I would agree that if unobtanium is so valuable, the humans are going to come back with a vengence.
My speculation is that in either part 2 or part 3, humans are going to trash Earth completely and permanently. The few space ships en route to Pandora will have no place to return to - either mankind learns to live on Pandora, or it can kiss its collective ass goodbye. Of course, the humans will form different camps with different ideas on how to do this and start shooting each other in addition to the natives.
Hm. Remains of humanity trying to settle on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system that's inhabited by a planet-size sentient life form and that has an atmosphere that's not breathable for humans. Where have I seen this before...? Ah, yes. Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri.
The natives don't kill Sully because of a semi-mystical sign that seems to signify that he is special.
There's nothing mystical about Eywa. That's the whole point of the plot. The thing is a life form like any other, and spectacularly fails at pretty much any test of deityhood that's thrown at it in the movie (can't save the dying, can't raise the dead, isn't immortal, etc). It can do some pretty nifty things, but nothing that would require it to be a god.
Later, after only 3 months of training, he is able do all the things that Navi warriors with many years of training can do.
He's a freakin' Marine. I don't believe his brother would have fared nearly as well. The only thing he really needed to learn was to control that other body. And maybe give it a bit of workout, since I don't believe spending a couple of years in an oversized test tube is conducive to ones physical potential. That is shown in the movie, by the way.
And we're asked to believe that a human driving an avatar can rise to the top of it in a matter of months.
Remember the title, "Avatar"? Here's a hint: It doesn't just refer to the Avatar program. The trees _did_ in fact chose and accept Jake. He can't do it because humans are special, he can do it because the network of trees likes him (- personally. It doesn't like the other humans as much, especially not the ones doing the bulldozing. It kind of accepts the scientists, but doesn't consider them able to truly learn and experience what it is. See the comment about it being hard to fill a container that's already full). Many of the key scenes in the movie probably only turn out the way they do because the trees are pulling the strings in the background (Neytiri not turning Jakes avatar into a pincushion, Jake being able to bond with the Toruk (I believe the don't show a fight here because there isn't one - these things can only be ridden when the trees "program" them to accept a rider, otherwise they turn the foolish would-be rider into a light snack), and some others).
I was disappointed because the movie had so much potential.
I agree. It felt like a three-hour, multi-course meal consisting only of bite-sized appetizers. Sure it's tasty, but you'll still leave hungry. However, it does leave quite a bit of room for the viewers imagination, which is also nice.
Interestingly, the native tribes had warriors, but the movie contained no hint of any conflict between them.
The hints were there, but they weren't driven home with a sledgehammer (like some other things, like the foreshadowing of who's going to die later in the movie). The Na'Vi are no strangers to inter-tribal conflicts. This can be deduced from the story about Neytiris ancestor who was one of the Toruk Makto - why would there be a need to unite the tribes in a time of great strife? Either Pandora was already being invaded by "aliens" centuries ago (unlikely), or the tribes were just at each others throats and Eywa felt the need to stop them from killing each other. The other hint is also given by Neytiri, when she tells Jake that the Eywa doesn't side with anyone - apparently, the Na'Vi did ask for Eywas help in their conflicts or wars, but never found that Eywa was favoring one side (tribe) over the other.
That Neytiris tribe isn't involved in any conflict with another tribe at the time of the movie can be explained by coincidence.
I just assumed that was the slang term for whatever the substance really was.
Slang? It was probably what the marketing department could come up with. They probably trademarked it, just to be sure. RDA Unobtanium (tm), sounds a whole lot better than the scientific mumbo-jumbo crap R&D spent half a dozen meetings trying to explain to them.
Among Grace's last words, on seeing that she had been brought to Eywa, was that she wanted to "collect some samples". But this wasn't some pot shot against "scientism".
It was probably a tribute to her sense of humor. She knew she wasn't going to make it, and she had remarked about being willing to die for some samples from that place. In the end, the tree got to sample her, so to speak.
Yes. Poke around the unknown environment too much, and you'll get your chest exploded and your head bitten off. Kind of like on Earth, just a bit faster.
"Avatar" is anti-technology? WTF? Is that why all of the scientists are good guys in the movie?
I thought the story was simple enough that anyone with a quarter of a brain may understand it, but apparently some people had their quarter of a brain way too preoccupied with processing the 3D visuals to even lend a thought to the story.
Ok, here is it for you guys. I'll use simple sentences.
1. Science is good. Heck, it's to die for, even.
2. Technology is okay, depending on what it's used for.
3. Killing other people and taking their stuff is bad. Even if they have blue skin and live in a tree. It's their tree, so keep your greedy little fingers off it.
There are a few other minor points to the story, but I won't overload your brain for now.
Re:Lower G = Weaker Lifeforms and another thing...
on
The Science of Avatar
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· Score: 1
We have lasers, NOW, why on Earth would we still be using bullets in 140 years?
Remember the old adage about everything in the army being made by the cheapest bidder? Still true in 140 years. Heck, still true in 1400 or 14000 years. It'll only cease to be true when armies are a thing of the past, which will be when, um, hell freezes over and pigs learn to fly.
Bullets are cheap and reliable. And they kill stuff.
No, the key words are "To promote the progess of...". Copyrights that exceed the lifespan of the creators don't promote progress. They encourage to create once and then milk the creation for the maximum amount of progress, instead of staying creative.
How many works of Mozard would we have if they had had 50-year copyright spans then? The guy would have been set for life with the expected royalties for his works at the age of, um 14 or so.
Well, Frontier: Elite had pretty realistic physics too. Navigating (or worse, landing) without the autopilot was insanely hard.
Autopilot? Autopilot!? Frontier threw autopilots at everyone and their dog. Now, in the original Elite, you had to work for your docking computer and spend a few hours cursing, swearing and crashing into space stations.
either need huge surface area (big radar cross section),
Your radar cross-section can be as large as you want, as long as you don't point the part of your spaceship that actually reflects radar waves towards the enemy transmitter. You spaceship does have a side that absorbs radar waves, right?
I believe a large part of space combat will involve pointing the right part of your spaceship (the one that doesn't reflect radar and is cooled down to 4K) towards the enemy and open fire while he still doesn't suspect you're there. On the sensor side, you probably want to be as sensitive as possible so you can spot small aberrations from the cosmic microwave background, occultations, heck, possibly even changes in local gravity. If you can do the latter, hiding from you will be pretty much impossible.
That is absolutely correct. The author seems to be unfamiliar with just how devastatingly destructive nuclear weapons are in space.
All he would have needed to do is look the function of distance with which various effects of an explosion drop. Radiation drops with distance squared, but blast effects drop with distance cube. Outside an atmosphere, pretty much none of the energy gets turned into blast effects, it's all radiation.
Since we do not know at compile-time how many parameters are going to be passed to it, the only way I could think of doing this was to manually construct the stack into the required calling convention using PUSH instructions and do JMP EAX to call the function.
Figure out the maximum number of arguments, and if that's not some overly large number, use a switch/case statement to make a call to the function using the appropriate number of arguments?
Of course that'll result in longer and slower code than doing it in assembly.
Do they rampage across the United States looting cities and holding wealthy citizens for ransom?
No. And do you know why they don't? Because the actual, non-mercenary army is going to kick their ass if they do (that is, if the police proves ineffective). And if you look at the price tag of their services, they don't need to resort to these measures just yet.
Does "the draft" ring a bell?
Does "volunteer army" ring a bell? Anyway, you find the draft evil and cruel, but Machiavelli argues that cruelty is necessary, especially when it comes to troops. "The Prince" isn't about being Mr. Nice Head Honcho, it's about getting power and keeping it. And having overpaid mercenaries in your service that don't fear or revere you doesn't help with that.
It is in the public domain and you can find linked copies from that page. The point of this is that believe it or not, every single president in the US or leader elsewhere has read that book.
"Machiavelli stands strongly against the use of mercenaries. He believes them useless to a ruler because they are undisciplined, cowardly, and without any loyalty, being motivated only by money."
Even if every single US president read the book, it appears some didn't do so thoroughly enough.
You're thinking too short. Let's ban clothes and cooking. Requiring nonnatural protection against the elements and treatment of food with unnatural high temperatures clearly indicates genetic flaws in humans.
How much are you proposing they be paid to prevent them from being corrupt? $100 million a year would certainly make it very hard for anyone to bribe them,
Why? If there are no sanctions for being bribed, or the chance to get caught is nonexistent, no amount of base salary is going to stop corruption. $100 million + $x is always better thant just $100 million.
If you've got a singularity (worst case in our example) that's the mass of the earth, how's that supposed to stop any light/matter/etc escaping? It's not massive enough!
A singularity with one Earth mass will be _tiny_. That means light and matter can get so close to it that they won't be able to escape. Of course, if you're one Earth radius away from it, it'll just exert as much gravitational pull as the real Earth.
The only way I can see for the parents to have so many genetic disorders in common that it would raise the rate significantly above what others pay would be for the parents to be identical siblings.
It's not necessary for both parents to have those disorders (in fact, only few genetic disorders require this). A disorder can be x- or y-linked, or dominant.
In fact, both parents can be perfectly healthy and still have offspring with a genetic defect (e.g. colorblindness, which is x-linked. Women can have one defective x chromosome and still have normal vision, while men with the defective version will be colorblind).
Maybe in the future if there is one "super expensive" defect,
How about something straight out of a horror novel, like fatal familial insomnia?
And as is the nature of probabilities, the most outrageous fees would apply to the smallest set of patients.
However, the insurers with the most stringent criteria can be the most profitable, essentially siphoning the cream of the customers away from insurers with less stringent criteria. Which in turn forces the latter to either charge outrageous fees from their remaining cusomters, adopt stringent criteria themselves, or go out of business.
The solution is pretty obvious: start insuring patients at a stage before genetic tests are practical, and insure against the possibility of a disorder being discovered by said tests.
Err... when would that be? Insuring right after delivery is probably too late. Insuring right after conception is too late, too, since they could just use genetic information from the parents.
As interesting as the plan sounds, I don't think it's feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
My speculation is that in either part 2 or part 3, humans are going to trash Earth completely and permanently. The few space ships en route to Pandora will have no place to return to - either mankind learns to live on Pandora, or it can kiss its collective ass goodbye. Of course, the humans will form different camps with different ideas on how to do this and start shooting each other in addition to the natives.
Hm. Remains of humanity trying to settle on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system that's inhabited by a planet-size sentient life form and that has an atmosphere that's not breathable for humans. Where have I seen this before ...? Ah, yes. Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri.
There's nothing mystical about Eywa. That's the whole point of the plot. The thing is a life form like any other, and spectacularly fails at pretty much any test of deityhood that's thrown at it in the movie (can't save the dying, can't raise the dead, isn't immortal, etc). It can do some pretty nifty things, but nothing that would require it to be a god.
Later, after only 3 months of training, he is able do all the things that Navi warriors with many years of training can do.
He's a freakin' Marine. I don't believe his brother would have fared nearly as well. The only thing he really needed to learn was to control that other body. And maybe give it a bit of workout, since I don't believe spending a couple of years in an oversized test tube is conducive to ones physical potential. That is shown in the movie, by the way.
And we're asked to believe that a human driving an avatar can rise to the top of it in a matter of months.
Remember the title, "Avatar"? Here's a hint: It doesn't just refer to the Avatar program. The trees _did_ in fact chose and accept Jake. He can't do it because humans are special, he can do it because the network of trees likes him (- personally. It doesn't like the other humans as much, especially not the ones doing the bulldozing. It kind of accepts the scientists, but doesn't consider them able to truly learn and experience what it is. See the comment about it being hard to fill a container that's already full). Many of the key scenes in the movie probably only turn out the way they do because the trees are pulling the strings in the background (Neytiri not turning Jakes avatar into a pincushion, Jake being able to bond with the Toruk (I believe the don't show a fight here because there isn't one - these things can only be ridden when the trees "program" them to accept a rider, otherwise they turn the foolish would-be rider into a light snack), and some others).
I was disappointed because the movie had so much potential.
I agree. It felt like a three-hour, multi-course meal consisting only of bite-sized appetizers. Sure it's tasty, but you'll still leave hungry. However, it does leave quite a bit of room for the viewers imagination, which is also nice.
The hints were there, but they weren't driven home with a sledgehammer (like some other things, like the foreshadowing of who's going to die later in the movie). The Na'Vi are no strangers to inter-tribal conflicts. This can be deduced from the story about Neytiris ancestor who was one of the Toruk Makto - why would there be a need to unite the tribes in a time of great strife? Either Pandora was already being invaded by "aliens" centuries ago (unlikely), or the tribes were just at each others throats and Eywa felt the need to stop them from killing each other. The other hint is also given by Neytiri, when she tells Jake that the Eywa doesn't side with anyone - apparently, the Na'Vi did ask for Eywas help in their conflicts or wars, but never found that Eywa was favoring one side (tribe) over the other.
That Neytiris tribe isn't involved in any conflict with another tribe at the time of the movie can be explained by coincidence.
Slang? It was probably what the marketing department could come up with. They probably trademarked it, just to be sure. RDA Unobtanium (tm), sounds a whole lot better than the scientific mumbo-jumbo crap R&D spent half a dozen meetings trying to explain to them.
So basically ... In Soviety Pandora, tree samples YOU?
Nah, it's the great circle of sampling. You get your turn, the tree gets its turn.
It was probably a tribute to her sense of humor. She knew she wasn't going to make it, and she had remarked about being willing to die for some samples from that place. In the end, the tree got to sample her, so to speak.
You post a sign and shoot every asshole who dares to set a foot on it. ;)
Actually, forget about the sign and go straight to the shooting part.
Yes. Poke around the unknown environment too much, and you'll get your chest exploded and your head bitten off. Kind of like on Earth, just a bit faster.
I thought the story was simple enough that anyone with a quarter of a brain may understand it, but apparently some people had their quarter of a brain way too preoccupied with processing the 3D visuals to even lend a thought to the story.
Ok, here is it for you guys. I'll use simple sentences.
1. Science is good. Heck, it's to die for, even.
2. Technology is okay, depending on what it's used for.
3. Killing other people and taking their stuff is bad. Even if they have blue skin and live in a tree. It's their tree, so keep your greedy little fingers off it.
There are a few other minor points to the story, but I won't overload your brain for now.
Remember the old adage about everything in the army being made by the cheapest bidder? Still true in 140 years. Heck, still true in 1400 or 14000 years. It'll only cease to be true when armies are a thing of the past, which will be when, um, hell freezes over and pigs learn to fly.
Bullets are cheap and reliable. And they kill stuff.
The key word there is limited time.
No, the key words are "To promote the progess of ...". Copyrights that exceed the lifespan of the creators don't promote progress. They encourage to create once and then milk the creation for the maximum amount of progress, instead of staying creative.
How many works of Mozard would we have if they had had 50-year copyright spans then? The guy would have been set for life with the expected royalties for his works at the age of, um 14 or so.
Well, Frontier: Elite had pretty realistic physics too. Navigating (or worse, landing) without the autopilot was insanely hard.
Autopilot? Autopilot!? Frontier threw autopilots at everyone and their dog. Now, in the original Elite, you had to work for your docking computer and spend a few hours cursing, swearing and crashing into space stations.
either need huge surface area (big radar cross section),
Your radar cross-section can be as large as you want, as long as you don't point the part of your spaceship that actually reflects radar waves towards the enemy transmitter. You spaceship does have a side that absorbs radar waves, right?
I believe a large part of space combat will involve pointing the right part of your spaceship (the one that doesn't reflect radar and is cooled down to 4K) towards the enemy and open fire while he still doesn't suspect you're there. On the sensor side, you probably want to be as sensitive as possible so you can spot small aberrations from the cosmic microwave background, occultations, heck, possibly even changes in local gravity. If you can do the latter, hiding from you will be pretty much impossible.
That is absolutely correct. The author seems to be unfamiliar with just how devastatingly destructive nuclear weapons are in space.
All he would have needed to do is look the function of distance with which various effects of an explosion drop. Radiation drops with distance squared, but blast effects drop with distance cube. Outside an atmosphere, pretty much none of the energy gets turned into blast effects, it's all radiation.
i bet they had weapons and live ammo with them so if you tried to break into the safe by yourself your buddy might have to shoot you.
But that would make him a loner in one of those no-lone-zones?
Since we do not know at compile-time how many parameters are going to be passed to it, the only way I could think of doing this was to manually construct the stack into the required calling convention using PUSH instructions and do JMP EAX to call the function.
Figure out the maximum number of arguments, and if that's not some overly large number, use a switch/case statement to make a call to the function using the appropriate number of arguments?
Of course that'll result in longer and slower code than doing it in assembly.
No. And do you know why they don't? Because the actual, non-mercenary army is going to kick their ass if they do (that is, if the police proves ineffective). And if you look at the price tag of their services, they don't need to resort to these measures just yet.
Does "the draft" ring a bell?
Does "volunteer army" ring a bell? Anyway, you find the draft evil and cruel, but Machiavelli argues that cruelty is necessary, especially when it comes to troops. "The Prince" isn't about being Mr. Nice Head Honcho, it's about getting power and keeping it. And having overpaid mercenaries in your service that don't fear or revere you doesn't help with that.
It is in the public domain and you can find linked copies from that page. The point of this is that believe it or not, every single president in the US or leader elsewhere has read that book.
"Machiavelli stands strongly against the use of mercenaries. He believes them useless to a ruler because they are undisciplined, cowardly, and without any loyalty, being motivated only by money."
Even if every single US president read the book, it appears some didn't do so thoroughly enough.
What about myopia? Hearing problems? Allergies?
You're thinking too short. Let's ban clothes and cooking. Requiring nonnatural protection against the elements and treatment of food with unnatural high temperatures clearly indicates genetic flaws in humans.
That only applies if you are cursed or doomed.
Only if you didn't get the reference. Getting eaten by a grue is not an invention of ADOM.
... cloud computing controls YOU!
How much are you proposing they be paid to prevent them from being corrupt? $100 million a year would certainly make it very hard for anyone to bribe them,
Why? If there are no sanctions for being bribed, or the chance to get caught is nonexistent, no amount of base salary is going to stop corruption. $100 million + $x is always better thant just $100 million.
If you've got a singularity (worst case in our example) that's the mass of the earth, how's that supposed to stop any light/matter/etc escaping? It's not massive enough!
A singularity with one Earth mass will be _tiny_. That means light and matter can get so close to it that they won't be able to escape. Of course, if you're one Earth radius away from it, it'll just exert as much gravitational pull as the real Earth.
It's not necessary for both parents to have those disorders (in fact, only few genetic disorders require this). A disorder can be x- or y-linked, or dominant.
In fact, both parents can be perfectly healthy and still have offspring with a genetic defect (e.g. colorblindness, which is x-linked. Women can have one defective x chromosome and still have normal vision, while men with the defective version will be colorblind).
Maybe in the future if there is one "super expensive" defect,
How about something straight out of a horror novel, like fatal familial insomnia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia
And as is the nature of probabilities, the most outrageous fees would apply to the smallest set of patients.
However, the insurers with the most stringent criteria can be the most profitable, essentially siphoning the cream of the customers away from insurers with less stringent criteria. Which in turn forces the latter to either charge outrageous fees from their remaining cusomters, adopt stringent criteria themselves, or go out of business.
Err ... when would that be? Insuring right after delivery is probably too late. Insuring right after conception is too late, too, since they could just use genetic information from the parents.
As interesting as the plan sounds, I don't think it's feasible.