For example, we liked Batman Begins, so why did it get hit by the slump, too? And while Star Wars episode 6, err 3, was more critically acclaimed than the previous two, should it really have been the movie to not get hit by the slump, if quality is the reason for said slump?
Batman Begins and Star Wars 3 were both franchise movies whose earlier films were not that well-liked, I think there's a kind of inertia principal here- a normal standalone movie will perform well only on the strength of advertising, the stars, and audience word-of-mouth, but a franchise movie is strongly prejudiced in audiences minds by the rest of the franchise, so no matter how good of a movie it is people will not be swayed to go see it because they got burnt before.
Batman - $251M - First in franchise, good movie Batman Returns - $162M - Did well because people liked the first one and relatively decent on its own Batman Forever - $184M - This one starts to be crappy, but inertia from first two carries it forward Batman & Robin - $107M - Forever was so bad, and this one is so bad, it barely breaks $100M Batman Begins - $204M - Good movie, but the two bad ones in a row probably prevented it from doing better.
I also think the number of movies per unit time in a franchise tends to dilute them- people become more indifferent the more they see the same characters over and over again over a few years.
I think we need billions of dollars of investment in upgrading our antimatter production facilities. The space elevator only gets you into orbit, antimatter can get you to nearby stars.
Unless I'm a Hindu fundamentalist, or something in the Dharmic tradition.
Then it's definitely not new-age or at all wishy-washy: it's quite well defined.
Or a slashdot fundamentalist, where karma is so well defined there's a definitive rating you can find on your user page and you can read the code that governs it. Either way, you would have to qualify the honesty bit with the reasons why whatever flavor of fundamentalism you subscribe to requires you to be honest.
I was so taken aback by this bizarre non-sequitur I had to look up the term in the wikipedia to see if there was any reference to a Fundamentalist's honesty- nope.
I believe that using a stolen computer is bad karma for me
The other fundamentalists will probably revoke your membership if you go all new-age wishy-washy talking about karma and so on...
.Except that this digital info is not likely to survive quite as well as the stone buildings from 1000 years ago.
Heck, even our VHS tapes wont be viewable by most people soon, but I can see the photos taken by my great grandparents.
We're creating a history which is increasingly malleable and vulnerable to destruction.
Once you've copied your vhs tapes or similar onto a digital format on a computer, they can be media independent, and the data can be put onto fresher formats repeatedly until you stop caring or archival grade media is more readily available. I've got friends who love their old home videos but just continue to watch the same tapes over and over and the video quality just degrades continually- they don't listen when I tell them to back it up right.
I understand your anger but this does not seem to be a malicious act, it appears to be an honest screw up
I have no problem with harsh punishments for honest screwups, if the consequences of the screwups are great. If the consequences are really great (like massive loss of life and/or extraordinary dollar loss) then I support throwing people in jail or even capital punishment even when the people intended no wrong (of course, if they did intend harm then the punishment should be much more extreme). In the case of potential losses, it gets a little gray- but I still want to create very strong incentives for others not to repeat those mistakes.
The bottom line here is that any space program will generate a lot of new technology, and that will get used in other places.
Your attitude isn't as bad as some who think 'new technology' is worthwhile for its own sake, but you still have to realize that even if a technology has multiple uses it still may not be as worthwhile of an investment as another technology. The same argument can be made towards any technological endeavour at all- an entirely ground based industry could claim it is deserving of r&d dollars because some unforseen development may benefit space exploration.
The most obvious is all of the tech that will be discovered along the way, which would be valuable both to private industry and the military.
I think this is a very frequently overstated benefit of space projects for several reasons:
Surely there are serendipitous inventions that may reduce costs and increase reliability, but ideally you would want to avoid having to invent something to finish a project you are starting right now- newly created or discovered things are typically much more expensive, are difficult to schedule around, and are more unreliable than tried-and-true materials and machines.
The second thing is about the ability to transfer the technology to other industries- this is very difficult to do, even assuming that the technology serves any purpose in other industries at all and would be cost-effective in those industries.
For instance, there are very significant divides between space electronics vs. consumer electronics- if I invent a chip that can withstand all sorts of solar radiation, will run for 20 years without error, withstands 10s or 100s of g's of shock, and tolerates an extraordinary temperature range- nobody is going to care in the consumer electronics world because my chip is going to cost 100 times as much as theirs and all those benefits are useless to them.
Unfortunately, doing a bad job is neither illegal nor grounds for impeachment.
I'm sure if you investigate deeply enough to figure out exactly why they did a bad job you will find something illegal or impeachable. When something minor happens, people will close ranks keep their mouths shut about what they and those around them are doing wrong, but when there is huge public pressure to produce scapegoats (though I don't really mean to imply the negative connotations of that word) then many people will step forward and say their boss or whoever did all kinds of things wrong. Nobody will be able to hide behind all the secrecy allowed for the war related disasters of recent years.
However, a burden shared is indeed a burden lightened. No one person can be called to account for everything that's gone wrong, and that's as it should be.
That's my point. But this burden is so huge that even spread across many people I would still say there's enough that they do not belong in positions where they are responsible for protecting people.
With the the Bush Administration doing the best it can...
It's funny to hear people try to defend incompetence with the 'they did the best they could' line- that's the point, the best they could is not good enough. Even if someone else would have done the same, or just as poorly, the one who was there in control at the time has to take their share of the blame- and there is plenty of blame to go around, don't worry.
That's fine. Enough people have died and enough billions of dollars of damage done I think everyone in a position of leadership who shares even a portion of the blame should resign, be fired, impeached, jailed, or forcefully removed from power by an angry mob.
They will argue all sides of an issue if it suits their political agenda, but they have no credibility.
I wasn't really aware that if you write for this paper you have to subscribe to every detail of their political agenda. Many papers actually encourage and pay people to write editorials that contain contradictory statements to other editorials located in an adjacent column! And then sometimes people even change their mind about a topic, or will support or oppose an idea not because of its primary purpose but because they disagree with the particulars- it's a crazy world I tell you.
What's worse is these papers are not even promoting a political agenda as people are encouraged to do in democratic nations- they are doing this out of a crass and despicable desire to sell more papers to a diverse readership. I'm disgusted, truly.
Seriously, this is only slightly better than those recurring trolls who say the thousands of individual slashdot readers are hypocrites because they say contradictory things sometimes, and the thousands of moderators will sometimes mod opposing views up.
Some of it lies with Bush. Some of it lies with Congress. Some of it lies with Governor Blanco. Some of it lies with Mayor Nagin.
Then get rid of all of them for a start. 'Partial' responsibility for the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people and tens of billions of dollars of damage is not something to shrug off with a lame 'but that other guy screwed up more than I did'. I don't care how much you suffered, how pure your intentions were, how much other people failed you, if you are in a position of leadership and fuck up this bad you should step down voluntarily, get fired, be impeached, and/or go to jail.
In fact, virtually all long-term problems in history have been because of mass population migrations.
This seems like a stupendously uninsightful theory of history implicitly supporting serfdom or for more heavily regulated travel between states and countries, but I guess the later comments sort of moderate this by suggesting that government should do more to provide for the welfare than simply reacting to immediate and obvious dangers.
fff.. i just got Oni (a bungie title) for my PS2 (a bungie title on the PS2!) at funcoland^W^H gamestop^W^H EB for $6. Then i noticed that they had a used copy right next to it for $35... all i could say was "haha"
I've noticed frequently the sticker price doesn't match the actual price of the game, when you go up to buy it you'll pay whatever is listed in the computer and it is usually cheaper than the sticker.
Sorry, I only catch Simpsons or Family Guy references, and the grits, ???-profit, soviet russia, and more cowbell jokes when I'm reading slashdot.
c) Anybody who goes looking for, or is quicker than the average individual to spot and or claim racism is a racist, having made one's skin color a more important factor than those around him.
An old variation on the 'he who smelt it, dealt it'/'I'm not x, you're x' line of impeccable logical reasoning. Classic.
>>Big flood along the Mississippi? OK...we'll just abandon it, and not bother to use the river.
>What a maroon.
Is this idiocy or supposed to be a play on words? If you actually look up the 'maroon' it refers to both a color and a descendant of slaves (either of which makes the comment sound racist), as well as abandonment meanings which sort of supports the play on words theory.
Sci-fi has no need for heroes, villains, explosions, swordfights or punchups. Sci-fi aims to imbue you with a sense of wonder; to amaze you with a fictional world that might possibly exist due to miracle of scientific progress. Sci-fi recreates the feeling of elation that comes from exploration and discovery.
I kind of like SF with both the sense of whatever and the action. Works that focus on either extreme tend to be either boring or shallow, respectively.
Given that anything you say, do, or code may become illegal in the future, why would you want it to be so traceable back to yourself? I kind of prefer to have email or whatever where the security is such that it would be very easy to raise reasonable doubt as to whether I myself actually am responsible for it or not.
It's being called nanotech because it uses nanoparticles, very small groupings of atoms, containing 100s or 1000s of atoms.
This is a really lame definition, because that means we've had nanotech unknowingly for thousands of years. Although previously, 'nanotech' materials were found accidently and were created with bulk processes that operate on ordinary scales, and there was no physical explanation for why the materials worked. Now that we understand the properties of things like silica beads, and have ways of slightly altering the properties to get designer molecules, we call it nanotech to get more funding and coverage in the press. To the average slashdot reader, silica beads are boring as hell.
Wikipedia explains that the nanotechnology most people think of is properly called 'Molecular Nanotechnology', and involves tiny mechanized parts that can manipulate molecules in any way they are programmed to.
In the real world, attacking even one police officer, even in a minor way, is going to do far more than making life more difficult. You're likely to end up captured or dead very shortly -- and in either case, you can't just hit reload.
I've always thought there was a wierd conceptual schism in GTA- the sandbox universe vs. the mostly linear missions. In San Andreas, there's an ongoing plotline involving the murder of a police officer, but in the course of the game the player may kill hundreds or thousands of nameless policemen with no long-term repercussions- you just hit a save spot, pay-n-spray, or hit a few stars to reduce your wanted level, and all the rampaging you just did means nothing. That makes the game a lot more playable, encouraging continuous play rather than constant reloading- but I'd like to see the series move in the direction of all actions having more long-term consequences (and they can figure out how to preserve playability).
Re:is it just me is the 299 version utterly pointl
on
J Allard Interviewed
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· Score: 0, Troll
MS released a bundle geared towards less discriminating users, and as such, have created a situation for the game dev to cater to that lowest common denominator?
Right. The average gamer is more savvy than MS and the grandparent post gives them credit for- there's no better way to turn off your most valuable market (I'm guessing teens and 20-something males) than by making your machine something that isn't dedicated 100% for them to play cool games on- it's for suckers, it's for kids, it's for families, it's for people to watch movies or listen to music on, it's to browse the net with, it's an appliance, (and the worst possible, but MS hasn't gone there yet) it's educational.
Why do people insist on using this term? Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to buy anything. They can't. If you don't like the options they've presented, don't buy the damned thing.
They use a strong term like force to warn other people not to buy the damned thing. We don't like the options because there's is no natural technical reason for how limited they are- the limitations have been forced.
Then, what I'm really scared of is the domino effect of communism. Our system is obsolete, communism is the future, and I'm scared. Oh, wait, the 1970's.
Actually, the Soviet's are better at us in everything. We have no chance. They have more war heads. Wake up, people! We're losing! In 50 years, its a Soviet World! Oh, wait, that was the 1960's - 1980's.
I love the 'people were worried about X, but then the problem went away (all by itself), so there's no reason to get worried again about Y' line of argument. The issues were dealt with because people were worried about them and did something about it, not because they sat on their asses and said 'the system works' or 'communism will fall under its own accord, no need to oppose or compete with it'.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, we liked Batman Begins, so why did it get hit by the slump, too? And while Star Wars episode 6, err 3, was more critically acclaimed than the previous two, should it really have been the movie to not get hit by the slump, if quality is the reason for said slump?
Batman Begins and Star Wars 3 were both franchise movies whose earlier films were not that well-liked, I think there's a kind of inertia principal here- a normal standalone movie will perform well only on the strength of advertising, the stars, and audience word-of-mouth, but a franchise movie is strongly prejudiced in audiences minds by the rest of the franchise, so no matter how good of a movie it is people will not be swayed to go see it because they got burnt before.
Batman - $251M - First in franchise, good movie
Batman Returns - $162M - Did well because people liked the first one and relatively decent on its own
Batman Forever - $184M - This one starts to be crappy, but inertia from first two carries it forward
Batman & Robin - $107M - Forever was so bad, and this one is so bad, it barely breaks $100M
Batman Begins - $204M - Good movie, but the two bad ones in a row probably prevented it from doing better.
I also think the number of movies per unit time in a franchise tends to dilute them- people become more indifferent the more they see the same characters over and over again over a few years.
I think we need billions of dollars of investment in upgrading our antimatter production facilities. The space elevator only gets you into orbit, antimatter can get you to nearby stars.
Unless I'm a Hindu fundamentalist, or something in the Dharmic tradition.
Then it's definitely not new-age or at all wishy-washy: it's quite well defined.
Or a slashdot fundamentalist, where karma is so well defined there's a definitive rating you can find on your user page and you can read the code that governs it. Either way, you would have to qualify the honesty bit with the reasons why whatever flavor of fundamentalism you subscribe to requires you to be honest.
I'm an honest person - a fundamentalist.
I was so taken aback by this bizarre non-sequitur I had to look up the term in the wikipedia to see if there was any reference to a Fundamentalist's honesty- nope.
I believe that using a stolen computer is bad karma for me
The other fundamentalists will probably revoke your membership if you go all new-age wishy-washy talking about karma and so on...
.Except that this digital info is not likely to survive quite as well as the stone buildings from 1000 years ago.
Heck, even our VHS tapes wont be viewable by most people soon, but I can see the photos taken by my great grandparents.
We're creating a history which is increasingly malleable and vulnerable to destruction.
Once you've copied your vhs tapes or similar onto a digital format on a computer, they can be media independent, and the data can be put onto fresher formats repeatedly until you stop caring or archival grade media is more readily available. I've got friends who love their old home videos but just continue to watch the same tapes over and over and the video quality just degrades continually- they don't listen when I tell them to back it up right.
I understand your anger but this does not seem to be a malicious act, it appears to be an honest screw up
I have no problem with harsh punishments for honest screwups, if the consequences of the screwups are great. If the consequences are really great (like massive loss of life and/or extraordinary dollar loss) then I support throwing people in jail or even capital punishment even when the people intended no wrong (of course, if they did intend harm then the punishment should be much more extreme). In the case of potential losses, it gets a little gray- but I still want to create very strong incentives for others not to repeat those mistakes.
The bottom line here is that any space program will generate a lot of new technology, and that will get used in other places.
Your attitude isn't as bad as some who think 'new technology' is worthwhile for its own sake, but you still have to realize that even if a technology has multiple uses it still may not be as worthwhile of an investment as another technology. The same argument can be made towards any technological endeavour at all- an entirely ground based industry could claim it is deserving of r&d dollars because some unforseen development may benefit space exploration.
The most obvious is all of the tech that will be discovered along the way, which would be valuable both to private industry and the military.
I think this is a very frequently overstated benefit of space projects for several reasons:
Surely there are serendipitous inventions that may reduce costs and increase reliability, but ideally you would want to avoid having to invent something to finish a project you are starting right now- newly created or discovered things are typically much more expensive, are difficult to schedule around, and are more unreliable than tried-and-true materials and machines.
The second thing is about the ability to transfer the technology to other industries- this is very difficult to do, even assuming that the technology serves any purpose in other industries at all and would be cost-effective in those industries.
For instance, there are very significant divides between space electronics vs. consumer electronics- if I invent a chip that can withstand all sorts of solar radiation, will run for 20 years without error, withstands 10s or 100s of g's of shock, and tolerates an extraordinary temperature range- nobody is going to care in the consumer electronics world because my chip is going to cost 100 times as much as theirs and all those benefits are useless to them.
(assuming the Federal Government even bothered telling God)
:)
I heard they revoked His security clearance a few years back, so probably not...
Unfortunately, doing a bad job is neither illegal nor grounds for impeachment.
I'm sure if you investigate deeply enough to figure out exactly why they did a bad job you will find something illegal or impeachable. When something minor happens, people will close ranks keep their mouths shut about what they and those around them are doing wrong, but when there is huge public pressure to produce scapegoats (though I don't really mean to imply the negative connotations of that word) then many people will step forward and say their boss or whoever did all kinds of things wrong. Nobody will be able to hide behind all the secrecy allowed for the war related disasters of recent years.
However, a burden shared is indeed a burden lightened. No one person can be called to account for everything that's gone wrong, and that's as it should be.
That's my point. But this burden is so huge that even spread across many people I would still say there's enough that they do not belong in positions where they are responsible for protecting people.
With the the Bush Administration doing the best it can...
It's funny to hear people try to defend incompetence with the 'they did the best they could' line- that's the point, the best they could is not good enough. Even if someone else would have done the same, or just as poorly, the one who was there in control at the time has to take their share of the blame- and there is plenty of blame to go around, don't worry.
However, the Feds are not the only ones at fault.
That's fine. Enough people have died and enough billions of dollars of damage done I think everyone in a position of leadership who shares even a portion of the blame should resign, be fired, impeached, jailed, or forcefully removed from power by an angry mob.
They will argue all sides of an issue if it suits their political agenda, but they have no credibility.
I wasn't really aware that if you write for this paper you have to subscribe to every detail of their political agenda. Many papers actually encourage and pay people to write editorials that contain contradictory statements to other editorials located in an adjacent column! And then sometimes people even change their mind about a topic, or will support or oppose an idea not because of its primary purpose but because they disagree with the particulars- it's a crazy world I tell you.
What's worse is these papers are not even promoting a political agenda as people are encouraged to do in democratic nations- they are doing this out of a crass and despicable desire to sell more papers to a diverse readership. I'm disgusted, truly.
Seriously, this is only slightly better than those recurring trolls who say the thousands of individual slashdot readers are hypocrites because they say contradictory things sometimes, and the thousands of moderators will sometimes mod opposing views up.
Some of it lies with Bush. Some of it lies with Congress. Some of it lies with Governor Blanco. Some of it lies with Mayor Nagin.
Then get rid of all of them for a start. 'Partial' responsibility for the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people and tens of billions of dollars of damage is not something to shrug off with a lame 'but that other guy screwed up more than I did'. I don't care how much you suffered, how pure your intentions were, how much other people failed you, if you are in a position of leadership and fuck up this bad you should step down voluntarily, get fired, be impeached, and/or go to jail.
In fact, virtually all long-term problems in history have been because of mass population migrations.
This seems like a stupendously uninsightful theory of history implicitly supporting serfdom or for more heavily regulated travel between states and countries, but I guess the later comments sort of moderate this by suggesting that government should do more to provide for the welfare than simply reacting to immediate and obvious dangers.
fff.. i just got Oni (a bungie title) for my PS2 (a bungie title on the PS2!) at funcoland^W^H gamestop^W^H EB for $6. Then i noticed that they had a used copy right next to it for $35... all i could say was "haha"
I've noticed frequently the sticker price doesn't match the actual price of the game, when you go up to buy it you'll pay whatever is listed in the computer and it is usually cheaper than the sticker.
b) You obviously aren't a Bugs Bunny fan
Sorry, I only catch Simpsons or Family Guy references, and the grits, ???-profit, soviet russia, and more cowbell jokes when I'm reading slashdot.
c) Anybody who goes looking for, or is quicker than the average individual to spot and or claim racism is a racist, having made one's skin color a more important factor than those around him.
An old variation on the 'he who smelt it, dealt it'/'I'm not x, you're x' line of impeccable logical reasoning. Classic.
>>Big flood along the Mississippi? OK...we'll just abandon it, and not bother to use the river.
>What a maroon.
Is this idiocy or supposed to be a play on words? If you actually look up the 'maroon' it refers to both a color and a descendant of slaves (either of which makes the comment sound racist), as well as abandonment meanings which sort of supports the play on words theory.
Sci-fi has no need for heroes, villains, explosions, swordfights or punchups. Sci-fi aims to imbue you with a sense of wonder; to amaze you with a fictional world that might possibly exist due to miracle of scientific progress. Sci-fi recreates the feeling of elation that comes from exploration and discovery.
I kind of like SF with both the sense of whatever and the action. Works that focus on either extreme tend to be either boring or shallow, respectively.
Given that anything you say, do, or code may become illegal in the future, why would you want it to be so traceable back to yourself? I kind of prefer to have email or whatever where the security is such that it would be very easy to raise reasonable doubt as to whether I myself actually am responsible for it or not.
It's being called nanotech because it uses nanoparticles, very small groupings of atoms, containing 100s or 1000s of atoms.
This is a really lame definition, because that means we've had nanotech unknowingly for thousands of years. Although previously, 'nanotech' materials were found accidently and were created with bulk processes that operate on ordinary scales, and there was no physical explanation for why the materials worked. Now that we understand the properties of things like silica beads, and have ways of slightly altering the properties to get designer molecules, we call it nanotech to get more funding and coverage in the press. To the average slashdot reader, silica beads are boring as hell.
Wikipedia explains that the nanotechnology most people think of is properly called 'Molecular Nanotechnology', and involves tiny mechanized parts that can manipulate molecules in any way they are programmed to.
In the real world, attacking even one police officer, even in a minor way, is going to do far more than making life more difficult. You're likely to end up captured or dead very shortly -- and in either case, you can't just hit reload.
I've always thought there was a wierd conceptual schism in GTA- the sandbox universe vs. the mostly linear missions. In San Andreas, there's an ongoing plotline involving the murder of a police officer, but in the course of the game the player may kill hundreds or thousands of nameless policemen with no long-term repercussions- you just hit a save spot, pay-n-spray, or hit a few stars to reduce your wanted level, and all the rampaging you just did means nothing. That makes the game a lot more playable, encouraging continuous play rather than constant reloading- but I'd like to see the series move in the direction of all actions having more long-term consequences (and they can figure out how to preserve playability).
MS released a bundle geared towards less discriminating users, and as such, have created a situation for the game dev to cater to that lowest common denominator?
Right. The average gamer is more savvy than MS and the grandparent post gives them credit for- there's no better way to turn off your most valuable market (I'm guessing teens and 20-something males) than by making your machine something that isn't dedicated 100% for them to play cool games on- it's for suckers, it's for kids, it's for families, it's for people to watch movies or listen to music on, it's to browse the net with, it's an appliance, (and the worst possible, but MS hasn't gone there yet) it's educational.
Why do people insist on using this term? Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to buy anything. They can't. If you don't like the options they've presented, don't buy the damned thing.
They use a strong term like force to warn other people not to buy the damned thing. We don't like the options because there's is no natural technical reason for how limited they are- the limitations have been forced.
Then, what I'm really scared of is the domino effect of communism. Our system is obsolete, communism is the future, and I'm scared. Oh, wait, the 1970's.
Actually, the Soviet's are better at us in everything. We have no chance. They have more war heads. Wake up, people! We're losing! In 50 years, its a Soviet World! Oh, wait, that was the 1960's - 1980's.
I love the 'people were worried about X, but then the problem went away (all by itself), so there's no reason to get worried again about Y' line of argument. The issues were dealt with because people were worried about them and did something about it, not because they sat on their asses and said 'the system works' or 'communism will fall under its own accord, no need to oppose or compete with it'.