Slashdot Mirror

Nanobots, tiny jet engines. Has anyone warned Dennis Quaid?

Wicker man reference - cool

Fox News is more popular than CNN and MSNBC combined.

You should watch So I Married An Axe Murderer some day, when you aren't so deluded.

May Mackenzie: Charlie, hand me the paper.
Charlie Mackenzie: Mom, I find it interesting that you call The Weekly World News "the paper." A paper contains facts.
Stuart Mackenzie: Hey! The Weekly World News has the most readers of ANY newspaper on the planet! You're going to say that's coincidence?

"People watch/read it, so it's right" has got to be one of the worst arguments I've ever read. I'm actually embarassed for you.

The cool thing about that book is that the first edition was written in 1984, and so offers a timely perspective on the formation of the computer industry. It's not a "looking back" history where facts get muddled over time. Everything is fresh. The second, 1999, edition updates with the history that happened since, and everything remains timely. I read the first edition in college, and bought the second when it came out.

The book was made into a movie a few years ago, which I believe aired on TNT (if memory serves). I see it is now also available on video.

Slacker (1991)

Naja (1997)

Links:
The Pixelvision Home Page
Pixelvision (includes tecnical details)

Slacker (1991)

Naja (1997)

Links:
The Pixelvision Home Page
Pixelvision (includes tecnical details)

So where's Chucky?

I think he saw this and was scarred for life.

Or, perhaps it was a directive from his parents. I had a friend whose dad was a geologist, and constantly as a kid his dad was telling us both things like "Become anything, but not a geologist. Turn to male prostitution, but whatever you do do not become a geologist". To this day I'd have to say neiter of us are, in fact, any sort of geologist. In fact my friend works as an engineer on a small boat at sea that's out for months at a time - about as far away from land as you can get.

At first, I thought maybe the new Child's Play movie already needed financial help.

Steven Hawkings A Brief History of time

Technically it's: Errol Morris's "A Brief History of Time" which is about Stephen Hawking.

Stephen Hawking didn't make the documentary. He wrote the book, certainly, but typically the director not the writer gets the credit.

I highly recommend all of Errol Morris's documentaries. My favorites are Fog of War, Mr. Death, Brief History of Time, and Gates of Heaven. I haven't seen the others.

If you really want to watch a movie that will be over after gentoo finishes compiling try The Cure for Insomnia

I just can't imagine there are many people who care enough about nerds dialing up bulletin boards to spend 7 hours watching them.

Half Baked? I don't really think Microsoft is in the movie tie-in business, and even if they were why would they want to link their products with a lame move from the late 90s? Dave Chappelle was pretty good, but Jim Breuer is a veritable human wasteland on par with Jeff Goldblum

This guy might help you out

They'd better make hunting kids legal again or next winter there may be thousands of them starving to death and running into traffic, just like deers.

Sounds uncannily like the plot of a film I once saw; cutting things a bit fine to get the plan ready for Halloween this year, unfortunately.

"14 more days till Haloween..."

The apartment tenant could have been killed by the toilet seat from the deorbiting Mir station, and be cursed to forever walk the undead world known as http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348913/Toilet Seat Girl...

Can't resist it... :-)

Am I the only one reminded immediately of the glasses invented by Steve Martin's character in The Jerk, which eventually made an entire population cross-eyed?

But then I started thinking: I am a regular listener to NPR, and though their coverage of news is better (in my opinion) it's still not all that different. It could be because they still have to get corporate contributions, or is it more than that?

Corporations are more conservative, because they want to keep the status quo, not make waves, and consolidate power to make more money. As long as news makes enough money, corporate stays out of it. But if reporters start taking that liberal stuff to heart and start making waves -- enough waves to make more trouble than money -- they slap it down. And they can, because reporters that are part of a big media conglomerate can (should? do?) make more money than independents. Once a reporter hits the big time, he'll be less willing to take the monetary/prestige hit.

(ObTheInsider: " 'I'm Lowell Bergmann, I'm from 60 Minutes.' You know, you take the 60 Minutes out of that sentence, nobody returns your phone call.")

This would explain why conservatives see a liberal media (listening directly to the journalists), liberals see a conservative media (watching what the corporations do) and you don't see much difference between corporate and public (because there isn't enough difference to notice at the journalist level).

Just a thought. Other possibilities include:

• Herd instinct - if everyone else is covering it, it must be important.
• Restrictions of the medium - Television works better with sound bites, simple assumptions, short explanations...
• Similar boundaries: Public television is, by definition, government-funded, restricting its ability to strongly criticize the establishment. To the extent it's corporate funded, the previous discussion would apply.

TSG

I remember that the teacher spends weeks coming up with "The night was humid" only to read it in one of his student's works.

It was from "Throw Momma From the Train" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094142/) and Danny Devito's character wrote a godawful short story that started this way.

Hilarious movie. :-)

The rest are rehashing the same idiotic themes repeatedly.

Watch Chasing Amy.

Rent this movie: Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

DeBeers has warehouses of bins, floor to ceiling of diamonds they keep off the market to artificially inflate their value.
11 Harrowhouse

gewg_

The episode number and subtitle "A New Hope" did not originally appear in the film's opening crawl. These were added to the April 10, 1981 re-release to be consistent with those seen in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

"Can this technology used for making weapons?"

For some strange reason, there's something | There
called a "lameness filter" that repeatedly | are
rejected all attempts to post this message | lots
the way I wanted it to appear and saying I | of
had too few characters per line and that I | technologies
needed to reduce the count of "junk" chars | that
per line in my post. Perhaps it's just me, | can
but I think that making me do something so | be
TOTALLY HOKEY as THIS, JUST so the post'll | used
appear the way I intended for it to appear | to
somehow seems MUCH more hokey, in the long | make
run... But maybe I'm just being too ornery | weapons...

You just have to learn to think like this guy
and turn yourself into a human one of these.

No, it was Gremlins.

Kennedy: "They dyed me this color! That's how clever they are!"

(Bubba Ho-Tep)

I can think of at least one director/producer who has bucked this trend: Sam Raimi

The Evil Dead series is classic, and totally low-budget. Recently, he did the two Spider-man movies, and they also turned out great, even though they were big budget blockbuster style movies.

If there is life on Titan and the landing is not controlled isn't the potential for murder high?

First? First public?

Contact, anthill, squish.

Nuclear waste is highly toxic, expensive to transport and store. CO2 you could probably pump into greenhouses and embiggen* tomatoes.

You'll be able to "embiggen" tomatoes with nuclear waste as well!
There may be a few side effects though...

He did it for the money. There's nothing really surprising about this.

We've been taught that Greed is Good after all, so why do we even comment on stuff like this? Oh yeah... that attitude only works when it's a small number of parasites feeding off society, not all of society with that attitude.

If you actually read the article, it sounds like his real complaint isn't that his program is being used for illegal/unethical/immoral purposes... it's just that he isn't getting paid for it, because it has a 3-day try-before-you-buy feature.

This is no different than a story about "Enterprising young man pimps out neighberhood girls." Only the tools are different.

And having read some comments in here... this posting is already -1, Redundant.

Demolition Man predicts that Taco Bell will win the Franchise Wars.

So this would make you the man who sued God? Pleased to meet you, Billy. ;)

Remember, the goal of this is not to clone entire humans (although, someday, who knows what will happen) but instead to perfect genetic engineering.

People will likely look back one day on the movie Gattaca as amazingly prophetic. For those unfamiliar with the film, it did an amazing job portraying what society may be like when genetic engineering becomes perfected. Coming, sooner than many think, are the days when we can engineer the child of two parents; not to be a perfect child, but instead to be the "best" of those parents. The child is more intelligent, stronger, etc. than the average child produced by those parents would be, and will have a much lower likelihood of diseases and other problems. This will be a fantastic thing, but those children born the old-fashioned way are likely going to be disadvantaged. Because we'll be able to weed them out just by plucking a hair and checking their DNA.

Should we forbid someone from taking a certain job based on their genetic makeup? And how long can we breed the "best" children before the best become so far ahead of the worst, that the worst no longer have any "value" to society at all? Those will be the real ethical dilemmas. The so-called ethical dilemmas we're faced with today are just temporary hurdles created by people who are frightened of progress and/or don't understand what the goals are.

--

I think the term you are looking for is "Cyborg".

Best case scenario: Soon your neighbourhood will be watched over by friendly Robocops.

Worst case scenario: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097138/

I think the term you are looking for is "Cyborg".

Best case scenario: Soon your neighbourhood will be watched over by friendly Robocops.

Worst case scenario: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097138/

"DARPA envisions a day when a fighter pilot, for instance, might operate some controls just by thinking."

Christopher Lee

Good thing you AC'd that, since you've just hoisted yourself on your own "retard".

What kind of game is this?

I've seen dozens of anti-Bush "documentaries" and "news magazine stories" on TV over the last year.

The sitting president is, and always should be, open for more criticism than anyone else in the nation. Bush's inability to admit mistakes, his willingness to push his political agenda, and the fact that many feel that his election was at least controversial, all add to the need to critical look at his decisions. (the fact that most critical looks at this administration are not too complementary is a different item)

Just because a news article or report doesn't follow the current day's talking points doesn't meant that the report has a liberal bias. When you hear "liberal bias" brandished about, think about it with a open mind; most of the time, any fact (like listing the names of the fallen in Iraq) not agreeing with the Republicans current talking points are labeled as "liberal". Critically investigating or reporting on an administration and its actions is not a "left wing" bias or "hatchet-job tabloid" journalism, but instead an important part of the political process, and one of the best uses of free speech in this country. The fake document CBS report was, in essence, true and relevant only because of the attacks on Kerry about his service during the Vietnam era. This report was not a "hachet-job", it was just poor journalism (double check you sources, and don't trust one with an axe to grind). Ironically, it did more to help the president than it hurt him.

If "Fahrenheit 9/11" were aired commercial free on TV before the election, you would hear the same cries of foul in reverse. No hypocrisy, just politics.

If Sinclair were truly interested in being fair and furthering the democratic process, it would air both "Stolen Honor" and Going Upriver, in the same commercial free time slot on consecutive evenings. This would show two sides of the same man and actions. But the democratic process and fairness are not on Sinclair's agenda.

No, Stone directs too.

I can't wait to see this combination of Trey Parker's highbrow humor with Stone's obsession for finding the truth.

You want the actor Robby, not one of his movies.

You saved me the trouble, thank you!