Hey, you got your causality backwards... If he doesn't see a "net" subtext, he doesn't write about it.
Re:I saw AI this afternoon. (SPOILERS)
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 1
Also how, exactly, are the robots powered? This is a small issue because this is sci-fi and you have to suspend your belief but come on!
The narrator does say that his power supply dies out between when he goes into the infinite loop and the time the robot archeologists come upon him. You see them explicitly do something to power him back on.
Why do they bother leading David to New York anyway? Who would expect that he would steal a helicopter and make his way to a particular building in the abondoned Manhatten. If you're gonna lead him somewhere, lead him someplace easily accesible at least.
The Doctor pretty clearly states that David has passed a test at this point; they made it difficult to make it a good test. Also, note that it wasn't just a random building in Manhattan. Dr. Know's poem very clearly pointed him at the building "where the lions weep" - and that's how he chose the building, finding that landmark.
The last thing is with the aliens. I can't believe that David is the only "living" remnant of humans. If one robot survived, couldn't others?
You missed it. They're David's own descendants, not aliens.
But how would they detect him anyway. They went directly to him like they knew he was there.
No they didn't. There was a *huge* cavern dug out in the remnants of Manhattan, and they had just come across David's remains there under the ice.
And they can bring somebody back but for only one day and only once. How stupid is that?
I agree that this is almost pure bullshit, although I could see some law of nature being connected to when a person goes to sleep--if the future society had somehow discovered the true nature of the human soul. This would also get around the whole "memory doesn't work like that" problem... But it still felt contrived while I sat there, and that's almost more important than whether the idea can be explained in the lobby outside the theater afterwards.
Other than that allusion to the poem, why would anyone fly a ship that everyone could see and run away from?... I think somebody would get the idea that it wasn't a moon if it was 10x as big as a real one anyway.
They were almost certainly doing it to associate the image of the moon with fear of capture in robots' minds. Note that later on in the movie they explicitly show this effect in action - "is it the moon? I can't tell... let's go the other way." It's a terror tactic, and that scene finally made me feel ok about them having used that funky airship thing. As for the idea that robots should be able to tell the difference, keep in mind that they're mostly still learning about the world... I get that impression, anyway. It seems like they don't stay fugitives very long, basically.
Also, if half the world has been engulfed, what is David's family doing living in such a luxurious and large house? Wouldn't there be space limits?
Not if the country they lived in had extremely strict population limitations.
This is weird. I came out of the movie thinking it was sucktacular, but the more I read this forum and other reviews and think about things, the more the things that seemed annoying get explained, and the better the movie seems.
I have to say that people who didn't like Starship Troopers, the movie, either missed the point or didn't like it. Verhoeven's ST was either a parody or an extension of Heinlein's ST; Verhoeven read it and saw it for what it was - a book of self-righteous military propaganda for a government that had its own take on what Democracy should be. If Heinlein was serious about it being a viable form of government, then Verhoeven was parodying it. Otherwise, he simply translated Heinlein's points into a visual medium. The little speeches about civic duty were deftly turned into wartime propaganda films, that sort of thing.
Didn't you at least find Doogie Himmler just a little disconcerting? You should have!
I seem to have gotten a bit off the topic of A.I. I have one pet peeve about all these reviews for it - people keep on blindly bringing up Asimov's "laws of robotics", as if they were some immutable thing in the Real World.
1. His laws of robotics were solidly based in his series of *fictional* stories.
2. *THINK* for a second! You have this A.I. that you're programming, and you decide that the three Laws of Robotics need to be ingrained at a basic level in your piece of hardware. How do you write these requirements? To just say them in English is one thing, but to make them as basic to the Robot's being as possible you need to *code* this up, in no ambiguous terms. Anything less gives robots wiggle room. I say the Three Laws Of Robotics cannot be implemented as written. Period.
3. Don't get me wrong - David's reaction pulling Martin into the pool was a sign of incredibly bad programming. I'm just saying don't call it a Three Laws failure.
Enough ReplayTV Customers (myself included) complained about this new "feature" that they removed it in a subsequent version of the OS. The system still works, congratulations.
The point here is not "BSD is better than Linux." The point: "it's unfair that Linux gets good press for doing something everyone else has been doing for so long."
1) Not only is the guy who played Krunk (not "Crank") "Patrick Warburton the guy from the last season of Seinfeld"; he's also "Patrick Warburton the guy who's playing The Tick in the live-action mid-season replacement series for Fox." Also, he has some of the *best* scenes in any Disney movie ever [the diner comes to mind].
2) I hate David Spade's whiney sarcastic standup thing, but this movie put it in the right context, and made David Spade bearable. My new theory is: "David Spade should be heard and not seen."
3) Get someone to proof articles before they get put up in front of thousands of readers.
4) Don't say "Granted, I was in a movie theater with crappy audio, but man, did that movie have crappy audio." The audio was fine; there's lots of nice subtleties like branches cracking at strategic moments... and I'm glad that for once there was a Disney film where they weren't breaking into song every ten minutes.
5) John Goodman was anything but bland, and you forgot to mention his extremely funny wife (even though she had only a bit part).
My take on this is it's the renaissance of Disney animation; this is the first really clever, emotionally engaging non-piece-of-crap to come out of Disney in a long time.
Except in Massachusetts... Though I don't plan on giving the Green Party my vote; the other problem with a three-party system is that there are no reasonable third parties as of yet:-/
How can Gore be considered "in bed with the entertainment industry" and "an evil censor of our free speech" at the same time? Isn't he the one pushing that whole "reduced-violence Hollywood" fiasco?
Oh, sure, when other people's protocols have minor weaknesses, like the CueCat being easily reengineered, everyone's all like "Hey, they made the system easy to hack, it's their own damn fault!" But watch Napster get hacked based on the inherent weakness in the whole system - in the very basic assumption of the system, and total lack of any attempt to hedge their bets against this kind of thing - and everyone cries out "abuse of the system" and "spam"...
On Apple's site, anyway, 1-click buying seems kinda dumb... Everything there is at least $100, there's no *impulse* buying at that level. The whole key to the 1-click purchase is that it enables people to do impulse buys...
Its secondary use is, of course, convenience... but who buys at apple.com more than once every couple years? Who needs a new computer that often? If you enter your information once now, you'll need new info (at least CC expiration dates) by the time you make your next purchase that... 1-click seems wholly inappropriate to Apple's website. 1-click is all about a whole lot of nickel-and-dime things, not about the big stuff.
Did people see the MTV Movie Awards, when Lucas went up on stage to accept "best action sequence" and he pointed out Samuel L. Jackson in the audience? He said something like "We didn't win best fight this year, but I expect to see Sam Jackson up here next year!" Sounds like they're expecting to put some meat in this one.
I noticed on the website that havenco plans to "give back to the community" by serving sites that promote free speech, human rights, or give voice to oppressed people... And the first site to get this treatment will be Tibet Online.
Is Tibet Online really a site that needs HavenCo protection? Do China's complaints about such a site get heard at all in the US (where the site appears to be hosted), where it's so clearly a matter of protected political speech?
I guess I want to know how this is more than an empty marketing move to move the spotlight over to the more honorable uses of havenco's services.
You have got to check out the Slayers series. It's got a great sense of humor, it's got a strong female lead, it's got a cool plot arc (leading up to fighting a major daemon at the end of the first season)... it's got big explosions, good theme music, and two seasons are now available on VHS. The characters in this series are wonderful, and it's fun all the way through.
And even though Lina Inverse, the sorceress star of the show, dresses reasonably (setting this series apart from most other anime out there), she's still really hot, mostly because of her personality.:) But maybe that's just me.
The Slayers Movie is available on DVD, but IMHO it pales in comparison to the series. It's missing some of the most important characters and has this annoying chick named Naga. So if you've seen the Slayers Movie, don't take it as an indication of the quality of the series. Get tape 1 of Slayers and start from the beginning!
Keep in mind that once a digital system, any digital syste, is established in Hollywood, it will probably be about as long 'til the next enhancement as it's been since scope 35mm prints (i.e. since the 50s... or 50 years). Hollywood moves very slowly, so it's very important that they not adopt a crappy digital standard, like the TI or the Hughes one that Ebert rips apart in this article.
Also, some of the problems he sites are inherently true of any digital system - the current distribution system of a bunch of 18G hard drives trucked to the theaters is infeasible. To use satellites at the unacceptable 1280x1024 resolution would take 10x more compression than the system they demonstrated.
Also, going to digital projection systems will have one incredibly bad side effect - cutting smaller theaters totally out of the loop. We're talking $100k upgrades here, places like the Brattle Theater and Coolidge Corner (in Boston) will no longer be able to show anything remotely new. This hurts the Indie film industry, since those theaters are where things like Princess Mononoke [not exactly indie, but] and Dogma premiere and have their test marketing done.
Having been an officer of MIT's Lecture Series Committee, I can say that a move to an all-digital Hollywood would likely kill any small 35mm projection operation. And that would truly be a shame.
Reading the article it's clear you don't have to "give it back"... You can just order the free repair kit and do it yourself. Good way to keep collectors from worrying, anyway.
Looking at the market for SWE1 toys, though, I suspect that collectors will never have to worry about their items becoming rare.
What part of that didn't I understand? Umm... I'm not sure. Probably the whole thing. Sorry, temporary case of blindness. But yeah, this is definitely good news!
There are two major questions left unanswered by the website.
Keyboard. They don't show the keyboard in any closeup pictures, so you can't tell if it's any good on layout. They're not descriptive at all about the tactile feedback on the keyboard, so chances are good (with today's keyboard market) that it's crap.
Additionally, they don't mention a PS/2 keyboard port, which implies to me that any replacement keyboard you put on the thing has to be a USB jobbie. I've never seen a good USB keyboard. If anyone's seen one, I'd like to hear about it.
DVD decoding. They don't say anything about hardware MPEG decoding for the DVD-ROM drive. I recently got an IBM laptop with a DVD-ROM drive and I didn't know to look for MPEG decoding. So I got an unpleasant surprise when I went to play a DVD movie and it was... not too great an image. I suppose this is irrelevant to people who run Linux and choose not to show DVDs at all.
Basically, this looks like a relatively cheap laptop packaged as a desktop PC. It's been tried before (remember the "PS/2e"?) and it comes nowhere near touching the iMac for what it's good for. They should have just used a CRT.
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Hey, you got your causality backwards... If he doesn't see a "net" subtext, he doesn't write about it.
The narrator does say that his power supply dies out between when he goes into the infinite loop and the time the robot archeologists come upon him. You see them explicitly do something to power him back on.
The Doctor pretty clearly states that David has passed a test at this point; they made it difficult to make it a good test. Also, note that it wasn't just a random building in Manhattan. Dr. Know's poem very clearly pointed him at the building "where the lions weep" - and that's how he chose the building, finding that landmark.
You missed it. They're David's own descendants, not aliens.
No they didn't. There was a *huge* cavern dug out in the remnants of Manhattan, and they had just come across David's remains there under the ice.
I agree that this is almost pure bullshit, although I could see some law of nature being connected to when a person goes to sleep--if the future society had somehow discovered the true nature of the human soul. This would also get around the whole "memory doesn't work like that" problem... But it still felt contrived while I sat there, and that's almost more important than whether the idea can be explained in the lobby outside the theater afterwards.
They were almost certainly doing it to associate the image of the moon with fear of capture in robots' minds. Note that later on in the movie they explicitly show this effect in action - "is it the moon? I can't tell... let's go the other way." It's a terror tactic, and that scene finally made me feel ok about them having used that funky airship thing. As for the idea that robots should be able to tell the difference, keep in mind that they're mostly still learning about the world... I get that impression, anyway. It seems like they don't stay fugitives very long, basically.
Not if the country they lived in had extremely strict population limitations.
This is weird. I came out of the movie thinking it was sucktacular, but the more I read this forum and other reviews and think about things, the more the things that seemed annoying get explained, and the better the movie seems.
Didn't you at least find Doogie Himmler just a little disconcerting? You should have!
I seem to have gotten a bit off the topic of A.I. I have one pet peeve about all these reviews for it - people keep on blindly bringing up Asimov's "laws of robotics", as if they were some immutable thing in the Real World.
1. His laws of robotics were solidly based in his series of *fictional* stories.
2. *THINK* for a second! You have this A.I. that you're programming, and you decide that the three Laws of Robotics need to be ingrained at a basic level in your piece of hardware. How do you write these requirements? To just say them in English is one thing, but to make them as basic to the Robot's being as possible you need to *code* this up, in no ambiguous terms. Anything less gives robots wiggle room. I say the Three Laws Of Robotics cannot be implemented as written. Period.
3. Don't get me wrong - David's reaction pulling Martin into the pool was a sign of incredibly bad programming. I'm just saying don't call it a Three Laws failure.
Enough ReplayTV Customers (myself included) complained about this new "feature" that they removed it in a subsequent version of the OS. The system still works, congratulations.
The point here is not "BSD is better than Linux." The point: "it's unfair that Linux gets good press for doing something everyone else has been doing for so long."
2) I hate David Spade's whiney sarcastic standup thing, but this movie put it in the right context, and made David Spade bearable. My new theory is: "David Spade should be heard and not seen."
3) Get someone to proof articles before they get put up in front of thousands of readers.
4) Don't say "Granted, I was in a movie theater with crappy audio, but man, did that movie have crappy audio." The audio was fine; there's lots of nice subtleties like branches cracking at strategic moments... and I'm glad that for once there was a Disney film where they weren't breaking into song every ten minutes.
5) John Goodman was anything but bland, and you forgot to mention his extremely funny wife (even though she had only a bit part).
My take on this is it's the renaissance of Disney animation; this is the first really clever, emotionally engaging non-piece-of-crap to come out of Disney in a long time.
Except in Massachusetts... Though I don't plan on giving the Green Party my vote; the other problem with a three-party system is that there are no reasonable third parties as of yet :-/
How can Gore be considered "in bed with the entertainment industry" and "an evil censor of our free speech" at the same time? Isn't he the one pushing that whole "reduced-violence Hollywood" fiasco?
Oh, sure, when other people's protocols have minor weaknesses, like the CueCat being easily reengineered, everyone's all like "Hey, they made the system easy to hack, it's their own damn fault!" But watch Napster get hacked based on the inherent weakness in the whole system - in the very basic assumption of the system, and total lack of any attempt to hedge their bets against this kind of thing - and everyone cries out "abuse of the system" and "spam"...
Its secondary use is, of course, convenience... but who buys at apple.com more than once every couple years? Who needs a new computer that often? If you enter your information once now, you'll need new info (at least CC expiration dates) by the time you make your next purchase that... 1-click seems wholly inappropriate to Apple's website. 1-click is all about a whole lot of nickel-and-dime things, not about the big stuff.
Did people see the MTV Movie Awards, when Lucas went up on stage to accept "best action sequence" and he pointed out Samuel L. Jackson in the audience? He said something like "We didn't win best fight this year, but I expect to see Sam Jackson up here next year!" Sounds like they're expecting to put some meat in this one.
Is Tibet Online really a site that needs HavenCo protection? Do China's complaints about such a site get heard at all in the US (where the site appears to be hosted), where it's so clearly a matter of protected political speech?
I guess I want to know how this is more than an empty marketing move to move the spotlight over to the more honorable uses of havenco's services.
And even though Lina Inverse, the sorceress star of the show, dresses reasonably (setting this series apart from most other anime out there), she's still really hot, mostly because of her personality. :) But maybe that's just me.
The Slayers Movie is available on DVD, but IMHO it pales in comparison to the series. It's missing some of the most important characters and has this annoying chick named Naga. So if you've seen the Slayers Movie, don't take it as an indication of the quality of the series. Get tape 1 of Slayers and start from the beginning!
Newton binary compatibility!
I'd love to see what a Beowulf cluster of these babies could do!
It's pretty funny watching the completely different tone of /. reactions between when AMD demos 1 GHz and when Intel demos 1.5 GHz...
Also, some of the problems he sites are inherently true of any digital system - the current distribution system of a bunch of 18G hard drives trucked to the theaters is infeasible. To use satellites at the unacceptable 1280x1024 resolution would take 10x more compression than the system they demonstrated.
Also, going to digital projection systems will have one incredibly bad side effect - cutting smaller theaters totally out of the loop. We're talking $100k upgrades here, places like the Brattle Theater and Coolidge Corner (in Boston) will no longer be able to show anything remotely new. This hurts the Indie film industry, since those theaters are where things like Princess Mononoke [not exactly indie, but] and Dogma premiere and have their test marketing done.
Having been an officer of MIT's Lecture Series Committee, I can say that a move to an all-digital Hollywood would likely kill any small 35mm projection operation. And that would truly be a shame.
- WB Characters (Bugs-bunny, taz, pinky, the-brain, plucky, aunt-slappy [the as/400], yakko, wakko, dot, daffy, otto-von-schnitzelpuskrankengescheitmeier, roadrunner, wile-e-coyote)
- Characters from The Matrix (Neo, Trinity, Morpheus)
- Characters from Tron (Tron, Ram, Flynn, Alan-1, Recognizer)
- Characters from The Tick (Tick, Arthur, Die-Fledermaus, American-Maid, Sewer-Urchin, Carmelita, Speak, Barry, Mucilage-man, Chairface-Chippendale, etc.)
- Of course, obUserFriendlyReference, Erwin, our other AS/400 (poor guy keeps getting put into all kinds of weirdass systems
:) - South Park (stan, cartman, kyle, and kenny are too obvious... We went with pip, damian, tweek, officer-barbrady, mr-garrison...)
There're always the classic Athena naming schemes... Off the top of my head, I can think of some.- Greek/Roman mythology (Athena, Hercules, Epimetheus, Atlas, and countless others. Use this one if you're gonna have a lot of servers.
- Ringworld (ringworld, louis-wu, speaker-to-animals, teela-brown, hindmost, longshot)
- Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Beeblebrox, etc.)
You get the idea. Find your favorite mass-media thing (be it Xena or Major League Baseball) and steal steal steal!Looking at the market for SWE1 toys, though, I suspect that collectors will never have to worry about their items becoming rare.
What part of that didn't I understand? Umm... I'm not sure. Probably the whole thing. Sorry, temporary case of blindness. But yeah, this is definitely good news!
- Keyboard. They don't show the keyboard in any closeup pictures, so you can't tell if it's any good on layout. They're not descriptive at all about the tactile feedback on the keyboard, so chances are good (with today's keyboard market) that it's crap.
- DVD decoding. They don't say anything about hardware MPEG decoding for the DVD-ROM drive. I recently got an IBM laptop with a DVD-ROM drive and I didn't know to look for MPEG decoding. So I got an unpleasant surprise when I went to play a DVD movie and it was... not too great an image. I suppose this is irrelevant to people who run Linux and choose not to show DVDs at all.
Basically, this looks like a relatively cheap laptop packaged as a desktop PC. It's been tried before (remember the "PS/2e"?) and it comes nowhere near touching the iMac for what it's good for. They should have just used a CRT.Additionally, they don't mention a PS/2 keyboard port, which implies to me that any replacement keyboard you put on the thing has to be a USB jobbie. I've never seen a good USB keyboard. If anyone's seen one, I'd like to hear about it.
Does anyone else think that the article says something different from the summary, or is it just me?