Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

At 10/22/14 01:51 AM, HollowedPumkinz wrote:

At 10/21/14 09:28 PM, Profanity wrote: Also, this tech is (A) not new, (B) not innovative, and (C) a publicity stunt by an earthquake mitigating structural engineer who wants to use high powered magnets to prevent building collapse. It's not going to lead to actual hover-boards.

Get that giant stick out of your ass dude, nothing has ever been original...EVER. Refining technology can be as exciting as "new" tech and the process of attaining the technology you so egregiously take for granted has been through the exact same process. Steve Jobs didn't "invent" the computer, he just made it readily available for mass consumer markets via the Macintosh. Henry Ford's automobile was not "innovative" or new, but the factory made parts that accompanied it and the ability to mass produce cars meant broader access to consumers.

This isn't actually going to result in "hoverboards" becoming mainstream. Carnegie didn't invent steel or the I-beam, he was a capitalist and a business butcher who traveled between Europe and the American Midwest converting new ideas into useful infrastructure. HENDO doesn't want to do that. They're solely interested in using an audience of 80s scifi fantasy addled dreamers to reach their target audience of structural engineers, civil engineers, and architects who are interested in using their patent.

The only way forward is through multiple trials and this is the best looking and most practical version of a "hover" board that there has ever been. Looking at the video of it, it seems like something that could very easily be mass produced and placed as an attraction in Amusement parks through out the country as well as entertainment based businesses like Chuck E Cheese, Dave & Busters and wherever Laser Tag and Bowling might be found. And that, buddy, is called progress.

Anything can be mass produced if you don't pay your South Asian laborers for their cancer treatments, continuing treatment for chemical induced paralysis, prosthetics for missing limbs, and pay the workers below a living wage.

First things first: actually invent the fucking thing. The Hendo Hoverboard only works over a flat sheet of non ferromagnetic sheet metal, only works for two minutes before the batteries are exhausted, and the mechanism of action is loud enough to completely ruin the experience. A toy is supposed to be a passive tool which encourages freedom. How many kids do you know with a giant sheet of aluminum in their parents' driveway? How many would use a toy that screeches like a dying ostrich for two minutes before it needs to be recharged?

Second move: is it better than analogous products? Skateboards run on any flat surface. If you can't even do that, the novelty of marketing and reduced friction probably isn't going to overcome the $10,000 price tag or need for ear plugs.

So yeah, I know you really wanted to be a Debbie Downing bitch but you're point lacks any substance and it doesn't keep this product from being seriously cool, regardless of its lack of revolutionary design and industry changing ambition.

I'm point? You must mean I'm on point. Because this is utter shit. WalMart had better skateboards and Drones are better hover toys.

At 10/21/14 09:19 PM, Seasons wrote: I would get excited about hoverboards, but I just can't get over the title of this thread and its inappropriate use of the apostrophe. But, yeah, I guess it's cool and all. Can't wait until I'm like fifty and the technology has improved.

Yeah, me too. The typo in the title might be excusable of he hadn't fucked it up again in the body. @Knights should just ask for this thread and his account to be deleted.

Also, this tech is (A) not new, (B) not innovative, and (C) a publicity stunt by an earthquake mitigating structural engineer who wants to use high powered magnets to prevent building collapse. It's not going to lead to actual hoverboards.

Several magnetic field inducers with laptop batteries which allow a person to glide along long sheets of non-ferromagnetic metal for several seconds. What a great way to spend $10,000.

At 10/21/14 12:12 PM, Knights wrote:

At 10/21/14 12:10 PM, FinaLee wrote:

At 10/21/14 11:58 AM, Knights wrote: Next on the list, flying DeLorean's that can travel through time.

Don't forget self-lacing shoes.

Are already being made.

Nike has already given up on making motorized laces.

Actual self-lacing shoes might be more like shape-changing shoes which adapt to the wearer and ground medium.

At 10/20/14 07:03 PM, X-Gary-Gigax-X wrote: Same goes for radio licenses basically saying you're allowed to talk on the radio.
Say yes to less federal power, Camaroa.

If we didn't have an FCC to partition, govern, and regulate the radio waves, it would have been impossible to use radiowaves to transmit information in the 20th century. Jamming, hijacking, and overriding signals isn't difficult, and anyone can gum up the works for a few hundred miles for as many dollars.

Tell me. Do you think that it's easy to go to every landowner in a 500 kilometer radius, paying each one a monthly stipend in exchange for them not jamming your radio signal? Do you think it's cost effective for everyone to be constantly embattled for the right to use a shared space? Does it make sense, fiscally, for us to postpone to proliferation of new communications systems just to allow every citizen the right to mask emergency signals for fun?

I don't think I need to tell you that having your competitors selling "Coca-Cola" with the exact same label, but made with cheaper ingredients, is detrimental to a business. Or "Advil" which contains no active medicinal ingredients.

At 10/20/14 12:58 AM, SentForMe wrote:

At 10/20/14 12:50 AM, Profanity wrote:

At 10/20/14 12:34 AM, tailsbuddy wrote:

At 10/20/14 12:27 AM, SentForMe wrote: So....if the topic of this thread is "Next Doomsday" when was the previous Doomsday?

The one that wiped out dinosaurs.

Are you sure it's not the ongoing Holocene Extinction? It's pretty big. And it's correlated to human population growth, just like climate change.

Human population has boomed like never before.

I don't know man, the Permian–Triassic extinction was pretty badass; 96% of all marine species, 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct, and the only known mass extinction of insects is nothing to sniff at. It makes the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction look like a walk in the park and the Holocene barely registers compared to it.

You should know. The Holocene Event is ongoing, but the introduction of technology to the equation seems to have made the timescale less relevant to the progress of the event. Assuming these sources are all correct, not only are species going extinct on a massive scale like previous cataclysmic events, but a species which catalyzes higher order environmental transformations is undergoing explosive population growth, new life is being engineered to serve the needs of that growing population, and the energy needs of that population are growing as they begin to create several entirely new forms of intelligent life. The governments of the planet have stockpiled enough nuclear weaponry to vaporize most of the biosphere.

Like any of the previous "doomsdays", there will be winners in all this and there will be losers. Even though our advancing technology makes it possible to leave this world behind, repair ecosystems, resurrect extinct species, and eliminate environmental pollutants: I have little faith that humanity would ever devote the resources to returning the earth to its natural state.

At 10/20/14 12:34 AM, tailsbuddy wrote:

At 10/20/14 12:27 AM, SentForMe wrote: So....if the topic of this thread is "Next Doomsday" when was the previous Doomsday?

The one that wiped out dinosaurs.

Are you sure it's not the ongoing Holocene Extinction? It's pretty big. And it's correlated to human population growth, just like climate change.

Human population has boomed like never before.

At 10/16/14 02:18 AM, Sense-Offender wrote: He's still posting. Well, sort of. You see, he and Memorize got together and...
fuuuuuuu... sion! HAAAH!

That is an absolutely amazing development. Newgrounds just… collects… new—uhhhhh—"victims".

@RaptorJesus

No, really. Let me stick it to you for good, asshole. I am wearing a T-shirt with a Mayan Calendar on it and there's a wooden Aztec version hanging on the wall behind my head. I can't even mention Mayan or Aztec cultures anymore without some utterly incompetent American ignoramus drooling out some idiotic tripe about how "2012 never happened".

Do your fucking research and stop insulting other people's cultures.

And fuck you.

At 10/17/14 12:29 AM, tailsbuddy wrote: Scientist predicted the world would end in 2000 because of computer malfunctioning

No they didn't, you fucking moron. Accountants and technology experts predicted that some computer code which wasn't wri properly might erase data that was tagged with dates that hadn't occurred on a two digit counting calendar.

In recent cases, Mayans predicted that doomsday would fall on 21 Dec 2012,but neither did that happen as well.

No they didn't, you fucking moron. Ancient Mayans made a calendar which corresponded to their observations of the cycles of astronomical observations derived from generations who lived in Chile, which has a very clear view of the night sky. The calendar was only written to reach the end of the 13th baktun because that was the mathematical end of their system, being a cycle, which meant that baktun 1 would be December 22, 2012.

Ethnocentric American assholes took the most prevalent cultural icon from the Mexican, Central American, and South American cultures, disregarded all logic, and tried to repackage it as a racist "hey white folks, look at how dumb the natives and conspiracy nutters are" cultural meme.

At 10/18/14 04:45 AM, Sensationalism wrote:

At 10/18/14 02:45 AM, NeonSpider wrote: No. Colors don't exist apart from in your mind or in the minds of other beings. What exists is the wavelengths. Your brain interprets them as colors, as do the brains of certain other organisms. So pink is a color just as much as any other color.

I couldn't have said it better. Great answer, Neon!

Making exception for the fact that it's wrong, it's a good answer.

Any visible light is reduced by the human eye to luminance and color. Anatomically, this is because the rod cells detect the intensity of the light and cone cells detect the wavelengths of a small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Each wavelength of light is converted through the photoelectric effect into an electrical signal which travels along the optical nerve into the rest of the brain, to be processed.

Now, for each color, the energy of each electrical impulse corresponds directly to the wavelength of the light striking the cone cells of the cornea. Those wavelengths exist as irreducible physical phenomena whether they are observed by a creature or not. However, for the composite image known as pink, the electric signals come in two distinct types. One type is the "overloaded" cone cell, which happens when more than four Violet and more than four Red photons strike a single cone cell, causing it to send a signal which instructs the brain to be prepared to react to harsh light in case the rod cells detect a change in luminance. The other type is that of greater than eight Violet photons striking a cone cell while greater than eight Red photons strike another cone cell wired to the same or nearby spatial location. This is often disregarded as noise by the brain, but can be observed as a blue-red shift within the pink region. Before the image reaches the brain, the light reduces beyond Pink to two distinct rays, or eight distinct quanta. If you were to follow the quanta back in time to their origins, you would discover that Pink light can only originate from two or more independent atomic nuclei, whereas any real color can originate from a single electron orbital in a single nucleus.

At 10/18/14 01:08 AM, Sensationalism wrote:

At 10/17/14 11:50 PM, Profanity wrote: Pink is the combination of the Red (lowest frequency visible light) and Violet (highest frequency visible light) wavelengths which, when combined, trick your brain into filtering out Green wavelengths from the region your visual cortex has identified as "Pink". It is not a color.

Actually, you just explained how pink is a color.

Physically? No. It is two distinct colors with two distinct wavelengths. What you see is a mental concept which represents overloaded cone cells and damaged nerves. It is an illusion. Colors, unlike pink or black or white or a variety of other light types, can be produced using a single wavelength.

Pink is a pattern.

At 10/17/14 11:59 PM, NeonSpider wrote: It is a color, you dingus. You're just playing semantics now.

I mean, sure, it's a color "for certain definitions of the word color". But when we say a word we shouldn't have to include "for certain definitions of that word" as it is implied in the usage of the word itself.

Maybe. But only because conversational language is so damn forgiving. What it all boils down to in my view is that these supposed "colors" which people love—pink and black—are less color and more state of mind. They're entirely conceptual.

We identify surfaces as black if they absorb light, but there is nothing blacker than light which has never stopped moving away. Abyss is the blackest thing a man will ever see.

And pink? Staring directly at any star from within a light-hour will show you the pinkest hue you have ever seen. It will be the last color you have ever seen.

At 10/17/14 11:44 PM, NeonSpider wrote:

At 10/17/14 09:20 PM, Profanity wrote: Pink is not a color.

Lol, yes it is. Unless you're one of those people who try to pull this shit like "only primary colors are colors" in which case I hope you know yellow isn't a primary. "But muh art teacher said ..." Your art teacher was wrong.

And if you want to get really technical, colors don't exist anyway. The only thing which exists is light waves and colors are mere interpretations of the eyes of the being experiencing those light waves.

And if you want to get really technical, and then slap on another layer of really technical:

Pink is the combination of the Red (lowest frequency visible light) and Violet (highest frequency visible light) wavelengths which, when combined, trick your brain into filtering out Green wavelengths from the region your visual cortex has identified as "Pink". It is not a color.

At 10/17/14 11:01 PM, NeonSpider wrote: I personally think gender divisions in most sports are pretty stupid anyway. It'd make much more sense to divide people up based on individual traits rather than gender.

There are no gender divisions in sports. Sports are divided by weight class, skill class, sex, and geographical location. IF there were gender divisions, a man who identifies as a woman would be relegated to the women's division.

Testosterone and estrogen levels change athletic performance during training, after training, and leave significant biological alterations for years and sometimes decades after they are no longer present. In some situations, the medical regimen used to change sexes would be a severe advantage over other athletes, and a crippling disadvantage in others. The complexities of endocrinology are probably too much for the modern sporting social apparatus to handle without treating each case differently, if the goal were to level the playing field.

For example, height divisions, weight divisions, strength divisions, and other physical attribute divisions, depending on what gives advantage in the particular sport. A stronger person will be placed in the stronger divisions whether they're male or female and so forth.

Yes this will mean that probably more men will be in the higher strength divisions than women so you shouldn't see much difference other than some very strong women in the higher strength divisions and some less strong men in the lower divisions.

I think it's ridiculous that, for example, there aren't height divisions in basketball when clearly height gives a huge advantage in that game.

You are misunderstanding the point of a team sport. Short players like Spud Webb (the 5'7" legend) may not have the advantages of taller players, but they use other skill sets to coordinate with their team on a standard goal.

Modern sports doesn't have the tools, the wherewithal, the capacity, nor the discipline to admit transgender athletes into either the league representing their chosen sex or their birth sex in a way which accounts fully for the advantages or disadvantages from their medical history. They have enough trouble dealing with athletes who are using surgical alterations, hormones, performance enhancing drugs, or biomedical training techniques. However, allowing transgender athletes to join the league of their current sex would improve public relations and possibly increase viewership. Therefore, it would be in the best interests of any sports league to allow transgender athletes to choose which league to play in.

Black is not a color, either.

Pink is not a color.

At 10/17/14 12:00 AM, sweet21 wrote:

At 10/16/14 11:54 PM, Obsix wrote: Thanks to people like you I don't want to contribute to Newgrounds

Aaaand there goes another. This is a shame. People leave, and nobody comes to take their place, and this is exactly why.

But we have plenty of temperamental mods who are opposed to using emotive language! And you will have so many opportunities to discuss only the subjects which are 'interesting' by their standards! You have literally dozens of people to type positively toward! Dozens!

Where is your Logic™?

Sorry about that, guy. SCTE3 is new around here as a mod. When users first start moderating, they go through a phase where they act like complete assholes and put an end to discussions they don't want to have. Most grow out if it eventually.

Don't think that that one person's opinions reflect the rest of the forums here. We'll debate/argue/discuss/chat with you on a bunch of topics. Just don't expect positive interactions with the moderators.

At 10/16/14 09:04 PM, Rad wrote: We still share the rest of the country with Texas. An infected Texan is free to travel anywhere else in the US and infect more people. Texas especially accepting more incoming flights sounds like a terrible idea given their recent track record.

Which is exactly why the CDC has protocols to isolate potentially infected patients who are a danger to

Yes, I understand that we can't just close the borders and make the problem magically go away, but why, why, why allow potentially infected people to fly into the US, with an infectious disease with a 2 week incubation period and a 40-70% chance of death upon contraction? Why? What benefit could that have for us?

The people who are trying to come to the United States are choosing us because they have family here. They aren't just going to choose to go somewhere else because we've stopped accepting flights from three countries. They will still try to enter the United States by going to a country which is still allowed to fly to the US. Or, they will go to black market solutions, assuming the identity of an individual from another country in the region.

With the current strategy, we know where these people are coming from, what their schedule looks like from the time they leave the hot zones, and we can use flight manifests to track the social connections of potentially infected persons to understand risks as they become relevant. If somebody tries to board a plane with a high temperature, they're going to be quarantined. If they try to avoid quarantine, they're going to be shot.

Without all that, we suddenly have potentially infected West Africans who are lying about where they came from, shielded by fake identities, hiding in a group of travelers from an uninflected country, and who are anonymous enough that we won't be able to find their relatives in the US.

Great. Let's have the FAA declare Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea to be disaster zones and stop all flights.

World health officals already gave up in Sierra Leone, they are, for all intents and purposes, disaster zones. I wish it wasn't the case, I wish that the world smothered this disease before it got this bad, but we didn't.

Then we can apologize directly to the heads of state of Guinea-Bisseau, Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Niger.

A lot of these countries actually do have all their ducks in a row and are successfully containing / quarantining / blocking Ebola patients.

Your first link was Nigeria, a country I hadn't listed. A country which doesn't have easy land routes to the infected countries.

Sorry guys, we're the most powerful and medically advanced nation on the planet, but we can't take the chance of several of your neighbors sending infected Ebola carriers to our hospitals.

YES. Ebola will kill an American just as easily as it will kill an African. We have had success with single cases in the past, but do you really think we can handle 10 infected at the same time? 100?? All without getting anyone else infected in the process and continuing the cycle?

YES. If we don't let our healthcare workers become infected, then we shouldn't have any trouble with the number of patients who might show up at our international doorstep. If we start sending more supplies and military support to the affected nations, WHO, MSF, and the missionaries in West Africa won't need to pull their workers out.

They're closing their borders Profanity, they're not letting them in. They're going to end up faring better than us in the long term as far as Ebola prevention goes if we don't close our borders to incoming flights.

You can't actually close a border; that's just an expression. It's just a deterrent, like locking the front door to your house. Money is enough to get you through closed roads, like a lock picking set. Otherwise, people can cross those imaginary lines on foot, off-road vehicles, or large groups rushing the order with brute force.

Doctors without borders is truly an organization filled with awesome people, and they have far more intellect and guts than me. Let them fly and do their job, let the medical supplies travel freely. but you must be daft to think that letting the average civilian fly from West Africa to the US is seriously a good idea in any respect

Or, maybe, think tanks have already devised solutions to counteract the spread of diseases and it's better to follow protocols instead of making hasty decisions which will cause more problems.

Great idea. You for State Rep, 2018.

No need, they were already saying this for a while.

Why so hostile anyway? What did I do to you?

I think you should run for HOR as a Republican. They love running campaigns using fear and hasty decisions. You'd fit right in, too. This and the next two election cycles will be full of GOP Congressional hopefuls playing on fear and flaming "Obamacrats" for not making needlessly expensive and destructive decisions.

At 10/16/14 08:07 PM, Rad wrote: we would be ruined by an unchecked Ebola outbreak.

It's not the entire US which has difficulty in coordinating to protect its citizens. It's states like Texas which pride themselves on being fundamentally opposed to spending money on better HazMat suits, improved facilities, and cooperating with the CDC.

That's sort of like being run over by a steamroller. Or running away from a lava flow. Or some other extremely slow-moving object. Texas has a history of standing in place and proclaiming that the benevolent power of the free market and their faith in God will stop any impending doom.

The least we can do is stop directly flying people in from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Yes, I understand that we can't just close the borders and make the problem magically go away, but why, why, why allow potentially infected people to fly into the US, with an infectious disease with a 2 week incubation period and a 40-70% chance of death upon contraction? Why? What benefit could that have for us?

Great. Let's have the FAA declare Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea to be disaster zones and stop all flights. Then we can apologize directly to the heads of state of Guinea-Bisseau, Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Niger. Sorry guys, we're the most powerful and medically advanced nation on the planet, but we can't take the chance of several of your neighbors sending infected Ebola carriers to our hospitals. Instead of coming here, now they're cramming into cars and busses to head to your countries, hoping to spend their bottom dollar to fly away from West Africa. Potentially causing more outbreaks or causing such an unmanageable surge of travel that your overworked officials who don't have the medical systems to deal with Ebola patients just decide to abandon their posts and join the exodus to East Africa.

The US is not ready for Ebola, the US doesn't have nearly enough serum or properly trained medical staff / containment facilities to afford flying in more and more Ebola positive people. We may be a first world country but that means nothing to a virus like Ebola, a virus that has already killed more than two September 11th's combined. I'm happy that Australia has a hold on this, but the US is not capable of handling this kind of thing.

Stop flights from Ebola positive countries please.

And then apologize to Médicine Sans Frontières when we seal off our borders, causing the three-nation pandemic which can be treated from Monrovia to become a twelve nation pandemic which requires an order of magnitude more funding just to cover travel expenses and bleach.

Great idea. You for State Rep, 2018.

1. All procedural law enforcement is done using autonomous drones flying regular routes based on detailed population data.
2. Most cars on the road are autonomous , behaving more like lounges, meeting spaces, bedrooms, and bathrooms on wheels.
3. A majority of all work is completed through telecommunications, rather than travel. Travel becomes ceremonial, a luxury, and a security protocol.
4. Rushed deliveries are completed by autonomous flying drones.
5. Routine deliveries are completed by ground based drones.
6. All first world countries except for USA have Universal Healthcare. Under the "Us 1st" campaign, healthcare and disease control are made into free market systems by mandate. Conservative rationale holds that families which cannot pay to keep their members healthy are paying the toll for being uncompetitive in the 20th and early 21st centuries.
7. The cost for manufacturing with automation decreases to pennies per hour (it's currently dollars per hour), which eliminates all sweatshops worldwide while enriching factory owners, intellectual property rights holders, and IP lawyers while disenfranchising millions of laborers.
8. Aging royal family members, politicians, celebrities, and other high earners begin to look and behave five, ten, even twenty years younger than the other members of their generations.
9. Although most of the governing workload has been completed by reliance on computers since the 90s, Estonia becomes the First Nation in the world to elect a cognitive computing system to hold a government office.
10. New Beijing experiences an outbreak of Influenza in one of its farming habitats which is blamed on a visiting scientist from SpaceX Laboratories at Musk. Tensions between the Socialist and Capitalist nations on Earth rise as China threatens to lock down the independent facility to eradicate the virus.

At 10/15/14 04:03 PM, wildfire4461 wrote: People actually are blaming Obama now: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-risking-u-ebola-outbreak-091500185.html

Well it IS election season.

This ad from the liberal group 'Agenda Project' is entitled Republican Cuts Kill

Thomas Eric Duncan, Oct 1, 2014 (symp Sep 25, 2014)

Oct 10, 2014 - First healthcare worker (Nina Pham)

Oct 14, 2014 - Second healthcare worker (unnamed)

So far so good on the 50ish Dallas residents TED had contact with.

At 10/15/14 03:21 AM, Gagsy wrote: I wonder if when bread came along people asked what would come after it. Hmm.

Things which were subsequently developed from Bread:
Beer
The sandwich
Refutation of the theory of spontaneous generation
The toaster
Sliced bread
LSD
Bread-sized Ziplock baggies
Low-carb diet crazes
The gluten free diet craze

I have just read that viral short "Ebola, A Nurse's Perspective" and thought a few of you could straighten your opinions out by reading it.

TL;DR: Hyperbole isn't helpful. People need to stop going around the internet saying that the only way to contract Ebola is by licking the bleeding eyeball of a person who is in quarantine. This disease is difficult to contain even in first world countries, especially in metropolitan areas surrounding international airports.

You have safety in numbers, but don't distance yourself from responsibility just because you're statistically unlikely to contract the virus yourself.

At 10/14/14 11:03 PM, Phonometrologist wrote: I would argue that Weyland did know as the crew were ordered to investigate, and they did not care whether it was dangerous. Moreover, that is probably why families were sent to colonize there in the first place.

I'm sure Weyland knew that there was something anomalous, but he didn't know anything from after Ash's treachery.

But perhaps that is just me looking too much into it, but how else would you explain them finding that planet again in the entire universe, and it's hard for me to believe that once Mother intercepted the transmission that it wasn't also sent to their employer. Ash corresponded with them from the very beginning.

I don't think it's you "looking too much into" anything. I think it's you not understanding basic astronomy.

The entire universe?? Do you realize how insulting to common sense that is?? Obviously they're not traveling farther than our local star cluster to find resources and planets to settle. They're not even leaving a sliver of our spiral arm of the Milky Way. It would take millions of years to go far enough to lose track of any specific star. That's like walking down the street to a bodega and then expecting to never find the same store ever again, because if you tried you're pretty sure you'd end up in Djibouti or Polynesia. Actually, it's like dropping your cell phone in a couch and expecting to find it in orbit around Neptune.

There's a fine line between reasoning and making excuses for these writers, though lol.

It's not a writer's job to hold your hand through the entire movie.

At 10/14/14 10:45 PM, FurryGod wrote:

At 10/14/14 08:40 PM, Profanity wrote:

At 10/6/14 03:14 PM, FurryGod wrote:

Ooga booga booga.

Okay that kind of make sense, but the point I was trying to make is of all the planets out there it's kind of a coincidence they colonized that one in the previous film. It's just seemed too convenient.

I can't remember where I read the overall plot, but basically Weyland-Yutani pays poor people to fix their machines and settle planets while they're being terraformed. That's not the only planet which has been colonized, but it's also not the only planet which has been visited by the Engineers. The engineers have built infrastructure and taken over so many solar systems that their power is supposed to be frighteningly omnipotent. The entire literature has been standardized by James Cameron, it might be in book format.

Anyway, she was picked up not-too-far from the planet because she was in orbit in that solar system. She didn't have a ship powerful enough to leave.

At 10/14/14 10:19 PM, NeonSpider wrote: tl;dr *cough cough* calling your bullshit *cough*

I already have dibs. And he was referencing Richard Ap Meryk

Also, the scholarly resource I provided earlier (this'un) discusses Carrew's belief that Vespucci was a prevaricator who changed his name from Ilbiergo go to Amerigho out of an obsession with America and the desire to edit himself into a prominent place in history.

At 10/14/14 09:55 PM, Bit wrote: In Avatar…unobtainium

This actually happens in solid resource mining. Companies lease or rent the exploration rights to small plots in an area and use computers to determine the shape and distribution of mineral resources in the area. They don't buy the rights to mind until they've found the plot with the core of the resources. There are many reasons for it, but basically it's less expensive to play with money above ground and hope yo buy the mining rights for the most concentrated deposits than it is to shell out mining rights for satellite deposits which would contain more slag which costs money to remove during processing and then dispose with. Also, it's explained during the film that they've had trouble making the unobtainium from smaller deposits worth mining. Especially when faced by the prospect of mining an enormous deposit of the stuff.

Think of it like this. Nobody goes into backyards in North America to harvest iron ore from granite. That iron can still be used to demonstrate principles of electromagnetism, but it's mixed in with a lot of other elements. Instead, profit-seekers probe around to find the highest concentration and maximize the efficiency.

Pics or it didn't happen.