Yeah the screaming at the sky thing really comes close (but ultimately doesn't) to ruining the whole thing. I really wonder what George was thinking with that one. He really has a flair for screwing things up by assuming that his audience will not understand subtlety.
I imagine that this statement will be controversial, but I would say this movie is second only to Empire, and that the Vader transformation scene is the most powerful scene in the entire franchise (until the screaming at the sky bit).
I think that there is an assumption that star wars is a kid friendly franchise (maybe its because of all the action figures). I just wanted to point out that this movie is much more violent then previous star wars movies, it wasn't my intension to tell someone else how to raise their kids.
I'm not sure you can say that Luke is half dark and half light, he's more imperfectly light (in that he tries to be light and isn't great at it). Then again, he does force choke a guy in ROTJ for no apparent reason (or has Lucas edited that out by now).
I always figured that the prophecy referred to the fact that there where exactly 2 Sith and 2 Jedi left in the beginning of Episode 4.
Watch out, this movies isn't exactly kid friendly. When they say its dark and violent, they mean its dark and violent for a movie, not just a star wars movie.
I remember when I was a kid I couldn't watch the carbonite sequence in Empire because I found it too scary and upsetting (I was about 7 or so). Maybe I am just a huge wuss, but the Vader transformation in Ep III would have terrified me for years if I had seen it then. Its horrific.
First, that scene could have been later, several years after the other events. The uniforms were different after all.
Second, it could take 18 years to build a deathstar. The second one would just have to be started while the first one was still being built (or better construction techniques were developed allowing the second one to be built faster). This could explain why Palapatine was not on the first deathstar when it was destroyed, he was overseeing work on the second.
Human aggression and violence are half of what makes us able to maintain dominance over the rest of the planet. The other half is compassion and empathy. They serve to balance our violent tendencies, and lead to an increasingly staple, more humane society where social and economic force can be used in the place of physical force.
However, if left unchecked compassion and empathy can lead to disaster, just as violence can:
An old professor of mine used to develop defenses to chemical and biological weapons for the US. Essentially her job involved killing of thousands of lab rats every week, as they researched cures for known biological and chemical agents. Eventually she quit, because she just couldn't stand killing all those rats everyday. She said that she eventually even felt sympathy for the harmful organisms they were eradicating.
I imagine such a job would be difficult for anyone. But if we all allowed ourselves to be so compassionate we would be left defenseless to a less compassionate adversary, even a non-human one. A disease could eradicate us all, assuming we were so compassionate, that like her we felt sympathy for microscopic organisms and hesitated to kill them.
Ultimately, in an evolutionary system, a life form incapable of violence will fall prey to one that is.
Don't forget higher metabolism to compensate for over abundance of food and lack of physical labor.
My girlfriend has one of those metabolisms where she can't gain weight no matter how much she eats, its very useful in our society. Not only does she not have to worry about obesity related diseases, but also makes her more attractive allowing her to be more selective when choosing a mate.
On a side note: I'm not sure that controlled background processing of thought would be a boon. "Chaotic subconscious reasoning" is possibly the only reason we are conscious. Without it I doubt we would be more then big spongy computers.
Assume that at any moment you subconscious mind is churning together completely unrelated thoughts, sensations, and abstract systems. It then passes forward to the conscious mind those that are found to be relevant. All forms of inspiration stem from this process, with the conscious mind responsible for problem solving (cleaning up) and execution of the subconsciously synthesized thought.
This is really just my guess as to the nature of human thought and reasoning, but if your entire brain was as orderly as a microchip, wouldn't that be exactly what you were. I really don't buy that we don't use 90% of our brains. The subconscious mind might make a big mess (a "mess" as observed by the conscious mind that by nature abhors a mess), but original thought would not possible without it.
I'm not sure about your terminology (laptop vs notebook), but I do agree with your assessment: this is a desk top replacement machine. Its rather frustrating that people don't seem understand that large portables are just meant to be portable in a way that a tower is not.
I predict a future where towers are the rarest form of computer, reserved for those that require extreme performance and customization. At this point only two people I know own towers (and one of those is my mom, with a 5 year old 400 MHz G4 tower). Every single other person has switched to laptops because they take up less space (I live in NYC), can be moved around, and look nice. One guy I know has a 17" PB, which he never moves, but he can move it if he needs to go to a LAN party or taker it to work --which is exactly why he has it.
Honestly, I thought there was a truce between Apple and MS. Maybe Jobs is just trying to show his ass a bit to the investors.
I mean, none of these techs are really new are they? [sarc]It's just new that they are incuded in the OS itself so that the people that actually developed the original software are screwed.[/sarc]
Damn Strait! This is America where when we go to war the spoils are distributed democratically! All these liberals whining about Iraq!? Why, gas is practically free now; and it wouldn't be if we hadn't fought for our freedom over there!
I know you are joking, but this seems like a good place to mention that a nuke wouldn't be very useful.
There are two ways that we could potentially administer a nuke to an asteroid:
The first would be to actually drill into the thing like in the movie. A nuke detonated in the center of the thing would just blow it to pieces (assuming the nuke is powerful enough). Then we have just turned a bullet into a shotgun shell, effectively increasing its chances of hitting the earth. An extremely bad idea unless we can be sure the atmosphere will burn away the pieces, and even then you have a massive dust cloud in the atmosphere. So even then a bad idea.
The second would be to detonate the nuke next to it. The energy produced by the nuke would raise the temperature of the surface of the asteroid and possible cause part of it to vaporize quickly enough so that the escaping matter would serve as a thruster that pushes it far enough away from (or toward) us that it misses.
People often forget that nukes have nowhere near the destructive force in space as they do on earth, as there is no medium in which to create a concussive event. All a nuke does in space is make matter hot by tranfering enery to it.
Someone once pointed out to me: If you detonated a 1 ton bomb next to a space shuttle (in a vacuum), as long as the shuttle wasn't hit by shrapnel, the crew wouldn't even notice (unless they watched it happen from the window).
I think it is pretty unlikely that an asteroid that will not pass closer then the moon would screw up the satellite networks. I imagine that the moon itself does more to disrupt them.
(I'm assuming that you are talking about the gravity of the object pulling the satellites off course.)
If Office, Outlook, and Explorer all ran as well as they should on a 1 GHz machine no one would buy a 2 GHz machine. The only commonly used applications that really require today's processors are games; as someone previously pointed out to me, PC games are not popular enough to really drive the market.
If software didn't get progressively more bloated it would put a lot of hardware people out of work and possibly destroy the hardware industry. They need it, or need someone to come up with a commonly used app that by its nature sucks up system resources (like "true" 3d monitors or something, key is that it has to be something everyone will use.
Personally my solution is to use a Mac. Apple is small enough that it doesn't matter, so every-time a new OS comes out it actually runs faster then the last one while incorporating new features -its amazing. The problem is MS Office (mac version) it runs like hell, regardless of the platform. Luckily there is Open Office and Neo Office (though Neo has stability problems still).
Apples non-OS software is pretty bloated too, to be fair. Its not quite to the same extent (across the board) in my opinion, but certainly iTunes could lose some fscking weight. Luckily there are lighter versions available to replace all the i-whatevers. You don't have to use them and they aren't like Office where they use horrible proprietary formats that you can't function day to day without.
Step one: Begin actively monitoring every single star in the galaxy. We need to know if any of them are likely to explode in a way likely to cause a burst. Given the number of stars in the galaxy, I think we will all need to pitch in! Everyone gets a couple thousand stars they will be responsible for monitoring.
Step two: Blow up the moon.
Step three: Take the moon's pieces and build a giant orbital gamma ray shield manned by robots. If we think a star will blow we will have the robots move the shield into place.
If someone uses opiates often enough they will begin to experience withdraw symptoms when they are without opiates. It might not be 100%, but its pretty certain.
In a way your statement has a lot of truth though. The term addiction has kinda a vague meaning these days. I don't remember which DSM they changed the meaning in; but addiction used to mean that your body became physically dependent on a substance and you could not discontinue usage with out severe and sometimes fatal withdraw symptoms. Addiction was considered a medical condition, it occurred mostly as a side effect of surgery or extended illness where morphine was used for pain.
By this definition only opiates and barbiturates were considered addictive.
The have since expanded the definition to include substances that produce compulsions and cravings without physical withdrawn being necessary. Heroin was originally developed by Bayer as a morphine substitute, they believed it was less addictive, and by the old definition it was. By the new definition it is considered more addictive as it produces more intense cravings and compulsions then morphine. Because of this its no longer used in the US and only rarely used in the UK (the patient must be terminal I think).
Because of this change, the list of addictive substances is pretty long. Personally I suspect that the motivations were somewhat political, but I can't back up that statement. Either way, the term addict has now taken on a negative connotation because most of the "new" addictive substances don't actually require medical intervention, just will power.
Slashdot Mirror
Vader just wanted to not have to worry about Luke escaping on the route. It wasn't because it takes a long time.
Yeah the screaming at the sky thing really comes close (but ultimately doesn't) to ruining the whole thing. I really wonder what George was thinking with that one. He really has a flair for screwing things up by assuming that his audience will not understand subtlety.
I imagine that this statement will be controversial, but I would say this movie is second only to Empire, and that the Vader transformation scene is the most powerful scene in the entire franchise (until the screaming at the sky bit).
I know, I was just giving a word of warning.
I think that there is an assumption that star wars is a kid friendly franchise (maybe its because of all the action figures). I just wanted to point out that this movie is much more violent then previous star wars movies, it wasn't my intension to tell someone else how to raise their kids.
I'm not sure you can say that Luke is half dark and half light, he's more imperfectly light (in that he tries to be light and isn't great at it). Then again, he does force choke a guy in ROTJ for no apparent reason (or has Lucas edited that out by now).
I always figured that the prophecy referred to the fact that there where exactly 2 Sith and 2 Jedi left in the beginning of Episode 4.
Watch out, this movies isn't exactly kid friendly. When they say its dark and violent, they mean its dark and violent for a movie, not just a star wars movie.
I remember when I was a kid I couldn't watch the carbonite sequence in Empire because I found it too scary and upsetting (I was about 7 or so). Maybe I am just a huge wuss, but the Vader transformation in Ep III would have terrified me for years if I had seen it then. Its horrific.
Just a word of caution.
Well, two things:
First, that scene could have been later, several years after the other events. The uniforms were different after all.
Second, it could take 18 years to build a deathstar. The second one would just have to be started while the first one was still being built (or better construction techniques were developed allowing the second one to be built faster). This could explain why Palapatine was not on the first deathstar when it was destroyed, he was overseeing work on the second.
But a Beowulf Cluster of Amidalas dressed in hot grits?
Eh, sorry....
Human aggression and violence are half of what makes us able to maintain dominance over the rest of the planet. The other half is compassion and empathy. They serve to balance our violent tendencies, and lead to an increasingly staple, more humane society where social and economic force can be used in the place of physical force.
However, if left unchecked compassion and empathy can lead to disaster, just as violence can:
An old professor of mine used to develop defenses to chemical and biological weapons for the US. Essentially her job involved killing of thousands of lab rats every week, as they researched cures for known biological and chemical agents. Eventually she quit, because she just couldn't stand killing all those rats everyday. She said that she eventually even felt sympathy for the harmful organisms they were eradicating.
I imagine such a job would be difficult for anyone. But if we all allowed ourselves to be so compassionate we would be left defenseless to a less compassionate adversary, even a non-human one. A disease could eradicate us all, assuming we were so compassionate, that like her we felt sympathy for microscopic organisms and hesitated to kill them.
Ultimately, in an evolutionary system, a life form incapable of violence will fall prey to one that is.
Don't forget higher metabolism to compensate for over abundance of food and lack of physical labor.
My girlfriend has one of those metabolisms where she can't gain weight no matter how much she eats, its very useful in our society. Not only does she not have to worry about obesity related diseases, but also makes her more attractive allowing her to be more selective when choosing a mate.
On a side note: I'm not sure that controlled background processing of thought would be a boon. "Chaotic subconscious reasoning" is possibly the only reason we are conscious. Without it I doubt we would be more then big spongy computers.
Assume that at any moment you subconscious mind is churning together completely unrelated thoughts, sensations, and abstract systems. It then passes forward to the conscious mind those that are found to be relevant. All forms of inspiration stem from this process, with the conscious mind responsible for problem solving (cleaning up) and execution of the subconsciously synthesized thought.
This is really just my guess as to the nature of human thought and reasoning, but if your entire brain was as orderly as a microchip, wouldn't that be exactly what you were. I really don't buy that we don't use 90% of our brains. The subconscious mind might make a big mess (a "mess" as observed by the conscious mind that by nature abhors a mess), but original thought would not possible without it.
I'm not sure about your terminology (laptop vs notebook), but I do agree with your assessment: this is a desk top replacement machine. Its rather frustrating that people don't seem understand that large portables are just meant to be portable in a way that a tower is not.
I predict a future where towers are the rarest form of computer, reserved for those that require extreme performance and customization. At this point only two people I know own towers (and one of those is my mom, with a 5 year old 400 MHz G4 tower). Every single other person has switched to laptops because they take up less space (I live in NYC), can be moved around, and look nice. One guy I know has a 17" PB, which he never moves, but he can move it if he needs to go to a LAN party or taker it to work --which is exactly why he has it.
"Ugly only because they are too large:
G5 Powermacs
20" iMacs
30" Cinema Display
17" Powerbook"
Your kidding, right? Its a display! How can a display be ugly for being too large?
Honestly, I thought there was a truce between Apple and MS. Maybe Jobs is just trying to show his ass a bit to the investors.
I mean, none of these techs are really new are they? [sarc]It's just new that they are incuded in the OS itself so that the people that actually developed the original software are screwed.[/sarc]
They shouldn't fight over this.
Dupe the disc, send it back. Problem solved.
The best version was on the Apple 2 GS. It came with a world almanac and you had to look up every location you visited.
According to AOL Translator its:
OMG I BT U LOSE 20 POINTS FOR IM11!!!!1! OMG LOL
The ALL-CAPS are evidently important to the syntax, after all...
you don't want to look like a nerd.
It seems to me that the most elegant solution would be to limit copyright to the same term as patents.
Damn Strait! This is America where when we go to war the spoils are distributed democratically! All these liberals whining about Iraq!? Why, gas is practically free now; and it wouldn't be if we hadn't fought for our freedom over there!
I know you are joking, but this seems like a good place to mention that a nuke wouldn't be very useful.
There are two ways that we could potentially administer a nuke to an asteroid:
The first would be to actually drill into the thing like in the movie. A nuke detonated in the center of the thing would just blow it to pieces (assuming the nuke is powerful enough). Then we have just turned a bullet into a shotgun shell, effectively increasing its chances of hitting the earth. An extremely bad idea unless we can be sure the atmosphere will burn away the pieces, and even then you have a massive dust cloud in the atmosphere. So even then a bad idea.
The second would be to detonate the nuke next to it. The energy produced by the nuke would raise the temperature of the surface of the asteroid and possible cause part of it to vaporize quickly enough so that the escaping matter would serve as a thruster that pushes it far enough away from (or toward) us that it misses.
People often forget that nukes have nowhere near the destructive force in space as they do on earth, as there is no medium in which to create a concussive event. All a nuke does in space is make matter hot by tranfering enery to it.
Someone once pointed out to me: If you detonated a 1 ton bomb next to a space shuttle (in a vacuum), as long as the shuttle wasn't hit by shrapnel, the crew wouldn't even notice (unless they watched it happen from the window).
I think it is pretty unlikely that an asteroid that will not pass closer then the moon would screw up the satellite networks. I imagine that the moon itself does more to disrupt them.
(I'm assuming that you are talking about the gravity of the object pulling the satellites off course.)
This won't change anything! There is still no software available for Macs! They still can't run:
1) Netsky-P
2) Zafi-B
3) Sasser
4) Netsky-B
5) Netsky-D
6) Netsky-Z
7) MyDoom-A
8) Sober-I
9) Netsky-C
10) Bagle-AA
What good are they?
Sorry I always take an unpopular position:
If Office, Outlook, and Explorer all ran as well as they should on a 1 GHz machine no one would buy a 2 GHz machine. The only commonly used applications that really require today's processors are games; as someone previously pointed out to me, PC games are not popular enough to really drive the market.
If software didn't get progressively more bloated it would put a lot of hardware people out of work and possibly destroy the hardware industry. They need it, or need someone to come up with a commonly used app that by its nature sucks up system resources (like "true" 3d monitors or something, key is that it has to be something everyone will use.
Personally my solution is to use a Mac. Apple is small enough that it doesn't matter, so every-time a new OS comes out it actually runs faster then the last one while incorporating new features -its amazing. The problem is MS Office (mac version) it runs like hell, regardless of the platform. Luckily there is Open Office and Neo Office (though Neo has stability problems still).
Apples non-OS software is pretty bloated too, to be fair. Its not quite to the same extent (across the board) in my opinion, but certainly iTunes could lose some fscking weight. Luckily there are lighter versions available to replace all the i-whatevers. You don't have to use them and they aren't like Office where they use horrible proprietary formats that you can't function day to day without.
AC #1 works for Intel; AC #2 must work for AMD or IBM.
I would imagine the danger would be ricochet, not decompression. Its kinda like how you don't want to fire a automatic weapon on a submarine.
"No."
Yes! We CAN protect the planet!
Step one: Begin actively monitoring every single star in the galaxy. We need to know if any of them are likely to explode in a way likely to cause a burst. Given the number of stars in the galaxy, I think we will all need to pitch in! Everyone gets a couple thousand stars they will be responsible for monitoring.
Step two: Blow up the moon.
Step three: Take the moon's pieces and build a giant orbital gamma ray shield manned by robots. If we think a star will blow we will have the robots move the shield into place.
Step four: ???
Step five: Profit!
If someone uses opiates often enough they will begin to experience withdraw symptoms when they are without opiates. It might not be 100%, but its pretty certain.
In a way your statement has a lot of truth though. The term addiction has kinda a vague meaning these days. I don't remember which DSM they changed the meaning in; but addiction used to mean that your body became physically dependent on a substance and you could not discontinue usage with out severe and sometimes fatal withdraw symptoms. Addiction was considered a medical condition, it occurred mostly as a side effect of surgery or extended illness where morphine was used for pain.
By this definition only opiates and barbiturates were considered addictive.
The have since expanded the definition to include substances that produce compulsions and cravings without physical withdrawn being necessary. Heroin was originally developed by Bayer as a morphine substitute, they believed it was less addictive, and by the old definition it was. By the new definition it is considered more addictive as it produces more intense cravings and compulsions then morphine. Because of this its no longer used in the US and only rarely used in the UK (the patient must be terminal I think).
Because of this change, the list of addictive substances is pretty long. Personally I suspect that the motivations were somewhat political, but I can't back up that statement. Either way, the term addict has now taken on a negative connotation because most of the "new" addictive substances don't actually require medical intervention, just will power.