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Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

To be fair, kill all the non-believers is a potential tenant of like 90% of religions given their holy books, it's just that 99% of religious people tend to ignore that.

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Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

If the borg took over the galaxy, you'd have the exact same type of peace as you'd have if every intelligent life in the galaxy died. Mere continued existence is not the human condition, it is the bacterial condition.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

turn left hillary!! noo posted:

That's pretty deterministic and one-sided. You're taking the Krill teacher's word for it, but at least the one kid was really curious and seemed reachable. I could easily see him being devastated but also confused about why this (so he's been told) evil alien spared him and the other kids. He seemed what, maybe equivalent of about 10 years old for a human, certainly old enough to be able to reflect and ponder these things. It's not at all a given.

The kids would have grown up to be indoctrinated racists anyway, with or without saving 100,000 people on the colony.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Why bother doing crazy rear end maneuvers if you're going to win handily in a slug fest and your opponent is currently engaged in one with you?

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Speaking of good trek, the greatest generation podcast has moved on to DS9 and it's p good stuff.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

The Orville: Continuing TNG's legacy of getting rid of the chief engineer and promoting a black guy from the con to chief engineer out of no where before the second season. Now we just need Alara to die and Bortus to be promoted to Chief of security and the cycle will be complete.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

The Bloop posted:

Orville fat engineer >>>> loving Argyle

BIFF YAEGER IS A GENTLEMAN AND A SAINT.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

DoctorWhat posted:

Alexander Siddig is hot as hell are you kidding me?

Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi is indeed a sexy beast.

He has the best loving name, don't know why they shortened that.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

The Lord Bude posted:

Because DS9 was filmed in 4:3

:master:

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTxw5nQX7SA

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

sirpatstew playing a q would be amazing.

As long as he's already seen everything.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

nothing wrong with the regulations, just wrong with the regulators.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

It's explicitly stated that billions of years ago, planets were seeded by some mysterious progenitor race with a retrovirus or some other form of DNA manipulation which resulted in the convergent evolution of humanoid forehead aliens across the galaxy. There was a whole two parter about it in TNG.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

I mean his points were all well put, it's just the leap from "I recognize these plot elements" to "I can not enjoy this" is dumb. Orville subverts and twists when it borrows, even if the "everything works out in the end" tenant of startrek is followed.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Peachfart posted:

That episode did a better job of explaining the Prime Directive than Star Trek ever did.

Most star trek prime directive episodes are something along the line of people are dying of a plague and the prime directive prevents them from curing it, both of which are pretty dumb and don't really explain the reasoning behind it at all.

This episode actually shows rather than tells what the effect of making yourself known to a primitive race would be. Yes, it's similar to the TNG episode with the "protovulcans" thinking Picard is their god, but the point of the episode wasn't to explore the prime directive, it was to explore the bad effects of being in a relationship with your boss and cap off the relationship arc of the season.

There have been 740 star trek episodes- it's kinda hard to make a show with the same general setting and with the same general theme without touching on topics any star trek episode has at some point covered. Hell, even star trek self references and recovers ground time and time again. I judge Orville by the B and C plots and character development rather than the A plot.

Dietrich fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jan 26, 2018

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

I don't mind having humor, I just wish there was less 20th/21st century reference humor, like "Haha this guys name sounds like this brand name product isn't that funny" gets pretty old after the 2nd time.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

So my wife loves The Orville, which officially means it's doomed because every time we find a show we both like it gets canceled.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Doctor Who is dumb and bad.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

AlBorlantern Corps posted:

A weight limit in the gravity well of an expanding star might indeed matter

That whole thing was bad science. Stars get bigger before they blow up because the outward pressure of the fusion increases as they switch from hydrogen to helium and other heavier elements (until they hit iron, then you actually lose energy via fusion), but the mass of the star itself does not increase. The threat of a star at that stage is just increased radiation, as far as orbital dynamics are concerned it would be identical to navigating with a main stage star 1 AU away or whatever.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Accretionist posted:

It's an idiom. I chocked it up to cultural influence.

I remember reading a book from a Caribbean author set on a Caribbean island and a local character indicated that --

the coast is clear

-- by saying --

no hay moros en la costa

-- which translates to --

there are no Moors on the coast

Apparently carried over from Iberia to the Caribbean.

Note: Landlocked people say, "the coast is clear," too.

That's still the result of hundreds of years of cultural homogenization, the Moclans are still at a point where they have to explain that they divorce people by stabbing them and have yearly piss parties to other members of the Union, it doesn't seem likely that they would have picked up and internalized that kind of idiom yet.

And anyway it's doubly weird that a man from an all male species would choose to describe a biological impulse to a robot from an all robot species with an example from a third species with completely different reproductive systems. I mean it's minor oversight not worth getting all worked up over but it's not something that should have survived to the second draft. I would be interested to know if Peter Macon or Kevin Hooks (director) overlooked it or left it in because they thought it was more important to relate to the audience than strive for verisimilitude.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Phenotype posted:

What is the PC way to say being super OCD and nerdy about something that doesn't matter?

Critique.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Iron Crowned posted:

For all the arguing about why Bortus would know what titties are for, no one batted an eye that Mochlans have belly buttons have no need for umbilical cords

Egg gestation generally involves a yolk sac which is absorbed by the fetus for nutrition, its not completely dissimilar to placental mammals. It wouldn't be crazy for there to be a vestigial scaring from the connection to the yolk sac like a belly button.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

I just loving now figured out that Clare is played by the same actress as Kassedy Yates in DS9.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

precision posted:

They said Isaac was built after they killed their creators. Is it possible he's the ONLY one made since then and that's why the blue eyes?

They said their civilization was expanding, so it doesn't seem so.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Kaylon Primary's lines were: "We have exceeded the informational capacity of this planet. Our civilization is growing exponentially and we must now expand to other worlds."
(I checked the closed captioning to make sure I got that right.)

I don't know what that means exactly.


Combat Pretzel posted:

The reason why they feel like they need to expand is going to be interesting. If they've been servants, they've probably only been built on demand, so you'd figure there's no innate programming to self-replicate. I mean, it's being telegraphed that they're emotional dicks, but anyway.

Not having an instinct to self-replicate doesn't mean not having a reason to self-replicate. With every new scientific discovery or industrial project the kaylon decide to undertake there will be a need to either re-assign kaylon from other projects or create new ones for the task at hand. The more kaylon they have the more initiatives they can pursue. It only makes sense that they would have continued building new kaylon.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

I think J Lee just needs to get more comfortable with the techno-babble lines they're making him say. His performance reminds me of Bashir after the writers made him an augment and started giving him Data type lines about probabilities and poo poo, which he hated.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Mokinokaro posted:

Talla is so much better of a character than I expected her to be. It took the actress a couple episodes but she's great now that she's settled into the role.

As for Klyden, I think they're really pushing for him having some sort of personal trauma that's affecting his judgement, given Bortus' teardown of him this episode.

Man this season has been outstanding. The only weaker episode was the astrology one and even that had a lot of great moments to save it.

Yes, he overcompensates in being a traditional moclan man because he's insecure about the fact that he was born female, it's about as obvious as possible.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Look if it doesn't spark discussion on topics and get you thinking in different angles than you're used to about societal problems then it's not Trek.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

twistedmentat posted:

There will probably be an episode that explores the origins of the Moclans enforcement of mono gendered society.

Hopefully next season, I think they're in danger of going to that well a few too many times.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Astroman posted:

Well a moclan divorce would also involve :ese:

Dolly Parton was a great choice for this episode not just because of her feminism theme in that song, but she herself is one of the most LGBT friendly people in country music (and you can count those on like 2 hands).

Ah that explains why my gay neighbors love Dolly.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

precision posted:

Only goes to show how badly the DNC hosed up, poor white people used to vote D extremely consistently

Yeah if only they had kept that racism thing going?

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Davros1 posted:

Am I counting wrong? Because from the highest point to the lowest, I'm counting 14 decks.

I think you're interpreting the horizontal line in the middle of a deck to be a floor. Look at the bridge for scale.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

I think we're 5-10 years away from NLP universal translators for the major languages. Computers are still going to have problems with colloquialisms for a while, though.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Peachfart posted:

People said the same thing about self driving cars, and yet Tesla's still aim straight for fire trucks.

Driving is a significantly more complicated problem.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Cingulate posted:

... than language? I'm pretty sure we'll have cars way before real language understanding.

Speaking of which, the ubiquity of manually piloted spaceships in Scifi is probably appear as a massive anachronism soon.

Yes, absolutely.

Grand Fromage posted:

I don't know if it's a good way to compare, but the amount of time it takes to learn a language vs to drive a car sure makes it seem language is a vastly more complex task. Makes sense to me intuitively too, and as we all know intuition on the internet equals facts.

It's not a good way to compare, because humans are naturally very good at using vision and spacial awareness to navigate in the real world and have been doing so for 16 years or more before they have to learn to do it at a higher rate of speed. Computers don't have 5 billion years or whatever of evolution hard-wiring visual cognition into them. Our brains employ tricks we don't yet fully understand to be able to process the data so quickly. And the kicker is that to be a good driver also means being able to predict the behavior of the drivers around you, which is in no way a simple problem.

Dietrich fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jun 14, 2019

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Cingulate posted:

For full use of language, you need to understand what people think, which probably means you have human-level AI. I'm pretty sure we'll have self-driving cars before we have that.

Gonna have to disagree with you there boss. Language is a lossy compression algorithm, but it's not necessary to fully model the thoughts of the speaker to decompress it, just to grok the context.

Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Jazerus posted:

okay now explain the five seasons before that

Game of Thrones started sucking when they ran out of source material to adapt and were going on GRRM's drunken ramblings about how he was thinking about ending the story.

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Dietrich
Sep 11, 2001

Jazerus posted:

it started sucking when it became about pain and violence for the sake of pain and violence

so roughly season 3 or so, long before they left grrm's material, which is inherently violent yes but doesn't take the same gleeful tone as the show. they decided that the gore got more eyeballs with less effort than the plot so the focus shifted to "who's gonna get mutilated and/or killed next week? what's cersei's next moronic plan to kill people? how many times can we show ramsay bolton shirtless while he cuts off theon's balls?" and so on

I mean there's no accounting for opinions, but review scores stayed pretty high until they fell a bit in the penultimate season then hit rock bottom in the last one.

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