Umm.. Wake up, dude- it's 2006! Ubuntu is the shit. I've been using it as my laptop OS for nearly a year now: it plays all the porn I can download (even wmv9), I can check my email, surf the web, snag torrents, all using my wireless card... So I can't browse YouTube or some of the crap they put on NYT- so what? That means the whole OS sucks for the desktop?! Macromedia says they'll have Flash 9 ready for Linux next year, so if I'm patient I'll be able to watch YouTube then.. Probably won't, but that's neither here nor there.
Ok, so my gaming/music production rig still runs XP - that doesn't surprise me. Eventually more companies will realize that they can increase their reach just by putting out a linux port. Maybe it's only the geek crowd now, but if we keep working on it more people will come to Linux as it improves. Also, remember who does the support for Linux: end users! So, tell me about the investment costs for Linux support again?
Basically your argument is:"Linux sucks for desktop users right now, so it's not worth the effort to make it so." Unfortunately, your basic premise is flawed (Linux (or at least Ubuntu) is mostly desktop-ready) - and your solution (don't bother working on it) is not really a solution.
Apparently common sense doesn't use logic, people.
I have subscribed to the MPP a NORML email newletters for a couple of years now and was pleased to hear that the NV initiative made it to the ballot. I live in Washington state, but I went ahead and donated $14.20 to the initiative campaign in June. It was the first political contribution I ever made, and I made a point of writing the DNC to let them know where my priorities lie. It seems to me that it's not just liberals who realize the insanity of the current policy towards cannabis, hell - Bill O'Reilly said he supports decriminalization on Conan O'Brien's show a few years ago (the only reason I believe him when he says he's an independant, BTW).
If pot were legalized I see no reason why it wouldn't be sold exclusively in liquor stores to adults over the age of 21. So, no - it wouldn't be "shoved in your face" unless you spend a lot of time in liquor stores.
Let me go slightly OT for a sec here... Do you think anybody will enjoy "Snakes on a Plane" if they're sober? I have a feeling I won't want to watch it without a little chemical assistance...
The thing that makes prohibition morally wrong in my eyes is the violence caused directly by the black market. http://www.reason.com/rb/rb012903.shtml This article observes that the murder rate doubles during eras of prohibition.
Think of it this way: if a drug dealer is robbed, s/he cannot call the police to help without being arrested and spending years in jail - so in order to protect that huge profit margin they must take steps to protect themselves.
Every time I have money to spend on pot and can't find it (withdrawal symptoms? Anxiety, insomnia. That's it. And I'll smoke a gram a day if I have it.) I spend an hour or so writing a letter to a member of congress telling them why they should support legalisation. I recommend this therapy to all the other potheads, it's a great way to occupy your mind.
Another interesting tidbit: from some quick googling it appears that marijuana sells for about 20x the price of silver (in my hometown an ounce of MJ goes for about $250, silver seems to be around $12/oz!) It's a fucking weed!!
I only spend about 1hr a week on myspace, but I've found it to be extremely powerful as a free music promotion site. Hits our demographic just right!
If you want to check out my modern rock band, go to http://myspace.com/thearchivesband... I haven't bothered with any of these third-party apps, haven't hacked the css, and it'll only play one song when you open it - so no fears, ok?
I watched the nova from the first link shortly after it first aired, below is the gist (IIRC)..
Basically, Bush decreed that scientists would recieve no federal funds for embrionic stem cell research based on new cell lines. He allowed the use of about 65 previously established lines. Unfortunately about half of those are ill-suited to study or contaminated.
It's the destruction of the fetus that he claims to object to. He's actually created a false dichotomy here: the new lines would be derived from aborted fetuses, which will be destroyed anyway.
I have ADHD, and I easily get lost in posts which don't have breaks in them... I end up re-reading a lot of the post.
Personally, I tend to just use the return key to break up my emails and other writing- so I can understand if people just do that and never preview their post. Just don't expect everyone to read it.:D
I haven't read On Writing, but have read much of King's work. Danse Macabre is also an interesting look inside the job of a horror/pop fiction writer.
As for the depth of his work, I must recommend the Dark Tower series as well as the many books which have tangential connections to it- especially Eyes of the Dragon and The Stand. He has woven an extremely detailed universe over the course of something like 50 books (wikipedia doesn't have a total, and I don't feel like counting). The Dark Tower (the seventh and last book of the series) is a total mind-blower and an excellent use of (totally self-concious) deux-ex-machina. He mentions deus ex machina a lot in his work, but I don't think I fully understood exactly what it meant until I read The Dark Tower last year. And the ending is totally zen and unique in any fiction I've read.
Since we're talking about writing, I gotta say this: I don't read posts on slashdot which don't use the paragraph tag ( it's easy: [p] -just replace the brackets with greater-than less-than... it's right there under the text box). Even when I have mod points I skip right over them.
I'm just saying it's annoying to have to do both, and short of running for office I'm doing all I can. I sign all of NORML's http://www.norml.org/ and MPP's http://mpp.org/ petitions and I'm on their mailing lists. Once my band is well-known enough I plan on playing Hempfest in Seattle. By then I'll probably be donating money to them also.
If it were legal it would be cheaper, and the people who sold it would not need to protect themselves from theft since the police would do it for them (it would only be sold at liquor stores to people old enough to buy alchohol). Therefore I could just buy hash and cook with it, or buy a vaporizer at the same place I buy my pot.
Now, I sometimes have to pass a drug test just to be employed. I have been ticketed for possession, and nearly shat myself when I learned the Mandatory Minimum penalty. If I'm caught again I will probably go to jail and pay at least $1000 in fines. Since I am not a dealer it will most certainly be for less possession of less than 42 grams. So marijuana possession, in my experience - and according to the link in my previous post, is anything but sparsely enforced.
So I don't want to give them anything else to prosecute with, thanks very much. It wasn't I who declared a "war" on drugs; I would love to be on the same side as the government on this. I remember the feeling of trust I had when the future Town Marshall stood up in front of us to teach us the DARE program... I wish I could feel it around an officer of the law again.
There is zero benefit to legal adult consumption of alcohol, yet we have seen the destructive results of banning such consumption. I see similar effects from the current prohibition, is this not a valid reason for opposing the law? As long as people are using cannibis with little or no physiological damage, there will be at least a percentage who realizes that the government prohibition is wrong.
I only mentioned recreational use since I feel that marijuana is a safer alternative to alcohol, but I use it more for its psychological benefits. Marijuana has helped me with a problem with rage and helps me get to sleep at night. Obviously I have no scientific data to back this up, only personal experience that these problems recur after abstenance and persist regardless of the length of abstention. Of course, the government feels no need to back up its position with science - and likes to ignore scientific evidence that refutes it.
Anyway, I said that "I feel" it is my duty. I never claimed its written down anywhere for me to obey. Many people feel they have a duty to God to do something, I'm not going to tell them they're mistaken (even if they do have it written down somewhere). I also write letters to our Congresspeople, but they have the same knee-jerk reaction so many other people do: "Drugs are bad, mmmkay." I do all I can to change the law, should I suffer while I do so?
I don't think there's all that much difference in standing up for millions of people who have been unjustly imprisoned for "a little hedonistic pleasure" than standing up for people who were persecuted for their skin color. Most of the more than 700,000 people arrested for charges related to cannibis in 2004 were charged with simple, non-violent possesion. Injustice is injustice.
I feel it is my duty as an American to defy laws that are obviously unjust. There's one in particular that I violate quite often... In Washington State, the mandatory minimum penalty for possession of up to 42 grams of Marijuana is about $500 and/or 90 days in jail (89 of which may be suspended).
I don't enjoy drinking alchohol, and it seems unfair to me that the obviously safer alternative recreational drug is outlawed. Why is it legal to be an alchoholic, but illegal to be a pot-head? The former is noticably more destructive to the body than the latter.
If I had been alive in the 1950s I would have stood up with the African American people for their rights just as I risk prosecution now to stand with the millions of ganja-smokers who have been unjustly imprisoned and raped.
This is why it is important for government to have checks on its power. If we want to have any hope of regaining our lost freedom, we need a little wiggle room... So I guess if they quit persecuting drug users I wouldn't mind seeing a national ID system.
I still can't figure this out. Why does the religious "right" get to decide what is offensive in America?
Personally, I find three things offensive - most offensive to least:
1. Censorship 2. Intolerance 3. Bad Smells
Every time I'm forced to change channels because I got tired of trying to figure out what word they were bleeping with the everfucking 1kHz tone I write an angry email. I never watch movies on basic cable (unless it's comedy central's secret stash or I've already seen it) because instead of losing myself in a good story I'm always wondering what I missed to the censor's editing machine.
Somehow, the US culture has managed to accept the axiom: morality == christian values. Why is it tacitly acceptable to offend me and my peers, but if someone of the christian persuasion claims offense people fall all over themselves apologizing?
The religious "right" has followed a homophobic line (not supported by the bible, as far as I can tell - having read the New Testament) for thousands of years and now their opposition has finally made some progress in terms of tolerance. It's probably not directly the "right's" fault that "gay" has become a derogatory term in the last 10 years or so - I blame middle-school kids, personally.
If I were playing WOW, I'm sure I would quickly grow tired of hearing "that's so gay" repeatedly (see offense #2), and the stifling of the GLBT guild would doubtless have pissed me off (offense #1) enough to cancel my subscription or kill off my character. I'm not gay, but I have friends who are - but even if I didn't #2 would still be #2.
So I guess this one hits 2 out of my big 3. I'll probably have to wait for smell-o-vision before I can get the trifecta.
That's the program I use to read the illegal rips I downloaded from the Undernet on my Pocket PC (a Dell Axim X30 on which I would love to run linux if I had time to help the porting effort)... I use the green on black color scheme and I can get about 5.5hrs of reading on one charge. Use either the side scroll or the buttons on the bottom to change pages and I'm a much more efficient reader.
Downsides: hand-scanned books have some pretty fucking weird typos.. If I use wifi at all my battery time plummets. The selection on IRC is usually pretty good, but some obscure titles are understandably hard to find. I don't mind using IRC to get books, it's easier than the *NIX command line most of the time - but it's certainly not user-friendly in the cushy-gui or even basic web page sense. If you use an old version of ubook you don't need a license, but looking at the web page it looks like that may cease to be. $15 is pretty cheap for such a useful program. It's definitely the program I use the most on my PPC and I'll have to have a replacement before I flash the ROM for the Penguin Familiar.
-g
Thanks for your service, even if it was in a couple of misguided campaigns.
While my brother and I completely agree with you on all these points, he has a plan and the Infantry is a big part of it. He graduated w/ a BS in Politcal Science a couple of years before he signed up, and could have gone straight to OCS... But his plan is to gain experience/respect in the Army now by doing their hardest (from what I hear) entry-level job, later he hopes to become a police officer in a large city (he already has an app in w/ the NYPD) and later still to go in to politics. I'm really proud of him for taking on these challenges, even if I abhor the policies of his commander-in-chief. When Doug was in basic training, the running joke was that the one liberal in the Army had died and Doug had to take his place.
I submitted this question more than a week ago, before he had shipped out. I waited a couple of days to see if it had posted, but he was due to ship out on the 1st so we went ahead and bought a refurbished Dell m700 with all the hardware he specified (DVD, wifi) - he was wary of ordering a computer once he was in country since the last time he went APO/FPO shipping tooks months.. My family has had mostly good experience with them (I still wish I could put linux on my Axim X30, but I'm not a developer and I'm patient - so there you go) and I didn't see anything about "Dell Hell" http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/08/17/de ar-mr-dell/ until a few days after we ordered.... D'oh!
I'm starting to think this might be okay, he was reassigned to a headquarters company (the Army reasonably pulled him off of active patrols after he suffered two separate incidences of heat stroke during training at Ft. Bragg) and probably will not be leaving the base this time. I have forwarded the link to this story to him, and hopefully he'll read it and take some of the good general advice proffered here..
As far as fixing the Vaio goes... I'm going to be cannibalizing that for parts;)... I'm thinking about building it into some kind of funky case and making it into a network-booted piece of furniture... Wish me luck!
Well, none of my friends are true audiophiles... But as a trained audio engineer, I can tell you tha t if you spend years "training your ears" you will hear things that other people either don't notice or simply can't hear.
Hang out with a real producer in a $500/hour studio sometime and you'll see what I mean.
He chose to save Palpatine for purely selfish reasons: Palpatine told Anakin that he would save Padme... Anakin, having been trained later than other Jedi didn't have the Zen attitude Obi-Wan and Yoda took for granted. It's a good thing too, or he wouldn't have been able to bring balance to the Force. He's Anti-Christ and Savior all rolled into one.
Totally agree with you.. The three-episode arcs this season have been the best Trek I've seen since DS9. The mini-series within a series on Vulcan with the mind-melds a la the end of Wrath of Khan and allusions to Jesus and New Testament were terrifically enlightening IMHO.
When they brought out the idea of a temporal cold war (two LONG years ago), that just about blew my mind (thinking about chess games where you get to change the opening you chose as you're about to lose the endgame - ok, well I thought that was a good analogy but maybe RISK would be a better choice since it requires more players). I was somewhat disappointed in the execution, to say the least. Way too long spent on a prick-tease of a sub-plot.
The things I like best about Enterprise are 1) the characters of the Capt, T'Pol, and Trip are (nearly) always entertaining and T'Pol's addiction was one of the more realistic (not resolved in a week) portrayals I have seen in popular TV shows. 2) the technology looks a lot more like what we have now, it breaks down a lot- and is often poorly designed (look at the railings in engineering, for example- a little turbulence while you're going down the stairs and whoops! broken neck!).
From what I understood, Berman has the whole thing mapped out to seven seasons, with all the juicy bits featuring Romulans and Klingons to commence shortly after that whole temporal war thing... I'm gonna be writing an email to Universal telling them how loyal I've been and will be. It's the only show I watch on UPN.
When I saw that pic, I thought to myself "damn, that would make a *badass* wallpaper!"
Then when I right-clicked on it a little java dialog popped up saying "She did it all for the wookie!"... Clever.
For some weird reason, it only saved a horizontal slice of the pic to my hdd. Anybody know where I can just download the damned thing, and thus avoid splicing all the slices together just for a silly wallpaper?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so my gaming/music production rig still runs XP - that doesn't surprise me. Eventually more companies will realize that they can increase their reach just by putting out a linux port. Maybe it's only the geek crowd now, but if we keep working on it more people will come to Linux as it improves. Also, remember who does the support for Linux: end users! So, tell me about the investment costs for Linux support again?
Basically your argument is:"Linux sucks for desktop users right now, so it's not worth the effort to make it so." Unfortunately, your basic premise is flawed (Linux (or at least Ubuntu) is mostly desktop-ready) - and your solution (don't bother working on it) is not really a solution.
Apparently common sense doesn't use logic, people.
So does the Green Party! If you live in Washington State vote for Aaron Dixon for US Senate this fall!
I have subscribed to the MPP a NORML email newletters for a couple of years now and was pleased to hear that the NV initiative made it to the ballot. I live in Washington state, but I went ahead and donated $14.20 to the initiative campaign in June. It was the first political contribution I ever made, and I made a point of writing the DNC to let them know where my priorities lie. It seems to me that it's not just liberals who realize the insanity of the current policy towards cannabis, hell - Bill O'Reilly said he supports decriminalization on Conan O'Brien's show a few years ago (the only reason I believe him when he says he's an independant, BTW).
Let me go slightly OT for a sec here... Do you think anybody will enjoy "Snakes on a Plane" if they're sober? I have a feeling I won't want to watch it without a little chemical assistance...
Think of it this way: if a drug dealer is robbed, s/he cannot call the police to help without being arrested and spending years in jail - so in order to protect that huge profit margin they must take steps to protect themselves.
Every time I have money to spend on pot and can't find it (withdrawal symptoms? Anxiety, insomnia. That's it. And I'll smoke a gram a day if I have it.) I spend an hour or so writing a letter to a member of congress telling them why they should support legalisation. I recommend this therapy to all the other potheads, it's a great way to occupy your mind.
Another interesting tidbit: from some quick googling it appears that marijuana sells for about 20x the price of silver (in my hometown an ounce of MJ goes for about $250, silver seems to be around $12/oz!) It's a fucking weed!!
"I'm late for fucking work!"
If you want to check out my modern rock band, go to http://myspace.com/thearchivesband ... I haven't bothered with any of these third-party apps, haven't hacked the css, and it'll only play one song when you open it - so no fears, ok?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/miracle/stemcells.htm l
http://www.time.com/time/2001/stemcells/
http://www.law4u.com.au/lil/ls_stem.html
I watched the nova from the first link shortly after it first aired, below is the gist (IIRC)..
Basically, Bush decreed that scientists would recieve no federal funds for embrionic stem cell research based on new cell lines. He allowed the use of about 65 previously established lines. Unfortunately about half of those are ill-suited to study or contaminated.
It's the destruction of the fetus that he claims to object to. He's actually created a false dichotomy here: the new lines would be derived from aborted fetuses, which will be destroyed anyway.
Personally, I tend to just use the return key to break up my emails and other writing- so I can understand if people just do that and never preview their post. Just don't expect everyone to read it. :D
As for the depth of his work, I must recommend the Dark Tower series as well as the many books which have tangential connections to it- especially Eyes of the Dragon and The Stand. He has woven an extremely detailed universe over the course of something like 50 books (wikipedia doesn't have a total, and I don't feel like counting). The Dark Tower (the seventh and last book of the series) is a total mind-blower and an excellent use of (totally self-concious) deux-ex-machina. He mentions deus ex machina a lot in his work, but I don't think I fully understood exactly what it meant until I read The Dark Tower last year. And the ending is totally zen and unique in any fiction I've read.
Since we're talking about writing, I gotta say this: I don't read posts on slashdot which don't use the paragraph tag ( it's easy: [p] -just replace the brackets with greater-than less-than... it's right there under the text box). Even when I have mod points I skip right over them.
My original point. ;)
Though I think I may have seen the light: http://www.thc-ministry.org/
When I wrote a reply to Rick Larsen's http://www.ricklarsen.org/ form letter (regarding the petition I signed protesting the Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Raich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich ) Larsen sent the same damn form letter again!
If it were legal it would be cheaper, and the people who sold it would not need to protect themselves from theft since the police would do it for them (it would only be sold at liquor stores to people old enough to buy alchohol). Therefore I could just buy hash and cook with it, or buy a vaporizer at the same place I buy my pot.
Now, I sometimes have to pass a drug test just to be employed. I have been ticketed for possession, and nearly shat myself when I learned the Mandatory Minimum penalty. If I'm caught again I will probably go to jail and pay at least $1000 in fines. Since I am not a dealer it will most certainly be for less possession of less than 42 grams. So marijuana possession, in my experience - and according to the link in my previous post, is anything but sparsely enforced.
So I don't want to give them anything else to prosecute with, thanks very much. It wasn't I who declared a "war" on drugs; I would love to be on the same side as the government on this. I remember the feeling of trust I had when the future Town Marshall stood up in front of us to teach us the DARE program... I wish I could feel it around an officer of the law again.
Oh, and I'm high right now. :)
I only mentioned recreational use since I feel that marijuana is a safer alternative to alcohol, but I use it more for its psychological benefits. Marijuana has helped me with a problem with rage and helps me get to sleep at night. Obviously I have no scientific data to back this up, only personal experience that these problems recur after abstenance and persist regardless of the length of abstention. Of course, the government feels no need to back up its position with science - and likes to ignore scientific evidence that refutes it.
Anyway, I said that "I feel" it is my duty. I never claimed its written down anywhere for me to obey. Many people feel they have a duty to God to do something, I'm not going to tell them they're mistaken (even if they do have it written down somewhere). I also write letters to our Congresspeople, but they have the same knee-jerk reaction so many other people do: "Drugs are bad, mmmkay." I do all I can to change the law, should I suffer while I do so?
I don't think there's all that much difference in standing up for millions of people who have been unjustly imprisoned for "a little hedonistic pleasure" than standing up for people who were persecuted for their skin color. Most of the more than 700,000 people arrested for charges related to cannibis in 2004 were charged with simple, non-violent possesion. Injustice is injustice.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/marijuan.htm
I don't enjoy drinking alchohol, and it seems unfair to me that the obviously safer alternative recreational drug is outlawed. Why is it legal to be an alchoholic, but illegal to be a pot-head? The former is noticably more destructive to the body than the latter.
If I had been alive in the 1950s I would have stood up with the African American people for their rights just as I risk prosecution now to stand with the millions of ganja-smokers who have been unjustly imprisoned and raped.
This is why it is important for government to have checks on its power. If we want to have any hope of regaining our lost freedom, we need a little wiggle room... So I guess if they quit persecuting drug users I wouldn't mind seeing a national ID system.
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=13840 5&highlight=automatix
Personally, I find three things offensive - most offensive to least:
1. Censorship 2. Intolerance 3. Bad Smells
Every time I'm forced to change channels because I got tired of trying to figure out what word they were bleeping with the everfucking 1kHz tone I write an angry email. I never watch movies on basic cable (unless it's comedy central's secret stash or I've already seen it) because instead of losing myself in a good story I'm always wondering what I missed to the censor's editing machine.
Somehow, the US culture has managed to accept the axiom: morality == christian values. Why is it tacitly acceptable to offend me and my peers, but if someone of the christian persuasion claims offense people fall all over themselves apologizing?
The religious "right" has followed a homophobic line (not supported by the bible, as far as I can tell - having read the New Testament) for thousands of years and now their opposition has finally made some progress in terms of tolerance. It's probably not directly the "right's" fault that "gay" has become a derogatory term in the last 10 years or so - I blame middle-school kids, personally.
If I were playing WOW, I'm sure I would quickly grow tired of hearing "that's so gay" repeatedly (see offense #2), and the stifling of the GLBT guild would doubtless have pissed me off (offense #1) enough to cancel my subscription or kill off my character. I'm not gay, but I have friends who are - but even if I didn't #2 would still be #2.
So I guess this one hits 2 out of my big 3. I'll probably have to wait for smell-o-vision before I can get the trifecta.
-g
That's the program I use to read the illegal rips I downloaded from the Undernet on my Pocket PC (a Dell Axim X30 on which I would love to run linux if I had time to help the porting effort)... I use the green on black color scheme and I can get about 5.5hrs of reading on one charge. Use either the side scroll or the buttons on the bottom to change pages and I'm a much more efficient reader.
Downsides: hand-scanned books have some pretty fucking weird typos.. If I use wifi at all my battery time plummets. The selection on IRC is usually pretty good, but some obscure titles are understandably hard to find. I don't mind using IRC to get books, it's easier than the *NIX command line most of the time - but it's certainly not user-friendly in the cushy-gui or even basic web page sense. If you use an old version of ubook you don't need a license, but looking at the web page it looks like that may cease to be. $15 is pretty cheap for such a useful program. It's definitely the program I use the most on my PPC and I'll have to have a replacement before I flash the ROM for the Penguin Familiar. -g
While my brother and I completely agree with you on all these points, he has a plan and the Infantry is a big part of it. He graduated w/ a BS in Politcal Science a couple of years before he signed up, and could have gone straight to OCS... But his plan is to gain experience/respect in the Army now by doing their hardest (from what I hear) entry-level job, later he hopes to become a police officer in a large city (he already has an app in w/ the NYPD) and later still to go in to politics. I'm really proud of him for taking on these challenges, even if I abhor the policies of his commander-in-chief. When Doug was in basic training, the running joke was that the one liberal in the Army had died and Doug had to take his place.
I submitted this question more than a week ago, before he had shipped out. I waited a couple of days to see if it had posted, but he was due to ship out on the 1st so we went ahead and bought a refurbished Dell m700 with all the hardware he specified (DVD, wifi) - he was wary of ordering a computer once he was in country since the last time he went APO/FPO shipping tooks months.. My family has had mostly good experience with them (I still wish I could put linux on my Axim X30, but I'm not a developer and I'm patient - so there you go) and I didn't see anything about "Dell Hell" http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/08/17/de ar-mr-dell/ until a few days after we ordered.... D'oh!
I'm starting to think this might be okay, he was reassigned to a headquarters company (the Army reasonably pulled him off of active patrols after he suffered two separate incidences of heat stroke during training at Ft. Bragg) and probably will not be leaving the base this time. I have forwarded the link to this story to him, and hopefully he'll read it and take some of the good general advice proffered here..
As far as fixing the Vaio goes... I'm going to be cannibalizing that for parts ;) ... I'm thinking about building it into some kind of funky case and making it into a network-booted piece of furniture... Wish me luck!
-g
Hang out with a real producer in a $500/hour studio sometime and you'll see what I mean.
g
He chose to save Palpatine for purely selfish reasons: Palpatine told Anakin that he would save Padme... Anakin, having been trained later than other Jedi didn't have the Zen attitude Obi-Wan and Yoda took for granted. It's a good thing too, or he wouldn't have been able to bring balance to the Force. He's Anti-Christ and Savior all rolled into one.
Thinking that the series is about telekinesis and exciting swordplay is like thinking that Animal Farm was about drunken swine.
When they brought out the idea of a temporal cold war (two LONG years ago), that just about blew my mind (thinking about chess games where you get to change the opening you chose as you're about to lose the endgame - ok, well I thought that was a good analogy but maybe RISK would be a better choice since it requires more players). I was somewhat disappointed in the execution, to say the least. Way too long spent on a prick-tease of a sub-plot.
The things I like best about Enterprise are 1) the characters of the Capt, T'Pol, and Trip are (nearly) always entertaining and T'Pol's addiction was one of the more realistic (not resolved in a week) portrayals I have seen in popular TV shows. 2) the technology looks a lot more like what we have now, it breaks down a lot- and is often poorly designed (look at the railings in engineering, for example- a little turbulence while you're going down the stairs and whoops! broken neck!).
From what I understood, Berman has the whole thing mapped out to seven seasons, with all the juicy bits featuring Romulans and Klingons to commence shortly after that whole temporal war thing... I'm gonna be writing an email to Universal telling them how loyal I've been and will be. It's the only show I watch on UPN.
-g
http://209.166.73.160/~g/ Please be gentle, it's only DSL :)
-G
Then when I right-clicked on it a little java dialog popped up saying "She did it all for the wookie!"... Clever.
For some weird reason, it only saved a horizontal slice of the pic to my hdd. Anybody know where I can just download the damned thing, and thus avoid splicing all the slices together just for a silly wallpaper?
-G