metadigital

Wrong. Dangerously ludicrous. M-theory does not do away with the Big Bang. The evidence that everything emerged from a 'fireball' with a temperature of 10 billion degrees, expanding on a timescale of one second, is now very compelling and uncontroversial. [Tuesday, 10 April, 2001, 15:49 GMT 16:49 UK, Before the Big Bang] The Big Bang, if it happened, was a massive explosion of all matter and energy (mostly energy until some of calmed down a bit) that occured at least approximately 15 billion years ago. Are you saying that crops won't grow on a volcanic mountainside? Volcanic soil is one of the richest sources of nutrients for plants. (Look at Papua New Guinea, Hawaii, Indonesia, etc.) Now think about a few billions of years, like from when the Earth was still cooling three billion years ago until 2.5 billion years ago, when armoured anthropods first skulked out of the sea onto land. Furthermore, the aptly named Hubble telescope has maped large areas (still a small fraction of the sky); the galaxies (like our own small Milky Way, which contains hundreds of millions of star systems, and Andromeda, the next closest galaxy, which is on a glancing collision coarse with our galaxy, so in a few billion years there will be some stars smacking into each other) are all aligned in equi-distant spherical waves from an as-yet-invisible source, much like layers of an onion. Eventually we will be able to see the point of origin, it's just out of range at the moment. (We need to build a telescope bigger than an Astronomical Unit (AU) or so, by launching geostationary satellites at a large distance from Earth). Also, a background noise has been detected that was predicted to be the "echo" of the Big Bang. It is now in the infrared spectrum, but clearly there as predicted by the Big Bang model, in the correct form. You are also not including the later corollory to the Big Bang, which includes the "Big Crunch", so that all the matter and energy in the universe will reach a point where the energy released from the Big Bang is exhasuted and gravity is still strong enough to reverse the process and drag everything back into the single point again. Then it all happens again, a perpetual exploding implosion. The other outcome is that the energy released is not exhausted before universal gravity is overcome, and instead of a Big Crunch, there is a slow, lingering cooling of the universe as everything just keeps careening off forever into limitless space, forever. Simple really.

That is not only implausible, but also ludicrously impractical. How did she eat for one hundred years, sucking worms out of the nearby dirt? I'll wager GL had something to do with this exceptional plot.

Well, they are a lot scarier in the novelisations ... no need for the added thrill of the stupendous special effects to bouy you through the show on a wave of tremulous excitement, just sheer hard-edged science fiction (with perhaps a tiny dash of fantasy, for relish).

My brother went to Duntroon Miltary Academy in Canberra, Australia, and did a quick summer vacation in West Point, so the thought had occurred to me. I would jump feet first except my language skills are not my best feature ( :D ) -- I'm sure I could achieve a working knowledge to achieve some further study in the Classics, sure would like to learn more Greek, Persian and Carthaginian (fat chance!) philosophy and even mathematics -- there is good reason to believe that the maths we have is all the "high art" stuff; the mundane calculations were seen as beneath a lot of the scribes (after all everyone knew it), and so a lot of it may have been lost.

He obviously should choose a different line of work that animal husbandry, as he doesn't seem to be very capable. Maybe auto-mechanic?

The problem with the modern age is all this namby-pamby liberal thought about "protecting the innocent civilians". They'd all join up as soon as they could, and the womenfolk are all part of the fifth column and black market supply lines ... as Pope Innocent III is cited as saying "Kill 'em all, God will know who's innocent." A couple of tactical neutron bombs, the ones that have a short half-life, so the radiation is down to manageable levels after a couple of weeks, are all that is required to clear out the area. Then it's terra nullius, as far as international law goes, and finder's keepers!

Go for your lightsabre reward, turn to the DS and use the Force to obtain your loot!

Either that or no points deducted for either.

If you watch the DVD special edition re-re-re-release of the original series he goes through some of the intial story ideas, some of the reject castings (like Kurt Russell for Han Solo) you will pick up some clues as to the original story and how fluid his script was. I am also pretty sure that's where you'll find the interview where he blathers on about themes and how he also wanted to have the "mythic archetype" of the child versus the fallen father. I don't have my copy to hand, but I can always look it up later (if someone on the forum doesn't jump in first to confirm this). The EU was written after George Lucas wrote his original Star Wars opera, back in the early 1970s. That is when he came up with the "Darth Vader" character, well before he evenconsidered the remote possibility that there would be any other Darths, let alone what a blinking Sith was. Therefore it does have everything to do with the misguided notion that "Darth" comes from "DArk siTH" and "Vader" from "inVADER".

Sounds like it is at least a spilt decision -- and therefore there are a few Council members that believe as Qui-Gon did. However, I would wager that there were few precedents for refusing a Jedi Knight's choice of padawan, and that this had more to do with the Council's grudging acceptance rather than a true "acceptance" of Anakin.

Spoiler: Just because it seems that everyone is choosing to come along of their own free will doesn't mean there is such a thing as free will. All that is required is the illusion for us to believe that we are free to choose, for us to think we are actually making the choice. We could be as fixed in what we do as the characters in a film. It's an illusion.

Watch out for T3, he's a sneaky one.

Well there's one clear reason: Most action movies are for men (most! not all) Therefore, the producers want a big crowd to watch their films so one thing leads to another....I actually prefer movies with a lead female, but who has sass and wears real clothes! Not some skimpy, slutty, bikini-like outfit. Like Princess Leia. She has sass and wears real clothes, not metal biki- well that was ONE TIME! She was Jabba's slave! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> For some unfathomable reason there were a lot of films with strong female protagonists with good scripts, made by Hollywood in the Fifties. I'm not sure why this trend ended. I for one would like to see more of them.

I was thinking of wearing that Dancers Outfit throughout the entire game. Playing the part of an evil ex-stripper out to kill off all her old clients. I'm kinda curious if anyone says something funny about wearing that outfit in the later parts of the game. After seeing how useless my companions were playing solo does have it's allure. However, I am looking forward to converting them to Sith Slaves, and that requires me to bring them along. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> There is a mod or two available to increase the difficulty of the standard game (counteract the bonus due to the PC level, for example). Also, someone has already done a "dancer's uniform" run through; so it is eminently possible (and apparently a lot of fun). I don't think anyone has added comments for the outfit later on, though, but do post if you hear any. epee (<{POST_SNAPBACK}>) has done some soloing. Another exploration you might like to try is using different companions on the planets. e.g. Apparently G0-T0 and Visas are a good pair for Korriban.

Apathy.

Exactly: that is what makes Kreia the One True Prophet, the one who will save us all from the slavery of a fate predestined by the selfish, malevolent Force. We, the Anti-Force Force, will take up force against the Force and force it into oblivion.

There's a spoiler forum for this stuff. <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm pretty sure everyone talking here has played the game in some shape or form. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Irrelevant. Some of the people who read these fora have not. And what should we do with the Spoiler forum, then? Don't be lazy. And impolite. And ignorant. Use the Spoiler tags and the Spoiler forum for outright discussion of plot and characters.

That is exactly what I was referring to. Killing Darth Maul, in effect, was Obi-Wan's trial. And the Council refused Obi-Wan permission to train Anakin. Then they promoted him to Jedi Knight, and he took "anyone" to be his padawan, which just happens to be Anakin.

Sliath, please use the SPOILER tags to hide SPOILERS! <_< Just put "Spoiler" and "/spoiler" in square brackets, like all the other codes, around the spoiler. Please. Thank you. You have no way of determining that Destiny is fixed and Free Will is an illusion.

I'm sure they could mount a retrospective law suit. "The sound of Galvatron's arm-mounted laser cannon firing is a modified version of the sound of Megatron's fusion cannon." Perhaps they didn't copyright it in Japan? (Certainly China doesn't -- or at least didn't -- recognise international copyright law. I think they may have had to recently, to keep their "Most Favored Trading Nation" (sic) from the US ... ) Maybe you might get a free lightsaber if you email GL and tell him he can sue Hasbro ... then again, doesn't Hasbro make the SW action figures? Maybe they've got a deal going?

Another writer I dislike! (Yes I dislike quite a few authors.) Im sure he wrote some worthwhile books, however the only one of his I have read (as summer reading) was "The Red Pony." Possibly among the worst books ever written. Heres a synopsis: Boy gets a pony. Pony dies. Boy gets another pony. Pony dies. Boy gets another pony who dies while giving birth to another pony. The End. P.S. This may be a slightly exaggerated account. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Steinbeck is all about the pain and suffering of the disposessed working class. You want to read a painful novel (pun intended), read "The Grapes of Wrath". Ugh.

a. Yep, everyone's equal under the British class system, Monarchy, nobility, middle classes and working classes -- "Johnny Foreigner" was allowed to be in the last two, with the occassional knighthood for a carrot to keep the cogs of empire oiled. b. No, the alternative would have been to be culturally sympathetic. It makes no big difference, however, as you say, because sooner or later the people would hopefully learn to live as "neighbours", whether in or out of some arbitrary political boundary. Like the Balkans. I do think that the British have demonstrated a much more capable hand at setting up countries for independence; however they have had their share of failures, too. And Britain was not fledging countries for altruistic reasons, either; the Empire contained the necessary ingredients to expand and defend itself, right up to the near-monopoly of rubber plantations from Malaysia, required for the tyres of automobiles and casings of electric cables. Some of the atrocities committed in the name of Empire were so appauling that as soon as the British public were made aware of them they were curtailed: like Rhodes raping central Africa before France could beat them to it, and Germany could get started. c. That's just a cop out; an excuse to cover a poor job. If the resolution was to do the job properly then no-one would have any reasonable argument against a longer withdrawal. The question your avoid is, Why -- if the British were so interested in Nation building -- did the actual core activities take place in that small fraction that was the end of the occupation? Nation-building was a side-effect of a good, strong Empire. Then again, I'd rather be an ex-British colony than an ex-Spanish or Portuguese South American Banana Republic.

As I said, I'm not sure what back-formation the EU have used to justify and explain this (because I don't read SW comics or novels), but that is the "canonical reason" from the films. The fact is that GL used "Dark Father" *** SPOILERS *** because Darth Vader was the Dark Father of Luke. *** End of 1980 SPOILERS *** GL had always planned this plot twitst in some form, at times he was going to write the script so that it was not hidden at all. So the garbage in the EU trying to make sense of the GL ramblings is a nice try to detangle the meaning of "canon" events, but it certainly bears no resemblance to the historical facts.

But Kreia is the One True Prophet! She knows the ultimate truth, that the Force is controlling the Force Sensitives of the universe to fulfil its own secret agenda: holding out the illusion of free will when secretly seeking its own hidden self-aggrandizement. The Anti-Force Forces will take up Kreia's banner, hold the Standard high and fight to the end of the Force!