On the good side, at least the battle against the indians... er avatars... went as it should (i.e. they were absolutely wasted by superior firepower). Other than the utter idiocy of the ground campaign at all (why are they down there??? to provide the horse avatars someone to fight-- no other purpose), the troops being overwhelmed by animals didn't bother me too much-- altho--- being overwhelmed by insects and rat type creatures would have been much more credible than doberman.. er alien black dogs.
No, I agree with you, at this point, we could get by with a smaller population and maintain progress. And with a smaller population we would be able to sustain it for many centuries.
The problem is that getting the population down is going to cause a massive economic bust, and will be very oppressive to some groups of humanity so it's not going to happen until things get horrible first.
technology always involves raping (to a larger or smaller degree) the biosphere. with less people the biosphere heals faster than it is destroyed.
Without things like Bingham Canyon Mine, you don't have affordable computers.
It's at a point that I do not think is sustainable. I expect some kind of huge blowout in 30-50 years. Maybe we will invent our way out of it, but I think it's reached a point where new inventions are now just making the eventual blowout worse.
---
The movie implicitly supports a small (I'd say minuscule) population where few individuals know how to do anything except hunt, gather, and sing.
Current selective pressures are against people who kill other people with guns. (unless they work for a government)
As soon as those selective pressures change, people will resume killing other people with guns (and sticks and knives and so on) and taking their stuff.
Civilization has existed for a blink of an eye. Hunting humans may be perfectly okay in 1,000 years.
What happens when the machine gun breaks or runs out of ammunition?
Carl sagan said to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe.
So what do you have to invite to make a machine gun, and produce ammunition for it?
The na'vi technology depends on maintaining a stable and tiny population.
How can you maintain a stable and tiny population without loss of freedom?
How do you maintain a stable population when some people die, some have 3 children, some have none?
And, there is ample evidence on earth, that ALL species (not just evil humans) breed to the very limit of the food supply and then beyond it.
The navi technology appears to be a dead end as well. They are never going to leave that planet. When it is destroyed, they cease to exist. If a space based civilization wants the unobtanium, there is going to be nothing the navi can do to protect themselves.
Because someone who had to win would not launch a senseless ground assault (seriously wtf was that about??), they are going to bombard with meteors from space. They are going to use microwave and sonic crowd dispersal. They'll use biological weapons.
Earth's solution in the movie is to reduce population. Given 20-30 years and a smaller population, things will get better fast. (and you can half the population in 40 years without killing people if you want to). Getting unobtanium is only going to push the population higher and make the eventual crash worse.
How many blacks had speaking parts in the movie? What percentage of the words by humans were said by blacks (much less asians). On the "bad guy" side, I am fairly certain 100% of the words were by whites, and 95% were by white males.
In today's atmosphere, If you don't have a black character somewhere on the bad corporate side, it's a choice. If the minorities are all heroic characters, it's a choice. If the two main bad guys are both white males, it's a choice.
In the real world, there are many minority corporate leaders, managers, and supervisors.
In a movie, people don't "happen to be white".
I agree that it's anti-corporate but found that theme to be overwhelmed by the "ex-marine military guys are murderous bastards" theme.
The problem is, that in the real world, might is right.
There isn't a single good thing in this world that lasts that isn't backed up by someone willing to kill or die for it.
It's a nice fantasy that it isn't true. You can even artificially create an environment where it seems true for a couple generations. But force wins out - always.
I've always been less picky so perhaps that is it, but I felt it was out of the uncanny valley. The alien's looked natural and not "alien".
I agree on the anti-technology (and also chime in with the "anti white male" and to some extent-- where the hell were black people at all? thinking back I don't recall any.)
Given a world mind, they may not have the same religious issues that we do.
Not sure about the plundering- it may be more equivalent to solar power (use but not destroy).
Implicit in the movie's structure is the requirement of a *small* population of sentient beings. You can't have a large population AND have large areas of verdant untouched wilderness. The earth would be pretty damn sweet if we attrited back down to 1 billion stable population over a few generations.
I thought the indian noises were overdone (at least make it something more cat-like?) and broke my suspension of disbelief.
The last third of the movie was just dumb. If you want to destroy that area, hit it with the shuttle from space traveling about 10kmph. If you really really want/need the unobtanium, then you are going to come back with a way to kill everything hint of resistance on the planet in about 10 years. And gaia isn't going to be able to do a damn thing about bombardment from space.
A much more plausible ending would have been right in the movie itself-- gaia+mankind has the technology for physical immortality. That's worth a hell of a lot more than unobtanium.
I've had reasonably good results with iterated development models. I prefer the RUP methodology because it puts risks first and easy stuff last and I like the way it time boxes work. Basically, every 4 weeks (X weeks as preferred- it's flexible), you produce a functional build and it is tested while you continue working.
Every X weeks, you get a realistic schedule validity check. If you were going to finish use cases (function points) 3,5,9 and you didn't, then you know it. So you can adjust the schedule half way through the project instead of near the end. Likewise, working the risks early, puts the schedule blow out (or even out right "this is impossible") stuff at the start of the project.
I think of a great programmer as someone who can code 5x code, clean and well designed for further use, that meets standards, in the same time as another programmer. A mediocre programmer with good business sense is better for many projects than a great programmer. But if you have something truly difficult, then you want a great programmer plus some flunky programmers. A small tight team. They can do amazing stuff. I'm not so impressed by super-programmers whose deliverables are not maintainable.
I am intuitive, not rational. I often see things before the coders do so I moved up the chain. I could not write 3000 lines of code in 3 months in a new area any more. But I can see where problems are before they occur. As I said in my parent post, this is a problem sometimes with coders (even great coders) who don't have an intuitive bent. I usually just let it go and let them walk into the buzz saw these days. It's more important to have a good relationship than to get it right the first go round.
in addition to the factors pointed out by others there is this:
Programmer "A" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "Y" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach. Programmer "B" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "P" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach. Programmer "C" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "3" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach.
I've seen A,B, and C get into very loud, very heated arguments over this (I've been programmer A at times when I thought the "solid" approach was missing something that I saw intuitively which they wouldn't accept until I proved it to them laboriously).
Programming is not plumbing. The goal posts are subject to change.
What is efficiency?
Delivering a 100% perfect product 3 months late? Delivering a 99% perfect product 1 week early? Delivering a 100% perfect product 3 weeks early but then they change the scope and (as one manager said to me) say "this isn't scope creep". (I turned to my programmer and asked, "can you deliver this change by the previous deadline" and they said "no" and I asked "what date can you deliver it by, and she said 5 days later, and I turned back to the sheepishly smiling manager and said, "is that date acceptable?" -- I mention this because it's a great negotiating technique. And you avoid delivering the product later than the delivered deadline without being an ass and refusing changes).
I've known "great" programmers who were- as long as they were the only one in the company- because they used operating system cheats that worked-- as long as someone else didn't use them too.
A lot of great programmers fail to understand the business side of things.
And you can never control being put on a crappy project with a bad deadline and a bad manager.
---
However, fundamentally- the compensation isn't there because there are too many people willing to do the work. I do not recommend to people who ask me that they enter the IT field in general any more. It's pay is not sufficient to cover the low status, increasing lack of freedom, required holiday work, and offshoring risk.
I'm personally shocked, because microsoft doesn't have a reputation of working with smaller companies, failing to close a contract, and then releasing their own very similar products.
If you pay lawyers and marketers and crap all over computer scientists and engineers in terms of pay, status, holiday work hours, then why do you expect anyone with a lick of brains to go into these fields?
Jar Jar was one of the best *characters* in the movie. He was the only one anyone really cared about and he was the only one who created any genuine character interaction (i.e. "Stop!", various looks of exasperation).
Without Jar Jar, the movie would have been even more dry and antiseptic than it was.
As our evil reviewer points out, most of the characters in this movie were boring and worse, indescribable as people.
Jarjar... clumsy, dumb, good with animals, lucky, irritating, friendly, brave, (you could go on a bit more)
It was sad to see so many human actors upstaged by an animation.
If you can have six people in a group, then I think you can have at most 6 viable classes.
Call them A B C D E F
Subclasses would then be like:
A - a + (b or c or d or e or f) which would create a need for (B or C or D or E or F) + a - (b or c or d or e or f).
Where the capital is the class and the lower case is an ability of that class.
EQ has really messed up the game lately by providing simulated player A and F. The simulated A (call it warrior) isn't so great. But the simulated healer is more than enough (even rez's the dead automatically).
In my DND game, I have 9 classes with 3 of them being racial variants. No one plays the racial class variants. They play racial characters but in the main classes (so we have a hobbit magician and an elven theif).
We have 3 fighters, 1 mystic (aka monk), 1 bard, 2 thieves, two magicians, 3 clerics.
One of the fighters has gone psionic. To master it, over time he lost 20% of his attack bonus and is hit about 15% more (since points went into psionics instead of attack bonuses). He mainly likes it since it lets him fly 90mph and teleport up to 105 miles.
The bard class is very powerful but lacks a big gun so it lacks sizzle. I am looking into that issue.
Slashdot Mirror
On the good side, at least the battle against the indians... er avatars... went as it should (i.e. they were absolutely wasted by superior firepower).
Other than the utter idiocy of the ground campaign at all (why are they down there??? to provide the horse avatars someone to fight-- no other purpose), the troops being overwhelmed by animals didn't bother me too much-- altho--- being overwhelmed by insects and rat type creatures would have been much more credible than doberman.. er alien black dogs.
No, I agree with you, at this point, we could get by with a smaller population and maintain progress. And with a smaller population we would be able to sustain it for many centuries.
The problem is that getting the population down is going to cause a massive economic bust, and will be very oppressive to some groups of humanity so it's not going to happen until things get horrible first.
You can't produce technology with metal for a large population without having things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingham_Canyon_Mine.
You can't produce food for a large population without things like this: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B0CE0D81438E433A25757C1A9679D94699ED7CF
WHEAT FIELD OF 25,000 ACRES.; It Would Take One Man Thirty Years to Plow and Plant Such a Field as One Californian Owns.
http://www.truthabouttrade.org/news/editorials/trade-policy-analysis/15288-china-moves-forward-on-biotech-crops
China is the world's largest producer and consumer of rice with 72 million acres devoted to rice annually
technology always involves raping (to a larger or smaller degree) the biosphere. with less people the biosphere heals faster than it is destroyed.
Without things like Bingham Canyon Mine, you don't have affordable computers.
It's at a point that I do not think is sustainable. I expect some kind of huge blowout in 30-50 years. Maybe we will invent our way out of it, but I think it's reached a point where new inventions are now just making the eventual blowout worse.
---
The movie implicitly supports a small (I'd say minuscule) population where few individuals know how to do anything except hunt, gather, and sing.
Current selective pressures are against people who kill other people with guns. (unless they work for a government)
As soon as those selective pressures change, people will resume killing other people with guns (and sticks and knives and so on) and taking their stuff.
Civilization has existed for a blink of an eye. Hunting humans may be perfectly okay in 1,000 years.
What happens when the machine gun breaks or runs out of ammunition?
Carl sagan said to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe.
So what do you have to invite to make a machine gun, and produce ammunition for it?
The na'vi technology depends on maintaining a stable and tiny population.
How can you maintain a stable and tiny population without loss of freedom?
How do you maintain a stable population when some people die, some have 3 children, some have none?
And, there is ample evidence on earth, that ALL species (not just evil humans) breed to the very limit of the food supply and then beyond it.
The navi technology appears to be a dead end as well. They are never going to leave that planet. When it is destroyed, they cease to exist.
If a space based civilization wants the unobtanium, there is going to be nothing the navi can do to protect themselves.
Because someone who had to win would not launch a senseless ground assault (seriously wtf was that about??), they are going to bombard with meteors from space. They are going to use microwave and sonic crowd dispersal. They'll use biological weapons.
Earth's solution in the movie is to reduce population. Given 20-30 years and a smaller population, things will get better fast. (and you can half the population in 40 years without killing people if you want to). Getting unobtanium is only going to push the population higher and make the eventual crash worse.
How many blacks had speaking parts in the movie?
What percentage of the words by humans were said by blacks (much less asians).
On the "bad guy" side, I am fairly certain 100% of the words were by whites, and 95% were by white males.
In today's atmosphere,
If you don't have a black character somewhere on the bad corporate side, it's a choice.
If the minorities are all heroic characters, it's a choice.
If the two main bad guys are both white males, it's a choice.
In the real world, there are many minority corporate leaders, managers, and supervisors.
In a movie, people don't "happen to be white".
I agree that it's anti-corporate but found that theme to be overwhelmed by the "ex-marine military guys are murderous bastards" theme.
The problem is, that in the real world, might is right.
There isn't a single good thing in this world that lasts that isn't backed up by someone willing to kill or die for it.
It's a nice fantasy that it isn't true. You can even artificially create an environment where it seems true for a couple generations. But force wins out - always.
I've always been less picky so perhaps that is it, but I felt it was out of the uncanny valley. The alien's looked natural and not "alien".
I agree on the anti-technology (and also chime in with the "anti white male" and to some extent-- where the hell were black people at all? thinking back I don't recall any.)
Given a world mind, they may not have the same religious issues that we do.
Not sure about the plundering- it may be more equivalent to solar power (use but not destroy).
Implicit in the movie's structure is the requirement of a *small* population of sentient beings. You can't have a large population AND have large areas of verdant untouched wilderness. The earth would be pretty damn sweet if we attrited back down to 1 billion stable population over a few generations.
I thought the indian noises were overdone (at least make it something more cat-like?) and broke my suspension of disbelief.
The last third of the movie was just dumb. If you want to destroy that area, hit it with the shuttle from space traveling about 10kmph. If you really really want/need the unobtanium, then you are going to come back with a way to kill everything hint of resistance on the planet in about 10 years. And gaia isn't going to be able to do a damn thing about bombardment from space.
A much more plausible ending would have been right in the movie itself-- gaia+mankind has the technology for physical immortality. That's worth a hell of a lot more than unobtanium.
I've had reasonably good results with iterated development models. I prefer the RUP methodology because it puts risks first and easy stuff last and I like the way it time boxes work. Basically, every 4 weeks (X weeks as preferred- it's flexible), you produce a functional build and it is tested while you continue working.
Every X weeks, you get a realistic schedule validity check. If you were going to finish use cases (function points) 3,5,9 and you didn't, then you know it. So you can adjust the schedule half way through the project instead of near the end. Likewise, working the risks early, puts the schedule blow out (or even out right "this is impossible") stuff at the start of the project.
I think of a great programmer as someone who can code 5x code, clean and well designed for further use, that meets standards, in the same time as another programmer. A mediocre programmer with good business sense is better for many projects than a great programmer. But if you have something truly difficult, then you want a great programmer plus some flunky programmers. A small tight team. They can do amazing stuff. I'm not so impressed by super-programmers whose deliverables are not maintainable.
I am intuitive, not rational. I often see things before the coders do so I moved up the chain. I could not write 3000 lines of code in 3 months in a new area any more. But I can see where problems are before they occur. As I said in my parent post, this is a problem sometimes with coders (even great coders) who don't have an intuitive bent. I usually just let it go and let them walk into the buzz saw these days. It's more important to have a good relationship than to get it right the first go round.
There is an entire line of sex toys designed to be used with TENS units. Plugs, nipple clamps, dildoes.
http://electropleasures.com/product/tens_toys/page03.html (NSFW but no nudity)
I think your post calls for an entirely new form of moderation. ;-)
I seriously doubt that a non-gamer girl will wake you up at 6am to level her alts.
in addition to the factors pointed out by others there is this:
Programmer "A" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "Y" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach.
Programmer "B" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "P" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach.
Programmer "C" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "3" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach.
I've seen A,B, and C get into very loud, very heated arguments over this (I've been programmer A at times when I thought the "solid" approach was missing something that I saw intuitively which they wouldn't accept until I proved it to them laboriously).
Programming is not plumbing. The goal posts are subject to change.
What is efficiency?
Delivering a 100% perfect product 3 months late?
Delivering a 99% perfect product 1 week early?
Delivering a 100% perfect product 3 weeks early but then they change the scope and (as one manager said to me) say "this isn't scope creep". (I turned to my programmer and asked, "can you deliver this change by the previous deadline" and they said "no" and I asked "what date can you deliver it by, and she said 5 days later, and I turned back to the sheepishly smiling manager and said, "is that date acceptable?" -- I mention this because it's a great negotiating technique. And you avoid delivering the product later than the delivered deadline without being an ass and refusing changes).
I've known "great" programmers who were- as long as they were the only one in the company- because they used operating system cheats that worked-- as long as someone else didn't use them too.
A lot of great programmers fail to understand the business side of things.
And you can never control being put on a crappy project with a bad deadline and a bad manager.
---
However, fundamentally- the compensation isn't there because there are too many people willing to do the work. I do not recommend to people who ask me that they enter the IT field in general any more. It's pay is not sufficient to cover the low status, increasing lack of freedom, required holiday work, and offshoring risk.
general respect for lawyers less?
What world do you live in???
Would a woman rather date a lawyer or an engineer?
Would she rather tell her girlfriends she was dating a lawyer or an engineer?
I mean, come on, get real.
I'm personally shocked, because microsoft doesn't have a reputation of working with smaller companies, failing to close a contract, and then releasing their own very similar products.
You could do something you know, yea, like poisoning their margaritas, that would show them.
If you pay lawyers and marketers and crap all over computer scientists and engineers in terms of pay, status, holiday work hours, then why do you expect anyone with a lick of brains to go into these fields?
Merchandising grew by an order of magnitude during the duration of the star wars franchise. I'm not sure if it is the reason.
Jar Jar was one of the best *characters* in the movie. He was the only one anyone really cared about and he was the only one who created any genuine character interaction (i.e. "Stop!", various looks of exasperation).
Without Jar Jar, the movie would have been even more dry and antiseptic than it was.
As our evil reviewer points out, most of the characters in this movie were boring and worse, indescribable as people.
Jarjar... clumsy, dumb, good with animals, lucky, irritating, friendly, brave, (you could go on a bit more)
It was sad to see so many human actors upstaged by an animation.
When I got my current job, there were a series of questions like that.
Fortunately, I'd been clued in that all the questions required that I think in terms of using a team.
My years of EQ guild leadership helped a great deal then and later on the job in terms of delegation.
I'd learned you can't do it all, you have to trust people, and they prefer you set the goal and let them work out the details.
Because, I have, you know, seen the advertising and buzz campaign.
If it's good, it will still be good in a few weeks and I'll know I wasn't suckered by hollywood advertising dollars.
In EQ, I (a 6'5" blacksmith type) played a gnome.
In the game, those who played handsome muscular avatars got more female hookups.
Next game, I'm a tall handsome avatar.
If you can have six people in a group, then I think you can have at most 6 viable classes.
Call them
A
B
C
D
E
F
Subclasses would then be like:
A - a + (b or c or d or e or f) which would create a need for (B or C or D or E or F) + a - (b or c or d or e or f).
Where the capital is the class and the lower case is an ability of that class.
EQ has really messed up the game lately by providing simulated player A and F.
The simulated A (call it warrior) isn't so great. But the simulated healer is more than enough (even rez's the dead automatically).
In my DND game, I have 9 classes with 3 of them being racial variants. No one plays the racial class variants. They play racial characters but in the main classes (so we have a hobbit magician and an elven theif).
We have 3 fighters, 1 mystic (aka monk), 1 bard, 2 thieves, two magicians, 3 clerics.
One of the fighters has gone psionic. To master it, over time he lost 20% of his attack bonus and is hit about 15% more (since points went into psionics instead of attack bonuses). He mainly likes it since it lets him fly 90mph and teleport up to 105 miles.
The bard class is very powerful but lacks a big gun so it lacks sizzle. I am looking into that issue.
Enchanters are clearly the coolest class in between massive nerf sessions.
I miss the days of old sebilous-- stopping trains of 15 mobs cold. Soloing areas that required groups with charmed, hasted, equipped pets.