The more influence Lucas has over the screenplay, the shoddier the story is.
The more influence he has over the directing, the crappier the blocking and acting it.
Lucas reminds me of an old programmer. He's great at painting the big picture, but keep his hands off the source code, he'll just fuck it up. Lucas is an architect, not a carpenter.
Every time one of these comes out, they say that it's better than the previous one. And each time, I'm sorely disappointed. This one will be no different, I suspect. The hype machine is in full spin mode.
What the hell are you talking about? That's only happened once! There's been _ONE_ sequel to a prequel so far.
But at this point, most of the slashdot crowd has their opinions engrained in their minds at this point. It may be the best of the prequels, but since it's "cool" to hate Star Wars, we'll see the usual posts shitting on Lucas.
Do you express similar disdain for those who shit on Microsoft or SCO? I don't hate Star Wars, but my opinion of George Lucas as a storyteller and filmmaker has undergone serious revision since about 1984. That has nothing to do with Slashdot groupthink.
But please, spare us the "Lucas raped my childhood" or "digital actors are the sux0rs" comments. We've seen them a million times and they still aren't clever. Come up with something new, please.
Why? It's clear that your views are just as ingrained as everybody else's, you've already decided on the source and cause of everybody else's opinion on this, so why bother debating it with you?
Good for you! Some of us, though, would rather not be "advertised" to. Ever. I *hate* ads with a passion, even if it's for things I like. I think it's a waste of resources, and more importantly, human creativity that could be better put towards solving real problems. My mantra has always been "don't call me, I'll call you"; ie, if I'm interested in your product, I'll do the research, find out about it, and if it fits my needs, I'll contact you directly to purchase it. Fuck the middlemen, advertisers included.
I agree with you, but you're apparantly at least halfway smart and competant. The ungodly majority of people will not take this initiative and will not know about your product, your store, your restaurant, your service, or whatever, unless you go tell them. Nobody would PAY to get their advertising out if most consumers were like you. They're not. I have to say this on Slashdot over and over and over: most of the people in this country aren't like you.
Word-of-mouth isn't advertising, in the modern sense. I expect that when I hear from a friend that "product X is great!" that they are not being paid to say that. Their only motivation is that they are truly happy with the product.
You're being literal now. Obviously they're not being paid, but they're still serving the purpose of advertising: giving you unsolicited information about a product. Everything from your buddy recommending a movie to your sig about Debian is advertising.
What's really telling about advertising is what other people are like who watch the same shows you do. The commercials on Spike during Star Trek are almost entirely for debt relief and penis enlargement.
But in your stating you don't mind advertising for items you would want, you are hitting at an inherent fallacy of advertising as it is. It *should* (from a consumer's point of view) be opt-in and not opt-out.
Yeah, that's true, and that's actually the crux of it. Most of the advertising I receive from companies with whom I already have a business relationship doesn't bug me that much. It's the random uninvited crap that I hate. Like the piles of "mortgage insurance" and "credit insurance" junk mail, and the refinance stuff. Gah! If I wanted to refinance I'd go do it!
You know the truth yet you dance around it. Common sense says that the 168 Billion is probably only half what the total will be before our troops come home.
Speculation is not truth. I don't know the truth and neither do you. We could be out of Iraq in 12 months. We could still be there in 40 years (we're still in Japan and Germany, do the expenses of maintaining those bases qualify as part of the WW2 effort?)
The only truth I know is what the war has cost to this point, and that's what I cited. You can't make a projection about something that might happen, no matter how likely, and claim it's truth.
It is amazing how polarized our society is. Half the folks will agree with this and half will disagree.
I know nothing about Vice President Gore's record in the senate, nor what legislation he's been involved in and whether or not it's benefited the nation.
As a Vice President, however, I went through college and much of my adult life to-date under his leadership, and my perception of him was that he's a very erudite, very educated, very intelligent man who went from a capable if understated Vice President into a seething raging ball of partisan hate and anger. Much like the rest of the Democratic party. Personally I'm praying for some kind of liberal Renaissance. Although I tend to drift conservative libertarian, I distrust the close relationship that Republicans enjoy with big business and the nation has a monoideological directive right now. I don't like the way the Republicans are growing and expanding government influence over personal decisions (e.g., gay marriage), although I do approve of it in other areas (e.g., social security reform). Gore's current attitude is symptomatic of a general plague in the Democratic party. They're out of power and losing ground and they're acting like... well they're acting like an overprivileged elder child who is throwing a temper tantrum over not getting his way any more. It's painful to watch. I really wish they'd clean out the 1960's generation of hostile boomers. Probably quit a ways to go yet before that happens, but it needs do. I've lost all respect for men like Vice President Gore in how they've handled and responded to the current political climate (note: I'm not saying they're any worse than the Republicans, but we're talking about Gore here).
Most will be very strong in their beliefs one way or another.
I neither agree nor disagree, I don't really know enough about Senator Gore's record to have an opinion, and I felt he was a pretty typical Vice President.
So really, MSFT is looking for the idiots who were selling windows on the street and issuing receipts. Does anyone think this is a significant numbner of people?
Not in America. In China, Malaysia, and Singapore, however, there literally are vendors in the streets selling illegal CDs of this and dozens of other expensive software products for five bucks.
First of all, most "illegal" software is had from P2P networks, which we all know damn well are used almost exclusively and entirely for legal downloading. Microsoft has no basis for this. Nobody sold me anything, it was free off P2P! And since P2P is a blameless, holy entity, one of Slashdot's Sacred Cows, we know that it cannot possibly be responsible for any wrongdoing. A very tiny minority of people might use it ilegally but overall the economy, especially businesses whose profitability stems directly from protections of intellectual property granted under Title XVII of the United States Code, have seen nothing but record profits due to expanded interest in their products caused by the proliferation of P2P networks.
So suck it up, Microsoft. We're out here making money for you by illegally distributing your software. You should be thanking us, not trying to bribe us into ratting out our upchain supplier with legal software. Legal software is so 1998.
Mod up the AC. Google is collecting many data dots about you. It would not take much for them to connect them to create an accurate picture of your hobbies, interests, and buying habits. This is every marketer's dream. Corporations will buy this data and purchase very precise profiles of each of us, enabling them to efficiently shake even more money from our wallets using all sorts of psychological enticements that will be very hard to defend against.
I've always said this...
I don't mind commercials if it's for something I might actually buy.
I don't mind junk mail for products I might actually want.
I don't even mind telemarketers selling me something that I'm interested in.
I don't mind advertising when it's for stuff I'm interested in or curious about.
What I mind is having to sit through ads for "Desperate Housewives" and other pop/crap culture TV shows. What I mind is "American Idol" conspiracy theories on respectable news reporting web sites. What I mind is being hassled at dinner time to switch my long distance carrier. What I mind is getting junk mail for any Chevy product.
Yet, I get Dell's monthly/quarterly mini-mag all the time and I never fail to flip through it and review prices.
When I want to buy something on-line, I often hit www.google.com and type the item in and then click on the ads to check prices and on-line vendors.
Advertising isn't evil. It's just annoying when it's for stuff that you don't want. I wouldn't even mind spam if the spam I got was, first of all, not fully of elementary school grammar and spelling errors, and second of all, not insulting my intelligence. If I got spam for stuff I might actually buy, I'd object to it less.
So, if Google can find a way to target advertising at me for products that I am actually interested in, then more power to them.
Why do you think word-of-mouth is the best advertising?
Your friends tend to like the same stuff you do
Your friends and family know you and know what you will and won't like and tend to recommend things that you'll like
Somebody else took the plunge and was satisfied, thus allowing somebody whose opinion you probably respect to personally recommend a product/service
You get the point. Word of mouth is highly directed personal advertising. If Google can reproduce that to some degree programmatically, I don't mind.
From a privacy perspective, I object to this data being collected without my knowledge, but that's not what they're doing. I _KNOW_ exactly what they can do with my information, and I continue to let them do it.
Gates is like, "WTF? Google isn't open source! Why does the future generation of computing flock to it!?"
Because Google doesn't have animated paperclips and a Dennis-the-Menace approach to its software.
"It looks like you're trying to use your computer! Would you like me to help? PLEASE? I just want to help. PLEASE! PLEASE LET ME HELP YOU!"
NO. FSCK. OFF.
Google also doesn't hijack and break standards and implicitely force everybody to do things their way or, to date, abuse its position as the de facto leader in its particular sector of the industry to make more money at the expense of the user in terms of both financial cost and overall computing experience.
You mean we could have afforded two or three Apollo programs if we had forgone Bush's Oil Crusade?
As of this moment, the total cost of the Iraq operation or whatever you want to call it is $167.5 billion. The actual cost of Apollo in modern dollars is well over $100 billion, around $110 billion. If the social and political climate was identicle, then yes, we could launch about 1.5 Apollo programs, starting now and finishing up in about 10-15 years. NASA's total budget for the next years, in fact, is likely to end up being (in 2005 constant dollars), about $170 billion, barring major changes in funding priorities in Congress.
But two or three? No way. And the political and social climate isn't the same as it was. I posit that repeating Apollo verbatim would cost almost twice what it did at the time, based on the cost of Apollo relative to the nation's total productivity. And it would also depend who the president was. If Bush tries to do it, it's going to cost a lot, not just in terms of money, but in national ire at how the guy is urinating our dollars on pointless, worthless legislation. What we need is military Democrat like JFK (John F Kennedy, not John Friggen Kerry) to propose it. When Democrats want to spend money on programs of questionable value the nation tends to rally around them. I don't know why, but it seems to generally be the case.
While I agree with the rest of your post, I don't agree that current US technology is inappropriate to the task. Current infrastructure, yes, but not technology.
Our current space technology is not appropriate for sending people to the moon. We have no rocketry to send a human payload there, no habitable moon orbiters, no landers, no spacesuits build for use on terrain, no rovers, nothing of the sort. The amount of work and research that went into designing the components for the Apollo program was staggering and we're not even close to having that technology available again.
We will have to go back and re-design and re-engineer that technology, we don't have any of it right now. I'm not sure what you mean by the infrastructure being the flaw. What current technology do we have that's going to launch us to the moon, land on it, and bring us back?
I just have one question for you: You say that the Apollo project cost over $100 billion in today's dollars - but for how many missions?
That's for the whole program, start to finish. For comparison, the total price tag of the space shuttle program is close to $150 billion.
It's also important to understand how much money NASA has relative to the nation's GDP, because a non-relativistic measure of NASA's cash flow is meaningless.
In the 1960's, NASA's budget as a percentage of GDB rose steadily from about 0.20% to over 0.50% of GDB.
From the early 1990's until this year it has declined from from 0.23% to just under 0.15%. NASA's buck doesn't go nearly as far in this economy. Note that I'md not dogging on the economy, I actually think it's doing rather well, but the reality is that it costs more to do business these days. We won't get the moon again for the same price tag (relatively) that we did in the 1960's.
It was mostly bloodless violence, though. Think cartoons. A mouse driving a nail through the head of a cat? (Tom and Jerry or Itchy and Scratchy, depending on your generation) Yet that is rated G - without the gore. Ships blew up etc., but we didnt see (much) in graphic detail related to the injuries. Also, in the USA sex is considered "worse" than violence with respect to ratings and what can and cannot be shown on TV and in movies. Star Wars comes across with flying colors in that regard, unless you feel an incestuous kiss on the cheek by Princess Leia to be objectionable.
And it's getting harder and harder to find Tom and Jerry cartoons in children's programming, for both the violent content and the racism in it.
Go back and watch another kid's movie from the early to mid 80's. The amount of violence, sexuality, and swearing that was permitted has changed a lot. It used to be ok to show a topless woman in a PG-13 movie (and before PG-13, it was permitted in PG movies).
No doubt, the Puritanical Right in America has been working hard at regressing our social consciousness on human sexuality for the last 20 years, but there's still plenty of violence in those films that'd earn them a stiffer rating today.
And perhaps most of all, why is it going to take us fifteen years to get back to the moon when we got there from scratch in less than ten the first time around? Heck, what's our goal in going back to the moon in the first place instead of concentrating on the much-more-promising Mars? Did we miss something the last time around?
We didn't go to the moon for science and exploration, we went there to give the Reds a big fat middle finger.
Further, NASA was a part of the United States Air Force at the time, not a separate entity with its own (very limited ) budget.
Third, the Apollo project cost over $25 billion. In modern dollars, that's aover $100 billion. And believe or not, government spending was more efficient back then. Environmental impact studies weren't necessary, the cost of doing business was lower, the bidding process was simpler and cheaper. NASA's entire budget for this year is under $17 billion.
You can't just reproduce the Saturn V and fly it. The Saturn V was too big for the launch facilities and it had to be assembled with its own tower and hauled out to the launch site.
The Apollo program was also cut short. We'd made our point: America can reach the moon, and the Soviets can't. Neener neener neener. The last three moon missions were cancelled due to budget cuts.
So why will it takes 15 years to get back there? Because none of our current technology is appropriate for the task, the old technology is not only unavailable (there's no more Saturn V's left that could fly) but updating it to modern standards and safety requirements (not to mention refocusing the moon landing to a science mission more than thumbing our nose at the Eastern Bloc) would probably cost as much or more than just starting from scratch.
What's going on: I have no idea, but I honestly don't think they'll even hit the moon in 15 years unless some thing major changes about how NASA or the government does business.
Of course, there WAS no such rating when the original trilogy was released - just G, PG, and R. That said, I don't think any of the originals would have qualfied even if there was such a rating (which lies between PG and R, for folks outide of the US)
A severed bloody arm in Star Wars? The hero's hand being cut off in Empire? Slicing open the guts of an animal and stuffing your buddy into it? People in ships blowing up? A guy being tortured by electrocution? Another hero being prepped for consumption by a savage race? Furry ewoks blowing up and screaming as their fur smokes? A guy being cut in half by a sword? Somebody being frozen in a block of what may as well be concrete? Being fed to a gigantic mouth? A guard being eaten alive by a huge monster?
None of that is violent enough for a PG-13 rating?
That's the problem with them damn Brits, they don't realize it's boobies in movies that's the real corrupting influence, not a little innocent killing and maiming.
Not true. Swear words are also ruining American society.
two things: moral high ground (riaa/mpaa are good guys; your college students are being bad, please stop them) and also the fact that colleged (and the legal system) should NOT be used to help protect one business' outdated sales model.
Just because they are a bunch of stubborn idiots doesn't mean that their request is unreasonable. If students were using the university's photocopier to reproduce entire text books (let's pretend the use of the copier is provided free of charge by the school) and were buying one book for a class and making copies of it and handing them out, I'd expect the publisher to be furious, to demand that the University put a stop to it and enact better controls over use of their equipment/services.
That's not unreasonable. The RIAA is still a bunch of bullying idiots, and they're still never going to solve the piracy problem, it's too late, they missed the bus, and they're going to have to eventually rethink their business model.
Still, the material is theirs, they do hold an exclusive right to redistribute and reproduce the content, and the students who violate this right are breaking the law using university resources. I don't think they're asking for anything unreasonable. I'm more concerned that legitimate file sharing would be trodden upon in an attempt to comply with whatever demands the RIAA is making.
Why should I pay? How about I just goto the library and pull out the article I am looking for in their microfilm/microfiche archive? Even small Universities have those going all the way back to the 1890's, as do most libraries.
It's called "convenience." Why should I pay for internet access? I can go to the library and read my email (from my gmail.com account). Why should I have a computer at all? I can play games at internet cafes. Why should I have a telephone? I can just drive and see people I want to talk to, or write them a letter. Why should I pay for or own ANYTHING? Because it makes my life more convenient.
Maybe your time isn't worth much to you, and spending a few hours going to the library to read one article (or a dozen, it doesn't matter) is ok, but I'd rather pay a few bucks to have it delivered to my computer screen and spend those few hours doing something else.
It's convenience. It's productivity. It's the advancement of the speed of life and it's what fuels our economy. COMMUNIST!
The best science fiction novel of all time is, in my opinion, "Tiger, Tiger", now known as "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. I believe it was written in the 1930's, but it's a brilliant novel that pioneered ideas that you still find being used in film today. Like a lot of great modern and post-modern literature, it's a retelling of a classic; in this case, it's the Count of Monte Cristo.... in space.
Slashdot Mirror
The more influence he has over the directing, the crappier the blocking and acting it.
Lucas reminds me of an old programmer. He's great at painting the big picture, but keep his hands off the source code, he'll just fuck it up. Lucas is an architect, not a carpenter.
What the hell are you talking about? That's only happened once! There's been _ONE_ sequel to a prequel so far.
Do you express similar disdain for those who shit on Microsoft or SCO? I don't hate Star Wars, but my opinion of George Lucas as a storyteller and filmmaker has undergone serious revision since about 1984. That has nothing to do with Slashdot groupthink.
But please, spare us the "Lucas raped my childhood" or "digital actors are the sux0rs" comments. We've seen them a million times and they still aren't clever. Come up with something new, please.
Why? It's clear that your views are just as ingrained as everybody else's, you've already decided on the source and cause of everybody else's opinion on this, so why bother debating it with you?
They don't have Beagle II on their site anywhere. Somebody needs to have a talk with the scorekeeper.
I agree with you, but you're apparantly at least halfway smart and competant. The ungodly majority of people will not take this initiative and will not know about your product, your store, your restaurant, your service, or whatever, unless you go tell them. Nobody would PAY to get their advertising out if most consumers were like you. They're not. I have to say this on Slashdot over and over and over: most of the people in this country aren't like you.
Word-of-mouth isn't advertising, in the modern sense. I expect that when I hear from a friend that "product X is great!" that they are not being paid to say that. Their only motivation is that they are truly happy with the product.
You're being literal now. Obviously they're not being paid, but they're still serving the purpose of advertising: giving you unsolicited information about a product. Everything from your buddy recommending a movie to your sig about Debian is advertising.
What's really telling about advertising is what other people are like who watch the same shows you do. The commercials on Spike during Star Trek are almost entirely for debt relief and penis enlargement.
Yeah, that's true, and that's actually the crux of it. Most of the advertising I receive from companies with whom I already have a business relationship doesn't bug me that much. It's the random uninvited crap that I hate. Like the piles of "mortgage insurance" and "credit insurance" junk mail, and the refinance stuff. Gah! If I wanted to refinance I'd go do it!
Speculation is not truth. I don't know the truth and neither do you. We could be out of Iraq in 12 months. We could still be there in 40 years (we're still in Japan and Germany, do the expenses of maintaining those bases qualify as part of the WW2 effort?)
The only truth I know is what the war has cost to this point, and that's what I cited. You can't make a projection about something that might happen, no matter how likely, and claim it's truth.
I know nothing about Vice President Gore's record in the senate, nor what legislation he's been involved in and whether or not it's benefited the nation.
As a Vice President, however, I went through college and much of my adult life to-date under his leadership, and my perception of him was that he's a very erudite, very educated, very intelligent man who went from a capable if understated Vice President into a seething raging ball of partisan hate and anger. Much like the rest of the Democratic party. Personally I'm praying for some kind of liberal Renaissance. Although I tend to drift conservative libertarian, I distrust the close relationship that Republicans enjoy with big business and the nation has a monoideological directive right now. I don't like the way the Republicans are growing and expanding government influence over personal decisions (e.g., gay marriage), although I do approve of it in other areas (e.g., social security reform). Gore's current attitude is symptomatic of a general plague in the Democratic party. They're out of power and losing ground and they're acting like ... well they're acting like an overprivileged elder child who is throwing a temper tantrum over not getting his way any more. It's painful to watch. I really wish they'd clean out the 1960's generation of hostile boomers. Probably quit a ways to go yet before that happens, but it needs do. I've lost all respect for men like Vice President Gore in how they've handled and responded to the current political climate (note: I'm not saying they're any worse than the Republicans, but we're talking about Gore here).
Most will be very strong in their beliefs one way or another.
I neither agree nor disagree, I don't really know enough about Senator Gore's record to have an opinion, and I felt he was a pretty typical Vice President.
Good, I finally know who to blame for the endless pathetic plays on that phrase in popular marketing and media.
"Your on-ramp to the information superhighway!"
"Speed limits on the information superhighway?"
"Pulled over on the information superhighway."
*groan*
Hehehehe, yeah I run into that now and then, but luckily those people are usually transparent.
Not in America. In China, Malaysia, and Singapore, however, there literally are vendors in the streets selling illegal CDs of this and dozens of other expensive software products for five bucks.
So suck it up, Microsoft. We're out here making money for you by illegally distributing your software. You should be thanking us, not trying to bribe us into ratting out our upchain supplier with legal software. Legal software is so 1998.
I've always said this...
I don't mind commercials if it's for something I might actually buy.
I don't mind junk mail for products I might actually want.
I don't even mind telemarketers selling me something that I'm interested in.
I don't mind advertising when it's for stuff I'm interested in or curious about.
What I mind is having to sit through ads for "Desperate Housewives" and other pop/crap culture TV shows. What I mind is "American Idol" conspiracy theories on respectable news reporting web sites. What I mind is being hassled at dinner time to switch my long distance carrier. What I mind is getting junk mail for any Chevy product.
Yet, I get Dell's monthly/quarterly mini-mag all the time and I never fail to flip through it and review prices.
When I want to buy something on-line, I often hit www.google.com and type the item in and then click on the ads to check prices and on-line vendors.
Advertising isn't evil. It's just annoying when it's for stuff that you don't want. I wouldn't even mind spam if the spam I got was, first of all, not fully of elementary school grammar and spelling errors, and second of all, not insulting my intelligence. If I got spam for stuff I might actually buy, I'd object to it less.
So, if Google can find a way to target advertising at me for products that I am actually interested in, then more power to them.
Why do you think word-of-mouth is the best advertising?
You get the point. Word of mouth is highly directed personal advertising. If Google can reproduce that to some degree programmatically, I don't mind.
From a privacy perspective, I object to this data being collected without my knowledge, but that's not what they're doing. I _KNOW_ exactly what they can do with my information, and I continue to let them do it.
Gates is like, "WTF? Google isn't open source! Why does the future generation of computing flock to it!?"
Because Google doesn't have animated paperclips and a Dennis-the-Menace approach to its software.
"It looks like you're trying to use your computer! Would you like me to help? PLEASE? I just want to help. PLEASE! PLEASE LET ME HELP YOU!"
NO. FSCK. OFF.
Google also doesn't hijack and break standards and implicitely force everybody to do things their way or, to date, abuse its position as the de facto leader in its particular sector of the industry to make more money at the expense of the user in terms of both financial cost and overall computing experience.
As of this moment, the total cost of the Iraq operation or whatever you want to call it is $167.5 billion. The actual cost of Apollo in modern dollars is well over $100 billion, around $110 billion. If the social and political climate was identicle, then yes, we could launch about 1.5 Apollo programs, starting now and finishing up in about 10-15 years. NASA's total budget for the next years, in fact, is likely to end up being (in 2005 constant dollars), about $170 billion, barring major changes in funding priorities in Congress.
But two or three? No way. And the political and social climate isn't the same as it was. I posit that repeating Apollo verbatim would cost almost twice what it did at the time, based on the cost of Apollo relative to the nation's total productivity. And it would also depend who the president was. If Bush tries to do it, it's going to cost a lot, not just in terms of money, but in national ire at how the guy is urinating our dollars on pointless, worthless legislation. What we need is military Democrat like JFK (John F Kennedy, not John Friggen Kerry) to propose it. When Democrats want to spend money on programs of questionable value the nation tends to rally around them. I don't know why, but it seems to generally be the case.
Our current space technology is not appropriate for sending people to the moon. We have no rocketry to send a human payload there, no habitable moon orbiters, no landers, no spacesuits build for use on terrain, no rovers, nothing of the sort. The amount of work and research that went into designing the components for the Apollo program was staggering and we're not even close to having that technology available again.
We will have to go back and re-design and re-engineer that technology, we don't have any of it right now. I'm not sure what you mean by the infrastructure being the flaw. What current technology do we have that's going to launch us to the moon, land on it, and bring us back?
That's for the whole program, start to finish. For comparison, the total price tag of the space shuttle program is close to $150 billion.
It's also important to understand how much money NASA has relative to the nation's GDP, because a non-relativistic measure of NASA's cash flow is meaningless.
In the 1960's, NASA's budget as a percentage of GDB rose steadily from about 0.20% to over 0.50% of GDB.
From the early 1990's until this year it has declined from from 0.23% to just under 0.15%. NASA's buck doesn't go nearly as far in this economy. Note that I'md not dogging on the economy, I actually think it's doing rather well, but the reality is that it costs more to do business these days. We won't get the moon again for the same price tag (relatively) that we did in the 1960's.
And it's getting harder and harder to find Tom and Jerry cartoons in children's programming, for both the violent content and the racism in it.
Go back and watch another kid's movie from the early to mid 80's. The amount of violence, sexuality, and swearing that was permitted has changed a lot. It used to be ok to show a topless woman in a PG-13 movie (and before PG-13, it was permitted in PG movies).
No doubt, the Puritanical Right in America has been working hard at regressing our social consciousness on human sexuality for the last 20 years, but there's still plenty of violence in those films that'd earn them a stiffer rating today.
We didn't go to the moon for science and exploration, we went there to give the Reds a big fat middle finger.
Further, NASA was a part of the United States Air Force at the time, not a separate entity with its own (very limited ) budget.
Third, the Apollo project cost over $25 billion. In modern dollars, that's aover $100 billion. And believe or not, government spending was more efficient back then. Environmental impact studies weren't necessary, the cost of doing business was lower, the bidding process was simpler and cheaper. NASA's entire budget for this year is under $17 billion.
You can't just reproduce the Saturn V and fly it. The Saturn V was too big for the launch facilities and it had to be assembled with its own tower and hauled out to the launch site.
The Apollo program was also cut short. We'd made our point: America can reach the moon, and the Soviets can't. Neener neener neener. The last three moon missions were cancelled due to budget cuts.
So why will it takes 15 years to get back there? Because none of our current technology is appropriate for the task, the old technology is not only unavailable (there's no more Saturn V's left that could fly) but updating it to modern standards and safety requirements (not to mention refocusing the moon landing to a science mission more than thumbing our nose at the Eastern Bloc) would probably cost as much or more than just starting from scratch.
What's going on: I have no idea, but I honestly don't think they'll even hit the moon in 15 years unless some thing major changes about how NASA or the government does business.
A severed bloody arm in Star Wars? The hero's hand being cut off in Empire? Slicing open the guts of an animal and stuffing your buddy into it? People in ships blowing up? A guy being tortured by electrocution? Another hero being prepped for consumption by a savage race? Furry ewoks blowing up and screaming as their fur smokes? A guy being cut in half by a sword? Somebody being frozen in a block of what may as well be concrete? Being fed to a gigantic mouth? A guard being eaten alive by a huge monster?
None of that is violent enough for a PG-13 rating?
Not true. Swear words are also ruining American society.
Just because they are a bunch of stubborn idiots doesn't mean that their request is unreasonable. If students were using the university's photocopier to reproduce entire text books (let's pretend the use of the copier is provided free of charge by the school) and were buying one book for a class and making copies of it and handing them out, I'd expect the publisher to be furious, to demand that the University put a stop to it and enact better controls over use of their equipment/services.
That's not unreasonable. The RIAA is still a bunch of bullying idiots, and they're still never going to solve the piracy problem, it's too late, they missed the bus, and they're going to have to eventually rethink their business model.
Still, the material is theirs, they do hold an exclusive right to redistribute and reproduce the content, and the students who violate this right are breaking the law using university resources. I don't think they're asking for anything unreasonable. I'm more concerned that legitimate file sharing would be trodden upon in an attempt to comply with whatever demands the RIAA is making.
It's called "convenience." Why should I pay for internet access? I can go to the library and read my email (from my gmail.com account). Why should I have a computer at all? I can play games at internet cafes. Why should I have a telephone? I can just drive and see people I want to talk to, or write them a letter. Why should I pay for or own ANYTHING? Because it makes my life more convenient.
Maybe your time isn't worth much to you, and spending a few hours going to the library to read one article (or a dozen, it doesn't matter) is ok, but I'd rather pay a few bucks to have it delivered to my computer screen and spend those few hours doing something else.
It's convenience. It's productivity. It's the advancement of the speed of life and it's what fuels our economy. COMMUNIST!
The best science fiction novel of all time is, in my opinion, "Tiger, Tiger", now known as "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. I believe it was written in the 1930's, but it's a brilliant novel that pioneered ideas that you still find being used in film today. Like a lot of great modern and post-modern literature, it's a retelling of a classic; in this case, it's the Count of Monte Cristo .... in space.
Robin Hood stole from the government, not from thieves.
Er... nevermind!