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Does anyone remember a few months ago when Larry Ellison cashed all of his stock options? It was something like $700m. I wonder what his intensions were and why he did it?

Let me (hopefully) be the first to announce that SlashDot discussed this when Episode 1 came out. Slash linked to an article that's still there. It talked about the same Chicago company, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, that publicised EP2 estimates. They were almost the same numbers for EP1.

I have to agree with the author. I have written to my Senators and my representive in the House regarding this legislation, and have heard back from only one of them. They are not noticing us, but they should. We are educated people, we have common goals and concerns, we are a large network of people, and we communicate frequently. We are a part of a grassroots movement. It is time for the politicians to take notice.

While GeekPAC may only be able to act one election at a time, the threat that will speak to them. It may seem like a dirty tactic, but they are trying to steal our fair use rights. We have to fight back.

Actually they have already been weakened. This happened a few weeks ago, when nobody was watching. What? You actually thought this administration would let them stand?

Ok, with all this fuss from Intel about "Intel inside" and the mystical powers it endows upon Intel that allow it to sue innocent companies, I decided to check it out.

"Check what out?" you might ask. Well, in short, I wanted to check out what's 'inside'. So I did.

Now, to do this with a Pentium 4 would be silly. It's an expensive chip and I don't like the idea of supporting Intel's legal BS with my purchases. I found a couple of 486's laying around (33MHz if you're curious) and decided I should immediately set out to find out what's 'inside'.

Noticing the top is one piece told me to focus my efforts on relieving the chips of their bottom plate which I theorized (having neither the time nor the inclination to actually find out) were simply either glued or soldered on. Working under this theory, I tried using a small straighthead scewdriver to scrape away whatever was holding it in place on the outside and try to pry under the plate.

After realizing this was going nowhere fast, I looked around and decided the best way in was to reverse the process by which it was assembled. Keep in mind I had no intention of trying to actually do anything with what I found, nor do I have the expertise to figure out how any of it worked. I just wanted to see what the hell is 'inside'. I therefore decided to use a small butaine torch. This should, I theorized, heat up the glue or whatever enough to allow me to get into the plate.

I'm going to say this once and I hope everyone listens... DO NOT TRY THIS YOURSELF WITHOUT GLOVES, LONG SLEEVES, LONG PANTS, AND GOGGLES! Also make sure someone is very nearby (within talking distance) in case something goes wrong. I STRONGLY recommend you NOT try this AT ALL.

Ok, now torch in one hand, vice grips in the other, I proceeded to heat the plate up as much as possible. Pins were glowing, popping and crackling sounds were easily heart, and I started smelling a rather odd burning smell. Eventually the plate came off (dropped off the first one, was pryed off the second one) and I got my first look at what's 'inside'.

Take it from me Intel, this ain't worth suing over. Fire your lawyers and go back to making stuff. It's basically a little rectangular piece of material held into place by a bunch of small gold traces (one for each pin). It looks like the hologram cards from the old Marvel X-men cards. Well, I figured I should investigate further, so I lit up my investigation tool (torch) and went back to work. After maybe 10 minutes of torching various places, the chip pretty much exploded. I have to hand it to Intel, their die held up pretty well until the chip blew apart. Basically, there was a loud 'pop' and about half the cpu flew off to my right about 4 or 5 feet. Pieces of the die went all over and it was altogether really cool.

So anyway, that's the basic story, second CPU didn't explode, and by then I had taken out goggles and gloves to protect myself in case it did. So without further adu, I send you off here so you can see the pictures of what's 'inside'. Trademarks have been edited out for my continued enjoyment of not getting tossed in an 8x10 foot cell with "Bubba".

Enjoy.

One other thing I find of interest are that while both the companies are heavily funded by Microsofts Paul Allen, both are using Linux as the base OS for their products.

I'd be surprised if Moxi is dead. Their not planning to lay anyone off...

Now lets look at it: First off, price. The bottom line iMac is actually very cheap and when you compare it to a packaged PC deal with 3 year warranty, you'll actually find the prices are roughly the same and the Mac has more features.

According to sfgate, the cheapest of the new iMacs $1,399.00. I've seen it elsewhere at $1294.00. Dell's cheapest Pentium 4 is $1,086.17 and $906.17 if you already have a monitor as many of us do. And that's to say nothing of eMachines! Macs may be competitive at the mid-range but if you want a cheap box, Apple is not where I would turn.

I did read the article, thank you very much. She is a licensed attorney, and she wants to go to Mexico to drum up some business, but she "should not be given a passport that would let her ... establish potential business contacts with a Peruvian law firm."

Although she is a flight risk, given the circumstances it is unlikely that she would otherwise be able to gather the $25,000 needed to allow her to get a passport without following client leads.

In another article on the same subject from the San Francisco Chronicle, it is noted that as far back as 1998 "as a struggling lawyer, Eunique tried to go to Peru, where she had a lead on some legal work, but she was denied a passport" because of the large debt she had accumulated to her ex-husband.

This was far from an easy decision to make, on the three judge panel, the ruling was made 2-1. The sole judge who ruled in her favor said "The right to leave is among the most important of all human rights." Apparently even the origins of the law back to the 1950's and it was originally intended to "restrict foreign travel by American communists and alleged subversives."

She is indeed a deadbeat parent, but denying her a basic right that would help enable her to pay off her debt, well, that seems just stupid.

The reality of the world today is that each one of us leave a trail of bits as we pass through our days. The purpose of "privacy" is not to stop those bits, but to keep them from being aggregated and used against me.

If my kroger buyer card shows that I do not buy pork and I charge fuel and fertilizer on my lawn care company visa, I do not want to be questioned by the FBI as a terrorist. The oversite needs to be on the use of the data, not it's existance.

My doctor needs the ability to genetically screen for disease, but my insurance company, even if it knows my flaws, should not be allowed to charge more. In the past I had the security through obscurity that my privacy provides, but this is no longer the case.

The transparent society is an open source society. The 'source code' of an individual are their life experiences. The exploits are already in the wild. (People generally by milk and produce in a grocery so why are those sections the furthest apart?).

The success of the transparent society will depend on the protections we provide for our most valuable intellectual property we own, ourselves.

Lawrence Lessig has an article that descibes a new system for protecting IP. Add ability to copyright your personal data and we have a start on the Transparent Society.

SD

Some airports already have the infrastructure that they use for baggage checks.

Now every run down to you nearest money grubbing airport and eavesdrop... err... I mean connect to the net and browse slashdot.

--
brr its cold up here, some want to pass me a polar bear skin?

Oh, the "enterprise" buyers those fancy consultants always talk about whenever they're discussing something that's wildly overpriced.

As for me, I'll stick with my Palm V, and my cellphone for paging. Why pay more?

Yes indeed, your facts are wrong. The Chinese scientist, Wen Ho Lee, worked at Los Alamos and did not STEAL the information as he had a right to access it. He was found not guilty of espionage, and the only thing that he was found to have done wrong was mis handle classified material.

I'm not sure where you heard about Clinton administration's sale of layouts for modernized weaponry and aircraft, but I'd like to see the source. As far as I know, the Chinese military technology is predominantly Russian-based, including their nuclear ICBM's.

You are misinformed. While sanitation and cleanliness is some of the common reasons for banning gum, the primary incident that caused gum to be banned is because of the MRT (subway). I believe singapore would have been willing to put up with gum as a public nuisance, but apparently disposed chewing gum on subway doors caused them to jam and cause huge delays, affecting the whole city.

http://www.sfgate.com/examiner/bondage/BOND-23960. html

Then you end up with something like those revolting open air urinals on the streets of Amsterdam

The Dutch have a great history of being very practical. It's a well known fact that men tend to not mind pissing outdoors on the way home from the bar. Yes, I'll do it in an instant if I really have to go. Having open air urinals is not nearly as bad as guys pissing on doorsteps or walls.

But then again I suppose you have a problem with Amsterdam allowing prostitution, shrooms, and marijuana (in coffee houses only, of course).

But here it is. Yes, San Francisco Muni just retired the last Boeing streetcars, which were amazingly unreliable. But they're not all dead yet! Manchester, England is buying a few to tide their system over until they can get some new cars.

I submitted this article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the anniversary last week (rejected, naturally). It has a nice discussion about the film's creation and influence.

You should check out this article. It's about a 12-year-old who kills his brother while pretending to play a videogame. The article focuses on the danger of videogames and barely mentions that it might be a bad thing for a parent to leave a loaded handgun laying around where kids can find it.

Palm Be Apple Triple Merger?

Rather than redefining "is", it seems that our old friend has found a new home at Cydoor Technologies, makers of another KaZaA-transmitted disease, who are now pushing the ClickTilUWin trojan to spyware-friendly companies.

To quote the article:

• Greg Bildson, chief technology officer of Lime Wire LLC, said the company was led to believe the program did no more than link to a game, making the permission request unnecessary.

• Robert Regular of Cydoor Technologies Inc., which distributed the ClickTillUWin software to the file-sharing companies, said the program wasn't supposed to collect information until users activated it -- and had an opportunity to be notified and decline if they so choosed.

  Regular said he did not believe deception was intended by any of the parties.

All your bridges are belong to us!

Karma hell, here I come!

There's a homily about how, when everyone is a lawbreaker, government has total control over everyone -- there will always be a pretext for detaining any person.

As another poster mentioned, it is quite likely that none of us would like to have all of our keystrokes made public -- some of our innermost thoughts go right through our keyboards, and Magic Lantern wouls apparently make no distinction between keystrokes that you intend to publish on the web, and those intended to stay private (financial info, personal letters, diaries, medical correspondence). If you think this sort of tapping would only occur under warrant, you aren't following the latest news.

Since 9/11, we already see our government detaining people for more extended periods of time even when the detaineee has not been accused of a crime, refusing to share the evidence against those detained, and the Dept of Justice is even, per AG Ashcroft, allowed to monitor conversations between people in custody and their lawyers. That last one applies to everyone, and is not limited to suspected illegal immigrants.

This is the top of a very slippery slope. If we give away rights to privacy in our homes and with our legal counsel, we will never get these rights back.

"A man who gives up some of his liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"Whether or not legislation is truly moral is often a question of who has the power to define morality." -- Jerome Skolnick

This article helps explain the ADCo in layman's terms.

As valuable as a list of good games is, let me tack on a note about a game not to buy your child this Christmas season.

Don't buy your kids "WinBack: Covert Operation". A young child recently shot his brother to death after playing this game on his computer and attempting to re-enact the game.

Personally, I'm rather fond of Half-Life, but my daughter doesn't seem to enjoy it.

SF Gate has an article about how the states are "sabotaging" the settlement:

Why are they asking the court to derail the settlement, effectively guaranteeing that the case won't be resolved for years? The state attorneys general claim the high ground as defenders of consumers, but it is hard to see what consumers of software would gain in prolonging this legal agony.

Uhh, ok...

California won't support the "settlement", at least not immediately. Makes me proud to live here, along with the DeCSS ruling yesterday.

From the article:
what's so unusual about a blue moon on Halloween is that it last shone over California in 1944. And there won't be another until the year 2020

And:
The blue moon was originally defined by the Maine Farmer's Almanac in 1819 as an extra full moon within any season. Later, however, the respected publication Sky and Telescope altered the almanac's definition and since then it has come to mean the second full moon within a single month.

It's apparently still being considered, as it's on the upcoming ballot as Measure B in San Francisco.

This first installment focuses on Frodo (Elijah Wood), the Hobbit, who embarks on a quest to destroy the One Ring before the evil Gandalf (Ian McKellen) can get his hands on it.

That article is trucated.

Here's a link to the original SF Gate / SF Chronicle article. It's an interesting article...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ ch ronicle/archive/2000/12/07/MN154990.DTL

When this came out in 1997 it sounded (again) as if smallish, clean power plants were "just around the corner"... but I haven't heard anything much more from it since!

Check out the original article I read and its accompanying diagram.

Or go to the scientists' web site, which hasn't been updated since 1997!

And these aren't crackpots either... they're professors at UC Irvine, Los Alamos National Labs, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory!

Oh well, I still have high hopes for fusion, but I also have low expectations...

When this came out in 1997 it sounded (again) as if smallish, clean power plants were "just around the corner"... but I haven't heard anything much more from it since!

Check out the original article I read and its accompanying diagram.

Or go to the scientists' web site, which hasn't been updated since 1997!

And these aren't crackpots either... they're professors at UC Irvine, Los Alamos National Labs, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory!

Oh well, I still have high hopes for fusion, but I also have low expectations...

Unfortunately, the latest word is next summer at the earliest. Plug Power reported a $30 mil loss as of their past fiscal year and their press releases talk more about financial transactions rather than actual sales or product delivery so things aren't looking all that great for GE or Plug Power's offering right now.

What's worse for Plug Power is their initial offering doesn't take advantage of the fact that the fuel cell produces hot water as a waste product. Were they to design the unit to feed the hot water to a water heater, the fuel cell efficiency would be greater than 70%. Supposedly, the water capture feature won't appear until the second generation offering which makes you wonder who would buy the first one - especially at $15k a pop.

By coincidence, Chevron Oil in San Ramon, CA fired up their 200 KW unit today for the first time. That puppy set them back $850,000 or around $4,250 per KW. More info is available at
SF Chronicle.

Notice the odd ratios - The Chevron unit that's real and online cost about twice what GE's not-available unit is supposed to come in at. Maybe there's a hint there as to why Plug Power can't deliver.

My source is an AP story pulled of the wire for sfgate. I don't know why they would lie about it. IT was a legitimate concern at one point. Read the article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/ archive/2001/09/17/national1723EDT0792.DTL

Of course it could be wrong but AP reports are not exactly known for their sensationalism.

• On September 11, someone allegedly threatened the president with codes indicating inside knowledge of the president's whereabouts. If this story true, it means there is a traitor somewhere at a high level in the administration. If it's false, it means that the government is deliberately leaking false information, in an attempt not to make the president look bad.
• There is some evidence that there were warnings of the attack:
  Security heightened at WTC, Bin Laden warnings, State Dept. advisory
  Echelon warnings
  Israeli intelligence
  San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown
  A crazed Iranian in Germany
  A US army base in New Jersey
• Circumstantial evidence of the US training terrorists.

So why is it unreasonable to speculate about the US government?

> Although, come to think of it, most of the MS
> shares are actually employee stock options, created
> out of thin air and used by MS as a means of (a)
> avoiding paying cash to employees and (b) dodging
> taxation

As was posted on Slashdot a while ago, Microsoft didn't pay taxes in 2000. If you don't remember, the San Francisco Gate reported that Microsoft paid no taxes in 2000 because of laws that let them take deductions for employees exercising their options. It's estimated that this action reduced Microsoft's tax burden by $3.6 billion dollars.

Luckily, Microsoft was able to divert some of that tax savings to certain campaigns of GWB and other Republicans, and now they're getting a better ROI than they ever would have gotten if they had actually paid any taxes.

Zork, from infogames.

You can apparently get the old Zork stuff from the Infocom web site.

Involves getting eaten by grues, trolls with weapons, that kind of stuff, but no humans are harmed (apart from the player).

See... even Geeks have violent fantasies. We kill imaginary creatures for fun. And profit.

As most of you know, in any dispute over domains it's the money that wins.

Er...not always:

• Sting lost his bid to take over the gamer site, sting.com (WIPO ruling)
• The World Wrestling Federation recently lost a battle with the World Wildlife Fund over wwf.org (British court ruling)

He brings up some very good points -- and the sort of backhand at Slashdot isn't anything that hasn't been said and nodded at by everyone here, and yeah, I'm sure we'll all get over it. Where he runs into a problem, though, is in his amusing assertion that the "legitimate" media [characterization is mine, not a quote] have and adhere to these standards of ethics. That's laughable. I wish I could find the references now, but I don't remember whether it was in the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Francisco Bay Guardian that I read about the publishing policy at the Los Angeles Times a few years ago -- where the publisher overruled the editorial staff and declared that no articles that were antagonistic to the advertisers would be run.

It's true of every news organ that the subscription fees (if any) do not even come close to financing the business. News outlets, whether they're radio, television, print, or online, are not actually in business for the reader. It's the same old story, guys: Follow the Money. The people who are actually making these "news" organs into profitable businesses are the advertisers, and don't think that the editorial and publishing staffs don't know this. They know exactly who their customers are. The customers are the advertisers. And their product is their subscriber base. The way they manufacture their product is to spew forth infotainment designed to keep their product's infamously short attention span focused on the medium long enough to score an ad impression.

The only part of this article that I really disagree with is his holier-than-thou attitude. Yeah right, offline media have ethics. Go watch The Insider and look at how 60 Minutes -- big guns in traditional media, I'd say -- sucked up to tobacco.

If you're in journalism, you're a whore. So what? We're mostly not down on prostitution around here, so long as we get our share. Here's fifty bucks; suck on this.

It's on their front page. There is also the opportunity to make comments and to possibly reach a crowd that is not enamored with computer technology.

20% OF U.S. TEENAGERS IGNORANT ABOUT U.S. INDEPENDENCE
Proof that U.S. public schools are dismal failures

CALIFORNIA PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE SO BAD THAT:
75% of 9th Graders Fail Math Skills Test and 50% fail English skills test when 70% is score needed to pass
Rather than teach, Calif. considers LOWERING passing score!

CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE SO BAD THAT MORE THAN HALF OF ALL STUDENTS MUST GO TO SUMMER SCHOOL
More than 215,000 failed Basic Skills Test!

GAY PERVERT WITH HIV RAPES9 YEAR OLD BOY
School teacher molests student; ALLOWED TO REMAIN ON THE JOB!!

SUPREME COURT SAYS LAW SCHOOLS CAN USE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Just what we need, more incompetent lawyers

"STRAIGHT PRIDE" T-SHIRT STUDENT WINS IN COURT
Was told by school he could not wear shirt because it was "offensive to gays."

13 YEAR OLD SAVAGE NEGRO BEAST FOUND GUILTY OF MURDERING WHITE SCHOOL TEACHER
Shot teacher in the head after being thrown out of class for water balloon; faces 25 years to life in prison

FLORIDA UNIVERSITY RUNS PLAY PORTRAYING JESUS AS GAY
Your Tax Dollars at work!

I second that, you are one of the few who actually know what is going on and have the ability to learn from history instead of look at it as a boring excersise in futility. Too bad the masses don't think like you, if they did we would never have to worry about such asinine things such as this and this

Actuly, according to this ( http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/kr on/archive/2001/08/06/telemarketing.DTL ) there is a $500 to $1,500 per call charge you can file....

Here are a couple new SF Chronicle articles of interest:

• Martyr or criminal? -- good article, even gets some anti-Dmitry comments from the Association of American Publishers, just in case anyone thought that no one wanted Dmitry to rot in jail
• Russian programmer Sklyarov freed on $50,000 bail

Here are a couple new SF Chronicle articles of interest:

• Martyr or criminal? -- good article, even gets some anti-Dmitry comments from the Association of American Publishers, just in case anyone thought that no one wanted Dmitry to rot in jail
• Russian programmer Sklyarov freed on $50,000 bail

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution - (grade: C+) "Maybe Darwin was wrong: this remake shows no sign of evolution."

• Chicago Tribune - "...a rouser, a screaming-banshee fun house."

• CNN.com - "...this is one really bad script."

• Deseret News (Salt Lake City) - (3 stars) "...when it's good, it comes close to being great."

• E! Online - (grade: C+) "...offers an eye-appealing world but a truly disappointing story."

• Entertainment Weekly - (grade: C+) "...[features] everything...but imagination."

• L.A. Weekly - "...underwritten..."

• Los Angeles Times - "...over-plotted and under-dramatized..."

• Mr. Showbiz - (rating: 2/5) "...despite its presentation, the film is so very ordinary, without urgency or revelation."

• New York Times - "...both a gas and distant, a toy sealed in its unbreakable box."

• People - "The fault lies not in the stars here but in the script."

• Roger Ebert - (2.5 stars) "I expected more."

• Salon - "...stops far too short of being completely seductive."

• San Francisco Chronicle - "...an amazing display of imagination."

• TV Guide - (2.5 out of 5 stars) "...sorely deficient on the story front."

• USA Today - (3 out of 4 stars) "...[the costumes] allow the power of the performer inside the ape gear to break on through."

• Search the Movie Review Query Engine

Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes" wants to be all things to all men, and all apes. It's an action picture and a satire of an action picture. It's a comedy and then it gets serious. It's a social satire and then backs away from pushing that angle too far. It even has a weird intra-species romantic triangle in it. And it has a surprise ending that I loved, even though Matt Drudge spoiled it last weekend with a breathless "scoop."

The movie could have been more. It could have been a parable of men and animals, as daring as "Animal Farm." It could have dealt in social commentary with a sting, and satire that hurt. It could have supported, or attacked, the animal rights movement. It could have dealt with the intriguing question of whether a man and a gorilla having sex is open-mindedness, or bestiality (and, if bestiality, in both directions?).

It could have, but it doesn't. It's a cautious movie, earning every letter and numeral of its PG-13 rating. Intellectually, it's science fiction for junior high school boys.

I expected more. I thought Burton would swing for the fence. He plays it too safe, defusing his momentum with little nudges to tell you he knows it's only a movie. The 1968 "Planet of the Apes" was made before irony became an insurance policy. It made jokes, but it took itself seriously. Burton's "Planet" has scenes that defy us to believe them (his hero survives two bumpy crash-landings that look about as realistic as the effects in his "Mars Attacks!"). And it backs away from any kind of risky complexity in its relationships.

The key couple consists of Leo (Mark Wahlberg), who is the human hero, and Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), who is the Eleanor Roosevelt of the apes. They're attracted to each other but don't know what to do about it, and the screenplay gives them little help. Leo is also supposed to be linked romantically, I guess, with a curvy blond human named Daena (Estella Warren), but her role has been so abbreviated that basically all she does is follow along looking at Leo either significantly or winsomely, as circumstances warrant. At the end, he doesn't even bid her a proper farewell.

Leo, to be sure, is not one for effusive emotional outbursts. He's played by Wahlberg as a limited and narrow person with little imagination, who never seems very surprised by anything that happens to him--like, oh, to take a random example, crash-landing on a planet where the apes rule the humans. He's a space jockey type, trained in macho self-abnegation, who is great in a crisis but doesn't offer much in the way of conversation. His basic motivation seems to be to get himself off the planet, and to hell with the friends he leaves behind; he's almost surly sometimes as he leads his little band through the wilderness.

The most "human" character in the movie is, in fact, the chimpanzee Ari, who believes all species were created equal, casts her lot with the outcast humans, and tells Leo, "you're sensitive--a welcome quality in a man." Helena Bonham Carter invests this character with warmth, personality and distinctive body language; she has a way of moving that kids itself.

There's also juice in a character named Limbo (Paul Giamatti), a scam artist who has a deal for everyone, and a lot of funny one-liners. That he sounds like a carnival pitch-man should not be held against him.

The major ape characters include the fearsome Gen. Thade (Tim Roth), his strong but occasionally thoughtful gorilla lieutenant Attar (Michael Clarke Duncan), and Sen. Sandar (David Warner), who is a parliamentary leader and Ari's father. There's also a cameo for Charlton Heston, as a wise old ape who inevitably introduces a gun into the plot and has a curmudgeonly exit line. Watching the apes is fun all during the movie, while watching the humans usually isn't; the movie works hard to bring the apes to life, but unwisely thinks the humans can take care of themselves.

It's interesting that several different simian species co-exist in the planet's ape society. It may be a little hard to account for that, given the logic of the movie, although I will say no more. One major change between this film and the earlier one is that everyone--apes and humans--speak English. The movie explains why the apes speak English, but fudges on how they learned to speak at all.

The movie is great-looking. Rick Baker's makeup is convincing even in the extreme closeups, and his apes sparkle with personality and presence. The sets and locations give us a proper sense of alien awe, and there's one neat long shot of the ape city-mountain that looks, when you squint a little, like Xanadu from "Citizen Kane." There are lines inviting laughs ("Extremism in the defense of apes is no vice") and others unwisely inviting groans ("If you show me the way out of here--I promise I'll show you something that will change your life forever"). And a priceless moment when Leo wants to stop the squabbling among his fugitive group of men and apes and barks: "Shut up! That goes for all species!"

"Planet of the Apes" is the kind of movie that you enjoy at times, admire at times, even really like at times, but is it necessary? Given how famous and familiar Franklin J. Schaffner's 1968 film is, Tim Burton had some kind of an obligation to either top it, or sidestep it. Instead, he pays homage. He calls this version a "reimaging," and so it is, but a reinvention might have been better. Burton's work can show a wild and crazed imagination, but here he seems reined in. He's made a film that's respectful to the original, and respectable in itself, but that's not enough. Ten years from now, it will be the 1968 version that people are still renting.

Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.

Let's make a tradition of this!

Jackson was the 2nd judge. Remember the 1995 Consent Decree?

Judge Sporkin's comments on the consent decree:
"It is clear to this Court that if it signs the decree presented to it, the message will be that Microsoft is so powerful that neither the market nor the Government is capable of dealing with all of its monopolistic practices. The attitude of Microsoft confirms these observations. While it has denied publicly that it engages in anticompetitive practices, it refuses to give the Court in any respect the same assurance. It has refused to take even a small step to meet any of the reasonable concerns that have been raised by the Court."

Judge Sporkin: Microsoft's Unwitting Ally, an interesting article from The Computer Lawyer (March 1995).
"On February 14, 1995, Federal Judge Stanley Sporkin refused to approve the consent decree negotiated between the U.S. Government and Microsoft to settle the antitrust complaint filed against Microsoft by the Government. Many think that this denial is a harsh blow against Microsoft. In fact, it may be very helpful to Microsoft for several reasons:
*It started an appellate process during which Microsoft will not be bound by any decree and after which any decree might be obsolete.
*It has caused an important adversary of Microsoft -- the government -- to become an advocate for Microsoft.
*It may well lessen the likelihood that the Government will investigate or take enforcement actions against other Microsoft anticompetitive practices.
*It may focus on a practice -- vaporware -- which is not illegal and which is fairly commonplace."

Civil Action No.: 94-1564, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff, vs. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, Defendant. Stanley Sporkin, Judge.

The Judge Who Rejected Microsoft / Stanley Sporkin is known as aggressive, unpredictable , S.F. Gate, 2/16/95
"Assigned to review the settlement, he could have rubber-stamped it, which was what both sides wanted. Instead, he peeled the respectability off the agreement like layers of skin off an onion, exposing it as an unenforceable deal that let the government save face while letting Microsoft off the hook.
In his lengthy, fiercely worded ruling, Sporkin characterized Microsoft as having monopolistic practices that pose ``a potential threat to the nation's well-being,'' and he called the consent decree ``too little, too late.''"


- - - - -

At least according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

From 30 to 60 days. Well, maybe some exponential law will apply to this...

Andrew.

The last thing is with the aliens. I can't believe that David is the only "living" remnant of humans. If one robot survived, couldn't others?

You missed it. They're David's own descendants, not aliens.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought that the beings at the end of the movie were aliens. Check out this review which panned the film: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 001/06/29/DD239232.DTL&type=movies

Some don't mind, others are actively protesting sodas like Medicine Man. Quite ironic, actually.

It looks like the Native Americans are starting to get their own back. The Great Plains are turning fallow and the proportion of N.A. population is zooming. They'll own a few states again in a few years.