It's those pesky social engineering issues again. If people are apt to go critical over nuclear power (like I mentioned in comments to the Mars and coffee story a couple weeks back), just think how they'll react to a proposal like this after decades of science fiction and Star Trek conditioning them to think of antimatter as insanely dangerous. --
Indeed, I recall reading FAQs in the Star Trek newsgroups several years ago telling exactly where and when the Star Trek satellite feeds were. I thought it was kinda neat.
On a related note, in my stint as moderator for rec.toys.transformers.moderated, I witnessed a related phenomenon when certain episodes (and in the case of Beast Machines, an entire season) were broadcast in Canada weeks or months before they made it to the U.S. Some Canadian fans digitized the episodes and put them up on websites and FreeDiskSpace folders within a couple days of their broadcast--meaning we American fans with high speed access got to watch them months ahead of schedule.
For that matter, I hear something similar happened with the Buffy season finale last year. --
why don't the people who publish these MMORPGs give away the games for free?
Well,
Neocron will (though admittedly they're not opening the source)--and they're even going to offer a subscription discount if you buy more than one month at a time, bringing the cost of the game down to about $8 a month if you buy time "in bulk".
As one of the first two hundred people outside the company picked to beta-test it, I'm very excited. I can't wait to see what it's like. I found the article very interesting, and I'm sure, as it said, that Neocron will have learned from the mistakes of its elders. The demo movie certainly looks enthralling . ..
I'm personally rather excited about Neocron right now--as I've been picked as one of the very first two hundred public beta testers. I should get my beta CD in a couple of weeks, then off we go!
Neocron is a cyberpunk/postholocaust first-person shooter MMORPG that's been in development for over two years and built up quite a huge fandom, even with no playable demos during that time. All indications are, it's gonna rock.:) --
You know, I don't use Aimster or anything, but up to this point, I had thought that the reason they had that name was that they were a subsidiary of the division of AOL that did the instant messaging thing. It took me completely by surprise to find that they weren't, and I would think AOL would have sued them already for the confusing nature of the use of "AIM" in that context. --
. . . to see people complaining about this worm, even as harmless as it is. "How dare they patch our systems! We want to be used as catspaws in denial of service attacks!" If they find out who wrote it and try to prosecute him for damages, will they have to make it a negative amount since it essentially fixed a broken system, instead of the other way around?
Sure, the idea of a worm in general might not be a good idea. But then, the only people who will be affected in a nontrivial way by this worm will be those who've been infected by another, malevolent worm anyway. Two wrongs may not make a right, but I would think in this case they would at least be somewhat better than just the one wrong, if the one wrong meant there were all those compromised computers out there that could be used in Denial of Service attacks, and the second wrong took those out of the equation.
--
Frankly, I wasn't even talking about nuclear power here on earth originally, though the few quotes I was able to select from that article might have given that impression. I was talking about space probes that use power generators that are essentially big batteries that just happen to have a smidge of nuclear material in them. They don't fiss or fuse at all, they just provide a steady stream of power that won't run out in a few days or weeks the way a nine-volt will.
But people hear the word "nuclear" in almost any context and have their own nuclear meltdowns. To quote Gregory Benford again:
But the staffs of congressional committees are political to the bone, and they're scared of the N-word because the public has been terrified of it for decades. Nuclear power, nuclear weapons, even nuclear medicine; one wonders what they think of the nuclear family. Using isotopes on cancer patients has a tough time in some communities; Berkeley, California, banned such treatments, and has big signs up at the city line proclaiming so. But when I asked a friend who is a cop there, he allowed with a laugh that of course they all look the other way when Alta Bates hospital uses them, and brings in more short-lived radioactive isotopes for the purpose.
--from A Scientist's Notebook: When Technology Fails, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jul2000, Vol. 99 Issue 1, p104, 6p
People are scared of it far out of proportion to the actual risks, largely due to reading all those science fiction stories of the previous century in which SF writers wanted to scare people and relied upon the most convenient bogeyman available--nuclear power. We're paying for it now.
Look at Chapter One of Underground, which chronicles the launch of the Galileo space probe, despite all the protestors trying to shut it down because there was an infinitessimal chance of something going wrong.
Nobody's saying we should just go ahead damning all risks. But the thing is, the scientists calculate the risks. The odds of Galileo inadvertantly re-entering the atmosphere were 1 in 2 million. The odds of something happening on launch were 1 in 2700. NASA was well aware of the risks, and had done everything it could to minimize them. But the anti-nuclear folks decided not to believe them, and went to court over it.
How infinitessimal a risk is "okay"? Should we not do something because of one in millions or one in thousands odds something might go wrong? Should we stick all our money in a sock under our mattresses because our bank might fail, taking all our livelihood with it? Should we take out mortgages on our houses and live it up, just because we might win the lottery and be able to pay it all back?
Perhaps we should stop using solar energy and look for an alternate power source, because the sun might blow up, destroying our entire planet.
Are these straw men? Perhaps. But then, it seems that most anti-nuclear arguments, like the one against the battery in Galileo, are founded on emotional appeals at their core--the fear of something that only might come to pass, at odds just about as infinitessimal as our bank failing or the lottery paying off, or, to use the old cliche, as being struck by lightning.
Heck, look at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accidents of all time. I mean, really look at them. Here's another quote from that first Benford article upthread:
Chernobyl has yielded 31 dead already from direct effects. Among the 24,000 living between 3 and 15 kilometers of the plant, a simple projection from the dose rate they got gives 131 added cancers in that population. That is a 2.6% increase in the expected number. If they all smoked -- and a majority did, actually -- that would give a 30% increase.
Ah, but what of the future? Considering the 75 million exposed in the Ukraine and Byelorussia, we get about 3,500 extra cancers, summed up over their entire lives.
Sounds like a lot. But this is only a 0.0047% increase in the expected 15 million cancers they should have in future.
Newspaper headline, front page:
3500 DEAD FROM CHERNOBYL.
Or, taking the other tack, there's a small item at the bottom of page 35 of that same newspaper:
CHERNOBYL CANCER RATE "INFINITESIMAL PERCENTAGE" SAYS PHYSICIST. ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS ATTACK HIM.
Okay, I favor the guy in the second headline. Still....
Which one of these methods is "right?"
Neither -- they just weigh different aspects of the problem. But it's clear how the media play the game.
People are against nuclear power because they're scared of it. And in many cases, for no real reason other than what might happen. --
Umm . . . I was also joking, and it seems to have gone right over your head. Silly me, thinking that humor could be conveyed through clever writing, instead of liberal amounts of smileys. I suppose all the humor writers of the pre-Internet era got it wrong.
What failures have we had so far with a space probe using nuclear power? We did it for decades before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl--with no accidents yet. Slashdot recently ran a story on how scientists had been able to contact one of the Pioneer space probes which is out far beyond the range of Pluto, where the sun is just another star and solar panels would be of no use. Think that would be possible without nuclear power?
Think there's anything in the world without risk?
Here are some excerpts from A Scientist's Notebook: Risk and Realities by Gregory Benford, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sep 2000, Vol. 99 Issue 3, p112, 12p., retrieved from EBSCOhost via my public library's website. (Much as I'd like to, I can't paste the whole thing without stepping far outside the limits of Fair Use, so to obtain it with all context intact, go to your local library or equivalent website.)
Still, such questions arise constantly in our technological world. In my last column I dealt with the Mars probe failures, but the element of risk appends to every human activity.
We often forget this, demanding that something be "safe" when nothing ever truly is. As you sit reading this, probably indoors, radon gas accumulates in the room with you. In many homes it probably yields a higher level of radioactivity than if you were sitting right on top of a nuclear waste storage facility.
. ..
Lawyers argue their cases as though the world should rightly guarantee us all a life free of any chance of accident -- and if something bad happens, it must be somebody else's fault.
That attitude arises because juries welcome it. Their perceptions of risk color courtroom judgments and public policy alike, but seldom very rationally (i.e., seldom with any quantitative sense).
. ..
Nuclear power provides a need that will be met somehow, after all. In North America it has lost the battle for public opinion. In Europe there is a regional schizophrenia. The French generate most of their electricity in nuclear plants, and have never had any big, risky events. Yet most of the rest of the western Europeans are trying to shut down the reactors they have. In Eastern Europe, reactors get a better perception. Even the Russians continue on with their extensive program, probably because they have so much invested.
Burning oil and coal, on the other hand, kills about 10,000 people per year in the U.S.A. from increased lung cancer and emphysema. This number has been known from careful NIH studies for decades. Nobody gets excited about those deaths, ever...except the relatives, of course.
The article also goes into why airline travel is perceived as more dangerous than automobile travel when air travel has a far lower death-per-miles-travelled rate than automobiles, why nuclear power is perceived as more dangerous than coal when coal kills far more people, and why you can find cancer-causing agents in almost everything, including peanut butter.
Risk is always present. We can confine it to within acceptible levels and move forward, or we can try to make everything completely "safe" and stay frozen right where we are--because no matter what, someone is going to object to any attempt to introduce bold new techniques or technologies (ion or nuclear propulsion, anyone?) as too unsafe to try out, even under carefully restricted study and implementation. We can't just stagnate, or we'll never get humanity off this rock and safely ensconced on other planets before someone finally goes nuts and pushes The Button. --
Because you'd immediately get all the conservationists claiming that, no, no, Venus should be left in its natural state, and doing anything to it would be evil and bad and wrong--sure, there aren't any living creatures there now, but why let a little thing like that stand in their way?
And before we even get that far, we'd have all the same people making the fuss about genetically modified food and cloning joining forces with all the people making the fuss about NASA wanting to use nuclear power plants in its probes (and thus causing them instead to rely on overly complex solar arrays that probably contributed nontrivially to the recent Mars probe failures) to try to block the development of said bacteria. It's not natural! What if it goes off-course and crashes here on earth?! (Yeah, sure, in reality probably nothing would happen, but try telling that to someone worked up into (Self-)Righteous Indignation with their emotions firmly behind the wheel. They tried explaining that with the nuclear power plant in that outer-solar-system probe a few years back, as chronicled in the first chapter of that e-book about Australian hackers that was mentioned here in Slashdot a while back, and it didn't work then, no reason it would work for bacteria now or any time soon.) How dare we play God, Frankenstein, other classic movie monsters, etc. etc.
People are all starry-eyed about doing all these science fiction things exactly until it seems likely that they could actually become reality. Then all of a sudden all the (tiny) real and (mostly) imaginary risks cause them to scream bloody murder. Gregory Benford had a great column about this sort of thing in F&SF Magazine in September of last year.
In a very real way, one of the greatest obstacles to our space program is not lack of budget, it's all the protesters who will picket Cape Canaveral at the drop of a nuclear isotope. This is the sort of thing that causes NASA to ditch observatory satellites with at least several months of service left in them just to avoid the one in a ka-zillion chance that someone might be hit by it when it comes down otherwise. This is the sort of thing that makes every space probe and satellite we create nowadays more complicated and thus more likely to failure even before it gets into space. This is the sort of thing that will continue to dog us the more advanced our space program gets. Human nature. Human fear. Human stupidity. Is there a cure? I doubt it. Probably not for at least another couple of generations, until most of the fearmongers have died out and the new youth are more open to that sort of thing--unless the fearmongers pass their fear on to their progeny, of course . .. --
Harry Potter gets even better with the third and fourth books. They're rather darker than the first, especially #4. They're better than 1 & 2 in the same way Empire Strikes Back was better than the first Star Wars. --
Probably no legal binding--but they'd know whom to exclude from future review screenings.
Of course, again, we don't know what's in a declaration of goodwill. If we're going to guess, let's use the most accurate definitions: according to the Lectric Law Library definition of "declaration":
A declaration is a written statement submitted to a court in which the writer swears 'under penalty of perjury' that the contents are true. That is, the writer acknowledges that if he is lying, he may be prosecuted for perjury. Declarations are normally used in place of live testimony when the court is asked to rule on a motion.
A typical declaration sets forth the factual assertions of the person signing it (called the declarant) and ends with a statement worded like this one: 'I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct, and would be my testimony if I were in a court of law.' The date and place of signing are usually included.
It goes on from there, but that's the most relevant part.
Main Entry:
goodwill
Pronunciation: "gud-'wil
Function: noun
Date: before 12th century 1 a: a kindly feeling of approval and support: benevolent interest or concern b (1): the favor or prestige that a business has acquired beyond the mere value of what it sells (2): the value of projected earnings increases of a business especially as part of its purchase price (3): the value of other intangible assets (as tax credits) of a business especially as part of its purchase price 2 a: cheerful consent b: willing effort - goodwilled/-'wild/ adjective
We combine the two, and get, essentially, a document saying, under penalty of perjury, you're inclined to feel kindly toward this movie. (NOTE: IANAL, and that may not even be a correct guess.)
Of course, how can they tell if you're lying? Even if you're inclined to feel kindly toward a movie doesn't mean you necessarily have to like it. I felt kindly toward Soldier going into it, since I like Kurt Russel and I like action movies. But it was utterly awful!
--
That's called "rotoscoping," and has been used quite a bit in all sorts of animated features over the years. Disney doesn't do it, IIRC. One might call rotoscoping the ancestor of the CGI technique called "motion capture," in which movements of a human model are recorded, then mapped onto a computer-animated model.
Incidentally, according to The Digital Bits (go to their archives page and do a text-find on "Bakshi"), the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings will be coming to DVD this year. --
I know that "goodwill" in the business sense is something entirely different from what we laypeople think of. In the business sense, if I recall rightly, it has to do with buying out another company--goodwill is how much more a company's assets are worth than what you paid for it.
And then there's the sort of "goodwill" to which you donate clothes and stuff you don't need anymore, and they sell it in their thrift shop . . .
I'm not sure what sort of parallels you could draw to the movie from this, though. One thing worth noting is that the way the article presents it--no positive or negative opinions, just a simple statement of fact--is actually good, unbiased journalism, technically . . . but it's also quite maddening, because it doesn't tell us anything, give us any qualitative information on which to form an opinion. So we're all just guessing.
Tomorrow I'll try to ask the local college film professor, who is also a professional reviewer who gets to go on film junkets and the like, what exactly a "declaration of goodwill" is in this context. (If he's around--for all I know, he may be at Cannes!) If I get an answer, I'll post it to this thread.
I would like to think that a declaration of goodwill is simply a statement saying you don't start with any prejudices against the movie, before ever even having seen it. (It was phrased as a "declaration," after all, which I believe is usually something that just says "I believe such and such," not "I will not do such and such." Though IANAL.) It seems fairly obvious that a lot of journalistic folk are prejudiced against certain kinds of movies (most notably action movies, science fiction, or animation) before ever setting foot in the theaters. With rare exceptions, such people invariably write bad reviews of any genre movie, no matter how good an example it is of its genre.
For example, take a look at this bit in the NY Times (free registration, blah blah blah, I'll let someone else construct the "free" URL because I don't remember how) about upcoming video-game-based movies and how they'll probably all suck. You can see his prejudice oozing from every pore, the way he seems to think the only appeal of Tomb Raider will be Angelina Jolie's measurements and his snide comments about how, based on the 17-minute preview he saw, Final Fantasy "is based on the kind of nebulous New Age science in which the world is controlled by spirits and supernatural forces. It's best appreciated by those who have had a frontal lobotomy" and how the movie would have been better if the voice actors had done the physical acting as well--and also how he can't believe over a hundred million dollars went into making it because "there are no locations, no sets and no acting costs other than voice-overs".
Only the occasional rare genre movie (such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) can muster the snob cachet to get reviewers to overlook their prejudices. And since bad buzz, especially this early, can do irreparable harm to even the best movie (especially if it cost a lot to make), I can't blame them for wanting to avoid the unfortunate combination of prejudice and unfinished footage. Of course, I'm not sure what they could do, legally, if someone lied about his prejudices . .. --
My brother just got a CD-ROM burner, and through the miracle of Enlight cases, I've borrowed the drive for my own nefarious purposes.
I just finished burning all 200 episodes of Sailor Moon onto 11 CDs...got them off my hard drive, at long last. I only have a few gigs, I need that space!:) I've also burned a couple fansubbed episodes of the new Transformers series, Car Robots to CD, so I can take and show them to people.
I've also archived about 450 megs in textual logs generated by a private roleplaying chatserv I frequent (and felt guilty about "wasting" 200 megs of space, if you can believe it:). I also have plans to master some personal mix CDs, maybe do a few copies of them for friends. I'll also make some personal MP3 CD-ROMs for playing at the school computer lab, since they capped my cable connection to a point where I can no longer stream them from home.
I'm not sure what else I'll do with them. Download more video eps and burn them, perhaps archive all my Webscription and other e-books . . . maybe I'll even back up my hard drive.
It's kind of sad, in a way. Now that hard drives with dozens of gigs are affordable, 650 megs doesn't seem quite so big anymore. --
Kind of funny--I've got almost the exact same things. A Rio 600 MP3 player, a WAP-equipped cellphone, a Visor, and a Gerber multitool. Well...actually, I don't have the MP3 player right now, I had to send it back to the factory. (Don't ever buy a Rio 600, folks. It has no resistance to static electricity. At all. This is the second one I've had to RMA, and if I hadn't gotten it by saving up Mountain Dew bottlecaps, I'd ask for my money back.) Thankfully, it's just one device, and not all of them. Which sort of proves your point.
My Batman factor isn't far behind yours, nope...:) --
Re:Where's the innovation?
on
PDAs, PDAs
·
· Score: 2
Doesn't help matters that Palm let itself be pressured into announcing its new lines prematurely, and now has to drop prices on its current Palms to try to lure people into buying them now instead of waiting for the new ones to come out. --
I read the same book. I believe that the Bibliofind search I just did on a half-remembered title has turned it up--it's The Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit by Theodore Tyler. The fellow's name was one letter too long, you see, and it aggravated him a great deal to keep getting mail with the last letter of his name chopped off. --
The only ads that bother me are the ones that come from something/someone that should be impartial, and are not generally understood to be ads. For instance, if Coke sponsors a 60 Minutes investigation of unhealthy practices by Pepsi, then 60 Minutes had better say "This investigation sponsored by Coke" at the beginning and end of every commercial break.
It is not uncommon for some firms to buy ad spots during newscasts that feature damaging reports about their products, just to try to offset some of the negative publicity. I recall a car company doing this during a nightly news show once a few years back.
--
surely a message not to do drugs, or to quit smoking, could be delivered in this speech (government departments advertise too remember).
You mean like the ones that have been showing up on arcade games in "attract mode" for ages? Interesting thought, though I doubt people would care to be sermonized at every time they booted up a game--it's their choice to walk up to the game in the arcade, after all. --
Slashdot Mirror
It's those pesky social engineering issues again. If people are apt to go critical over nuclear power (like I mentioned in comments to the Mars and coffee story a couple weeks back), just think how they'll react to a proposal like this after decades of science fiction and Star Trek conditioning them to think of antimatter as insanely dangerous.
--
On a related note, in my stint as moderator for rec.toys.transformers.moderated, I witnessed a related phenomenon when certain episodes (and in the case of Beast Machines, an entire season) were broadcast in Canada weeks or months before they made it to the U.S. Some Canadian fans digitized the episodes and put them up on websites and FreeDiskSpace folders within a couple days of their broadcast--meaning we American fans with high speed access got to watch them months ahead of schedule.
For that matter, I hear something similar happened with the Buffy season finale last year.
--
Moral of the story: Be careful who you get killed, he might hit home runs off of you someday. Or something like that.
--
--
Neocron is a cyberpunk/postholocaust first-person shooter MMORPG that's been in development for over two years and built up quite a huge fandom, even with no playable demos during that time. All indications are, it's gonna rock. :)
--
You know, I don't use Aimster or anything, but up to this point, I had thought that the reason they had that name was that they were a subsidiary of the division of AOL that did the instant messaging thing. It took me completely by surprise to find that they weren't, and I would think AOL would have sued them already for the confusing nature of the use of "AIM" in that context.
--
Sure, the idea of a worm in general might not be a good idea. But then, the only people who will be affected in a nontrivial way by this worm will be those who've been infected by another, malevolent worm anyway. Two wrongs may not make a right, but I would think in this case they would at least be somewhat better than just the one wrong, if the one wrong meant there were all those compromised computers out there that could be used in Denial of Service attacks, and the second wrong took those out of the equation.
--
But people hear the word "nuclear" in almost any context and have their own nuclear meltdowns. To quote Gregory Benford again:
People are scared of it far out of proportion to the actual risks, largely due to reading all those science fiction stories of the previous century in which SF writers wanted to scare people and relied upon the most convenient bogeyman available--nuclear power. We're paying for it now.Look at Chapter One of Underground, which chronicles the launch of the Galileo space probe, despite all the protestors trying to shut it down because there was an infinitessimal chance of something going wrong.
Nobody's saying we should just go ahead damning all risks. But the thing is, the scientists calculate the risks. The odds of Galileo inadvertantly re-entering the atmosphere were 1 in 2 million. The odds of something happening on launch were 1 in 2700. NASA was well aware of the risks, and had done everything it could to minimize them. But the anti-nuclear folks decided not to believe them, and went to court over it.
How infinitessimal a risk is "okay"? Should we not do something because of one in millions or one in thousands odds something might go wrong? Should we stick all our money in a sock under our mattresses because our bank might fail, taking all our livelihood with it? Should we take out mortgages on our houses and live it up, just because we might win the lottery and be able to pay it all back?
Perhaps we should stop using solar energy and look for an alternate power source, because the sun might blow up, destroying our entire planet.
Are these straw men? Perhaps. But then, it seems that most anti-nuclear arguments, like the one against the battery in Galileo, are founded on emotional appeals at their core--the fear of something that only might come to pass, at odds just about as infinitessimal as our bank failing or the lottery paying off, or, to use the old cliche, as being struck by lightning.
Heck, look at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accidents of all time. I mean, really look at them. Here's another quote from that first Benford article upthread:
People are against nuclear power because they're scared of it. And in many cases, for no real reason other than what might happen.--
That was humor, too. :) See?
--
So, what you're saying is . . . Mars is a harsh mistress?
--
Probably not, though.
--
Think there's anything in the world without risk?
Here are some excerpts from A Scientist's Notebook: Risk and Realities by Gregory Benford, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sep 2000, Vol. 99 Issue 3, p112, 12p., retrieved from EBSCOhost via my public library's website. (Much as I'd like to, I can't paste the whole thing without stepping far outside the limits of Fair Use, so to obtain it with all context intact, go to your local library or equivalent website.)
. .Risk is always present. We can confine it to within acceptible levels and move forward, or we can try to make everything completely "safe" and stay frozen right where we are--because no matter what, someone is going to object to any attempt to introduce bold new techniques or technologies (ion or nuclear propulsion, anyone?) as too unsafe to try out, even under carefully restricted study and implementation. We can't just stagnate, or we'll never get humanity off this rock and safely ensconced on other planets before someone finally goes nuts and pushes The Button.
--
And before we even get that far, we'd have all the same people making the fuss about genetically modified food and cloning joining forces with all the people making the fuss about NASA wanting to use nuclear power plants in its probes (and thus causing them instead to rely on overly complex solar arrays that probably contributed nontrivially to the recent Mars probe failures) to try to block the development of said bacteria. It's not natural! What if it goes off-course and crashes here on earth?! (Yeah, sure, in reality probably nothing would happen, but try telling that to someone worked up into (Self-)Righteous Indignation with their emotions firmly behind the wheel. They tried explaining that with the nuclear power plant in that outer-solar-system probe a few years back, as chronicled in the first chapter of that e-book about Australian hackers that was mentioned here in Slashdot a while back, and it didn't work then, no reason it would work for bacteria now or any time soon.) How dare we play God, Frankenstein, other classic movie monsters, etc. etc.
People are all starry-eyed about doing all these science fiction things exactly until it seems likely that they could actually become reality. Then all of a sudden all the (tiny) real and (mostly) imaginary risks cause them to scream bloody murder. Gregory Benford had a great column about this sort of thing in F&SF Magazine in September of last year.
In a very real way, one of the greatest obstacles to our space program is not lack of budget, it's all the protesters who will picket Cape Canaveral at the drop of a nuclear isotope. This is the sort of thing that causes NASA to ditch observatory satellites with at least several months of service left in them just to avoid the one in a ka-zillion chance that someone might be hit by it when it comes down otherwise. This is the sort of thing that makes every space probe and satellite we create nowadays more complicated and thus more likely to failure even before it gets into space. This is the sort of thing that will continue to dog us the more advanced our space program gets. Human nature. Human fear. Human stupidity. Is there a cure? I doubt it. Probably not for at least another couple of generations, until most of the fearmongers have died out and the new youth are more open to that sort of thing--unless the fearmongers pass their fear on to their progeny, of course . . .
--
--
Harry Potter gets even better with the third and fourth books. They're rather darker than the first, especially #4. They're better than 1 & 2 in the same way Empire Strikes Back was better than the first Star Wars.
--
Of course, again, we don't know what's in a declaration of goodwill. If we're going to guess, let's use the most accurate definitions: according to the Lectric Law Library definition of "declaration":
It goes on from there, but that's the most relevant part.Next, let's look at the Merriam-Webster definition of "goodwill":
We combine the two, and get, essentially, a document saying, under penalty of perjury, you're inclined to feel kindly toward this movie. (NOTE: IANAL, and that may not even be a correct guess.)
Of course, how can they tell if you're lying? Even if you're inclined to feel kindly toward a movie doesn't mean you necessarily have to like it. I felt kindly toward Soldier going into it, since I like Kurt Russel and I like action movies. But it was utterly awful!
--
Incidentally, according to The Digital Bits (go to their archives page and do a text-find on "Bakshi"), the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings will be coming to DVD this year.
--
And then there's the sort of "goodwill" to which you donate clothes and stuff you don't need anymore, and they sell it in their thrift shop . . .
I'm not sure what sort of parallels you could draw to the movie from this, though. One thing worth noting is that the way the article presents it--no positive or negative opinions, just a simple statement of fact--is actually good, unbiased journalism, technically . . . but it's also quite maddening, because it doesn't tell us anything, give us any qualitative information on which to form an opinion. So we're all just guessing.
Tomorrow I'll try to ask the local college film professor, who is also a professional reviewer who gets to go on film junkets and the like, what exactly a "declaration of goodwill" is in this context. (If he's around--for all I know, he may be at Cannes!) If I get an answer, I'll post it to this thread.
I would like to think that a declaration of goodwill is simply a statement saying you don't start with any prejudices against the movie, before ever even having seen it. (It was phrased as a "declaration," after all, which I believe is usually something that just says "I believe such and such," not "I will not do such and such." Though IANAL.) It seems fairly obvious that a lot of journalistic folk are prejudiced against certain kinds of movies (most notably action movies, science fiction, or animation) before ever setting foot in the theaters. With rare exceptions, such people invariably write bad reviews of any genre movie, no matter how good an example it is of its genre.
For example, take a look at this bit in the NY Times (free registration, blah blah blah, I'll let someone else construct the "free" URL because I don't remember how) about upcoming video-game-based movies and how they'll probably all suck. You can see his prejudice oozing from every pore, the way he seems to think the only appeal of Tomb Raider will be Angelina Jolie's measurements and his snide comments about how, based on the 17-minute preview he saw, Final Fantasy "is based on the kind of nebulous New Age science in which the world is controlled by spirits and supernatural forces. It's best appreciated by those who have had a frontal lobotomy" and how the movie would have been better if the voice actors had done the physical acting as well--and also how he can't believe over a hundred million dollars went into making it because "there are no locations, no sets and no acting costs other than voice-overs".
Only the occasional rare genre movie (such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) can muster the snob cachet to get reviewers to overlook their prejudices. And since bad buzz, especially this early, can do irreparable harm to even the best movie (especially if it cost a lot to make), I can't blame them for wanting to avoid the unfortunate combination of prejudice and unfinished footage. Of course, I'm not sure what they could do, legally, if someone lied about his prejudices . . .
--
I just finished burning all 200 episodes of Sailor Moon onto 11 CDs...got them off my hard drive, at long last. I only have a few gigs, I need that space! :) I've also burned a couple fansubbed episodes of the new Transformers series, Car Robots to CD, so I can take and show them to people.
I've also archived about 450 megs in textual logs generated by a private roleplaying chatserv I frequent (and felt guilty about "wasting" 200 megs of space, if you can believe it :). I also have plans to master some personal mix CDs, maybe do a few copies of them for friends. I'll also make some personal MP3 CD-ROMs for playing at the school computer lab, since they capped my cable connection to a point where I can no longer stream them from home.
I'm not sure what else I'll do with them. Download more video eps and burn them, perhaps archive all my Webscription and other e-books . . . maybe I'll even back up my hard drive.
It's kind of sad, in a way. Now that hard drives with dozens of gigs are affordable, 650 megs doesn't seem quite so big anymore.
--
Well, if it includes the functionality of a cellphone, he'd just be able to phone it when he misplaced it--assuming he left the ringer on, anyway.
--
My Batman factor isn't far behind yours, nope... :)
--
Doesn't help matters that Palm let itself be pressured into announcing its new lines prematurely, and now has to drop prices on its current Palms to try to lure people into buying them now instead of waiting for the new ones to come out.
--
I read the same book. I believe that the Bibliofind search I just did on a half-remembered title has turned it up--it's The Man Whose Name Wouldn't Fit by Theodore Tyler. The fellow's name was one letter too long, you see, and it aggravated him a great deal to keep getting mail with the last letter of his name chopped off.
--
--
--