There are those who would say we are already slaves considering that while we own shotguns the Army owns F-16s. No militia of the people could possibly stand against the Federal government today.
The failure of this tired old argument is that you need someone to drive a tank, fly an F-16, or load an artillery shell.
For every soldier who will fire on his own people, there are several who would refuse, or who would desert, or would join the resistence, or would fire but then go crazy and end up commiting suicide or fragging an officer.
Any scenario that involves using military hardware to stop 2nd amendment practioners is not going to be that simple.
Exactly. A "god" of that nature would just be a random force of nature, some sort of tendency to chaos. The one in the BSG universe, however, is distinctly interventionist and takes an active interest in playing games with its creations.
Considering one of these games it likes to play is "Now you commit genocide on each other," the entity that is running human affairs by fiat in the BSG universe is a particularly unpleasant fucker.
but she's certainly not the only undergradute to have made a contribution such as this.
Woah woah woah there. Didn't anyone tell you undergraduates aren't good for anything and undergraduate degrees are only useful to show you can "complete something?" Get with the latest talking points there please.
Just because the Greeks didn't believe that didn't mean it wasn't true. In a universe with an omnipotent omniscient power, any descision you make is meaningless because that power can fiat you into not only doing something different, but believing you did something different of your own "free will." You'd never be able to know the difference. If these powerful beings exist, our lives and choices are meaningless.
Yeah but if you can create a full human from vaccum, along with attendant viper and the like, then you can definitely create them with whatever knowledge, skills, predispositions, biases, and beliefs that you want. If you create them in such a way that they naturally trend away from what you want them to do, and then punish them for not doing what you want them to, all it means is that you're a sick motherfucker and should probably be put down.
Or you're bored with your Sims and decided to turn the door to the bathroom into a wall.
Either way, the problem is that it doesn't make for an interesting story for anyone other than the player. Thats why you don't see a tv channel dedicated entirely to watching other people play "The Sims" and thats why having a supernatural fiat in your science fiction show (as opposed to events that characters interpret with supernaturalism, which I can accept far more readily) is an epic fail on the story front.
That, ultimately, is the distinction that so many people have failed to make in the discussion of "the God solution" to the BSG mysteries.
On the one hand, you have characters who interpret things that are happening to them with supernatural explanations. Things like the visions that characters experienced, the "coincidences" that were essentially miracles (sun going nova, the fleet losing power, etc), and the various prophecies. You can have this and still have a good story, as long as you explain later that what appeared to be miracles from the perspective of the characters were actually explainable, rational phenomena. This would actually make for a good story.
On the other hand, you have a story filled with drama and tension, except in your story world there is an all powerful (capable of creating people and advanced technology without effort from vaccum, capable of exploding stars on cue, capable of transmitting information instantly across spacetime, etc) and all knowing and who can change events at a whim, but only chooses to do so when dramatically appropriate, but with no sense of internal logic or consistancy. In that case your built in magical dues ex can swoop in at any moment and rescue anyone from anything, or not, and the only real question when the characters are in danger is, "Will God save them or not?"
That, added to the fact that humans existed on Earth2 the whole time, means that the entire "escape" of the ragtag fleet was meaningless. Humanity as a whole was never threatened, and if the crew of the Galactica had never lifted a finger, God would have done all the heavy lifting to allow their "destiny" to come to pass. Either that, or God wouldn't have done anything. Except, there isn't really a God, just the writers, and so what the show boils down to is, "What do the writers feel like randomly fiating this week?" Not very interesting, and it robs the show of all of its tension and mystery.
If I want a 'Wizards did it' plot, I'll just read the old testament. Its like Battlestar, but with less guns and more incest (but not much more *cough*TighandCaprica*cough*).
This ends racism, as it creates one race, the Human race, the best of Humans and Cylons merged into one, and speaks out against violence and trying to play God and creating new life, which might turn on us and try to kill us all.
We can all see how well that turned out. What a bunch of crap. Stop trying to justify ex-post-facto a bunch of random shit Ron Moore made up because he didn't know what to do.
You're trying to hard to dislike the finale. Why not accept that the other participant in this cycle isn't actually all-powerful. It can influence, prod, and manipulate. It can pull of events that appear miraculous, but perhaps there's a scale concern.
If this entity can teleport a fully functional Kara Thrace and a fully functional like-new Viper into space, there is no consequcnce to anything the characters do. Everything is pointless because the magical being behind the curtain can fiat anything it wants to happen. This makes following the story and the drama pointless.
Also, as mentioned many times, Ron Moore admited that he was just making shit up as he went along. Which is basically how religion came about, so I guess I can see why religious people liked it.
Making liqor was probably the first technology they redeveloped. Well, the handful of them who survived trying to live off the land when all they'd ever known was modern civilization.
If I had been one of those guys on the tilium ship, when Lee Adama came to me and said "Guess what, now you get to go live like a cave man in the dirt!" I would have shot him in the fucking head.
Exactly. They had finally learned the lessons about not enslaving machines, etc and then decided that passing that lesson (and all of the thousands of years of hard fought lessons learned from their ancestors) was too much trouble, and that instead they'd just give up and punt the problem down a few hundred generations.
Ultimately, it leaves you wondering: Why do I even care that these people survived? There is already another planet full of humans hanging out there in space, and God can create Kara Thraces and Vipers from scratch out of pure vaccum, so even if they'd all died it wouldn't have mattered, it would have just had Kara Thrace crap out another viper and fly it back to the newly recreated ragtag fleet to try again.
Including the magical pigeon Starbuck ruins the entire show and makes it unwatchable.
I think most people who complain about the finale not meeting their expectations are the people whose expectations included a cereberal explanation for everything that happened on the show. And I'll admit, I was hoping for a little more in that arena. But in terms of emotional wrap-up and as a fitting send-off to the show, I thought it couldn't have done better.
To people who wanted every mystery tied up nice and neat, I hate to break it to you but it was never that kind of show. Moore has said from the beginning that certain supernatural aspects wouldn't be explained.
Dude, they made it so that Starbuck was a magical viper-crapping pigeon. The fail was as epic as the story was supposed to be.
I'm afraid that too many fans of zombie movies would recognize that scenario (and obviously Poe fans). If they tried to market a game based on that it would be shot down as cliche. Not everyone, but enough that it might not sell good enough to suit the company. I say "might not" because even if did sell just fine, the fact that it was criticized could scare the company enough to scrap before they got far into developing it.
I don't know, I think that watching things passively unfold on the screen (or in the pages of a book) and having a chance to do the defense your way against the zombies would be enough to bring a lot of people in. After all, we saw "badass guy runs around like a one man army killing hordes of bad guys to save the world" over and over again in action movies in the 80s, and people still loved doom and quake etc when they came out.
Ultimately this is why democracy in its current form has failed. We should really be working hard to come up with a new form of democracy, with checks and balances that allow sufficiently large groups of concerned citizens to do something like appoint a special prosecutor to investigate corruption in the government.
Of course, something like that would be easily abusable.
I don't know. I guess the one thing that we could do right now with off the shelf technology would be to assign to each congressperson, supreme court justice, and high executive branch member (president, vp, cabinet secretaries, maybe undersecretaries) a team of people who would do nothing but record on video and audio with multiple redundancy everything those people do, including recording every bit of binary data they generate and getting photocopies of anything they generate in hardcopy. It would become part of truly serving the public, for the years you are in office you give up your right to privacy, much like the way that soldiers give up rights when they sign up for military service.
I think it would be well worth the expense if it would help prevent corruption. If these people want trust they can buy a fucking dog, we need to watch them carefully while they wield the kind of power we've given them.
You don't fuck with elections. The reason we have elections is so that we don't have to murder tyrants all the time. Its a courtesy to the people in power that we remove them from office with a ballot instead of a razor sharp blade.
When stupid worthless moronic assholes like the ones working at Diebold, who intentially designed their equipment to make elections more stealable, start fucking with the electoral process for personal gain on such a widespread level, the only answer is to convict them of treason and hang them from the nearest high tree.
Farcry 2 had a LOT of problems with it. But I'd suggest that *I* know when someone is outside my door without being able to see them. And back in my college years I REALLY knew when the upstairs neighbors were home without ever seeing them.
Did you also shoot at them through the walls and ceiling with perfect accuracy?
Slashdot Mirror
There are those who would say we are already slaves considering that while we own shotguns the Army owns F-16s. No militia of the people could possibly stand against the Federal government today.
The failure of this tired old argument is that you need someone to drive a tank, fly an F-16, or load an artillery shell.
For every soldier who will fire on his own people, there are several who would refuse, or who would desert, or would join the resistence, or would fire but then go crazy and end up commiting suicide or fragging an officer.
Any scenario that involves using military hardware to stop 2nd amendment practioners is not going to be that simple.
Exactly. A "god" of that nature would just be a random force of nature, some sort of tendency to chaos. The one in the BSG universe, however, is distinctly interventionist and takes an active interest in playing games with its creations.
Considering one of these games it likes to play is "Now you commit genocide on each other," the entity that is running human affairs by fiat in the BSG universe is a particularly unpleasant fucker.
And the award for coolest link in a response to one of my comments ever goes to... !
Sweet thanks.
If I had large amounts of disposable cash, I'd find out who that guy was and send him a gift wrapped red crowbar.
but she's certainly not the only undergradute to have made a contribution such as this.
Woah woah woah there. Didn't anyone tell you undergraduates aren't good for anything and undergraduate degrees are only useful to show you can "complete something?" Get with the latest talking points there please.
That's her model number. She's actually a Japanese Robot.
Or a Cylon.
Have you found thousands of bugs on billion dollar projects announced by the media as world-sucking black-hole producing machine?
I found some bugs in Tim Geitner's bailout plan, which seems to match the second part of your criteria...
Just because the Greeks didn't believe that didn't mean it wasn't true. In a universe with an omnipotent omniscient power, any descision you make is meaningless because that power can fiat you into not only doing something different, but believing you did something different of your own "free will." You'd never be able to know the difference. If these powerful beings exist, our lives and choices are meaningless.
Yeah but if you can create a full human from vaccum, along with attendant viper and the like, then you can definitely create them with whatever knowledge, skills, predispositions, biases, and beliefs that you want. If you create them in such a way that they naturally trend away from what you want them to do, and then punish them for not doing what you want them to, all it means is that you're a sick motherfucker and should probably be put down.
Or you're bored with your Sims and decided to turn the door to the bathroom into a wall.
Either way, the problem is that it doesn't make for an interesting story for anyone other than the player. Thats why you don't see a tv channel dedicated entirely to watching other people play "The Sims" and thats why having a supernatural fiat in your science fiction show (as opposed to events that characters interpret with supernaturalism, which I can accept far more readily) is an epic fail on the story front.
That, ultimately, is the distinction that so many people have failed to make in the discussion of "the God solution" to the BSG mysteries.
On the one hand, you have characters who interpret things that are happening to them with supernatural explanations. Things like the visions that characters experienced, the "coincidences" that were essentially miracles (sun going nova, the fleet losing power, etc), and the various prophecies. You can have this and still have a good story, as long as you explain later that what appeared to be miracles from the perspective of the characters were actually explainable, rational phenomena. This would actually make for a good story.
On the other hand, you have a story filled with drama and tension, except in your story world there is an all powerful (capable of creating people and advanced technology without effort from vaccum, capable of exploding stars on cue, capable of transmitting information instantly across spacetime, etc) and all knowing and who can change events at a whim, but only chooses to do so when dramatically appropriate, but with no sense of internal logic or consistancy. In that case your built in magical dues ex can swoop in at any moment and rescue anyone from anything, or not, and the only real question when the characters are in danger is, "Will God save them or not?"
That, added to the fact that humans existed on Earth2 the whole time, means that the entire "escape" of the ragtag fleet was meaningless. Humanity as a whole was never threatened, and if the crew of the Galactica had never lifted a finger, God would have done all the heavy lifting to allow their "destiny" to come to pass. Either that, or God wouldn't have done anything. Except, there isn't really a God, just the writers, and so what the show boils down to is, "What do the writers feel like randomly fiating this week?" Not very interesting, and it robs the show of all of its tension and mystery.
If I want a 'Wizards did it' plot, I'll just read the old testament. Its like Battlestar, but with less guns and more incest (but not much more *cough*TighandCaprica*cough*).
I like how you justify keeping people uninformed by claiming that they're ignorant. :)
Seemed fairly obvious to me:Jesus.
Died, resurrected, then ascended once the job was done.
Wow, I totally want to get in a three way with my girlfriend and Jesus now. Jesus is fuckin hot.
This ends racism, as it creates one race, the Human race, the best of Humans and Cylons merged into one, and speaks out against violence and trying to play God and creating new life, which might turn on us and try to kill us all.
We can all see how well that turned out. What a bunch of crap. Stop trying to justify ex-post-facto a bunch of random shit Ron Moore made up because he didn't know what to do.
You're trying to hard to dislike the finale. Why not accept that the other participant in this cycle isn't actually all-powerful. It can influence, prod, and manipulate. It can pull of events that appear miraculous, but perhaps there's a scale concern.
If this entity can teleport a fully functional Kara Thrace and a fully functional like-new Viper into space, there is no consequcnce to anything the characters do. Everything is pointless because the magical being behind the curtain can fiat anything it wants to happen. This makes following the story and the drama pointless.
Also, as mentioned many times, Ron Moore admited that he was just making shit up as he went along. Which is basically how religion came about, so I guess I can see why religious people liked it.
Making liqor was probably the first technology they redeveloped. Well, the handful of them who survived trying to live off the land when all they'd ever known was modern civilization.
If I had been one of those guys on the tilium ship, when Lee Adama came to me and said "Guess what, now you get to go live like a cave man in the dirt!" I would have shot him in the fucking head.
Exactly. They had finally learned the lessons about not enslaving machines, etc and then decided that passing that lesson (and all of the thousands of years of hard fought lessons learned from their ancestors) was too much trouble, and that instead they'd just give up and punt the problem down a few hundred generations.
Ultimately, it leaves you wondering: Why do I even care that these people survived? There is already another planet full of humans hanging out there in space, and God can create Kara Thraces and Vipers from scratch out of pure vaccum, so even if they'd all died it wouldn't have mattered, it would have just had Kara Thrace crap out another viper and fly it back to the newly recreated ragtag fleet to try again.
Including the magical pigeon Starbuck ruins the entire show and makes it unwatchable.
Adama punching Baltar in the face for about five minutes straight.
That was my favorite part of the first hour.
I think most people who complain about the finale not meeting their expectations are the people whose expectations included a cereberal explanation for everything that happened on the show. And I'll admit, I was hoping for a little more in that arena. But in terms of emotional wrap-up and as a fitting send-off to the show, I thought it couldn't have done better.
To people who wanted every mystery tied up nice and neat, I hate to break it to you but it was never that kind of show. Moore has said from the beginning that certain supernatural aspects wouldn't be explained.
Dude, they made it so that Starbuck was a magical viper-crapping pigeon. The fail was as epic as the story was supposed to be.
I'm afraid that too many fans of zombie movies would recognize that scenario (and obviously Poe fans). If they tried to market a game based on that it would be shot down as cliche. Not everyone, but enough that it might not sell good enough to suit the company. I say "might not" because even if did sell just fine, the fact that it was criticized could scare the company enough to scrap before they got far into developing it.
I don't know, I think that watching things passively unfold on the screen (or in the pages of a book) and having a chance to do the defense your way against the zombies would be enough to bring a lot of people in. After all, we saw "badass guy runs around like a one man army killing hordes of bad guys to save the world" over and over again in action movies in the 80s, and people still loved doom and quake etc when they came out.
Whatever, they're all the same. Useless classes and a piece of paper that can get you into an interview.
Which is why our economy is all fucked up. Its inherent in the culture we've built that values bullshit over substance.
Speaking as someone who's been involved in IT for 30+ years, allow me to shout at you...."You're going the wrong way!!!"
Is your boyfriend going to shoot me in the leg now?
Ultimately this is why democracy in its current form has failed. We should really be working hard to come up with a new form of democracy, with checks and balances that allow sufficiently large groups of concerned citizens to do something like appoint a special prosecutor to investigate corruption in the government.
Of course, something like that would be easily abusable.
I don't know. I guess the one thing that we could do right now with off the shelf technology would be to assign to each congressperson, supreme court justice, and high executive branch member (president, vp, cabinet secretaries, maybe undersecretaries) a team of people who would do nothing but record on video and audio with multiple redundancy everything those people do, including recording every bit of binary data they generate and getting photocopies of anything they generate in hardcopy. It would become part of truly serving the public, for the years you are in office you give up your right to privacy, much like the way that soldiers give up rights when they sign up for military service.
I think it would be well worth the expense if it would help prevent corruption. If these people want trust they can buy a fucking dog, we need to watch them carefully while they wield the kind of power we've given them.
You don't fuck with elections. The reason we have elections is so that we don't have to murder tyrants all the time. Its a courtesy to the people in power that we remove them from office with a ballot instead of a razor sharp blade.
When stupid worthless moronic assholes like the ones working at Diebold, who intentially designed their equipment to make elections more stealable, start fucking with the electoral process for personal gain on such a widespread level, the only answer is to convict them of treason and hang them from the nearest high tree.
Farcry 2 had a LOT of problems with it. But I'd suggest that *I* know when someone is outside my door without being able to see them. And back in my college years I REALLY knew when the upstairs neighbors were home without ever seeing them.
Did you also shoot at them through the walls and ceiling with perfect accuracy?
If you think you're not afraid of death, try this test: get a friend, and go to the Grand Canyon.
What if I'm afraid of my friend?
The funny thing about UT3 is that everyone agrees that it failed to live up to UT2004's awesomeness, but nobody can agree on the reasons for it.
Thats easy, the UT series apparently suffers from the same curse as the Star Trek franchise. Only the even numbered games are any good.