lordjedi

Gaffer Tape said:

You should know by now that Starfleet subscribes to the Main Character Promotion Track school of militarism.  It's the same way that Star Wars operates.  Remember?  When Han and Lando become generals for... reasons?

Han had a history and experience before joining the rebellion.  So did Lando.  If I recall correctly, Kirk was fresh out of the academy and was in the middle of a trial for cheating when they all (except Kirk) got called up.  That's the other thing I didn't like, the way he acted during the Kobayashi Maru.  Did he really need to sit there eating an apple acting like it was nothing?  They could've at least had him pretend like he didn't know what was going on.

Han was captain of his own ship.  He may have been made a General, but we don't really see him commanding anyone in the movies until Jedi.

Things I didn't like:

1. The lens flare.  My god man, what was he thinking?  I know everyone has mentioned this, but damn, sometimes it was unbelievable how in the way it was.

2. McCoy with his "Damnit Jim!" lines.  I think one time would've been sufficient, but I'm pretty sure I counted at least three occurrences of that line.  I started to feel like it was being shoved in our face.  "Look, they're the same characters as before...see".  Scotty's one line near the end was the only one that really seemed to fit.

3. Chekov's accent interfering with the voice recognition.  It just so happen to be on the same letter as vessel (as in nuclear vessel) too.  I always thought that thing was coded to your voice, so this one seemed doubly lame to me.

4. Kirk making out with the green alien chick.  Yeah, I know he did that a lot in TOS, but again, it seemed forced.  It seemed like just another "Hey, remember, Kirk makes out with green aliens".  I also always thought he only did that because they were in deep space and there wasn't anything else around.

5. Sulu forgets to take off the "parking brake".  I know most of this is suppose to show that they're inexperienced, but again, it was a groaning moment for me, especially after Pike asked if he had done it.

6. Kirk gets a captains commission and the Enterprise at the end.  I get that he was getting an officers commission for his actions, but to go straight to captain and get the flagship starship?  Again it just seemed a little overdone to me.  Maybe someone else with a military background can sound off on the accuracy of that.  It obviously had to happen, just seemed like a "wow" over the top moment.

Other than those things, I liked it a lot.  It was probably better than all the prequels combined too.

Johnny Ringo said:

Well from now on any inconsistency or error can be explained away with "Oh that's cuz Nero messed with the timeline..." :)

I just saw Star Trek and this is exactly what I was thinking with the changes to Kirk's character that everyone was talking about before.  I have a whole host of other things that I didn't like about the movie, but I'll have to post them later.  It was a fun movie, but I didn't like all the in your face moments that seemed like they were trying to remind the audience of the original series.

Arnie.d said:

ferris209 said:

C'mon Arnie, why so slow on the uptake?

 

I think because english isn't my first language and I didn't see janskeet's typo at first.

I didn't get it at first either.  I actually went all the way back to Janskeet's post and then went "Oh, I get it now"

Arnie.d said:

Ow, I looked minuet up before I asked and found it was a dance. But since waffle talked about listening to the minuet I thought it had another meaning.

Actually, it did.  Look at what he quoted carefully.

Arnie.d said:

What bothers me is that a lot of people expect some define intervention when things get really bad.

Call it divine intervention, call it mother nature.  Either way, the planet has a tendency to strike back with a vengeance when it comes under attack.  Mess with the atmosphere enough and you'll alter the weather patterns and you'll be in for a real shit storm the next time some massive system comes through.

Arnie.d said:

 I've never heard of this earth day stuff. Weird predictions also. But don't you agree there's a limit to the amount of people this planet can sustain? Especially if we want to preserve the environment. You don't want to turn earth into something like Coruscant?

Actually, I wouldn't mind freeways running over each other and buildings being built vertically rather than horizontally.  Have you ever seen a parking lot that was a big sprawling lot vs a parking garage?  You can get far more cars into far less space by going upwards instead of allocating huge plots of land.  They might be a bit harder to build, but they save space for other things.  And since they usually put elevators into parking garages, you can park on the top and you don't really have to walk any further than if you're only a level or two up.  With a huge sprawling parking lot, it's a long walk to the store from the back.

C3PX said:

Let's not delude ourselves into believing we have the ability to conquer and destroy something like the earth. The earth is sure to take us out long before we take it out. The over population "issue" will take care of itself without us needing to barbarically murder our own children or resorting to totalitarian style regulations.

This.  I do not for one second think that humans have the ability to destroy the planet on our own.  We are far more likely to kill ourselves in the process and leave the planet perfectly capable of healing itself.  If it's true that the planet is billions of years old, then it did fine before us and it'll do fine after us.  IMO, thinking that humans are going to destroy the planet if we don't do something smacks of extreme arrogance.

No.  Absolutely not.  No way.  I think Lucas needs to move on to his small independent movies that he keeps telling everyone he wants to do.  As long as he keeps sticking his nose into these old franchises, he's going to continue to ruin them.  I am not a fan of the Clone Wars cartoon and I will probably not watch the live action series.

Move on George!

Arnie.d said:

I'm all for population control. There will be too many people on this planet if we continue like this. But I'm against abortion (except for ea few exceptions).

 

Really?  Here's what they said at the first Earth Day back in 1970:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day

They didn't specifically mention population control, but it's not to difficult to connect the dots.  They essentially said, nearly 40 years ago, that there would be too many people on the planet by the year 2000.  None of the dire predictions have come true.

C3PX said:

lordjedi said:

Honestly, I have no problem putting limits on people that receive welfare, but if you want to have 14 kids and take care of them all yourself, go right ahead and do it.

How would you propose doing that? Some program where the government would offer to pay to have your bits and pieces' reproductive abilities disabled? I suppose it would be okay if it was offered and not obligatory. But I'd be very uncomfortable with the government telling women they must get their tubes tied to continue receive welfare.

 

What I'd probably do is just cut off welfare instead of increasing payments the more children you have.  If you have more kids after you go on welfare, you wouldn't get more money (the current system pays a certain amount per child).  That way the woman can continue to have kids, but it doesn't drain the economy.  "Octomom" is a prime example of a broken system.

adywan said:

Janskeet said:

I really don't see what the big deal is.

 

try being a male (by this i mean one that actually cares that he has fathered a child)  who gets a female pregnant and has no say whatsoever if she wants to abort your child. Abortion has become as readily available over here as the contraception pill.

This actually happened to someone I know.  His girlfriend found out she was pregnant.  They had originally wanted to have a child and he was ready and willing to take care of it.  She went and got an abortion because she changed her mind and since they weren't married, she didn't have to consult him.  He broke up with her.

Is the rest of this thread for real?  I've never seen so much hate spewed forth from people that say they're moderates.  Abortion as a form of population control?  Government mandated limits on children?  We don't have to guess where that leads to, just look at China.  They have an out of control male population since they're only allowed one child, so they kill their daughters if they happen to have a girl.  It's completely barbaric.  Honestly, I have no problem putting limits on people that receive welfare, but if you want to have 14 kids and take care of them all yourself, go right ahead and do it.

shimy said:

as for the challenge i was giving, here ill put it simple with the number of stars that are out there or even in our galaxy why isn't the night sky way brighter then it was, cause realistically at and point you look up at in the sky there are probably 5 or 6 stars in your line of sight. and if space is empty there should be nothing to prevent the light of those stars from reaching us. So why is the night sky doted with stars NOT jam packed with them?

I know this is an old post, but do you live in a desert or in a city?  Typically, if you live in a city, you can only see the brightest stars (ones closest to us) due to the city lights.  Even if you shade your eyes, you can still only see a few stars.  Take a trip out to the desert where it's pitch black and you can suddenly see all kinds of stars.  Hell, you don't even have to go out to the desert, just go anywhere far enough from the city lights and you'll see them.

My point is that the night sky is jam packed with stars, you just can't normally see them unless you live in some remote area because the sky is lit up from the city lights.  You also have the atmosphere to deal with, but your average astronomer can't really get past that.  This is why telescopes are placed out in the desert and why NASA has been putting telescopes into space since the 90s.

Janskeet said:

After watching the entirety of "The Obama Deception" I can say that most of it was crap. I do agree with the movie on some things like Obama's decisions on the current banking crisis. I do beleive it was engineered and Obama should've put a stop to the bail-outs, but I don't know if he has the power to do that.

If it was engineered, then it was engineered by Democrats after 2006.  As I said in a previous post, Barney Frank is on video saying that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were doing fine and that was months before the government took them over.  Of course both Republicans and Democrats are to blame for the current mess.  Alan Greenspan deserves a lot of the blame for keeping rates so low that so many people who couldn't afford to buy homes were able to.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/obam-a15.shtml

That was 5 days ago.  It seems to me that Obama doesn't want to stop the bailouts.  He's even preventing some of the banks from giving the money back by trying to convert the TARP money into equity investments.  That would give the government even more control than they already have.  That's why the banks are in such a rush to pay that money back.  They've seen what happened with GMs CEO getting fired and they don't want that happening to them.

Obama said that more "transparency and accountability" may be necessary this past weekend at a news conference after the summit of the Americas.  That was in answer to a question on whether or not bank CEOs and other executives may be asked to leave if the banks don't start to improve.  That sounds to me like he'll have no problem firing more CEOs.  That, to me, is a very scary situation.  The President and the government should not be deciding who wins and who loses.  When they start doing that, they aren't going to stop at the banks.

Janskeet said:

The crap about Obama's federal health care plan being restricted and denying coverage is a load of balonga. By making medicare accasable to all will make the insurance companies compete and will lower the cost and increase coverage.

Actually Janskeet, it does the opposite and we have Hawaii as proof.  Hawaii instituted a healthcare plan where those without healthcare could get State provided care for free.  The idea was that people without it would take it.  What happened is that everyone started dropping their own healthcare and getting the State provided healthcare.  Insurance companies can't compete with "free".  They have since had to drop the State plan because so many people signed up.

We also have Canada as a prime example.  By fixing medical costs, they've increased costs everywhere else.  In Canada, the healthcare is great as long as you don't get sick.  Prescriptions are cheap there because the government said "You can only charge this much".  So now the pharmeceuticals charge more in the US in order to recoup their costs.

In Europe, they have a committee that decides if you get treatment for things like cancer or not.  If you can survive for another year with treatment, you get treatment.  If you can't, then you don't get treatment.  I believe the cost estimate they use is $57,000.  If it's going to cost more than that and you won't survive the year, then you don't get treatment.  Europeans actually come to the US in droves for cancer treatments and other major surgeries because it can take months to get treatment over there.

Contrast all of that with lasik.  10 years ago lasik was thousands of dollars per eye.  Today it's a few hundred.  That's what happens when you have real competition.

We have seen time and time again that when the federal government gets involved, companies back out.  You cannot compete with the feds since they provide it for "free" (they want to cover everyone, right?).  Unfortunately, at some point, they run out of other peoples money (the feds use taxes to pay for it all) and then they start either denying coverage or just delaying it.

Exactly.  Barney Frank is on video stating that Fannie and Freddie were fine.  A few months later they collapsed.  Now he's playing the saviour and talking about limiting corporate salaries.

I too am fine with corporate execs being evil and putting profits first.  Eventually it will catch up with them (assuming we allow it).  It's called bankruptcy.  If we don't allow bankruptcy to happen, we end up in a neverending cycle of bailouts.

EDIT: Perhaps I shouldn't say I'm totally fine with evil corporate execs.  I'm not totally fine with them, but I'm not about to ask the government to stop them or bail them out.  I vote with my wallet.  If I think they're doing something that's illegal or should be illegal, I'll ask my representatives to pass laws to stop them and I'll stop doing business with them in the meantime (see Circuit City for a prime example).  Since I rarely see a company do anything illegal (I don't think deceptive marketing is wrong, I think people need to wake the freak up and pay attention to what they agree to), then I really have no problems with most of them.

C3PX said:

It is my feeling that America has reached her crossroads. Not saying this is the beginning of the decline, but this is the part where we take an exit on the highway without any means of turning back, at least not for a very, very long time.

We are turning down an old road that has been trodden on many times before, and just so long as we are allowed our televisions and our ball games undisturbed, we really don't give a shit where it takes us.

That's the sad part.  Most people are so wrapped up in everything else that they don't realize what's going on in Washington.  It's not even happening under the radar anymore either.

Just the fact that they talk about salary caps and government removal of CEOs that "pose a risk to the financial system" scares the shit out of me.  It'll start with the corporate executives and eventually move down to the common man.  Government rarely gives up power, they usually just slowly claim more and more.

Darth Chaltab said:

I'm pretty skeptical of anyone who claims to have secret insider knowledge into why the politician du jour is the greatest threat to freedom since Hitler.

You don't really need insider knowledge (at least not anymore).  You just need a knowledge of history.

3 or 4 years ago, I would've laughed any of these things off as typical conspiracy bullshit.  But listening to Geitner, Emmanuel, and Obama tells me that we're headed down a very dangerous road.  It didn't start with them, but it seems like it's going to get a whole lot worse under them.

skyjedi2005 said:

But the wii does not do high def games or video what the hell do you need 32 GB for, lol.  What to store all your bootleg nintendo games on one SD card.

Not all.  Just 8 of them :P

That's the type of disc that, if dropped, it was as good as gone.  That 1 GB flash card in the pic can easily be dropped, kicked, and probably stepped on and still work.

You shouldn't just be worried about a single day.  Run anti-virus, update it daily, make sure you're all patched up.  If you do those things, you'll stop 99% of viruses.  Practicing some safe browsing habits and you'll stop the rest.  Do those things on a daily basis, not just one day out of the year.

Can you not use red text next time?  That's killer on the eyes.

C3PX said:

skyjedi2005 said:

Summer Glau has no depth to her acting but neither does Loken.

 

Huh, I have not seen Glau in anything other than Firefly/Serenity and TSCC. And in both of them she plays a very abnormal character that doesn't show much emotion, so even if she is able to act with great depth, we wouldn't know it. I think she does a great job at the two roles she has had, hopefully for her next role she'll try out something different. I guess she has had a few guest appearances on a few other things, but I haven't seen them.

She was in a few episodes of The Unit as well.

Anyone that thinks her acting has no depth isn't paying attention.  She played a disturbed psychic in FireFly/Serenity (and if you saw the movie, you'd know exactly why she was disturbed).  In TSCC, she plays a Terminator.  How much emotion are we expecting?  She's a machine and she seems to act like one to me.  She shows no emotion whatsoever (except that one episode), even when John's trying to explain something to her.  It's like if it doesn't result in something logical, she simply doesn't get it (makes sense for a machine).

In The Unit, she played someone's wife and I thought she did it very well.

Loken seems to always play some kind of sexed up character.  That's not acting, it's called modelling.

Fang Zei said:

First we got Close Encounters and Blade Runner, with the original versions included. Now we're getting the original versions of all the Star Trek films. Call me naive, but I'm getting more and more hopeful that GL won't get away with simply pressing out an SE-only Star Wars BD set.

The only ones that can stop him are us and the retailers.  If we don't buy it, they won't stock it.  Remember what happened with all the Jar Jar Binks figures?  That's right, they either ended up on the clearance aisle or in the trash.  If we want a proper release, then we must stop buying each new release.

GL will continue to get away with releasing the ever changing SEs until people simply stop buying the merchandise.  Toys, movies, DVDs, etc, etc, etc.  Until then, he'll just continue to subsidize the release of whatever the latest crap is with whatever else people are buying (books, comics, games, etc).  Unfortunately, so many are still convinced that Lucas can do no wrong that it doesn't matter what he releases, it's viewed as the one true vision each time.

StormtroopersAreBetter said:

I just disabled UAC in Vista. UAC was annoying me. I'd open something completely harmless and it'd take seconds of my life to make sure the Control Panel was safe to run. I'm running Spybot and ZoneAlarm Firewall so I'm not worried.

It's not bad OS actually.

The control panel doesn't launch a UAC dialog.  This is why I usually wonder what people are doing when they say "I get UAC prompts all the time."  If you're installing software all the time, then no kidding.  But if you're not doing anything else, then you shouldn't be getting it very often.  I only get them when I attempt to diagnose a problem with a network adapter or add an exception to the Windows Firewall.

vbangle said:

Windows 7 as with Vista was made for anybody over 65 or who had purchased their first computer from Best Buy, Circuit City etc...and maybe took an adult ed class to "learn the computer"...

 

 

So the vast majority of PC users.  You could also put that label on most people that buy a Mac since they don't usually build those either.  As someone that did build his own, I can tell you that while Vista isn't a huge improvement over XP (though 64-bit Vista did push manufacturers to start writing 64-bit drivers), Windows 7 has a lot of features that are well worth the upgrade.  And that was just from using it for only an hour.

Bassem said:

7 is nice, but what I don't enjoy about it is that it's still Vista under the hood. It has all the usual 'Vista-isms'.

* Insane 'choose-your-own-adventure' Control Panel

I thought I'd have trouble with this too, but it seems to be a lot more intuitive than XPs was.  I haven't wanted to turn Classic view on at all in Vista or Windows 7.

* UAC

What programs are you running that are giving you trouble with UAC?  I haven't encountered a single program that has a problem with it.  Sure, I get a popup when I run regedit or computer management, but I'd rather see that than have some piece of malware be able to do it in the background without me knowing it.  I don't run computer management at home that much anyway.  At work I get it whenever I open the management tools, so I just leave them open on my taskbar.

In Windows 7, UAC is being tweaked so it doesn't prompt when you try to do most of those things, but it'll still prompt if you try to change the UAC setting.

* Compatibility (Retro games particularly)

Uh, which games?  Just like XP, programs can be run in compatibility mode.  They can also be set to always Run as Administrator.  That'll give you a UAC prompt every time, but that's what happens when developers don't follow MS guidelines from the beginning (MS has always told developers to not use admin privileges unless they needed them...now they're being forced to follow that).

* Sucky OpenGL

If your OpenGL is having trouble, blame your drivers.  As far as I know, MS does not ship OpenGL drivers.  ATI and Nvidia typically supply their own OpenGL implementation in their drivers.  The desktop and Aero are implemented through DirectX.

* Painful networking (Sharing / Printers)

Again, what's the problem with this?  I have had no problems with it.  Sure, it's a little more restrictive by default than previous versions, but the restrictions can easily be disabled.

This honestly reads like a blog from January 2007, when Vista was first released.  I've read almost nothing but positive things about Windows 7, unlike what was published about Vista.  I've been running 64-bit Vista for almost 3 weeks now and I have yet to run into any problems (not even minor ones).

Ziz: I think you're going to be hard pressed convincing the casual viewers among us of the differences between video and film.  I know for myself, I don't have a clue what you're talking about and I don't see any difference.

As far as that TV goes, that's quite a set your sister has.  120Hz TV sets are pretty pricey if I'm not mistaken.