A place for complete-off-topic conversations that have nothing to do with Star Trek. The rules still apply here, stay civil.
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By Boffo97 (Dave Hines)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Retired Moderator
#557235
Looked up this thread for this thought I had while watching the original Back to the Future.

Between this film and the sequel, Marty's girlfriend Jennifer Parker was recast from Claudia Wells to Elisabeth Shue. But what if, says my nerdy, nerdy brain, there's an in-universe explanation for the change?

What if some small unnoticed change Marty made caused a difference which caused a difference which butterfly effects all the way down to affecting the exact time and circumstances under which Jennifer was conceived. Different sperm fertilizes potentially different egg (in this scenario it's possible Jennifer's mother is a completely different woman than before) and because of the difference in precisely which genes were inherited, there's a different but very similar Jennifer Parker who is presumably raised in at least mostly the same way the original was and thus still falls in love with Marty, etc.

Under this scenario, the other differences between the end scene of the original and the beginning scene of the sequel (Doc pausing when asked by Marty how he and Jennifer turned out, and Biff noticing the DeLorean fly away) are explainable: The timeline hadn't quite finished settling down yet after Marty's adventure in the original film, and these differences were caused by the small changes Marty made. Butterfly effect again.

Which leads to a potentially disturbing question: If this is all true, then is Marty guilty of unintentionally murdering his girlfriend (if that is indeed the correct term for retroactively causing someone to never exist) and causing her to be replaced by a similar but not quite identical duplicate?

...

Yeah, this is how my brain works. I can't really turn it off.
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#557700
Boffo97 wrote: Wed Jun 26, 2019 4:28 pm On the topic of Star Wars, specifically "A New Hope"...

Other than "Then there wouldn't be a movie", why didn't the Rebel ship get the Death Star plans and then just broadcast them to the entire galaxy? The Yavin IV base, along with everyone else, gets the plans and the Empire still has no idea where they are. Luke, Obi Wan, Han and Chewie basically don't even get into the story. Leia's lost, but she probably expected as much anyway.

And of course, our hero lives. Our hero... Jektono Porkins.

You might argue that the equivalent of subspace radio doesn't exist in Star Wars, except we do see one instance in The Empire Strikes Back of Vader talking to the Emperor over what must be FTL communications. Not to mention, Boba Fett had to tell Darth Vader that the Millenium Falcon was going to Bespin somehow.
The Death Star, as you noted, is the size of a small moon and has 1.2 million people aboard. Its hundreds of thousands of miles of corridors and billions of linear miles of wiring and conduits and so forth appear to be rendered in low-texture 3D... but still 3D. And these are technical schematics, not just general cut-and-paste blueprints. So the filesize is going to be large. Let's be extremely generous and suggest that the Death Star Plans are 100 GB total, although, frankly, if you told me they were in the petabyte range, I wouldn't bat an eyelash at you.

FTL communication is one thing, but (based on the quality of the FTL communications we see) they only appear to only have bandwidth of maybe... 1 Megabit per second? And those aren't broadcasts: they're point-to-point transmissions between dedicated (military-grade) arrays. So even beaming the Death Star Plans to another recipient is going to take you (does some math) a minimum of nine days. Broadcasting? Yikes. If the technology exists at all -- and there's no evidence it does, and no reason to suspect it's possible; there's no such thing as broadcasting a telegram outside the telegraph network--it's very likely to be even slower, with dismayingly short range.

This leads us to the better question, though, which is: why didn't the Rebels just make a gazillion copies and send out runners as quick as you can to as many places as you can, using shuttles and whatever else they could lay hands on, to ensure at least one copy got back home? Why put all the plans inside a single Astromech and hope for the best?

There is no G-canon evidence that file copying exists in the Star Wars universe. Reading a file out of a system for data transfer appears to destroy it in the source system. There can therefore always be only one copy of a file.

This makes sense, insofar as Star Wars is (among other things) a pastiche of World War II movies, where spies and special forces stole physical documents and photocopiers didn't exist. It also explains other nagging plot issues, like why Jocasta Nu didn't just go check the Jedi Archive Offsite Backup Tapes for evidence of tampering when Kamino went missing, or know what a checksum is. There's no backup tapes because backups are impossible, because file copy isn't a technology available to the Old Republic.
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By commdecker (Matthew Zinno)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Arbiter
Community Contributor
#557722
I don't know if this is a theory, or just fridge logic, but when I thought about how Minority Report worked, and that the idea at the end is that the bad guy *framed* him for the murder ... how does that work, exactly? He sets up the orgy of evidence, and then just, idk, *hopes* that the seers foretell that he's gonna go there and maybe kill the guy?
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#557734
commdecker wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 2:36 pm I don't know if this is a theory, or just fridge logic, but when I thought about how Minority Report worked, and that the idea at the end is that the bad guy *framed* him for the murder ... how does that work, exactly? He sets up the orgy of evidence, and then just, idk, *hopes* that the seers foretell that he's gonna go there and maybe kill the guy?
No. They see images of the kill, so high probability that it works. Their gift makes them feel and zoom in on the future death -- not the murderer. If false evidence then points to Com Truise (who will be present for sure), the culprit will achieve his goal.
(The story was written by PKD, so I reckon -- I didn't read it myself -- that it's bound to be better thought-through than a random lame action flick.)
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By commdecker (Matthew Zinno)
 - Gamma Quadrant
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Arbiter
Community Contributor
#557743
But all the culprit did is set up the room. Not only can't he make Cruise go there because that's in the future, he can't make the seers see an event because they don't see it until after he has set up the room. It's all kicked off by them seeing the event, but the culprit can't make that happen.
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By Latok
 - Second Edition Rules Master
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1E Australian Continental Champion 2019
2E Australian Continental Runner-Up 2019
#557744
commdecker wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:21 pm But all the culprit did is set up the room. Not only can't he make Cruise go there because that's in the future, he can't make the seers see an event because they don't see it until after he has set up the room. It's all kicked off by them seeing the event, but the culprit can't make that happen.
Yeah you're right. If there was only one possible future it'd work but obviously that completely destroys the whole premise, so it doesn't make sense.
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By SudenKapala (Suden Käpälä)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#557751
Latok wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:48 pm
commdecker wrote: Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:21 pm But all the culprit did is set up the room. Not only can't he make Cruise go there because that's in the future, he can't make the seers see an event because they don't see it until after he has set up the room. It's all kicked off by them seeing the event, but the culprit can't make that happen.
Yeah you're right. If there was only one possible future it'd work but obviously that completely destroys the whole premise, so it doesn't make sense.
Truise was bound to go there because he was the officer in charge of the Pre-Crime arrest unit. The culprit being who he is, knows that. So that was a safe bet. Right?

The other point you make, I don't quite follow. I saw the film 3 or 4 times (don't know why), but that was years ago; I don't remember a problem with that.

I might be missing something you're trying to say (or misremember the plot), but the clairvoyants predict violent deaths. So the trap being carefully set and sprung will trigger their vision of it.

Also, the plot is about the titular occurence, which comes to light -- the system is flawed and should not be used to predict murders, since it was sold as 100% air-tight (perfect precognition), but in fact the crimes often are only 67% sure to happen (fluid future).

I might remember having slightly more problems somehow with how the earlier murder was covered up (the one in the water)?
Not sure. Too long ago.
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By The Guardian (Richard New)
 - Second Edition Design Manager
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2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#557791
SudenKapala wrote: Mon Jul 12, 2021 4:48 am I might remember having slightly more problems somehow with how the earlier murder was covered up (the one in the water)?
Not sure. Too long ago.
My recollection was that the bad guy had hired someone to drown his victim. Then, Precog Division sees it and stops it. Then, the bad guy is free to go and kill her in the exact same way because then his new original murder looks like an echo of the previous one.

As for the main plot setup, he also could have set in motion some other reason to get Cruise to go to that room at that time, but doing so sparked the investigation that got him to go there in the first place, making the earlier arrangement superfluous. (This is all just speculation by me. I like trying to fill in plot holes. "How would I do it?" types of thinking.)

My big theory is from watching too much children's television with my kids over the last year and a half; my theory is that Jett and his friends from Super Wings are going to be responsible for delivering a package that unleashes a deadly worldwide plague that they also help spread, leading to the Pixar Cars and Planes universe of anthropomorphic vehicles in a human-like world but no human beings. God, this last year was boring at times...
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First Edition Rules Master
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#557842
The Guardian wrote: Mon Jul 12, 2021 3:03 pm My big theory is from watching too much children's television with my kids over the last year and a half
Children's television tends to be *brutal* if you pay attention to any of them. (Particularly how many run fail to answer "where are the parents?")

A friend pointed out that Paw Patrol is actually a great example of iterant workers. Every time there's a job, *every* dog comes scrambling, hoping that maybe this time they get to go work for the day. (Meaning, the rest of the dogs dropped everything, ran into the office, and got told "nah, don't need you today". Ryder is a jerk.)

(Aside: if you've got young kids, I strongly recommend tracking down Pocoyo - it does a pretty good job of being little-kid friendly but throwing enough gags at the adults to make it bearable to have on in the background.)
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By jadziadax8 (Maggie Geppert)
 - Executive Officer
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2E North American Continental Semi-Finalist 2023
ibbles  Trek Masters Tribbles Champion 2023
2E Deep Space 9 Regional Champion 2023
#557848
Thomas the Tank Engine is a brainwashed slave.

Pokemon is a show about a society that is perfectly OK sending 10-year-old children out in the wilderness to capture animals for dogfighting rings.
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 - First Edition Rules Master
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Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Community Contributor
#557850
jadziadax8 wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 12:01 pm Thomas the Tank Engine is a brainwashed slave.
For a British show, I find Thomas to be the best example of the "American Dream" on TV. (C'mon, we all know that guy at the office who works super hard, because he's been told that's how you get to own the place.)
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By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
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Community Contributor
#557852
Whenever someone mentions the Paw Patrol, I reflexively post this:

https://jeb.substack.com/p/the-paw-patr ... -democracy

(There's some politics in it, but all of it is -- as far as I can tell -- entirely unserious, so hopefully doesn't violate the no-politics rule.)
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Second Edition Design Manager
By The Guardian (Richard New)
 - Second Edition Design Manager
 -  
2E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
#557854
AllenGould wrote: Tue Jul 13, 2021 9:45 am(Aside: if you've got young kids, I strongly recommend tracking down Pocoyo - it does a pretty good job of being little-kid friendly but throwing enough gags at the adults to make it bearable to have on in the background.)
Who doesn't love listening to the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry? That's a favorite of 3-year-old Rubik.
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By Armus (Brian Sykes)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
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Regent
Community Contributor
#557855
I think I've said this somewhere before, but as far as kid-friendly-but-also-adult-watchable goes, I can't recommend The Mysterious Cities of Gold highly enough. I loved it as a kid and it really held up well 30+ years later watching it with my own kids. The story line is solid and it touches on actual historical events in the course of the plot. Best of all, it doesn't sugar coat things or treat kids as idiots.

As a bonus, there's legit history/ Anthropology shorts at the end of each episode. They may be a bit dated at this point (footage looks to be from the 1970s), but they cover a lot of ancient American history (Inca, Aztec, Maya, even Olmec), which isn't an area that gets a lot of play, so learning opportunities abound.
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