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Don't you mean U.S. Robotics?

If you lived in Chicago (like I do), you would know that Will Smith is always there to shut down all the USRs. Or at least find a USR to do it for him.

Oh never mind, I hear he's a super hero now.

On the other hand, if you are a project manager looking for contractors, you really do need someone who is not going to spend 6 months learning the tools (not syntax, but the libraries)

While problem solving skills are important in any programming candidate, they are terribly insufficient to choose an employee for any type of job, other than perhaps Winston the Wolf.

A good tech can always and easily adapt to new and different ways to do things.

This appears to be the "infinite monkeys" argument. Most companies can't afford (relatively) unlimited development resources, and adaptation takes the most scarce resource in technology development: time.

To only Amanda Hudson I can find is a camera operator. She's done some pretty big movies, but I don't see why anything in her life would be in the news. Maybe she's related to Kate Hudson. Anyway, I find the amount of attention rich people get in the news to be way over the top.

Reminds me of a Peter Cook film. The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer.
Basic plot outline is that by giving everyone a say in how the country is run, he manages to piss them off with having to vote multiple times a day, on boring and unintelligible subjects, until they don't want to do it any more. So he offers to take away the responsibility and becomes a defacto dictator.
Good film.

Or he could...
... Start making a stink about that fact that these companies violated the law, violated our rights, and now after the fact are looking to get a deal for it.

This morning I heard on the news that one senator (sorry didn't get his name) was holding up that the companies did the "Patriotic" thing by doing what bush had asked for. My response to this: If they were to do the patriotic thing, they would have gone public with the illegal request in the first place.

Perhpas a bunch of them should watch A Few Good Men, "Dawson: We were supposed to fight for the people who couldn't fight for themselves."

I'd have to agree with the Tripods series of books, perfect coming of age storytelling mixed up with some subtle post apocalyptic stuff. Plus if you get the kids into it now they'll be well cool before the upcoming movie (hope they don't ruin that)

If your goal is to teach kids how to manage finances, then teach them applied finances.

You need algebra at least for financing.

Teaching them how to balance a checkbook will help them balance a checkbook.

Balancing a checkbook comes no where near all any should be able to do financially, unless they live in a socialist or communist economy in which the nanny state takes care of you,

Don't teach them how to calculate linear regressions, a concept they will never use, and hope that somehow, maybe, magically, they'll make some sort of leap between such totally abstract concepts and real-life applied concepts.

Perhaps you missed where I said "In a way I agree, students should be shown or taught the practical application of what they are being taught, but math, and science and art still should be taught." One of my favorite movies, "Stand and Deliver" is about Jamie Escalante. Jamie quit a job working in IT to teach at a high school. Starting at a school in a poor neighborhood in East LA he was supposed to teach computer classes but he was put into classes teaching math. He showed his students what math can do, be used for. Starting with algebra he was able to take his students all the way to AP Calculus.

Or a restuarant manager

A big part of running a restaurant is keeping it open, if a manager can't make sure it's making a profit it won't be open for long.

most so-called "business" positions including middle and executive management.

And they all require at least some financial knowledge, like that restaurant manager if they can't make a profit they won'[t be in business long. I've known several people who have run their own businesses; some IT related, some owned bookstores, and one who was an organizer organizing others lives and businesses, and they all needed to know more than just balancing a checkbook. And that's just running the business on a day to day basis, not worrying about the future like are they saving enough to make it through hard tymes.

I'm not saying math shouldn't be taught. I'm saying it shouldn't be forced.

How about art, reading and writing, composition, history, or any other subject? Afterall not everyone's going to become an artist or art critic, a writer, or have any other career path. The reason the them all is to help people become well rounded individuals. Perhaps I took it overboard myself however while I majored in Computer Engineering in college I took classes that had nothing to do with it such as dancing, theatre, and scuba diving.

So, tell me. What's the "practical application" of a quadratic equation to Joe Punchclock's day to day life

And what's the practical application of history to a farmer or a janitor? What's social sciences to them? What's physical education to anybody who's not an athlete? We, well I don't really want to, can play this game "what's the use of _____ subject to anyone" all day. But I don't want to go back in tyme to when people were only taught a trade, "you're going to be a shoe cobbler making shoes and you a blacksmith so you will only be taught what you need to do them/"

Fslcon

This is the sad and tragic truth. For further reading: Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. Check out the short promo by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men .

Is this password safe: 1 2 3 4 5

That's safe ONLY if the guy trying to decrypt is so overrun by paranoia that he skips enterely a bruteforce with a wordlist and starts a plain bruteforce looking for password > 10 characters. Given the case of /dotters here I thing that it would be safe around 20% of times.

BTW... that's a Spaceball quote! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/quotes

President Skroob: [enters after the interrogation of King Roland] Well? Did it work? Where's the king?
Dark Helmet: It worked, sir. We have the combination.
President Skroob: Great. Now we can take every last breath of fresh air from planet Druidia. What's the combination?
Dark Helmet: 1 2 3 4 5.
President Skroob: 1 2 3 4 5? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage! Prepare Spaceball 1 for immediate departure!
Dark Helmet: Yes, sir!
President Skroob: And change the combination on my luggage!

To paraphrase from Who Killed the Electric Car:

"I don't want to turn down my thermostat in winter (or up for AC on hot days in California), I don't want to drive around in a small car, I don't want to live like a European"

This is basically how the average American feels about the present situation. Whichever political party pushes us to live like Europeans will be politically dead in the next election. The Unites States has more oil locked up in oil shale than anyone else, 1.5-2.6 trillion barrels. How about we work on getting that out of the ground before our economy has a very hard landing? To say that we should NOT exploit the natural resources that we have here in the United States is insane and that is what the left is saying. Anyone who cares about what they pay at the pump cannot vote Democratic (and have a leg to stand on when prices go up even faster) in the next election if they want the price to come down because "no drilling" ala Obama is a prescription for extremely high gas prices and punitively taxing the oil companies on top of that will make them even higher. To which the left responds, "well let's pass a law making it illegal to pass the cost of the taxes onto the consumers." Which sounds great until reality sets in and people realize that the lawmakers might just as well have passed a law saying that water is not wet or that gravity is suspended for all the good it will do.

A neck collar that explodes is way better:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103239/

The rephrase a quote from the great A Fish Called Wanda: Monkeys can fly spaceships, they just don't UNDERSTAND them.

which would actually mirror the experiences of every other European language: the "original" speakers tend to pick up the New World variations a lot better than the opposite, mainly due to the fact that they are a lot more "closed" in terms of used sounds.

what exactly do you mean by that?

are you talking about comprehension or about adopting the uses? because i'd have to say that on both terms you'd be wrong.

take spanish, for example. the spanish that got to america back during the final years of the 15th century was the result of a mix of the spoken languages of all the sailors and explorers who first decided to travel to the new world, and after that, of the combination of that form of spanish with the different native languages of the caribbean (mainly carib and arawakan). but the spaniards whose language became the basis for the american variant of spanish were precisely those who were more likely to get on a life-threatening voyage of discovery that could very well last for many months in the unlikely event of them not falling off the edge of the world. and in those days, the spaniards who had nothing to lose were mainly from the southern parts of the country (andalusia, mainly) and some of them from the basque country and other regions, but definitely not from the more socially relevant and powerfull regions.

therefore, the spanish that got to america, and that later evolved to become american spanish, has always been deeply related to andalusian, which was considered to be a lower class variant specially back in those days: that is why the latin american nations that were politically and socially powerful under spanish rule (mexico, peru, etc) have a much more careful pronunciation of spanish than those that lacked said political relevance (argentina, chile, central american countries, etc): because the presence of powerful spaniards, who used the more prestigious variant of spanish, helped the residents of those places to more correctly grasp the prestigious manners of speech of the continent.

this distinction, between american and european spanish, has lasted until this very date. and the fact that we have a real academia española de la lengua does very little to help: most of the time, latin american "academias" are struggling to convince the spanish RAE to "accept" a word or construction that is commonly used in america, something the RAE is very, very reluctant to do.

and as far as inter-comprehension is concerned, let me tell you a little anecdote: a couple of years ago a chilean movie called "taxi para tres" was released in that country and it became a huge box-office success. however, when they showed that movie in spain, they had to use subtitles because people couldn't understand what the actors were saying. this is the same thing that happened before with trainspotting in america, but it goes to show you that "original speakers *do not* tend to pick up the New World variations a lot better than the opposite". just a clarification.

With the assistance of my arms and hands, I find my mind can control all sorts of physical objects very easily.

Just be careful of not shortcircuiting the neural interface, or we could get in serious trouble :)

I agree. This is not The Happening. You cannot make somebody kill themselves over the Internet; although someone should start an RFC because that would be very useful.

Meh, I thought it would have something to do with The Mystery of Chess Boxing (which is also the inspiration for a lot of Wu-Tang Clan material).

.... I get my own copy of Leeloo?

Worse than all the privacy implications, this is making Enemy of the State look plausible.
--
billeater - lower my bills

Compared to Manos: the Hands of Fate http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060666/, Plan 9 looks like Citizen Kane!
Easily the worst movie ever!

In fact, I'd say in the case of Night of the Hunter and Psycho, they wouldn't be nearly as effective in color.

And Hitchcock would agree with you. "Psycho" was made in 1960, well into the era of color ("The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With The Wind" were both fully in color.... in 1939). Like "Manhattan" (1979), "Ed Wood" (1994), "Sin City" (2005), "Schindler's List" (1995), etc. sometimes filmmakers actually elect for black and white even though color is available.

The IMDB says about Psycho:

One of the reasons Alfred Hitchcock shot the movie in black and white was he thought it would be too gory in color. But the main reason was that he wanted to make the film as inexpensively as possible (under $1 million). He also wondered if so many bad, inexpensively made, b/w "B" movies did so well at the box office, what would happen if a really good, inexpensively made, b/w movie was made.

This is the Giorgio Moroder version

Working link: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002380/. (The original link is only for paying members of IMDB.)

Most black and white movies suck actually. And if they are silent, you might as well shoot yourself.

I know you're just trolling, but go watch City Lights and The General, then come back to apologize.

W

Most black and white movies suck actually. And if they are silent, you might as well shoot yourself.

I know you're just trolling, but go watch City Lights and The General, then come back to apologize.

W

But steer clear of The Saragossa Manuscript
If Quentin Tarantino ever gets the idea of doing a recursive-descent plot, I predict an immanentization of the eschaton.

A little clarification would be good. IMDB shows lots of different runtimes, depending on the release. I watched the German version a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure it was longer than 2 1/2 hours (I even slept a bit through it, even though I loved the movie). IMDB says that version is 210 minutes long. So is it just because of playing speed, or are there differences between the versions? Has anyone else watched any of the versions referenced in IMDB?

Go watch Robinson in Space and discover the mystic land that lies beyond the Ocean of Boredom.

As was the practice with many silent films: a live pianist would play the music during the film.

This is partially true, but most modern scholarship on the subject suggests that all but the smallest houses had at least a four-piece ensemble. Large city houses would have entire orchestras, and even hire actors to read the intertitles in character from behind the screen. Metropolis had an entire orchestral score composed, which can be heard on most available DVDs nowadays, and the sheet music sent to most venues would either be the full score or a reduction.

Later, a colorized version came out with a modern Heavy Metal score. I didn't care for it at all. It's not that I dislike Heavy Metal, but that the music chosen really didn't work for the film.

This is the Giorgio Moroder version, alternately ignored and despised; some of the "lost footage" from the original version was present in this cut however, not in its actual form but mocked up with illustrations from the pre-production that were animated on a rostrum camera. Particularly jarring in this version are the extended stadium-rock-inspired lyrics, in English no less.

I read somewhere that Adolf Hitler was really into Metropolis, and that he held it up as an example that all filmmakers should strive for. Food for thought.

Hitler and Goebbels personally sought out Lang to ask him to make films for the government, essentially to take the job eventually given the Leni Riefenstahl. Lang caught the first boat out of the country; he could see that it'd be impossible to work outside of the government in the years to come. But his wife, Thea von Harbou, who wrote the original novel of Metropolis, had Nazi sympathies and stayed in Germany to work for the regime.

i'm suddenly reminded of the opening scene of ridley scott's gladiator:

Quintus: People should know when they are conquered.
Maximus: Would you, Quintus? Would I?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172495/quotes

some enemies you simply have to burn off the face of the earth. they don't understand defeat. the only way to truly defeat them is to utterly destroy them. they are too proud to accept defeat, no matter how wrong they are

the war is on

According to IMDB, season 2 starts on September 8.

The 1000 cores might be just what you need.

OK, this is totally off topic, but what the fuck are you talking about? I just did a search for "if I was from control", apart from stupid things like the above post on slashdot, the only relevant thing I found was

Get Smart wasnt that nice as i imagine.cos the trailer showed it being so funny, but in the movie is like quite lame. i think they overdid it with the lame humor. like when the actor said something thats supposed to make ppl laugh, no one laugh at all. SO SAD THE PRODUCER! xD
i like the part where max & seigfried talk to each other.
Max: if i was from CONTROL you'd already be dead.
Sieg:if you were form CONTROL you'd already be dead.
Max:well, since neither of us are dead it proves that im NOT from CONTROL.

So, there is a movie? A movie about Get Smart? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425061/ I guess so.

So yeah, I found the answer myself. Stupid memes. (I still don't get the one about hot grits and Natille Portman, though I found out apparently she is some actor or another. Oh yeah, and just because I don't watch movies or TV or know about popular culture, doesn't make me not a geek. I play Nethack, I read Slashdot, I program, so fuck you if you want my fucking non-existent "geek membership card" or whatever.)

It's from the movie Get Smart

MTV had one good show called Austin Stories from 1997. I watched it again about a month ago and it still holds up. I'm not sure how you'd go about watching without buying it or borrowing from someone who owns it.

People...this is old news!!!! The actual first human pig embryo was successfully created almost 50 years ago. It even has a photo, check it out: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000102/

That is a WOPR of an idea (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/)

Anyway, there is always the need for some human to be able to override, in the case of "computer error" (whether the computer was responsible or not). He or she can be scammed, perhaps at a higher level of access.

I did, wondered if Adobe was coming out with something like this.

More importantly, on the way up they forgot the parking brake, not to mention the crackers. If you have not seen the show, it is a beautiful thing to watch.

It *IS* lupus!

You know, they identify crispy corpses using dental records somewhat accurately. Only the craziest of criminals (see The Whole Nine Yards) would do something like replacing teeth or removing teeth. How hard would it be to implement dental authentication? In addition, I believe teeth are one thing that even genetically similar people differ on because environmental factors affect their development.

The whole idea of cigarette vending machines is itself fantastically stupid if there is an age cutoff for the legal purchase of cigarettes. Can you just imagine what Japan would be like if marijuana were legal there?

I can! :)

... but the video shows a classroom of students running the game on a lab of iMacs! Are they really dual-booting Windows or running a VM on all those Macs just to play the game? Sounds expensive from a licensing perspective.

  Also odd, in the video when the teacher is introduced she says her name is Netia (as do the credits) but the text overlay introduces her as Jessica. Those two are not even close.

  Funny enough, a Netia Elam appeared as a contestant on a TV game show called "Love's a Trip" according to IMDB

  Wonder if it's the same woman, she's not bad looking :)

Didn't they make a movie about this?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

I would much rather have the engines remotely shut down or idled on a plane in flight, offering at least a chance at an emergency landing, than to have the plane summarily blown out of the sky. Most likely the "kill switch" would be engaged only so long as the craft remains on a threatening course. It would also be useful in preventing unauthorized/uncontrolled take-offs.

Lo-jack seems to have been fairly effective in stopping auto thieves. I don't really see an "After the Sunset" remotely hacked limousine scenario developing in real life.

It does contain news -- the news that the current melting rate of the polar ice is the highest recorded.

I'm wondering what is happening to lower latitude glaciers and snowpack. I am wondering if it is time to start looking for some disputed bible evidence, such as the search for Noah's ark. Rumor has it that it's buried in ice on Mt. Ararat.

It would be interesting if the evidence would support the biblical story as many world religions all claim the great flood and Noah and the ark.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076182/
http://www.pbase.com/andrys/noah
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0427_040427_noahsark.html

The Island

The future seems dangerously close.

Uh, why would anyone go to a theater

This reminds me of parts of "Meeting Woody Allen" where they talk about how going to the cinema has changed/died.

Simple. Most people here in the US can't think in Russian.

Eh?! What's wrong with Liv?! I'll hear nothing bad said against her. Liv, darling, don't listen to the nasty men. She was goooood in Plunkett & Macleane. It's a damn good Arts Council of England film. Yes, I know no-one has ever heard of it. And I know it's only at 5.9 on IMDB. Damn idiots, the lot of them.

I guess would should move Diehard with a vengeance to the educational section of the library (along with "Count of Monte Cristo").

They use magstripe writers to encode the stolen account numbers onto blank cards, then hit ATMs in New York

Someone has been watching the movie Prime Risk (currently available only as a German-only Region 2 PAL full-screen DVD).

Cop: You know, you shouldn't write your pin number on the back of your card like this. If you lose it and someone finds it they can rob you blind.

Julie: I thought you said you knew how to fly!
Michael: I do know how to fly!
[pause]
Michael: It's just landing I've never done before.
Julie: Oh, shit.