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To Sweeny Todd with all Burma Shave hecklers!

You think that's bad?

I played a dead horse in the snow in Indigènes.

Lecturer: Okay, so what you want to do is this: You want to attack at the most vulnerable spot. Come at it from this angle and locate the automatic flip-flop override device here, which in turn will defuse the antigyroscopic preinterface thruster chamber, and the pneumatic centripetal antigravity shield deflectors, then you simply deactivate the axial gyro-presubinertia-photomegatronic oscillator that you see here.
Fluke Starbucker: Huh?
Lecturer: You pull the plug!

There is actually a better movie on the subject. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097889
Miracle Mile deals with the spread of panic started from a single phone call.

when Hollywood has done several studies on fleeing citizens already?

when Hollywood has done several studies on fleeing citizens already?

when Hollywood has done several studies on fleeing citizens already?

when Hollywood has done several studies on fleeing citizens already?

Chief Bud McGee: Why do you bring a video camera to school?
Trevor: The same reason you bring a gun to work. To shoot people.
-- Bang Bang, You're Dead

My favourite was the Microwriter, invented by the bloke that wrote/produced and directed Zulu

Because it's next. Because we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is on a timeline of explorations and this is What's next.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg: Oh, it's not going in that end, Mr. Lightbody. "

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111001/quotes

Thank God, the... police.

Let's see.. a lightweight article about a 1960's technology that might be possible at some point..

hmm.. why was this even newsworthy?

ayup...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425061/

Can anyone say "Media Plant"?

Thank you Michael Douglas!

Even if you buy into that load of crap that you just spewed, how does imposing new restrictions on Americans and granting the Government sweeping new powers help towards that goal? I'd like to think that my drivers license bears no relationship to the military strength of the United States.

And I'll address your theory that we need to exterminate them with a quote from one of my favorite movies: "He seems to have a serious weed up his ass and a legitimate gripe, always a dangerous combination" -Captain Ramsey from Crimson Tide.

Point being, that the Muslim World has several legitimate gripes with the Western World. We can kill all the terrorists we want but until we address those gripes we'll just be creating more of them to fight us. Unless you plan on exterminating them all?

But he did!

"Meteor Crater, Arizona" (it's on Google Maps; it's where the final scene of Starman was shot incidentally).

And also the final scene of Mac and Me.

I should really have posted this AC...

Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted Stroehmann: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted Stroehmann: Right. Yes. OK, alright. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted Stroehmann: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted Stroehmann: You guarantee it? That's -- how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted Stroehmann: That's right. That's -- that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted Stroehmann: That -- good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Ted Stroehmann: Why?
Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!
http://imdb.com/title/tt0129387/

And the less said about your exotic diseases, Uncle Jack, the better.

Oh, come on, now. Everybody knows that the right speed to have things activate is 88 mph! Gotta keep your nerd cred up, man!

The Rainmaker

Ranked Pairs is far and away the best option. It satisfies the monotonocity criterion. It is very simple to understand, especially from the perspective of a voter. You simply rank who you want to vote for. (Any voter who doesn't like it can simply rank their candidate #1 and leave the rest blank, just as we do now.)

I was a huge fan of Schulze method (another Condorcet variant, and one used in the real world in Debian elections), until RangeVoting.org convinced me today that Favorite Betrayal is an actual problem in any Condorcet method. Not only does Range Voting not have this problem, it also bypasses a lot of the Arrow's Impossibility Theorem baggage (since Arrow only applies to ranked systems, not scored systems) and, even better, is nearly as simple as Plurality or Approval.

(As the RV.org site points out, when you sit down and write code to implement a Condorcet method, any of them, you end up with about twice as much code compared to implementing RV. I've implemented Schulze voting before, so I know that of which they speak. Meanwhile, with RV, you just sum the votes as you would with Plurality or Approval, then divide by the number of voters. The fact that each vote is a ranged score rather than a {0|1} doesn't really change how the code works. Maybe you add a simple quorum check on the final score sums, but that's 2 lines of Perl using sort and grep.)

Plus bee swarms use it to vote on new hive locations, so even though I was skeptical at first about the Bayesian regret metric, RV is a tried and tested voting method in the real world, and bees are considerably less intelligent than even the dumbest voter.

There are two main problems with range voting. One, it makes voting overly complicated (not to the Slashdot crowd, but for the average voter.) Two, it is subject to gaming. Voters will be likely to rate secondary candidates lower than how they really feel in order to increase their top candidate's odds.

Re #1: I'd argue that RV is actually simpler than any ranked ballot. Seven words: Hot or Not, Olympic scoring, IMDb, Netflix. Every Joe-on-the-Street already understands RV. It's one of the three simplest systems possible (after Approval and Plurality). Try out this Range Vote on the US Presidential race — unlike Condorcet, you don't have to stand around hemming and hawing about exactly which order you'd put them in, plus you can actually express "I have no opinion" by leaving a line blank. (And since they threw in all the kitchen sink candidates on that poll, you'll use that option a lot.)

(In Condorcet, your only option for unknown candidates is to lump them all together in one big tie in the middle... but you're still saying "These unknown candidates are definitely worse than any of the ones I like" and "These unknown candidates are definitely better than any of the ones I hate". One of them could be {your undiscovered favorite|the reincarnation of Hitler}, but you've just {hurt|helped} their campaign. RV lets you leave them blank, so that better informed voters can put their knowledge to work — but thanks to the quorum, unknown bad candidates can't win by voting once for themselves or anything silly like that.)

(Oh, and speaking of unknowns, RV works well with write-in candidates, thanks to the quorum. Condorcet does not, since write-ins are implicitly in last place on every ballot by default.)

Re #2: Yes, there's some ga

Okay, so it's not the greatest movie ever, but every time I see something like this, it reminds me of Extreme Measures. Yes, this is a good thing, but at what cost was it derived. That's a question that, frankly, I don't think the scientific community asks itself often enough.

I'm not saying that advances have to be stopped, but without full, informed disclosure, we are doing a disservice to patients and their families.

And that is your prerogative. I prefer to watch HD movies. You apparently want to watch SD movies rather than going with a format that your religion says you should not use. Good for you.

The rest of us, on the other hand, prefer to watch a few more movies than the latest "American Pie 12 vs. Saw 13", which is pretty much all that is available on HD optical disk at this time. OK, so that's an exaggeration, but less than 5% of the top 250 movies are available on HD optical disk, while all of them are available on DVD.

Darwin Tremor: [manipulating Dupree's mouth so Jack seems to be speaking to him] Oh hell yeah, we was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, so don't feel so bad, chief.

Buy Volvos. They're boxy, but they're good. We know they're not sexy, but this is not a smart time to be sexy anyway with so many new diseases around. Be safe instead of sexy."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099316/

Shouldn't it be Brainstorm instead?

Why don't you go look up the Deacons for Defense? Here are a couple of links:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335034/

http://www.amazon.com/Deacons-Defense-Resistance-Rights-Movement/dp/0807857025/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199740596&sr=8-3

Blacks in the south who used guns to defend themselves from a corrupt government -- state, county, city elected officials, police, judges -- who were in league with the KKK. They shot back and stopped the outrages, and that was the ONLY reason the federal government stepped in -- niggers with guns freaked them out.

You read up on them, and then tell me guns have no use except evil. You explain how blacks defending themselves against a corrupt oppressive government is anything but good, and then explain to me how all the patronizing whites looked the other way and pretended Martin Luther King completed his march to Selma without armed patrols around the nightly camps.

You nanny staters with your smug patronizing attitude that individuals must defer to the almighty government, whose Supreme Court has ruled several times that police are not obligated to defend individuals -- yes, you, who think everyone should follow your moral guidelines, that you are a superior thinker for the ages and conditions can never change -- go ahead, I dare you -- read up on the Deacons for Defense and Justice of just 40 years ago, and then tell me how your patronizing smugness can prevent a repeat today.

You can't, because it will happen again, and I hope there are heroes like the Deacons to come save your sorry ass.

And what about Marc Dacascos of the double dragons movie and other "great" late night movies?

Like we should worry?, that second sun of theirs didn't seem to last so long now did it?

We should insist they take Roy Scheider just because he's earned it.

So it seems that failing to invest in IT will provide companies with a strategic disadvantage...

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

"As many as three American Airlines passenger jets will be outfitted this spring with laser technology intended to protect planes from missile attacks"

What Rand genious thought this one up. Sounds like yet another excuse by the Military Industrial Complex to spend yet more billions of your money. What good is a laser defense system against people who are prepared to destroy themselves as well as the airline armed with nothing more leathal than knives and mace spray.

These 'terror' alerts are designed to make us so scared that we'll let them take away even more of our freedoms. It's us they are really scared of. The best defence against not getting blown up by a missile is not to sell them one in the first place. I wonder who sold them the missile?

"I want everyone to remember, why they need us!"

Adam Sutler, Lord High Chancellor of Greater England

Great Movie! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/

I wouldn't be too sure of that (casting a cunning, but somehow suave glance over shoulder), as some believe that the Illuminati have timed various peaks to coincide, causing massive disruption, and further their Shadow Government agenda.

So far, we're looking at Music and Oil peaks in the 1997-2000 time frame. Your 1988 claim is well outside. It's possible that you're correct, if other peaks are considered. For instance, there's a possible Mutant Humor Flick peak as early as '83, with the release of Strange Brew. http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=strange+brew&x=0&y=0&=go

That's somewhat scary, as it would seem to indicate a broad peak, and correspondingly poor usefulness as means of predicting future events. By your reasoning, the peak is so broad that we've yet to see the trailing edge. What would you have us do, invent bizarre new metrics? Peak of Brittney Lunacy? Peak of Ozzy's IQ? OK, ignore that last. But you know what I mean.

So do the Illuminati, and their henchmen, the NSA. Take care in what you say, my friend. They know whether or not you ate corn last night. If by some chance they don't, a simple Probe will tell them, and you'll be left with nothing but confused memories of gray aliens and bright lights.

Well, presumably you'll be left with some residual bits of corn, as well. Every cloud has a silver lining.

And of those three, which will you replay the most? Which will you get bored of first? I don't know about you, but I've listened to the "one decent song" on a few albums far more than I've ever watched even my favorite movie

I last bought music about 4 years ago. Since then I've bought a bunch of movies. Whereas I rarely listen to music other than on the radio I frequently watch movies. Some of them I even watch a lot. One of my fav is "Hellfighters". I got it on tape more than 10 years ago and on DVD a few years ago. In that tyme I've watched them more than 100 tymes. Admittedly it's not as many as listening to 3 or 4 minute songs a few tymes a week, but I watch movies way more than I listen to music other than the music in the movies. Now, if I had a good stereo and turntable I'd listen to more music.

I'm reminded of the Star Trek: TNG episode "Ship in a Bottle". Moriarty, a simulated character, is made (with outside interference) to understand that reality is bigger than what he can see. Ultimately, he is tricked into believing he escaped from what he knew into the bigger world, which is only another simulation wrapped on top of what he expected to see. Either way, it reaffirms the idea that a simulation could not itself notice that there is a boundry to the world without the outside reaching in, and that even if you do "get out", how can you be assured that what you now percieve as reality is in fact not a simulation anymore?

Umm... Did you really just use the Truman Show and Matrix to make a point? Even if those weren't just movies, there is a fundamental difference between them and the universe is a simulation theory. In those movies, the human(s) were put into an artificial environment. In the simulation theory, humans would themselves be artificial. A better movie to prove your point would be The Thirteenth Floor but even that required outside interference for the artificial beings to realize they were artificial.

Anybody remember the movie The Thirteenth Floor? http://imdb.com/title/tt0139809/

This structural biologist offers the following insight. I looked
over the papers published by the FOLDING@Home guys and I didn't
see a lot of medically important results. Actually it looks like
the computational equivalent of naval gazing. I wonder why
the authors don't just get dirty and use crystallography
and/or NMR to solve their structural questions. I looked at their
recent paper trail, no (ok 1) Science/Nature papers...

I guarantee that if SETI@home finds a signal in the static the
authors will get the cover of science/nature (and a trip to Sweden).
Maybe beyond:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/

Save my job -- don't do FOLDING@Home
---537

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118883/

Yeah, you missed that one.

Good movie, although a bit date today

Or better yet:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110216/

This reminds me of the TV show "A Year At The Top" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075602/ where you literally made a deal with the Devil's son for fame and fortune for one year...at the cost of your soul. One part of the deal was you couldn't warn anyone about how bad the deal was (he/she would only spout nonsense instead of the warning).

I don't think apple has the monopoly on that, they just provide a service that many distributors utilise to promote their product. It downloads off Apple provided servers and the companies themselves own the trailers anyway. not only that but people provide the trailers on their own sites as well. what they do have is some exclusive trailers that you don't see elsewhere, but given that beyond the cinemas, the distributors/producers I only see Apple being the one to show trailers. Apple is offering a service, something Microsoft can do if they so feel like it. Or Google. In fact I did a quick google of movie trailers and got a few results after Apple:
http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Trailers/ (links into its database and has better search)
http://movies.yahoo.com/trailers/
http://video.google.com/movietrailers.html (looks like this got forgotten however)
http://movies.go.com/movie_trailers

There were also other sites that pointed back to Apple and others that pointed to the trailers at the distributors site as well. Apple hardly have a monopoly as there are many other options. Its just that they provide a lot useful integration as well.

Sounds like somebody needs to watch Contact (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/) again ;)