TPH Forum
General => General => Topic started by: Swiftman on August 04, 2005, 03:42:31 am
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There comes a time when movies that have almsot all computer generated effects get tedious and tiresome. They don't look good, you can tell they're computer, they aren't good 3D, and they jsut generally look like crap. I hate moments like that.
However, this is not one of those times.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v605/Swiftman/stealth.jpg)
THIS little gem here is a wonder among wonders. In simpler words:
THIS MOVIE FUCKING ROCKS!
I thought Batman was the best movie ever, and that opinion hasn't changed. However, Stealth has EASILy beaten the Incredibles/Spiderman 2 tie for second. Now they're fighting for third, cuz STEALTH FREAKING RULES! Hell, even my mom liked this movie, and she's not tech buff at all.
IF IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR MY MOM, IT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE LOT OF YE!
Have fun! See Stealth, or the owl will eat you! (not a good thing)
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You mean Mr. Owl from those old Tootsie Roll commercials (What the hell happened to those)?
And yeah, Stealth looks pretty awesome.
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When I first saw the previews before Batman, I knew this would either be awesome to the max or extremely medicore. I'll probably watch it tomorrow, as it doesn't look like it'll finish downloading any time before that.
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I dunno, SY. I got he owl thing from Elgoonishshive, and he could have gotten it from anywhere.
And Lazlo, this movie is NOT mediocre. Not by any means. The trailers showed only about 2% of it's awesomeness. There is SO much more to the movie than fancy tricks and flying missiles.
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Speaking of the owl, does anyone know how many licks it takes to the center of a tootsie pop? Oh, and the movie is gonna be so cool!
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Speaking of the owl, does anyone know how many licks it takes to the center of a tootsie pop?
Yes. The exact number 1,378. No I'm not joking i actually waste dmy time doing this.
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Well, it would really vary depending on the person. How much acidity their saliva has, if they have smaller or larger licks. I'm sure someone could do it in under 1,000 licks easily.
edit: oh yeah/. the movie, it looks mediocre to me. I'm tired of hollywood failing horribly at making intelligent movies. Remember I Robot? *shudder*
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I've seen the previews, and I still think it looks pretty bad, especially since they brought back Hal as the villain. I've seen the preview and all I can say is ugh, a movie about a killer air plane, woopty freakin doo. I might see it when it comes out on video.
For those of you who don't know, Hal is a talking robot eye ball that controlled a big space station in 2001 a Space Odyssy. Hal was the bad guy.
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Spoilers!!!!11
(http://pic.templetons.com/burnpic/burn2/monolith.jpg)
I wish I had a monolith. . .
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Me too. And a troop of mindless monkey men to dance around it for hours while I floated in space and tried to get that damn robot to open those pod bay doors.
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It took me 1,200-something...
Anyway, I need to watch 2001 again, I haven't seen that movie in years..
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People, it's not as abd as you think. About half the movie is spent with the plane computer going haywire. Really, there's hardly as much emphasis as the trailers make it. And there's a lot of inner politics behind the computer, it's hard to explain, you JUST HAVE TO SEE THE AWESOME MOVIE!
Really, there is SO much the trailers don't show.
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This movie was created in response to the $1.75 billion dollars approved for research and develop of the United States of America's Class 1 -5 robotic army, to be submitted in burst over one decade. Estimated time of the entire system's completion: 2025. No, I'm not kidding. Working protoypes of each class have already been developed, the Class 1 robots being the killtypes. They move with bipedal rover treads, and are equipped with stabilization arms. They use a trycloptic camera eye, and are armed with special flares and an autogatling, at least right now. The issue is that robots keep humans from losing lives, supposedly. However it also makes war more of a game, and trusting machines with the lives of "friendly" or civilian humans, all based on some sort of programming or somehow giving the machines the ability to "think for themselves" is a scary thought to many people. Machines don't need to eat or sleep, and if they die so what? Some money down the drain, but that's cheaper than a life, some say. More importantly, these machines, especially the killers, have to be able to decide who's friend and who's foe. Not only that, but the Pentagon wants them to be autonomous, functioning in robot-only units, under the control of a single computer. If you think that sounds like Skynet... well you're right it's the same basic idea. If you think it sounds like a movie... well yeah it does, doesn't it. Take five minutes to think hard about it and the moral possibilities/ramifications for both arguments shan't be lost on you, I'd hope. Anyway, enjoy your thoughts.
Zaijian,
Tiger
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I jsut think Artificial intelligence should be avoided unless the computer is given no power to kill or harm and can be manually shut off (not just a program to shit it down, like pull the plug thing)
But I jstu think we should make mechs, and all problems for war will be over, cuz whoever has the most mechs, wins.
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Yeah. How many times have we seen computers and robots attempt to destroy the human race? The Matrix and Terminator movies were examples of that.
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But I jstu think we should make mechs, and all problems for war will be over, cuz whoever has the most mechs, wins.
Mechs are cool, but completely impractical for actual combat. I'd rather see mechs put to use in exibition matches, just fighting to fight, rather than fighting in a war.
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ZOMG!!! A GIANT CHICKEN WITH GATLING GUNS!!! THERE IS NO WAY WE CAN WIN A WAR AGAINST THAT!*
*what I would actually say if a battle mech attacked me
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What really makes a mech impractical is armoring and fuel. With our current technology, the most efficient way to deply heavy firepower, that is highly mobile and extremely well-armored, is the tank (I would like an M1-A1 Abrams for Christmas if anyone has a big enough paycheck... "depleted uranium shells not included" so that too). However, in most of the media in which you come across mechs, in particular MechWarrior, the improbabilities are taken care of. The need for an energy propulsion system capable of moving a machine that ways dozens of tons at high speeds or with limited flight is met. A mech can hold more weapons than a tank ever could, just by sheer size if not by copious amounts of robotic articulation. Furthermore, they have futuristic armor that makes them sturdy enough to withhold attacks from just about anything besides another mech. You have the armor to withstand an amount of firepower tha a tank is capable of delivering, size enough to carry more weapons than a tank could, and power to do it faster and with more versasitility. Gundams leave out inertia. Just turning around would knock an average person out form the gravitational force, but in a MechWarrior mech such movement is realistically achieved.
All we lack is the science.
But ultimately yeah, even if we could get a machine to walk (reliably) on two legs, it'd be better to stick with the tank until we fix some of those other problems, estne?
Zaijian,
Tiger
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And with the heavy armor comes the support form it.. If the metal around it is thick enough, you don't need to add any support trusses inside of, say, the legs. The armor alone is enough to support the weight. Now, say, in another mech-ish case, the H.A.R. from One Must Fall, the whole thing is a complicated system of megnets repelling and attracting in very complicated fashions, and it is controlled by a computer that a human psyche can literally 'jack into' and your body is left behind, and your mind controls the whole HAR like it was your own body. You can easily 'jack out' of it easily, and your back to your own human body. This has almost limitless applications. If you make an HAR small as a human, a handicapped person can jack in and leave their human body behind. (Like Cossette, if you've played One Must Fall) One in-game application of the HAR is deep space mining on moons like Ganymede, and another thing they do in the example of teh Chronos, it has a system with enough power to modify the flow of time itself, and it can cause an area-wide freeze to gain precious extra seconds in rescue missions. They don't use the Chronos functions elsewhere, since it's an area-effect thing, and they can't move the system near as effectively on a ship, so they stuck it inside of a 90-story mech.
I know that was a huge swarm of nerd-ism, but another thing I see is the jumpjets in mechs. Gundams can do it, because they're mainly in space. A Mech, however, looks to be MUCH heavier than a Gundam, so it would take incredulous amounts of thrust to make it air-born. I guess that's why the Mechwarrior games occur in 3052 (or something like that) but from what we have now, it's not possible.
And I think what the biggest obstacle in mech technology is the balance. A human can lift a foot and he can bend his body to maintain his balance, and thus not fall over. A Mech, however, has no such luxury and would fall on it's side everytime a foot was raised. They would have to make it so the mech wouldn't topple over everytime it stepped. How that would be fixed is my dunno.
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A mech doesn't need legs. If you got rid of the wildly flapping legs and arms, then a mech would be effective, though no longer a mech.
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Functioning legs are what makes a mech more maneuverable than a tank. The arms are superfluous though, and the legs would be as well if you could just fly around. That'd be what... a superarmored gunship? I'm all for that. My only point was that what makes a mech practical is that it can carry more, go more places, and take more damage than anything land-based. The only things it lacks are the power source and the armor, which 30 years ago was the same issue for a T-41 or an M1-A1, and a problem that isn't as fantastic as "Minovsky reactor", or "psi-linking", or "jack-up/ins", or "virtual reality skins" etc. etc. I think MechWarrior mechs run on nuclear power anyhow. Yeah, balance is a problem, but a mech would be just as good if not better with four legs, but regardless I mentioned the issue with robotic bipeds above, right?
Anyway, that was fun.
Zaijian,
Tiger