It was a mediocre to less than average of a movie to me--even as a standalone movie, ignoring the first one, and the books; indeed, I've never even read them.
The truely frustrating thing to me, looking back on it, was that it could have EASILY been better without much more work. The camera action, I think, was used as a distraction from the action sequences, which were poorly planned and implemented (in contrast from Identity), and I think the director realized this.
The acting was stiff--pretty much all around--and I know that Damon is quite capable of doing much much better; and as you say, the story's been done before; and that's not so bad in itself. There are only so many plots that are interesting to people, and I recognize that fact... However it seemed to me that the story's characters seemed to be in this instance, generic, and seperated from the story.
Eh, anyway... I think the director was responsible for much of this. It's artistic vision, and that's always to be appreciated, however, I think this movie was about as insightful as someone troweling ape shit over another artist's otherwise handsome sculpture.
Bah, I thought "Supremacy" was teh major suck. It was about a tenth as good as the first one, which was quite entertaining and well done--and the cinematography was among the worst I've ever seen. It's like the whole thing was shot with a handicam resting on one of those vibrating hotel beds. I'm not one prone to nausea (thanks FPSs!) but this movie brought me close.
The first movie had soul, this one had none. It's a revenge flick, and I just didn't feel it. Totally disappointed.
He said that electric heaters are virtually 100% efficient, and he'd be absolutely right.
A heater's function is to create heat. All of the energy coming into it is either spent on heating the air, or creating infrared, which will heat the objects surrounding the heater... And either way you slice it, it's heat. Heck, even the impedance in the power cable will create heat. It's 100% efficient even to the outlet.
An electric heater is the only 100% efficient device that I can think of. Who cares about the power plant, that's not the subject matter.
Well, my felling is that it's just not that bad. When something just dosen't make sense, either Jack or Daniel make light of it Most of the time, anyway..
The episode where Teal'C was trapped in the memory buffer of the stargate, they said that stuff entering the gate is more or less digitized, stored into the gate via a quantum buffer, and transmitted through the wormhole. It's far out there, but it's plausible--the gate works like a giant computer. It was supposed to be built by a race that were almost godly, millions of years ago, why not, eh! I mean, I'm a computer geek, and as you say, they did a good job at suspending disbelief, for me at least. In other episodes (the one with the super-strength-speed armband comes to mind,) they didn't do so good, and it was too ST like...
In ST (not so much in the original series, or DS9, mind you), nearly every problem technical problem is solved by a tachyon beam, or some other generic plot tool that. For me, it's glaringly obvious when they're trying to prop up a suffering plot with technobable--it might as well jump out and hit me in the face!
At least SG1's writers use the technology to advance the story arc, and the technology dosen't become a focus of the episode, in general.
Yeah, I thought about starting down that road with the O2, but at the time they only had Linux running Indys, and even then X11 support was limited, and decided that in the end it just wasn't worth the effort--stuck with IRIX 6.3 and used whatever binarys I could find 'till I found someone with 6.5
I called SGI up back probably 5 years ago. I wanted to upgrade my O2 from IRIX 6.3 to 6.5 They wanted $650 for the "educational" pricing, and they needed to verify that I was at a university. Hooooly shit. All I wanted was to be able to use gcc, and in that way casually learn some of IRIX's quirks... I was a fan of SGI and the cool stuff they've done, and I wanted to learn.
All the system libraries came with 6.5, so unless you wanted to pay out the ass for SGI's cc, you had to have 6.5. I eventually borrowed the discs from someone, and made copies... And honestly, it was painful, because I wanted to give SGI money, but there's no way a student can justify that kind of expense. I could've bought an x86 machine with a legit version of windows, and been close to affording a student version of MS Vis. C++ with that sort of money.
A company with a hostile educational policy isn't going to gain people that will use their products when they become professionals, and that company will either die, or be forced to change policy. It's not like I wasn't willing to pay a fair price--If I belived that $650 (a signifigant portion of my bank) was worth it *to me*, I wouldn't have had a problem--but that was like going out and buying Adobe Photoshop to do some casual not-for-profit graphics practice.
Honestly, I think their salesmen and executives strangled the company. There's no way you can justify pricing a 4x CD-ROM at a thousand dollars or more, when compatible consumer products that fast or faster exist for less than a tenth of the price... Even if it's got some weird firmware.
That's the thing. It's not a license. It's their terms of service.
If you violate their terms of service, they have the right to not serve you. Heck, they don't have to serve you even if you follow the rules exactly.
Much like the signs on private businesses: "no shirt, no shoes, no service". A business can refuse service pretty much on any basis. They don't like the way you look, and won't sell you what you want? Tough luck. Same deal here.
WTF? In no way is BSD like public domain. Public Domain means that nobody owns the copyrights (or in that same token that EVERYONE owns the copyrights), or that the copyrights have expired.
BSD is a liscense, just like any other. BSD is completely unrelated to copyright, except in that if you follw the rules of the liscense you gain the ability to use those copyrighted works within the bounds of the liscense--just like the GPL. Liscenses are like chisels, and copyrights are like wood, and in this way they are completely unrelated excapt for the fact that their use is quite obvious. You use the tools at hand to shape the wood into the form you desire. That's the entireity of it.
If an author had complete ownership of the copyrighted material in question, he could liscense it in whatever fashion he wanted, even under mutiple liscenses, binary only liscenses, or what ever he desired. The ONLY ***only*** reason that BSD stuff can't usually become GPL stuff is the fact that so many people own the copyrights on it that it would be absolutely impossible to contact them all and ask for their (written) permission to use the code involved, and also the simple matter is that many people contribute to BSD stuff because it's BSD, and they wouldn't want to change liscense--meaning that you'd have to cleanroom engineer it all--talk about an excercise of futility.
If these people molested a BSD project in the same way they've molested ReactOS (not giving credit where credit is due, as per the BSD liscense) they'd be in just as much shit.
Personally, I'd like a law enacted that that somehow disallowed all counties and states from saying *anything* about the election until two weeks after election day, or until every single ballot has been counted (or determined to be invalid)--whichever comes latter. Also, all political ads, and anything even slightly resembling news about the candidates should be banned from TV and radio from the closing of polls till the two week mark.
In this way, it would allow counties to do their counting, recounting, and whatever else they need to do (einie meinie minie moe?) well before there is any public frenzy, and it would alleviate stress on the public. The candidates won't have to freak out over making some dern concession call and speech, nor should they be expected to do so until EVERY vote has been counted.
And most important of all, such a law would eliminate all of the asinine network antics, and especially the stupid consideration that the "news" of states going in the direction of one person or ther other influences people in other states where the polls haven't closed yet.
I can pronounce "CVD" as a word, so it must be an acronym. That I almost coughed my liver up as a result of said pronunciation has no bearing on that fact, from my point of view...
Hey, at least the guy they found to play the Marine has the weird evil/pleased/constipated grin thing going. And stubbly facial hair, too... Gotta' have that.
Well, I do agree with you in that respect, big companies do put lots more into R&D than any small group of people could ever hope to compare to... But the problem with big companies (like the ones in Detroit) is that they're largely monolithic, and seem to actively discourage creativity within their product lines. Yeah, they do have their development branches, but I don't think they get enough exposure. They worked on hybrid cars, and other things almost twenty years ago, and technology hasn't changed in any signifigant respect to make them much more viable now then they were back then.
Then there's the problem with engineers. Engineers are, in my opinion, programmed to all think alike, to recycle their old designs and thoeries into their new ones, and otherwise think inside the box. I'm working on becoming a mechanical engineer, and I've got to say that in general my peers and many of the real engineers I've come across suffer this problem, in addition to the general lack of Common Sense.
I agree that perhaps a super efficint car is a little too closed ended. Everyone knows to use lightweight materials and how to make very aerodynamic shapes, etc. But putting constraints on the design would encourage development that could be used in industry to make all of our cars better. For instance, it could be required that the car be four passenger, with a certain engine output reqirement (thereby encouraging more power for less fuel consumption), and a set weight, as I indicated earlier. No doubt it's going to be a fair bit easier, and closed ended than getting to 300,000 ft. any way you can, but it's an example of an idea that I think might help more of us sooner.
I like the idea of a regular X event, but not necessairly all having the same goal.. That would just become obnoxious and boring, in exactly the same way watching Astronauts on the moon did in the 70's.
Perhaps they need to go a different route: I suggest that there is a competition with no set time limit that would do exactly what the X-Prize did:encourage reguar people to try and do what is thought impossible, with engineering and imagination.
Let's say that the next X-Prize was for developing a car that pushed the envelope on fuel efficiency a little higher, within a set limit. It would work just like the race to space; first team that beats the set mileage on a certain course with a car that qualifies for weight, wins.
When one contest ends, another is anounced, and so on. This would be much more exciting to me, and no doubt to many more people.
For one thing, trying to blow oneself into space is quite a technological and monetary hurdle. Not everyone can invest $20 million to win $10 million. Secondly, it will encourage advances in whatever feild they chose for the prize, which is good for the rest of the people that can't or aren't interested to compete.
Seriously. I've though the same thing for a long time.
There have been numerous occasions that Sony comes out with something awesomely cool, but it a) never gets released to North America b) never even makes it out of Sony c) is obviously encumbered by the will of the music/video side of the company.
Really, I think that if you just loosed Sony's engineers and designers to work on a project and do whatever they wanted, they'd make it better, faster, and stronger than anyone has ever seen such a widget built. The people that build and design these things are as geeky as any slashdotter. They would incorporate the sort of things they themselves would appreciate (and therefore likewise to other geeks), and likely make it very usable, too.
When I hear a middle aged waitress (who's not known to be especially computer savvy) use the term "google" as a verb--and in the right context--well, let's just say that google has become a word. Just like xerox, kleenex, or any other widely used trademarks.
Yeah, I was with it until this Popular hacker software includes "Comet Cursor", "Bonzi Buddy" and "Flash"....(a bit later)....There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson; "Neuromancer" by William Gibson; "Programming with Perl" by Timothy O'Reilly; "Geeks" by Jon Katz; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland; "Hackers" by Steven Levy; and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond.
So, yeah. It's got to be a farce. If not, I'm scared. Very, very, very scared.:D
I've seen precisely one event that wasn't swimming, gymnastics, or volleyball.... Shotput. Okay, I take that back. I caught about 2:00 of the Boulder kid winning the gold in the bike contest, and some water polo... But that's more-or-less swimming, so it dosen't count!:P
I know other things have to be going on... I mean, as endlessly facinating swimming and teenage girls bouncing about are, I'd like to see some other stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a mediocre to less than average of a movie to me--even as a standalone movie, ignoring the first one, and the books; indeed, I've never even read them.
The truely frustrating thing to me, looking back on it, was that it could have EASILY been better without much more work. The camera action, I think, was used as a distraction from the action sequences, which were poorly planned and implemented (in contrast from Identity), and I think the director realized this.
The acting was stiff--pretty much all around--and I know that Damon is quite capable of doing much much better; and as you say, the story's been done before; and that's not so bad in itself. There are only so many plots that are interesting to people, and I recognize that fact... However it seemed to me that the story's characters seemed to be in this instance, generic, and seperated from the story.
Eh, anyway... I think the director was responsible for much of this. It's artistic vision, and that's always to be appreciated, however, I think this movie was about as insightful as someone troweling ape shit over another artist's otherwise handsome sculpture.
Bah, I thought "Supremacy" was teh major suck. It was about a tenth as good as the first one, which was quite entertaining and well done--and the cinematography was among the worst I've ever seen. It's like the whole thing was shot with a handicam resting on one of those vibrating hotel beds. I'm not one prone to nausea (thanks FPSs!) but this movie brought me close.
The first movie had soul, this one had none. It's a revenge flick, and I just didn't feel it. Totally disappointed.
He said that electric heaters are virtually 100% efficient, and he'd be absolutely right.
A heater's function is to create heat. All of the energy coming into it is either spent on heating the air, or creating infrared, which will heat the objects surrounding the heater... And either way you slice it, it's heat. Heck, even the impedance in the power cable will create heat. It's 100% efficient even to the outlet.
An electric heater is the only 100% efficient device that I can think of. Who cares about the power plant, that's not the subject matter.
Well, my felling is that it's just not that bad. When something just dosen't make sense, either Jack or Daniel make light of it Most of the time, anyway..
The episode where Teal'C was trapped in the memory buffer of the stargate, they said that stuff entering the gate is more or less digitized, stored into the gate via a quantum buffer, and transmitted through the wormhole. It's far out there, but it's plausible--the gate works like a giant computer. It was supposed to be built by a race that were almost godly, millions of years ago, why not, eh! I mean, I'm a computer geek, and as you say, they did a good job at suspending disbelief, for me at least. In other episodes (the one with the super-strength-speed armband comes to mind,) they didn't do so good, and it was too ST like...
In ST (not so much in the original series, or DS9, mind you), nearly every problem technical problem is solved by a tachyon beam, or some other generic plot tool that. For me, it's glaringly obvious when they're trying to prop up a suffering plot with technobable--it might as well jump out and hit me in the face!
At least SG1's writers use the technology to advance the story arc, and the technology dosen't become a focus of the episode, in general.
Not only that, but when they do use technobabble, it at least seems plausible. StarTrek, for one completely screws that up.
Yeah, I thought about starting down that road with the O2, but at the time they only had Linux running Indys, and even then X11 support was limited, and decided that in the end it just wasn't worth the effort--stuck with IRIX 6.3 and used whatever binarys I could find 'till I found someone with 6.5
Geez, that's an inane price.
I called SGI up back probably 5 years ago. I wanted to upgrade my O2 from IRIX 6.3 to 6.5 They wanted $650 for the "educational" pricing, and they needed to verify that I was at a university. Hooooly shit. All I wanted was to be able to use gcc, and in that way casually learn some of IRIX's quirks... I was a fan of SGI and the cool stuff they've done, and I wanted to learn.
All the system libraries came with 6.5, so unless you wanted to pay out the ass for SGI's cc, you had to have 6.5. I eventually borrowed the discs from someone, and made copies... And honestly, it was painful, because I wanted to give SGI money, but there's no way a student can justify that kind of expense. I could've bought an x86 machine with a legit version of windows, and been close to affording a student version of MS Vis. C++ with that sort of money.
A company with a hostile educational policy isn't going to gain people that will use their products when they become professionals, and that company will either die, or be forced to change policy. It's not like I wasn't willing to pay a fair price--If I belived that $650 (a signifigant portion of my bank) was worth it *to me*, I wouldn't have had a problem--but that was like going out and buying Adobe Photoshop to do some casual not-for-profit graphics practice.
Honestly, I think their salesmen and executives strangled the company. There's no way you can justify pricing a 4x CD-ROM at a thousand dollars or more, when compatible consumer products that fast or faster exist for less than a tenth of the price... Even if it's got some weird firmware.
That's the thing. It's not a license. It's their terms of service.
If you violate their terms of service, they have the right to not serve you. Heck, they don't have to serve you even if you follow the rules exactly.
Much like the signs on private businesses: "no shirt, no shoes, no service". A business can refuse service pretty much on any basis. They don't like the way you look, and won't sell you what you want? Tough luck. Same deal here.
Ahhh soo. You're right, of course.
Dyslexia! Caffiene! SCO! Myriad of open source licensing options! GO NERD! With your powers combined I am Captain Confused Geek!
WTF? In no way is BSD like public domain. Public Domain means that nobody owns the copyrights (or in that same token that EVERYONE owns the copyrights), or that the copyrights have expired.
BSD is a liscense, just like any other. BSD is completely unrelated to copyright, except in that if you follw the rules of the liscense you gain the ability to use those copyrighted works within the bounds of the liscense--just like the GPL. Liscenses are like chisels, and copyrights are like wood, and in this way they are completely unrelated excapt for the fact that their use is quite obvious. You use the tools at hand to shape the wood into the form you desire. That's the entireity of it.
If an author had complete ownership of the copyrighted material in question, he could liscense it in whatever fashion he wanted, even under mutiple liscenses, binary only liscenses, or what ever he desired. The ONLY ***only*** reason that BSD stuff can't usually become GPL stuff is the fact that so many people own the copyrights on it that it would be absolutely impossible to contact them all and ask for their (written) permission to use the code involved, and also the simple matter is that many people contribute to BSD stuff because it's BSD, and they wouldn't want to change liscense--meaning that you'd have to cleanroom engineer it all--talk about an excercise of futility.
If these people molested a BSD project in the same way they've molested ReactOS (not giving credit where credit is due, as per the BSD liscense) they'd be in just as much shit.
Nonono... You've got it all wrong. You see, that's what the second amendment is for.
Personally, I'd like a law enacted that that somehow disallowed all counties and states from saying *anything* about the election until two weeks after election day, or until every single ballot has been counted (or determined to be invalid)--whichever comes latter. Also, all political ads, and anything even slightly resembling news about the candidates should be banned from TV and radio from the closing of polls till the two week mark.
In this way, it would allow counties to do their counting, recounting, and whatever else they need to do (einie meinie minie moe?) well before there is any public frenzy, and it would alleviate stress on the public. The candidates won't have to freak out over making some dern concession call and speech, nor should they be expected to do so until EVERY vote has been counted.
And most important of all, such a law would eliminate all of the asinine network antics, and especially the stupid consideration that the "news" of states going in the direction of one person or ther other influences people in other states where the polls haven't closed yet.
I can pronounce "CVD" as a word, so it must be an acronym. That I almost coughed my liver up as a result of said pronunciation has no bearing on that fact, from my point of view...
Hey, they think the original Doom and Doom3 were on MARS. The planet. Says so in the interview.
It was Phobos you retards!
(if they can't even get that right, we know that the movie is going to be a pile of shit)
I'm thinking it's going to be a cross between ALL of the bad movie games thusfar.
Hey, at least the guy they found to play the Marine has the weird evil/pleased/constipated grin thing going. And stubbly facial hair, too... Gotta' have that.
Marine==Karl Urban
Well, I do agree with you in that respect, big companies do put lots more into R&D than any small group of people could ever hope to compare to... But the problem with big companies (like the ones in Detroit) is that they're largely monolithic, and seem to actively discourage creativity within their product lines. Yeah, they do have their development branches, but I don't think they get enough exposure. They worked on hybrid cars, and other things almost twenty years ago, and technology hasn't changed in any signifigant respect to make them much more viable now then they were back then.
Then there's the problem with engineers. Engineers are, in my opinion, programmed to all think alike, to recycle their old designs and thoeries into their new ones, and otherwise think inside the box. I'm working on becoming a mechanical engineer, and I've got to say that in general my peers and many of the real engineers I've come across suffer this problem, in addition to the general lack of Common Sense.
I agree that perhaps a super efficint car is a little too closed ended. Everyone knows to use lightweight materials and how to make very aerodynamic shapes, etc. But putting constraints on the design would encourage development that could be used in industry to make all of our cars better. For instance, it could be required that the car be four passenger, with a certain engine output reqirement (thereby encouraging more power for less fuel consumption), and a set weight, as I indicated earlier. No doubt it's going to be a fair bit easier, and closed ended than getting to 300,000 ft. any way you can, but it's an example of an idea that I think might help more of us sooner.
I like the idea of a regular X event, but not necessairly all having the same goal.. That would just become obnoxious and boring, in exactly the same way watching Astronauts on the moon did in the 70's.
Perhaps they need to go a different route: I suggest that there is a competition with no set time limit that would do exactly what the X-Prize did:encourage reguar people to try and do what is thought impossible, with engineering and imagination.
Let's say that the next X-Prize was for developing a car that pushed the envelope on fuel efficiency a little higher, within a set limit. It would work just like the race to space; first team that beats the set mileage on a certain course with a car that qualifies for weight, wins.
When one contest ends, another is anounced, and so on. This would be much more exciting to me, and no doubt to many more people.
For one thing, trying to blow oneself into space is quite a technological and monetary hurdle. Not everyone can invest $20 million to win $10 million. Secondly, it will encourage advances in whatever feild they chose for the prize, which is good for the rest of the people that can't or aren't interested to compete.
So, are you going to vote for him again?
A simple "gesundheit" would be just as good.
Judging by the complexion, I'd guess the mountian just might be German!
Seriously. I've though the same thing for a long time.
There have been numerous occasions that Sony comes out with something awesomely cool, but it a) never gets released to North America b) never even makes it out of Sony c) is obviously encumbered by the will of the music/video side of the company.
Really, I think that if you just loosed Sony's engineers and designers to work on a project and do whatever they wanted, they'd make it better, faster, and stronger than anyone has ever seen such a widget built. The people that build and design these things are as geeky as any slashdotter. They would incorporate the sort of things they themselves would appreciate (and therefore likewise to other geeks), and likely make it very usable, too.
Alas, such a thing will never happen.
No doubt.
When I hear a middle aged waitress (who's not known to be especially computer savvy) use the term "google" as a verb--and in the right context--well, let's just say that google has become a word. Just like xerox, kleenex, or any other widely used trademarks.
Welcome to our lexicon, the word "google".
Yeah, I was with it until this Popular hacker software includes "Comet Cursor", "Bonzi Buddy" and "Flash"....(a bit later)....There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson; "Neuromancer" by William Gibson; "Programming with Perl" by Timothy O'Reilly; "Geeks" by Jon Katz; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland; "Hackers" by Steven Levy; and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond.
:D
So, yeah. It's got to be a farce. If not, I'm scared. Very, very, very scared.
But they probably pay money for the privilege, either directly to the IOC or to NBC or someone else.
I've seen precisely one event that wasn't swimming, gymnastics, or volleyball.... Shotput. Okay, I take that back. I caught about 2:00 of the Boulder kid winning the gold in the bike contest, and some water polo... But that's more-or-less swimming, so it dosen't count! :P
I know other things have to be going on... I mean, as endlessly facinating swimming and teenage girls bouncing about are, I'd like to see some other stuff.
Because people might learn of the outcomes before NBC/other affiliates air them? I dunno, that's my guess. But it's a long shot, admittedly.
It's just another peice of evidence indicating that the IOC et. al. are a group of giant solar-system sized distended assholes.