On the one hand we've got one guy lying about a consensual blowjob that results in nothing further, and on the other we've got a group of people lying about a threat to the US that results in hundreds of thousands of dead, destruction of a nation's infrastructure, revival of Al Qaeda and the subsequent massively increase threat of global terrorism.
Hmm... I'd say that one set of lies is not equivalent to the other in scale, impact or 'truthiness.'
It's not just warming, it's the change in weather patterns. Previously arable areas are becoming arid, previously arid areas are becoming arable. Ocean currents are changing, driving weather systems into changes in turn. And then there's the issue of ice on land being melted. Evidence is coming in from many places around the world showing earlier thawing and later re-freezing, lower or missing icecaps. Low-lying land is being threatened by all of this, and while you may be okay, many of the world's people won't be. There are lots of low islands in addition to the coastal cities of the world.
But hey! It's all a hoax!
Keep telling yourself that.
I'd argue that even if it is a hoax, we lose little by treating it seriously. We get lower pollution, more efficient energy and some minor wealth redistribution from big energy companies to the small pollution-control companies. If it's real, treating it seriously may well be critical to the future of the Human race.
Seems that the only logical position is to assume (or pretend) Human-caused climate change is real and form policy from there.
What, is reading between the lines a lost art these days?
It's not that so much as the way that people tie themselves to a company or product and feel a great need to defend it. For some reason I see a lot of people become pseudo-lawyers, debating the detail of semantics in order to avoid debating the meaning.
I've always felt that at the point where you need to take notes as you read, any fiction has become unwieldy. I've felt that with a few authors in the past, and have steered clear of Jordan's series mainly due to the sheer mass of the books. Now I find that people feel a need for a summarised version with cross-linked character data, I feel pretty good about not touching those weighty tomes.
LoTR produced 12 hours of feature movie, and from only a few hundred pages (about the total length of a single book from Jordan)
"a few hundred pages" ? Seriously?
The various reprints are typeset the same, and Amazon lists the 50th anniversary edition as 1184 pages. That includes about 80 pages of appendices and maps, but you're well over a thousand pages of text.
Where did you get "a few hundred pages" from? The Hobbit?
but of course, this is your opinion. I enjoy books with depth, complexity, and longevity. I avoid books and series that are simple or episodic.
You mean you enjoy books that you think have depth, complexity and longevity, and avoid books that you judge to be simple or episodic. I find some of the authors you list tedious, dull, uninspired and repetitive in the extreme. You find their books full of depth and complexity. That's all down to personal taste, or lack thereof. You mention personal opinion and then go on to ignore it in the very next sentence.
If it can be made into a 3 hour or less movie, it's not worth my time.
When you say that the book has to equate to at least a three hour movie, how do you judge that before you read the book? Heavy books make longer movies? Do you imagine a particular director's or screenwriter's version? After all, one director would make Lord of the Rings into a two hour movie, another made it into a nine hour movie. I reckon it's possible to successfully tell the entire story in two hours (the movies had a few hours of battle scenes that weren't described in the books for more than a few pages).
How can you look at a book in the store, read a few pages and say "Well, this'd be a 2 hour film so it's not for me!" or "Ooh, looks like a five hour movie's in here! Where's my wallet?" I ask because I find this behaviour astonishing.
He'd ignore looming business threats until far too late, and then be the only director left standing after all the corporate bloodletting. Then he'd bugger off to a retirement in the jungle somewhere.
GPS systems can be great for finding unfamiliar routes, but are only ever as smart as the driver.
My wife and I took a taxi from a friend's place in the outer suburbs of Melbourne to our place in the central city. The taxi driver put the address into the GPS and off we went. It was late, we were tired so we didn't pay too much attention until... I noticed a sign pointing to a satellite town.
As we argued with the driver where the city was (!) he confidently stopped at a small side street in the middle of nowhere and said that we'd arrived.
It took us another ninety minutes and several fare resets (plus arguments) to get back home because this bozo relied on the GPS completely at the expense of his own common sense.
I've got zero faith in drivers who rely on their GPS navigation because (as in our case) they disregard signs that clearly show where they should be going in favour of what the machine tells them.
The GPS navigation company should be forced to change their software to actually conform to the road rules because as it stands now, it has a serious design flaw.
We could shoot these people in the field. No muss no fuss. These things happen in war. Innocent people die.
Nice. Shoot suspects without trial. You do know that many of the people captured and sent to Guantanamo Bay weren't captured on the field of battle, don't you? So you're saying your soldiers could just execute potentially innocent people without trial.
Lots of people at GB have since been released without trial. The first and most serious trial of these "worst of the worst" (as so many politicians have damned them) resulted in a slap on the wrist sentence of nine months for the hideous crime of guarding a tank. And Mr Hicks was sent back to Australia under a gag order to keep quiet until 2008 (after the Australian elections). He wasn't captured on a battlefield though, but turned in for bounty money like many other prisoners at GB.
Many report torture and renditions to other nations (such as Egypt) where they were tortured. Then they were released, as there was either no evidence or they were innocent anyway.
Refraining from executing the innocent is not the act of a "damn great people." It's the minimum standard that can be expected of anyone above the level of total barbarism. Is that, then, your point? That you're not utterly barbaric?
Sure, a few suspects got a bit of torture and brought the entire nation of the United States into shame and disrepute through their rank stupidity, but I'm sure it won't happen a second time.
I wonder what sort of stories we'll be reading in another ten years that would shock us now but will seem like regular occurrences in 2017? Thoughtcrime executions, archived recording of all telephone calls (the European Union is already working on this!), incarcerating people because they have the "genes" of a potential psychopath (again, the EU is looking into this)? It's gunna happen and we'll just keep boiling like the frogs we are.
I don't accept for a second these stories about what the EU is doing. I've seen stories about the EU that were shown to be made up before, and I reckon I'm looking at two more now.
Gitmo is the place where the worst of the worst are kept.
People like the Australian David Hicks, who was found guilty of supporting terrorism through the nefarious act of guarding a tank. What a bastard!
If these are the worst of the worst, then Al Qaeda isn't so bad after all.
And what about those Brits who were let off with a smack on the hand? Or Mamdouh Habib (another Aussie) who was 'rendered' in Egypt for the US and then released without charge?
Gitmo is absolutely not about keeping the worst of the worst. It's about keeping suspects outside US legal jurisdiction. The question "Why?" is critical here. What reasons could there be for denying legal access to suspects?
I wasn't criticising the quality of the water from the wells, but drawing attention to the low-tech world these people live in. Having spent most of the trip in and around the Andes, I'd say the water people get in those regions would be extremely high quality. I was certainly happy to drink it! In the cities you're back to bottled water, 'just in case.'
I travelled briefly in Peru in 2005 and saw the crushing poverty both in and out of the cities. It's worse out of the cities, and not uncommon to see houses with no electricity and water delivered from wells.
In Cuzco begging is rife, and the kids usually try to sell something to justify giving them money. Postcards are pretty popular. These kids are smart too, learning enough English to have a conversation and show their sense of humour. I think that giving them an opportunity to learn valuable skills can only be a good thing for them and for their country.
They'll even put in a web frontend (Access generates these *so* easily and well) and an advanced system to page data in/out to get around the 2GB limit.
All the tables will have a local key field called "ID" and the other fields will be named "Field1", "Field2", "Field3" and so on. The tables will be named "Table1", "Table2", "Table3" (etc) as well.
And worst of all... Every output query will be based on other queries, which will draw data from yet other queries, and on and on and on.
The horror! Even writing this brief description leaves me with a feeling that something evil is rising from the depths of Hell, and... what's that at the window!
Argh! So many tentacles and eyes! Arrrghhghhhghhhhhh
I'm avoiding the US as well, and while I'd like to visit to see the sights, I'll skip it while the country keeps fingerprinting, terrorist risk analysis and other stupidities. It's a big world and there are plenty of other places to spend my tourist dollars, places that actually welcome tourists.
What do I *do* about this sort of crap? I write letters to the papers to try to get my point across, I vote (and here in Australia we recently threw out our 'conservative' government). I debate politics with people and stick up for my beliefs.
Do you, Anonymous Coward? Who are you anyway, to be so strident with your criticism of other people while not naming yourself?
If I'd thought about it at all I'd have assumed he'd turned off his inertia suppression field or whatever other 'e e "doc" smith' magic was keeping him from being smeared into a thin paste from the high gee maneuvers.
What did bug me was how their engines were thrusting all the time even when they were maintaining constant velocity.
One of the more realistic 'ships fighting in space' scenes I've read was in the Gap series by Stephen Donaldson. The ships were thousands of kilometres apart, firing high-frequency lasers, particle weapons and missiles while trying to guess the next shot from their opponents. They used thrusters all over their surfaces to manoeuvre in space and there were no tight turns that would leave the occupants pasted around the inner surfaces. Inertia and physics seemed to actually matter!
So many authors (books and screenplays) think ships in space are just like ships in atmosphere, complete with wings, back-facing engines and turns at hundreds of times the velocity of current aircraft but the same turning radius. But then we've got a world where people think visible laser 'bolts' look good (if you can see it, chances are it can't hurt you) and every computer makes annoying sounds when text (slowly) appears on screen. Who needs thrusters, inertia, centrifugal force and the vacuum of space when you can have magically manoeuvrable ships that whoosh as they pass by?
Even sadder than the complete failure of Sci-Fi films to 'get' physics in any meaningful manner are the dedicated fans who use tortuous leaps of logic to justify that "it could happen!" The timing of the Kessel Run is only one of many cases.
the Salar de Uyuni was found to have only 16 inches (40 cm) of variation over its entire surface
I assume you're not factoring in the few 'islands' dotted around the Salar de Uyuni.
It's a very interesting place to visit. My (now) wife and I went there in 2005 on our trip around South America. For two months of the year it rains steadily and the whole area floods to about 30-50 cm (going from memory here). The water evaporates for the next few months, leaving a bed of salt. We went there in the last few weeks of water evaporation, and when there's a few centimetres of water over the packed salt you get these incredible reflections.
The locals mine the salt, piling it in small mounds about a metre tall. The reflective surface makes these little mounds look just like diamond shapes hanging in the air around you. It's surreal.
Just before the road enters the area, some locals will try to sell you salt crystal formations in any size you like. We paid a few small coins for one that sits on my bookshelf, but once we were in we realised we could easily have found hundreds of crystals just as nice. Tourists, eh?
The islands dotted around the place are full of ancient coral fossils and the one we wandered around had a huge, freestanding arch you could walk under. It's clear that all this area was once sea bed, although I can't recall how long ago that was.
An amazing place, well worth visiting. The tour company we met in Potosi tried to rip us off (very dishonest, promising much, costing hundreds but failing to deliver) but the people in the local town (name escapes me at the moment) were very nice. Oddly enough they were the only town where people smiled that we saw in Bolivia. In Peru we saw poverty just as terrible but the people were generally far happier. Must be a local thing.
You're right - his list was terrible. He didn't even include Bejewelled!
Otherwise those games mostly cover what 'normal' people care about. These are the people who don't care about getting the latest Catalyst driver within fifteen seconds of release to crank that extra 0.83 FPS in Bioshock. Hell, WoW pretty much satisfies casual gaming today, but add in the Sims, Bejewelled and a card game and there's almost nothing left.
Anyone still in doubt should just get a Wii or an X-Box 360 in addition to their computer. They'll have all the casual games and all the really hardcore games then.
So I guess that when they're flying out afterwards and Luke's seat seems to be wobbling back and forth you were also thinking "what the hell's causing that and wouldn't it mean his ship is all over the place?" I thought he was going to get whiplash from all that seat movement.
Why didn't the actors stand up for themselves a bit in the prequel trilogy? They're mostly good actors, but some of the lines they deliver are the most atrocious, wooden dialogue this side of daytime soapies.
Off the top of my head: "Hold me like you did on Naboo." "He's killed all the younglings" (bites knuckle) Anything by meesah! "Neow! Neow! Neow! Neow! No! No!" (mofo Palpatine cornered by the bad-ass Jedi) "Nooooooooooooo (draws another breath) Oooooooooooo!"
I don't know if Ford stood up to Lucas or not, but I do know that this lot didn't. Surely they must have known they were delivering pure turds and even ILM can't polish them enough to make them shine.
Add to that the amazing accents that seemed to drive stereotyping to a new dimension. All the evil traders are Japanese apparently (certainly Asian, might be Chinese). The bankers are soulless and apparently all of the same race. The only interesting new race were those flying guys - they had a new language that couldn't easily be traced back to some existing race on Earth (maybe some of the plosives would be familiar to a few African languages though).
But the actors, oh the actors. Why couldn't just one of them have delivered a solid performance in a whole film? Why must Lucas' shitty dialogue be uncontested when it seems everyone (certainly everyone I've spoken to about the films) clearly knows it's just full of turds like the lines above?
(sigh)
I see the potential for a great classic trilogy was there, but Lucas was the wrong man to write and direct it.
that doesn't make the entire 'backstory' of the Bible "dull" because "there's no tension and no surprise."
No, the Bible is dull because after you plough through several bad creation myths, then a number of "x begat y" pages before getting to the really hateful stuff about how everyone deserves death unless they believe this religion (and many descriptions of exactly how to deliver that punishment). After a few more books, you realise that the barely sane rantings of dark ages authors who miss the point that their god, as written, was evil absolute doesn't make for a good read.
There's no tension, no plot, no story. There isn't meant to be, either.
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand we've got one guy lying about a consensual blowjob that results in nothing further, and on the other we've got a group of people lying about a threat to the US that results in hundreds of thousands of dead, destruction of a nation's infrastructure, revival of Al Qaeda and the subsequent massively increase threat of global terrorism.
Hmm... I'd say that one set of lies is not equivalent to the other in scale, impact or 'truthiness.'
It's not just warming, it's the change in weather patterns. Previously arable areas are becoming arid, previously arid areas are becoming arable. Ocean currents are changing, driving weather systems into changes in turn. And then there's the issue of ice on land being melted. Evidence is coming in from many places around the world showing earlier thawing and later re-freezing, lower or missing icecaps. Low-lying land is being threatened by all of this, and while you may be okay, many of the world's people won't be. There are lots of low islands in addition to the coastal cities of the world.
But hey! It's all a hoax!
Keep telling yourself that.
I'd argue that even if it is a hoax, we lose little by treating it seriously. We get lower pollution, more efficient energy and some minor wealth redistribution from big energy companies to the small pollution-control companies. If it's real, treating it seriously may well be critical to the future of the Human race.
Seems that the only logical position is to assume (or pretend) Human-caused climate change is real and form policy from there.
I don't think that page on GeoCities constitutes proof. It reads like crank science. Have you got anything more substantive?
What, is reading between the lines a lost art these days?
It's not that so much as the way that people tie themselves to a company or product and feel a great need to defend it. For some reason I see a lot of people become pseudo-lawyers, debating the detail of semantics in order to avoid debating the meaning.
"It depends what you mean by 'the.'"
I've always felt that at the point where you need to take notes as you read, any fiction has become unwieldy. I've felt that with a few authors in the past, and have steered clear of Jordan's series mainly due to the sheer mass of the books. Now I find that people feel a need for a summarised version with cross-linked character data, I feel pretty good about not touching those weighty tomes.
LoTR produced 12 hours of feature movie, and from only a few hundred pages (about the total length of a single book from Jordan)
"a few hundred pages" ? Seriously?
The various reprints are typeset the same, and Amazon lists the 50th anniversary edition as 1184 pages. That includes about 80 pages of appendices and maps, but you're well over a thousand pages of text.
Where did you get "a few hundred pages" from? The Hobbit?
but of course, this is your opinion. I enjoy books with depth, complexity, and longevity. I avoid books and series that are simple or episodic.
You mean you enjoy books that you think have depth, complexity and longevity, and avoid books that you judge to be simple or episodic. I find some of the authors you list tedious, dull, uninspired and repetitive in the extreme. You find their books full of depth and complexity. That's all down to personal taste, or lack thereof. You mention personal opinion and then go on to ignore it in the very next sentence.
If it can be made into a 3 hour or less movie, it's not worth my time.
When you say that the book has to equate to at least a three hour movie, how do you judge that before you read the book? Heavy books make longer movies? Do you imagine a particular director's or screenwriter's version? After all, one director would make Lord of the Rings into a two hour movie, another made it into a nine hour movie. I reckon it's possible to successfully tell the entire story in two hours (the movies had a few hours of battle scenes that weren't described in the books for more than a few pages).
How can you look at a book in the store, read a few pages and say "Well, this'd be a 2 hour film so it's not for me!" or "Ooh, looks like a five hour movie's in here! Where's my wallet?" I ask because I find this behaviour astonishing.
(and it's "enthralled" not "enthrawled")
... he'd have a translator on hand at all times.
He'd ignore looming business threats until far too late, and then be the only director left standing after all the corporate bloodletting. Then he'd bugger off to a retirement in the jungle somewhere.
GPS systems can be great for finding unfamiliar routes, but are only ever as smart as the driver.
My wife and I took a taxi from a friend's place in the outer suburbs of Melbourne to our place in the central city. The taxi driver put the address into the GPS and off we went. It was late, we were tired so we didn't pay too much attention until... I noticed a sign pointing to a satellite town.
As we argued with the driver where the city was (!) he confidently stopped at a small side street in the middle of nowhere and said that we'd arrived.
It took us another ninety minutes and several fare resets (plus arguments) to get back home because this bozo relied on the GPS completely at the expense of his own common sense.
I've got zero faith in drivers who rely on their GPS navigation because (as in our case) they disregard signs that clearly show where they should be going in favour of what the machine tells them.
The GPS navigation company should be forced to change their software to actually conform to the road rules because as it stands now, it has a serious design flaw.
>>> Perhaps you should try signing your binaries, and then get on MSDN to figure out what else you're doing wrong.
>>How much does that cost? Oh, right.
>Nothing.
Signed binaries are free? Wow, that's good of Microsoft!
We could shoot these people in the field. No muss no fuss. These things happen in war. Innocent people die.
Nice. Shoot suspects without trial. You do know that many of the people captured and sent to Guantanamo Bay weren't captured on the field of battle, don't you? So you're saying your soldiers could just execute potentially innocent people without trial.
Lots of people at GB have since been released without trial. The first and most serious trial of these "worst of the worst" (as so many politicians have damned them) resulted in a slap on the wrist sentence of nine months for the hideous crime of guarding a tank. And Mr Hicks was sent back to Australia under a gag order to keep quiet until 2008 (after the Australian elections). He wasn't captured on a battlefield though, but turned in for bounty money like many other prisoners at GB.
Many report torture and renditions to other nations (such as Egypt) where they were tortured. Then they were released, as there was either no evidence or they were innocent anyway.
Refraining from executing the innocent is not the act of a "damn great people." It's the minimum standard that can be expected of anyone above the level of total barbarism. Is that, then, your point? That you're not utterly barbaric?
I expected more.
Surely exposing bad behaviour for correction can only strengthen a nation?
And precisely how does this make your country more susceptible to terrorist attacks?
Hey, guards worked really well in Abu Ghraib!
Sure, a few suspects got a bit of torture and brought the entire nation of the United States into shame and disrepute through their rank stupidity, but I'm sure it won't happen a second time.
I mean, what are the odds?
I wonder what sort of stories we'll be reading in another ten years that would shock us now but will seem like regular occurrences in 2017? Thoughtcrime executions, archived recording of all telephone calls (the European Union is already working on this!), incarcerating people because they have the "genes" of a potential psychopath (again, the EU is looking into this)? It's gunna happen and we'll just keep boiling like the frogs we are.
I don't accept for a second these stories about what the EU is doing. I've seen stories about the EU that were shown to be made up before, and I reckon I'm looking at two more now.
Gitmo is the place where the worst of the worst are kept.
People like the Australian David Hicks, who was found guilty of supporting terrorism through the nefarious act of guarding a tank. What a bastard!
If these are the worst of the worst, then Al Qaeda isn't so bad after all.
And what about those Brits who were let off with a smack on the hand? Or Mamdouh Habib (another Aussie) who was 'rendered' in Egypt for the US and then released without charge?
Gitmo is absolutely not about keeping the worst of the worst. It's about keeping suspects outside US legal jurisdiction. The question "Why?" is critical here. What reasons could there be for denying legal access to suspects?
I wasn't criticising the quality of the water from the wells, but drawing attention to the low-tech world these people live in. Having spent most of the trip in and around the Andes, I'd say the water people get in those regions would be extremely high quality. I was certainly happy to drink it! In the cities you're back to bottled water, 'just in case.'
I travelled briefly in Peru in 2005 and saw the crushing poverty both in and out of the cities. It's worse out of the cities, and not uncommon to see houses with no electricity and water delivered from wells.
In Cuzco begging is rife, and the kids usually try to sell something to justify giving them money. Postcards are pretty popular. These kids are smart too, learning enough English to have a conversation and show their sense of humour. I think that giving them an opportunity to learn valuable skills can only be a good thing for them and for their country.
Microsoft Access.
There. *Now* you're scared!
They'll even put in a web frontend (Access generates these *so* easily and well) and an advanced system to page data in/out to get around the 2GB limit.
All the tables will have a local key field called "ID" and the other fields will be named "Field1", "Field2", "Field3" and so on. The tables will be named "Table1", "Table2", "Table3" (etc) as well.
And worst of all... Every output query will be based on other queries, which will draw data from yet other queries, and on and on and on.
The horror! Even writing this brief description leaves me with a feeling that something evil is rising from the depths of Hell, and... what's that at the window!
Argh! So many tentacles and eyes! Arrrghhghhhghhhhhh
I'm avoiding the US as well, and while I'd like to visit to see the sights, I'll skip it while the country keeps fingerprinting, terrorist risk analysis and other stupidities. It's a big world and there are plenty of other places to spend my tourist dollars, places that actually welcome tourists.
What do I *do* about this sort of crap? I write letters to the papers to try to get my point across, I vote (and here in Australia we recently threw out our 'conservative' government). I debate politics with people and stick up for my beliefs.
Do you, Anonymous Coward? Who are you anyway, to be so strident with your criticism of other people while not naming yourself?
If I'd thought about it at all I'd have assumed he'd turned off his inertia suppression field or whatever other 'e e "doc" smith' magic was keeping him from being smeared into a thin paste from the high gee maneuvers.
What did bug me was how their engines were thrusting all the time even when they were maintaining constant velocity.
One of the more realistic 'ships fighting in space' scenes I've read was in the Gap series by Stephen Donaldson. The ships were thousands of kilometres apart, firing high-frequency lasers, particle weapons and missiles while trying to guess the next shot from their opponents. They used thrusters all over their surfaces to manoeuvre in space and there were no tight turns that would leave the occupants pasted around the inner surfaces. Inertia and physics seemed to actually matter!
So many authors (books and screenplays) think ships in space are just like ships in atmosphere, complete with wings, back-facing engines and turns at hundreds of times the velocity of current aircraft but the same turning radius. But then we've got a world where people think visible laser 'bolts' look good (if you can see it, chances are it can't hurt you) and every computer makes annoying sounds when text (slowly) appears on screen. Who needs thrusters, inertia, centrifugal force and the vacuum of space when you can have magically manoeuvrable ships that whoosh as they pass by?
Even sadder than the complete failure of Sci-Fi films to 'get' physics in any meaningful manner are the dedicated fans who use tortuous leaps of logic to justify that "it could happen!" The timing of the Kessel Run is only one of many cases.
the Salar de Uyuni was found to have only 16 inches (40 cm) of variation over its entire surface
I assume you're not factoring in the few 'islands' dotted around the Salar de Uyuni.
It's a very interesting place to visit. My (now) wife and I went there in 2005 on our trip around South America. For two months of the year it rains steadily and the whole area floods to about 30-50 cm (going from memory here). The water evaporates for the next few months, leaving a bed of salt. We went there in the last few weeks of water evaporation, and when there's a few centimetres of water over the packed salt you get these incredible reflections.
The locals mine the salt, piling it in small mounds about a metre tall. The reflective surface makes these little mounds look just like diamond shapes hanging in the air around you. It's surreal.
Just before the road enters the area, some locals will try to sell you salt crystal formations in any size you like. We paid a few small coins for one that sits on my bookshelf, but once we were in we realised we could easily have found hundreds of crystals just as nice. Tourists, eh?
The islands dotted around the place are full of ancient coral fossils and the one we wandered around had a huge, freestanding arch you could walk under. It's clear that all this area was once sea bed, although I can't recall how long ago that was.
An amazing place, well worth visiting. The tour company we met in Potosi tried to rip us off (very dishonest, promising much, costing hundreds but failing to deliver) but the people in the local town (name escapes me at the moment) were very nice. Oddly enough they were the only town where people smiled that we saw in Bolivia. In Peru we saw poverty just as terrible but the people were generally far happier. Must be a local thing.
Does anyone else remember the code puzzle in Impossible Mission (old C64 game)?
The colorised QR code on Wikipedia looks a lot like the codes from IM.
Coincidence or poor memory on my part - you choose!
You're right - his list was terrible. He didn't even include Bejewelled!
Otherwise those games mostly cover what 'normal' people care about. These are the people who don't care about getting the latest Catalyst driver within fifteen seconds of release to crank that extra 0.83 FPS in Bioshock. Hell, WoW pretty much satisfies casual gaming today, but add in the Sims, Bejewelled and a card game and there's almost nothing left.
Anyone still in doubt should just get a Wii or an X-Box 360 in addition to their computer. They'll have all the casual games and all the really hardcore games then.
So I guess that when they're flying out afterwards and Luke's seat seems to be wobbling back and forth you were also thinking "what the hell's causing that and wouldn't it mean his ship is all over the place?" I thought he was going to get whiplash from all that seat movement.
Why didn't the actors stand up for themselves a bit in the prequel trilogy? They're mostly good actors, but some of the lines they deliver are the most atrocious, wooden dialogue this side of daytime soapies.
Off the top of my head:
"Hold me like you did on Naboo."
"He's killed all the younglings" (bites knuckle)
Anything by meesah!
"Neow! Neow! Neow! Neow! No! No!" (mofo Palpatine cornered by the bad-ass Jedi)
"Nooooooooooooo (draws another breath) Oooooooooooo!"
I don't know if Ford stood up to Lucas or not, but I do know that this lot didn't. Surely they must have known they were delivering pure turds and even ILM can't polish them enough to make them shine.
Add to that the amazing accents that seemed to drive stereotyping to a new dimension. All the evil traders are Japanese apparently (certainly Asian, might be Chinese). The bankers are soulless and apparently all of the same race. The only interesting new race were those flying guys - they had a new language that couldn't easily be traced back to some existing race on Earth (maybe some of the plosives would be familiar to a few African languages though).
But the actors, oh the actors. Why couldn't just one of them have delivered a solid performance in a whole film? Why must Lucas' shitty dialogue be uncontested when it seems everyone (certainly everyone I've spoken to about the films) clearly knows it's just full of turds like the lines above?
(sigh)
I see the potential for a great classic trilogy was there, but Lucas was the wrong man to write and direct it.
that doesn't make the entire 'backstory' of the Bible "dull" because "there's no tension and no surprise."
No, the Bible is dull because after you plough through several bad creation myths, then a number of "x begat y" pages before getting to the really hateful stuff about how everyone deserves death unless they believe this religion (and many descriptions of exactly how to deliver that punishment). After a few more books, you realise that the barely sane rantings of dark ages authors who miss the point that their god, as written, was evil absolute doesn't make for a good read.
There's no tension, no plot, no story. There isn't meant to be, either.