Every movie listed in this thread was enjoyable, brainless entertainment. Just like the video games they were based on.
No. They weren't. They were each badly written, appallingly acted and poorly choreographed. Even the fight sequences were outright bad. I enjoy good Kung Fu films. These were shit Kung Fu films.
Hey, if you enjoyed them, good for you. But I like my mindless chop-socky violent entertainment to be high quality mindless violent entertainment made by people who know how to sustain tension, write witty dialogue and produce choreograph action sequences. And the plots don't have to be deep, but it'd be nice if they were at least slightly coherent.
That's why Enter The Dragon and The Matrix are great mindless entertainment, and Mortal Kombat is an appalling waste of everyone's time and money.
Well the best of them rated 6.2/10 of IMDB, which given that IMDB is still slightly nerd-skewed in its ratings, is pretty dismal.
And, for the record, the reason I chose those is because they were the three that (i) were based on video games, (ii) I've seen and (iii) were, basically, shit.
I like the fact that the convergence of those is dependent on the order of the terms. If I change the order, I can make them sum to any damn thing I like.
Except, as no Americans seem to realise, unless their investigating a crime, the vast, vast majority of that tape goes unwatched. And even if it were (which it isn't) there's no centralised system for tracking and identifying you across the myriad CCTV operators. You're just a body floating across the frame. No one gives a damn who you are, you're just not important. The purpose is evidentiary, for prosecuting criminals.
As intelligence/information gathering infrastructures go, you might as well get paranoid about strolling across the shot of various soccer moms as they're capturing the darling little child on the family camcorder.
Fact: my Athlon 2400 PC (a whole bundle of difficult-to-fabricate components) costs less than Microsoft Office Pro (a few easily duplicated CDs), and Steve tells me its the hardware thats overpriced. Sure Steve. Whatever.
Once back around 1992 they were practically a gathering of experts all around the world (and the occasional fringe wacko); now they're nothing but spam and all discussion is by fringe wackos
That's just crap. Very few of the groups I read are full of spam (the few that are are gatewayed mailing lists). And the technical ones are full of knowledgeable people: ask an F95 question on comp.lang.fortran if you don't believe me. They were really bad in the mid-90s, but now they're much, much better. I'd bet the average comp.os.unix contributor is way smarter than the average/.er.
Lucky you. But it is luck. Those of us of a certain age could never have avoided spam, because widely propagated spam predates the first effective anti-spam measures by several years.
... Imminent death of the net predicted. Film at Eleven.
I predict that within one year, someone smart enough to know better will predict the demise of the Net within 2 years. Can I have my "Professional Futurologist" badge now?
And possibly the first, Eric von Stroheim's "Greed", which clocked in at over seven hours. As a contemporary review said : "Von Stroheim is a genius -- GREED establishes that beyond all doubt -- but he is badly in need of a stopwatch."
i) To display the books, they've got to send that information to the browser, on your machine. ii) Once its displayable on your machine, there is *absolutely* no way they can stop a determined person from printing it. iii) If its going to work on Open-Souce browsers, the DRM must be fairly transparent. iv) If it works on Open Source browsers, someone cleverer than me will modify that browser so that it works as the user intends, rather than the sender. Their only protection is the DMCA, which may stop a US coder from writing/distributing the hacked app, but the rest of us will be laughing.
Frankly, if Google were as smart as they're hyped to be, they'd know this.
Thugs? They didn't hurt anybody. The didn't destroy anything, and they were so intimidating and violent, that no charges have been pressed. They defaced a poster. Unpleasant, but not enough to qualify you as a thug, I think you'll find.
If they were my hired goons, I'd ask for my money back.
It's funny except that your comment has an historical precedent... During the French Revolution, the Committee of Public Safety beheaded people that "did not want to be free."
Hell, you don't have to go back that far. Remember "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it"?
The flyer could have veered into a crowd of people.
In the middle of fucking nowhere? Where were the crowd of people going to come from? Kill Devil Hill was a bloody great sand dune. There was no around.
Engine could have fallen off.
And fallen 20 or 30 metres to land on open wasteground.
All I can say thank God it didn't happen else we'd still be traveling on trains.
If the Wright brothers had tested Flyer in a way that engangered the lives of others, you can be damn sure the local authorities would have intervened. Probably with a posse and a lynching.
As if other countries are going to like having boosters dumped on their peoples' houses and the like.
Well, some of them aren't going to mind. In some of them, if you throw enough money to the nearest elected official, they'll make all your regulatory problems go away. Fortunately, realising the benefits to entrepreneurial free market capitalism that arrise from this, the US is presently moving over to this system:)
No, it isn't. Medicare is paid for through general taxation. The BBC isn't, its entirely funded through a license fee, paid by people for the right to receive television broadcasts.
Well hang about. The BBC said something about the government. The government got very upset about one specific allegation ("The 45 minute claim was inserted by govt spin doctors against the advice of the JIC") which Gilligan inserted off the cuff and which no-one believes to be true (even Gilligan admitted that was wrong).
The government then said "Will you retract that, as it isn't true". The BBC asked Gilligan, he stood by it. The BBC said we won't retract that.
Flash forward... Hutton says: "The BBC's processes in checking Gilligan's story were woeful" (undeniably true; they asked Gilligan, then based their defense on the assumption he hadn't lied to them, which he had).
People think Hutton was a whitewash, because almost no-one's read it, and every newspaper in the country felt the need to stand up for their journalistic brother and pretend that the kerfuffle had been caused by something other than one specific lie in Gilligan's story.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if you enjoyed them, good for you. But I like my mindless chop-socky violent entertainment to be high quality mindless violent entertainment made by people who know how to sustain tension, write witty dialogue and produce choreograph action sequences. And the plots don't have to be deep, but it'd be nice if they were at least slightly coherent.
That's why Enter The Dragon and The Matrix are great mindless entertainment, and Mortal Kombat is an appalling waste of everyone's time and money.
Pah. I'd hazard that Ghosts Of Mars of much worse than Mission To Mars on both those counts
Well the best of them rated 6.2/10 of IMDB, which given that IMDB is still slightly nerd-skewed in its ratings, is pretty dismal.
And, for the record, the reason I chose those is because they were the three that (i) were based on video games, (ii) I've seen and (iii) were, basically, shit.
Hooray! Because we all know that films based on video games are always great
I like the fact that the convergence of those is dependent on the order of the terms. If I change the order, I can make them sum to any damn thing I like.
As intelligence/information gathering infrastructures go, you might as well get paranoid about strolling across the shot of various soccer moms as they're capturing the darling little child on the family camcorder.
But you get to choose who to show your passport to. Anyone can read RFID information, as long as they can get reasonably close to you.
Well, back-in-the-day, no one knew how to deal with it, so we all suffered a little.
Fact: my Athlon 2400 PC (a whole bundle of difficult-to-fabricate components) costs less than Microsoft Office Pro (a few easily duplicated CDs), and Steve tells me its the hardware thats overpriced. Sure Steve. Whatever.
... Imminent death of the net predicted. Film at Eleven.
I predict that within one year, someone smart enough to know better will predict the demise of the Net within 2 years. Can I have my "Professional Futurologist" badge now?
And possibly the first, Eric von Stroheim's "Greed", which clocked in at over seven hours. As a contemporary review said : "Von Stroheim is a genius -- GREED establishes that beyond all doubt -- but he is badly in need of a stopwatch."
Facts :
i) To display the books, they've got to send that information to the browser, on your machine.
ii) Once its displayable on your machine, there is *absolutely* no way they can stop a determined person from printing it.
iii) If its going to work on Open-Souce browsers, the DRM must be fairly transparent.
iv) If it works on Open Source browsers, someone cleverer than me will modify that browser so that it works as the user intends, rather than the sender. Their only protection is the DMCA, which may stop a US coder from writing/distributing the hacked app, but the rest of us will be laughing.
Frankly, if Google were as smart as they're hyped to be, they'd know this.
Now watch this C: drive.
Thugs? They didn't hurt anybody. The didn't destroy anything, and they were so intimidating and violent, that no charges have been pressed. They defaced a poster. Unpleasant, but not enough to qualify you as a thug, I think you'll find.
If they were my hired goons, I'd ask for my money back.
No, it isn't. Medicare is paid for through general taxation. The BBC isn't, its entirely funded through a license fee, paid by people for the right to receive television broadcasts.
Well hang about. The BBC said something about the government. The government got very upset about one specific allegation ("The 45 minute claim was inserted by govt spin doctors against the advice of the JIC") which Gilligan inserted off the cuff and which no-one believes to be true (even Gilligan admitted that was wrong).
... Hutton says: "The BBC's processes in checking Gilligan's story were woeful" (undeniably true; they asked Gilligan, then based their defense on the assumption he hadn't lied to them, which he had).
The government then said "Will you retract that, as it isn't true". The BBC asked Gilligan, he stood by it. The BBC said we won't retract that.
Flash forward
People think Hutton was a whitewash, because almost no-one's read it, and every newspaper in the country felt the need to stand up for their journalistic brother and pretend that the kerfuffle had been caused by something other than one specific lie in Gilligan's story.