That book was both one of the best depictions of alien life invading Earth, and a pretty bad attempt at characters and dramatization.
The author had a pretty good understand of human psychology and behavior, but didn't seem to be very good at writing dialogue or working out personal motivations.
I don't know about virtual keyboards. There have been many touch-screen style keyboards, and I have used membrane keyboards that were sensitive enough to practically be touch screen. I have never liked using a single one. I like the tactile feel of a full-sized keyboard. I actually even miss the Click you got from the older ones. I don't need anything heavy, but I like the curved spring-loaded keys, and it makes it far easier to stay aligned when you have tactile feedback.
Virtual keyboards might see use, but I think physical keyboards will remain the primary preference - one reason they haven't really changed much over the decades.
While the cost of this sort of hardware will be prohibitive for large-scale use, I fully believe that it's just this sort of interface that will someday replace the mouse. Keyboards are likely to remain in use for a very long time, but mice are simply a pointing device... and we all come with a natural built-in pointer (our fingers).
In the comming decades, I'd expect people's "monitors" to be replaced with hardware similar to this drafting-table design.
Not to mention the possibility that the question itself has no meaning (that there is no such things as "before the big bang")
That's the part that I think gets most people. It seems the majority of people view the Big Bang as being a literal explosion that occured in an indeterminate location, is expanding to fill space, and occured at a particular point in time (and by default existed as something else before then).
The BB WAS the expansion of space AND time. Space, as a concept, has no meaning except after the incident. Time, likewise, has no meaning until the incident.
If you started with this moment, and tracked it back through the years, centuries, millenia, and eons, would get closer and closer to the BB (or whatever happened). If the BB theory is at all correct, you could track it all the way back to the "moment of creation", but no further... because that would have been when time began to exist.
People who ponder "where" the big bang occured do not understand the theory. People who ponder about before the big bang likewise do not understand the theory.
I think you'll find that it's good taste that prevents the UK from watching American football:). It's not a real sport if you have to stop for a rest every few seconds, and it must be a game for girly men if you need to wear armour! It's basically rubgy with padding and resting, isn't it?
...And players who are large enough to turn your average rugby player into something like red paste.
Serious injury is common on the football field (and I mean Football, North American style), and that's WITH armor. Considering that football players collide with a force that often snaps bone, and how often they go flying into the air and land on their heads, or have 5 large men leaping onto them full-force... that armor is what keeps them alive.
...as opposed to a bunch of (relatively) half-naked men scrabbling in the dirt for a ball, as in rugby.
If you want to bring in a number of auxilliary driving forces, you might as well enumerate the seven deadly sins. When you think about it, these provide almost all the core reasons why we have advanced as fast as we have, compared to other cultures throughout history.
Many cultures have risen to heights, both technological and philosophical, some of which we ourselves can't yet lay claim to. But from a historical standpoint, Eurocentric societies have rapidly moved from being quite literally the armpit of the known world, to the absolute domination of the globe (both the US and modern Russia count as eurocentrically derrived, in the long run). Only China and the middle east can claim to have had a global impact worth comparing.
Why? Simple. Europeans, back in the dark ages, identified, enumerated, and understood human nature. They knew their sins, which made them easier to pursue.
Greed - the need to make money, and to find more ways of getting as much of it as possible.
Sloth - just plain lazyness. We want our machines to do the work for us.
Gluttony - the drive to produce more plentiful food, that tastes better, regardless of nutritional content or actual need.
Wrath - newer and better ways to kill our fellow man
Envy - one nation sees what another has, and wants it for themselves, so they have to figure it out for themselves.
Pride - the need to produce something better than what's out there, to become famous for your creations, or for national pride.
Lust - I'm not sure how to articulate why this actually drives western progress, but I'm certain it's the keystone to all our social evolution.
Haven't a great many of the popular advances in the 19th and 20th century been driven by marketing, and the desire to draw attention for purposes of profit? The earliest visions of the phograph's uses were more oriented towards automated marketing than towards the memoranda and music they were actually used for. Color printing was exclusively for the purpose of making product packaging more appealing, and television only became possible as a mass-market item when it was married to marketing (to this day, commercials are the life blood of the networks).
Early radio broadcasts were practically commerials with a thin veil of entertainment laid over them. It took a little while for radio commercials to seperate from the actual content (when they started announcing the products during frequent breaks, rather than the programs constantly hawking a product within a poorly contrived story).
Holograms were invented simply to see it done, but the bulk of the funding came from companies who sought to apply them as the new wonder-label (which turned out to remain prohibitively expensive for some time, and just never that appealing).
Western technology has been driven by three primary needs:
* direct threats - be it war, disease, famine, etc. Death avoidance.
* misguided ambition - attempting to create something unrealistic, and ending up with something unexpected (and often unnoticed for some time)
* commerce - the inherent desire to make people give you money
Altruism is a noble thing, but it's greed that makes the world actually turn.
I actually take the time to read a side-dispute over a submitter's reasons for submitting, then blow it off as something that doesn't really interest me.
Then suddenly it seems like he's popping up left and right. It's like something out of a low-grade horror movie. To make matters worse, someone nearby keeps blasting Beatles tunes from their cubicle - not even the good ones. I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.
I still don't fully comprehend this whole Karma Whore concept.
What is the advantage to trying to rack up a whole lot of karma, when from what I understand it's already capped? My karma read "excellent" quite some time back, and since then I've gotten high karma on most of my points (it must be my trim Buddha-ish physique)... but other than having two initial points instead of one when my posts are submitted, I don't see how things are any different, nor have I seen anything change since then.
If we rack up massive karma points, do we cross some threshhold? Do we suddenly start seeing articles before they're actually written, or do women start showing up at our door? I'd whore my karma all over the place if the chicks dig it.
I downloaded the source, and took a quick look to make sure it wasn't really something intended to do something nasty.
I then realized that, going over it, it was a little like a Neanderthal trying to figure out how a swiss army knife worked... and just compiled and ran the damned thing.
I scanned over a good bit of the posts here, hoping for some info, and R'd a number of TFA's, but am not much closer to figuring out what I can actually do with this thing (or what collisions are for that matter). I'm even confused by it's parameters (you can pass it either four params or none at all. I'm not clear on what those params actually are for, or what the purpose in the default entries are).
Does anyone have a reference to some useful info that a caveman could understand, or shed some light on how this actually threatens my stylishly antiquated md5 shadow file?
We apologize in advance for any actual evolutionarily-challenged cave dwellers who may take offense at the above post.
I sincerely apologize for this...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 4, Funny
So really, the "main legal usage" of a P2P network varies from country to country. When you say that "anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure", you're implying that all P2P users are from the United States and are bound by American laws. This is simply untrue. With the Internet being a worldwide phenomenon, "you can't do that, it's illegal!" isn't really a viable argument.
While that's a valid point (and one of the stumbling blocks on this whole Internet Internationalization shindig), it's also a problem.
Snuff films, child pornography, and other extreme issues aren't illegal everywhere. You're dealing with an entirely different level of illegality here (protection from exploitation, rather than protection of revenue), but the issue is similar - different places have different laws, which not only affects the enforcement of those laws, but also brings their illegality into question.
And no, nobody has lost any income due to "piracy." They never had that person's money to begin with. No lives have been disrupted due to copyright violations alone. All evidence proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that copyright violations represent zero danger to the income potential of content producers.
Piracy, in terms of downloading pirated content for free, does not directly take a cent from anyone. However, it DOES have an impact. Unless you have zero income, you're one of the masses of potential consumers who will be inclined to buy a dvd or cd. Given no freebie route to this media, you'd end up buying some. Quite a few people used to buy a lot - I used to see massive tape and cd collections in the people's places I'd go to. Given unrestricted freebie access, you're less inclined to purchase these products - and it seems many do not. I now know more people with massive drives full of movies and music, but who own a few dvd's and no cd's at all. I still buy one dvd a week - just as I have since I got my first dvd player some time back - and people tend to look at me like a weirdo for having a stockpile of divx movies, and slowly supplanting them with the real thing. When people think like that, it does have an impact on the industry that makes these films.
When you download music, you're not taking the food from an artist's mouth - the music industry does that for you. When you choose not to buy music out of protest over prices, etc, you're denying them their income but take nothing from them. However, when you choose not to buy, but STILL get the music anyway, there is no moral ground to stand on - you're taking advantage of their work and returning nothing. I've done it myself, but I don't defend it in any way. The only defense I'd ever give for myself is that I still buy music (for the car - standard mp3 doesn't fulfill a real sound system), but my mp3 collection allows me to expand my horizons in ways I never had access to before (though I suppose XM and Sirius might be changing that as well).
Downloading isn't stealing, it's not theft, and it's not the high crime the industries want to turn it into. But it IS still wrong. Having been an unrepentant pirate since my Apple II+ days, I should know. Once I started working I started buying most of what went on my computer, but there's still a good bit of software on my system that I don't exactly have a license for. I'm even thinking of, for the first time ever, actually PURCHASING a copy of Windows. I should be spanked.
As much as I agree with you that banning open P2P is little different from banning any recording device, I believe it's wishfull thinking to believe that the majority of P2P users are not pirating. While there is a wealth of uncopyrighted content (from hillarious amature videos made purely to entertain the masses to no-name bands who want exposure), it has always seemed to me that almost all the content I've seen on the various networks I've perused, and the contents of the shared directories I've seen, are almost exclusively copyrighted music and movies. There are many exceptions, but I believe that is a minority. The main legal usage is most likely from peer-distributed software (such as WOW updates, etc), and given time legal usage WILL exceed any other use as use of these networks for efficient content distribution continues to spread into the mainstream.
I have no figures to back that up, and find most of the figures I've seen from both sides highly suspect. But from everything I've seen on p2p, everything I've heard from people using p2p networks, and all my personal experience in general, anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure. It's human nature to take what you can get, when there's little guilt involved (and let's face it - who feels THAT guilty about downloading, especially those of us with a large collection of legally-purchased cd's and dvd's?).
That said, legislation and judgements aimed at restricting and even banning p2p are no different from big radio's attempts to block tape recorders throughout the 70's, or the even more brute-force attempts by Disney and others to block the sale of VCRs to the public in the early 80's... or attempts to "tax" all cd and dvd blank sales to compensate for piracy. It's misguided, it's shortsighted, and it's almost certainly going to be shortlived as far as laws go - judging by recent history.
It's perfect. When you go there, you see nothing. This is probably the best way to visually describe a quark - something which is, for all intents and purposes, nothing that builds something.
I can understand people being upset over Ep III not meeting our near-impossible expectations (I wanted more Vader action, dammit!), I don't understand how people can compare Ep III disfavorably to things like Firefly (fairly cool movie, but not exactly one of the better sci-fi's made recently) and Battlestar Galactica (which I can't even understand how that show keeps it's viewers - take away the special effects and it's not even interesting).
Ep III is not what I started hoping for back when I was a midget struggling my way through a Starlog that I could barely read yet, but I'm pretty sure Ep III will be a movie for the next generation, while a lot of the current crop of "popular this year" movies won't be.
If you haven't seen Firefly yet (it's currently in previews), I was initially ready to blast it but it's honestly a fairly decent sci-fi, even if you're not into Whedon's work (which I am not). While it's sort of pop-scifi-ish, and seems built primarily around quips and oneliners, it's blessed with one of the very best villians I have seen in years. He's not quite Khan or Zod level, but as far as sci-fi goes he can hold his own in any evil-pissing contest.
What do you mean by it being a "disappearing finish line"?
In my case, I choose the first cell division because the dna is still in a state of flux until that moment. That's why failed conception (as seen in in vitro fertilization in humans and other animals) usually results in cellular death during initial mitosis, rather than before. The cell usually dies, when it dies, during the division process itself. Once it makes that first successful division, the dna is set in stone, and at that point you have a new distinct genetic sequence. Before that you simply have genetic material from two parents in the process of combining within an ovum.
There is no one absolute point to go by. Some people say "the moment of conception", which sounds great but itself means little to me for reasons stated above. Others give the moment of neural activation (which used to be my opinion at one point - but it doesn't work because there is no specific point, and the organism itself exists before that point). Other people say birth - there's some logic to that, but it doesn't seem most people will accept that. As for seperate sperm and ova, I don't think anyone considers those human (as they're unable to reproduce on their own, have incomplete genetic material and thus very limited lifespans, and by many standards are not even independant organisms except on a superficial level).
As for implantation, that's nothing more than it's support system. Before implantation, the cells themselves are able to draw some nutrients but require a specific source for further development (or else the blastocyst simply chokes on it's own waste products, from the inside out, since the individual cells have enough stored material to keep going slightly past that point). That has no affect on it's identity, it's just it's food supply.
Slashdot Mirror
That book was both one of the best depictions of alien life invading Earth, and a pretty bad attempt at characters and dramatization.
The author had a pretty good understand of human psychology and behavior, but didn't seem to be very good at writing dialogue or working out personal motivations.
We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
We are allied with Eurasia. We have always been allied with Eurasia.
I don't know about virtual keyboards. There have been many touch-screen style keyboards, and I have used membrane keyboards that were sensitive enough to practically be touch screen. I have never liked using a single one. I like the tactile feel of a full-sized keyboard. I actually even miss the Click you got from the older ones. I don't need anything heavy, but I like the curved spring-loaded keys, and it makes it far easier to stay aligned when you have tactile feedback.
Virtual keyboards might see use, but I think physical keyboards will remain the primary preference - one reason they haven't really changed much over the decades.
While the cost of this sort of hardware will be prohibitive for large-scale use, I fully believe that it's just this sort of interface that will someday replace the mouse. Keyboards are likely to remain in use for a very long time, but mice are simply a pointing device... and we all come with a natural built-in pointer (our fingers).
In the comming decades, I'd expect people's "monitors" to be replaced with hardware similar to this drafting-table design.
[insert insanely witty riposte regarding the awesome might of my hardware here]
You haven't lost the argument until you make a nazi reference.
Godwin's Law is a powerful thing.
Not to mention the possibility that the question itself has no meaning (that there is no such things as "before the big bang")
That's the part that I think gets most people. It seems the majority of people view the Big Bang as being a literal explosion that occured in an indeterminate location, is expanding to fill space, and occured at a particular point in time (and by default existed as something else before then).
The BB WAS the expansion of space AND time. Space, as a concept, has no meaning except after the incident. Time, likewise, has no meaning until the incident.
If you started with this moment, and tracked it back through the years, centuries, millenia, and eons, would get closer and closer to the BB (or whatever happened). If the BB theory is at all correct, you could track it all the way back to the "moment of creation", but no further... because that would have been when time began to exist.
People who ponder "where" the big bang occured do not understand the theory. People who ponder about before the big bang likewise do not understand the theory.
I believe Poon is covered under that whole Lust clause.
I think you'll find that it's good taste that prevents the UK from watching American football :). It's not a real sport if you have to stop for a rest every few seconds, and it must be a game for girly men if you need to wear armour! It's basically rubgy with padding and resting, isn't it?
...And players who are large enough to turn your average rugby player into something like red paste.
...as opposed to a bunch of (relatively) half-naked men scrabbling in the dirt for a ball, as in rugby.
Serious injury is common on the football field (and I mean Football, North American style), and that's WITH armor. Considering that football players collide with a force that often snaps bone, and how often they go flying into the air and land on their heads, or have 5 large men leaping onto them full-force... that armor is what keeps them alive.
If you want to bring in a number of auxilliary driving forces, you might as well enumerate the seven deadly sins. When you think about it, these provide almost all the core reasons why we have advanced as fast as we have, compared to other cultures throughout history.
Many cultures have risen to heights, both technological and philosophical, some of which we ourselves can't yet lay claim to. But from a historical standpoint, Eurocentric societies have rapidly moved from being quite literally the armpit of the known world, to the absolute domination of the globe (both the US and modern Russia count as eurocentrically derrived, in the long run). Only China and the middle east can claim to have had a global impact worth comparing.
Why? Simple. Europeans, back in the dark ages, identified, enumerated, and understood human nature. They knew their sins, which made them easier to pursue.
Greed - the need to make money, and to find more ways of getting as much of it as possible.
Sloth - just plain lazyness. We want our machines to do the work for us.
Gluttony - the drive to produce more plentiful food, that tastes better, regardless of nutritional content or actual need.
Wrath - newer and better ways to kill our fellow man
Envy - one nation sees what another has, and wants it for themselves, so they have to figure it out for themselves.
Pride - the need to produce something better than what's out there, to become famous for your creations, or for national pride.
Lust - I'm not sure how to articulate why this actually drives western progress, but I'm certain it's the keystone to all our social evolution.
Erm... that's "phonograph". Not to be confused with "phograph", which is only a product of my diseased imagination.
Damned wireless keyboards...
Vision?
Haven't a great many of the popular advances in the 19th and 20th century been driven by marketing, and the desire to draw attention for purposes of profit? The earliest visions of the phograph's uses were more oriented towards automated marketing than towards the memoranda and music they were actually used for. Color printing was exclusively for the purpose of making product packaging more appealing, and television only became possible as a mass-market item when it was married to marketing (to this day, commercials are the life blood of the networks).
Early radio broadcasts were practically commerials with a thin veil of entertainment laid over them. It took a little while for radio commercials to seperate from the actual content (when they started announcing the products during frequent breaks, rather than the programs constantly hawking a product within a poorly contrived story).
Holograms were invented simply to see it done, but the bulk of the funding came from companies who sought to apply them as the new wonder-label (which turned out to remain prohibitively expensive for some time, and just never that appealing).
Western technology has been driven by three primary needs:
* direct threats - be it war, disease, famine, etc. Death avoidance.
* misguided ambition - attempting to create something unrealistic, and ending up with something unexpected (and often unnoticed for some time)
* commerce - the inherent desire to make people give you money
Altruism is a noble thing, but it's greed that makes the world actually turn.
I actually take the time to read a side-dispute over a submitter's reasons for submitting, then blow it off as something that doesn't really interest me.
Then suddenly it seems like he's popping up left and right. It's like something out of a low-grade horror movie. To make matters worse, someone nearby keeps blasting Beatles tunes from their cubicle - not even the good ones. I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.
I still don't fully comprehend this whole Karma Whore concept.
What is the advantage to trying to rack up a whole lot of karma, when from what I understand it's already capped? My karma read "excellent" quite some time back, and since then I've gotten high karma on most of my points (it must be my trim Buddha-ish physique)... but other than having two initial points instead of one when my posts are submitted, I don't see how things are any different, nor have I seen anything change since then.
If we rack up massive karma points, do we cross some threshhold? Do we suddenly start seeing articles before they're actually written, or do women start showing up at our door? I'd whore my karma all over the place if the chicks dig it.
54550 Tackhead. "Post" unword. "Crime" unword. Reference Newspeak v42. Antetalk reject, references unwords, edit fullwise, verging Badthink.
(note that the word "crime" itself was scheduled to be removed, as "bad" was considered more than adequate)
I downloaded the source, and took a quick look to make sure it wasn't really something intended to do something nasty.
I then realized that, going over it, it was a little like a Neanderthal trying to figure out how a swiss army knife worked... and just compiled and ran the damned thing.
I scanned over a good bit of the posts here, hoping for some info, and R'd a number of TFA's, but am not much closer to figuring out what I can actually do with this thing (or what collisions are for that matter). I'm even confused by it's parameters (you can pass it either four params or none at all. I'm not clear on what those params actually are for, or what the purpose in the default entries are).
Does anyone have a reference to some useful info that a caveman could understand, or shed some light on how this actually threatens my stylishly antiquated md5 shadow file?
We apologize in advance for any actual evolutionarily-challenged cave dwellers who may take offense at the above post.
The DRM WANTS to be free!
So really, the "main legal usage" of a P2P network varies from country to country. When you say that "anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure", you're implying that all P2P users are from the United States and are bound by American laws. This is simply untrue. With the Internet being a worldwide phenomenon, "you can't do that, it's illegal!" isn't really a viable argument.
While that's a valid point (and one of the stumbling blocks on this whole Internet Internationalization shindig), it's also a problem.
Snuff films, child pornography, and other extreme issues aren't illegal everywhere. You're dealing with an entirely different level of illegality here (protection from exploitation, rather than protection of revenue), but the issue is similar - different places have different laws, which not only affects the enforcement of those laws, but also brings their illegality into question.
And no, nobody has lost any income due to "piracy." They never had that person's money to begin with. No lives have been disrupted due to copyright violations alone. All evidence proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that copyright violations represent zero danger to the income potential of content producers.
Piracy, in terms of downloading pirated content for free, does not directly take a cent from anyone. However, it DOES have an impact. Unless you have zero income, you're one of the masses of potential consumers who will be inclined to buy a dvd or cd. Given no freebie route to this media, you'd end up buying some. Quite a few people used to buy a lot - I used to see massive tape and cd collections in the people's places I'd go to. Given unrestricted freebie access, you're less inclined to purchase these products - and it seems many do not. I now know more people with massive drives full of movies and music, but who own a few dvd's and no cd's at all. I still buy one dvd a week - just as I have since I got my first dvd player some time back - and people tend to look at me like a weirdo for having a stockpile of divx movies, and slowly supplanting them with the real thing. When people think like that, it does have an impact on the industry that makes these films.
When you download music, you're not taking the food from an artist's mouth - the music industry does that for you. When you choose not to buy music out of protest over prices, etc, you're denying them their income but take nothing from them. However, when you choose not to buy, but STILL get the music anyway, there is no moral ground to stand on - you're taking advantage of their work and returning nothing. I've done it myself, but I don't defend it in any way. The only defense I'd ever give for myself is that I still buy music (for the car - standard mp3 doesn't fulfill a real sound system), but my mp3 collection allows me to expand my horizons in ways I never had access to before (though I suppose XM and Sirius might be changing that as well).
Downloading isn't stealing, it's not theft, and it's not the high crime the industries want to turn it into. But it IS still wrong. Having been an unrepentant pirate since my Apple II+ days, I should know. Once I started working I started buying most of what went on my computer, but there's still a good bit of software on my system that I don't exactly have a license for. I'm even thinking of, for the first time ever, actually PURCHASING a copy of Windows. I should be spanked.
As much as I agree with you that banning open P2P is little different from banning any recording device, I believe it's wishfull thinking to believe that the majority of P2P users are not pirating. While there is a wealth of uncopyrighted content (from hillarious amature videos made purely to entertain the masses to no-name bands who want exposure), it has always seemed to me that almost all the content I've seen on the various networks I've perused, and the contents of the shared directories I've seen, are almost exclusively copyrighted music and movies. There are many exceptions, but I believe that is a minority. The main legal usage is most likely from peer-distributed software (such as WOW updates, etc), and given time legal usage WILL exceed any other use as use of these networks for efficient content distribution continues to spread into the mainstream.
I have no figures to back that up, and find most of the figures I've seen from both sides highly suspect. But from everything I've seen on p2p, everything I've heard from people using p2p networks, and all my personal experience in general, anyone would be hard pressed to convince me that the majority of p2p users are obedient law-abiding responsible citizens who's intentions (and hard drives) are wholly pure. It's human nature to take what you can get, when there's little guilt involved (and let's face it - who feels THAT guilty about downloading, especially those of us with a large collection of legally-purchased cd's and dvd's?).
That said, legislation and judgements aimed at restricting and even banning p2p are no different from big radio's attempts to block tape recorders throughout the 70's, or the even more brute-force attempts by Disney and others to block the sale of VCRs to the public in the early 80's... or attempts to "tax" all cd and dvd blank sales to compensate for piracy. It's misguided, it's shortsighted, and it's almost certainly going to be shortlived as far as laws go - judging by recent history.
It's perfect. When you go there, you see nothing. This is probably the best way to visually describe a quark - something which is, for all intents and purposes, nothing that builds something.
So can these things be modified to handle pitchers? I rarely ever get individual beers, as I count my beers by the liter.
...the robot barkeep, R2 style.
Also, this brings us one step closer to humanities highest achievement to be...
I've got a fever... and the only perscription... is more cowbell!
I can understand people being upset over Ep III not meeting our near-impossible expectations (I wanted more Vader action, dammit!), I don't understand how people can compare Ep III disfavorably to things like Firefly (fairly cool movie, but not exactly one of the better sci-fi's made recently) and Battlestar Galactica (which I can't even understand how that show keeps it's viewers - take away the special effects and it's not even interesting).
Ep III is not what I started hoping for back when I was a midget struggling my way through a Starlog that I could barely read yet, but I'm pretty sure Ep III will be a movie for the next generation, while a lot of the current crop of "popular this year" movies won't be.
If you haven't seen Firefly yet (it's currently in previews), I was initially ready to blast it but it's honestly a fairly decent sci-fi, even if you're not into Whedon's work (which I am not). While it's sort of pop-scifi-ish, and seems built primarily around quips and oneliners, it's blessed with one of the very best villians I have seen in years. He's not quite Khan or Zod level, but as far as sci-fi goes he can hold his own in any evil-pissing contest.
What do you mean by it being a "disappearing finish line"?
In my case, I choose the first cell division because the dna is still in a state of flux until that moment. That's why failed conception (as seen in in vitro fertilization in humans and other animals) usually results in cellular death during initial mitosis, rather than before. The cell usually dies, when it dies, during the division process itself. Once it makes that first successful division, the dna is set in stone, and at that point you have a new distinct genetic sequence. Before that you simply have genetic material from two parents in the process of combining within an ovum.
There is no one absolute point to go by. Some people say "the moment of conception", which sounds great but itself means little to me for reasons stated above. Others give the moment of neural activation (which used to be my opinion at one point - but it doesn't work because there is no specific point, and the organism itself exists before that point). Other people say birth - there's some logic to that, but it doesn't seem most people will accept that. As for seperate sperm and ova, I don't think anyone considers those human (as they're unable to reproduce on their own, have incomplete genetic material and thus very limited lifespans, and by many standards are not even independant organisms except on a superficial level).
As for implantation, that's nothing more than it's support system. Before implantation, the cells themselves are able to draw some nutrients but require a specific source for further development (or else the blastocyst simply chokes on it's own waste products, from the inside out, since the individual cells have enough stored material to keep going slightly past that point). That has no affect on it's identity, it's just it's food supply.