My summary would be that with LOTR he took a good book and made a very good movie , whereas with The Hobbit he took a great book and made a very poor movie .
If I had been of the opinion that The Hobbit was some masterpiece of literature in the same way I feel about the epic trilogy, maybe I would have been really cross.
If you think LOTR is a masterpiece of literature, you really need to widen your reading.
OTOH, The Hobbit is a genuine classic like Treasure Island or A Wrinkle In Time, which is to say a children's classic.
I thought the movies were really good. I never understand the people who don't like movies. Haters on The Hobbit. Haters on Star Wars. These were entertaining. That's why I go to the movies. To be entertained. They succeeded.
So you don't think there is any real differentiation between movies at all? They're all just a bit of harmless fun?
Alvin and the Cunting Chipmunks is just as good as Pulp Fiction?
The Hobbit book wasn't that, it was all in good fun.
Which is precisely why Tolkein had Gandalf (the Ainu) go off to do his "big scene" stuff with the "Necromancer" (another Ainu, called Sauron) OFF STAGE. Same reason that some guy called Shakespeare (who is reputed to know a thing or several about writing screenplays) had his guys Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed offstage - to keep the focus on Hamlet.
If this Shakespeare guy's so hot, how come he never won an Oscar?
Yeah, really... If you're going to do a trilogy, make it a good one
That's a great trilogy, but great books do not generally translate to great movies, as there is simply too much that you have to lose in the translation.
The reason that Lord of the Rings works well as a movie is that it is not great literature to begin with. It's not bad, it's just minor literature in the same way that PG Wodehouse or Agatha Christie are, both of whom also translate well to the small or large screen.
i like the apple tv, but I think certain elements of the remote are a disaster. if you set the remote down and then pick it up again, there's no easy way to tell which orientation is right without looking at it.
Call me a sausage-fingered, cabbage-brained dullard, but I always have to look at a TV remote before using it.
ok, so until there's a star trek computer you're going to forego any speech command technology, even though it is a useful tool for controling a phone?
Yes, in much the same way that I don't see the point of a 95% autonomous car.
If it can't drive me home over unfamiliar twisty mountain roads in the snow at night when I'm drunk, what's the point? I'm quite capable of doing my regular commute by myself anyway. If I have to be constantly on standby to over-ride my mostly-autonomous car, I might just as well drive manually.
Disclaimier: I am not a goods driver or from the US, and so don't ever drive for ten hours in a row.
"because it's our consciousness that makes us distinctly human vis-a-vis the (rest of) the animal or plant kingdom."
Err , I think its been pretty well demonstrated numerous times that all animals have conciousness in varying degrees. If you think humans are special in that regard then I'm afraid you're wrong. What makes us special is our opposable thumb and our intelligence , but thats not the same as conciousness.
That is only true if you take "consciousness" to mean something like "being aware of your surroundings". Self evidently, a cat is aware of a mouse it's hunting and a mouse is aware that there is a cat trying to catch it, or else the cat wouldn't know there was a mouse to catch and the mouse wouldn't be able to react and try to run away. But that is such a wide definition that it's meaningless.
Human consciousness implies self-awareness. Most animals do not have this. There is some evidence that chimps and dolphins do in some sense, but it's not decided whether they're sentient like humans.
I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
Hard to say, but given that the word 'slaves' was already used previously in the sentence, best practice in English writing is not to use the word again, but to use another similar word.
The words "worker" and "slave" have widely different meanings and are certainly not interchangeable.
Because you can't really find any economist who disagree on the general principle of free markets. They debate quite vigorously things like how much the free market should be regulated, but you can't find an economist to support a centrally planned economy. Even in China, they've given up that ship. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to minimize some of the negative effects that completely unregulated markets bring. Look at the terrible toll those experiments with planned economies took on the people of eastern Europe.
But this just exemplifies the point that economics and politics are intertwined.
The problem with the USSR was that its centralised economic policy followed from its centralised political policy, and its politics did not grow from a background of democracy.
And it is perfectly possible to have planned, centralised institutions provided you have democratic control of some sort. For instance, the civil service and armed forces function without (necessarily) creating tyranny in the western world.
My economics course in High School was a propaganda platform for capitalism. There was no discussion of other competing systems,
And your physics course was a propaganda platform for the Laws of Thermodynamics, with no discussion of perpetual motion machines. Reality and science sometimes are just no fun.
Funny how right wingers are prepared to treat economics as a science as long as it supports laissez faire capitalism unthinkingly, whereas otherwise it's a liberal-hippy pseudo-science like sociology.
It's also worth exploring the question of why Twitter hasn't already disabled these accounts, and why intelligence agencies haven't done anything about them, if they're so easy to find.
I imagine intelligence agencies are quite happy for ISIS supporters to identify themselves on the internet, and wouldn't want Twitter to disable them.
I don't know about that, but the Paris attacks did demonstrate that Obama's point of view that gun control will stop these attacks is so wrong it isn't even funny.
Oh please. If a group of suicide bombers/gunmen stormed an American restaurant or gig, they'd have killed enough people to make their point before any of the concealed carriers knew what was happening.
There's a huge difference between a lone nutjob with a handgun and a hunting rifle and a squad of trained terrorists with automatic weapons.
And even if you declared martial law and made every US citizen patrol with their own automatic weapon, the terrorists would just resort to suicide bombs anyway. Although they'd have already destroyed civil society, so maybe they wouldn't even bother.
How many of these degrees look like they will lead to a job? To be sure there are many, that are good degrees, and if it weren't considered a microagression to point it out, most sane people can also point out those degrees that one should probably not go into debt to acquire. Or certainly not complain about it if that is one's choice.
For fuck's sake, university is not supposed to be a job training programme. People who graduate in Medieval fine art, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian philosophy or whatever do not expect to be working in those fields once they leave college, except for the few who go into academia.
If this seems hard to understand, consider someone who does a degree in Pure Maths or Theoretical Physics: they are just as likely to end up as a lawyer or banker as any sort of scientist.
Slashdot Mirror
OH, almost forgot - won first place in a science prize in which he bumped off a teenaged kid who found a cheap/easy means of detecting *ebola*?
I take it by "bumped off" you're not using it in the UK colloquial sense of "murdered"? Is that some sort of US slang?
Old political trick. Treat every piece of news as a potential terrorist threat. So we won't complain so much when they take away our civil rights.
Um, I think a story about blowing up electricity pylons is an actual piece of news about terrorism.
The Preppers are planning for something worse than a power outage. They are prepping for the time it doesn't come back on.
I thought they were prepping for the time when the zombie apocalypse happens?
Hell, if they were so successful in monitoring ISIS, why the fuck weren't they able to stop the Paris attacks from happening in the first place?
Groups like ISIS use social media for general propaganda, recruitment, etc, not detailing their military plans.
My summary would be that with LOTR he took a good book and made a very good movie , whereas with The Hobbit he took a great book and made a very poor movie .
What's a "fagget"?
What the GP is simultaneously afraid of and excited by.
If I had been of the opinion that The Hobbit was some masterpiece of literature in the same way I feel about the epic trilogy, maybe I would have been really cross.
If you think LOTR is a masterpiece of literature, you really need to widen your reading.
OTOH, The Hobbit is a genuine classic like Treasure Island or A Wrinkle In Time, which is to say a children's classic.
I thought the movies were really good. I never understand the people who don't like movies. Haters on The Hobbit. Haters on Star Wars. These were entertaining. That's why I go to the movies. To be entertained. They succeeded.
So you don't think there is any real differentiation between movies at all? They're all just a bit of harmless fun?
Alvin and the Cunting Chipmunks is just as good as Pulp Fiction?
Which is precisely why Tolkein had Gandalf (the Ainu) go off to do his "big scene" stuff with the "Necromancer" (another Ainu, called Sauron) OFF STAGE. Same reason that some guy called Shakespeare (who is reputed to know a thing or several about writing screenplays) had his guys Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed offstage - to keep the focus on Hamlet.
If this Shakespeare guy's so hot, how come he never won an Oscar?
Yeah, really... If you're going to do a trilogy, make it a good one
That's a great trilogy, but great books do not generally translate to great movies, as there is simply too much that you have to lose in the translation.
The reason that Lord of the Rings works well as a movie is that it is not great literature to begin with. It's not bad, it's just minor literature in the same way that PG Wodehouse or Agatha Christie are, both of whom also translate well to the small or large screen.
i like the apple tv, but I think certain elements of the remote are a disaster. if you set the remote down and then pick it up again, there's no easy way to tell which orientation is right without looking at it.
Call me a sausage-fingered, cabbage-brained dullard, but I always have to look at a TV remote before using it.
ok, so until there's a star trek computer you're going to forego any speech command technology, even though it is a useful tool for controling a phone?
Yes, in much the same way that I don't see the point of a 95% autonomous car.
If it can't drive me home over unfamiliar twisty mountain roads in the snow at night when I'm drunk, what's the point? I'm quite capable of doing my regular commute by myself anyway. If I have to be constantly on standby to over-ride my mostly-autonomous car, I might just as well drive manually.
Disclaimier: I am not a goods driver or from the US, and so don't ever drive for ten hours in a row.
"because it's our consciousness that makes us distinctly human vis-a-vis the (rest of) the animal or plant kingdom."
Err , I think its been pretty well demonstrated numerous times that all animals have conciousness in varying degrees. If you think humans are special in that regard then I'm afraid you're wrong. What makes us special is our opposable thumb and our intelligence , but thats not the same as conciousness.
That is only true if you take "consciousness" to mean something like "being aware of your surroundings". Self evidently, a cat is aware of a mouse it's hunting and a mouse is aware that there is a cat trying to catch it, or else the cat wouldn't know there was a mouse to catch and the mouse wouldn't be able to react and try to run away. But that is such a wide definition that it's meaningless.
Human consciousness implies self-awareness. Most animals do not have this. There is some evidence that chimps and dolphins do in some sense, but it's not decided whether they're sentient like humans.
"...information theory, a branch of applied mathematics..."
It is not; it is a branch of electrical engineering.
I thought engineering was a part of applied mathematics?
fucking splitter!
I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
Hard to say, but given that the word 'slaves' was already used previously in the sentence, best practice in English writing is not to use the word again, but to use another similar word.
The words "worker" and "slave" have widely different meanings and are certainly not interchangeable.
Because you can't really find any economist who disagree on the general principle of free markets. They debate quite vigorously things like how much the free market should be regulated, but you can't find an economist to support a centrally planned economy. Even in China, they've given up that ship. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to minimize some of the negative effects that completely unregulated markets bring. Look at the terrible toll those experiments with planned economies took on the people of eastern Europe.
But this just exemplifies the point that economics and politics are intertwined.
The problem with the USSR was that its centralised economic policy followed from its centralised political policy, and its politics did not grow from a background of democracy.
And it is perfectly possible to have planned, centralised institutions provided you have democratic control of some sort. For instance, the civil service and armed forces function without (necessarily) creating tyranny in the western world.
And your physics course was a propaganda platform for the Laws of Thermodynamics, with no discussion of perpetual motion machines. Reality and science sometimes are just no fun.
Funny how right wingers are prepared to treat economics as a science as long as it supports laissez faire capitalism unthinkingly, whereas otherwise it's a liberal-hippy pseudo-science like sociology.
That's because if you follow the logical laws of economics you get capitalism. The other things you are thinking about are political constructs.
Yup, the brainwashing certainly worked on you.
If there's one thing that's true abouit economics it's that it's not logical once you get beyond massively simplified supply and demand curves.
And anything involving more than one person is a social and hence political construct.
...but when are we going to embark on a mission of true impact: the manned space mission to the sun!
Now, I know you have doubts, chief among them, "Isn't it really hot on the sun?" Fortunately, there is a simple solution: we will go at night.
Ah, the old ones truly are the best.
It's also worth exploring the question of why Twitter hasn't already disabled these accounts, and why intelligence agencies haven't done anything about them, if they're so easy to find.
I imagine intelligence agencies are quite happy for ISIS supporters to identify themselves on the internet, and wouldn't want Twitter to disable them.
I don't know about that, but the Paris attacks did demonstrate that Obama's point of view that gun control will stop these attacks is so wrong it isn't even funny.
Oh please. If a group of suicide bombers/gunmen stormed an American restaurant or gig, they'd have killed enough people to make their point before any of the concealed carriers knew what was happening.
There's a huge difference between a lone nutjob with a handgun and a hunting rifle and a squad of trained terrorists with automatic weapons.
And even if you declared martial law and made every US citizen patrol with their own automatic weapon, the terrorists would just resort to suicide bombs anyway. Although they'd have already destroyed civil society, so maybe they wouldn't even bother.
How many of these degrees look like they will lead to a job? To be sure there are many, that are good degrees, and if it weren't considered a microagression to point it out, most sane people can also point out those degrees that one should probably not go into debt to acquire. Or certainly not complain about it if that is one's choice.
For fuck's sake, university is not supposed to be a job training programme. People who graduate in Medieval fine art, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian philosophy or whatever do not expect to be working in those fields once they leave college, except for the few who go into academia.
If this seems hard to understand, consider someone who does a degree in Pure Maths or Theoretical Physics: they are just as likely to end up as a lawyer or banker as any sort of scientist.
As a project lead I worked 40 hours straight without sleep
Yes, I'm sure you performed brilliantly during the whole of those forty hours. Twat.
How old are you?
I'm in my 40s, if someone asked me to prove I graduated high school, I'm not even sure how I'd do that at this point.
In any case, if that was a requirement, for something from 25 years ago, then I'm not interested in working there, that is just silly.
You might need a job requiring security clearance, which will go back over your whole adult life.