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Interestingly, Unoriginality in Hollywood *is* something new, but you are wrong in your assumption that this is a sign of a lack of depth in the film industry. It was simply poor oversight on their part to not take advantage of likeable characters and existing media before the rise of the Bond film series, the Rocky, Star Wars, and Superman franchises, and so on into our current state.

The simple fact is that we can have our cake and eat it, too. American filmgoers like their sequelized, franchised, overmarketed, easily-hyped crap, but they also like their intelligent, thoughtful works. That's why every major studio has their vanity arthouse studio, too - so you get Fantastic Four and Elektra, but you also get Donnie Darko and Clerks. And, if anything, Hollywood is becoming a bit more enchanted with more budget-conscious movies (witness the frat boy populist comedies of Will Ferrell and the Wilson brothers) and arthouse cinema as an industry itself - to suggest that somehow Hollywood's artistic sensibilities have suffered due to the rise of the sequel and the adaptation is patently false.

If anything, Hollywood is just now starting to stabilize the entire system - the adaptations/blockbusters running on top of the flops, which all help subsidize their "high art" films and other, more mass-marketed (but cheaply made) pop fare (Adam Sandler movies and CGI family films.) The ship is open to all takers; the idea of originality vs. success is a false dilemma.

What's your alternate proposal?

everything2.

For those who don't already know, the difference in a nutshell is that when you create content on Everything2 it is owned by you, covered by copyright law, and you can license it to people under any terms you like.

The Wikipedia model has proven to be far more popular, probably mostly because it produces more complete information (over time.) Since multiple people can write about the same thing on Everything2, it is more likely that you have to read multiple articles to find information you're looking for.

I produce content only for E2, because I want to retain control of it. Many people don't care, so they contribute to Wikipedia, which is more immediately useful.

I'd like to see a portal site that wraps around content from both.

What does a man's sexual preference have to do with news reporting?

read the article.

> Wallis was frequently classified as being in a permanent vegetative state. Though his family fought for a re-evaluation after seeing many promising signs that he was trying to communicate, their requests were turned down.

Schiavo was also in a PVS and showed certain signs of consciousness, allbeit with severe mental handicap. Therefore she could have been argued to have been in a minimally conscious state.

Here's some more information about how the case progressed but it's still from 2 years ago - presumably he is continuing to improve but it'd be interesting to find out: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=147582 5

Now here's an interesting thing. Terry Wallis regained consciousness in 2003. I have spent a good half hour searching the internet for anything about him since then. I have one link (see above) and that's it. Nothing. It's as if the world is stuck in 2003 when it comes to news about Terry Wallis, which is a strange parallel to his being stuck in 1984.

I have a vested interest in these sorts of articles. I have Multiple Sclerosis although I've been lucky in that it's relapsing-remitting and controlled by medication. But the worry is the same, will enough brain damage be caused that I am eventually in permanent pain, permanently disabled or enter a permanently vegetative state? If my brain can be trained to re-wire itself is there a way to learn how to induce this? If a brain can be trained to re-wire, can that overcome the effects of dementia and conditions such as Alzheimers?

Well, Finland is a industrialized country and has used mines in a responsible way in the past. The way Finnish Defence Forces operated during the war time was using mine field maps to mark the location of mines. Why are mines necessary for us? 3940 kilometers of land border. As far as I know, Finland hasn't deployed mines by dropping them by the shitloadhttp://everything2.com/index.pl?node=shitl oad from a plane. Old wartime mines have never been a huge problem, I remember there were a couple of casualties after the war, but nothing after that. There are no areas where one could not trek safely.

Do we really need mines? Considering the previous conflict with Russia, I would say yes. Should mines be randomly tossed into the woods? Hell no.

Mines are not a problem when used properly.

Some information from the military http://www.mil.fi/maavoimat/kalustoesittely/00074_ en.dsp

Terry woke up three years ago, and the story was rather widely reported back then. In fact, Terri Schiavo has, in her time, often been compared to Terry - in fact, their medical cases share almost no similarities.

The story itself has woken up in 2006, for reasons unknown. You can find a better article than the one of the front page at http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/full/060703 -5.html

This everything2 article is probably the best I found about Terry, including updates from 2004: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=147582 5

Also, some updates on the family's fight with health services, from 2005: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/6/21 /143438.shtml

One of the first games I can recall that had idle animations, he'd polish his sunglasses and load his shotgun IIRC.

This is the second-best genesis game ever. (First is Forgotten Worlds, one of the best 16-bit arcade conversions ever, if you can overlook the two deleted levels.

The shotgun would be loaded only if you had fired shells, and it would be loaded only until the number of shells fired had been equalled. Very slick touch.

You can read my writeup on Blackthorne on Everything2.

"Hey, a power up. OW DAMN HELL,"

Supposedly there's already TheNineBillionNamesofGod@Home project. See, I want more people to do this because I look forward to watching the stars go out, on by one...

Before there was even a hint of an OpenGL port in John Carmack's mind, there was VQuake, the first 3D-accelerated version of Quake. VQuake was designed for the Rendition Verite 1000 chipset, one of the first fully-featured 2D/3D combo cards. Boy, was it sweet looking - it featured edge and particle anti-aliasing and better lighting than even GL Quake.

Unfortunately, Rendition turned out to be a bitch of a company to work with, so Carmack swore off hardware-specific ports and made an OpenGL version. But, until Quake was open-sourced, VQuake was by-far the best implementation of hardware-accelerated Quake. Too bad Rendition never made a QuakeWorld-compatible VQuake renderer, I could have used the better performance. I always found it funny that I bought a Rendition card for VQuake, but my favorite aspect of the game - QuakeWorld TF - required me to use OpenGL.

They can cuff you any time they please, as far as I understand even for just looking at them.

It's not that simple. If you are arrested for something that trivial you can sue the police department for wrongful arrest and make yourself a tidy little sum.

MSM. You keep using that term. It does not mean what you think it means.

it's from the bible, of course.

That's second base.

Theorems whose names sound like Robert Ludlum titles

There's a whole slew of mathematical theorems, conjectures, hypotheses, et. al. that sound like Robert Ludlum novels:

1. The Riemann Hypothesis
2. The Eisenstein Criterion
3. The Fredholm Alternative
4. The Poincare Conjecture
5. The Fourier Transform

Well, General Relativity works in 4D, where this result applies, and lots of things in general relativity are basically 3-manifolds. So, if warp drives are invented at any point in the future, the proof of this conjecture will reassure us that Picard can get from Rigel to Farpoint station without being spewed out as salami.

More generalised versions might also result, which will help us along with string theory and move us closer to cool stuff like this.

In English there are four genders [...]

In Djirbal, there are also four. According to Everything2, they are, roughly:

• Bayi: Masculine (men, male animals etc), many animals, the moon, storms, rainbows, boomerangs, etc.
• Balan: Feminine (women, female animals etc), anything connected with water or fire (including fireflies, scorpions etc), other animals, the stars, shields, etc.
• Balam: Edible plant material and derivatives thereof. (e.g. fruit, tubers, ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine, cake)
• Bala: Neuter-abstract (e.g. noises, language, mud, stones, wind), parts of the body, meat, most trees.

The point of this is that "gender" doesn't make so much sense as a grammatical term, since it only applies to certain Indo-European languages, and even then not consistently. (I've never understood the rationale for "Das Mädchen" in German. Probably because there is no rationale.) The more inclusive term "noun class" makes more sense.

So again... Fact someone REPORTED THE NAME OF VALERIE PLAME TO NOVAK. Let me type it in english. Someone reported the name Valerie Plame to NOVAK. Since you dared... 1, 2, 3 (Department of Energy, If left alone, Freeh warned, unbreakable encryption poses a threat to fighting crime through wiretapping., Finally... Case Study of HR 695: The Security and Freedom Through Encryption (SAFE) Act... This is where the government decided to place controls on encryption leaving the US because (guess what...) the government cannot break ciphers as easily as you might think. So when I use the term "Unbreakable Crypto", let me make it clear what I mean... Without the keys its impossible... With the keys... Good luck. It would 1) take too long 2) require more space then there currently is ON THE PLANET 3) by the time they cracked it, it would likely mean nothing.

Mu

Are you claiming that people hold onto stereotypes or that stereotypes are in fact correct descriptions of the the real world. It seems like you're arguing the latter, in which case your argument is essentially, "I used to not accept stereotypes, but now I do. Some people who work at restaurants accept them too. Therefore they are clearly true statements." This does not really resemble a rational argument.

Yes, many people hold stereotypes. These are typically irrational generalizations based on anecdotal evidence. Look into that discussion of the term (in the linked article) for further explanation of how it is people can mistakenly feel they've seen evidence that shows something is true based on anecdotal evidence. One way in which this happens is that people learn a sterotype, and at least sometimes others will act in accord with the stereotype. The tendancy is to remember these incidents and forget all those unremarkable ones in which the stereotype was not fullfilled. While generalizations can certainly be made about groups of people "on average", applying stereotypes or prejudice to individuals is almost always just plan irrational, based as it is on anecdotal evidence.

It all went downhill after that fault was found in the AE-35 unit.

Hmmmm. Check this. Not sure if I'm more impressed or saddened.

...is right here. You'd think that would have turned up in a Google search, sheesh.

A guy named Jim Bell was working on this (not for spammers, but for any sufficiently unpopular public figure). He'd use untraceable digital cash to put up bounties. Potential assissins would (again, untraceably) make "predictions" on when said figure would meet his demise. The person "predicting" the correct date and time would collect the bounty. See the article at e2 on assassination politics. Jim Bell is currently in jail on IRS charges.

it's prices inexpesively for what it is

I remember Steve Jobs saying something similar about the NeXT Cube. Only problem is that real people have budgets. The Earth Simulator may be inexpensive for what it is, too, but you're not going to sell very many of them.

Cheers.

This is the same reason I don't purchase used games if I Can help it.

However, Lumines Plus (for PS2), Lumines 2 (for PSP), and Lumines Mobile (for mobile phones) are distributed by a unit of The Walt Disney Company, which (unlike most other software publishers) has lobbied Congress for copyright term extensions. If I want Lumines Plus (and not some homebrew clone), I have to either buy from Disney or buy used. I'd rather buy used, so as not to support Disney.

I log on, select a game, buy it legally, and play it. Simple.

Either that, or you find that your favorite titles are not available on the service.

The common myth in the US stems from USC 117 Section 17. It allows for owners of software to make a single backup copy. The purpose of this dates back to the 70s or 80s when software was distributed mostly on volatile magnetic storage mediums. People like to pretend that it extends to ROMs too, but in fact, not only is it not true, but case law (See Atari vs JS&A or google it) contradicts it.

Atari v. JS&A covers backups from carts onto carts. It does not cover backups or "adaptations" from carts onto another medium using a copier, which are both explicitly permitted (17 USC 117(a)(1)) and implicitly permitted (Sony v. Universal, interpreting 17 USC 107).

Yep, although the origin is, again, French...

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Anglo-Saxon%2 0words%20for%20animals%2C%20French%20words%20for%2 0meat

("Snail" is presumably related to the German "Schnecke").

The plot of a Dukes Of Hazzard episode is the least essential part of the script. Be creative in the structure of your episode, but adhere to the following rule: If the question "Is this the episode where Boss Hogg comes up with a crazy scheme to put the Dukes in jail or swindle honest folk, but in the end is foiled in part due to his own stupidity?" doesn't apply to your episode, you've got to go back to the drawing board. Remember: there is no "very special episode" where Uncle Jesse reveals that he can't read, or the Dukes learn a special lesson about teenage pregnancy. A "very special episode" of Dukes Of Hazzard is one that features the Oak Ridge Boys.

It was even more cunning than that. Not only that, the compiler was coded to tell when it was compiling itself, and added the trojan to the compiler it was compiling.

So you compile a compiler with a trojaned compiler that inserts a trojan into the compiler it's compiling so that when you compile login with the compiler you just compiled with the trojaned compiler, login will have the trojan compiled in too.

Here, this explains it better than I could.

Bill Clinton was impeached by the house of representatives, but he was not convicted by the Senate. See here and here.

To add little more to your post, I think the term is compromise effect: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=127302 9 (or also known extreme aversion effect). People will generally choose a midpoint of an option set and framing an option as a middle makes it more attractive.

Apparently, this effect has been "applied" to many fields like marketing, sales, negotiation and also in legislative world where a legislator will present a stupid bill that he knows will fail because of the backlash but will make his next bill more reasonable (as we see too often).

Oh, come on, name me one major hollywood movie with more realistic IT in it

The TV show "Alias" actually isn't that bad. The show is campy, sure, but in spite of being "high-tech" they mostly don't seem to indulge in much of the usual TV/movie pseudo-IT gobbleygook nonsense.

More to the point, whenever they have a shot of someone trying to break into a system, or get files off a system, etc, the commands they're typing to do so are generally credible. Sure, a display full of xterms isn't very exciting to watch, so they dress the xterms up with the usual MovieOS silliness of big fonts, translucent windows, etc. But look past that to what is actually being typed, and it's credible -- rsync files from bad guy's terminal to a USB thumb drive, ssh/scp back to the good guys, etc.

Compare & contrast with, say, "CSI: Miami", where the IT forensics nerd spouts off nonsense that half-correctly over-explains at a third grade level how he's trying to catch the bad guy based on log files on the laptop left at the crime scene, followed by screenshots, in full MovieOS glory, that don't even have any relation to what the actor was babbling about. And to top things off, they then follow up by noticing some possibly useful detail in an unfocused section of a photo found at the scene, so the boss says "enhance that" and presto-chango, you're looking at a perfectly focused, zoomed-in image of the perp and the murder weapon. I can't say how realistic the show is with other branches of forensics, but anywhere they get a computer involved, it's completely off-the-wall.

And likewise with the other CSI shows, or Law & Order, or any other modern cop show. But "CSI: Miami" seems particularly awful here.

"Alias", on the other hand, is at least accurate enough to not be distracting to someone comfortable with computers, and even more specifically, the Unix shell. That, I think, is as much as anyone can reasonably expect in pop fiction entertainment.

Hey, you're right, nobody has asked to be CowboyNeal. Gee, I wonder why...

Fascinating. One question though: How do you know when your Karma has gone down to -4 or -5? Karma hasn't been a numerical value for YEARS.

Here's how: you steal your material from the distant past.

Also see this article on that very comment.

YHL. HAND.

The only example of popular fiction that I can think of that contains a believable depiction of an IT system is Jurassic Park - the novel, not the movie.

Oh yes, Michael Chricton is just the person I'd point to for realistic portrayals of science in popular fiction.

What makes a game good is gameplay. What makes a film good is plot. The two have nothing to do with one another. Hence running around hitting your head on blocks, avoiding turtles and eating magic mushrooms makes a very fun game, but a lousy film. Conversely, many films have been licensed to make bad games (such as ET on the Atari 2600).

The problem is the question of cause and effect - if we remove copyright much of the economic incentive to produce this abundance would disappear, and we would likely to be facing a great decline in both abundance and quality.

I never said anything about removing copyright, and the example of the Hong Kong film industry is irrelevant to discussions of copyright term length.

When copyright was introduced in the comparatively slow-moving commerce of the nascent United States, the term was 14 years, with a right to extend for 14 more years if the author was alive.

Now we live in a global commerce environment that moves much more swiftly, where tremendous profits are made in days and artistic works can be distributed all over the globe in a matter of weeks. Yet amazingly, the copyright term is now the life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years for works under corporate authorship. This came into effect even though the vast majority of copyrighted works provide no revenue to their owners beyond a few years.

This has nothing to do with piracy. United States law in effect says that the ideas of an individual can continue to make money for another party long after the creator dies. It has gone from being an incentive favoring creativity, to an incentive for corporate entities to milk the monetary value of artistic works as long as possible. It is corporate welfare handed out by the government to support established media distribution cartels. They are using legislative action to stave off the collapse of the business models that brought them so much wealth in the 20th century.

As a final note, don't you think it is ironic that Disney, the most powerful promulgator of copyright extension, is using copyright law to extend their exclusive rights to control so many films that originated from the public domain?

I also find some of the trolls hilarious, and I've even befriended one just because she's an excellent creative writer. So while I'm not a troll myself, I do enjoy the (very occasional) troll. I sometimes wonder if I'm too close to the border for them to restore my mod points.

You do know that one way to catch catfish is to use your index finger as tackle? (and often your entire hand and parts of fore-arm...)

Just watch Jurassic Park. It's blatently advertised in it. Apparently it can be learned without much difficulty by 13 year old girls and has a very pretty 3D graphical interface. Here's the line:

"This is a UNIX system. I know this."

How I wish this intuitive GUI and OS were available to the masses. I hear that Apple is using some kind of clone as the basis for OSX, but I have yet to find confirmation about it.

I think they might be close to finishing up Pink as well.

Myspace is the reason that this lives on my bookmark bar.

Try F0 0F C7 C8.

Is it time to set off a few nukes and see if nuclear winter can cool things down?

Nature's already working on that.

Is L. Ron invading San Francisco?

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.