That's a shame, but I think there are plenty of precedents of male actors who have likewise done stupid shit because of the bottle, but have gotten help to get out of it, and given second and third chances.

Not all celebrities are created equal, it's true, but I don't think that's a gender thing. Plenty of men cant get work, and plenty of men have gotten blackballed over the years by directors for similar shenanigans. And for what it's worth, I agree both from a sentimental and practical perspective: Sean Young, the ultimate tsundere, has a special place in my heart and that of many others who fell in love with her screen presence in the 80s. That is a very bankable thing, but it takes a professional to cash it in, and she hasn't proven up to the task so far. I wish her really well, believe me.

There are many older actresses that still do look great, and who aren't used as much as I think they should be. Like Susan Sarandon, who I think looks so awesome precisely because she has aged naturally

Susan Sarandon is beautiful and one of a kind. I'm not sure I'd class her as hard-up for work, though. Same with Diane Keaton, Sally Fields, Annette Bening, Kathy Bates, and quite a few other great and talented Hollywood ladies. This isn't exactly the 1950s with respect to movie studios' attitudes towards mature women, in fact they're an incredibly reliable, and thus courted, box office demographic.

I think it's sad that Hollywood continues to make so many movies with elderly gents in the lead role, but never do you see an elderly woman in a lead role. Even the great looking ones.

I'm probably going to get dagger-stares for it, but here is my two cents. And that's really all it is, but here goes anyway. Part of the thing here is that older women don't necessarily want to be, or see, themselves in the lead role of a film. Be honest, and focus for a second not on the rag-flying co-ed Boudicas at the outskirts of culture today, but the warm-steel wisdom of real American family matriarchs. By and large, they aren't looking for superheros, they're looking for stories that ring true to them and their own experiences.

He defeats both the pleasure and assassin models without too much trouble. The brute might have beaten him, although we can't know that for sure. We do know that love saved the day. The only one who definitely would have beaten him was Roy, who is a full-on combat model and vastly experienced, not fresh off the assembly line.

Dick was well known in the same circles as the people who were actually willing to watch (and wound up liking) Blade Runner.

Q: How many Hollywood movies were based on PKD works *prior* to Blade Runner?
A: Zero.

Q: How many Hollywood movies have been based on PKD works *after* Blade Runner?
A: Eleven.

If that's not breaking ground, I don't know what you call breaking ground.

It is said in the movie that Rachel was "an experiment, nothing more". That she did not know what it was. This contrasts with the N6s which where in service. Not a mere experiment

I see where you're coming from, but...

It's a pretty big leap to interpret Tyrell's guarded/teasing response to Deckard's question about Rachel as meaning that. The experiment he referred to could have been Rachel's (...and Deckard's) lack of self-knowledge. It could have been that the meeting of Rachel and Deckard itself was the experiment - perhaps Tyrell was exploring the depth of N6 emotional capabilities? It could be that the whole darn thing was a setup right down to the rogue N6s as set pieces. Or maybe he was just lying off-the-cuff as a way to dismiss an unexpectedly piercing query by the detective. Honestly *any* of those possibilities seems to fit the storyline better than that Deckard, who did well to hold his own against any Nexus 6 combat model he faced, was some next generation model.

The storyline in my head goes something like this. Rachel and Deckard were Nexus 6-Xs - experimental models - that Tyrell was using to work out one or both of the line's major design flaws: their emotional instability and/or their limited longevity. This is why Roy and the other N6s are totally aware of their status as replicants, but Rachel and Deckard are not. The experiment that Tyrell is testing is exactly depriving them of the knowledge of their (from the standpoint of individual ego) inferior origin, on the theory that by permitting them to believe themselves human (which, really, they all are) and integrate on an emotional level with the human world. Tyrell suspects this to be true already, but has been in denial heretofore because of what it would mean on a moral level: specifically, that Tyrell is the biggest slave-trader in history, his vaunted empire nothing more than a dark exploitation of life, with his own countless children as debased chattel.

Will Deckard's superior Nexus 6 brain cause him to run perpendicular to the giant ring rolling in his direction in a straight line? If so, at least marginally happier than I was at the end of that stinker.

undermine Mr. Dick's larger legacy

I LOVE LOVE LOVE PKD, but PKD had basically zero popular legacy to undermine before Ridley Scott got ahold of "Do Androids Dream..." and made it into something rather different. The world has Ridley Scott to thank for waking us up to his works.

But Decker and Rachel where not N6s.

Sorry, what makes you say that?

It would be interesting to see a Blade Runner 2 with Sean Young.

Sean Young's lack of work has nothing to do with her looks (hope I look half that good at her age), and a lot to do with her being a raging alcoholic and major drama queen. The ravishingly gorgeous and talented lady established a pretty legendary reputation as THE hot mess of the movie industry back in the 80s, and age appears to have done little to mellow things: she got arrested at an Oscars after-party in 2012 for misdemeanor assault on one of the other guests.

You know....I've just never really "gotten" this movie.

It's certainly not Scott's most accessible film. Much is left unspoken and implied, not dumbed down. That's one of the (many) reasons I like it so much: there's always something to discover or analyze.

Here's one that even fans don't seem to have noticed: every human left on Earth, except the replicants, is shown to be somehow unfit for offworld travel (old & infirm, diseased, alcoholic, criminal). This seems like a major, major clue that Deckard is a replicant, but I've never seen any review or analysis of the film mention it, and of course it's never outright stated in the film.

Which version you watch won't matter that much from the standpoint of "getting it". I like the Director's Cut.

That was intended to be a joke

Welcome to Slashdot, where the coffee's always hot and the jokes usually missed. :)

All war is ultimately a form of resource contention. It is pretty stupid to destroy all the resources in a fight over who gets this or that resource, but that's the only possible result of "all out war" at this stage in human technological progress.

and the next thing you know, we're waging war with no human casualties.

Why would anyone program their robots to fight other robots? That won't convince the politicians on the other side to start/stop doing this or that thing.

So the net result eventually will be the elimination of human soldiers, but not human targets. So we will have wars fought between killer robots and hapless unsuspecting civilians, with cities as the battlefields.

"Steak" denotes the way the butcher cut the meat, not what animal the meat came from. Cut across the muscle fibers and you have a steak, with the muscle fibers and you have a filet.

Looks like a standard quadcopter to me. That means it will have a pretty limited flight time and even less once you add weight and some wind. Standard is around 10 minutes. So that is 5 minutes distance in flight.

Off the shelf quadcopters can have multi-kilometer ranges. Not the logistical equivalent of cargo ships, but they're capable in "last mile" scenarios.

Add to that the time you need to change the batteries and add the load and you are easily at 15 minutes for a 5 minute flight.

So just mount multiple drones and allow some to work while the others are charging? You're also free to construct drone waypoints for longer range operations, cargo exchanges in the event of malfunctions, etc.

Add some maintenance/setting up to that and you get to 20.

You think commercial drones require five minutes of maintenance for every 10 minutes of flight?!

unlike Debian and Linux, where I'd get a kernel panic around once a month

So... how would you like a job as a fuzzer?