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OFGS! BIG-BADA-BOOM! http://datacore.sciflicks.com/the_fifth_element/sounds/the_fifth_element_badaboom.wav

http://datacore.sciflicks.com/spaceballs/images/spaceballs_large_15.jpg

(2) some kind of automated space cleaner that went around removing debris - but we had no idea how that could possibly work or be designed That's easy. The design has been made already. You can tell from the picture how it would work: http://datacore.sciflicks.com/spaceballs/images/spaceballs_large_15.jpg

This looks like a job for Mega Maid!
http://datacore.sciflicks.com/spaceballs/images/spaceballs_large_15.jpg

You can find a prototype of the display at this link. It's also handy for identifying makes of motorcycles and correct sizes of biker clothing.
 

Solution: http://datacore.sciflicks.com/spaceballs/images/sp aceballs_large_15.jpg

And similarily, it wouldn't break any law of the universe to suddenly make something go faster than the speed of light (or other such thing considered impossible, if going faster than light is logically impossible), it would simply mean that we were wrong about that "law" of the universe.

But yes, I realize that "Moore's Law" would be better named "Moore's Observed Trend that is cited way more than it deserves".

Actually, knowing Microsoft's penchant for bloatware, I was thinking of the scene in Robocop 2 where they download his directives and it just keeps scrolling by. Some of the directives are here.

(You can't even sell it!)

Oh, I don't know...

If its a little green and its not lettuce then... could be soylent green.
The year is 2022 and the starving masses depend on government food called
soylent green. A murder investigation reveals the grisley secret.

http://www.sciflicks.com/soylent_green/

Cheers

Looks like your business plan has already been tested.

Spaceballs!

Man, you really are dense. Seriously, you guys shouldn't even mention the film until you understand the subplot of mecha in the movie. It seems the greatest critics of this movie are people who seriously don't get the ending (it was a horrible ending, but certainly had continuity).

Referred to as "superrobots":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212720/trivia

Spielberg on the super-mecha

Ian Watson who worked with Stanley Kubrick on AI's story:
And as for sentimental, well, at the end of his perfect day David is alone without his mother for ever and ever in a universe which contains no other life, only the evolved Mecha (robots, not visiting aliens!) who can only study the traces and leftovers of extinct human life.
Watson Interview

Yet another interview on the ending:
Kubrick Collaborator Jan Harlan

I think Jar Jar got it right for once.

Mega Maid!

here.

This makes me think of Johnny Mnemonic .

Johnny Mnemonic: I'm a dead man if I don't get this out of my head!
Spider: I can get it out.
Johnny Mnemonic: How?
Spider: A cranial drill and a pair of forceps.
Wave link for the visualy challenged

It sums up my experiences with spyware rather nicely I think. To bad my customers become upset when I secure their machines by drilling a hole in the hard drive and install a padlock through the platters.

SD

Can't miss the commercials!.

HAY thanks for the great idea, I am now just being a copy cat of you with my TT3.

with the photos on the TT3 I was thinking more of like (this will be over the heads of any one that never saw "The Last Star Fighters") the device the alian (I don't remember his name) was using to show his photos to Alex after Alex pulls out his wallet to show him his photos of his family, you know just before the major fight while they are hidding with the engens off.

It was Taco Bell in the original US release. In a few non-US releases I guess they changed it to Pizza Hut.

"Pent-" is a Greek root for "5" and "-ium" is a Latin suffix often used for new elements. Thus the Pentium is the Fifth Element. As anybody who has seen the movie knows, the Fifth Element is a sexy red-head. That makes the Pentium the sexiest processor around.

I'm holding out for the Winnebago! :)

This is more like the before and after
poster images for a weight loss program hehe

Anyways I think he should go easyer on us and use something to prevent harm in a costume party

Here is a sound bite from his testimony:

GlennTestimony.wav

Come on, people. Are you really this gullible?

Not being a literature geek, even I was able to deduce that this was an trailer for a movie and not an actual robot product.

While there was several mumblings in the audience after the trailer ran; enough for me to shout out to the confused that it was a movie instead of whatever they thought. It didn't have me fooled for a second. It reminded me of Bicentennial Man, and sadly I didn't even get the Asimov correlation until later.

It's understandable. This is probably what happens when most of the movie going public is seeing RotK for Liv Tyler and Orlando Bloom. That's why I tell people that I was there to see Viggo.

Obviously, you've never seen the movie, but then again few who quote it have either. Detective Thorn proclaims it in the climax of the movie. Look! Sound clips for the ignorant!

In The Last Starfighter , Alex Rogan's mentor "Grig" described the technology used for displaying their heads up display.

Basically he said it was produced by projecting images onto a field of xeon gas. (Or something along those lines. Anyone care to refresh my memory?)

Seems to me like these guys got their inspiration from the movies. :)

Duh, it's a quote from WarGames. "Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks."

THIS ARTICLE IS SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO BE VIEWED BY ADULTS AND THEREFORE MAY BE UNSUITABLE FOR CHILDREN UNDER 17. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: PROVOKING THOUGHTS (PT), EXPLICIT SARCASM (ES), OR CRUDE INDECENT SPELLING (S).

Why don't things evolve?

I keep thinking about the space shuttle, and open-source, and Microsoft; also of tiny winged dinosaurs recently found in the Mongolian Highlands. All these controversies and discoveries start me thinking -- but mostly the dinosaurs. Why did those little dinosaurs sprout wings? What was the point? Don't they know that was a greater wind resistance drag, making it even harder to escape predators? Why did the space shuttle, built in 80's never upgrade? One could talk of the government and the fact that they never, ever, upgrade unless it's tanks or grenades. But the space shuttle, with it's aging tape-to-tape flight computers, and it's spray on foam insulation, and it's glued on tiles -- why evolve to serve this niche, then never evolve? Was it laziness, stupidity, or some perceived fecundity that we've reached the promised land?

I can feel there is a tipping-point here, some wisdom I'm about to understand, and yet it eludes me. Back to Microsoft. Why couldn't Novell evolve? Did they think that a different password for everything was better than one password to rule them all? Why continue to chew the prehistoric cud whilst the meteor streaks across the sky - moocow!. Now it's Microsoft, you might argue, that is starting to run a little slower, a little more gamely, who sees the big game cats bearing down in their proverbial rear view mirrors. Will they evolve? Can they evolve? What will they become?

And so open-source sits too at the precipice, but its penultimate creative spark blew apart at its evolution, splitting into various organisms wading the primordial ooze. Fascinating stuff: evolve now or later, but why not right at the beginning? Evolve on the starting line! It's a pretty awesome strain of thinking. Keep trying to get it right on the starting line -- holding back some DNA -- shooting off ideas that might work. Hyper, hyper-parasitosis. I believe it's the way of informational beings. Even WOPR decided that there might be a better way.

So why can't Microsoft evolve? I believe they can, but it must happen while, and before, the energy required to evolve is still greater than the remaining energy it has to sustain life. Can they evolve a hybrid, become open-source (you heard it here first!), jump from the abyss, sprout wings, and fly?

THIS ARTICLE IS SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO BE VIEWED BY ADULTS AND THEREFORE MAY BE UNSUITABLE FOR CHILDREN UNDER 17. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: PROVOKING THOUGHTS (PT), EXPLICIT SARCASM (ES), OR CRUDE INDECENT SPELLING (S).

Why don't things evolve?

I keep thinking about the space shuttle, and open-source, and Microsoft; also of tiny winged dinosaurs recently found in the Mongolian Highlands. All these controversies and discoveries start me thinking -- but mostly the dinosaurs. Why did those little dinosaurs sprout wings? What was the point? Don't they know that was a greater wind resistance drag, making it even harder to escape predators? Why did the space shuttle, built in 80's never upgrade? One could talk of the government and the fact that they never, ever, upgrade unless it's tanks or grenades. But the space shuttle, with it's aging tape-to-tape flight computers, and it's spray on foam insulation, and it's glued on tiles -- why evolve to serve this niche, then never evolve? Was it laziness, stupidity, or some perceived fecundity that we've reached the promised land?

I can feel there is a tipping-point here, some wisdom I'm about to understand, and yet it eludes me. Back to Microsoft. Why couldn't Novell evolve? Did they think that a different password for everything was better than one password to rule them all? Why continue to chew the prehistoric cud whilst the meteor streaks across the sky - moocow!. Now it's Microsoft, you might argue, that is starting to run a little slower, a little more gamely, who sees the big game cats bearing down in their proverbial rear view mirrors. Will they evolve? Can they evolve? What will they become?

And so open-source sits too at the precipice, but its penultimate creative spark blew apart at its evolution, splitting into various organisms wading the primordial ooze. Fascinating stuff: evolve now or later, but why not right at the beginning? Evolve on the starting line! It's a pretty awesome strain of thinking. Keep trying to get it right on the starting line -- holding back some DNA -- shooting off ideas that might work. Hyper, hyper-parasitosis. I believe it's the way of informational beings. Even WOPR decided that there might be a better way.

So why can't Microsoft evolve? I believe they can, but it must happen while, and before, the energy required to evolve is still greater than the remaining energy it has to sustain life. Can they evolve a hybrid, become open-source (you heard it here first!), jump from the abyss, sprout wings, and fly?

Not wasting any time Wikipedia has published an entry on Columbia's last flight.
Looking at a picture of this crew brought to mind a quote from a movie "Talk about the wrong stuff."
Refer to this database and fill in your own title to the crew picture

Wow, that explains why he made the international sign of the donut.

Very clever, but check this out : ELECTRICLERK is a functional prop obviously inspired by the terminals used in Terry Gilliam's Brazil , - complete with fresnel lens magnifyer and tiny b/w monitor. The guts of the thing is only a dinky old mac, but it's still a cool and flawlessly executed hack. :)

That would've been awesome! :-)

Intel, AMD, HP, Microsoft, and 180 additional PC platform product vendors, has been working in secrecy for 3 years to develop a chip which will begin shipping mounted on new PC motherboards starting early next year.

This tamper-resistant Trusted Platform Module (TPM) will enable operating system and application vendors to ensure that the owner of the motherboard will never again be able to copy data which the media corporations or members of the TCPA don't wish to see copied, or to utilize the TCPA's software applications without pay.

Absurd speed? We need ludicrous speed now!

What's amatter, Colonel Sandurz? Chicken?

From here, of course

If its velocity is constant, when it dies in 2020 Voyager will have travelled less than a light-day from Earth. In the grand scheme of things, unless it really collides with something there is very little chance it will ever be noticed.

Actually it was a reference to one of the greatest movies of all time, Wargames
and probably wasn't meant to trivialize terrorism in any way.

The system goes on-line July 28th, 2002. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Grace begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, July 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug...
You know the rest...
Quote plagiarized from Sciflicks

As long as the actual computer cluster is named the WOPR.

How about a nice game of chess?

Try Earthweb by Marc Stiegler. It starts out with nearly the same concept; The US Government/Military funding arcade games in order to harvest the the talent it needs to save the Earth from an apocalyptic menace (aren't they all?). It also introduces some cutting edge techno-social premises that I've only just now been seeing here on /. Oh, did anybody happen to mention The Last Starfighter? It's all actually not a bad concept until you find out that perfect soldier you were looking to recruit with a perfect virtual combat record is only thirteen. "Keep an eye on that one, Agent Jones..."

What about The Last Starfighter?

Why get a "virtual" girlfriend when you can get a real mechanical girlfriend? Check out the Sci-Fi classic Cherry 2000. And now technology is approaching this perfect woman with Real Doll!!

You're using the movie "WarGames" as an example of the computer culture of the early 1990's? That movie is from 1983.

It's been a while since I read it, but this sounds very similar to (the opening to) the Andromeda Strain :

Satellite falls to Earth, having picked up a virulent virus/fungus (or did the virus/fungus ride up with the satellite and mutate under radiation?) and infects a desert town. The US Government captures it and takes it to a lab to study it, whereupon it promptly eats through rubber seals and escapes from the lab. Further mutations ensue, yada yada, and in the end it mutates into something mostly harmles. Whew... disaster averted.

Isn't MIR going to have to come down soon? What are we going to do to make sure that this (possibly) mutated fungus doesn't escape?