hardworking taxpayers to fund it. I for one, for example, would happily donate a couple of hundred bucks a year to keep the unmanned side of NASA going, but wouldn't donate anything towards the shuttle or ISS: I want to go into space myself one day, and the manned spaceflight side of NASA is one of the main obstacles _preventing_ the development of cheap private spaceflight.
"how does maintaining such an old telescope with expensive maintenance...reduce cost?"
It doesn't. When Hubble was designed, NASA were claiming that the shuttle would fly fifty times a year and launch payloads for $250 a pound, so repair made sense. Now that it actually flies four or five times a year and payload costs $25,000 a pound, it doesn't make much sense... launching new Hubbles every few years on expendable boosters would probably have been a lot cheaper.
"The cost launching the space shuttle is around 375 million dollars [psu.edu]"
It's not. The average cost of a shuttle flight is actually more like $1,000,000,000. However, pricing shuttle flights is complicated because that's almost entirely due to fixed costs of running the shuttle side of NASA: the variable cost of flying another shuttle once those fixed costs are covered for the year is about $200,000,000.
Slashdot Mirror
I would imagine that's the weight of the suit alone, without the life support equipment: that probably adds a significant amount by itself.
"Why is this OT?"
Because the mods haven't realised that Lucas has put Greebo, Jar-Jar, Yoda and a bunch of other computer-generated 'Star Wars' characters into this movie so he can claim that it was always part of his 'vision'.
Just like he's adding fart jokes and Jabba the Hut to the Super-Duper Edition of 'American Graffiti' and replacing the car race with pod racing.
"Seriously though, do you not expect the agency reponsible for anti-terrorism efforts to actually do its job well?"
How is picking 120,000 people as potential terrorists based on some arbitrary algorithm "doing its job well"? Do you really think there are 120,000 terrorists in America? Do you really think that the government will do better to harass 120,000 people, most of whom are not terrorists, than to, say, infiltrate terrorist groups and find out who really, actually, is a terrorist?
"If this could have stopped those planes from killing thousands of civilians, people would be screaming in outrage about how we didn't use it when we should have"
Once the terrorists know how the system works they can easily avoid being spotted: and the government will be too busy chasing those 120,000 non-terrorists to do anything about the real ones. This is the most basic and obvious flaw of any such arbitrary flagging scheme... anyone who knows the algorithm knows how _not_ to get flagged.
I hope you realise that being seen wearing a tin-foil hat will immediately add 15,000,000,000 points to your Terrorist Quotient: after all, if you're paranoid, you must be doing something illegal.
And what difference will that make? You don't honestly think that Kerry will roll back the US police state, do you?
The amusing thing is that Americans are seeing their freedom rapidly destroyed yet still believe they're free because they can vote for one of two almost identical candidates. If only the USSR had offered people two voting choices rather than one, they'd still be around today.
"Because of the Final Fantasy CG movie."
:).
Yeah, but the main problem with that movie was that there weren't enough nude scenes (i.e. none)... they could probably recoup the money they lost by releasing a 'Final Fantasy XXX' movie
"The super success of Finding Nemo was BECAUSE it was aimed at children and adults."
Actually, I'd say that 'Finding Nemo' was the least adult movie that Pixar have made. I've watched 'Toy Story 1/2' and 'Monsters Inc' numerous times, but have no great desire to see 'Finding Nemo' again.
Maybe this is why they quit Disney, so their movies weren't dumbed down for kids.
"Low pay, long hours"
LOL. The average teacher in the UK earns not much less than I do, is far less useful, and probably works far fewer hours, even including work outside school time.
"Vouchers are stupid and don't solve any problems."
Of course they do. They allow parents to remove kids from bad schools and send them to good schools. How can that not be a solution to those parents' problems?
""Performance" based teaching is totally moronic."
Why should teachers who can't teach continue to be paid the same amount as teachers who can? Why should they even be employed? What's so special about teaching that the same kind of performance-based pay that applies to most other jobs shouldn't be applied to them?
"Give teachers the money the deserve,"
$5 an hour?
"fund classrooms and education properly,"
But we've been doing that forever. Every year the teachers whine that they don't have enough money and that's why they're crap, so we give them more money and the schools become even more crap. The solution is to give them less money and make them work for it.
"all those countries that totally kick our ass when it comes to the education of thier children don't do it with privatized voucher systems."
And how many countries, exactly, have such systems to compare against?
"can an unregulated market in effect regulate itself?"
Uh, ebay is a long way from unregulated: it's a market run as a monopoly by one company. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but its success or failure tells you nothing about the merits or problems of a free market.
"A common new computer when XP came out was about a 1.4GHz If I recall correctly, but the system requirements are 400MHz..."
Given how slowly XP runs on my P4-2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM, I'd hate to see how slow it runs on a PII-400 with 128MB...
"Are you going to vote?"
Who for? Do you really think it makes a difference whether Bush or Whatsisname get elected?
The great thing about democracy is that the people who choose the candidates get to choose the result: you just put two indistinguishable candidates on the ballot and laugh while the proles argue about which one is better.
"That should have been followed up with "you're fired"."
Which would have been followed by a lawsuit for unfair dismissal: being stupid probaby qualifies under the 'Americans with disabilities act' these days.
"Music and art are about as essential to education as the core. Do we really want to become an even bigger mass of uncultured people."
Then feel free to pay for 'culture' out of your own pocket. Don't expect other people to pay for it.
"We need the diversity many high schools offer in order to push students towards the right college degrees."
How many students, exactly, _need_ a college degree? I suspect that other than specialised areas, the vast majority rarely use anything they studied at college in their working life afterwards. Certainly I don't, after spending years studying Physics at a top university: the whole thing was an utter waste of my time other than giving me a piece of paper that gets me interviews for decently-paid jobs.
'Education' has become a total scam to keep teachers employed. It serves very little purpose in actually educating people.
"Public schools doesn't exist to educate. They exist to contain kids while parents are at work."
Exactly. Education is easy: it doesn't take long to teach kids the basics of reading, writing and math, then with a good library and Internet connection they can educate themselves.
Schools exist to keep kids out of the parents' hair, to teach them to be mindless drones who do what they're told, and keep teachers in comfy, well-paid jobs when many would otherwise be lucky to qualify for burger-flipping, and universities exist to charge kids for a piece of paper that will qualify them for highly-paid middle-class jobs.
The sooner tax-funded schools are eliminated, the better off we'll all be. They benefit no-one other than control freaks and the schooling bureaucracy.
That's pretty much what 'liberal' used to mean before the term was stolen by the commies (just as, today, they've stolen the term 'neo-conservative').
"However, I think "brainwashing" may be too strong of a word. Brainwashing, to me, means forcibly removing ALL other messages other than they one you are promoting,"
Well, it's not as though any of the 'bad guys' in the Tom Clancy games I've played are ever given a chance to put their message across... in my experience everything is always very black and white with the US government as the good guys (and, for example, I don't remember ever being sent to bump off US-funded Irish terrorists).
Which, again, is probably inevitable in a very linear game like that, but it's hard to deny that it's unrealistic politically-correct propaganda.
"What you don't understand is that the International Monetary Fund is the Illuminati.... (etc)"
:).
Now that's a game background I'd like to see
Interesting: I was playing 'Raven Shield' last night and thinking about the whacko politically correct politics it's based around.
For example, in one of the early missions I had to rescue some hostages who worked for the IMF, as though they provided some benefit to society worth risking your life for: again, it's a very linear game where saying no or shooting them is not an option you can choose. Personally I much prefered 'Strike Commander' from years back, where a mission or two involved destroying planes belonging to the evil IRS.
"I hate to tell you this but it actually sort of does this already."
Maybe 2.4 does, but my 2.2 system has never suffered from this problem (haven't got around to upgrading it yet). Small amounts get swapped out, but nothing noticeable in interactive use.
"Why waste ram that could be used for live data?"
Because when I want to use my web browser again after playing a game for an hour, I don't want to have to sit there for two minutes watching it slowly swap back in... interactivity is far more important to me than small performance benefits from an extra 64MB of disk cache.
"You really don't want hundreds of megabytes of BloatyApp's untouched memory floating about in the machine. Get it out on the disk, use the memory for something useful."
I absolutely despise the way that XP swaps out applications in order to make the disk cache larger. I have 1GB of RAM on my machine precisely so I don't have to wait two minutes for it to swap my web browser back in after it's swapped out... yet if I copy a 2GB file from one drive to another, the stupid operating system will swap out all the applications it can just to make the cache larger.
Please, please, don't take Linux down the same braindead route as Microsoft has done for XP. It's utterly insane to swap out my browser so that a 2GB file can be copied two seconds faster when I then have to wait two minutes for the browser to swap back in. Or at least provide some kind of '#define STOP_VM_SWAPPING_STUPIDITY' so that I can disable it.
"I mean, if invading Iraq or national defense in general were actually useful, the government wouldn't have to steal money from taxpayers, now, would it?"
Exactly. Invading Iraq is not useful in any sense, except, perhaps, to create more terrorists so that the government can justify more control and higher taxes.
Equally, tax-funded manned spaceflight is not useful... and the switch from manned maintenance flights for Hubble to umanned is a clear example of that. It's pretty funny to read above that NASA are planning robotic maintenace for ISS, when human occupancy of space is supposed to be the whole justification for ISS now.
As to why my original post was labelled 'flamebait', I have no idea.
"I happen to work in a bio lab and actually like it when the sales reps come by. I need their stuff and they're constantly filling me in on their new products."
But that's sales, not marketing. Marketing is trying to persuade people to buy stuff they don't want, sales is trying to persuade people to buy the stuff they want from you, not your competitors.
There are very, very few cases where popup ads are being used for sales, rather than marketing crap that I have no interest in: people who waste my time trying to convince me to buy their crap that I don't want are just scum.
"These people actually believe that NASA is a complete waste of time."
If NASA was actually useful, the government wouldn't have to steal money from hardworking taxpayers to fund it. I for one, for example, would happily donate a couple of hundred bucks a year to keep the unmanned side of NASA going, but wouldn't donate anything towards the shuttle or ISS: I want to go into space myself one day, and the manned spaceflight side of NASA is one of the main obstacles _preventing_ the development of cheap private spaceflight.
"how does maintaining such an old telescope with expensive maintenance...reduce cost?"
It doesn't. When Hubble was designed, NASA were claiming that the shuttle would fly fifty times a year and launch payloads for $250 a pound, so repair made sense. Now that it actually flies four or five times a year and payload costs $25,000 a pound, it doesn't make much sense... launching new Hubbles every few years on expendable boosters would probably have been a lot cheaper.
"The cost launching the space shuttle is around 375 million dollars [psu.edu]"
It's not. The average cost of a shuttle flight is actually more like $1,000,000,000. However, pricing shuttle flights is complicated because that's almost entirely due to fixed costs of running the shuttle side of NASA: the variable cost of flying another shuttle once those fixed costs are covered for the year is about $200,000,000.