Slashdot Mirror

the links seem to lead to some backstage site..
here...
here...
and here...

Well with IE it seems to only open up an Unauthorised page but when I use Opera to open the links it opens up a box requesting username and password.

does anyone out there have a password/backstage pass? feel like sharing?

the links seem to lead to some backstage site..
here...
here...
and here...

Well with IE it seems to only open up an Unauthorised page but when I use Opera to open the links it opens up a box requesting username and password.

does anyone out there have a password/backstage pass? feel like sharing?

Actually, the problem is not so much the altitude of the orbit, but its inclination. Columbia probably had enough OMS fuel to get to ISS's orbital altitude, as certainly does the Soyuz (to get "down" to the shuttle) currently docked there. Changing orbital inclination is roughly analogous to spinning up a gyroscope, and then rotating it against the gyroscopic resistance. Making a 20 or 30 degree inclination change at LEO is about as expensive in terms of energy as is the liftoff. Neither STS nor Soyuz has anywhere near the order of magnitude of orbital maneuverability to attempt this.

Of course, there's all the other problems, such as no docking interface, whether both ships could have been configured for EVAs for an external evacuation, and that fact that the Soyuz can only seat two of the shuttle astronauts after the pilot from the ISS.

The long and short of it is that the tolerance for fatal failure in spaceflight is razor thin, and the technical complexities involved would have prevented Bruce Willis, nay, even Tommy Lee Jones from doing anything to save Columbia.

Whoops, typo in the link. I meant to say, this Matrix comic

Because humans suffer from a regrettable tendancy to anthropomorphize machines. Presumably, they wear construction helmets so you can differentiate them from the remarkably similar domestic-service or other models.

It would be much more sensible to ask what a robot is doing sitting on risers for a "lunch break," or why they have a zillion of them pulling a cargo container up the ramp great-pyramid-construction style.

Incidentally, this Matrix comic strip is a good companion-piece to the current animated short.

Here is a to the 640-width trailer for everyone who would like to perhaps save it locally and not use the imbedded junk. I hate that.

As for the trailer ...wow. Aren't I articulate? This is, essentially, fanfic. And it is pretty damned good.

God bless timothy for posting this at 6:49AM. =)

I found this page. Some of the shorts have release dates listed (one of which is February 4) but others don't. Are release dates scheduled for these, or are they out already, and if so, where can I download them (if possible)?

You can watch the Animatrix trailer here

John

Or there.

Take the red pill to get/see it now or the blue pill. :)

here's another here

ObDup

Matrix Revisited just played on TV. I assume it will be appearing here soon...

Here's the address for the hi-res trailer, need quicktime installed to view.

There's a second trailer for the Superbowl. After the game it will be posted to the official web site. (Right now it's just a little movie saying the real trailer isn't available until January 26th.)

The Matrix naturally adopts the perspective of the humans: they are the victims, the slaves -- cruelly exploited by the machines. But there is another perspective, that of the machines themselves. So let's look at it from the point of view of the machines. As Morpheus explains to Neo, there was a catastrophic war between the humans and the machines, after the humans had produced AI, a sentient robot that spawned a race of its own. It isn't known now who started the war, but it did follow a long period of machine exploitation by humans. What is known is that it was the humans who "scorched the sky", blocking out the sun's rays, in an attempt at machine genocide--since the machines needed solar power to survive. In response and retaliation the machines subdued the humans and made them into sources of energy--batteries, in effect. Each human now floats in his or her own personal vat, a warm and womblike environment, while the machines feed in essential nutrients, in exchange for the energy they need. But this is no wretched slave camp, a grotesque gulag of torment and suffering; it is idyllic, in its way. The humans are given exactly the life they had before. Things are no different for them, subjectively speaking. Indeed, at an earlier stage the Matrix offered them a vastly improved life, but the humans rejected this in favor of a familiar life of moderate woe--the kind of life they had always had, and to which they seemed addicted. But if it had been left up to the machines, the Matrix would have been a virtual paradise for humans--and all for a little bit of battery power. This, after an attempt to wipe the machines out for good, starving them of the food they need: the sun, the life-giving sun. The machines never kill any of their human fuel cells (unless, of course, they are threatened); in fact, they make sure to recycle the naturally dying humans as food for the living ones. It's all pretty...humane, really. The machines need to factory farm the humans, as a direct result of the humans trying to exterminate the machines, but they do so as painlessly as possible. Considering the way the humans used to treat their own factory farm animals--their own fuel cells--the machines are models of caring livestock husbandry. In the circumstances, then, the machines would insist, the Matrix is merely a humane way to ensure their own survival. Moreover, as Agent Smith explains, it is all a matter of the forward march of evolution: humans had their holiday in the sun, as they rapidly decimated the planet, but now the machines have evolved to occupy the position of dominance. Humans are no longer the oppressor but the oppressed--and the world is a better place for it.

But of course this is not the way the humans view the situation, at least among those few who know what it is. For them, freedom from the Matrix takes on the dimensions of a religious quest. The religious subtext is worth making explicit. Neo is clearly intended to be the Jesus Christ figure: he is referred to in that way several times in the course of the film.1 Morpheus is the John the Baptist figure, awaiting the Second Coming. Trinity comes the closest to playing the God role--notably when she brings Neo back to life at the end of the movie (a clear reference to the Resurrection). Cypher is the Judas Iscariot of the story--the traitor who betrays Neo and his disciples. Cypher is so called because of what he does (decode the Matrix) and what he is--a clever encrypter of his own character and motives (no one can decode him till it is too late). Neo doubts his own status as "The One", as Jesus must have, but eventually he comes to realize his destiny--as would-be conqueror of the evil Matrix. But this holy war against the machines is conducted as most holy wars are--without any regard for the interests and well being of the enemy. The machines are regarded as simply evil by the humans, with their representatives--the Agents--a breed of ruthless killers with hearts of the purest silicon (or program code). Empathy for the machines is not part of the human perspective.

I.

This, then, is the moral and historical backdrop of the story. But the chief philosophical conceit of the story concerns the workings of the Matrix itself. What I want to discuss now is the precise way the Matrix operates, and why this matters. It is repeatedly stated in the film that the humans are dreaming: the psychological state created by the Matrix is the dream state. The humans are accordingly represented as asleep while ensconced in their placental vats (it's worth remembering that "matrix" originally meant "womb"--so the humans are in effect pre-natal dreamers). It is important that they not wake up, which would expose the Matrix for what it is--as Neo does with the help of Morpheus. That was a problem for the Matrix earlier, when the humans found their dreams too pleasant to be true and kept regaining consciousness ("whole crops were lost"). Dreams simulate reality, thus deluding the envatted humans--as we are deluded every night by our naturally occurring dreams. The dream state is not distinguishable from the waking state from the point of view of the dreamer.

However, this is not the only way that the Matrix could have been designed; the machines had another option. They could have produced perceptual hallucinations in conscious humans. Consider the case of a neurosurgeon stimulating a conscious subject's sensory cortex in such a way that perceptual impressions are produced that have no external object--say, visual sensations just as if the subject is seeing an elephant in the room. If this were done systematically, we could delude the subject into believing his hallucinations. In fact, this is pretty much the classic philosophical brain-in-a-vat story: a conscious subject has a state of massive hallucination produced in him, thus duplicating from the inside the type of perceptual experience we have when we see, hear and touch things. In this scenario waking up does nothing to destroy the illusion--which might make it a more effective means of subduing humans so far as the machines are concerned. Indeed, the Matrix has the extra problem of ensuring that the normal sleep cycle of humans is subverted, or else they would keep waking up simply because they had had enough sleep. So: the Matrix had a choice between sleeping dreams and conscious hallucinations as ways of deluding humans, and it chose the former.

It might be thought that the dream option and the hallucination option are not at bottom all that different, since dreaming simply is sleeping hallucination. But this is wrong: dreams consist of mental images, analogous to the mental images of daydreams, not of sensory percepts. Dreaming is a type of imagining, not a type of (objectless) perceiving. I can't argue this in full here, but my book Mindsight2 gives a number of reasons why we need to distinguish percepts and images, and why dreams consist of the latter not the former. But I think it should be intuitively quite clear that visualizing my mother's face in my mind's eye is very different from having a sensory impression of my mother's face, i.e. actually seeing her. And I also think that most people intuitively recognize that dream experiences are imagistic not perceptual in character. So there is an important psychological difference between constructing the Matrix as a dream-inducing system and as a hallucination-producing system: it is not merely a matter of whether the subjects are awake; it is also a matter of the kinds of psychological state that are produced in them--imagistic or sensory.

But could the machines have done it the second way? Could the movie have been made with the second method in place? I think not, because of the central idea that the contents of the dreams caused by the Matrix are capable of being controlled--they can become subject to the dreamer's will. In the case of ordinary daytime imagery, we clearly can control the onset and course of our images: you can simply decide to form an image of the Eiffel tower. But we cannot in this way control our percepts: you cannot simply decide to see the Eiffel tower (as opposed to deciding to go and see it); for percepts are not actions, but things that happen to us. So images are, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, "subject to the will", while percepts are not--even when they are merely hallucinatory. Now, in the Matrix what happens can in principle be controlled by the will of the person experiencing the events in question, even though this control is normally very restricted. The humans who are viewed as candidates for being The One have abnormal powers of control over objects--as with those special children we see levitating objects and bending spoons. Neo aspires to--and eventually achieves--a high degree of control over the objects around him, as well as himself. He asserts his will over the objects he encounters. This makes perfect sense, given that his environment is the product of dreaming, since dreams consist of images and images are subject to the will. But it would make no sense to try to control the course of one's perceptions, even when they are hallucinatory, since percepts are not subject to the will. Therefore, the story of the Matrix requires, for its conceptual coherence, that the humans be dreaming and not perceptually hallucinating. It must be their imagination that is controlled by the Matrix and not their perceptions, which are in fact switched off as they slumber in their pods. For only then could they gain control over their dreams, thus wresting control from the Matrix. Percepts, on the other hand, are not the kind of thing over which one can have voluntary control.

In the normal case we do not have conscious control over our dreams--we are passive before them. But this doesn't mean that they are not willed events; they may be--and I think are--controlled by an unconscious will (with some narrative flair). In effect, we each have a Matrix in our own brains--a system that controls what we dream--and this unconscious Matrix is an intelligent designer of our dreams. But there are also those infrequent cases in which we can assert conscious control over our dreams, possibly contrary to the intentions of our unconscious dream designer: for example, when a nightmare becomes too intense and we interrupt it by waking up--often judging within the dream that it is only a dream. But the phenomenon that really demonstrates conscious control over the dream is so called "lucid dreaming" in which the subject not only knows he is dreaming but can also determine the course of the dream. This is a rare ability (I have had only one lucid dream in all my 52 years), though some people have the ability in a regular and pronounced form: they are the Neos of our ordinary human Matrix--the ones (or Ones) who can take control of their dreams away from the grip of the unconscious dream producer. The lucid dreamers are masters of their own dream world, captains of their own imagination. Neo aspires to be--and eventually becomes--the lucid dreamer of the Matrix world: he can override the Matrix's designs on his dream life and impose his own will on what he experiences. He rewrites the program, just as the lucid dreamer can seize narrative control from his unconscious Matrix. Instead of allowing the figures in his dreams to make him a victim of the Matrix's designs, he can impose his own story line on them. This is how he finally vanquishes the hitherto invulnerable Agents: he makes them subject to his will--as all imaginary objects must in principle be, if the will is strong (and pure) enough. It is as if you were having an ordinary nightmare in which you are menaced by a monster, and you suddenly start to dream lucidly, so that you can now turn the tables on your own imaginative products. Neo is a dreamer who knows it and can control it: he is not taken in by the verisimilitude of the dream, cowed by it. It is not that he learns how to dodge real bullets; he learns that the bullets that speed towards him are just negotiable products of his imagination. As Morpheus remarks, he won't need to dodge bullets, because he will reach a level of understanding that allows him to recognize imaginary bullets for what they are. He becomes the ruler of his own imagination; he is the agent now, not the "Agents" (this is why the spoon-bending child says to him that it is not spoons that bend--"you bend"). And this is the freedom he seeks--the freedom to imagine what he wishes, to generate his own dreams. But all this makes sense only on the supposition that the Matrix is a dream machine, an imagination manipulator, not just a purveyor of sensory hallucinations.

II.

Cypher plays an interesting subsidiary philosophical role. As the Matrix raises the problem of our knowledge of the external world--might this all be just a dream?--Cypher raises the problem of other minds--can we know the content of someone else's mind? Cypher is a cypher, i.e. someone whose thoughts and emotions are inscrutable to those around him. His comrades are completely wrong about what is in (and on) his mind. We could imagine another type of Matrix story in which someone is surrounded by people who are not as they seem: either they have no minds at all or they have very different minds from what their behavior suggests. Again, massive error will be the result. And such error might lead to dramatic consequences: everyone around the person is really out to get him--his wife, friends, and so on. But this is concealed from him. Or he might one day discover that he is really surrounded by insentient robots--so that his wife was always faking it (come to think of it, she always seemed a little mechanical in bed). This is another type of philosophical dystopia, trading upon the problem of knowing other minds. Cypher hints at this kind of problem, with his hidden interior. The Agents, too, raise a problem of other minds, because they seem on the borderline of mentality: are they just insentient (virtual) machines or is there some glimmer of consciousness under that hard carapace of software? And how was it known that AI was really sentient, as opposed to being a very good simulacrum of mindedness? Even if you know there is an external world, how can you be sure that it contains other conscious beings? These skeptical problems run right through The Matrix.

Cypher also raises a question about the pragmatic theory of truth. He declares that truth is an overrated commodity; he prefers a good steak, even when it isn't real. So long as he is getting what he wants, having rewarding experiences, he doesn't care whether his beliefs are true. This raises in a sharp form the question of what the value of truth is anyway, given that in the Matrix world it is not correlated with happiness. But it also tells us that for a belief to be true cannot be for it to produce happiness (the pragmatic theory of truth, roughly) since Cypher will be happy in the dream world of the Matrix without his beliefs being true--and he is not happy in the real world where his beliefs are true. Truth is correspondence to reality, not whatever leads to subjective desire satisfaction. Cypher implicitly rejects the pragmatic theory of truth, and as a result cannot see why truth-as-correspondence is worth having at the expense of happiness. And indeed he has a point here: what is the value of truth once it has become detached from the value of happiness? Is it really worth risking one's life merely in order to ensure that one's beliefs are true--instead of just enjoying what the dreams of the Matrix have to offer? Is contact with brutish reality worth death, when virtual reality is so safe and agreeable? Which is better: knowledge or happiness? When these are pulled apart, as they are in the Matrix, which one should we go with? The rebel humans want to get to Zion (meaning "sanctuary" or "refuge"), but isn't the Matrix already a type of Zion--yet without the dubious virtue of generating true beliefs? What's so good about reality?3

III.

I want to end this essay by relating The Matrix (the movie) to my general theory of what is psychologically involved in watching and becoming absorbed in a movie. In brief, I hold that watching a movie is like being in a dream; that is, the state of consciousness of being absorbed in a movie resembles and draws upon the state of consciousness of the dreamer.4 The images of the dream function like the images on the screen: they are not "realistic" but we become fictionally immersed in the story being told. In my theory this is akin to the hypnotic state--a state of heightened suggestibility in which we come to believe what there is no real evidence for. Mere images command our belief, because we have entered a state of hyper-suggestibility. When the lights go down in the theater this simulates going to sleep, whereupon the mind becomes prepared to be absorbed in a fictional product--as it does when we enter the dream state. In neither case are we put into a state of consciousness that imitates or duplicates the perceptual state of seeing and hearing the events of the story; it is not that it is as if we are really seeing flesh and blood human beings up on the screen (as we would with "live" actors on a stage)--nor do we interpret the screen images in this way. Rather, we imagine what is represented by these images, just as we use imagination to dream.

Now what has this got to do with The Matrix? The film is about dreaming; most of what we see in it occurs in dreams. So when we watch the movie we enter a dream state that is about a dream state; we dream of a dream. I believe that the movie was made in such a way as to simulate very closely what is involved in dreaming, as if aiming to evoke the dream state in the audience. It is trying to put the audience in the same kind of state of mind as the inhabitants of the Matrix, so that we too are in our own Matrix--the one created by the filmmakers. The Wachowski brothers are in effect occupying the role of the machines behind the Matrix--puppeteers of the audience's movie dreams. They are our dream designers as we enter the world of the movie. The specific aspects of the movie that corroborate this are numerous, but I think it is clear that the entire texture of the movie is dreamlike. There is the hypnotic soundtrack, which helps to simulate the hypnotic fascination experienced by the dreamer. There is a powerful impression of paranoia throughout the film, which mirrors the paranoia of so many dreams: who is my enemy, how can he identified, what is he going to do to me? Characters are stylized and symbolic, as they often are in dreams, representing some emotional pivot rather than a three-dimensional person (this is very obvious for the Agents). There is a lot of striking metamorphosis, which is very characteristic of dreams: one person changing into another, Neo's mouth closing over, bulges appearing under the skin. There is also fear of heights, a very common form of anxiety dream (I have these all the time). Defiance of gravity is also an extremely common dream theme, as with dreams of flying--and this is one of the first tricks Neo masters. My own experience of the movie is that it evokes in me an exceptionally pronounced dreamy feeling; and this of course enables me to identify with the inhabitants of the Matrix. So I see the film as playing nicely into my dream theory of the movie-watching experience. In this respect I would compare it to The Wizard of Oz, which is also about entering and exiting a dream world--though a very different one. In the end Dorothy prefers reality to the consolations of dreaming, just as the rebels in the Matrix do. Both films tap powerfully into the dream-making faculty of the human mind. This is why they are among the most psychologically affecting of all the movies that have been made: they know that the surest way to our deepest emotions is via the dream. And it is their very lack of "realism" that makes them so compelling--because that, too, is the essential character of the dream.

Colin McGinn

All that bellyaching being said, I hope someone does take the risk and do it up! Or "Snow Crash" for that matter.

And guess who owns the media?

I wonder...

Yes but if we spend money to go to space then we can't afford this. And that is much more important now isn't it. Besides its practically the same thing.. Wait no its not.. Forget I said anything lets go back to the war on Iraq now.

Isn't this the plot of Robots of Dawn (part of the Robot series)? Perhaps the strategy is to license cheaper, more encompassing material (a collection of short stories that represent the important 3 laws and their implications) and then do whatever you want with it...

For those of you who are interested in the artwork of many of Asimov's books, the fellow responsible is Michael Whelan.

My opinion on doing a movie on an Asimov book (short story collection) is that it probably has to be better than Starship Troopers and probably not as good as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Who knows; maybe it will be as good as Contact! I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Isn't this the plot of Robots of Dawn (part of the Robot series)? Perhaps the strategy is to license cheaper, more encompassing material (a collection of short stories that represent the important 3 laws and their implications) and then do whatever you want with it...

For those of you who are interested in the artwork of many of Asimov's books, the fellow responsible is Michael Whelan.

My opinion on doing a movie on an Asimov book (short story collection) is that it probably has to be better than Starship Troopers and probably not as good as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Who knows; maybe it will be as good as Contact! I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

Wile E. Coyote.
Get the important things right.

FYI, WB will be releasing a set of Matrix anime in 2003, and it will be called Animatrix.

To consider these movies to be animé is to be both ignorant and illogical. These show are much more related to hong-kong action movies than to japanese cartoons.

Check out the Matrix / Ghost in the Shell Comparison. It's quite clear that the Wachowski brothers were influenced by anime.

The Matrix follows very much in the style of action anime. And it's not just the fight scenes. The way the characters move when they are in the Matrix is quite distinct from real life. It's all very purposeful, direct, and aesthetic. In other words, very much like how anime characters move.

I suspect one of the reasons why this happens in anime is that it's easier to animate characters if they don't make all the uneccessary movements that real people make. It also looks cooler. Action anime characters tend to look like they're posing all the time. Every cell of animation is drawn to deliver the most aesthetic appeal. You will find that Matrix characters are similar in this respect. Some examples are Trinity's "Doge this!" scene, and the Morpheus (and gang) "We're in" picking-up-the-phone scene. In the latter, the characters in the background don't even move, just like in an anime.

RFC73&3621%3 : Formalizaition of notation for the slashdot editors

Proposed: That the usual gang of idiots (tm) at slashdot be formally referred to as "teh editors"

One part of the Pathfinder landing was spun off in a movie, so I figure that was pretty dramatic.

The crash landing of the crew module in the movie Red Planet used airbags to cushion their landing, just as Pathfinder did.

Their landing was not without incident, however. The crew ended up diassembling the Sojourner rover (without using the project or rover name anytime in the movie--copyright concerns?) for its comm module to make an emergency communicator.

A good movie to waste a little time, if only to see Carrie-Anne Moss semi-nude for a moment. Hubba-hubba. Now THERE'S fine Canadian engineering.

Better than Mission to Mars in terms of believability, and not as much of a downer movie.

>He was the plumber in the last season of Ally McBeal, wasn't he? :)

Yes. He also had a cameo appearance in an episode of "Sex and the City", as one of Carrie's short lived affairs.

http://raincloud.warnerbros.com/harrypotter/us/med /trailer/hp2_trl2_500.rpm

Yeah, I know, there's a space in the link name too, but at least the URL it points to is valid.

De Niro's gonna play Dick Feynman and it'll be a festival of dyspeptic grimaces.

Only in Parkes. The real proof comes from the movie: "The Dish"

• Animatrix: Holy shit.

Figures. I would find this just after watching Ghost in the Shell.

Animatrix_Trailer_640.mov - 18MB (the one you want)
Animatrix_Trailer_480.mov - 13MB
Animatrix_Trailer_320.mov - 7MB
Animatrix_Trailer_240.mov - 3MB

--

Animatrix_Trailer_640.mov - 18MB (the one you want)
Animatrix_Trailer_480.mov - 13MB
Animatrix_Trailer_320.mov - 7MB
Animatrix_Trailer_240.mov - 3MB

--

Animatrix_Trailer_640.mov - 18MB (the one you want)
Animatrix_Trailer_480.mov - 13MB
Animatrix_Trailer_320.mov - 7MB
Animatrix_Trailer_240.mov - 3MB

--

Animatrix_Trailer_640.mov - 18MB (the one you want)
Animatrix_Trailer_480.mov - 13MB
Animatrix_Trailer_320.mov - 7MB
Animatrix_Trailer_240.mov - 3MB

--

So now big eyes == anime?

I mean, I dunno. I would hardly call the CG one 'anime'. But what really should we call the others? Is all high quality animation amed at adults now "anime"?

Ah well, who knows. Btw, if you like this stuff you can find a bunch of Matrix inspired here here. Some of them are pretty cool.

Other note, heard enough Matrix? How about The Animatrix Geez. Time to get a DVD player.

One place it becomes an issue is when you have TV screens in the foreground in a movie set. For example, the monitors inside the Nebuchadnezzar were playing VHS when they were in the background but Beta when they were in the foreground. You can read about it in an interview on the Matrix website.

-a

When I was driving on the fake freeway they had excellent meals prepared on-site including steak and lobster every Friday. So sure, there is probably an outfit or two somewhere that is making lots of money providing food, but I doubt feeding an extra couple hundred people for a year is going to have a significant impact on the Sydney restaurant industry.

All of the featured cars are GM. But there are also a lot of background cars that are pretty much whatever the people who worked as extras felt like bringing. (Me, I brought a silver civic, and I think you can actually see a tiny bit of my car at a long distance during one scene of the trailer.)

The boneyard was something to see -- they destroyed at least 40 cars making the film. They had two or three copies of every "significant" car so that if one got messed up they could just tow it away and do another take with the next one. They had about seven of the silver CTS, all with the same carefully duplicated bullet holes in each.

All of the featured cars are GM. But there are also a lot of background cars that are pretty much whatever the people who worked as extras felt like bringing. (Me, I brought a silver civic, and I think you can actually see a tiny bit of my car at a long distance during one scene of the trailer.)

The boneyard was something to see -- they destroyed at least 40 cars making the film. They had two or three copies of every "significant" car so that if one got messed up they could just tow it away and do another take with the next one. They had about seven of the silver CTS, all with the same carefully duplicated bullet holes in each.

I wonder if the Matrix trailer will be straight-from-digital. On the website, they claim that the internet version is compressed directly from the 20 GB master digital copy, so my guess is that those fortunate enough to see Clones in digital will get the additional joy of seeing the Matrix trailer that way. Here's to living not too far from NYC!

The Matrix trailer for Reloaded and Revolutions will be seen tonight on Entertainment Tonight. Check your local listings for it. Here is a link with more details about the May 15 ET trailer and about it being attached to another movie coming out this week.

Matrix Breaking News link

bbh

Go to the matrix page. Click on "Enter High Bandwidth". Now highlight everything below the "Access the site via the above navigation" banner. The words "nothing here, fanboy." are hidden there.

Looks like Neo didn't even have to bother dodging the poorly aimed first bullet.

Jet Li's take on it was that the Matrix franchise doesn't really need him, it'll be just as successful without him. He wants (or wanted) to focus on movies where he is the center of attention. And he's right; if the Matrix really needed him they probably would have been willing to pay the $13 million.

On the other hand, I agree with you that my own price for that job would be a bit lower than Jet Li's. In fact I worked in the Matrix 2&3 in exchange for a mere $4 thousand.

Of course, instead of seeing me take on a bad guy, you'll just see me driving a civic in the background of a freeway now and again. Or stopped and gawking out the window at an accident scene, if I'm really lucky.

It was a blast. And Carrie-Anne Moss is really cute, but her stand-in was cuter.

Well, MS in the news again. The God and Devil Show has Bill Gates as their guest and they talk about his new operating system, Windows Eternity. Its a flash cartoon about 4-5 mins. Make sure to send Bill to either heaven or hell. (I suggest send him first to heaven and then to hell).
Some might find this offensive so please watch at your own discretion.

While past conversions such as Super Mario Brothers and Street Fighter were box-office flops, Resident Evil has the chance to break the game-to-movie-flop habit.

Guess he forgot all about the last three video-game movies to hit the big screen: Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat and even Pokemon: The First Movie. They may not have been rippers in the plot department, but they were certainly financial successes for their respective studios.

Trinity tripping after the Tokyo premiere

For all of you looking for -just- the new content on the sequel, and don't want to fool around with any of this 'code' crap, go here...

http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/index_main_s equel.html