Good point. Worth noting that ToS took a lot of its cues from ancient mythology, and the succubus of legend (which is what this episode riffs on) is rather different in its behaviour from the incubus. The succubus also has precursors in sirens and similar myths, where the goal is death of the possession of the man's soul. The incubus is really just a guy out to get his wicked way with women. These two parallel threads continue the old view that casual sex is fun for blokes but makes victims of women, and the notion of the wife as a "ball and chain" to the man. By starting with a female succubus archetype, the episode plugged into existing folk consciousness, then added the twist that equalised men and women in terms of gender politics.
I'd like to see what Steven Moffat could do with Star Trek.
Yes, it would be hugely entertaining to focus almost exclusively on the angst and loneliness of being a starship captain, seeking solice in superficial relationships to try to ease the eternal pain.... And the angst and loneliness of being a half-human Vulcan, seeking solice in superficial logic to try to ease the eternal pain.... And the angst and loneliness of being in love with your captain, who does not even look at you.... And the angst and loneliness of every single creature in the universe being your sworn enemy, existing only because of you and only to hunt you down and destroy you.
Moffat's an emo, writing self-indulgent cathartic claptrap, plumbing the depths of self-doubt, resolved in a flash of sudden self-confidence and a stupidly bombastic piece of near-tuneless music then "bang, flash...I am the Doctor" and done.
Having not seen the film I can't comment, but I'm assuming that the mechanism of time-travel was established relatively early on. This would make it Deus in machina -- the all-powerful element is part of the known continuity of the universe.
Yeah, but the factories were shut. How can you make a gun when your entire manufacturing infrastructure has been undermined by replicators that can reproduce anything instantly?!?
Except that <<spoiler alert>> they let him live, so he is still alive to come back and attempt to kill them, whereas if he won, they would be dead and wouldn't be able to come back and attempt to stop him. The only realistic winner in that fight was De Nomolos....
Even Bill and fucking Ted knew that time travel gave you a hell of an advantage but we are supposed to buy that somebody that has the ability to go back in time is too God damned stupid to understand that concept? Really?
Although Bill and Ted suffered a serious cause-and-effect gap. Spoiler alert! How could they defeat Chuck de Nomolos if he was willing to kill them and they weren't willing to kill him? As soon as he got out of prison, he could kill them. Life imprisonment? Well he could just come back from after his breakout to help himself break out....
Except sketches, designs, moulds, casts etc are all talking about artwork. Your argument suggests it would be OK to make a complete walkthrough if the LPer recreated the graphics from the ground up.
I think in fact not only should Nintendo not get ANY money, because they already did when they sold the movie making tool to the customer, but they should have to pay for product placement. Stick that in your court and litigate it. Remember Hollywood will be watching that one closely, and could even donate some shysters to the cause.
Hollywood's already established precedent. If you have guys watching the TV in your film, you have to get an agreement with the people who made the programme they're watching. They can license it for free if they want, and they can even pay for product placement if they want, but they're well within their rights to demand cold, hard cash.
Nintendo are not safe from a lawsuit for theft of copyright (in the most genuine and accurate sense) just because they wrote the game that is being played.
Subtle point: they don't have to claim copyright on the entire video, simply on the visual material depicted therein, and you can't argue that an LP doesn't include their material. Now there's the question of royalties. Just because you own part of the copyright (assuming playing the game is a "creative" act, which is not necessarily a safe assumption), doesn't mean you can claim part of the royalties. Nintendo can set whatever licensing rates they chose to use their copyright material within your work. It just so happens that this time, they're claiming 100% of the royalties, and LPers don't have enough influence to negotiate.
(To clarify: yes, I'll keep working on it, but I've made virtually no progress trying to do it in my spare time, and I need to sit down and dedicate myself to it for a solid chunk of time in order to really work my way through the biggest conceptual problems. Going full-time dev is a massive gamble, and it relies on the possibility of a big payoff at the end of it.)
Ban copyright tomorrow, and I'll go looking for an office job. I'm not going to dedicate a year to perfecting the (hopefully) ground-breaking piece of software I've been fiddling with for years if I can't sell it....
To weeks... I work now on a map of the town with a satellite imagery from 2010. And besides it is offset by about 100 meters at some spots.
Newer imagery likely exists, but hasn't been licensed yet.
And the moon would only be able to get consistent imagery of the tropics, because it can't look downwards on the high latitudes except during rare extreme phases.
Does anyone have an idea why they're doing this? IIRC the distance to geostationary orbit is bigger than the omne to ground, so why waste energy for that long distance stuff?
The ISS orbits the Earth 15.7 times a day. It has an orbital period of 92 minutes and 50 seconds. That means that it's rotational velocity relative to the centre of the Earth is almost 4 degrees per minute, which is pretty difficult to track.
Of course, that's assuming your antenna is at the centre of the Earth, and the Earth doesn't obstruct signals (not true). In the real world, your antenna is on the surface of the Earth, and is only going to be able to communicate with the space station when it's passing overhead. The angular velocity of the station relative to you is going to be much, much higher than 4 degrees a minute, because it's coming mostly towards you, passing relatively close. (The Earth's radius is 6371 km and the ISS orbits at 330 to 435 km of altitude, so it's pretty close.
If you can't picture this difference in relative velocity, imagine a fast car on a long circular race track. Imagine you're standing in the middle and turning to watch it as it circles you at constant speed. Now imagine yourself trackside. The car whings past you in the blink of an eye, then takes a seemingly long time to go round the rest of the track, and when it gets back to you, it whings past again.
So while the path of the ISS can be accurately computed in advance and could theoretically be programmed into a motorised antenna, it would have to be a very very expensive motorised antenna, and it would have to be meticulously cleaned before every use to avoid any of the bearings jammed even for a fraction of a second.
Not only that, but if we picture ourselves back at the trackside, we get the familiar weeeEEEEEE-Yowoooooooooo as the car passes us: the so-called Doppler effect. Any direct transmission between the ISS and ground stations would suffer the same distortion due to relative speeds. A broadcast to geostationary orbit suffers no doppler effect relative to any point on the surface of the Earth (obviously -- zero relative velocity), and the distortion due to the relative speed of the ISS vs geostationary is pretty much negligible (the ISS's orbit has a radius of approximately 6700km, whereas a geostationary satellite's rotation has a radius of 42000km -- you're no longer at the race track; you're now watching someone driving in a small circle at the opposite side of the car park, and the engine noise doesn't change pitch perceptibly).
I think that's an autocorrect error. "Space is the past. The three Martian lunch is dead." Little known fact: the majority of astronauts were members of the NRA, and they went to space on a big game hunt. Aliens are extinct.
What's unacceptable about boycotting someone because of their views?
It's none of your business what I think. Would you like to be isolated from society simply because you don't believe in God, or because you believe in the "wrong" god? Should people not buy sweets from a sweetshop run by a man who believes farming animals for fur is OK, but isn't a fur farmer himself? Should I not shop at a shop where the owner believes that torturing suspected terrorists is acceptable, even though he's never said it to me?
Purchasing books from Card means my money will help in a bigoted crusade against a people that makes him feel funny inside.
That's all well and good, but that's not what you said before:
With Orson Scott Card's emphatically homophobic world view, I refuse to help finance any of his works.
There is a huge difference between boycotting someone for their views and for their actions. Only the latter is acceptable, yet you were proposing the former.
The reason Ender's Game is a great book is that it's written engagingly.
If this is the case, then there's no point in adapting it to film, because you lose the writing and are just left with the story, which appears to be somewhat cliched.
Consider the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a classic short story known for its atmospheric writing. But it's all about the writing and you couldn't make a film out of the plot — Tim Burton's film took practically nothing from the narrative structure of the story, because there was nothing there to work with. And yet the original still has some value to a reader.
Freedom of speech? There's a difference between allowing someone to speak and supporting them in it. Personally, I think the basic premise of Ender's Game is now so old that it's hardly worth making a film of it, so I won't be going to see it. But the question of whether going to see it is funding hate speech or not is a little too complicated to be brushed off with simple "free speech". OSC has more prominence than me because he's richer and more famous than me. Surely then "free speech" suggests that I should be given lots of money and lots of press so that my free speech is as valuable as his...? No, of course not. But increasing his wealth and public profile effectively aids him in spreading his message.
Hubbert's mistake was thinking of oil reserves as all being more or less alike.
Says who? He did nothing of the sort.
When we look at the alternative hydrocarbon sources, we see that he was wrong to do so. What we can say about most of the newly-discovered reserves is that vast though they may be, they are much more expensive to extract than the traditional oilfields.
Thats EXACTLY what Hubbert said! The easy stuff is extracted first, and then the hard to get stuff. New discoveries of hard to get stuff are absolutely part of the theory from the very start.
Look again. He was talking about the easy half and the hard half -- a peak at 50%. And yet we have now used up most of the easy-to-extract oil, and with the finds of new oil shales and deep sea reserves, we reckon we haven't used anywhere near half the total reserves. Hubbert's model was an oversimplification, and it made an assumption that new finds would fit previous patterns, rather than be dominated by radically different types of reserves.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that JJ Abrams didn't make a movie for Star Trek fans. He made a movie for movie fans.
As a proper cinema fan, I take great umbrage to that. Movies are an art. These films aren't.
Star Wars wasn't cowboys and indians... it was mostly people of equal technology and intellect, but republicanism vs authoritarianism.
Good point. Worth noting that ToS took a lot of its cues from ancient mythology, and the succubus of legend (which is what this episode riffs on) is rather different in its behaviour from the incubus. The succubus also has precursors in sirens and similar myths, where the goal is death of the possession of the man's soul. The incubus is really just a guy out to get his wicked way with women. These two parallel threads continue the old view that casual sex is fun for blokes but makes victims of women, and the notion of the wife as a "ball and chain" to the man. By starting with a female succubus archetype, the episode plugged into existing folk consciousness, then added the twist that equalised men and women in terms of gender politics.
I'd like to see what Steven Moffat could do with Star Trek.
Yes, it would be hugely entertaining to focus almost exclusively on the angst and loneliness of being a starship captain, seeking solice in superficial relationships to try to ease the eternal pain.... And the angst and loneliness of being a half-human Vulcan, seeking solice in superficial logic to try to ease the eternal pain.... And the angst and loneliness of being in love with your captain, who does not even look at you.... And the angst and loneliness of every single creature in the universe being your sworn enemy, existing only because of you and only to hunt you down and destroy you.
Moffat's an emo, writing self-indulgent cathartic claptrap, plumbing the depths of self-doubt, resolved in a flash of sudden self-confidence and a stupidly bombastic piece of near-tuneless music then "bang, flash...I am the Doctor" and done.
Having not seen the film I can't comment, but I'm assuming that the mechanism of time-travel was established relatively early on. This would make it Deus in machina -- the all-powerful element is part of the known continuity of the universe.
Yeah, but the factories were shut. How can you make a gun when your entire manufacturing infrastructure has been undermined by replicators that can reproduce anything instantly?!?
Except that <<spoiler alert>> they let him live, so he is still alive to come back and attempt to kill them, whereas if he won, they would be dead and wouldn't be able to come back and attempt to stop him. The only realistic winner in that fight was De Nomolos....
Even Bill and fucking Ted knew that time travel gave you a hell of an advantage but we are supposed to buy that somebody that has the ability to go back in time is too God damned stupid to understand that concept? Really?
Although Bill and Ted suffered a serious cause-and-effect gap. Spoiler alert! How could they defeat Chuck de Nomolos if he was willing to kill them and they weren't willing to kill him? As soon as he got out of prison, he could kill them. Life imprisonment? Well he could just come back from after his breakout to help himself break out....
Except sketches, designs, moulds, casts etc are all talking about artwork. Your argument suggests it would be OK to make a complete walkthrough if the LPer recreated the graphics from the ground up.
I think in fact not only should Nintendo not get ANY money, because they already did when they sold the movie making tool to the customer, but they should have to pay for product placement. Stick that in your court and litigate it. Remember Hollywood will be watching that one closely, and could even donate some shysters to the cause.
Hollywood's already established precedent. If you have guys watching the TV in your film, you have to get an agreement with the people who made the programme they're watching. They can license it for free if they want, and they can even pay for product placement if they want, but they're well within their rights to demand cold, hard cash.
Nintendo are not safe from a lawsuit for theft of copyright (in the most genuine and accurate sense) just because they wrote the game that is being played.
Subtle point: they don't have to claim copyright on the entire video, simply on the visual material depicted therein, and you can't argue that an LP doesn't include their material. Now there's the question of royalties. Just because you own part of the copyright (assuming playing the game is a "creative" act, which is not necessarily a safe assumption), doesn't mean you can claim part of the royalties. Nintendo can set whatever licensing rates they chose to use their copyright material within your work. It just so happens that this time, they're claiming 100% of the royalties, and LPers don't have enough influence to negotiate.
(To clarify: yes, I'll keep working on it, but I've made virtually no progress trying to do it in my spare time, and I need to sit down and dedicate myself to it for a solid chunk of time in order to really work my way through the biggest conceptual problems. Going full-time dev is a massive gamble, and it relies on the possibility of a big payoff at the end of it.)
Ergo: Copyrights are retarding and wrong.
Ban copyright tomorrow, and I'll go looking for an office job. I'm not going to dedicate a year to perfecting the (hopefully) ground-breaking piece of software I've been fiddling with for years if I can't sell it....
To weeks... I work now on a map of the town with a satellite imagery from 2010. And besides it is offset by about 100 meters at some spots.
Newer imagery likely exists, but hasn't been licensed yet.
And the moon would only be able to get consistent imagery of the tropics, because it can't look downwards on the high latitudes except during rare extreme phases.
Does anyone have an idea why they're doing this? IIRC the distance to geostationary orbit is bigger than the omne to ground, so why waste energy for that long distance stuff?
The ISS orbits the Earth 15.7 times a day. It has an orbital period of 92 minutes and 50 seconds. That means that it's rotational velocity relative to the centre of the Earth is almost 4 degrees per minute, which is pretty difficult to track.
Of course, that's assuming your antenna is at the centre of the Earth, and the Earth doesn't obstruct signals (not true). In the real world, your antenna is on the surface of the Earth, and is only going to be able to communicate with the space station when it's passing overhead. The angular velocity of the station relative to you is going to be much, much higher than 4 degrees a minute, because it's coming mostly towards you, passing relatively close. (The Earth's radius is 6371 km and the ISS orbits at 330 to 435 km of altitude, so it's pretty close.
If you can't picture this difference in relative velocity, imagine a fast car on a long circular race track. Imagine you're standing in the middle and turning to watch it as it circles you at constant speed. Now imagine yourself trackside. The car whings past you in the blink of an eye, then takes a seemingly long time to go round the rest of the track, and when it gets back to you, it whings past again.
So while the path of the ISS can be accurately computed in advance and could theoretically be programmed into a motorised antenna, it would have to be a very very expensive motorised antenna, and it would have to be meticulously cleaned before every use to avoid any of the bearings jammed even for a fraction of a second.
Not only that, but if we picture ourselves back at the trackside, we get the familiar weeeEEEEEE-Yowoooooooooo as the car passes us: the so-called Doppler effect. Any direct transmission between the ISS and ground stations would suffer the same distortion due to relative speeds. A broadcast to geostationary orbit suffers no doppler effect relative to any point on the surface of the Earth (obviously -- zero relative velocity), and the distortion due to the relative speed of the ISS vs geostationary is pretty much negligible (the ISS's orbit has a radius of approximately 6700km, whereas a geostationary satellite's rotation has a radius of 42000km -- you're no longer at the race track; you're now watching someone driving in a small circle at the opposite side of the car park, and the engine noise doesn't change pitch perceptibly).
By claiming there is no conspiracy, you prove to those who believe in the conspiracy that you are part of the conspiracy.
That's what they want you to believe.
Space hasn't ratified the Berne Convention.
I think that's an autocorrect error. "Space is the past. The three Martian lunch is dead." Little known fact: the majority of astronauts were members of the NRA, and they went to space on a big game hunt. Aliens are extinct.
What's unacceptable about boycotting someone because of their views?
It's none of your business what I think. Would you like to be isolated from society simply because you don't believe in God, or because you believe in the "wrong" god? Should people not buy sweets from a sweetshop run by a man who believes farming animals for fur is OK, but isn't a fur farmer himself? Should I not shop at a shop where the owner believes that torturing suspected terrorists is acceptable, even though he's never said it to me?
Purchasing books from Card means my money will help in a bigoted crusade against a people that makes him feel funny inside.
That's all well and good, but that's not what you said before:
With Orson Scott Card's emphatically homophobic world view, I refuse to help finance any of his works.
There is a huge difference between boycotting someone for their views and for their actions. Only the latter is acceptable, yet you were proposing the former.
The reason Ender's Game is a great book is that it's written engagingly.
If this is the case, then there's no point in adapting it to film, because you lose the writing and are just left with the story, which appears to be somewhat cliched.
Consider the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a classic short story known for its atmospheric writing. But it's all about the writing and you couldn't make a film out of the plot — Tim Burton's film took practically nothing from the narrative structure of the story, because there was nothing there to work with. And yet the original still has some value to a reader.
bugger wars
You don't find much buggery in Orson Scott Card's works...
Freedom of speech? There's a difference between allowing someone to speak and supporting them in it. Personally, I think the basic premise of Ender's Game is now so old that it's hardly worth making a film of it, so I won't be going to see it. But the question of whether going to see it is funding hate speech or not is a little too complicated to be brushed off with simple "free speech". OSC has more prominence than me because he's richer and more famous than me. Surely then "free speech" suggests that I should be given lots of money and lots of press so that my free speech is as valuable as his...? No, of course not. But increasing his wealth and public profile effectively aids him in spreading his message.
Hubbert's mistake was thinking of oil reserves as all being more or less alike.
Says who? He did nothing of the sort.
When we look at the alternative hydrocarbon sources, we see that he was wrong to do so. What we can say about most of the newly-discovered reserves is that vast though they may be, they are much more expensive to extract than the traditional oilfields.
Thats EXACTLY what Hubbert said! The easy stuff is extracted first, and then the hard to get stuff. New discoveries of hard to get stuff are absolutely part of the theory from the very start.
Look again. He was talking about the easy half and the hard half -- a peak at 50%. And yet we have now used up most of the easy-to-extract oil, and with the finds of new oil shales and deep sea reserves, we reckon we haven't used anywhere near half the total reserves. Hubbert's model was an oversimplification, and it made an assumption that new finds would fit previous patterns, rather than be dominated by radically different types of reserves.
The prices came down once we started making them and perfecting them through use....