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Comment Re:Oh God queue the fucking wingnuts (Score 1) 242

So long as those roads are used for shipping mail and connect states to each other, facilitating interstate commerce (to make it regular), they're perfectly Constitutional...

Gotta love the cop out since the vast, vast majority of the traffic on the interstate highways have no commercial purpose and unless you're using them purely for commercial activity then you are being a hypocrite for using them.

But I love the notion that the nanny staters always go to when the issue of being overtaxed or the government overly intrusive arises... "because you think government doesn't have the power to do (some big idea), good luck without your police, firemen, etc!" It's so demagogic... police and firemen are local issues, not federal ones. Ditto for the vast, vast majority of public roads (most belong to states/counties/towns).

Huh? How am I a nanny stater? Because I disagree with the absurd notion of original intent? The very fact that other founding fathers wrote the anti-federalist papers that had views of the constitution that were in direct opposition to the writers of the federalist papers should be enough to show that the concept is absolute bunk. When someone like you tries to claim the "original intent" of something you always use a specially hand-picked group of people that agree with you and ignore the dozens of others that held an opposing view on the subject. It's also funny in that you know absolutely nothing about my political views and have incorrectly plugged me as some sort of tax and spend liberal which is ludicrous and wrong. I'm not a left winger nor have I voted for a Democrat in my life. But I'm sure your pea-sized brain is unable to cope with the notion that someone might have a more nuanced political philosophy than your "zOMG YOU DISAGREE WITH ME THUS YOU HAVE TO BE A LIBRUL!!!!11ELEVENTYONE" view of the world.

Comment Re:Better Then CGI (Score 3, Insightful) 271

Even if there was no CGI used in the prequels they still would have sucked. Jar Jar wouldn't be less annoying and less unfunny had it been an animatronic. Hayden Christiansen's stilted acting would have still sucked had the environments not been CGI rendered scenes. The midichlorian angle would still have been stupid. The failings of the prequel trilogy had almost nothing to do with the CGI and all to do with a poorly written story with piss-poor acting by many of the main actors. Using animatronics and non-digital effects wouldn't have somehow made this different.

Comment Re:Better Then CGI (Score 1) 271

Exactly. Even if the prequels didn't use a single bit of CGI they still would have sucked. Jar Jar Binks still would have been annoying and unfunny. CGI is just used as a convenient excuse by old Star Wars fans for the fact that their messiah George Lucas pushed out a trilogy of shitty prequel movies.

Comment Re:Better Then CGI (Score 1) 271

That said, I think his point was that over-reliance on CGI has led to a decline in the quality of the scripts that studios end up making. Why blow the budget on writers when the audience has shown, time and again, that they will just as easily part with their money for special effects? Coupled with a general tendency against taking risks with scripts, and you can see the general quality of movies being made has gone *way* downhill over the last 30 years. But I'd argue that while CGI has been a contributing factor to that decline, it's also been a contributing factor to some of the really high quality work that's been done, too. Done well, CGI compliments the work in question.

Because there were never movies made that heavily relied on special effects over story before the use of CGI? You must be kidding. You're viewing the world through rose-tinted nostalgia glasses. There were plenty of crappy movies made during the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s that never used any CGI effects.

Comment Re:LGPL-3? (Score 2, Informative) 199

Short of getting into a pointless pissing match to sort out all of the minor semantic differences between what we've both said, it's effectively something you can essentially change the license of by only including the statement that it contains some BSD code. Or at least, you can release your software under any license you choose even if it includes BSD code.

There is no minor semantic difference. You just have poor reading comprehension. What that statement is saying is that you can create derived works using BSD license code and release the program as a whole under a proprietary license. But the license to the BSD code is still covered under the BSD license.

You yourself have pointed out several times in this thread that you can do this. The nit-picking is identifying every little way in which one is ever so slightly is semantically different from the other.

I've pointed out that one can create works using BSD code and release that under a different license. But this isn't the same as saying you can relicense BSD code at your will. There is a major difference between the two.

Comment Re:Better Then CGI (Score 1) 271

What made the original star wars great was the animitronics for all the characters instead of jar jar binks super imposed cartoon characters.

Because Jar-Jar would have ceased to be utteryly annoying if it had been an animatronic instead of CGI? You're seriously claiming that?

Comment Re:Better Then CGI (Score 1) 271

good old fashioned compositing almost always create a more compelling, stylized look

Actually pretty much all people doing SFX were happy when digital compositing became viable because optical compositing had some many downsides. Blurry picture, exaggerated grain structure, and all sorts of other generational loss that came from optical compositing were not beloved as "stylized looks".

Comment Re:Better Then CGI (Score 1) 271

The real issue is that people like Jim Henson were masters of their trade. Today, any idiot can fire up some software and make an alien who looks 100x "better" than Yoda. However, the mastery isn't there, and it's obvious to everyone except those to whom newer means better.

Implying that there were no people who were working with puppets in the 70s that weren't master puppeteers. Secondly, any idiot has been able to fire up software since the 80s and make badly done CGI. What's your point supposed to be?

Comment Re:LGPL-3? (Score 1) 199

Which, other than the need for attribution, doesn't really restrict you much.

Sure it doesn't. But it doesn't allow you to relicense the code under something else without the permission of the copyright holder.

But, yes, one occasionally forgets that Slashdot is well populated with semanticists and nit-pickers. ;-)

What nitpicking? You claimed one can fork BSD code and change the code's license. That's wrong.

Comment Re:v2.0? (Score 0, Redundant) 199

So basically you attempted to contradict my statement with your first line and then backed it up with the second. Yes, cause 3 DEs is clearly insufficient! Linux is only being held back from stealing all of Microsoft's market share because it only has 3 DEs to choose from! Clearly if it had had 15 by now it would already be the winner!

Comment Re:Better Then CGI (Score 1) 271

Are you kidding? Yoda looks like a rag doll in the originals. The cantina puppets are pretty bad and Jabba's palace is a B-quality muppet showcase. If anything, CGI is producing a seamlessness that is impossible with the old techniques.

Exactly. These people try to claim that puppets and animatronics were so realistic and yet you go back to watch those old movies and it's laughable at how fake they looked.

Comment Re:Oh God queue the fucking wingnuts (Score 1) 242

To expand further this is an excellent reason why "original intent" is especially bunk:

Original intent presumes that there is a single, unified intent behind a text. In the case of the Constitution, the Philadelphia Convention was composed of over fifty men, who spent an entire summer compromising and arguing over provisions that were interpreted very differently the moment the Constitution's text became public.[5] It is far from clear, therefore, that those fifty-plus men had—i.e. agreed upon—a single original intent of the text.

Oh and that citation in the quoted wiki section is a comparison between the Federalist papers and the Anti-Federalist papers. Both written by "founding fathers" and both with disparate views.

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