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User: daschmid

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  1. Commercialization of Space on Pizza Hut's Space Program: First Launch · · Score: 1
    "Pizza Hut is a pioneer in space commercialization,"
    [...]
    Congress has mandated that NASA work aggressively to support efforts to commercialize space and the International Space Station," he added.
    It's somewhat disturbing to me just how eagerly they've interpreted the directive to "commercialize space" as meaning "use space to promote consumer products". Have these people no imagination?

    What about developing commercial space transport systems, commercial space stations or commerical on-orbit manufacturing plants? What about doing something vaguely useful for humankind?

    Of course, if they chose to interpret it that way, they couldn't claim to have revolutionized space travel by buying a $500M billboard. They'd also have to give credit to the numerous companies that are actually doing something useful.

    Frankly, I don't give a damn how many PhDs it takes to make a fricking pizza; I just want to be able to vacation on the moon.

  2. Re:Disney... on Movie Reviews: Fantasia 2000 · · Score: 1
    There are a few thinktanks, (Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, CA is one of them) that primarilly attack the movies at the design stage, throwing out wild sequences and ideas.
    Imagineering actually has nothing to do with films; they do theme park and location based stuff exclusively.
  3. Re:It was wonderful on Movie Reviews: Fantasia 2000 · · Score: 3
    I don't know about that. Some of his ideas were obviously brilliant, but others were questionable. I mean, Disney City (a city where everything was engineered to be disney-clean and disney-efficient) was a total disaster, and it was a brainchild of Walt himself.

    If you're referring to EPCOT, the city that Walt was working on at the time of his death, it was never built. If you're referring to "Celebration", the planned community that Disney actually did build near Orlando a few years ago, that's... well... that's another matter entirely.

    EPCOT, if constructed with Walt at the helm would have been incredible. Perhaps a bit too corporate for my tastes, but incredible. Designs were based on years of research into urban planning and years of experience running Disneyland (considered by many to be at the pinnacle of urban planning) It would have been a real, working city unlike any in the the world.

    Walt Disney World was supposed to be this city. The theme parks and resorts were just a "weenie" to get the project going and get some capital going for the real work. If you look at some of the infrastructure systems at WDW, you begin to get a flavor of what it would have been like

    When Walt died, Roy Disney sat through a meeting with the planning team at WED, Walt's personal company (now Walt Disney Imagineering,) basically told them "Walt is dead" and turned EPCOT into a theme park.

    More recently, somebody in the real-estate development arm of Disney heard about EPCOT, and decided that what Walt really wanted was some kind of profit oriented gated community. So they proceeded to build the completely uninspired, completely banal Celebration.

    Celebration is what you get when corporate america COMPLETELY MISSES THE POINT.

    Walt really did want to change the world for the better, he had the skills to do so, and he almost succeeded. I think that's worthy of at a least minor canonization...

  4. Re:Disney... on Movie Reviews: Fantasia 2000 · · Score: 3
    The Goofy movie, Tigger Movie, etc. are actually produced by Walt Disney Television Animation, the same people responsible for cartoon series and direct-to-video sequels.

    Walt Disney Feature Animation does the big releases. They have offices in California, Florida and Paris, but they don't always work on seperate films at seperate locations; the work is often split.

    Since Pixar is an independant company, Disney pretty much stays out of there way, production-wise. FA doesn't seem all that reluctant to compete, either; Dinosaur is being released this Labor Day, was done by Feature Animation, and has absolutely stunning cgi.

  5. Re:CPU Comparison! VERY INTERESTING!~~~~ on Top 500 Supercomputers · · Score: 1

    Note that ASCI Red is a Pentium Pro based machine; not exactly Intel's current offering.