It's true that some people have crowed about the hypocrisy of an openly right-wing pundit being associated with gay sex sites.
Domain names, not sites. The names which were registered by this guy never actually went anywhere. I'm as disappointed in him as anybody, but let's keep the facts straight here. While what he apparently did is bad enough, the accusations that have been leveled at him don't appear to be supported by the facts.
Of course, if you'd read the group's press release, you'd already know that there is not one word about the gay sex sites.
No, but it is chock full of blah-blah about Gannon's lack of journalism experience, a change I find fascinating given that Markos Zuniga had zero journalism experience when he was invited to cover the Democratic National Convention last summer.
This whole hoo-hah boils down to one thing and one thing only: Gannon was openly conservative, and an open advocate of the administration. That drives some people up the wall. Some people seem to believe that it's only okay for people who are open critics of the administration to report the news. These people are shamefully misguided about how a free press operates. A free press means that people you don't like get to print their stories and opinions too.
But the very worst part --the very worst part --is the way some people participating in this mess have accused Gannon of taking payment for advocacy. First, there is zero evidence that any such thing ever took place, and an accusation along those lines is tantamount to libel. But second and more importantly, Markos Zuniga was a paid member of Howard Dean's political campaign when he was given press credentials to the Democratic National Convention. I mean, come on. "Systematic subversion of the free press?" You've got some nerve.
Bottom line: Where were these people when Eason Jordan told members of the Davos panel that the American military systematically targeted reporters in Iraq? That's the same Eason Jordan who admitted last year that CNN deliberately buried stories that would be unflattering to the Baath party in order to keep their Baghdad bureau open.
A story is a story, and that's the truth. But it's the selective pursuit of stories that bugs the shit out of me. If you're only going to chase stories that advance your political agenda that's fine, as long as you don't get all high-and-mighty when other people choose to do the same thing. Be a man, suck it up, and admit that you're practicing advocacy journalism.
Gannon/Guckert lied and misrepresented and might have committed a felony in the process.
But none of that is true. He never lied, as far as anybody knows. Are you referring to his use of a pen name? Tons of reporters use pen names. He didn't misrepresent anything. And he certainly hasn't been accused of any crimes.
You're participating in a witch hunt orchestrated to silence a political opponent. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm afraid that's not correct. Anybody with an "A" pass gets a cursory background check to verify that they actually are who they say they are, and "A" passes aren't allowed in the press room. To get access to the press room, Gannon had to get a press pass, which means he got a more extensive background check: The Secret Service contacted his employer to verify that he really worked there, and they verified his home address.
Please stop the conspiracy-theory talk. It's just silly.
They had lots of valid evidence but they allowed it to be tainted by an obviously forged document.
Actually, the documents were the only evidence they had. Everything else was (1) anecdotal, and (2) completely discredited. They had nothing at all to go on except the documents, and the documents were faked.
But that's not really the point here. The point is that Mapes shouldn't even have been running down this story. Somebody above her in the CBS News org chart should have shut her down years ago. Because her only motivation in following the story was to politically damage George W. Bush. That's not what CBS News is supposed to be doing.
Is it unusual that a man with two weeks of training from a political 'think-tank', belonging to a news organisation that had only been publishing for a few weeks at the time, gets accredited to the White House under a false name? You bet is.
To get access to the White House briefing room, all you have to do is get a job with a news organization and then ask to get your name on the list. That's it. It's incredibly easy to get access to the briefing room. Understandably so. It's in the White House's interest to get its message out through as many channels as possible. Hell, the White House lets al-Jazeera into the briefing room. And you're worried about this guy?
We have evidence of problems, and SusanG and company at DKos are looking into it because the mainstream media won't.
Sigh. Let's at least be men enough to drop the pretense, okay? These people are digging around trying to find dirt with which to damage the Bush administration. That's their goal, that's their mission. They're not interested in news. If they were interested in news, they'd be on Eason Jordan and Ward Churchill like white on rice. They're interested only in stories that further their political agenda. And, quite obviously, they're not all that dissuaded by questions of veracity, either.
Don't try to paint this as a "David and Goliath" thing. Be honest about it.
Again, that's fine. But it's sort of a fundamental assumption in this country that we don't restrict press access just to people we like, or to people that we think are good reporters. Hell, I always thought Helen Thomas was incredibly bad at her job, but she never got kicked out of the press room, did she? Our government doesn't operate behind stone walls. It's no more appropriate for you to call for Gannon's expulsion than it is for me to call for Eason Jordan's expulsion.
I might be more persuaded that this were something other than an openly partisan issue if it weren't for the fact that everybody who got up in arms about this was a member of the "Bush = Hitler" crowd from before the election. It seems to me that this is just a matter of trying to find fault with anybody who openly supports the President's agenda. And, as we all know, if you look for fault, you're going to find fault. No surprises there.
Oh, and bashing somebody for hypocrisy is, I shouldn't need to point out, the height of hypocrisy.
If that happened, that would be a problem. But since during the daily briefing everybody in the press room gets to ask two questions --the briefer, usually Scott, goes in seating order -- I'd have to say that it's kind of a non issue. Don't you think?
No, we don't need any such thing. In fact, we need just the opposite of such a thing. Because transparent journalism only works in a high-trust environment. If every author is anonymous, you've reduced the news to a giant rumor mill filled with unprovable and irrefutable lies.
We have this wacky idea called "freedom of the press." It means that even people you disagree with are allowed to report and to comment on the news of the day.
You can keep looking for evidence of a high-level conspiracy all you want. It's still not gonna be true. The bottom line is that there are a lot of people who hold opinions that are different from yours. These people are sincere. They're not "plants." And they have just as much right to report the news as anybody else.
I'm afraid you're only seeing part of the story. CBS blew it in a number of ways.
First, they blew it because Mary Mapes was following an agenda, not a story. Her goal was to influence the election, not to report the news.
Second, they blew it because nobody inside CBS was willing to shut Mapes down. There should have been an internal check-and-balance mechanism to prevent her from ever getting that story past the lead stage.
Third, once the story was demonstrated to be a big ol' lie, CBS should have immediately issued a retraction. They didn't. Instead, they stonewalled for something like two weeks, an eternity in this day and age.
Finally, CBS promised to conduct an impartial investigation and issue its findings in "weeks, not months." That didn't happen.
What the TANG story revealed was that CBS News had a whole series of systemic flaws that allowed the story to get to air, then prevented the organization from rectifying the situation. It revealed that CBS News, and, by extension, similar organizations, had fundamental problems that couldn't be fixed with a wave of the hand.
You might have seen some coverage of Jeff Gannon, a conservative reporter who lobbed softball questions during White House press briefings. It was discovered that he was using an alias to get past White House security.
That's not true. Jeff Gannon is a pen name for reporter James Guckert. He didn't adopt his pen name to try to get past security, and even if it had it wouldn't have worked. Everybody in the White House press corps has to go through an in-depth Secret Service background check. That's not the kind of thing that can be bypassed using a fake name.
Gannon (or Guckert, if you prefer) resigned over links to inappropriate pornography. These links were uncovered during what basically amounted to a witch hunt. Granted, he had no business being involved with porn, and it's entirely appropriate for him to resign over it, but the links never even would have been found if certain people with a political agenda hadn't singled Gannon (or Guckert) out for negative attention.
It's a native OSX app using the Mac OSX port of QT.
This is nitpicky, but that's a little bit of a contradiction in terms. QT applications are not native. They don't look, feel or work like native Mac OS X applications. They might be kinda close, but they're not the same.
I've never understood the point of a Mac port of QT anyway. It's so easy to write a Cocoa application that it hardly seems worth short-changing your users on the application in order to maintain a single code base with lots of hairy ifdefs.
Re:My prediction for the DVR market
on
MythTV 0.17 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think so. TiVo is great for what it is, but it's really not up to Apple's standards. The user experience is good, but not NEARLY good enough. Plus there's no FireWire support, which would be necessary for an Apple product. Also, no QuickTime, which means no easy way to add support for H.264/AVC.
But the bigger problem is that TiVo's software is, I believe, encumbered by the GPL. That's a show-stopper for Apple.
Re:Shouldn't Apple put something like this out?
on
MythTV 0.17 Released
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· Score: 1
Agreed. Plus, using a general-purpose computer as a DVR just sucks compared to the user experience of something like a TiVo.
I think the opportunity here is for something more like a TiVo with FireWire or DVB input and FireWire or DVI/component output. Hughes (I think it is) makes a TiVo for HD already, but it only works with the DirecTV system or with over-the-air HD. There are various HD DVRs for the various cable services, but the user experience generally sucks. And none of these devices can play DVDs or pre-encoded content. And they're incredibly expensive.
There's definitely an opportunity here, but MythTV is no the solution.
That's predicated on the assumption that the Mac is going to be encoding and decoding the video. It really shouldn't be. In a perfect world, your Mac will just write the pre-encoded MPEG-2 transport stream that comes down off the satellite or over the airwaves to disk, then stream that data back out over the FireWire port on playback.
High-definition MPEG-2 ranges anywhere from about 14 Mbps to about 25 Mbps, depending on the source. That's really low. Even a laptop hard drive can handle 25 Mbps.
Now, it's possible to decode the transport stream in your TV or set-top box and then bring it out via DVI or component analog into your Mac, re-encoding it for storage and then decoding it for playback. But that's kind of a waste, considering that every HDTV and HD set-top box has FireWire on it already.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. There's no reason you can't do MPEG-2 stuff on a Mac. In fact, it's considerably easier on a Mac because FireWire is built right in.
I don't buy it. If you enjoy the show, what compels you to be so critical of it? And about such stupid nitpicks? It's like you're saying that the show sucks because the costumes are the wrong color or something. What motivates this nonsense?
The whole fleet is outside of a system in one episode and starfuries are flying back-and-forth to the low atmosphere of a particular planet which Starbuck is downed
I don't know what a "starfury" is, but you're mistaken. In that episode there's a chunk of dialogue establishing that Adama ordered the fleet to move closer to the planet to facilitate CSAR operations. Tigh reminded him that this would leave the fleet in a vulnerable position, but Adama didn't care. Remember?
My definition of mis-using is manyfold, but in this case it's entirely about using the hand-held thing so much that it no longer has any impact on the telling of the story.
It's not supposed to have any impact on telling the story. The entire series -- with a few very specific exceptions --is shot handheld. It's just how things are done. It's not used for effect; it's used all the time, and the occasional steadicam or crane shot is used for effect. (If you've seen episode 13, you know EXACTLY what I mean.)
The suit isn't designed to make such a seal
The seal doesn't need to be perfect, any more than you need your house to be perfectly airtight in order to air condition it. As long as the Raider maintained positive pressure, Kara had nothing to worry about. Well, except getting lost, getting shot down or flying into something at a thousand miles an hour.
The suit is flexible, so the pressure would just push it right through the hole into space.
Not that flexible. Have you ever felt space-suit material? It's very rigid.
The suit will do nothing for temperature
It doesn't need to. It's an oft-repeated fallacy that space is cold. In fact, space is an excellent insulator. Because you're in a vacuum, there can be no heat transport through convection or conduction; all you're left with is radiation in the infrared. As you can clearly see, the inside of the Raider is lined with musculature which would be quite opaque in the infrared. With Kara in there pumping out heat, the problem would be cooling it, not keeping it warm.
You're aware, are you not, that the inner layer in a space suit is a refrigerated layer? The suit circulates chilled water next to the astronaut's skin to keep him from overheating.
No story is ever served by a lack of believability.
Heh. The king's brother murders him with ear poison and marries the queen. The king's ghost appears to his son, the prince, and commands him to avenge his death, which the prince does through an incredibly elaborate plan involving shaming the usurper into confessing by showing him a play. Plausible? Not hardly. Yet that's the plot of the greatest story ever told in the English language.
Methinks you're looking too hard to find things to sneer at.
I think I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't spending so much time NOT wincing at the really stupid stuff.
I wholeheartedly agree. And while "Babylon 5" was a profoundly stupid story, you'll find you enjoy "Galactica" a lot more if you quit worrying about how many pounds PSI Kara's flight suit can take and just enjoy the show.
Actually, there's a third possibility that you didn't take into consideration.
3. It's a television show about people who are lost among the stars. If they can't explore different planets or escape from dangerous situations, the premise falls apart.
I'm actually kind of surprised that you haven't bitched about gravity yet. At which point, of course, I would remind you that it would be prohibitively expensive to shoot the entire show aboard the "vomit comet," and ask you please to take a stress pill and think things over.
The faster-than-light engine, like the artificial gravity, are both powered by magic. The inner workings of neither will be discussed during the show's run, because they just aren't important. They are necessary conceits in order to tell the story.
Stop making day trips into planetary systems at sub-light speed
That's never happened. The planets are scouted by Raptors, which are kind of like Black Hawks. They are equipped with engines that can do the hand-waving "jump" thing they do.
Stop mis-using the camera work.
Meh. It's obviously a matter of opinion, but sometimes the difference between the right opinion and the wrong opinion is pretty clear.
The human is surprised, and yet still manages to pull off the first shot.
Has it ever occurred to you that the cylon was there to take Helo alive? Or, better, that he was there merely to... hmm... how to say this without spoiling the story for you? Let's just say that it's not necessarily the case that the cylon was there to kill him.
Never, ever, show someone stopping up a hole in a spacecraft with a boot or whatever that was, and then flying into space. That's just awful science.
Actually, it's perfect science. It wasn't a boot; it was a part of Kara's pressure suit. Obviously a pressure suit is air-tight. She wedged it into the hole to form a seal. Once in space, the pressure of the air inside (pushing at about 5 pounds psi, probably; that's about how we pressurized the Apollo spacecraft) will hold the patch in place. The pressure will not be enough to push the patch out through the hole, because the pressure suit is strong enough not to tear or deform under that kind of pressure.
And it doesn't even have to be a perfect seal. It's a short trip, and there's a big tank of O2 (comparable in size to a scuba tank) under Kara's left arm. A little leakage isn't a problem because the O2 is constantly being replaced.
There are a bunch of other really minor problems, almost all of which can be explained away by saying that the tech level is REALLY uneven.
Actually, they can be explained away by saying that it's a television show and that all things serve the story.
Actually, CGI is often more expensive than model work, but studios use it to get a certain look.
The thing about model work is that we know exactly how to do it right. CGI is still very much a new medium, and we're still figuring out how to get the right look. For instance, compare the CGI effects in a show like "Babylon 5" to a show like "Galactica." The very first thing you notice is that the color saturation in "Babylon 5" is way too high. Yes, the computer enables you to generate synthetic images with all that wonderful color, but it doesn't look real. It looks fake, like a cartoon. In real life, colors are muted and dull unless they're lit perfectly. The guys at Zoic know that.
The thing about CGI and miniature work is that it's very difficult to make CGI work look as good as miniature work. Not impossible, just very tricky and time-consuming. But the very best miniature work in the world doesn't look as good as the very best CGI work. It's possible to go further with CGI than it is with miniatures.
Not that it would be cheaper. In fact, it's considerably more expensive. Figures haven't been released, but the scuttlebutt is that "Galactica" costs upwards for $2M an episode, costs shared by Sky, Space, Sci Fi and (now) NBC. And that's in 2005 dollars. The new "Galactica," a show that's being lauded as a phenomenal success, is five times as expensive as the old "Galactica," a show that was cancelled because of high per-episode costs.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true that some people have crowed about the hypocrisy of an openly right-wing pundit being associated with gay sex sites.
Domain names, not sites. The names which were registered by this guy never actually went anywhere. I'm as disappointed in him as anybody, but let's keep the facts straight here. While what he apparently did is bad enough, the accusations that have been leveled at him don't appear to be supported by the facts.
Of course, if you'd read the group's press release, you'd already know that there is not one word about the gay sex sites.
No, but it is chock full of blah-blah about Gannon's lack of journalism experience, a change I find fascinating given that Markos Zuniga had zero journalism experience when he was invited to cover the Democratic National Convention last summer.
This whole hoo-hah boils down to one thing and one thing only: Gannon was openly conservative, and an open advocate of the administration. That drives some people up the wall. Some people seem to believe that it's only okay for people who are open critics of the administration to report the news. These people are shamefully misguided about how a free press operates. A free press means that people you don't like get to print their stories and opinions too.
But the very worst part --the very worst part --is the way some people participating in this mess have accused Gannon of taking payment for advocacy. First, there is zero evidence that any such thing ever took place, and an accusation along those lines is tantamount to libel. But second and more importantly, Markos Zuniga was a paid member of Howard Dean's political campaign when he was given press credentials to the Democratic National Convention. I mean, come on. "Systematic subversion of the free press?" You've got some nerve.
Bottom line: Where were these people when Eason Jordan told members of the Davos panel that the American military systematically targeted reporters in Iraq? That's the same Eason Jordan who admitted last year that CNN deliberately buried stories that would be unflattering to the Baath party in order to keep their Baghdad bureau open.
A story is a story, and that's the truth. But it's the selective pursuit of stories that bugs the shit out of me. If you're only going to chase stories that advance your political agenda that's fine, as long as you don't get all high-and-mighty when other people choose to do the same thing. Be a man, suck it up, and admit that you're practicing advocacy journalism.
Gannon/Guckert lied and misrepresented and might have committed a felony in the process.
But none of that is true. He never lied, as far as anybody knows. Are you referring to his use of a pen name? Tons of reporters use pen names. He didn't misrepresent anything. And he certainly hasn't been accused of any crimes.
You're participating in a witch hunt orchestrated to silence a political opponent. You should be ashamed of yourself.
No background check
I'm afraid that's not correct. Anybody with an "A" pass gets a cursory background check to verify that they actually are who they say they are, and "A" passes aren't allowed in the press room. To get access to the press room, Gannon had to get a press pass, which means he got a more extensive background check: The Secret Service contacted his employer to verify that he really worked there, and they verified his home address.
Please stop the conspiracy-theory talk. It's just silly.
They had lots of valid evidence but they allowed it to be tainted by an obviously forged document.
Actually, the documents were the only evidence they had. Everything else was (1) anecdotal, and (2) completely discredited. They had nothing at all to go on except the documents, and the documents were faked.
But that's not really the point here. The point is that Mapes shouldn't even have been running down this story. Somebody above her in the CBS News org chart should have shut her down years ago. Because her only motivation in following the story was to politically damage George W. Bush. That's not what CBS News is supposed to be doing.
Is it unusual that a man with two weeks of training from a political 'think-tank', belonging to a news organisation that had only been publishing for a few weeks at the time, gets accredited to the White House under a false name? You bet is.
To get access to the White House briefing room, all you have to do is get a job with a news organization and then ask to get your name on the list. That's it. It's incredibly easy to get access to the briefing room. Understandably so. It's in the White House's interest to get its message out through as many channels as possible. Hell, the White House lets al-Jazeera into the briefing room. And you're worried about this guy?
We have evidence of problems, and SusanG and company at DKos are looking into it because the mainstream media won't.
Sigh. Let's at least be men enough to drop the pretense, okay? These people are digging around trying to find dirt with which to damage the Bush administration. That's their goal, that's their mission. They're not interested in news. If they were interested in news, they'd be on Eason Jordan and Ward Churchill like white on rice. They're interested only in stories that further their political agenda. And, quite obviously, they're not all that dissuaded by questions of veracity, either.
Don't try to paint this as a "David and Goliath" thing. Be honest about it.
Again, that's fine. But it's sort of a fundamental assumption in this country that we don't restrict press access just to people we like, or to people that we think are good reporters. Hell, I always thought Helen Thomas was incredibly bad at her job, but she never got kicked out of the press room, did she? Our government doesn't operate behind stone walls. It's no more appropriate for you to call for Gannon's expulsion than it is for me to call for Eason Jordan's expulsion.
I might be more persuaded that this were something other than an openly partisan issue if it weren't for the fact that everybody who got up in arms about this was a member of the "Bush = Hitler" crowd from before the election. It seems to me that this is just a matter of trying to find fault with anybody who openly supports the President's agenda. And, as we all know, if you look for fault, you're going to find fault. No surprises there.
Oh, and bashing somebody for hypocrisy is, I shouldn't need to point out, the height of hypocrisy.
If that happened, that would be a problem. But since during the daily briefing everybody in the press room gets to ask two questions --the briefer, usually Scott, goes in seating order -- I'd have to say that it's kind of a non issue. Don't you think?
No, we don't need any such thing. In fact, we need just the opposite of such a thing. Because transparent journalism only works in a high-trust environment. If every author is anonymous, you've reduced the news to a giant rumor mill filled with unprovable and irrefutable lies.
We have this wacky idea called "freedom of the press." It means that even people you disagree with are allowed to report and to comment on the news of the day.
You can keep looking for evidence of a high-level conspiracy all you want. It's still not gonna be true. The bottom line is that there are a lot of people who hold opinions that are different from yours. These people are sincere. They're not "plants." And they have just as much right to report the news as anybody else.
I'm afraid you're only seeing part of the story. CBS blew it in a number of ways.
First, they blew it because Mary Mapes was following an agenda, not a story. Her goal was to influence the election, not to report the news.
Second, they blew it because nobody inside CBS was willing to shut Mapes down. There should have been an internal check-and-balance mechanism to prevent her from ever getting that story past the lead stage.
Third, once the story was demonstrated to be a big ol' lie, CBS should have immediately issued a retraction. They didn't. Instead, they stonewalled for something like two weeks, an eternity in this day and age.
Finally, CBS promised to conduct an impartial investigation and issue its findings in "weeks, not months." That didn't happen.
What the TANG story revealed was that CBS News had a whole series of systemic flaws that allowed the story to get to air, then prevented the organization from rectifying the situation. It revealed that CBS News, and, by extension, similar organizations, had fundamental problems that couldn't be fixed with a wave of the hand.
Quoting Salon on this issue makes about as much sense as quoting Markos Zuniga. Not exactly the last bastion of objective journalism, are they?
You might have seen some coverage of Jeff Gannon, a conservative reporter who lobbed softball questions during White House press briefings. It was discovered that he was using an alias to get past White House security.
That's not true. Jeff Gannon is a pen name for reporter James Guckert. He didn't adopt his pen name to try to get past security, and even if it had it wouldn't have worked. Everybody in the White House press corps has to go through an in-depth Secret Service background check. That's not the kind of thing that can be bypassed using a fake name.
Gannon (or Guckert, if you prefer) resigned over links to inappropriate pornography. These links were uncovered during what basically amounted to a witch hunt. Granted, he had no business being involved with porn, and it's entirely appropriate for him to resign over it, but the links never even would have been found if certain people with a political agenda hadn't singled Gannon (or Guckert) out for negative attention.
It's a native OSX app using the Mac OSX port of QT.
This is nitpicky, but that's a little bit of a contradiction in terms. QT applications are not native. They don't look, feel or work like native Mac OS X applications. They might be kinda close, but they're not the same.
I've never understood the point of a Mac port of QT anyway. It's so easy to write a Cocoa application that it hardly seems worth short-changing your users on the application in order to maintain a single code base with lots of hairy ifdefs.
I don't think so. TiVo is great for what it is, but it's really not up to Apple's standards. The user experience is good, but not NEARLY good enough. Plus there's no FireWire support, which would be necessary for an Apple product. Also, no QuickTime, which means no easy way to add support for H.264/AVC.
But the bigger problem is that TiVo's software is, I believe, encumbered by the GPL. That's a show-stopper for Apple.
Agreed. Plus, using a general-purpose computer as a DVR just sucks compared to the user experience of something like a TiVo.
I think the opportunity here is for something more like a TiVo with FireWire or DVB input and FireWire or DVI/component output. Hughes (I think it is) makes a TiVo for HD already, but it only works with the DirecTV system or with over-the-air HD. There are various HD DVRs for the various cable services, but the user experience generally sucks. And none of these devices can play DVDs or pre-encoded content. And they're incredibly expensive.
There's definitely an opportunity here, but MythTV is no the solution.
That's predicated on the assumption that the Mac is going to be encoding and decoding the video. It really shouldn't be. In a perfect world, your Mac will just write the pre-encoded MPEG-2 transport stream that comes down off the satellite or over the airwaves to disk, then stream that data back out over the FireWire port on playback.
High-definition MPEG-2 ranges anywhere from about 14 Mbps to about 25 Mbps, depending on the source. That's really low. Even a laptop hard drive can handle 25 Mbps.
Now, it's possible to decode the transport stream in your TV or set-top box and then bring it out via DVI or component analog into your Mac, re-encoding it for storage and then decoding it for playback. But that's kind of a waste, considering that every HDTV and HD set-top box has FireWire on it already.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. There's no reason you can't do MPEG-2 stuff on a Mac. In fact, it's considerably easier on a Mac because FireWire is built right in.
I don't buy it. If you enjoy the show, what compels you to be so critical of it? And about such stupid nitpicks? It's like you're saying that the show sucks because the costumes are the wrong color or something. What motivates this nonsense?
Then change the channel.
Wow. That superiority complex of your is really unappealing. Anybody who has a flaw or makes a mistake is an "idiot."
You must think everybody's an idiot.
The whole fleet is outside of a system in one episode and starfuries are flying back-and-forth to the low atmosphere of a particular planet which Starbuck is downed
I don't know what a "starfury" is, but you're mistaken. In that episode there's a chunk of dialogue establishing that Adama ordered the fleet to move closer to the planet to facilitate CSAR operations. Tigh reminded him that this would leave the fleet in a vulnerable position, but Adama didn't care. Remember?
My definition of mis-using is manyfold, but in this case it's entirely about using the hand-held thing so much that it no longer has any impact on the telling of the story.
It's not supposed to have any impact on telling the story. The entire series -- with a few very specific exceptions --is shot handheld. It's just how things are done. It's not used for effect; it's used all the time, and the occasional steadicam or crane shot is used for effect. (If you've seen episode 13, you know EXACTLY what I mean.)
The suit isn't designed to make such a seal
The seal doesn't need to be perfect, any more than you need your house to be perfectly airtight in order to air condition it. As long as the Raider maintained positive pressure, Kara had nothing to worry about. Well, except getting lost, getting shot down or flying into something at a thousand miles an hour.
The suit is flexible, so the pressure would just push it right through the hole into space.
Not that flexible. Have you ever felt space-suit material? It's very rigid.
The suit will do nothing for temperature
It doesn't need to. It's an oft-repeated fallacy that space is cold. In fact, space is an excellent insulator. Because you're in a vacuum, there can be no heat transport through convection or conduction; all you're left with is radiation in the infrared. As you can clearly see, the inside of the Raider is lined with musculature which would be quite opaque in the infrared. With Kara in there pumping out heat, the problem would be cooling it, not keeping it warm.
You're aware, are you not, that the inner layer in a space suit is a refrigerated layer? The suit circulates chilled water next to the astronaut's skin to keep him from overheating.
No story is ever served by a lack of believability.
Heh. The king's brother murders him with ear poison and marries the queen. The king's ghost appears to his son, the prince, and commands him to avenge his death, which the prince does through an incredibly elaborate plan involving shaming the usurper into confessing by showing him a play. Plausible? Not hardly. Yet that's the plot of the greatest story ever told in the English language.
Methinks you're looking too hard to find things to sneer at.
I think I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't spending so much time NOT wincing at the really stupid stuff.
I wholeheartedly agree. And while "Babylon 5" was a profoundly stupid story, you'll find you enjoy "Galactica" a lot more if you quit worrying about how many pounds PSI Kara's flight suit can take and just enjoy the show.
Then don't watch it.
Yes, because 9/11 only affected Americans. Your life was only forever changed if you carry a US passport.
Dumbass.
Actually, there's a third possibility that you didn't take into consideration.
3. It's a television show about people who are lost among the stars. If they can't explore different planets or escape from dangerous situations, the premise falls apart.
I'm actually kind of surprised that you haven't bitched about gravity yet. At which point, of course, I would remind you that it would be prohibitively expensive to shoot the entire show aboard the "vomit comet," and ask you please to take a stress pill and think things over.
The faster-than-light engine, like the artificial gravity, are both powered by magic. The inner workings of neither will be discussed during the show's run, because they just aren't important. They are necessary conceits in order to tell the story.
Stop making day trips into planetary systems at sub-light speed
... hmm ... how to say this without spoiling the story for you? Let's just say that it's not necessarily the case that the cylon was there to kill him.
That's never happened. The planets are scouted by Raptors, which are kind of like Black Hawks. They are equipped with engines that can do the hand-waving "jump" thing they do.
Stop mis-using the camera work.
Meh. It's obviously a matter of opinion, but sometimes the difference between the right opinion and the wrong opinion is pretty clear.
The human is surprised, and yet still manages to pull off the first shot.
Has it ever occurred to you that the cylon was there to take Helo alive? Or, better, that he was there merely to
Never, ever, show someone stopping up a hole in a spacecraft with a boot or whatever that was, and then flying into space. That's just awful science.
Actually, it's perfect science. It wasn't a boot; it was a part of Kara's pressure suit. Obviously a pressure suit is air-tight. She wedged it into the hole to form a seal. Once in space, the pressure of the air inside (pushing at about 5 pounds psi, probably; that's about how we pressurized the Apollo spacecraft) will hold the patch in place. The pressure will not be enough to push the patch out through the hole, because the pressure suit is strong enough not to tear or deform under that kind of pressure.
And it doesn't even have to be a perfect seal. It's a short trip, and there's a big tank of O2 (comparable in size to a scuba tank) under Kara's left arm. A little leakage isn't a problem because the O2 is constantly being replaced.
There are a bunch of other really minor problems, almost all of which can be explained away by saying that the tech level is REALLY uneven.
Actually, they can be explained away by saying that it's a television show and that all things serve the story.
Actually, CGI is often more expensive than model work, but studios use it to get a certain look.
The thing about model work is that we know exactly how to do it right. CGI is still very much a new medium, and we're still figuring out how to get the right look. For instance, compare the CGI effects in a show like "Babylon 5" to a show like "Galactica." The very first thing you notice is that the color saturation in "Babylon 5" is way too high. Yes, the computer enables you to generate synthetic images with all that wonderful color, but it doesn't look real. It looks fake, like a cartoon. In real life, colors are muted and dull unless they're lit perfectly. The guys at Zoic know that.
The thing about CGI and miniature work is that it's very difficult to make CGI work look as good as miniature work. Not impossible, just very tricky and time-consuming. But the very best miniature work in the world doesn't look as good as the very best CGI work. It's possible to go further with CGI than it is with miniatures.
Not that it would be cheaper. In fact, it's considerably more expensive. Figures haven't been released, but the scuttlebutt is that "Galactica" costs upwards for $2M an episode, costs shared by Sky, Space, Sci Fi and (now) NBC. And that's in 2005 dollars. The new "Galactica," a show that's being lauded as a phenomenal success, is five times as expensive as the old "Galactica," a show that was cancelled because of high per-episode costs.