Why is higher education only useful for helping you making money?
Because that is what life IS. We can chat all day about the value of philosophy, but as my former college roommate philosophy major found, at the end of the day, life is about fighting to survive. And the job prospects of philosophy majors is basically... teach philosophy in college. There's not much other than that.
Slashdot has had its ups and downs. Beta is possibly its lowest point. There's little now that approaches the ridiculousness of the Jon Katz days, though.
Yes, I remember working back at a Dot Com in the late 90s, specialized in digitizing local news stations' broadcasts and putting them on the web with additional content. The CEO says the company was -too- ahead of its time, but see if you can spot any holes in this business model:
*) The company paid for network links at the TV stations, and the TV stations provided free advertising for the company (both commercial space and mentions of the website during the newscast). *) The company sent small servers to be hosted at the TV stations, which digitized the broadcast and sent it over those T1 links that the company paid for (this is a T1 per station, in 1999). *) The company ran commercials for itself on the website and in the broadcasts that it hosted. That was fine.
You may have noticed a step missing -- where money comes into the company to pay for all those T1 lines, employee salaries, and equipment. It existed solely on venture capital, and the company shuttered when the third round of VC funding was denied. They brought up an advertising server a week beforehand, but it was too little, too late.
Yes, well, I was talking about the framers of the Constitution here, who did approve a copyright term of 14 years with a 14-year extension. Since the details of copyright were ambiguously left up to Congress, it's allowed different interpretations. Enforcement of intent was not written in the Constitution, so it's allowed copyright to become corrupted over time.
I think movies come and go on Netflix. There one minute, gone the next and then back again months later.
Exactly, because they need to sign agreements with the movie companies, and the movie companies get to demand terms. On the other hand, Netflix doesn't need any agreement to rent out whatever DVD they want. That's why the DVD catalog is fantastic, but the streaming library is horrid.
Long ago, Disney signed an agreement with Netflix and Netflix streamed a decent amount of their movies. Well, that agreement expired, and Disney demanded far more money than Netflix could cover -- enough so that Netflix would have had to raise their subscriber rates. Netflix refused, and blammo, hundreds of Disney titles that used to be available for Netflix streaming are no longer there.
This is a common refrain and I've heard of it happening to Netflix several times -- a studio requires large fees from Netflix, and Netflix refused when it would raise rates, because of course Netflix will pass on the costs to the customers. This shouldn't be a surprise, the media companies have no love for Netflix. They want to be in charge of the customer experience, not a third party. Even HBO got into that act, which is why I could get The Wire on DVD from Netflix, but of course there was no streaming option. Why bother, when HBO can charge more per month for only their own offerings than Netflix does for their entire catalog?
[update: I just noticed that Netflix has taken down all the Jodorowsky movies. Those fuckers. I hope someone realizes there's room in the market for a streaming service that's modeled on the old fashioned independent video rental store.]
I love the model, but again, don't blame Netflix. When the media companies distributed a physical product, they had little say over such a product. Rule of first sale and all. However, now that they're dealing with an electronic product, they have the entire power of copyright on their side, which allows them strictly control how things are streamed. It's worth noting that the movie studios have always felt that they got a "bad deal" in the VHS and DVD eras, despite those markets being wildly successful for them. They're looking to push online streaming as a way of increasing revenue. In other words, according to them, you and I do not pay NEARLY enough for the media we watch.
In that case, NSA [extremetech.com], Google [quora.com], Facebook [pcworld.com] et al. collecting our data aren't "stealing" anything either.
Absolutely correct, that is not stealing.
The infringer gets something for nothing — like a thief
"Getting something for nothing" is not, and never has been stealing. Taking something from someone, such that they no longer have full use of it, is.
Inasmuch as anything can be owned [wikipedia.org], why can't ideas be?
Because if someone else has that idea, you still have that idea. For someone to "steal" your idea, they would have had to hit you over the head hard enough that you'd never be able to remember it. Someone copied your idea. He/she didn't steal it.
There is nothing in the article affirming your Socialistic view, that my idea exists for "society as a whole." [...] the Constitution acknowledges the benefit the authors may derive from their writings and discoveries and leaves it to Congress to develop a system to reward them
The Constitution acknowledges the benefit the authors derive from copyright because the Framers felt it was the system that would encourage the most works to be available to the public. The public. They realized that if there was no copyright, there would be little incentive (or ability) to create, and so the public would lose out entirely. Copyright is there to incentivize creation. It's also why they put limitations on the length of copyright, where it would expire after a set time, as opposed to physical property which can be held and passed down through generations forever. This is because copyright is a balance, a compromise. A copyright gives the creator more rights than he would naturally have, and it does that by reducing the rights of everyone else. Your natural ability to write whatever you want, to copy whatever you want, to say whatever you want. Because putting such a limitation on the public is a pretty big deal, they need to be getting something out of the bargain, and they do -- more content. But let's be clear that it IS a compromise, that there needs to be a balance between those two interests.
So save the "Socialist" bullshit, because copyright is socialist. It is a government-granted and enforced monopoly against what you and I can naturally do on our own: to write, read, and say what we wish. There are certainly reasons for those limitations, but just remember that it's the heavy hand of government that makes it possible.
If you just browse through Netflix, you can find a lot of good movies.
If you ever go there wanting to find something specific, you will be greatly disappointed. Of the 19 items currently in my Netflix DVD queue, only three are available for streaming: two foreign films and an obscure documentary. In addition, I've recently been streaming Ken Burns's fantastic Civil War series. But...
Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Chan Wook-Park, Jim Jarmusch, Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Linklater and the Coen Brothers are all directors whose catalogs are nearly 100% available on Netflix Streaming
Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino's five major films are streamable. His studio must still have a deal with Netflix, because this is pretty unusual.
Martin Scorsese
Available: Hugo, Taxi Driver, The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street. Missing: GoodFellas, The Departed, The Last Temptation of Christ, Shutter Island, Raging Bull, Casino, Cape Fear, Mean Streets, Gangs of New York.
Chan Wook-Park
Available: The Vengeance Trilogy Missing: JSA, Stoker, Three... Extremes. Foreign films might be easier to get. We're not talking about WB's AAA titles here.
Francis For Coppola
Available: The Conversation, Apocalypse Now. Missing: The Godfather I, II, and III, Tucker, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Outsiders, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married, Jack.
Richard Linklater
Available: Bernie, The Newton Boys, School of Rock Missing: Boyhood, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life
Coen Brothers
Available: Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Missing: True Grit, No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, Inside Llewyn Davis, Barton Fink, Burn After Reading.
It's not enough to have a few good movies. Netflix's catalog sucks. It used to be higher, but major studios pulled out, and with that came a major shrinking of Netflix's catalog. The movie studios HATE Netflix's all-you-can-eat-for-$8 format. They want pay-per-view, and they want it to be expensive. They want the return of the $5 rental. No fucking way will they ever stand for prices as low as Netflix's, and the studios can dictate every term because they own most of the content.
The only streaming package that Netflix has established for $8/month is the streaming of their own admittedly-delightful content.
And at which point did they become warm-blooded animals? How does that happen?
Dinosaurs were always warm-blooded, at least the larger ones were. Analysis of the T-Rex heart cavity indicates structures implying such. But most damning, cold-blooded creatures don't scale well in size. The larger a creature grows, the more difficult it is for them to regulate temperature through external means (like sunning themselves). When you get to Apatasaur/Brachiosaur size, it seems fairly implausible that they could have been cold-blooded.
Reptile is a catch-all term that doesn't really mean anything. Crocodiles are much more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than they are to any other reptiles (so should probably be grouped with birds rather than lizards and snakes), and extinct "reptiles" like dimetrodon [wikipedia.org] are more closely related to humans than they are to any extant reptiles.
Birds are warm-blooded, while crocodiles, lizards, and snakes are all cold-blooded, thus the distinction and groupings.
I think it's because everyone overcooks the hell out of everything in fear of bacteria, and add tons of additives to restore "flavor" that they don't ever taste chicken.
"Chicken" Top Ramen sure doesn't taste like chicken.
That such problems as basic as incorrectly typed URLs could break Skype is beyond understanding
It's not that odd, and it's not that unusual for this to happen to programs that pass data to external libraries. I deal with Thunderbird under Gnome2 in Linux quite a bit, and have noticed a bug with URI parsing as well. It doesn't lead to crashes, just annoying and incorrect error messages when opening emails. Why does it happen? Thunderbird scans emails (including headers) for URIs that are handled by external programs so it can create clickable links that open those programs when you click them. It does that by taking any string that matches STRING1:STRING2. STRING1 (which is usually "http" or "ftp" or "gopher" or "itunes" or something like that) then gets passed to Gconf, and it checks to see if the gconf key "/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/STRING1/command" exists. If it does, then it creates a clickable link. If it doesn't exist, then Thunderbird leaves the string alone.
The problem comes when STRING1 includes the + character. IE, just having the word "one+two:three" in the message will trigger this. Thunderbird asks Gconf if "/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/one+two/command" exists. That causes GConf to flip out, because + is not allowed as a character in a gconf key. It doesn't say that key doesn't exists, it gives an "invalid query" that gets passed back to the application.
This gets triggered often now when certain mail clients (usually apple) send the timezone portion of a Date string with the format GMT+01:00.
So should Thunderbird not pass through strings that contain the + character? Possibly.. is the + character forbidden by the URI spec? If it's not, then the bug comes with storing URI values as GConf keys in the first place, and it's difficult to tell where the fault really lies. Thunderbird can't totally validate whether something is a URI, as it cannot know (and should not try) all the possible protocols one might use.
So this thing is not as strange as it might sound. It's not uncommon when passing user data to third-party libraries.
Forced? You mean when you are to cheap to pay for a phone call.
For unknown reasons, Skype seems to be the instant-messenger of choice these days. I use it all the time to talk to friends; never made a voice call with it.
Saw San Andreas and was pleasantly surprised they didn't moralize it or make it the Republican's Fault.
Yes, it is nice to know that Hollywood understands that occasionally natural disasters just happen and it is not always mankind's fault.
The last "world blows up" film, 2012, made it pretty clear that it wasn't mankind's fault. It wasn't even a topic that came up. And the closest thing it had to a villain, Chief of Staff Anheuser, is the only person in the movie who makes any sort of sense.
Everyone time I hear of a reboot it's "we'll take the original and make it grittier"
Actually, Tron is the one place where that might actually make sense. All their technology is vector-based, right? What if they got infected by a bitmap virus? You could have some really bitchin' visuals.
Tron is interesting because the "look" of the world, that is how much you can see, how clean it is, and the complexity of the objects, are reflections of how powerful the running computer is. In the case of Tron, the world was based on the 1982 hardware it had available. For Tron 2, it was a 1989 computer running the grid.
To base the overall profitability on the first two weekends
... is usually pretty accurate. Tomorrowland is not a My Big Fat Greek Wedding sort of movie which starts semi-slow but never drops off. You can predict fairly well how well a movie will do overall based on the first two or three weekends. It lets you plot a curve that is surprisingly predictable.
Re:Is it all about the Chinese box office these da
on
Tron 3 Is Cancelled
·
· Score: 1
Yep, Disney is betting big on China becoming a huge emerging market for their entertainment. It's almost as if they were about to...
Disney, like every major studio, is looking to expand into new or underserved territories, partly to make up for the loss of revenue from the home video market.
Tron 1 was a product of its time; that is, it was way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, that's all it really has going for it. Plot was ok, acting was pretty bad throughout (except for Jeff Bridges. He -carried- the movie). Soundtrack was terrible, effects were decent in some ways, poor in others. Even at the time, I would say it was a mistake to rotoscope light into the costumes in post.
Unless you have super-nostalgic-blinders, Tron 1 was visionary, but like many other 'visionary' movies, it wasn't great on its own merits.
That may be a case, but Godzilla had just about the right amount of total monster smash. Monsters smashing things over and over for hours on end... not interesting. You need a lot more than that.
No, it bombed because there was very little Tomorrowland in Tomorrowland. The entire screentime TL gets is what, maybe 15 minutes? Simply put, the trailers were completely at odds with what the film actually does.
The only two good sequences in the movie (The Tomorrowland pin "commercial" and the home invasion at Clooney's house) are in two trailers. Everything else is seriously, seriously flawed.
Worse, it has a 25 year old womanplaying a kid as the main actor. I don't understand why Hollywood won't cast teenagers to play teenagers.
A number of reasons, child labor laws being one of them. It's why twins are so popular in sitcoms. You can get two actors to convincingly play a young character while not exceeding the number of hours you're allowed to shoot with a young actor.
There are a lot of other reasons as well, and TV Tropes's Dawson Casting
gives a pretty good breakdown of why this happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is higher education only useful for helping you making money?
Because that is what life IS. We can chat all day about the value of philosophy, but as my former college roommate philosophy major found, at the end of the day, life is about fighting to survive. And the job prospects of philosophy majors is basically... teach philosophy in college. There's not much other than that.
Slashdot has had its ups and downs. Beta is possibly its lowest point. There's little now that approaches the ridiculousness of the Jon Katz days, though.
Yes, I remember working back at a Dot Com in the late 90s, specialized in digitizing local news stations' broadcasts and putting them on the web with additional content. The CEO says the company was -too- ahead of its time, but see if you can spot any holes in this business model:
*) The company paid for network links at the TV stations, and the TV stations provided free advertising for the company (both commercial space and mentions of the website during the newscast).
*) The company sent small servers to be hosted at the TV stations, which digitized the broadcast and sent it over those T1 links that the company paid for (this is a T1 per station, in 1999).
*) The company ran commercials for itself on the website and in the broadcasts that it hosted. That was fine.
You may have noticed a step missing -- where money comes into the company to pay for all those T1 lines, employee salaries, and equipment. It existed solely on venture capital, and the company shuttered when the third round of VC funding was denied. They brought up an advertising server a week beforehand, but it was too little, too late.
Yes, well, I was talking about the framers of the Constitution here, who did approve a copyright term of 14 years with a 14-year extension. Since the details of copyright were ambiguously left up to Congress, it's allowed different interpretations. Enforcement of intent was not written in the Constitution, so it's allowed copyright to become corrupted over time.
I think movies come and go on Netflix. There one minute, gone the next and then back again months later.
Exactly, because they need to sign agreements with the movie companies, and the movie companies get to demand terms. On the other hand, Netflix doesn't need any agreement to rent out whatever DVD they want. That's why the DVD catalog is fantastic, but the streaming library is horrid.
Long ago, Disney signed an agreement with Netflix and Netflix streamed a decent amount of their movies. Well, that agreement expired, and Disney demanded far more money than Netflix could cover -- enough so that Netflix would have had to raise their subscriber rates. Netflix refused, and blammo, hundreds of Disney titles that used to be available for Netflix streaming are no longer there.
This is a common refrain and I've heard of it happening to Netflix several times -- a studio requires large fees from Netflix, and Netflix refused when it would raise rates, because of course Netflix will pass on the costs to the customers. This shouldn't be a surprise, the media companies have no love for Netflix. They want to be in charge of the customer experience, not a third party. Even HBO got into that act, which is why I could get The Wire on DVD from Netflix, but of course there was no streaming option. Why bother, when HBO can charge more per month for only their own offerings than Netflix does for their entire catalog?
[update: I just noticed that Netflix has taken down all the Jodorowsky movies. Those fuckers. I hope someone realizes there's room in the market for a streaming service that's modeled on the old fashioned independent video rental store.]
I love the model, but again, don't blame Netflix. When the media companies distributed a physical product, they had little say over such a product. Rule of first sale and all. However, now that they're dealing with an electronic product, they have the entire power of copyright on their side, which allows them strictly control how things are streamed. It's worth noting that the movie studios have always felt that they got a "bad deal" in the VHS and DVD eras, despite those markets being wildly successful for them. They're looking to push online streaming as a way of increasing revenue. In other words, according to them, you and I do not pay NEARLY enough for the media we watch.
In that case, NSA [extremetech.com], Google [quora.com], Facebook [pcworld.com] et al. collecting our data aren't "stealing" anything either.
Absolutely correct, that is not stealing.
The infringer gets something for nothing — like a thief
"Getting something for nothing" is not, and never has been stealing. Taking something from someone, such that they no longer have full use of it, is.
Inasmuch as anything can be owned [wikipedia.org], why can't ideas be?
Because if someone else has that idea, you still have that idea. For someone to "steal" your idea, they would have had to hit you over the head hard enough that you'd never be able to remember it. Someone copied your idea. He/she didn't steal it.
There is nothing in the article affirming your Socialistic view, that my idea exists for "society as a whole." [...] the Constitution acknowledges the benefit the authors may derive from their writings and discoveries and leaves it to Congress to develop a system to reward them
The Constitution acknowledges the benefit the authors derive from copyright because the Framers felt it was the system that would encourage the most works to be available to the public. The public. They realized that if there was no copyright, there would be little incentive (or ability) to create, and so the public would lose out entirely. Copyright is there to incentivize creation. It's also why they put limitations on the length of copyright, where it would expire after a set time, as opposed to physical property which can be held and passed down through generations forever. This is because copyright is a balance, a compromise. A copyright gives the creator more rights than he would naturally have, and it does that by reducing the rights of everyone else. Your natural ability to write whatever you want, to copy whatever you want, to say whatever you want. Because putting such a limitation on the public is a pretty big deal, they need to be getting something out of the bargain, and they do -- more content. But let's be clear that it IS a compromise, that there needs to be a balance between those two interests.
So save the "Socialist" bullshit, because copyright is socialist. It is a government-granted and enforced monopoly against what you and I can naturally do on our own: to write, read, and say what we wish. There are certainly reasons for those limitations, but just remember that it's the heavy hand of government that makes it possible.
If you just browse through Netflix, you can find a lot of good movies.
If you ever go there wanting to find something specific, you will be greatly disappointed.
Of the 19 items currently in my Netflix DVD queue, only three are available for streaming: two foreign films and an obscure documentary. In addition, I've recently been streaming Ken Burns's fantastic Civil War series. But...
Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Chan Wook-Park, Jim Jarmusch, Francis Ford Coppola, Richard Linklater and the Coen Brothers are all directors whose catalogs are nearly 100% available on Netflix Streaming
Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino's five major films are streamable. His studio must still have a deal with Netflix, because this is pretty unusual.
Martin Scorsese
Available: Hugo, Taxi Driver, The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street.
Missing: GoodFellas, The Departed, The Last Temptation of Christ, Shutter Island, Raging Bull, Casino, Cape Fear, Mean Streets, Gangs of New York.
Chan Wook-Park
Available: The Vengeance Trilogy
Missing: JSA, Stoker, Three... Extremes.
Foreign films might be easier to get. We're not talking about WB's AAA titles here.
Francis For Coppola
Available: The Conversation, Apocalypse Now.
Missing: The Godfather I, II, and III, Tucker, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Outsiders, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married, Jack.
Richard Linklater
Available: Bernie, The Newton Boys, School of Rock
Missing: Boyhood, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life
Coen Brothers
Available: Fargo, The Big Lebowski,
Missing: True Grit, No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, Blood Simple, Inside Llewyn Davis, Barton Fink, Burn After Reading.
It's not enough to have a few good movies. Netflix's catalog sucks. It used to be higher, but major studios pulled out, and with that came a major shrinking of Netflix's catalog. The movie studios HATE Netflix's all-you-can-eat-for-$8 format. They want pay-per-view, and they want it to be expensive. They want the return of the $5 rental. No fucking way will they ever stand for prices as low as Netflix's, and the studios can dictate every term because they own most of the content.
The only streaming package that Netflix has established for $8/month is the streaming of their own admittedly-delightful content.
And at which point did they become warm-blooded animals? How does that happen?
Dinosaurs were always warm-blooded, at least the larger ones were. Analysis of the T-Rex heart cavity indicates structures implying such.
But most damning, cold-blooded creatures don't scale well in size. The larger a creature grows, the more difficult it is for them to regulate temperature through external means (like sunning themselves). When you get to Apatasaur/Brachiosaur size, it seems fairly implausible that they could have been cold-blooded.
Birds are warm-blooded, while crocodiles, lizards, and snakes are all cold-blooded, thus the distinction and groupings.
And actually this distinction is why today we consider dinosaurs to be more closely related to the modern bird than to the modern reptile.
Reptile is a catch-all term that doesn't really mean anything. Crocodiles are much more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than they are to any other reptiles (so should probably be grouped with birds rather than lizards and snakes), and extinct "reptiles" like dimetrodon [wikipedia.org] are more closely related to humans than they are to any extant reptiles.
Birds are warm-blooded, while crocodiles, lizards, and snakes are all cold-blooded, thus the distinction and groupings.
I think it's because everyone overcooks the hell out of everything in fear of bacteria, and add tons of additives to restore "flavor" that they don't ever taste chicken.
"Chicken" Top Ramen sure doesn't taste like chicken.
That such problems as basic as incorrectly typed URLs could break Skype is beyond understanding
It's not that odd, and it's not that unusual for this to happen to programs that pass data to external libraries. I deal with Thunderbird under Gnome2 in Linux quite a bit, and have noticed a bug with URI parsing as well. It doesn't lead to crashes, just annoying and incorrect error messages when opening emails. Why does it happen? Thunderbird scans emails (including headers) for URIs that are handled by external programs so it can create clickable links that open those programs when you click them. It does that by taking any string that matches STRING1:STRING2. STRING1 (which is usually "http" or "ftp" or "gopher" or "itunes" or something like that) then gets passed to Gconf, and it checks to see if the gconf key "/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/STRING1/command" exists. If it does, then it creates a clickable link. If it doesn't exist, then Thunderbird leaves the string alone.
The problem comes when STRING1 includes the + character. IE, just having the word "one+two:three" in the message will trigger this. Thunderbird asks Gconf if "/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/one+two/command" exists. That causes GConf to flip out, because + is not allowed as a character in a gconf key. It doesn't say that key doesn't exists, it gives an "invalid query" that gets passed back to the application.
This gets triggered often now when certain mail clients (usually apple) send the timezone portion of a Date string with the format GMT+01:00.
So should Thunderbird not pass through strings that contain the + character? Possibly.. is the + character forbidden by the URI spec? If it's not, then the bug comes with storing URI values as GConf keys in the first place, and it's difficult to tell where the fault really lies. Thunderbird can't totally validate whether something is a URI, as it cannot know (and should not try) all the possible protocols one might use.
So this thing is not as strange as it might sound. It's not uncommon when passing user data to third-party libraries.
Almost twice as many people died in that war than died in the cola wars
And Tab was involved with both!
. ..
Man, Tab tasted terrible.
Forced? You mean when you are to cheap to pay for a phone call.
For unknown reasons, Skype seems to be the instant-messenger of choice these days. I use it all the time to talk to friends; never made a voice call with it.
Saw San Andreas and was pleasantly surprised they didn't moralize it or make it the Republican's Fault.
Yes, it is nice to know that Hollywood understands that occasionally natural disasters just happen and it is not always mankind's fault.
The last "world blows up" film, 2012, made it pretty clear that it wasn't mankind's fault. It wasn't even a topic that came up.
And the closest thing it had to a villain, Chief of Staff Anheuser, is the only person in the movie who makes any sort of sense.
Everyone time I hear of a reboot it's "we'll take the original and make it grittier"
Actually, Tron is the one place where that might actually make sense. All their technology is vector-based, right? What if they got infected by a bitmap virus? You could have some really bitchin' visuals.
Tron is interesting because the "look" of the world, that is how much you can see, how clean it is, and the complexity of the objects, are reflections of how powerful the running computer is. In the case of Tron, the world was based on the 1982 hardware it had available. For Tron 2, it was a 1989 computer running the grid.
To base the overall profitability on the first two weekends
... is usually pretty accurate. Tomorrowland is not a My Big Fat Greek Wedding sort of movie which starts semi-slow but never drops off. You can predict fairly well how well a movie will do overall based on the first two or three weekends. It lets you plot a curve that is surprisingly predictable.
Yep, Disney is betting big on China becoming a huge emerging market for their entertainment. It's almost as if they were about to...
Oh yeah... next year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Disney, like every major studio, is looking to expand into new or underserved territories, partly to make up for the loss of revenue from the home video market.
Filming was originally supposed to start in October 2015, so it would be impossible to have a trailer that contained scenes from the movie.
While the whole time Tomorrowland was happening, I was hoping for the payoff. The payoff that would make it all worth it.
Nada.
Wait... there was a Tron 2?
Yup. It was better than Tron 1.
Tron 1 was a product of its time; that is, it was way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, that's all it really has going for it. Plot was ok, acting was pretty bad throughout (except for Jeff Bridges. He -carried- the movie). Soundtrack was terrible, effects were decent in some ways, poor in others. Even at the time, I would say it was a mistake to rotoscope light into the costumes in post.
Unless you have super-nostalgic-blinders, Tron 1 was visionary, but like many other 'visionary' movies, it wasn't great on its own merits.
100% of the time?
Back to the Future Part 3 did fine.
The Two Towers and Return of the King did fine.
The various Harry Potter movies did just fine.
That may be a case, but Godzilla had just about the right amount of total monster smash. Monsters smashing things over and over for hours on end... not interesting. You need a lot more than that.
No, it bombed because there was very little Tomorrowland in Tomorrowland. The entire screentime TL gets is what, maybe 15 minutes? Simply put, the trailers were completely at odds with what the film actually does.
The only two good sequences in the movie (The Tomorrowland pin "commercial" and the home invasion at Clooney's house) are in two trailers. Everything else is seriously, seriously flawed.
Worse, it has a 25 year old woman playing a kid as the main actor. I don't understand why Hollywood won't cast teenagers to play teenagers.
A number of reasons, child labor laws being one of them.
It's why twins are so popular in sitcoms. You can get two actors to convincingly play a young character while not exceeding the number of hours you're allowed to shoot with a young actor.
There are a lot of other reasons as well, and TV Tropes's Dawson Casting
gives a pretty good breakdown of why this happens.