Anyone watched Heroes Season 3?

True, but then why ask him at all?

 

Yeah no wonder the Skynet attacked humans when they had to endure such teachings... It's all James Ellison's fault.

 

My theory is the guy was well qualified anyway (he does have a good sense of morality by the looks of it), its just that the Terminator figured the best way to motivate him was to call upon his religious background.

Or perhaps the T1000 is going to twist his religious teachings in order to turn skynet against humainty (use the same teachings to convince it that it has moral superiority over humanity). That would be a cool twist, and quite feasable. Religion can indeed be manipulated to support virtually any viewpoint.

 

Haha

Well, in general, it is the right idea. If one is to build an autonomous machine, one needs to also make that machine ethical. To fail to do so would mean that we could not realistically live with it: the end would necessarily be us destroying it (most likely) or it destroying us. But the idea that extremely human emotional arguments that depend upon a pre-existing moral grammar would do the trick is patently absurd.

I think the right way to go about it would be to explain why, when considered selfishly and rationally, the machine should pursue morals.

 

I think they should just be hardwired in! Asking a machine to think for itself, at least to that extent, no matter how well or thoroughly we teach it is definatly asking for trouble!

 

Well, that idea has been well-explored, and it seems that it's rather difficult to hardwire explicit moral rules. It seems to me that the best we can hope for is to hardwire specific drives that lend themselves towards the development of ethics.

 

Agreed. What a wonderful show and Serenity was a good movie also. A couple of more seasons of FireFly would be nice or give me 2 more Serenity sequels.

 

If only. I loved that show (and movie).

 

I see people that enjoyed Firefly everywere... Just an objervation.
One would think that the suits that cancel a show or give it the green light would be fools not to bring it back... I guess I'm just seeing what I want to see

 

What I'm not understanding is how shows like Firefly can be so well-liked, but get such low ratings. That's the fundamental reason why it was canceled: it wasn't watched. Same with the movie.

 

As has been explained several times before: it had no promotion, it was shown out of order, episodes and regular transmissions were skipped, broadcast times were moved around with little or no notice, it's exactly the type of geek show that was watched in groups or time-shifted so that it didn't get proper ratings.

It was deliberately sabotaged from the beginning by the network, so after a few weeks of ensuring no one would know about it, or if they did know about it they wouldn't be able to find it, it was easy for the suits to point at low ratings and cancel the show.

The show may have been cancelled for "low ratings" but those rating were deliberately manipulated to make them low. With ten percent of the promotion given to Heroes and a regular timeslot, Firefly would have been big, but someone at the network decided they didn't want it after it was commissioned, and made sure it got killed off straight away.

 

Sure, but that doesn't explain why the movie did poorly:
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=Serenity.htm

 

The movie made more money than that when you factor in overseas and DVD sales. However, I thought we were talking about the series, and many of the things that made the series good (such as character development, dialogue and relationships) did not translate that well to a 90 minute movie that was designed to wrap things up for the fans.

For instance if Buffy had been 10 episodes and a movie, there would have been a lot of very "wheedonesque" stuff that would simply have never existed, and those were the things that made it what it was.

Too much nowadays studios are simply employing a scattershot approach to television. If you can't get big audiences in the first five episodes, you get cancelled and move onto the next thing. No more of growing a show across a season or two.

If the same thing had been done in previous times, most of our best known TV shows would have been strangled at birth, just as Firefly was. It's like the TV execs are headless chickens, not knowing what to comission, cancel or keep.

 

One thing's for sure - having seen a few episodes now, given a choice between Heroes and Firefly I know which one I'd pick. Looking forward even more to Whedon's next project though! (Doll House, right?)

 

Yup, February 13

 

Latest Heroes Unmasked has unseen scenes from volume 4.
http://www.ninjavideo.net/video/16654

 

I'm not sure that makes sense... If you allready have 13 episodes, why would you sabotage the series, even if you thing that it will be a failure it's not the logical course of action... There's no benefit for anyone...
Perhaps it was just a matter of bad luck and awfull coordination from the networks part.
Although I loved the series and the movie, I haven't done any searching as to why it was canceled, so I might not know all the facts. But that could only happen if Wheddon had pissed off a lot of people at the time and this was personal. From a business point of view, it's kind of wierd...

 

Why would you commission a show and then not give it more than half a dozen episodes? Why would you show the second show before the first, thus not establishing the characters as intended? Why would you move the transmission time around with little notice?

There are lot of reasons for these things. Internal politics, poor planning, bad judgement, lack of promotion. The favoured reason is that they simply changed their mind, and decided they didn't want the type and style of show as they had commissioned it. Rather than some exec admitting they screwed up, they ensured the show would fail so that it wasn't managements fault, but a fault with the show itself. If TV stations were infallible, every single show would be a big hit, but it isn't. There really isn't some magic formula that can be followed and that every exec knows what they are doing.

You only have to look at the TV schedules to see that this type of thing happens all the time. So much TV production is effectively outsourced to external production companies, it's easy for the networks to commission stuff, and then kill it off with little expense or commitment to themselves, so that's what they do. Like I said, it's just scattergun TV making, throwing a much as they can at the audience and seeing what sticks, almost with little understanding.

I was reading an article on shows that consistently get cancelled from the 10 pm Monday night slot. There are low audiences there, and so the networks keep putting shows in there and then cancelling them when they don't do well. The networks don't understand why they can put on a good show at 9pm, and yet that large audience turns off at 10 pm, so they keep cancelling shows that loose 10-20 percent of the 9 pm audience instead of staying with their 10 pm slot. It must be the shows right, so lets keep trying something new.

Turns out there's just a general reluctance for people to stay up till 11 pm to watch a show on a Monday night. They've just had a weekend, they've got a week of work ahead of them, and they want to get an early night in. It's as simple as that , and so instead of getting an audience into that slot, you're actually killing off any show that you put in there. The exec's logic is reversed because it's not a bad show that's losing the audience, it's a bad slot that loses the audience.

 

To tell you the truth, I'm not that much of a tv fan. Most of the shows I've seen were either on dvd or divx. I just can't stand commercials... They kill whatever I'm watching... In other words, I don't have that much experince on it. I only watch the news
What you say makes sense, but is very strange, considering that those execs are there to ensure that money is made for the network...
I can only wish that Dollhouse won't have the same fate Firefly had. In Wheddon I trust, so, I'm fairly certain that it will be a good show, at least if it's given a chance.

 

Getting Back to heroes...

I have missed ep13 (final of villains) and was wondering if there is anywhere i can watch it online.

I see NBC have it available for free but it is not available in Northern Ireland.

Failing that, does anyone fancy giving me a run down of what happened in that episode?

What date in Feb does it kick off again?