but from power on to where I can actually do something is just as long in Windows as it is in KDE.
Is this a default distro type install, out of the box, or have you customized some things and turned a bunch of stuff off or something?
I'd honestly like to know- because if I could get a Linux box to boot quicker that would go a long way towards making reasonable for me to use in other places. It does seem that a simple DHCP workstation with minimal services shouldn't take that long to boot.
I agree. If they want to penetrate the Windows market, some things have to change.
Windows XP starts up faster than any "modern" OS I've ever seen. XP looks okay once you turn all the fisher price theme stuff off and it generally works pretty darn good. And it can be had for the price that some people spend on Starbucks coffee every month. Not bad for something you use every single day.
Linux users will say that you only have to boot your machine once a month so startup doesn't matter. How real is this? I've used my share of modern distros and I can tell you unless you are an expert you'll end up rebooting so that certain config changes will take effect because you don't know what grep/ps/kill/stop/restart statements to use to restart the right processes. The average user will also reboot to remedy common problems- you can't expect them to know how to fix problems any other way.
I run several Linux servers at the office as well as a server at home. It just isn't mature enough for desktop use yet though. I don't care what people say, I've seen "user-friendly" Mandrake 9.x distros installed fresh just plain lock up. That $129 or whatever for XP Home ends up not being that much money when the average user had tried to deal with all these issues- stability, speed, hardware support, etc. Okay it was free- but I'm wasting how much time every day?
I use XP daily for application development and can tell you I've yet to have a blue screen type event. And with the Mozilla suite to replace Outlook, IE, etc., it becomes even more attractive. I use OS X on my iBook and it is great as well. Linux is a hell of a server platform. But we have to be realistic here about desktop use. Being realistic will help let people like the KDE folks know that we're not there yet... good job but keep working on it.
Intellij's IDEA is probably the best IDE I've ever seen for any dev platform anywhere.
Additionally, it runs well and there are no issues with its GUI that I have seen in two years of using it daily. It is written on top of Swing.
I've noticed people trashing Swing on some other threads. News flash- most Swing developers suck and don't know how to write good code. They're VB programmers who downloaded the J2SDK. They don't even think before before putting code into a renderer that takes seconds to run. i.e. they have no concept of MVC. This is why most Swing GUI's suck. And it is the same reason if you go to download.com most of the shit you download will be some pile of dung shareware VB app that is just as bad as the Swing GUIs that people are bitching about.
It is worth noting (while on the topic) how overtasked the DSN apparently is right now. We're using it to keep track of everything from Voyager I & II to the Mars Rovers, including everything launched in between that is still functional and we want to keep track of. It becomes harder and harder to get a signal from the Voyager crafts, but it is worth it even for any trivial scientific data that can still be returned.
You know I'm too cheap to get cable but I have a nice big set of rabbit ears I bought at Radio Shack. One of the local stations that is probably 20 miles away NEVER comes in with a clean signal. Apparently this is the one place where the space program has failed to offer better technology to the consumer market. You'd think someone could build a friggin' slightly stronger tuner for a TV! This technology doesn't seem to have improved at all in the last 15 years or more.
Sounds totally worthless to me. This stuff will probably end up having no practical value anywhere.
That being said, anybody know where I can buy a small block?
Why are we willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to colonize other planets, when we are slowly destroying our own.
If you ask me, global warming is the best thing to ever happen to our planet. While I live in Florida it still gets cold on occasion. And I really pity the folks up north who have to shovel all that snow. How is making Boston a tropical paradise a bad thing? People pay lots of money to travel to tropical destinations. People rarely visit Boston for fun during the winter however.
So if you ask me we're upgrading this big round hunk of rock we live on- not destroying it! Plus we've built some really cool shit here. Skyscrapers, theme parks, etc. That has to boost our value in the intergalactic real estate market. Otherwise we'd just be written off as unimproved property.
The one at Kennedy Space Center was fixed up quite nicely and moved inside a new Saturn V center several years back. It appears to be in excellent shape now and is protected from the elements and is also surrounded by other great exhibits.
So, you're right- put that 5 mil towards something else. Add it as a charitable contribution to the X-Prize, if nothing else.
I'm not a expert Mac user, I'm quite new, but when I installed my Java IDE (IDEA) on my new iBook, I had a problem right away with the dock.
The installer stuck the icons in the dock, I think. InstallAnywhere lets you pick one place to put icons but not multiple.
I didn't want the icon in my dock anymore so I dragged it off to my desktop. And there it went. Poof! Now you have someone who has used various operating systems over 15 years staring at the LCD wondering what in the hell just happened and how to get it back! Everybody says Mac is this greatly intuitive system but this particular feature is pretty un-intuitive if you ask me.
Yeah, except unfortunately this kind of thing trickles all the way down to consumers. We'll have SCO to thank for higher prices, even if a tiny fraction of a cent. You see, that 10 mil comes from somewhere. IBM, Intel charge ever-so-slightly higher prices to cover the expense of ridiculous law suits like this thing.
Of course, the effects are more obvious when someone sues your local mom-and-pop coffee shop for 10 million dollars because their bathroom's toilet paper dispenser is one inch too high to be reached by an unusually short disabled person sitting in a particular brand of wheelchair (but only when the roll is almost out.) Mom and pop have to close up shop and start drawing unemployment and welfare.
So thank IBM and Intel but realize that what SCO is doing costs everyone. Having big companies fight them in court isn't "free". These types of lawsuits are a drain on the productive aspects of our economy as a whole.
I agree. Apache makes good stuff, bottom line. I've used so much of the Jakarta stuff- Tomcat, Velocity, Axis, loads of other utility type libraries. It all works and it all works damn good. And the documentation and support beats anything you'll ever get from Microshaft. Kudos and thanks to whoever these guys are.
The big advantage of measuring the fall in IIS vs Apache is that web servers are public, and easily counted.
True, but depending on the nature of the survey, it is reasonable to consider all the intranet servers out there that will never see the Internet. Probably all of the Fortune 1000 companies have very extensive Intranets as well as internal web-based applications that may also utilize Apache or IIS on the front end.
Funny, too, that Michael isn't complaining about the fact that most of the Britney Spears porn he looks at all day have been given a severe Photoshop work over. This guy is pathetic, what a serious waste of a freaking life. He'd have accomplished more if he had decided to make his ambition scrubbing shitters at the local shopping mall. I mean, how do you argue with a clean toilet?
Normal CD players are too big IMHO to carry around in the gym or while running, cycling, etc. This is simply because of the size of the media. The player can only become so small.
For uses like these, I still prefer solid state players. They're the smallest, lightest, and most durable. I hope that this breed of players doesn't die out. They've already started to be considered the Ford Festivas of the digital player market.
So I guess at least the MD form factor has the size thing going for it. But, it sure doesn't seem to gain much ground in any other category.
I have to agree with the OP. At first glance an install of a recent distro (say, Mandrake) looks okay.
But, then open Mozilla. Looks totally different, fonts are ugly, etc. Sure, there is a technical reason for this, I know. As a user do I care about the technical reasons? If memory serves Mozilla looks much nicer on OS X. At that very least it doesn't look like a foreign app.
Then you start opening lots of apps under the KDE menu and you find that it is just a hodge podge of apps, some things look nice, others don't, and few things have much consistency.
On the flip side with OS X you get things like iLife. Very high quality, consistent, great look and feel, etc.
Linux is trying, but think of what you could do if you had a development team that took the Linux kernel and starting writing awesome apps from the ground up with a great deal of UI standards, functionality standards, etc. Then, charge $150 or so for it to cover your expenses. Note that it won't work to just check stuff out of sourceforge and build it into your distro. This is where the hodge podge effect comes in.
If it is only a license that is being purchased, why is a CD license on iTunes usually several dollars cheaper than the same license on a physical CD in the store?
It costs very little to produce a CD and package and distribute it, when done in a large scale. This is how AOL and everyone else can put free CDs in front of your face. If it was costing even a dollar or two they could never do it.
No, the record industry has messed this up on their own. If you are really buying a license, perhaps they should do their part and treat it that way. As another poster said, if his CD becomes damaged a replacement should be just a few cents. He's already bought the license. Instead they've only taken this stance recently, after entire generations of people have spent years being educated otherwise. Digital rights are confusing and far from self-evident even for most techie folks even if basic property rights ARE self evident. When I was a kid taping music off the radio so I could listen to it at a later date, nobody was in my face threatening jail time. Why are we so suprised all of a sudden with the way consumers think? You can't just start severe negative re-enforcement this late in the game and expect it to solve everything.
Email is useful for businesses and individuals and is widely used by both.
Spam is not typically used by "big" business. The stuff you get from Amazon, buy.com, etc. can be easily opt'ed out of. That isn't spam. Those are the guys that are using email responsibly.
It is the dumb asses selling tic tacs relabeled as penis enlargement pills from their bedroom that are usually the spammers.
This is why the laws won't work well. It would be easy to stop big companies like Amazon from spamming with a law, assuming they were in fact spamming. It is the fly-by-night under-the-radar folks who operate like drug dealers that are hard to snuff out.
Maybe a better law would be that you're breaking the law if you're doing something other than paying attention to the road. Difficult to enforce, but- where does this end otherwise?
For example, do we outlaw reading books, like you said, and newspapers, playing game boys, reading maps, working on laptops, using a palm pilot, fussing with your Fossil PDA watch, fiddling with a GPS, messing with your in-dash MP3 player, etc?
When I was younger I rear-ended someone because I was messing with my car's CD player, not paying attention. This kind of stuff is not limited to laptops and phones.
Yes, thank God someone finally got CE.NET ported to the X-Box. Clearly, this is the tech breakthrough of the year! The world just became twice as productive thanks to this. What a debt society owes to these individuals for giving their spare time to accomplish this. Where is the Paypal "donate now" link? I really owe my life to these guys. Well, maybe not my life but at least the life of a close family member.
The next step is clearly to get thousands of modified X-Boxes running a halfway working version of CE.NET to stores everywhere. I have a sneaky suspicion that most of the fortune 500 companies can't wait to aquire some of these genius devices for their IT departments.
The only thing that doesn't suck is at least the orbiter is functioning perfectly. Kind of odd to think that there are three Earth-made objects orbiting Mars right now.
Of course, that is little consolation to the team that built Beagle 2. And, we've already done a lot from Mars orbit- what we really need now are functional landers.
The Beagle 2 team is in good company though. 2/3 of all Mars missions have failed and only 3 landers have ever worked I think- The Viking duo and '97 Pathfinder.
In fact, there are places all over in the States that offer free WiFi access. Its a good marketing angle- you can buy our coffee and surf for free or pay by the hour at Starbucks (and probably pay more for the coffee!)
What does it really cost for a small or medium sized coffee joint to set up WiFi? Just a business class DSL service and a couple hundred bucks in hardware. There is no friggin' way that anybody will be able to charge $10 an hour for much longer.
Airports and places like that may be the only exception- and that is just because all the rules are different there. Everything is marked up and the audience is highly captive.
I remember as a kid when we first got a VCR and started renting tapes to watch at the local video store. They wanted annual membership dues? Like 40 bucks or something. How long do you think that lasted?
Sometimes its nice to have a spare battery that you can swap out easily though, when the primary one dies on you during a trip. This is a real benefit of the cheaper solid state units that run off of a single AAA.
You're right with your comparison to Episodes I and II. And I don't think you'll find a geek who doesn't see the potential that either had.
Of course, when you see a trilogy like LOTR that fit together so freaking well and the acting is very good, it just makes SW & Matrix look even worse. I mean, honestly.... this is the benchmark others need to reach for. Sure we're talking fantasy vs. sci fi but they aren't so different in the end- an epic is an epic. I hope the LOTR trilogy makes a billion dollars. Money talks and identifies to the industry what we'd like to see more of.
constantly being reinterpreted to best fit our needs
A good Constituion should never need to be rewritten. Our's is not perfect by any means but in general it is pretty solid especially after some intial bugs were worked out in early amendments.
The reason for this is that facts are facts. Reason is man absolute and always will be. Peoples hopes, dreams, wishes, pleas, or prayers do not change the facts. Man must always uphold his morals regardless of the situation. It will always be wrong to shoot someone dead on the street just because you feel like it. It will always be right to use force (deadly, if necessary) to protect your house and your family if someone has violated your rights and now threatens you....i.e. a burglar.
If our society grows to appeciate self-sacrafice and the greatest moral value, someone might have the bright idea to suggest that if the burglar is hungry and is just looking to take some things he can pawn for food, then his entry to your home is justifed. More on this in a sec.
I quote Jefferson,
"the natural tendency of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield," ... "no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
P.S. Do you see the immediate problem with religion? For example, taking "Thou shalt not kill" as a moral absolute. This just launches people into a complete mind-body dichotomy. They just killed a burglar to protect their kids and now look. They've got to pray for forgiveness for upholding a very high moral- protecting their own rights (and in this case their children.) The opposition would say that if the burglar is justified if he was only seeking to feed his own family. This will lead to nothing but madness: the total collapse of our civilization.
Doesn't man deserve a better philosophy to live by? Something that presents itself without contradiction? Something that doesn't launch moral, honest people into confusion and contradiction around every corner? Something that you can read and take "literally" without having to fabricate interpretations that make sense? Read through Leviticus. It says you shouldn't round the edges of your head or beard. And we're to take everything in this book seriously? Or just parts? Which parts? Who says which parts. Uh oh.
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but from power on to where I can actually do something is just as long in Windows as it is in KDE.
Is this a default distro type install, out of the box, or have you customized some things and turned a bunch of stuff off or something?
I'd honestly like to know- because if I could get a Linux box to boot quicker that would go a long way towards making reasonable for me to use in other places. It does seem that a simple DHCP workstation with minimal services shouldn't take that long to boot.
I agree. If they want to penetrate the Windows market, some things have to change.
Windows XP starts up faster than any "modern" OS I've ever seen. XP looks okay once you turn all the fisher price theme stuff off and it generally works pretty darn good. And it can be had for the price that some people spend on Starbucks coffee every month. Not bad for something you use every single day.
Linux users will say that you only have to boot your machine once a month so startup doesn't matter. How real is this? I've used my share of modern distros and I can tell you unless you are an expert you'll end up rebooting so that certain config changes will take effect because you don't know what grep/ps/kill/stop/restart statements to use to restart the right processes. The average user will also reboot to remedy common problems- you can't expect them to know how to fix problems any other way.
I run several Linux servers at the office as well as a server at home. It just isn't mature enough for desktop use yet though. I don't care what people say, I've seen "user-friendly" Mandrake 9.x distros installed fresh just plain lock up. That $129 or whatever for XP Home ends up not being that much money when the average user had tried to deal with all these issues- stability, speed, hardware support, etc. Okay it was free- but I'm wasting how much time every day?
I use XP daily for application development and can tell you I've yet to have a blue screen type event. And with the Mozilla suite to replace Outlook, IE, etc., it becomes even more attractive. I use OS X on my iBook and it is great as well. Linux is a hell of a server platform. But we have to be realistic here about desktop use. Being realistic will help let people like the KDE folks know that we're not there yet... good job but keep working on it.
Intellij's IDEA is probably the best IDE I've ever seen for any dev platform anywhere. Additionally, it runs well and there are no issues with its GUI that I have seen in two years of using it daily. It is written on top of Swing. I've noticed people trashing Swing on some other threads. News flash- most Swing developers suck and don't know how to write good code. They're VB programmers who downloaded the J2SDK. They don't even think before before putting code into a renderer that takes seconds to run. i.e. they have no concept of MVC. This is why most Swing GUI's suck. And it is the same reason if you go to download.com most of the shit you download will be some pile of dung shareware VB app that is just as bad as the Swing GUIs that people are bitching about.
Maybe they don't like the SWT aspect.
It is worth noting (while on the topic) how overtasked the DSN apparently is right now. We're using it to keep track of everything from Voyager I & II to the Mars Rovers, including everything launched in between that is still functional and we want to keep track of. It becomes harder and harder to get a signal from the Voyager crafts, but it is worth it even for any trivial scientific data that can still be returned.
You know I'm too cheap to get cable but I have a nice big set of rabbit ears I bought at Radio Shack. One of the local stations that is probably 20 miles away NEVER comes in with a clean signal. Apparently this is the one place where the space program has failed to offer better technology to the consumer market. You'd think someone could build a friggin' slightly stronger tuner for a TV! This technology doesn't seem to have improved at all in the last 15 years or more.
Sounds totally worthless to me. This stuff will probably end up having no practical value anywhere. That being said, anybody know where I can buy a small block?
Why are we willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to colonize other planets, when we are slowly destroying our own.
If you ask me, global warming is the best thing to ever happen to our planet. While I live in Florida it still gets cold on occasion. And I really pity the folks up north who have to shovel all that snow. How is making Boston a tropical paradise a bad thing? People pay lots of money to travel to tropical destinations. People rarely visit Boston for fun during the winter however.
So if you ask me we're upgrading this big round hunk of rock we live on- not destroying it! Plus we've built some really cool shit here. Skyscrapers, theme parks, etc. That has to boost our value in the intergalactic real estate market. Otherwise we'd just be written off as unimproved property.
The one at Kennedy Space Center was fixed up quite nicely and moved inside a new Saturn V center several years back. It appears to be in excellent shape now and is protected from the elements and is also surrounded by other great exhibits.
So, you're right- put that 5 mil towards something else. Add it as a charitable contribution to the X-Prize, if nothing else.
I'm not a expert Mac user, I'm quite new, but when I installed my Java IDE (IDEA) on my new iBook, I had a problem right away with the dock.
The installer stuck the icons in the dock, I think. InstallAnywhere lets you pick one place to put icons but not multiple.
I didn't want the icon in my dock anymore so I dragged it off to my desktop. And there it went. Poof! Now you have someone who has used various operating systems over 15 years staring at the LCD wondering what in the hell just happened and how to get it back! Everybody says Mac is this greatly intuitive system but this particular feature is pretty un-intuitive if you ask me.
Yeah, except unfortunately this kind of thing trickles all the way down to consumers. We'll have SCO to thank for higher prices, even if a tiny fraction of a cent. You see, that 10 mil comes from somewhere. IBM, Intel charge ever-so-slightly higher prices to cover the expense of ridiculous law suits like this thing.
Of course, the effects are more obvious when someone sues your local mom-and-pop coffee shop for 10 million dollars because their bathroom's toilet paper dispenser is one inch too high to be reached by an unusually short disabled person sitting in a particular brand of wheelchair (but only when the roll is almost out.) Mom and pop have to close up shop and start drawing unemployment and welfare.
So thank IBM and Intel but realize that what SCO is doing costs everyone. Having big companies fight them in court isn't "free". These types of lawsuits are a drain on the productive aspects of our economy as a whole.
I agree. Apache makes good stuff, bottom line. I've used so much of the Jakarta stuff- Tomcat, Velocity, Axis, loads of other utility type libraries. It all works and it all works damn good. And the documentation and support beats anything you'll ever get from Microshaft. Kudos and thanks to whoever these guys are.
The big advantage of measuring the fall in IIS vs Apache is that web servers are public, and easily counted.
True, but depending on the nature of the survey, it is reasonable to consider all the intranet servers out there that will never see the Internet. Probably all of the Fortune 1000 companies have very extensive Intranets as well as internal web-based applications that may also utilize Apache or IIS on the front end.
Funny, too, that Michael isn't complaining about the fact that most of the Britney Spears porn he looks at all day have been given a severe Photoshop work over. This guy is pathetic, what a serious waste of a freaking life. He'd have accomplished more if he had decided to make his ambition scrubbing shitters at the local shopping mall. I mean, how do you argue with a clean toilet?
Normal CD players are too big IMHO to carry around in the gym or while running, cycling, etc. This is simply because of the size of the media. The player can only become so small.
For uses like these, I still prefer solid state players. They're the smallest, lightest, and most durable. I hope that this breed of players doesn't die out. They've already started to be considered the Ford Festivas of the digital player market.
So I guess at least the MD form factor has the size thing going for it. But, it sure doesn't seem to gain much ground in any other category.
I have to agree with the OP. At first glance an install of a recent distro (say, Mandrake) looks okay.
But, then open Mozilla. Looks totally different, fonts are ugly, etc. Sure, there is a technical reason for this, I know. As a user do I care about the technical reasons? If memory serves Mozilla looks much nicer on OS X. At that very least it doesn't look like a foreign app.
Then you start opening lots of apps under the KDE menu and you find that it is just a hodge podge of apps, some things look nice, others don't, and few things have much consistency.
On the flip side with OS X you get things like iLife. Very high quality, consistent, great look and feel, etc.
Linux is trying, but think of what you could do if you had a development team that took the Linux kernel and starting writing awesome apps from the ground up with a great deal of UI standards, functionality standards, etc. Then, charge $150 or so for it to cover your expenses. Note that it won't work to just check stuff out of sourceforge and build it into your distro. This is where the hodge podge effect comes in.
If it is only a license that is being purchased, why is a CD license on iTunes usually several dollars cheaper than the same license on a physical CD in the store?
It costs very little to produce a CD and package and distribute it, when done in a large scale. This is how AOL and everyone else can put free CDs in front of your face. If it was costing even a dollar or two they could never do it.
No, the record industry has messed this up on their own. If you are really buying a license, perhaps they should do their part and treat it that way. As another poster said, if his CD becomes damaged a replacement should be just a few cents. He's already bought the license. Instead they've only taken this stance recently, after entire generations of people have spent years being educated otherwise. Digital rights are confusing and far from self-evident even for most techie folks even if basic property rights ARE self evident. When I was a kid taping music off the radio so I could listen to it at a later date, nobody was in my face threatening jail time. Why are we so suprised all of a sudden with the way consumers think? You can't just start severe negative re-enforcement this late in the game and expect it to solve everything.
Not sure what you mean to say.
Email is useful for businesses and individuals and is widely used by both.
Spam is not typically used by "big" business. The stuff you get from Amazon, buy.com, etc. can be easily opt'ed out of. That isn't spam. Those are the guys that are using email responsibly.
It is the dumb asses selling tic tacs relabeled as penis enlargement pills from their bedroom that are usually the spammers.
This is why the laws won't work well. It would be easy to stop big companies like Amazon from spamming with a law, assuming they were in fact spamming. It is the fly-by-night under-the-radar folks who operate like drug dealers that are hard to snuff out.
Maybe a better law would be that you're breaking the law if you're doing something other than paying attention to the road. Difficult to enforce, but- where does this end otherwise?
For example, do we outlaw reading books, like you said, and newspapers, playing game boys, reading maps, working on laptops, using a palm pilot, fussing with your Fossil PDA watch, fiddling with a GPS, messing with your in-dash MP3 player, etc?
When I was younger I rear-ended someone because I was messing with my car's CD player, not paying attention. This kind of stuff is not limited to laptops and phones.
a generally useful release
Yes, thank God someone finally got CE.NET ported to the X-Box. Clearly, this is the tech breakthrough of the year! The world just became twice as productive thanks to this. What a debt society owes to these individuals for giving their spare time to accomplish this. Where is the Paypal "donate now" link? I really owe my life to these guys. Well, maybe not my life but at least the life of a close family member.
The next step is clearly to get thousands of modified X-Boxes running a halfway working version of CE.NET to stores everywhere. I have a sneaky suspicion that most of the fortune 500 companies can't wait to aquire some of these genius devices for their IT departments.
Wait until you see what Scaled Composites has in store after they launch Space Ship One into a suborbital flight in 2004.
In the usual fashion, they've been working on Mars Ship One but won't go public until they're ready to do a major test flight.
I agree this is a huge disappointment.
The only thing that doesn't suck is at least the orbiter is functioning perfectly. Kind of odd to think that there are three Earth-made objects orbiting Mars right now.
Of course, that is little consolation to the team that built Beagle 2. And, we've already done a lot from Mars orbit- what we really need now are functional landers.
The Beagle 2 team is in good company though. 2/3 of all Mars missions have failed and only 3 landers have ever worked I think- The Viking duo and '97 Pathfinder.
Quite true.
In fact, there are places all over in the States that offer free WiFi access. Its a good marketing angle- you can buy our coffee and surf for free or pay by the hour at Starbucks (and probably pay more for the coffee!)
What does it really cost for a small or medium sized coffee joint to set up WiFi? Just a business class DSL service and a couple hundred bucks in hardware. There is no friggin' way that anybody will be able to charge $10 an hour for much longer.
Airports and places like that may be the only exception- and that is just because all the rules are different there. Everything is marked up and the audience is highly captive.
I remember as a kid when we first got a VCR and started renting tapes to watch at the local video store. They wanted annual membership dues? Like 40 bucks or something. How long do you think that lasted?
Sometimes its nice to have a spare battery that you can swap out easily though, when the primary one dies on you during a trip. This is a real benefit of the cheaper solid state units that run off of a single AAA.
You're right with your comparison to Episodes I and II. And I don't think you'll find a geek who doesn't see the potential that either had.
Of course, when you see a trilogy like LOTR that fit together so freaking well and the acting is very good, it just makes SW & Matrix look even worse. I mean, honestly.... this is the benchmark others need to reach for. Sure we're talking fantasy vs. sci fi but they aren't so different in the end- an epic is an epic. I hope the LOTR trilogy makes a billion dollars. Money talks and identifies to the industry what we'd like to see more of.
constantly being reinterpreted to best fit our needs
... "no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
A good Constituion should never need to be rewritten. Our's is not perfect by any means but in general it is pretty solid especially after some intial bugs were worked out in early amendments.
The reason for this is that facts are facts. Reason is man absolute and always will be. Peoples hopes, dreams, wishes, pleas, or prayers do not change the facts. Man must always uphold his morals regardless of the situation. It will always be wrong to shoot someone dead on the street just because you feel like it. It will always be right to use force (deadly, if necessary) to protect your house and your family if someone has violated your rights and now threatens you....i.e. a burglar.
If our society grows to appeciate self-sacrafice and the greatest moral value, someone might have the bright idea to suggest that if the burglar is hungry and is just looking to take some things he can pawn for food, then his entry to your home is justifed. More on this in a sec.
I quote Jefferson,
"the natural tendency of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield,"
P.S. Do you see the immediate problem with religion? For example, taking "Thou shalt not kill" as a moral absolute. This just launches people into a complete mind-body dichotomy. They just killed a burglar to protect their kids and now look. They've got to pray for forgiveness for upholding a very high moral- protecting their own rights (and in this case their children.) The opposition would say that if the burglar is justified if he was only seeking to feed his own family. This will lead to nothing but madness: the total collapse of our civilization.
Doesn't man deserve a better philosophy to live by? Something that presents itself without contradiction? Something that doesn't launch moral, honest people into confusion and contradiction around every corner? Something that you can read and take "literally" without having to fabricate interpretations that make sense? Read through Leviticus. It says you shouldn't round the edges of your head or beard. And we're to take everything in this book seriously? Or just parts? Which parts? Who says which parts. Uh oh.