Mattman723 wrote:

Who's read Y: The Last Man...

I have. A good solid series, and the type of story that it would be difficult to tell in any other medium (except, possibly, as a textual book) without a large number of changes to the story.

Kesch wrote:

Anonymous sperm donation is pretty much the only way to get out of child support. In every other case the court has ruled "in favor of the child" which means the man has to pay child support even if he was raped. In contrast to much of society, reproductive rights are an area where the women have the men by the balls.

I think the only way an anonymous sperm donor can be safe from being required to pay child support is if it is truly anonymous, meaning there is completely impossible identify the donor. If a single record exists that can be used to identify the donor, then I would not be surprised if that could be used to require child support payments.

Also, there have been cases where it is later proven that a man is not the child's father but he is required to pay child support. If he fails to raise an objection in a timely manner, he can be forced to pay child support for a child that is not his.

MarkvW wrote:

If a woman gets your blood, then she can bear your children? Wow! This will be a great argument for deadbeat dads! Now they can truthfully say "I never had sexual relations with that woman."

Black markets for the blood of rich men . . .
Personal IP rights in your personal blood composition . . .

Wow, the world got more interesting on 7/08/2009!!!!

This could be a serious legal problem for men in the future. I'm not a lawyer, but based on what I've read the general guide is that if male reproductive material is used to produce a child, the biological father is liable for child support no matter what the specific circumstances are.

In the scenario mentioned by MarkvWI in his first quoted paragraph above, I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility that the man the blood was taken from could be held liable for child support.

techess wrote as part of a post:

So this is where I'm going to throw my two cents in and get declared a heretic. This is exactly why my favorite Trek is DS9. Captain Sisko was a good mix of action and diplomacy. They had a lot of different races that were major characters, and most importantly to me the characters changed. They were completely different people at the end of the show.

I, too, enjoyed DS9 on the whole. One of the main reasons was Captain Sisko. Much as has been made about Kirk breaking the rules, but Sisko pushed it even further at points.

Two cases come to mind (I don't remember the names of the episodes). In one, he made a planet uninhabitable for humans in order to force Eddington (his former security chief) to turn himself in and he was prepared to do it to planet after planet until Eddington turned himself in. Sisko view was that Eddington was a threat to the Federation, and Sisko would remove that threat.

In another case, he allowed the death of a Romulan representative in order to bring the Romulans into the war against the Dominion. Despite the fact that his actions would lead to more deaths, Sisko could live with it.

RoboRay wrote:

But I think it's a shame that Abrams decided just to throw something together based on the Trek franchise, film it in a spectacular way and profit, ignoring the existing trek history when it got in his way.

Umm, that's kind of what "reboots" are all about.

If you restrict yourself to working completely within the pre-existing material, it's not a reboot at all. It's a sequel (or prequel). A reboot of a franchise typically occurs when the property owners reallize that irreconcialable mistakes have been made, and the only way to fix things is to start over and pretend the earlier material doesn't exist. They'll typically reuse a great deal of it, but anything and everything is subject to change, to suit the revised story.

An example of this is in the comic series "Legion Of Super-Heroes." In 1994 the creative team completely wiped out the entire continuity and started over again. The reason was that its continuity had been so damaged by recent events (such as Superman having never been a Superboy, and then the complete deletion of Superboy and Supergirl from continuity, and inserting new characters to take their place) that the writers were spending a massive amount of time trying to fix the continuity rather than moving the series forward. I've compared what was done with the Legion to the writers of Star Trek suddenly being told by the powers that be that "James T. Kirk never existed, deal with it" and yet being required to revise many of the old stories and replace Kirk with another similar character.

Worse, every time the writers did fix something, something else would happen in another comic series that the Legion writers would have to work around. Every fix lead to more problems which had to be fixed, which led to more problems. In the end, there was little choice but to wipe it all out and then start again. This turned out to be a good thing because the writers were able to focus on telling good stories.

This is why I think rebooting Star Trek is a good thing. Each new movie can focus on telling a great story, one that is planned to be built upon and used in the future, while not having work with a massive already-existing continuity. But the writers do need to ensure that each movie in the new series is kept consistent with the previous ones.

MightyMartian wrote:

I agree. This is, after all, a REBOOT. That means a lot of the cruft from about thirty years of post-ToS development is being dispensed with, and that's fine by me. This is meant to rejuvenate a series that had pretty much become one monstrous cliche of itself. If there's one thing ToS had that, over time, the later series lacked, it was solid, straightforward storytelling. Everything was burdened down by the vast edifice of Everything-That-Had-Come-Before. The last two attempts, the dull Voyager and the increasingly-pathetic Enterprise, showed just how uninteresting it had all become.

The Trouble With Tribbles was just fine with Klingons speaking English, thank you very much. In fact, and so will this.

I think that starting over is the key. From what I've picked up, this movie is starting from scratch and nothing we've seen previously will count. This gives the new team the freedom to take the series in a new direction, without being bogged down with having to deal any of the already-existing stories.

One thing I that has been overlooked is that when the Original Series was done, I doubt much thought was given to the possibility that writers would have to live with these stories over 40 years later. Added to the fact that the limitations of television further prevented the writers from doing stories they'd like to do. Although I was doubtful about the new movie when I first heard about it, I find that I'm looking forward to it.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that the new Star Trek could make is to simply tell the same stories over again. Unlike the Original Series (which had much already established even if we hadn't yet seen it), it appears that this movie will start at the beginning. It is possible that the reason the Klingons don't appear in the new movie is that the Federation hasn't encountered them (yet). It could be that the first time we see the Klingons is during a full-out war with the Federation (how that happened, now there's a story).

pentalive wrote:

Of course wouldn't the Klingon reply be "It is a good day to take yours."

That sounds more appropriate for a Ferengi than for a Klingon.

Cro Magnon wrote and included with a post:

In the previous three DHs, every other word was either "fuck" or "shit" (or "fucking shit! Motherfucker!"). I can't for the life of me understand why it's OK to show a bloody murder, but uttering "shit" gives you an R rating.

I didn't fully realize just how much cussing Bruce Willis did until I saw DH1 & 2 on TV. They replaced the words with a voiceover with milder language, and the vocieover didn't even sound like willis. It was more jarring to me than the language was. And "Yippie Kayay, Mr. Falcon"? Barf!

Reminds me when I saw "Smokie and the Bandit" on network TV. They replaced Sheriff Justice's (played by Jackie Gleason) cuss words, and the voice replacement sounded like the same man who was also doing the voice of Fred Flintstone at the time. The voice was close, but it was still a bit jarring because of the Fred Flintstone connection.

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF wrote and included with a post:

Does someone want to tell me what's wrong with plain text?

No graphics for one. Do you really think the state doesn't make any documents that include graphs or maps or charts? Aside from that, it's nice to be able to do some formatting, you know like including page numbers on longer documents and cross references that you don't have to spend hours updating every time you add a page to the middle of a document. Then there's the issue of color. It's awfully nice to be able to add some large, red text and a hazard symbol when said document is providing important information to the reader's health, like "Warning, don't open the valve until the green light comes on or sewage will fill the tunnel killing you!"

From what I've seen, it seems like everyone focuses on there being only one format and trying to make it work for all documents. Rather than trying to use a single format, why not offer documents in multiple formats?

As a minimum, I would support all government documents being available in four formats:

• Plain Text: To preserve the actual text of the document. For graphics, placeholder notes are placed in the text file and graphics are available as separate files.
• HTML: To allow formatting and the insertion of graphics.
• PDF - Small: Formatted for small-screen devices like on PDAs, phones, and e-book readers
• PDF - Large: Formatted for large-screen devices and for printing on letter-sized paper.

Although the above would take more storage space, it would ensure that government documents are easily accessible and available to everyone.

falconwolf wrote:

whilst it's always good to see genuinely open formats in use, isn't there already an ISO standard document format? If there is, is it better to use the ISO standard or an open standard?

ODF is an ISO standard, as is Microsoft's OOXML format. However ODF is an open standard whereas OOXML is proprietary. As the Star-Telegram article says "If the Constitution was in WordPerfect 5.1 format, it would probably be difficult to read right now", substitute any of MS's formats and it would still be true.

Falcon

I'm not sure if it would be that difficult to read a document in the WordPerfect 5.1 format right now since the current version of WordPerfect and both OpenOffice.org and StarOffice will open the file.

Chris Burke wrote and included with a post:

You're right.

You should never take chances. It's safer that way.

If you're so sensitive that watching a bad movie will actually damage your love for a different movie, and this is actually painful for you... Then yeah. You should probably not take many chances in life, due to insufficient stomach for the most pathetic of consequences.

There is nothing Blade Runner 2 can do that will reduce my enjoyment of Blade Runner. I pity anyone who can't say that.

There is also the chance that the sequel might be better than the previous movie. Compare Star Trek - The Motion Picture to Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan, for me the sequel was much better than its predecessor. It is much the same with the rest of even-numbered Star Trek movies.

I think that one reason sequels are sometimes not good is they rehash much of what they thought made the original work, rather than making the new story work on its own merits. For me, I will take a chance of a sequel and hope that it is at least good. If its bad, I can hope that its so bad its good.

Foobar of Borg wrote and included with a post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_2

LIES!!! This is an ugly rumor started by people who believe extra-terrestrial reptilian humanoids really run the world. There was no Highlander 2 or 3, or anything else. Really. There wasn't! [sobs uncontrollably]

Sounds like part of the plot of Martian Successor Nadesico (where Earth is at war with an enemy called "the Jovian Lizards").

Enderandrew wrote:

Nightmare on Elm Street
Karate Kid
Candyman
GI Joe
Pink Panther
Street Fighter (not that there was much of a franchise to begin with)
Tron (this project has waffled between reboot and sequel, but is now being called Tr2n)
Terminator Salvation (technically a sequel, but one that isn't recognizing T3 as canon, and recast everyone to start a new franchise)
Land of the Lost
Fame
The Stepfather
Astro Boy
Sherlock Holmes
Hellraiser
Superman
Catwoman (a failed reboot, but a reboot none the less)

Sadly, I'm probably forgetting more reboots.

With TRON, I think it is more likely to be a reboot instead of a sequel since there have been two sequels already. The first, called TRON 2.0 was a video game that was a direct sequel to the movie. Recently, there was a comic book series called TRON that was a sequel to both the movie and the video game and continued the story.

With Astro Boy, the 1980s series was more of a retelling of the story from the 1960s series (which was based on the original manga), rather than a sequel or a reboot and allowed for better animation than the original series. The 2000s series, on the other hand, was a reboot of the story with vastly improved animation and with large changes from the original animated series (such as Dr. Tenma now being an actual villain unlike in the previous series). With the move to the large screen I think the movie version of Astro Boy will be another reboot (to make allowances for the limited screen time).

Hadlock wrote:

Well the first two or three would go out and buy new TVs. Then they'd get to talking and (hopefully) notice that ALL their tvs were black and white. Although hopefully you would think with an average of 3 tvs per household, they would notice that all their tvs went B&W at the same time.

Since we are so close to the original transition date, I doubt that any analog TVs are still available for sale. At this point there would be little reason to still sell them.