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Cyberspace. William Gibson, Neuromancer

"And they never let me forget it." -- William Gibson, Wild Palms

I thought King Roland of Planet Druidia had the monopoly on air so he could sell us all bottled Perri-Air? It's not like he did much to protect it, though,... I mean, with a password of 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 5,... what do you expect? Seriously, I have the same combination on my luggage!

Its a reference to Office Space.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/

That'll be one nerd card please.

As a side note, imdb shows The Wonder Years Up 568% in popularity this week. WTF is up with that?

Worse than that, this guy pirated the movie as part of his official duties. If this guy's column stayed up and a representative from Donner's asked Fox, "Did you pay Mr. Friedman to illegally download, view, and review 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'"? Technically they would have to admit to it. Another organization may have simply refused to print that specific review and adjust his pay accordingly, but Fox is special - As jwildstr points out, they make movies. If a rival company's reviewer had downloaded and reviewed Kung Fu Panda or Cloverfield before they hit the theaters, you can bet the Fox would be up at arms.

It was a movie reference.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114898/

that's an interesting way to threaten someone.

"Hey, if you thought our satellite-rockets were lousy, wait til you see our nukes!"

At least the japanese nuclear radiation doesn't effect humans

damn you, now I feel the urge to watch it again

would be a great idea, right? Well, I doubt you could ever successfully implement it.

Do not doubt, this idea had been successfully implemented many years ago, and even a movie was made that pictures a quick demo of this technology (among other things.) The trick to the successful implementation is in borrowing the lawnmower together with its operator; the rest is the same, just as you described :-)

If you are trying to create a business or product and nobody else is doing anything even close, odds are pretty good something is wrong with your idea.

Or everything is right with your idea and you are about to become filthy rich. The sad story is that if you do what other people also do you can make a living, but you can't make it big. You always have to do something special, something that other people haven't done, to be really successful.

Never mind the county corruption, the Phoenix DA employes a psychic, and allows her dreams to influence his investigations. Not only that, he's expecting to get re-elected even though this has been made abundantly public.

Here, I'll "publish" your invention, thus:

O

It is a toy, "You know, for the kids"

Originally I was going to post an ascii art circle, followed by the phrase, "You know, for the kids."

I could not get past the damn lameness filter (" Filter error: Please use less whitespace"), which has apparently gotten "better", because simply posting lots of normal-looking paragraphs later wasn't enough to override the "percentage" of whitespace, or whatever.

So now I'm forced to start a rant: why the hell is there a lameness filter? Doesn't the moderation system take care of the problem the filter is trying to solve, placing all the otherwise offtopic posts at -1 where no reasonable person will ever see them? And while on the topic of things that have gotten worse with time, what's with the new system that forces you to wait a certain amount of time in between posts? That's really annoying when I'm participating in a topic I know a lot about, and have a lot to say (ok, that only happens with Star Trek articles, but more knowledgeable people than I must run into this problem all the time).

Sigh...sorry about the rant. I had a post which I thought would be quite funny, with a reference that demanded more than simple text, and feel that I was robbed of the opportunity.

Anyway, the last 8 years of terrorism talk seem to have you unduly paranoid. A terrorist could totally cripple the US right now by targeting pipelines.

LOL and THAT's supposed to make him feel better? We're just lucky all the terrorists (domestic and foreign) haven't really thought things through all the way.

Terrorists wouldn't have to go that far to find stuff like this. Chuck Norris's movie "Invasion U.S.A. goes along this line.

Falcon

Back in the day I went to see Chicken Run in the cinema. On the back of the cinema ticket it had a voucher for KFC.

Uh oh, you'd better stop listening to The Beatles. And watching Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, etc etc.

The only reason you're not "importing culture" from other European countries is because you can't speak the fucking language. Berlin, Berlin is a fantastic comedy-drama. Sucks for you if you don't speak German, though.

Next thing you know, the robot will abduct a pretty female lab assistant to experiment on.

We already had a story about that http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/09/147255

(yeah, it turned out to be fake, but still...)

Next thing you know, the robot will abduct a pretty female lab assistant to experiment on.

He was continuing the quote. You're a combo breaker.

They say they don't want to be targeted by burglars. But I've seen plenty of movies about small English villiages. I've seen the alarming homicide statistics.

Clearly these people have something hide. If they didn't they wouldn't have been so concerned about the Google camera.

I demand that the home office immeadiately send the Army in to round up the lot of these devil worshiping, pedophile, terrorists.

back in 1979.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078869/
man, that V.I.N.CENT. was such a character!

As Jeff from Coupling would suggest - that's what fast forward was invented for. "...you tend to fast forward if anyone's dressed. Sometimes I forget and do that with proper films. I can get through a lot of movies in an evening. "

Funny movie too, Blood Car.

I suspect the intersection between those who get it and those with modpoints will be the empty set.

Nope, I have modpoints. But no more for this story, GP got +5 funny anyway.

You forgot to give refs :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080801/

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Troll Moderator hasn't seen Idiocracy.

Gah... Get the quote right if you're going to quote something!

"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! This is the war room!"

In his defense, the 2004 documentary is called "No Fighting in the War Room or Dr. Strangelove and the Nuclear Threat" according to imdb ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445088/ ). So it's a quote of sorts.

It's been done before

Have Pink Flamingo, will travel!(check out Don Ameche)

Hell, in 15 minutes, who's gonna know!

Hint: She won't!(she==yo' momma!)

and the general trend among all developed nations, not just the west, to stop having children

This is because those "developed nations" developed themselves past any common sense in marriage, family and law. This whole thread is one proof of it. Take the movie "Fanfan la Tulipe" set in 1700 or something. Fanfan successfully negotiates a difficult agreement, but some other peasant notices and runs to the father of the girl, screaming "Hey, your daughter has fallen on her back already!" and the father immediately runs to punish the offender. The offender escapes, naturally, but that's the rest of the movie. The point is that affairs of this sort were back then handled locally and within common sense; nobody would appeal to the Royal Court for a judgement over such a minor, usual incident. Contemporary literature is full of such stories.

But today, were that to happen, both perpetrators would be first arrested for public obscenity, then probably the family would pressure the girl to claim rape, and then the man would be toast. And that is assuming that they are both old enough (which one can't safely say in the movie, back in 1700's people lived fast and died young.)

Modern societies of those "developed nations" - or at least the USA - are set, legally and practically, against families. In old times a divorce could consist of one family member booting the other one out of the door, that simple. Today it is a lifetime affair, and be prepared to lose everything that you own. I know someone who lost her home in a divorce recently, owes tons of money to lawyers and has to live at a friend's place in a corner, literally. Who in his/her right mind would take such a risk, and why? Then the subject of children - most families want them (or at least women want them) but in case of divorce the woman gets the children and the man gets to pay for them. Great, sign me up - right?

On top of that, the value of a child used to be positive (a helper when young, an earner when adult, a life saver when you get old.) A peasant family could work land and manage some cattle and be reasonably OK, with all children typically contributing to the family and marrying nearby. But today a child has negative value - it costs probably hundreds of thousands of dollars up front, counting the birth, food, doctors, schools, wages/opportunities lost, etc. Once s/he is an adult the child takes off and lives independently, and you as a parent have to depend primarily on your retirement funds to finance your last years on this Earth. Not that all children are evil, they are too poor to feed you if they start their own family, and by the time they are kind of OK you are long dead, and so the cycle continues.

This way a developed society kills itself, and "less developed" but far more vital societies move in. This is what is happening in Europe right now - immigrants from Africa and Asia are taking over, and I say that's a natural process. The Roman Empire fell, in part, due to decay of the society.

Yea, last time I participated in an acid test, I went and saw Used Cars at a midnight movie. This is somehow reminiscent... only without Kurt Russell.

Whoooosh! (and that's not the sound of a toilet flushing)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/

It reminds me of a movie I've seen before.

How childish a thing to do.

Somebody mod this guy up!

I have another example. With XP, my friends system would hang from time to time. I installed Linux (dual boot), and it began complaining immediately about the processor being overheated. We added a fan, and Ta Da ... no more crashes. So stability is also about the OS being able to identify hardware problems rather than just ignoring them and crossing their fingers, holding hands, and jumping off a cliff (if you have two Windows machines, Thelma and Louise make great hostnames! ;-)

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) :
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0092007/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323944/

Shattered Glass is a film about how an investigative journalist, Adam Peneberg, working for Forbes.com in 1996, exposed journalist Stephen Glass for plagiarizing nearly every article he wrote for The New Republic, a well trusted and highly respected journalistic publication.

This was considered one of the first major breakthroughs for online journalism and it happened in 1996. Online news has been filled with investigative journalism for a while.

Even wikileaks can be seen as legitimate investigative reporting and whistle blowing. http://www.wikileaks.org/

OmniWeb has had something similar for a long time, it's called shortcuts. You can either type in your searches (such as: imdb Jack Black) or you can use the search shortcut on the toolbar.

I like Firefox a lot because of its support for standards and its expandability but honestly I find myself using OmniWeb a lot more. Sure I can get addons to Firefox that make it as (or perhaps even more) functional as OmniWeb but the Firefox addons can get a bit odd at times, interacting with Firefox in weird ways. It's also annoying to constantly have to update all the Firefox addons I'd need to match OmniWeb. (I'm sure I can turn off updates but see the previous statement about odd bugs.) It's nice to get so much functionality in an easy-to-use browser like OmniWeb.

Hope everyone has burned all their photo albums with the pictures of themselves or children in the tub as infants. Because if you have not, then you are next.

This points out a big problem with child porn laws and child porn charges. Several years ago in a photography class I took in college this came up. A parent had taken photos of their child(ren) taking a bath, heck my mom had photos of this in our family album, and turned the film in for development. Some worker at the lab saw the photos and called police. If people have a problem with that, I wonder what they thought of the movie "Three Men and a Baby".

Falcon

We have heard of it before now. It was episode two of "Perfect Disaster" back in 06 for example: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0817543/episodes

Of course the next maxima happens to be 2012 which is already an "end of the world" year for a bunch of morons.

Of course we didn't all die in 2003.

...throw in some business management courses

Agreed. I'm 55 and I've been writing software since 1972. I only have an AAS -- I don't think CS degrees even existed when I was in school. Life was good until Jan, but then I was RIFed (first time for me). Now I'm bobbing along in a sea of baccalaureal hammerheads. Ever see the movie "Open Water"? Feels like that. I'm also going to try to get some relevant education and a degree or certification, since I have access to govt Trade Adjustment Allowance (TAA) funding ($13k). That should cover .... um .... about 2 hours of first year art history at Carnegie-Mellon SEI. Yee-ha. And meanwhile the COBRA will be eating $1100/mo.

Some unrelated observations/opinions:

• Older IT workers are generally better compensated, either because they've been loyal to the company, or they've amassed a substantial base of industry-relevant knowledge.
• Expensive workers float to the head of the RIF list.
• The cost of hiring a full-time worker is considerable. Virtues like flexibility, the willingness to learn and adapt, and the ability to "fit" into the culture and infrastructure of a company can be far more important than a canned education. These traits can be the hallmarks of older workers; at least I hope they are for me. Granted, I have worked with some crotchety, stubborn, command-line, two-finger-hunt-and-peck old coots.
• Younger, agile brains can more easily think outside the box.
• Older, more experienced brains know there's more than one box.
• A previous post mentioned the "ten thousand hours" threshold to achieve competency on a subject (probably referring to the book "Outliers"). On how many chips, operating systems, languages, and applications can you claim that kind of proficiency? Multiply that by 6 the next time you see one of us old farts. I don't wish to be judgmental, pedantic or dismissive. To provide some balancing perspective, I'll acknowledge that 60% of my accumulated proficiency would only be demonstrable in a museum.
• I know the lyrics of every "Beach Boys" song, but I'll be damned if I remember where I parked the truck.
• Twitter? No thanks. You really don't want to get me started on my prostate....

"That's us, dude!"

I think there's something about nudity that triggers an adverse reaction in the US (at least, may also be other countries).

My favorite movie nude/semi-nude scenes that were portrayed in an a-sexual way are:
1) topless girl in "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". That girl ran around topless and everyone treated her as if she were a guy running around topless. Pretty cool.
2) Hotel room scene in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". This appears to be a post-orgy scene when everyone was just lounging around in various states of undress, but definitely not doing anything sexual. Dewey's sitting on the floor, camera is looking at his face and a naked guy walks past the camera in the foreground. Only thing you could see of the guy was his schlong. Pretty casual shot, funny as hell. May have been a scene from the "unrated DVD version".
3) Watchmen.

Compare this to the youtube video that occasionally springs up of a fully clothed young woman essentially doing a pole dance. The comments I've seen on the few of those I've watched are along the lines of "Yea, nothing sexual about that, way to go. Don't understand why my parents won't let me watch it." Which I usually take as the earnest utterances of a pimply faced young male teenager who just doesn't understand.

You can do something sexy and suggestive fully clothed and you can do something ordinary and non-suggestive fully naked. Put them on film in this culture and one will net you a PG rating and the other will net you an R rating. Go figure.

I think there's something about nudity that triggers an adverse reaction in the US (at least, may also be other countries).

My favorite movie nude/semi-nude scenes that were portrayed in an a-sexual way are:
1) topless girl in "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou". That girl ran around topless and everyone treated her as if she were a guy running around topless. Pretty cool.
2) Hotel room scene in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". This appears to be a post-orgy scene when everyone was just lounging around in various states of undress, but definitely not doing anything sexual. Dewey's sitting on the floor, camera is looking at his face and a naked guy walks past the camera in the foreground. Only thing you could see of the guy was his schlong. Pretty casual shot, funny as hell. May have been a scene from the "unrated DVD version".
3) Watchmen.

Compare this to the youtube video that occasionally springs up of a fully clothed young woman essentially doing a pole dance. The comments I've seen on the few of those I've watched are along the lines of "Yea, nothing sexual about that, way to go. Don't understand why my parents won't let me watch it." Which I usually take as the earnest utterances of a pimply faced young male teenager who just doesn't understand.

You can do something sexy and suggestive fully clothed and you can do something ordinary and non-suggestive fully naked. Put them on film in this culture and one will net you a PG rating and the other will net you an R rating. Go figure.

It was PG-13!

IMBD: The Dark Night

funny how often this trollish little attempt at a point is made.

Ok, how about a retort, just for fun. So Americans didn't like it because we don't want to see a big blue dong for half a movie. Europeans on the other hand will love it because they DO like seeing a big blue dong for half a movie.

Not fair? Sortof silly, really? Hmmm. Yeah, I agree.

There is a point at which something goes well beyond gratuitous, passes up Supersize Me, and goes on past there being any point anymore.

Kirby Dick?

The box office on that one was great.
I hear another is in the works, and I doubt it will be PG-13.

Batman Begins (2005) - Rated PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements.
The Dark Knight (2008) - Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.

Remember that scene where they bring Joker's "corpse" to Gambol, only Joker jumps up from the table alive and psychotic...?
What exactly does he do to Gambol?
How about those two guys that were standing right next to his "corpse"?
Did you ever actually see what happens there?

A good director can do wonders with PG-13.
Always remember that we never really see the actual stabbing in Psycho.

Why the R-Rating then? Phantom boobs, men dressed in women clothing and even toilets being flushed.

The box office on that one was great.
I hear another is in the works, and I doubt it will be PG-13.

Batman Begins (2005) - Rated PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements.
The Dark Knight (2008) - Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.

Remember that scene where they bring Joker's "corpse" to Gambol, only Joker jumps up from the table alive and psychotic...?
What exactly does he do to Gambol?
How about those two guys that were standing right next to his "corpse"?
Did you ever actually see what happens there?

A good director can do wonders with PG-13.
Always remember that we never really see the actual stabbing in Psycho.

Why the R-Rating then? Phantom boobs, men dressed in women clothing and even toilets being flushed.