Unlike most other characters in the movies, he generated an emotional response in the audience.
Other characters reacted to him and their reactions defined them.
He also expressed many human emotions that none of the other characters expressed.
The type of conflict that he and Qui-Gon had was a callback to that of the original three star wars characters.
And I'm not really being ironic when I say the only better actor in the movie was Ian McDiarmid. Ian owned that role. He gave complex performances. He was actually about 70% of the way to convincingly portraying the plausible corruption of Anakin.. and then they ran out of time I guess.
They were all likable and they argued and sniped and competed with each other bitterly while also being friends.
Meanwhile, the next set of movies had essentially no character conflict at all except Jar Jar.
Darth Maul vs Qui-Gon
They fight.. then they sit. And they sit. And they sit. And then they fight and Darth Maul wins.
We don't learn a thing about either of them.
meanwhile Jar Jar.. spearfishing Fruit irritates the hell out of the otherwise completely stoic Qui-Gon. "STOP!"
In fact, some of the only character building banter (such as the whether the welded door will hold or not between Anakin and Kenobi) are CUT from the film-- giving us more scenes of people not saying anything and being pulled up the sides of buildings on magic ropes.
Give us characters.
Have those characters say things.
Give them points of view.
Have them show ordinary emotions like... Romantic Interest Foolishness Excitement Overconfidence Lust Depression Happiness Enjoyment of food and drink. Snarkiness Rude statements they regret.
Make them believe they are the best and then throw them in with each other and see which ones are best and how they react to finding out they are not quite so good- or that they are good (confident? humble?)
One of the great things about Admiral Thrawn was that he was brilliant-- he kept figuring out every move the rebels made-- and then he made an error-- a reasonable error but he was so smart he couldn't believe he could make an error. Fantastic! The plot flowed FROM the character's traits. A very strong villain makes the hero's seem even stronger.
It's not about the scenary. Good writing with good characters can take place in a one room set and be fully engaging-- because we care.
The original 3 insulted each other. Almost constantly. And they also liked each other. And the actors found ways to make the characters likable-- that's what actors do. But actors need good writing to start with. Then they put little twists on the words or in the way those words or delivered-- the subtext.
The damage to Florida alone from just Hurricane Andrew was catastrophic and slightly larger than Hurricane Sandy. And that was with an atypically small wind field.
The damage to Louisiana alone was *triple* that to New York ($75 billion vs $25 billion) and just about killed the city which is a major jazz hub and a major cultural center in the country.
I know you think New York is more important... and it used to be.... but there are many cultural, financial, educational, and large population centers around the country these days.
The state is about as important as several other similar size states spread around the country. And it's losing political power. Two representatives after the last census. Likely more after the next census. And the entire northeast area is a sea of lost seats (most other losing states only lost 1 representative however) while states like Florida and Texas are gaining (6 representatives just for those two states alone).
If you want to claim Blizzards or Nor'easters, cool.
Of course, if a storm with a 20-25' storm surge hits New York -- okay, then I'll agree. Because then the damage really would be catastrophic. Since only 10' of storm surge would flood lower Manhattan, Jersey City, and Hoboken (per the army corp of engineers), imagine 15 more feet of water plus up to 10' of surf on top of that.
That level of flooding would basically put everything up to highway 27 under water. Half of Jersey City would be under water.
Highways 78, 95, 278, and 280 would be underwater and probably destroyed in the Jersey city area.
I'm not sure if the area would be inhabitable if a major storm ever hits.
Five storms with 20' surge have hit the southern region of the country since 1989. Six if you want to go back to 1969.
Like the population affected by gulf and southern atlantic hurricanes. You know... texas with 25 million (up by 5 million since 2000 alone) vs new york with 19 million ( essentially no growth since 2000).
Another 16 million in Florida (which has been hit by almost every major hurricane at some point). 10's of millions more in loiusiana, alabama, mississippi, the carolina's, and arkansas.
You have an argument culturally (tho california has come on a bit with it's 33 million people). Nothing is replacing Broadway and off Broadway.
New York is visible financially (tho it's slowly being routed around due to cost issues). The largest component of job loss recently has been financial jobs (20,000 in 2009 alone).
The hurricane season officially began on June 1 and will end on November 30. It was predicted to be a rough season.
So far, it's a dud.
In the 20th century, of the 64 major hurricanes to hit the US, 51 hit in september and august.
If a catastrophic weather event occurred three times in the 1800's they didn't get a claim because there were no humans there who made insurance claims.
High population density equal high claim rate.
The estimates are 12% more climate events (probably due to climate change but not statistically provable yet) for that area of the country.
As population increases, and people build in beautiful places like on the banks of creeks and rivers (because having water in the area is a premium view except for when there is an uncommonly heavy rain), claims will increase.
You can see the flooding (even from this extreme event) could have been completely avoided by placing parklands in the watersheds and avoiding building in the flood zone (or at least requiring buildings and garages to be elevated).
They are building $650,000 houses on the shore of Galveston where every single house was wiped out only 3 years ago.
I would be astonished if similarly unwise building wasn't taking place all over the country.
If the view is pretty and the people have money to put up a structure that's going to generate a lot of tax revenue, then government will find a way to make an exception for them unless the federal government is actively preventing it.
(lol at the current time I have both a +5 and a 0 comment in the same thread. They should have an achievement for that.)
I get the point but similarly large rainfalls occurred several times last century. About the same back in 1914.
Part of the devastation is due to building in dry creek beds. So the level of damage is due to more humans and unwise building habits.
Climate change has potentially contributed to these type of rainfall events being more likely (and I've seen some charts which support this-- things that used to happen every 20 year are now happening every 10 years- maybe even more often). I've seen the number "12% more likely for extreme weather to occur" for that area of the country. Those articles were less able to prove it was global warming (the old causality thing) but leaned towards believing it was.
But you still shouldn't build below historically observed storm surge levels or historically observed flood zones. You WILL get heavy damage and flooding.
At the least, the government shouldn't pay for disaster relief for a particular area more than once a generation.
However, keep in mind which way the incentives work.
Predict too low--- lose money. Predict too high--- make extra money.
Specific events like the rainfall in Boulder are also very bad examples. Such events have probably happened randomly many times over the last 1,000 years.
Oh and the reason was they were already increasingly going through places like amazon or other automated sales systems to get a discount on the most profitable items which cut margins on the remaining products so low it didn't really pay to send a human being to them to sell them stuff.
The billion dollar clients still even had personal salesmen (our employees) permanently on staff at their locations.
You are probably right that many areas of B2B won't be affected but these sales people were strictly B2B and this sales application was strictly B2B. In a big way.
Sales to small businesses (under 10 million a year in sales).
From experience, I can tell you the peak of indian quality was about 2003.
At that point you had brilliant (masters and dotorate level) programmers working for bachelors degree pay.
Since then, the quality dropped consistently.
I.e. Indians are just people like everywhere else. The good ones have been bid up.
And wages are rising so quickly that companies like Infosys are trying to get out of the "grunt programmer" market.
I think the hole stays open another 7 to 8 years and then it won't be worth it to offshore.
The outsourcing benefit will remain.
I.e. you do not have to interview and you can supposedly turn on/off IT resources like a tap. The dream is, you have 3 programmers- you need 12 for a project and the outsourcer provides them on schedule and then when you don't need them, they go away without raising your unemployment insurance.
The reality is-- these days costs are going up fast and there can be a 4 month lag to free up the 12 programmers to come work at your site.
You can do a good job- but reach a point where your skills are no longer needed. They do not have to retain you just because you did a good job.
But it wasn't created to provide jobs for the software equivalent of buggy whip makers.
Think about it, if they did this, they would become less profitable- customers (like you) would buy the cheapest products from another company (you are not obligated to buy the most expensive product just because they fire people less), and the entire company would go belly up and everyone would be unemployed.
They do not owe YOU (the individual) a job.
They do owe society as a whole, a net benefit or else society should stop allowing them to exist.
It's about a fair balance between each of the stakeholders.
The employees, management, people who loaned the company money, and the rest of the citizens who provided roads, courts, a legal system.
Right now- in my opinion, things are out of balance in favor of 2% of the population. A lot of people on the bottom live much less happy lives and suffer more so that a tiny percentage can be "plaid" wealthy instead of "ridiculously" wealthy and really even instead of "wealthy."
There's clear evidence that since reagan's second term- we passed the line where this benefited society as a whole. Since then, 80% of society has been doing worse and worse to benefit the top 2%. The other 18% are doing okay- but actually their relative income is starting to drop too since 2007. Despite tax cuts that were supposed to "unleash" productivity.
Some of it is unavoidable as long as we have a wage imbalance in the world. That's just going to take time to even out.
Many companies are going to automated sales. They want to be "like amazon".
Company where I was at had a goal to lay off 4000 sales people and force all but the top customers onto an automated sales system with customer service (not sales) people as backups to the automated systems.
It may fail here and there for the next few years- but it's going to happen.
Because given a choice between $20 with a salesperson and $19 with a web site, the customers will choose the latter most the time. This makes salespeople so expensive for the remaining items that you are actually losing money selling them with a human. So then it makes sense to drop those items.
I've been ordering product from Amazon for years now and never dealt with a human being once.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHqjmlM3kxs
Funny little lens flare bit
Honest trailer for JJ's Star Trek..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTfBH-XFdSc
Funny star wars comparison at 2:09.
And ..... lens flare at 2:55
And... even more lens flares....
fyi
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/jk-rowling-harry-potter-new-movie-fantastic-beasts-newt-scam
technically not a prequel- just follows another character in the same universe in an earlier time period.
THIS.
I watched the "Making of the Avengers" and many scenes I thought were real were CGI.
I think a line was crossed sometime in 2012.
However, showing me a CGI of them swinging over a 90' gap evokes no emotional response compared to really showing them really swinging over a 25' gap.
Portraying NYC in the background-- wonderful.
Trying to make me feel really impressed by something fake-- nope. Give me real stunts for that.
However... oddly... I did feel sad for a cgi character in the latest Riddick. So that's something. Must have been well written and well animated.
And Stage/Shakespearean acting style.
We all joke about it-- but Shatner was.... on... to.. something.
Jar Jar actually was a good character.
Unlike most other characters in the movies, he generated an emotional response in the audience.
Other characters reacted to him and their reactions defined them.
He also expressed many human emotions that none of the other characters expressed.
The type of conflict that he and Qui-Gon had was a callback to that of the original three star wars characters.
And I'm not really being ironic when I say the only better actor in the movie was Ian McDiarmid. Ian owned that role. He gave complex performances. He was actually about 70% of the way to convincingly portraying the plausible corruption of Anakin.. and then they ran out of time I guess.
How hard does it have to be to see this?
They were all likable and they argued and sniped and competed with each other bitterly while also being friends.
Meanwhile, the next set of movies had essentially no character conflict at all except Jar Jar.
Darth Maul vs Qui-Gon
They fight.. then they sit.
And they sit.
And they sit.
And then they fight and Darth Maul wins.
We don't learn a thing about either of them.
meanwhile Jar Jar.. spearfishing Fruit irritates the hell out of the otherwise completely stoic Qui-Gon. "STOP!"
In fact, some of the only character building banter (such as the whether the welded door will hold or not between Anakin and Kenobi) are CUT from the film-- giving us more scenes of people not saying anything and being pulled up the sides of buildings on magic ropes.
Give us characters.
Have those characters say things.
Give them points of view.
Have them show ordinary emotions like...
Romantic Interest
Foolishness
Excitement
Overconfidence
Lust
Depression
Happiness
Enjoyment of food and drink.
Snarkiness
Rude statements they regret.
Make them believe they are the best and then throw them in with each other and see which ones are best and how they react to finding out they are not quite so good- or that they are good (confident? humble?)
One of the great things about Admiral Thrawn was that he was brilliant-- he kept figuring out every move the rebels made-- and then he made an error-- a reasonable error but he was so smart he couldn't believe he could make an error. Fantastic! The plot flowed FROM the character's traits. A very strong villain makes the hero's seem even stronger.
Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters Characters
It's not about the scenary. Good writing with good characters can take place in a one room set and be fully engaging-- because we care.
The original 3 insulted each other. Almost constantly. And they also liked each other.
And the actors found ways to make the characters likable-- that's what actors do.
But actors need good writing to start with. Then they put little twists on the words or in the way those words or delivered-- the subtext.
The damage to Florida alone from just Hurricane Andrew was catastrophic and slightly larger than Hurricane Sandy. And that was with an atypically small wind field.
The damage to Louisiana alone was *triple* that to New York ($75 billion vs $25 billion) and just about killed the city which is a major jazz hub and a major cultural center in the country.
I know you think New York is more important... and it used to be.... but there are many cultural, financial, educational, and large population centers around the country these days.
The state is about as important as several other similar size states spread around the country. And it's losing political power. Two representatives after the last census. Likely more after the next census. And the entire northeast area is a sea of lost seats (most other losing states only lost 1 representative however) while states like Florida and Texas are gaining (6 representatives just for those two states alone).
If you want to claim Blizzards or Nor'easters, cool.
Of course, if a storm with a 20-25' storm surge hits New York -- okay, then I'll agree. Because then the damage really would be catastrophic. Since only 10' of storm surge would flood lower Manhattan, Jersey City, and Hoboken (per the army corp of engineers), imagine 15 more feet of water plus up to 10' of surf on top of that.
That level of flooding would basically put everything up to highway 27 under water. Half of Jersey City would be under water.
Highways 78, 95, 278, and 280 would be underwater and probably destroyed in the Jersey city area.
I'm not sure if the area would be inhabitable if a major storm ever hits.
Five storms with 20' surge have hit the southern region of the country since 1989. Six if you want to go back to 1969.
I think you are ignoring some critical points.
Like the population affected by gulf and southern atlantic hurricanes.
You know... texas with 25 million (up by 5 million since 2000 alone) vs new york with 19 million ( essentially no growth since 2000).
Another 16 million in Florida (which has been hit by almost every major hurricane at some point). 10's of millions more in loiusiana, alabama, mississippi, the carolina's, and arkansas.
You have an argument culturally (tho california has come on a bit with it's 33 million people). Nothing is replacing Broadway and off Broadway.
New York is visible financially (tho it's slowly being routed around due to cost issues). The largest component of job loss recently has been financial jobs (20,000 in 2009 alone).
The hurricane season officially began on June 1 and will end on November 30.
It was predicted to be a rough season.
So far, it's a dud.
In the 20th century, of the 64 major hurricanes to hit the US, 51 hit in september and august.
Well...
If everyone slept, then pay would be slightly less but things would cost less.
Or you might be able to have higher employment.
Seriously -- we don't have to run our economy at breakneck speed all the time. It wasn't anything like this back in the 80s when I started working.
They are seeing claims go up.
There is a difference.
If a catastrophic weather event occurred three times in the 1800's they didn't get a claim because there were no humans there who made insurance claims.
High population density equal high claim rate.
The estimates are 12% more climate events (probably due to climate change but not statistically provable yet) for that area of the country.
As population increases, and people build in beautiful places like on the banks of creeks and rivers (because having water in the area is a premium view except for when there is an uncommonly heavy rain), claims will increase.
If you look here:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/colorado-floods-aftermath-pictures-130919.htm
You can see the flooding (even from this extreme event) could have been completely avoided by placing parklands in the watersheds and avoiding building in the flood zone (or at least requiring buildings and garages to be elevated).
They are building $650,000 houses on the shore of Galveston where every single house was wiped out only 3 years ago.
I would be astonished if similarly unwise building wasn't taking place all over the country.
If the view is pretty and the people have money to put up a structure that's going to generate a lot of tax revenue, then government will find a way to make an exception for them unless the federal government is actively preventing it.
(lol at the current time I have both a +5 and a 0 comment in the same thread. They should have an achievement for that.)
Here...
Give it a look and let us know what you think...
http://solarfocus.blogspot.com/2009/02/solar-goes-supernova.html
I get the point but similarly large rainfalls occurred several times last century. About the same back in 1914.
Part of the devastation is due to building in dry creek beds. So the level of damage is due to more humans and unwise building habits.
Climate change has potentially contributed to these type of rainfall events being more likely (and I've seen some charts which support this-- things that used to happen every 20 year are now happening every 10 years- maybe even more often). I've seen the number "12% more likely for extreme weather to occur" for that area of the country. Those articles were less able to prove it was global warming (the old causality thing) but leaned towards believing it was.
But you still shouldn't build below historically observed storm surge levels or historically observed flood zones. You WILL get heavy damage and flooding.
At the least, the government shouldn't pay for disaster relief for a particular area more than once a generation.
After I retired, it became clear my "natural" cycle was about 26 hours.
Annoying!
However, keep in mind which way the incentives work.
Predict too low--- lose money.
Predict too high--- make extra money.
Specific events like the rainfall in Boulder are also very bad examples. Such events have probably happened randomly many times over the last 1,000 years.
At cleantechnica site you can see a priced drop of $76/w to under $.74 a watt in only (sorta wish it was .76 a watt for neatness sake, dontcha?)
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/24/solar-powers-massive-price-drop-graph/
You can also see a similar exponential but reverse growth curve off a link from that page.
Elsewhere, I saw solar was projected to generate more energy than the U.S. currently generates by 2050-- and to quintuple from there by 2100.
---
Loved "Mystery Men". On my top 100 list.
How many months or years is a 10 million dollars worth?
Most people sell out for $10k cash if it's put in front of them in studies.
I agree- people are stupid.
But some of them get rich.
And some of them get away with it.
Imagine the jammers are less expensive than ALARMS or HARMS and there are dozens of them flying around.
I think we may be congratulating Captain Dunsail's within a decade.
Question: What happens if you jam GPS and all electronic signals to or from the planes?
Do they crash?
Oh and the reason was they were already increasingly going through places like amazon or other automated sales systems to get a discount on the most profitable items which cut margins on the remaining products so low it didn't really pay to send a human being to them to sell them stuff.
The billion dollar clients still even had personal salesmen (our employees) permanently on staff at their locations.
You are probably right that many areas of B2B won't be affected but these sales people were strictly B2B and this sales application was strictly B2B. In a big way.
Sales to small businesses (under 10 million a year in sales).
From experience, I can tell you the peak of indian quality was about 2003.
At that point you had brilliant (masters and dotorate level) programmers working for bachelors degree pay.
Since then, the quality dropped consistently.
I.e. Indians are just people like everywhere else. The good ones have been bid up.
And wages are rising so quickly that companies like Infosys are trying to get out of the "grunt programmer" market.
I think the hole stays open another 7 to 8 years and then it won't be worth it to offshore.
The outsourcing benefit will remain.
I.e. you do not have to interview and you can supposedly turn on/off IT resources like a tap.
The dream is, you have 3 programmers- you need 12 for a project and the outsourcer provides them on schedule and then when you don't need them, they go away without raising your unemployment insurance.
The reality is-- these days costs are going up fast and there can be a 4 month lag to free up the 12 programmers to come work at your site.
Oh cool. Got a link?
You can do a good job- but reach a point where your skills are no longer needed. They do not have to retain you just because you did a good job.
But it wasn't created to provide jobs for the software equivalent of buggy whip makers.
Think about it, if they did this, they would become less profitable- customers (like you) would buy the cheapest products from another company (you are not obligated to buy the most expensive product just because they fire people less), and the entire company would go belly up and everyone would be unemployed.
They do not owe YOU (the individual) a job.
They do owe society as a whole, a net benefit or else society should stop allowing them to exist.
It's about a fair balance between each of the stakeholders.
The employees, management, people who loaned the company money, and the rest of the citizens who provided roads, courts, a legal system.
Right now- in my opinion, things are out of balance in favor of 2% of the population.
A lot of people on the bottom live much less happy lives and suffer more so that a tiny percentage can be "plaid" wealthy instead of "ridiculously" wealthy and really even instead of "wealthy."
There's clear evidence that since reagan's second term- we passed the line where this benefited society as a whole. Since then, 80% of society has been doing worse and worse to benefit the top 2%. The other 18% are doing okay- but actually their relative income is starting to drop too since 2007. Despite tax cuts that were supposed to "unleash" productivity.
Some of it is unavoidable as long as we have a wage imbalance in the world. That's just going to take time to even out.
Careful with assuming sales isn't a cost.
Many companies are going to automated sales.
They want to be "like amazon".
Company where I was at had a goal to lay off 4000 sales people and force all but the top customers onto an automated sales system with customer service (not sales) people as backups to the automated systems.
It may fail here and there for the next few years- but it's going to happen.
Because given a choice between $20 with a salesperson and $19 with a web site, the customers will choose the latter most the time. This makes salespeople so expensive for the remaining items that you are actually losing money selling them with a human. So then it makes sense to drop those items.
I've been ordering product from Amazon for years now and never dealt with a human being once.