Well, those "millions of self-proclaimed 'hardcore' gamers with an XBox" did seem to spend money on casual games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, so yeah, I'd say Dance Central could wind up being something pretty big for Kinect.
I have a Wii, a PS3 and an XBox + Kinect - I don't know if I'm "hardcore" but I will say that there's a rather distinct difference between the Wii and the Kinect, for sure. Heck, the first title for Kinect - Kinect Adventures - already does more than the Wii does: whole body immersion in the game. It may not seem like a big thing, but it is vastly different and way more fun, to me.
Hm, maybe I am old and slow, or maybe I'm not having that issue of lag - I haven't really noticed it; it's felt pretty responsive to me. I tried it on both an XBox 360 Elite and on my XBox 360 4GB.
Dance Central is FUN! I can't dance to save my life, but it's FUN!
My condo association is largely run by idiots who signed a contract with Comcast to get service. No other provider in my area is willing or able to provide service. And I live in the beating heart of Chicago, in one of the neighborhoods with the highest population densities and median income in the city.
WiMAX/4G I can get, but the latency makes online gaming impossible (no thank you, 2000MS ping times!). Satellite is the same thing, and also has other issues (board rules about dishes, I'm in the midst of a bunch of high-rises and they block most orientations). DSL isn't happening for reasons that the phone company has not made clear.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but I assure you, a lack of choice (or, at least, a lack of any kinds of viable choices if you do anything that benefits from or requires a lowish ping) is not uncommon.
When it is done well and adds something, it's worth it. When it's a gimmick it's dumb.
I saw Beowulf in 3D because I was taken to it on a date. I didn't see the point of it being in 3D - it didn't seem to add much, and when it was used it was in a really, no pun intended, "in your face!" fashion so it felt forced and obvious.
I saw Avatar in 3D and it was great - I actually stopped noticing the 3D effect quickly and just sat in and enjoyed the visuals of the rest of the movie. I've also seen Avatar in 2D, and in my opinion, the 3D added something - it was still visually stunning (and I noticed way more detail than the first run through) - but it felt pretty flat, the world was more like a video game than a "living" world.
Like any tool in the artist's toolbox, 3D should be used when it will enhance the work.
I agree that it isn't terribly significant (wake me when I can actually change the POV of a film by moving around, that will be pretty big) but I am glad that it exists in a format that doesn't give me a screaming migraine for the few films that can benefit from it.
He crashed into the a Rolls Royce, broke his hand, and was essentially "broken" after that - dreams crushed, hope shattered, he wound up a miserable loser. They go over that explicitly in the movies, and you see him avoid that fate at the end of the 3rd movie when he decides not to race Needles.
For me it was that I had basically been told, since birth, that if I smoke weed I will very shortly be hooked on smack and selling my body for a fix. When I found out that quite a few people I knew (adults mostly) were casual users for a rather long time and, so far as I could tell, had not become heroin addicts or prostitutes, it made me question the whole notion of whether or not weed was actually all that bad - basically it put it in the category of all that other stuff people (parents, usually) try to scare you off from when it's too hard for them to just teach you how to make good choices.
In high school I smoked up a fair amount, and somewhat in college, though certainly not every day and definitely in the most casual way I can think of when it comes to amounts. I also tried coke, dropped acid, did a little X, and drank. Amazingly, I didn't become a prostitute, didn't become an addict, didn't do anything except, in one case, show up for an English final and wound up writing something that rhymed like Dr. Seuss mixed with Timothy Leary (wound up getting an A- for the course, in spite of this).
As an adult I drink responsibly, don't smoke weed anymore (mainly because I quit smoking tobacco years ago and don't want to take up the inhalant habit again, period). I also work for a university and I think I'm probably in the minority in my lab and among my peers - I've definitely scented marijuana when visiting some work friends at home, and have been offered a toke on several occasions. Yet, amazingly, we do good work, nobody is out of hand, and by and large it's no big thing.
When I see some people get stoned they seem a bit looser and goofier than usual, but the only people who turn into Brad Pitt from True Romance are the ones who are constantly smoking up - abusing ANYTHING like that will make you an idiot. So, when I saw people use weed casually - no, it didn't cause me to think of people negatively because it just wasn't a big deal.
Seriously, the person you were replying to thinking that watching people get high would always lead to a negative impression would be like saying watching people eat food would give you a negative impression because, hey, some fatties overeat and look gross as a result.
Sure, though the best way to send a message is to go beyond not shopping there, but to specifically mention to the employees, when you have any reason for an unsatisfactory interaction with them, why you are not satisfied and then to not purchase. It takes a bit more time, but it can be effective. Whenever I have a negative interaction with a store (pretty rare, actually, but it does happen) I do take the time to let someone there know about it; sometimes it makes for a good change, though I admit usually they ignore it. Point being, if they don't know that their bullshit policies are driving away business, they won't change the policies and will instead try to come up with even more ridiculous ways to rob people rather than improving their service to lure people back.
Except you still bought the drive from them, so pretty clearly it isn't a death knell for Best Buy, but rather a sign that even when someone sees the kind of shit they're pulling, they'll STILL be a customer. I can understand if you absolutely NEEDED that hard drive then and there and this was literally the ONLY place within 100 miles where you could get it, but to do what you did and then still buy it - it doesn't send them any kind of message, and it definitely does not bode badly for their chances to survive.
I used to play a game called Blackdragon on The Source (My userid back then was TCI006) - it wasn't multiplayer, but I would play it with a friend of mine, and we would imagine that the other monsters we ran into were other players. That game really ate up a LOT of my time, and I remember my dad getting really irked that I ran up such a bill (but he was also really glad that his daughter was so into computers, so it evened out:)) That and the Game Master BBS in Illinois used to really eat up a LOT of time for me.
I agree 110%! Instead of changing our environment to suit our needs, we should stop using tools all together. No houses; caves were fine for great^nth grandma and pa, they're fine for us! No fire, no cooking, no agriculture, no domestication of animals, definitely no medicines or vaccines, no clothes, no nothing.
Or, instead of being alarmist, we can try to modify our behavior (knowing full well that only some people will do so) while also using that big glob of gray goo in our heads to find ways to compensate for those who don't change their behavior. Even better, maybe we'll learn some new and interesting things that will help us in ways we currently can't even imagine.
I'll leave off with this quote:
The reasonable man adapts to his environment; the unreasonable man seeks to adapt his environment to himself; all progress is made by unreasonable men.
I love it - because often I'm not really sure *what* I want to search for, so when I get some autocomplete suggestions that can be nice. With the new results popping up now, I often find things that autocomplete wouldn't give me, which is pretty cool.
You do know that if a terrorist were to buy a private plane that the plane would be the weapon, right? I mean, I suppose they could put some explosives on board to up the oomph, but it's kind of beside the point. But yeah, throwing stars, box-cutters, random objects that aren't hundreds of pounds of high explosives, it does kind of make sense that a private plane wouldn't have the same restrictions on it.
What is someone who owns a private plane going to do with shit like throwing stars, anyway? Hijack themselves at bladepoint?
There was a story a while back about a pilot for a commercial carrier who was forbidden from bringing his eyedrops onboard a flight because he might use them to take over the plane. Which he was already in charge of. It's security theater and it's absurd.
What you asked the other person I ask of you: Did you actually bother to think your comment through at all before posting?
As I said in my post, my problem wasn't a fear of alzheimer's - it was that I was forgetting important (to me) things with great regularity. So the point would be mainly so that I don't get stopped every time I say "Stop me if I've told you this one before..."
For one of my courses back in the day, we were forbidden from using words larger than 2 syllables for a paper. The topics were picked at random - I wound up having to explain the discovery of electromagnetism, which was especially challenging because I couldn't actually say the name of what I was talking about!*
Aside from driving us insane, the goal was to give us an understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the written word and to become extremely thoughtful so that we would write with precision.
* "Waves that flow through space and cause many kinds of effects, where those effects often are the reverse of each other or could be made into each other" was what I came up with. The whole paper read as if I were talking to primitive screwheads about my boomstick.
Synthesis is the goal, memorization helps you reach it. And, it should be said, some things are more important to memorize than others.
For example, it's important and useful to memorize the logic behind certain algorithms or certain concepts that are used in computer science because, if you have those fundamentals memorized, you'll be able to combine the basic concepts into more complex structures and create new and novel things. Not having the basics memorized will prevent you from doing any higher level thinking because you won't have the tools necessary to get there.
What isn't important or particularly useful to memorize is the detail of a particular implementation of that concept (e.g. making a dialog box pop up) - you can just look up how to do that, and not having it instantly available will not stop you from engaging in higher level thinking about a problem, it will just make your particular implementation take more time.
Tangentially, I think continuing to exercise your memory (even for trivia) is a GOOD thing because it sure doesn't hurt to be able to keep lots of stuff available for quick access and it keeps your brain in shape. 10 years ago I was able to remember arbitrary strings that were 30-50 characters in length pretty easily because I was in the habit of needing to do so from time to time; 5 years ago I realized I could barely remember a 10 digit phone number without struggling, and even worse, I was having a hard time remembering people's names, what we'd talked about just the day prior, etc. - and I realized that I'd been using speed dial and relying on my contact list, as well as just offloading the kind of trivia I'd normally try to memorize in detail to the web in the form of search engines. This scared the hell out of me, so I began dialing numbers manually, remembering people's email addresses rather than just typing their name, and so on. I'm now back to being able to remember much longer strings (though closer to 30 characters than 50 now, alas) and generally am having a much easier time remembering *important* things like details of conversations I had with people.
Saying "don't criticize a theory unless you have a better one" is actually counter productive because it encourages the championing of pet theories rather than the actual doing of science.
TL;DR - People complain at string without proposing anything better.
What ever happened to "we don't know"?
You can criticize a theory without proposing anything better if you don't have a theory yourself - because you can point to flaws in the other theory. Observations that seem to go against the theory, the impossibility of falsifying the theory, etc.
For example, I can point at "intelligent design" and say it's a bad theory because it is not falsifiable and I don't have to offer an alternative theory of abiogenesis because I'm not saying "my theory is better" but merely "that theory is not scientific."
I can say "God gets involved when we talk about very small, heavy things, because God is just fascinated by those things, too, and that's why we find it so difficult to bridge the gap between our two major ways of understanding the universe when it comes to those" and it is *every* bit as good as string theory because it's *exactly* as testable, and it's based on *exactly* as much evidence as string theory is based on.
"I don't know, but I know that your theory isn't scientific, so until you can make it testable, I'm going to treat it as nothing more than speculation" is a PERFECTLY acceptable starting point.
Did you know that your great-great-grandparents probably also thought it was perfectly OK to sell their barely nubile daughters into, essentially, slavery to a much older man in order to have those 19 kids? And that your great-great-grandmother was probably repeatedly raped by your great-great-grandfather because a wife was property and couldn't say no?
What was once normal is now disgusting. Times change. Celebrating some morons who are collecting children is fucked up and insane.
Assume that any writing, pictures or texts you send to anyone else WILL be made public. As a result, avoid sending things you wouldn't want your parents, co-workers, future employers, or anyone else to see.
If you want to participate in the online world, use a pseudonym, don't have it directly linked to your real name, and then go for it, or be willing to be accountable for whatever you put out there.
I don't disagree that I would have liked to see the interstitial period between episode 3 and 4, BUT -
The real problem with the prequels (aside from crappy dialogue & wooden acting for the most part) was that Lucas was relying on other media to tell the bits; the clone wars, the novelizations, the other movie that came out (whatever that CGI thing was) - they all kind of fill in the blanks with things that actually are kind of neat. Alas, Lucas chose to spend time on pod races, gungans, "I hate sand" and stupid crap like that rather than on giving us the larger picture of things, or at least insights into key events.
For example - in the films, Anakin's transition from Jedi to Sith occurs in something like 15 seconds (yes, it was telegraphed a long way off) and feels very much like "Oh, shit, I just killed Mace Windu in the heat of the moment when he was beating up my mentor so I guess that makes me PURE FUCKING EVIL and I have no choice but to go slaughter a dorm full of children now!" It's absurd - we should have seen, in Episode 2, WAY more of that grooming relationship and other events that would make Anakin legitimately think the Jedi could be evil, or at least that they were overstating the evilness of the Sith or something like that. Instead we get that in the collateral materials. Which not everyone will see.
I actually subjected myself to the phenomenally shittacular writing that is employed in the novelizations of the films, and I have caught a few episodes of Clone Wars and some of the other books going over that period; it turns out the story of how all the things that happened that were half-assedly referenced in the movies are actually kind of interesting, or at least had the potential to be interesting, if they had only been told better. Alas, Lucas... Is not good at that whole scripting thing.
In the books the Monolith is just a very, very powerful computer + manipulator/nanotech created by a very, very advanced civilization. I think in the book 3001 they get into that quite a bit, as humanity had advanced to a point where they could begin to understand it. As the author himself said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - the monolith is a perfect example.
I don't know that HAL *needs* an explanation - it's a computer, an artificial intelligence, and that was something that people kind of got at the time: computers were seen as artificial brains, HAL was a big brain, albeit neurotic as hell thanks to bad programming. In any case, "explaining" HAL is as necessary as people "explaining" the cold sleep or the drive on the ship - it's a kind of logical (albeit extremely optimistic) extrapolation of tech we have in front of us.
Personally, the only book in the series that stretched my credulity to the breaking point was the ludicrous 2100 (I think that was the year) - why would people 90 years from now still care about *diamonds* as if they were valuable, when today we're able to make diamonds industrially and cheaply, and certainly could make artificial gemstone quality diamonds given more effort in a few years. Seriously, it would be as if someone in 1900 wrote a story about people in the year 2000 finding a cache of buggy whips or something.
Well, yeah - I mean, ADSL sucks; of COURSE they're going to look at you funny. You should at least look into fiber, which is at least somewhat futureproof.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, those "millions of self-proclaimed 'hardcore' gamers with an XBox" did seem to spend money on casual games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, so yeah, I'd say Dance Central could wind up being something pretty big for Kinect.
I have a Wii, a PS3 and an XBox + Kinect - I don't know if I'm "hardcore" but I will say that there's a rather distinct difference between the Wii and the Kinect, for sure. Heck, the first title for Kinect - Kinect Adventures - already does more than the Wii does: whole body immersion in the game. It may not seem like a big thing, but it is vastly different and way more fun, to me.
Hm, maybe I am old and slow, or maybe I'm not having that issue of lag - I haven't really noticed it; it's felt pretty responsive to me. I tried it on both an XBox 360 Elite and on my XBox 360 4GB.
Dance Central is FUN! I can't dance to save my life, but it's FUN!
Dance Central may be that "must have" game.
Shape may be the "Wii Fit" of Kinect.
New XBoxes are being sold as either Kinect ready or with Kinect.
I think it'll do ok.
My condo association is largely run by idiots who signed a contract with Comcast to get service. No other provider in my area is willing or able to provide service. And I live in the beating heart of Chicago, in one of the neighborhoods with the highest population densities and median income in the city.
WiMAX/4G I can get, but the latency makes online gaming impossible (no thank you, 2000MS ping times!). Satellite is the same thing, and also has other issues (board rules about dishes, I'm in the midst of a bunch of high-rises and they block most orientations). DSL isn't happening for reasons that the phone company has not made clear.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but I assure you, a lack of choice (or, at least, a lack of any kinds of viable choices if you do anything that benefits from or requires a lowish ping) is not uncommon.
When it is done well and adds something, it's worth it. When it's a gimmick it's dumb.
I saw Beowulf in 3D because I was taken to it on a date. I didn't see the point of it being in 3D - it didn't seem to add much, and when it was used it was in a really, no pun intended, "in your face!" fashion so it felt forced and obvious.
I saw Avatar in 3D and it was great - I actually stopped noticing the 3D effect quickly and just sat in and enjoyed the visuals of the rest of the movie. I've also seen Avatar in 2D, and in my opinion, the 3D added something - it was still visually stunning (and I noticed way more detail than the first run through) - but it felt pretty flat, the world was more like a video game than a "living" world.
Like any tool in the artist's toolbox, 3D should be used when it will enhance the work.
I agree that it isn't terribly significant (wake me when I can actually change the POV of a film by moving around, that will be pretty big) but I am glad that it exists in a format that doesn't give me a screaming migraine for the few films that can benefit from it.
Oh, bonk, never mind - I missed the larger point. The other Marty may have shifted to another timeline, too. That's what I'm hoping.
He crashed into the a Rolls Royce, broke his hand, and was essentially "broken" after that - dreams crushed, hope shattered, he wound up a miserable loser. They go over that explicitly in the movies, and you see him avoid that fate at the end of the 3rd movie when he decides not to race Needles.
People are more important than property. Even people I don't like.
For me it was that I had basically been told, since birth, that if I smoke weed I will very shortly be hooked on smack and selling my body for a fix. When I found out that quite a few people I knew (adults mostly) were casual users for a rather long time and, so far as I could tell, had not become heroin addicts or prostitutes, it made me question the whole notion of whether or not weed was actually all that bad - basically it put it in the category of all that other stuff people (parents, usually) try to scare you off from when it's too hard for them to just teach you how to make good choices.
In high school I smoked up a fair amount, and somewhat in college, though certainly not every day and definitely in the most casual way I can think of when it comes to amounts. I also tried coke, dropped acid, did a little X, and drank. Amazingly, I didn't become a prostitute, didn't become an addict, didn't do anything except, in one case, show up for an English final and wound up writing something that rhymed like Dr. Seuss mixed with Timothy Leary (wound up getting an A- for the course, in spite of this).
As an adult I drink responsibly, don't smoke weed anymore (mainly because I quit smoking tobacco years ago and don't want to take up the inhalant habit again, period). I also work for a university and I think I'm probably in the minority in my lab and among my peers - I've definitely scented marijuana when visiting some work friends at home, and have been offered a toke on several occasions. Yet, amazingly, we do good work, nobody is out of hand, and by and large it's no big thing.
When I see some people get stoned they seem a bit looser and goofier than usual, but the only people who turn into Brad Pitt from True Romance are the ones who are constantly smoking up - abusing ANYTHING like that will make you an idiot. So, when I saw people use weed casually - no, it didn't cause me to think of people negatively because it just wasn't a big deal.
Seriously, the person you were replying to thinking that watching people get high would always lead to a negative impression would be like saying watching people eat food would give you a negative impression because, hey, some fatties overeat and look gross as a result.
Sure, though the best way to send a message is to go beyond not shopping there, but to specifically mention to the employees, when you have any reason for an unsatisfactory interaction with them, why you are not satisfied and then to not purchase. It takes a bit more time, but it can be effective. Whenever I have a negative interaction with a store (pretty rare, actually, but it does happen) I do take the time to let someone there know about it; sometimes it makes for a good change, though I admit usually they ignore it. Point being, if they don't know that their bullshit policies are driving away business, they won't change the policies and will instead try to come up with even more ridiculous ways to rob people rather than improving their service to lure people back.
Except you still bought the drive from them, so pretty clearly it isn't a death knell for Best Buy, but rather a sign that even when someone sees the kind of shit they're pulling, they'll STILL be a customer. I can understand if you absolutely NEEDED that hard drive then and there and this was literally the ONLY place within 100 miles where you could get it, but to do what you did and then still buy it - it doesn't send them any kind of message, and it definitely does not bode badly for their chances to survive.
I used to play a game called Blackdragon on The Source (My userid back then was TCI006) - it wasn't multiplayer, but I would play it with a friend of mine, and we would imagine that the other monsters we ran into were other players. That game really ate up a LOT of my time, and I remember my dad getting really irked that I ran up such a bill (but he was also really glad that his daughter was so into computers, so it evened out :)) That and the Game Master BBS in Illinois used to really eat up a LOT of time for me.
I agree 110%! Instead of changing our environment to suit our needs, we should stop using tools all together. No houses; caves were fine for great^nth grandma and pa, they're fine for us! No fire, no cooking, no agriculture, no domestication of animals, definitely no medicines or vaccines, no clothes, no nothing.
Or, instead of being alarmist, we can try to modify our behavior (knowing full well that only some people will do so) while also using that big glob of gray goo in our heads to find ways to compensate for those who don't change their behavior. Even better, maybe we'll learn some new and interesting things that will help us in ways we currently can't even imagine.
I'll leave off with this quote:
The reasonable man adapts to his environment; the unreasonable man seeks to adapt his environment to himself; all progress is made by unreasonable men.
I love it - because often I'm not really sure *what* I want to search for, so when I get some autocomplete suggestions that can be nice. With the new results popping up now, I often find things that autocomplete wouldn't give me, which is pretty cool.
You do know that if a terrorist were to buy a private plane that the plane would be the weapon, right? I mean, I suppose they could put some explosives on board to up the oomph, but it's kind of beside the point. But yeah, throwing stars, box-cutters, random objects that aren't hundreds of pounds of high explosives, it does kind of make sense that a private plane wouldn't have the same restrictions on it.
What is someone who owns a private plane going to do with shit like throwing stars, anyway? Hijack themselves at bladepoint?
There was a story a while back about a pilot for a commercial carrier who was forbidden from bringing his eyedrops onboard a flight because he might use them to take over the plane. Which he was already in charge of. It's security theater and it's absurd.
What you asked the other person I ask of you: Did you actually bother to think your comment through at all before posting?
As I said in my post, my problem wasn't a fear of alzheimer's - it was that I was forgetting important (to me) things with great regularity. So the point would be mainly so that I don't get stopped every time I say "Stop me if I've told you this one before..."
For one of my courses back in the day, we were forbidden from using words larger than 2 syllables for a paper. The topics were picked at random - I wound up having to explain the discovery of electromagnetism, which was especially challenging because I couldn't actually say the name of what I was talking about!*
Aside from driving us insane, the goal was to give us an understanding and appreciation of the complexities of the written word and to become extremely thoughtful so that we would write with precision.
* "Waves that flow through space and cause many kinds of effects, where those effects often are the reverse of each other or could be made into each other" was what I came up with. The whole paper read as if I were talking to primitive screwheads about my boomstick.
Synthesis is the goal, memorization helps you reach it. And, it should be said, some things are more important to memorize than others.
For example, it's important and useful to memorize the logic behind certain algorithms or certain concepts that are used in computer science because, if you have those fundamentals memorized, you'll be able to combine the basic concepts into more complex structures and create new and novel things. Not having the basics memorized will prevent you from doing any higher level thinking because you won't have the tools necessary to get there.
What isn't important or particularly useful to memorize is the detail of a particular implementation of that concept (e.g. making a dialog box pop up) - you can just look up how to do that, and not having it instantly available will not stop you from engaging in higher level thinking about a problem, it will just make your particular implementation take more time.
Tangentially, I think continuing to exercise your memory (even for trivia) is a GOOD thing because it sure doesn't hurt to be able to keep lots of stuff available for quick access and it keeps your brain in shape. 10 years ago I was able to remember arbitrary strings that were 30-50 characters in length pretty easily because I was in the habit of needing to do so from time to time; 5 years ago I realized I could barely remember a 10 digit phone number without struggling, and even worse, I was having a hard time remembering people's names, what we'd talked about just the day prior, etc. - and I realized that I'd been using speed dial and relying on my contact list, as well as just offloading the kind of trivia I'd normally try to memorize in detail to the web in the form of search engines. This scared the hell out of me, so I began dialing numbers manually, remembering people's email addresses rather than just typing their name, and so on. I'm now back to being able to remember much longer strings (though closer to 30 characters than 50 now, alas) and generally am having a much easier time remembering *important* things like details of conversations I had with people.
Forgive the self reply - I wanted to amplify:
Saying "don't criticize a theory unless you have a better one" is actually counter productive because it encourages the championing of pet theories rather than the actual doing of science.
TL;DR - People complain at string without proposing anything better.
What ever happened to "we don't know"?
You can criticize a theory without proposing anything better if you don't have a theory yourself - because you can point to flaws in the other theory. Observations that seem to go against the theory, the impossibility of falsifying the theory, etc.
For example, I can point at "intelligent design" and say it's a bad theory because it is not falsifiable and I don't have to offer an alternative theory of abiogenesis because I'm not saying "my theory is better" but merely "that theory is not scientific."
I can say "God gets involved when we talk about very small, heavy things, because God is just fascinated by those things, too, and that's why we find it so difficult to bridge the gap between our two major ways of understanding the universe when it comes to those" and it is *every* bit as good as string theory because it's *exactly* as testable, and it's based on *exactly* as much evidence as string theory is based on.
"I don't know, but I know that your theory isn't scientific, so until you can make it testable, I'm going to treat it as nothing more than speculation" is a PERFECTLY acceptable starting point.
Did you know that your great-great-grandparents probably also thought it was perfectly OK to sell their barely nubile daughters into, essentially, slavery to a much older man in order to have those 19 kids? And that your great-great-grandmother was probably repeatedly raped by your great-great-grandfather because a wife was property and couldn't say no?
What was once normal is now disgusting. Times change. Celebrating some morons who are collecting children is fucked up and insane.
Let's add another biggie to that:
Assume that any writing, pictures or texts you send to anyone else WILL be made public. As a result, avoid sending things you wouldn't want your parents, co-workers, future employers, or anyone else to see.
If you want to participate in the online world, use a pseudonym, don't have it directly linked to your real name, and then go for it, or be willing to be accountable for whatever you put out there.
I don't disagree that I would have liked to see the interstitial period between episode 3 and 4, BUT -
The real problem with the prequels (aside from crappy dialogue & wooden acting for the most part) was that Lucas was relying on other media to tell the bits; the clone wars, the novelizations, the other movie that came out (whatever that CGI thing was) - they all kind of fill in the blanks with things that actually are kind of neat. Alas, Lucas chose to spend time on pod races, gungans, "I hate sand" and stupid crap like that rather than on giving us the larger picture of things, or at least insights into key events.
For example - in the films, Anakin's transition from Jedi to Sith occurs in something like 15 seconds (yes, it was telegraphed a long way off) and feels very much like "Oh, shit, I just killed Mace Windu in the heat of the moment when he was beating up my mentor so I guess that makes me PURE FUCKING EVIL and I have no choice but to go slaughter a dorm full of children now!" It's absurd - we should have seen, in Episode 2, WAY more of that grooming relationship and other events that would make Anakin legitimately think the Jedi could be evil, or at least that they were overstating the evilness of the Sith or something like that. Instead we get that in the collateral materials. Which not everyone will see.
I actually subjected myself to the phenomenally shittacular writing that is employed in the novelizations of the films, and I have caught a few episodes of Clone Wars and some of the other books going over that period; it turns out the story of how all the things that happened that were half-assedly referenced in the movies are actually kind of interesting, or at least had the potential to be interesting, if they had only been told better. Alas, Lucas... Is not good at that whole scripting thing.
In the books the Monolith is just a very, very powerful computer + manipulator/nanotech created by a very, very advanced civilization. I think in the book 3001 they get into that quite a bit, as humanity had advanced to a point where they could begin to understand it. As the author himself said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - the monolith is a perfect example.
I don't know that HAL *needs* an explanation - it's a computer, an artificial intelligence, and that was something that people kind of got at the time: computers were seen as artificial brains, HAL was a big brain, albeit neurotic as hell thanks to bad programming. In any case, "explaining" HAL is as necessary as people "explaining" the cold sleep or the drive on the ship - it's a kind of logical (albeit extremely optimistic) extrapolation of tech we have in front of us.
Personally, the only book in the series that stretched my credulity to the breaking point was the ludicrous 2100 (I think that was the year) - why would people 90 years from now still care about *diamonds* as if they were valuable, when today we're able to make diamonds industrially and cheaply, and certainly could make artificial gemstone quality diamonds given more effort in a few years. Seriously, it would be as if someone in 1900 wrote a story about people in the year 2000 finding a cache of buggy whips or something.
Well, yeah - I mean, ADSL sucks; of COURSE they're going to look at you funny. You should at least look into fiber, which is at least somewhat futureproof.