Can somebody explain that to me? The corruption causes... piracy? And then people decide to make their server run MS 2003 Server because they can get a free copy, instead of downloading Debian or Fedora and doing that?
Or Microsoft recruits lackeys in the government, puts them on the dole, and makes sure all the important IT decisions go Microsoft?
I'm genuinely curious. Do you know first hand about how corruption works in the former Warsaw Pact countries and former Soviet republics, or are you just speculating?
It seems to be that at least Scandinavia is probably the most vibrant set of nations involved with Open Source. Besides the fact that Linus is a Finn (not really Scandinavia, I know, please turn the flamethrower off) the Danes, Swedes, Norweigians are all heavily into Linux. Anti-Microsoft sentiment runs pretty high, at least with the Europeans I chat with.
There are Starbuck guys (and gals) and there are Boomer people. I, personally, think Boomer is the better looking one. The Cyclon chick just looks like Farrah Fawcett.
He's previously said that the film will feature a whole new cast and ship; it's being written by Band of Brothers screenwriter Erik Jendresen."
Ok, so the crew of the USS Intrepid is sent to the planet from TOS where it's still 1944 Germany, and the cast will honor the prime directive, and then get captured, and then have to slog through the Ardennes Forest towards the Rhine with Easy Company.
In the end, to escape the brutality of the Stalag, the Klingon Captain of this Federation ship rushes the guard tower while the science officer teaches the American captives how to make a bomb from the pollen of a weed. THe final shootout is between Panzers in the snow and a shuttlecraft.
The entire story is told as flashback from the Federation officers, now in their eighties and safely back at Starfleet.
It's happening to me as well. I used to be known growing up in my teens and 20s as somebody with a huge attention span. I could lose myself in work and not come up for 12-24 hours or more. And, as I've gone into my 30's, it's been harder and harder to do.
I've started hyperlinking my brain. I hear snippets of what people are telling me, I free associate during a conversation, I tune out my wife (most of the time with good reason) but even during important lectures or trainings, I start needing to check my laptop or my PDA.
I've consdiered resorting to meditation to help me stop the inner dialog and outwardly focus on things. I picked up my O'Reilley Advanced Perl Prrogramming book last night, because yet again I was struggling with references (pointers) and the book at one point just faded into symbols. I couldn't force myself to concentrate and read the code. Ok, perl can be like that sometimes, but this was TEXTBOOK perl, so it was supposed to be readable and understandable. But I couldn't focus on it.
I think I need to do something. I don't know what. Historically, reading a long book of non-fiction, like a biography, over the course a day or so sitting outside, has helped alot.
The U.S. defense industry will have a hard time hiring foreign workers. Do they really want to outsource missile guidance subsystems to Indian programmers?
A. Cisco
B. Va-Linux
C. Juniper
D. JD Uniphase
E. Broadcast.com
F. Microsoft
G. Real Media
H. Netscape
I. Nortel
J. Lucent
Of all those companies.... hmmm.. Nortel took the worst beating. They were nearly Enron like, with books being reviewed, quarterly announcements being investigated. JDS was the biggest get-rich quick, stock that went from $10 to about $240 per share.... Cisco was the most overvalued, at one time being the 2nd biggest company in the world.... Netscape's Jim Barksdale was the worst manager, getting anally reamed by Microsoft and doing nothing about it. Mark Cuban made out like the biggest bandit, selling Broadcast.com and buying the Dallas Mavs.
Of all those companies, the only buy and hold there is Juniper.
Some of the people who banked on SCO's claims got their start busting real people's real kneecaps over trivial 1,000 dollar loans.
Jesus H! It's the......
....wait for it...
M O R M O N Mafia!!!!!!
Prominently featured in next year's Grand Theft Auto: Salt Lake. Hijack a bus and drive into the Tabernacle Choir building! Watch the sparks fly as millions of tiny lightbulbs smash!
I suggest watching the Insider by Michael Mann. Do you think Russell Crowe's character deserved death threats? Do you think he served a public good by revealing the chemists inside Brown & Williamson were designing the tar content in cigarettes to be more addictive than crack and not informing anyone of it?
What protections should the two women who blew the whistle on Enron be afforded? Should Enron have been allowed to cull through every email they ever wrote, every phone call they ever had, in an effort to smear them and discredit the allegations? Maybe out them as homosexual or reveal that they have cancer or sought a counsel for personal problems? Should that be legal?
It's not so easy as "don't work for a corporation" is it? Nearly everything is privately owned. Hospitals are corporations. Sometimes public transit companies are privately owned. What government's job is to write laws that set the boundary of expectations of privacy. If a company doesn't have a written policy that was signed by an employee that they will read or scan every email, then they shouldn't be allowed to retroactively introduce email into a court proceeding.
If you or somebody close to you gets seriously ill, and no company will hire them, you let me know how that "just don't work there" thing works out for you.
On that note, I heard Enderle on NPR... again. Can we start a email campaign to NPR to get them to stop interviewing this idiot? Seriously, something has to be done. NPR has to be educated as to who that crackpot really is, and why most everyone regards him as a moron. I'm getting tired of NPR jacking up the guy. Often he is the ONLY guy interviewed in the piece. It's sickening.
Here's what the survey doesn't say. That sometimes employers decide to retaliate against employees who point out problems or cause what management thinks is trouble. These employees often find themselves the targets of investigations.
All surveys like this do is give ammunition to corporate management to investigate who they want, when they want, expect even less privacy and create conditions of employment so egregrious that the IT worker becomes chattel.
As it is, there are systems to monitor web surfing, chat conversations, phone conversations, VOIP decoders for phone conversations that aren't analog, cameras, keystroke loggers, mail server agents that look for keywords, policies against the use of encryption, etc etc.
With blood tests and mandatory screenings for crime history, blood history, pretty soon genetic history of family disease (company insurance is expensive you know they don't need any cancer heads) there will be no part of a worker's life that isn't controlled by the corporation that employs them.
Surveys like this one cull fear in IT shops, fear of insider attacks, of competitive disadvantage brought about by unscrupulous employees. When, in fact, it's employers for the most part who engage in espionage and frame workers. It's easy and efficient. Want to get rid of that guy nearing his pension? Put some kiddie porn on his hard drive.
We don't need any more tools to spy. We need some fucking national legislation to curb the uncontrolled police state that exists inside the corporations of the world.
Yeah, it was nice AC flamebait, but it overlooked one important fact. Those African nations don't have the most overwhelming military the world has ever seen.
If Germany had the kind of military and battlefield advantage that the USA has in today's world, Slashdot would only be in German today. Slashdot wouldn't exist, we'd be learning about racial purity, and if you're not white, you wouldn't be reading this at all.
So, what am I saying? I'm saying that every nation that has a staggering military advantage resorts to using it, and if the United States goes through anything like Weimar Germany, you'd better fucking duck or expect the U.S. to detonate a nuke in India or central europe to "reset" the economy back in it's favor. The World Bank still uses dollars. The US is already holding down the world's oil reserves, and fucked over the French and Chinese who sneaking oil out of Iraq during embargo years. All your base belong to them.
Re:Maybe this is sour grapes
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You know who had that in spades? Michael Jordan. He HATED when some new kid would be appointed the next Jordan. And way before Kobe, there were lots of people given that title. I remember one kid, same kind of build, bald held - could jump out of the gym, played for the Heat. Jordan asked that he be put on him, he often rotated the offense to force the matchup. And then he would just POUND guys. make them look stupid. At both ends of the floor.
He'd do this to WHOMEVER was the hot new thing. He really got off on it. It wasn't just a fuel to win, a competitive drive, it was vindictive and it was personal. Michael's trash talk was considered some of the most mean spirited talk in the league for many years. He'd talk about your mother. He made it personal.
I think for some guys, the Gordon Gekko Sun Tsu thing is just there. Business is war. You msut hear the lamantations of their women. Ellison at Oracle is like that. He launched a smear campaign aginst the Peoplesoft execs that were holding out on him, he wiped them out.
FOr Gates, it's weird. He knows most people hate him. He has a huge, very generous and very well directed foundation that does a ton for AIDS in developing nations, but it seems to buy him no PR. He has no personal charm or charisma at all. He's petulant and vindictive by all accounts. Everybody would like to see the guy get his. Even customers.
I'm trying to think of another historical figure in the United States history who was that powerful, that philanthropic, and yet that reviled. Andrew Carnegie maybe.
If Bush said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating clean hydrogen powered cars." People would jump all over him...and at least in that case he earmarked some $6 billion over a period of a several years.
Bush would hire a PR firm to create a fake newscast to "report" that he invented hydrogen powered cars. Or his GOP would buddies would plant a gay male escort in the press corps to feed him questions like, "So, given that you invented hydrogen cars and are so great, how do you feel about alternative fuels."
Gore's candor was refreshing compared to that good old boy, 'shucks I'm just a common man with a few lucky breaks' schtick that Bush runs with.
Screenwriter magazine this month has an article on Star Wars. I spend my lunch hours in bookstores wayyyy too often.
Anyhow, the article is about how Lucas wanted to perpetuate the ties to mythic storytelling in his saga. Even though in '77, his initial interviews talked about little more than a Western in space, once the connections to Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth started happening, Lucas didn't exactly go out of his way to deny it.
I wonder if that, more than anything, overly influenced the latter trilogy. The epic fall from grace. Suddenly, I have visions of Lucas sitting around reading Milton and having inner dialogs about why Satan gets all the zingy one liners.
There's a ton of ways to read into Star Wars. The ancient Sith / Jedi split invokes the Jesuits, right down to the robes and the dress. If you've read the final script, you know that (spoiler ahead)
Anakin forsees the death of his beloved again and again (in very vividly written scenes) and it torments him, as he wants his children, but it starts to drive him mad, and he agrees to become Sith only to gain the power to change the future and save the woman he loves. But, in the end, when he thinks Obi-Wan has betrayed him, he force chokes her and nearly kills her. in fact, Sidious tells him later that his force choke DID kill her, which drives him right over the edge.
There's a strong influence of Greek tragedy in this script. Cheating death, changing fate. Being at the height of your intellectual and phsyical powers in your late 20's, thinking that the world owes you, that you are the sole master of your destiny and finding your mortality is still all too real.
The script is brutal. If it's shot that way, it would be a stark departure from the first two. The final scene between Anakin and Obi-Wan was suprising in it's adultness. He falls into the lava, his legs are burning, he can't get up. He's clawing the sand... all of his conceits wash away. No more rationalizations of how totalitarianism is somehow more benign, he just cringes and screams at Obi-Wan, hs face twisted and red "I hate you!!!". Obi-Wan leans down, a tear streaming in his eyes and responds "I always loved you. Like a brother." and walks away leaving him to burn.
That's serious Campbell territory. The mentor relationship, the hero who fails the test because jealousy consumes him.
So, when Lucas says 'I needed to tell this story', what I really think is happening is that he needs to fufill the power of myth aspects. This film is a violent fable. The father falls, the son redeems him. His fall needs to be brutal and ultimately apolitical. Anakin doesn't want power for power's sake. He wants respect, he wants everyone to love him and adore him. He has a God complex. There are many levels there.
I have a feeling that this movie will leave everybody wondering all the ways the first two could be redone. Anakin should have picked up in his early 20's someplace NOT tattooine. His struggle as a slave, beaten and oppressed, would have forced him into spirituality (not chemistry) and a brutal desire for acceptance and hatred for oppression that ultimately twisted around until the only way he could fufill that was to become the oppressor.
Oh, and the scene where he kills all the padawans, that could have been brutal if it had a flashback to his slave days. As it is, it's just disturbing and the script invokes Columbine somewhat, with the imagery focusing on his black cloak.
The online shopping network works the same trick. Time is running out, quantities are limited! Artificial or manufacturered scarcity. It triggers a response in people. Cabbage Patch dolls, Breakdancing Elmo or whatever it is - Hasbro and other toy people started it, and now others do it around the shopping seasons as well.
I've abandoned tech book sellers and other smaller online retilers for this very reason. I will put things in my cart on Amazon, and leave them there for weeks or months. I don't always have the discretionary cash to buy all the books and videos that I want, but I like keeping my cart around.
Amazon does this well. If you put a used book in your cart, if that allotment of books goes away, it comes out of your cart. If an item is sold out or discontinued, it comes out of your cart. I would like even more customization, such as email notifications when things get removed from my cart, but it doesn't have that.
This type of E-commerce sophistication should be called the Ebayzinization of the world. We want auctions, we want resale markets, and we want them organized. Companies like Amazon who do this well can create monopolization effects, such as the resale book market. A lot of book sellers hate Amazon, hate the way that they get a bite of a book transaction, on damaged or used books, and don't give them (the sellers) any concession for postage, etc. When you buy a used book from somebody on Amazon, they have nothing to do with it, except to perform a middleman and something of an indemification of the transaction. i.e. if the reseller takes your money and runs, Amazon will work with you to help you get your book.
The key to all of this, is shopping cart power. I want to make wish lists on things I see - and rank them according to what things I would rather have. I can't remember all the things I see that I might like, my brain is not going to remember this, and I don't want to write it down. I want to walk up to a kiosk at a store at Christmas and pull my, and any of my trusted friends shopping carts up, much like wedding registries work. I want to buy a pal something he wants for Christmas, keep who it was anonymous, and be assured that it gets checked off and nobody else gets him the same thing.
This study should serve as a catalyst for even more customization options for major E-retailers. Places like Amazon can market capture places like Crate & Barrel (just picking one from thin air), as the cost and complexity of maintaining that kind of system begins to spiral upward, these type s of places don't want to do it for themselves anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe what they need is a little xtracto compacto, eh? Nudge, nudge, wink wink.
Worked for Lady Di.
Can somebody explain that to me? The corruption causes... piracy? And then people decide to make their server run MS 2003 Server because they can get a free copy, instead of downloading Debian or Fedora and doing that?
Or Microsoft recruits lackeys in the government, puts them on the dole, and makes sure all the important IT decisions go Microsoft?
I'm genuinely curious. Do you know first hand about how corruption works in the former Warsaw Pact countries and former Soviet republics, or are you just speculating?
It seems to be that at least Scandinavia is probably the most vibrant set of nations involved with Open Source. Besides the fact that Linus is a Finn (not really Scandinavia, I know, please turn the flamethrower off) the Danes, Swedes, Norweigians are all heavily into Linux. Anti-Microsoft sentiment runs pretty high, at least with the Europeans I chat with.
Not to mention the fact they are right near each other on I-36 between Boulder and Denver. Probably two miles apart, tops.
There are Starbuck guys (and gals) and there are Boomer people. I, personally, think Boomer is the better looking one. The Cyclon chick just looks like Farrah Fawcett.
He's previously said that the film will feature a whole new cast and ship; it's being written by Band of Brothers screenwriter Erik Jendresen."
Ok, so the crew of the USS Intrepid is sent to the planet from TOS where it's still 1944 Germany, and the cast will honor the prime directive, and then get captured, and then have to slog through the Ardennes Forest towards the Rhine with Easy Company.
In the end, to escape the brutality of the Stalag, the Klingon Captain of this Federation ship rushes the guard tower while the science officer teaches the American captives how to make a bomb from the pollen of a weed. THe final shootout is between Panzers in the snow and a shuttlecraft.
The entire story is told as flashback from the Federation officers, now in their eighties and safely back at Starfleet.
Hard to believe Mark Hamill is in his late 50's with kids of his own. He's done well as an actor.
Man, I love it when the humor is that subtle.
It's happening to me as well. I used to be known growing up in my teens and 20s as somebody with a huge attention span. I could lose myself in work and not come up for 12-24 hours or more. And, as I've gone into my 30's, it's been harder and harder to do.
I've started hyperlinking my brain. I hear snippets of what people are telling me, I free associate during a conversation, I tune out my wife (most of the time with good reason) but even during important lectures or trainings, I start needing to check my laptop or my PDA.
I've consdiered resorting to meditation to help me stop the inner dialog and outwardly focus on things. I picked up my O'Reilley Advanced Perl Prrogramming book last night, because yet again I was struggling with references (pointers) and the book at one point just faded into symbols. I couldn't force myself to concentrate and read the code. Ok, perl can be like that sometimes, but this was TEXTBOOK perl, so it was supposed to be readable and understandable. But I couldn't focus on it.
I think I need to do something. I don't know what. Historically, reading a long book of non-fiction, like a biography, over the course a day or so sitting outside, has helped alot.
The U.S. defense industry will have a hard time hiring foreign workers. Do they really want to outsource missile guidance subsystems to Indian programmers?
A. Cisco
B. Va-Linux
C. Juniper
D. JD Uniphase
E. Broadcast.com
F. Microsoft
G. Real Media
H. Netscape
I. Nortel
J. Lucent
Of all those companies.... hmmm.. Nortel took the worst beating. They were nearly Enron like, with books being reviewed, quarterly announcements being investigated. JDS was the biggest get-rich quick, stock that went from $10 to about $240 per share.... Cisco was the most overvalued, at one time being the 2nd biggest company in the world.... Netscape's Jim Barksdale was the worst manager, getting anally reamed by Microsoft and doing nothing about it. Mark Cuban made out like the biggest bandit, selling Broadcast.com and buying the Dallas Mavs.
Of all those companies, the only buy and hold there is Juniper.
Some of the people who banked on SCO's claims got their start busting real people's real kneecaps over trivial 1,000 dollar loans.
....wait for it...
Jesus H! It's the......
M O R M O N Mafia!!!!!!
Prominently featured in next year's Grand Theft Auto: Salt Lake. Hijack a bus and drive into the Tabernacle Choir building! Watch the sparks fly as millions of tiny lightbulbs smash!
Two words: John Chambers. His company depends on it.
I suggest watching the Insider by Michael Mann. Do you think Russell Crowe's character deserved death threats? Do you think he served a public good by revealing the chemists inside Brown & Williamson were designing the tar content in cigarettes to be more addictive than crack and not informing anyone of it?
What protections should the two women who blew the whistle on Enron be afforded? Should Enron have been allowed to cull through every email they ever wrote, every phone call they ever had, in an effort to smear them and discredit the allegations? Maybe out them as homosexual or reveal that they have cancer or sought a counsel for personal problems? Should that be legal?
It's not so easy as "don't work for a corporation" is it? Nearly everything is privately owned. Hospitals are corporations. Sometimes public transit companies are privately owned. What government's job is to write laws that set the boundary of expectations of privacy. If a company doesn't have a written policy that was signed by an employee that they will read or scan every email, then they shouldn't be allowed to retroactively introduce email into a court proceeding.
If you or somebody close to you gets seriously ill, and no company will hire them, you let me know how that "just don't work there" thing works out for you.
On that note, I heard Enderle on NPR... again. Can we start a email campaign to NPR to get them to stop interviewing this idiot? Seriously, something has to be done. NPR has to be educated as to who that crackpot really is, and why most everyone regards him as a moron. I'm getting tired of NPR jacking up the guy. Often he is the ONLY guy interviewed in the piece. It's sickening.
Here's what the survey doesn't say. That sometimes employers decide to retaliate against employees who point out problems or cause what management thinks is trouble. These employees often find themselves the targets of investigations.
All surveys like this do is give ammunition to corporate management to investigate who they want, when they want, expect even less privacy and create conditions of employment so egregrious that the IT worker becomes chattel.
As it is, there are systems to monitor web surfing, chat conversations, phone conversations, VOIP decoders for phone conversations that aren't analog, cameras, keystroke loggers, mail server agents that look for keywords, policies against the use of encryption, etc etc.
With blood tests and mandatory screenings for crime history, blood history, pretty soon genetic history of family disease (company insurance is expensive you know they don't need any cancer heads) there will be no part of a worker's life that isn't controlled by the corporation that employs them.
Surveys like this one cull fear in IT shops, fear of insider attacks, of competitive disadvantage brought about by unscrupulous employees. When, in fact, it's employers for the most part who engage in espionage and frame workers. It's easy and efficient. Want to get rid of that guy nearing his pension? Put some kiddie porn on his hard drive.
We don't need any more tools to spy. We need some fucking national legislation to curb the uncontrolled police state that exists inside the corporations of the world.
Why?
BTW, nice all your fundie pals modded you up. Sing a hymn to your cleverness this Sunday.
Yeah, it was nice AC flamebait, but it overlooked one important fact. Those African nations don't have the most overwhelming military the world has ever seen.
If Germany had the kind of military and battlefield advantage that the USA has in today's world, Slashdot would only be in German today. Slashdot wouldn't exist, we'd be learning about racial purity, and if you're not white, you wouldn't be reading this at all.
So, what am I saying? I'm saying that every nation that has a staggering military advantage resorts to using it, and if the United States goes through anything like Weimar Germany, you'd better fucking duck or expect the U.S. to detonate a nuke in India or central europe to "reset" the economy back in it's favor. The World Bank still uses dollars. The US is already holding down the world's oil reserves, and fucked over the French and Chinese who sneaking oil out of Iraq during embargo years. All your base belong to them.
You know who had that in spades? Michael Jordan. He HATED when some new kid would be appointed the next Jordan. And way before Kobe, there were lots of people given that title. I remember one kid, same kind of build, bald held - could jump out of the gym, played for the Heat. Jordan asked that he be put on him, he often rotated the offense to force the matchup. And then he would just POUND guys. make them look stupid. At both ends of the floor.
He'd do this to WHOMEVER was the hot new thing. He really got off on it. It wasn't just a fuel to win, a competitive drive, it was vindictive and it was personal. Michael's trash talk was considered some of the most mean spirited talk in the league for many years. He'd talk about your mother. He made it personal.
I think for some guys, the Gordon Gekko Sun Tsu thing is just there. Business is war. You msut hear the lamantations of their women. Ellison at Oracle is like that. He launched a smear campaign aginst the Peoplesoft execs that were holding out on him, he wiped them out.
FOr Gates, it's weird. He knows most people hate him. He has a huge, very generous and very well directed foundation that does a ton for AIDS in developing nations, but it seems to buy him no PR. He has no personal charm or charisma at all. He's petulant and vindictive by all accounts. Everybody would like to see the guy get his. Even customers.
I'm trying to think of another historical figure in the United States history who was that powerful, that philanthropic, and yet that reviled. Andrew Carnegie maybe.
If Bush said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating clean hydrogen powered cars." People would jump all over him...and at least in that case he earmarked some $6 billion over a period of a several years.
Bush would hire a PR firm to create a fake newscast to "report" that he invented hydrogen powered cars. Or his GOP would buddies would plant a gay male escort in the press corps to feed him questions like, "So, given that you invented hydrogen cars and are so great, how do you feel about alternative fuels."
Gore's candor was refreshing compared to that good old boy, 'shucks I'm just a common man with a few lucky breaks' schtick that Bush runs with.
Wow... wish I had read that site before going off on that post. Thanks.
I thought Jake Busey was Oedipal. Fuckin Oedipal man.
Degenerate Jedi = Mace Windu?
Screenwriter magazine this month has an article on Star Wars. I spend my lunch hours in bookstores wayyyy too often.
Anyhow, the article is about how Lucas wanted to perpetuate the ties to mythic storytelling in his saga. Even though in '77, his initial interviews talked about little more than a Western in space, once the connections to Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth started happening, Lucas didn't exactly go out of his way to deny it.
I wonder if that, more than anything, overly influenced the latter trilogy. The epic fall from grace. Suddenly, I have visions of Lucas sitting around reading Milton and having inner dialogs about why Satan gets all the zingy one liners.
There's a ton of ways to read into Star Wars. The ancient Sith / Jedi split invokes the Jesuits, right down to the robes and the dress. If you've read the final script, you know that (spoiler ahead)
Anakin forsees the death of his beloved again and again (in very vividly written scenes) and it torments him, as he wants his children, but it starts to drive him mad, and he agrees to become Sith only to gain the power to change the future and save the woman he loves. But, in the end, when he thinks Obi-Wan has betrayed him, he force chokes her and nearly kills her. in fact, Sidious tells him later that his force choke DID kill her, which drives him right over the edge.
There's a strong influence of Greek tragedy in this script. Cheating death, changing fate. Being at the height of your intellectual and phsyical powers in your late 20's, thinking that the world owes you, that you are the sole master of your destiny and finding your mortality is still all too real.
The script is brutal. If it's shot that way, it would be a stark departure from the first two. The final scene between Anakin and Obi-Wan was suprising in it's adultness. He falls into the lava, his legs are burning, he can't get up. He's clawing the sand... all of his conceits wash away. No more rationalizations of how totalitarianism is somehow more benign, he just cringes and screams at Obi-Wan, hs face twisted and red "I hate you!!!". Obi-Wan leans down, a tear streaming in his eyes and responds "I always loved you. Like a brother." and walks away leaving him to burn.
That's serious Campbell territory. The mentor relationship, the hero who fails the test because jealousy consumes him.
So, when Lucas says 'I needed to tell this story', what I really think is happening is that he needs to fufill the power of myth aspects. This film is a violent fable. The father falls, the son redeems him. His fall needs to be brutal and ultimately apolitical. Anakin doesn't want power for power's sake. He wants respect, he wants everyone to love him and adore him. He has a God complex. There are many levels there.
I have a feeling that this movie will leave everybody wondering all the ways the first two could be redone. Anakin should have picked up in his early 20's someplace NOT tattooine. His struggle as a slave, beaten and oppressed, would have forced him into spirituality (not chemistry) and a brutal desire for acceptance and hatred for oppression that ultimately twisted around until the only way he could fufill that was to become the oppressor.
Oh, and the scene where he kills all the padawans, that could have been brutal if it had a flashback to his slave days. As it is, it's just disturbing and the script invokes Columbine somewhat, with the imagery focusing on his black cloak.
In the movie, the casino owner will be played by Robbie Coltrane. With a thick Russian accent, like in the Bond movie he did.
Or wait... Paulie Walnuts! Yes! "heyz, youz wanna take down dee-enn-esses? I gotcha ur DNS right here!"
The online shopping network works the same trick. Time is running out, quantities are limited! Artificial or manufacturered scarcity. It triggers a response in people. Cabbage Patch dolls, Breakdancing Elmo or whatever it is - Hasbro and other toy people started it, and now others do it around the shopping seasons as well.
I've abandoned tech book sellers and other smaller online retilers for this very reason. I will put things in my cart on Amazon, and leave them there for weeks or months. I don't always have the discretionary cash to buy all the books and videos that I want, but I like keeping my cart around.
Amazon does this well. If you put a used book in your cart, if that allotment of books goes away, it comes out of your cart. If an item is sold out or discontinued, it comes out of your cart. I would like even more customization, such as email notifications when things get removed from my cart, but it doesn't have that.
This type of E-commerce sophistication should be called the Ebayzinization of the world. We want auctions, we want resale markets, and we want them organized. Companies like Amazon who do this well can create monopolization effects, such as the resale book market. A lot of book sellers hate Amazon, hate the way that they get a bite of a book transaction, on damaged or used books, and don't give them (the sellers) any concession for postage, etc. When you buy a used book from somebody on Amazon, they have nothing to do with it, except to perform a middleman and something of an indemification of the transaction. i.e. if the reseller takes your money and runs, Amazon will work with you to help you get your book.
The key to all of this, is shopping cart power. I want to make wish lists on things I see - and rank them according to what things I would rather have. I can't remember all the things I see that I might like, my brain is not going to remember this, and I don't want to write it down. I want to walk up to a kiosk at a store at Christmas and pull my, and any of my trusted friends shopping carts up, much like wedding registries work. I want to buy a pal something he wants for Christmas, keep who it was anonymous, and be assured that it gets checked off and nobody else gets him the same thing.
This study should serve as a catalyst for even more customization options for major E-retailers. Places like Amazon can market capture places like Crate & Barrel (just picking one from thin air), as the cost and complexity of maintaining that kind of system begins to spiral upward, these type s of places don't want to do it for themselves anymore.