On the bright side, both The Lord of the Rings and the Dune trilogies are so good that they can be reread often over a lifetime,
Neither one is a trilogy. LotR is a single novel that the publisher broke into three volumes to save costs. If read as three novels, there are serious structural problems that go away when taken as a single novel. As for Dune, Herbert wrote five sequels during his lifetime and none of them are that good (and the last three downright suck).
The story is set 100,000 years in the future. But it's the story of a messiah who can see the future, talk with the past, of all humanity. His life's work is to adjust the path of humanity to avert an impending, otherwise inevitable disaster that would destroy us.
If you're implying that Paul and Leto's communing with their ancestors somehow alters history, I gotta say that's unsupported by the text. When Alia regresses back and talks to Agamemnon, she's not communicating back in time, she's communing with the genetic memory of Agamemnon that she carries, just as she's not altering her own recent past by communing with Baron Harkonen.
Chris Tolkien annoys the crap out of me, though, admittedly, more for "original" tripe like The Treason of Isengard than for compilations like the Silmarillion...
The Treason of Isengard is just as much a compilation as the Silmarillion -- in this case, it's early drafts of The Two Towers. The only original content CRT provides is notes on when various sections were written and how they relate to others.
He's definitely out to make a buck on his father's work.
Making a buck by publishing twelve volumes of early manuscripts and notes that are of interest to scholars, and editing some of those manuscripts so they can be published as completed novels for general fans, is vastly preferable to creating novels from whole cloth like Frank Herbert's son.
So saying that Lucas killed Sci-Fi is like saying that Disney killed cartoons (or "animation"/"animated moveie"): names a single hollywood cartoon/animation that doesn't look like it was produced from Disney's grave
Watership Down (name one Disney movie where the entire screen turns to blood). Waking Life. A Scanner Darkly. Bakshi's Lord of the Rings and the Rankin-Bass Hobbit and Return of the King.
1970 Science fiction movies:
"The Andromeda Strain" (1971)
"Silent Running" (1972)
"Soylent Green" (1973)
"West World" (1973)
"Futureworld" (1976)
"Rollerball" (1975)
"Omega Man" (?)
"Planet of the Apes"
Some thinkers, mostly action based.
If you're going to include Planet of the Apes (1968), why not throw in 2001?
Others you forgot:
Logan's Run THX 1138 Dark Star The Stepford Wives Seconds
And if we go back to the earlier '60s and '50s we get: War of the Worlds 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Incredible Shrinking Man The Time Machine The Thing from Another World It Came From Outer Space Invasion of the Body Snatchers Fantastic Voyage First Men in the Moon Forbidden Planet This Island Earth The Day the Earth Stood Still The Last Man on Earth Panic in Year Zero The Man in the White Suit
And while many of these are action based, they're also thinkers. The original Planet of the Apes may be a big spectacle film, but it's also full of social satire and critiques of the modern world (as are the sequels, which became even more action based). What Lucas started were action spectacles that are just action spectacles (and don't give me any horsehockey about Joseph Campbell -- the fact that he used cliches that are five thousand years old doesn't make Star Wars any more meaningful).
After "Bicentennial Man" (*shudder*), I had hoped that the Good Doctor's work would not be further reduced to trash by Hollywood... but I was wrong. I'll have no part of "I, Robot", the Holly-weird version
That's too bad, because it's actually quite a good riff on the ideas from Asimov's books -- the Three Laws, the Zeroth Law, the Evitable Conflict, acceptance of robots by society -- melded with the plot of R.U.R.
Sales tax, schmales tax, couldn't they just drop the price of the books they sell so their price with sales tax is competitive with amazon without tax?
Sales tax varies from state to state. It's easy to design the system to show the sales tax during the check-out process, when the customer has to enter his location for billing and shipping purposes, but to affect the prices Borders would either have to discount everything by the maximum sales tax rate in the country, or make customers give their location before they can see prices.
Consumer banking keeps retail hours, so you need to be there when the storefront opens, but they have no regard for their customer's schedules; after all, the term "Banker's Hours" exists for a reason.
That would be a great argument ten years ago when most banks still kept banker's hours, but nowadays quite a few stay open until the evening, open their drive-thru at 7:00AM, are open all day Saturday and even on Sundays.
Does anyone honestly think that The Shins would be so popular without iTune's help? They are a great (semi) indie band, and iTunes promotes LOTS of indie bands.
And in ten years, some young punk band will do a song called, "Do You Remember Indie Rock iTunes?" about how Apple has homogenized the indie music market until it all sounds like The Shins.
My mom never bought me the 1541 disk drive. It would taken ages to load a game from the tape.
Tape. I had to hand code all my games in Basic, and if we lost power I had to start over. I just finished writing Impossible Mission last June -- you don't know how hard it is to get VIC to say "Another vee-see-tor. Stay a while. Stay for-ever," using just "poke" commands.
Thing I hated about the C64 disk load times: time. You could make two sandwiches and eat them while watching half a Cosby episode before a game would load.
And the worst were Electronic Arts games -- you'd spend the entire morning watching the ECA logo change from blue to green to cyan to orange to yellow...
can you site a case where europeans pay a state sales tax?
European comes to the US, goes into a souvenir shop and buys a chotchke. Of course, in such a situation, it's perfectly reasonable for a European to pay sales tax, just as an American in Europe would do (even if in Europe he'd be unaware of it because it's a VAT).
I'm no big fan of Merck the company, but this is one case where I'm totally behind them. This is an incredibly effective vaccine. As far as they can tell, it might be 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer,
Merchandising! Get your Wikipedia t-shirt. Your Wikipedia toilet paper. Your Wikipedia breakfast cereal (each batch is produced according to a wiki recipe -- just hope vandals didn't alter the recipe). Wikipedia the flamethrower!
what ever happened to the customer is always right?
Customers switch price-tags and throw hissy-fits in the cashier notices. Customers demand discounts on items because the packaging's damaged. Customers try to return items two years after purchase and want cash back. Customers go into a store, buy an item then walk straight over to the service desk to demand a price-match, because the store gives a bigger discount if you PM after making the purchase than before. Customers have their checks declined and demand the cashier accept them anyway. Customers go into stores, say they were out of town last week, and ask the manager to let them buy items from last week's sales flier.
If you ever worked in retail, you'd know that customers can't be trusted.
(Note that I got half of those examples from my own experience, and half are things from the DVD Talk forum, where this story originated.)
Slashdot Mirror
Please, people, is it necessary to mod up people who post links to wikipedia?
1) Get job with TJX 2) Steal customer credit card information 3) PROFIT!
Others you forgot:
Logan's Run
THX 1138
Dark Star
The Stepford Wives
Seconds
And if we go back to the earlier '60s and '50s we get:
War of the Worlds
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Incredible Shrinking Man
The Time Machine
The Thing from Another World
It Came From Outer Space
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Fantastic Voyage
First Men in the Moon
Forbidden Planet
This Island Earth
The Day the Earth Stood Still
The Last Man on Earth
Panic in Year Zero
The Man in the White Suit
And while many of these are action based, they're also thinkers. The original Planet of the Apes may be a big spectacle film, but it's also full of social satire and critiques of the modern world (as are the sequels, which became even more action based). What Lucas started were action spectacles that are just action spectacles (and don't give me any horsehockey about Joseph Campbell -- the fact that he used cliches that are five thousand years old doesn't make Star Wars any more meaningful).
Sales tax varies from state to state. It's easy to design the system to show the sales tax during the check-out process, when the customer has to enter his location for billing and shipping purposes, but to affect the prices Borders would either have to discount everything by the maximum sales tax rate in the country, or make customers give their location before they can see prices.
Oh my god, speech might persuade people to a position you dislike! We should totally ban it.
Elite is definitely the most glaring omission.
Zelda is just Zork with a GUI.
Quite right. Anyone with knowledge of video game history should be familiar with the Underground Empire.
That would be a great argument ten years ago when most banks still kept banker's hours, but nowadays quite a few stay open until the evening, open their drive-thru at 7:00AM, are open all day Saturday and even on Sundays.
And in ten years, some young punk band will do a song called, "Do You Remember Indie Rock iTunes?" about how Apple has homogenized the indie music market until it all sounds like The Shins.
No, but you should get fired if you're arrested for planning to murder a coworker's girlfriend.
And the worst were Electronic Arts games -- you'd spend the entire morning watching the ECA logo change from blue to green to cyan to orange to yellow...
Merchandising! Get your Wikipedia t-shirt. Your Wikipedia toilet paper. Your Wikipedia breakfast cereal (each batch is produced according to a wiki recipe -- just hope vandals didn't alter the recipe). Wikipedia the flamethrower!
what ever happened to the customer is always right?
Customers switch price-tags and throw hissy-fits in the cashier notices. Customers demand discounts on items because the packaging's damaged. Customers try to return items two years after purchase and want cash back. Customers go into a store, buy an item then walk straight over to the service desk to demand a price-match, because the store gives a bigger discount if you PM after making the purchase than before. Customers have their checks declined and demand the cashier accept them anyway. Customers go into stores, say they were out of town last week, and ask the manager to let them buy items from last week's sales flier. If you ever worked in retail, you'd know that customers can't be trusted. (Note that I got half of those examples from my own experience, and half are things from the DVD Talk forum, where this story originated.)