With a projected cost of $2-2.5k for the hardware, I doubt this will knock off sat radio for those who only want audio. A Sirius or XM rcvr is a couple hundred bucks, and the monthly sub is $10-12, similar to this. Since I would think sat radio is going to find more of a market with truck drivers and sales types, who mostly travel alone, (So nobody in the back seat to watch video), audio-only will predominate.
True, transflective would work, but can they be made in color? I have a Newton with such a screen, and I think my palm m105 is like that too, though when the light is turned on, the palm screen inverts, so I don't know exactly what tech it has. I do know both of those are very visible in daylight. For reference, the frontlight for GBA (afterburner) is constructed with a fresnel-type lens, that shines most of the light from the edge-mounted LEDs onto the front face of the LCD. There is some leakage out the edges, though.
Actually, be glad it is frontlit. Because that means the LCD is Reflective Vs. Transmissive. And why does that make me happy? Because, like an iPaq, you can use it outdoors without it washing out. Backlit displays (see "Laptops") are useless in the sun (or under other bright ambient conditions.
I have put several Afterburners in GBA'a and it turned them from useless curios to wonderful, fun gaming devices. I don't feel too sorry for the Afterburner guy, as someone has said, because there are millions of GBA's out there that will want to be modded once the kiddies see how much cooler the GBA SP looks than their GBA/wormlight.
These ideas have been prototyped for several years now, and every time a law-enforcement organization tests them, they've determined the risk of *not operating when needed* to be too high. Bottom line is that the tech is not foolproof, and I doubt it ever will be. Unless it is foolproof, cops will not allow themselves to be disarmed like this.
Good linkage, and points out something critical to the discussion. DEcoders were free for personal use, but ENcoders were supposed to be paid for. So the question is, does my copy of LAME have a paid-up license? I doubt it.
Conclusion: They have had the royalties in place for encoders, but have not enforced them, and Redhat shipped them anyway. Now that they have royalties for the decoders, why is RH (and everyone else) running scared?
Oh, yeah... Thanks for the reminder on reliability. I forgot that I had to get the unit replaced about a week after I first got it. It was getting it's brains all scrambled, and needing to be rebooted about once a day. The current unit has been working pretty well, considering the power here is not the cleanest, (My pwrchute logs on the linux machine are full of brownouts and overvoltages), and so the 501 has been rebooted a couple times in the last year.
My buddy has to reboot his TiVO about that often, (~2/yr) so I guess it is a symptom of these things just being computers after all.
This is probably OT, but I know there are many aspects of the Dish PVR 501 that are not apparent from the literature available on it, and my personal experiences might help you make the decision of whether to buy one (I don't know anything about the 701, so some of this might have been "fixed" in that model).
I've had the dish PVR 501 for almost a year now, and my friend has a TiVO that he has bumped up to 90 hours, & added ethernet to. Certainly, the PVR 501 was a pretty good deal, but looking back, and comparing with TiVO, I believe if I had to choose again, I would go with TiVO.
The Dish unit has some advantages over a stock TiVO, such as 35 hours at full resolution, where the TiVO was 14 hours. Of course the upgraded TiVO beats it hands down on storage, but truthfully, I never seem to fill up more than about 15-20 hours anyway.
The real difference in the dish unit, is that it is nowhere near as smart as the TiVO, in that it has no "suggestions" or the "thumbs up/dn" rating system, or the "get all Clint Eastwood films" sort of programming. The Dish is strictly a VCR- like device, ie pick a time and it records that show. If a show gets pushed back for a ball game, or etc, It is supposed to follow it, but I have not seen that happen.
I get local channels off of cable, and where the TiVO has an input and a tuner for cable/antenna broadcasts, and can record just as easily from my buddy's DirecTV unit as his cable feed, my dish 501 only records from satellite. I keep forgetting to tune in to Enterprise, where if I could set up the PVR to record it, I would watch it when I wanted.
The Dish 501 interface is fine for scheduling a show, by picking it off the on-screen guide, but to remove a timed event, you have to go to a separate menu, which doesn't list the show name, but only the time/channel. It makes it inconvenient to edit your recording setups.
I really like the unit, it is vastly better and more convenient than vhs tapes, but between the TiVO and the Dish PVR 501, the TiVO is certainly the cooler unit. I noticed in the ads lately that the new TiVOs are coming with more capacity off the shelf, so that is not really an issue anymore.
For what it's worth, if a game was good, it would be much more likely to get finished. If it really sucked, (poor gameplay, irritating plot, etc.) it would not get a lot of time wasted on it. You can evaluate a lot about a game without finishing it to see the (usually lame) ending movie. Some games are "finishable" early, for example flight simulators - you don't need to fly every mission to truly evaluate the whole game. You try to pick out a good sampling of the different types of missions, and play those missions all the way through.
Same goes for fighting games, casino games, etc. Adventure games are an example of ones I would try my best to finish (though the previews of those were often not finished, since the game itself was often not complete). But even games that were complete crap, I would play as much as I could stand, just to try to be as fair as possible. Like I said, it was a hobby, and I never claimed to finish a game if I didn't.
Yeah, I spent a couple of years "in the biz". I was not paid, but worked voluntarily on an online-only game rag that has since bitten the dust. Anyway, before the speculation gets too thick on this thread, I'll throw out some info on the job of game reviewer, and how the subject of perks and such fit in.
Our mag was not one of the biggies, though we had a pretty fair readership. Aside from the publishers sending us games, and hardware companies sending us joysticks and stuff for review, there was not much else. Much of the hardware had to be returned after the write-up, but the games didn't. So, sure, I didn't buy a game for a couple years, and ended up with a few controllers and even a few sound and video cards.
The print guys definitely got more attention from the publishers, especially at E3, where they all got the special invitations to the vendor parties, and they may have even gotten some of the perks that the article implies, I don't know. The parties we did get invited to were often much like those timeshare gigs where you have to listen to a bunch of marketing hype in order to get a few chicken nuggets and two free beers, and maybe a can cooler printed with the game logo.
There was no real incentive to skew reviews. We got more games than we could reasonably play, and kept getting them from a publisher even if we had just poo-poo'd one from that publisher. One thing we tried to do, was to be objective. No game is completely bad, and we tried to point out any good points, even if the overall score was low. For instance a game might have had crappy controls, bad graphics, poor AI, and even an ugly box, but if it had good audio and soundtrack, we said so.
Then, the publisher would quote the line that said "Killer soundtrack and realistic audio effects..." on the "press" section of the game's web site and they just wouldn't mention that we thought the thing was sheer tedium to play. And they would send us another box full of games the next week.
If I had not written fair, honest reviews, pretty soon, no one would believe me. It makes no sense to lie to your readers. It was funny, I would usually head out on the web to read the other site's reviews of a game after I had posted mine. More than once I would flame a particularly bad game, only to find that some other guys were raving about it. I wondered at the time if there was some sort of "playola" going on or if my opinions were just that much different. But I never ran across any proof.
Incidentally, as for game reviewing = "vagina testing", well, allow me to dispute that somewhat. First of all, I often had been assigned two or three games per week. Which means I almost never finished a game, since I also have a day job and a family. Had this been my living, I imagine I would have had considerably more assignments, and so the result would have been the same. Also, you have to write the reviews, which takes time, writing skill, and overall, a desire to write. I dare say that not everyone who wants to play lots of games also wants to produce the equivalent of an english paper after each one. Luckily, I can spell, and write reasonably well, and so I enjoyed the writing as well as the game playing.
Of course to write a critical review, you must do more than just play. You must play while honestly evaluating the various elements of the experience, and maybe even pausing to take notes, or replaying a section just to verify some item or glitch you did not get a good look at the first time.
Often you are playing beta or even alpha quality games for previews, and so crashes and configuration hassles are not uncommon. You don't generally have time to play much on advanced levels, because you want to get to as much of the game environment as you can in a short time.
Yes it was a lot of fun, especially at first, and rewarding most of the time, but it was definitely not the easiest, sweetest gig you could imagine. Eventually, I burned out, and bid the reviewer's podium adieu. It was at least a year before I played another computer game after that.
Sorry, the/. editors chopped out the paragraph that "that" refers to. The paragraph is the one in their document that discusses how previous efforts to kill/repeal things like UTICA, DMCA had failed.
My letter to the editor of my local paper, in case anyone wants to use any of it in theirs:
Dear Editor: A dangerous bill (S2048) has been introduced by Senator Hollings (SC). This so-called "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)" is a federal mandate for the inclusion of "copy prevention" into the hardware of every digital device and into all software sold in the US.
The bill was designed and paid for by media companies such as Disney to further control the public's use of digital content in the name of "preventing piracy". What it really prevents is "Fair Use": the ability to use legally purchased music and movies on a device of your choice, (mp3 players, computers), and to make backup copies, "mix" CDs, recordings on digital tape, etc. It specifies federal enforcement through huge fines and prison time.
S2048 will cripple US companies in the global market. Intel, Gateway, Dell, etc. will be forced to build this technology into every digital device, adding to cost and sabotaging overseas sales.
PCs capable of upgrade by non-licensed technicians will be illegal. The PC will be reduced to a sealed "set top" box that can only be used to play content from approved providers. Media without copy protection will not be supported. Forget recording your own guitar licks or home movies without a content creation license.
Educate yourself (http://www.eff.org), then contact your senators and tell them you refuse to be treated as a thief and to vote NO on S2048.
****
It was more detailed, but I had to edit it to 250 words, or they wouldn't accept it.
PROBABLY SPOILERS, but what the hell, if I help someone save their $6, I have done a good deed.
Finally, one person who agrees with me and the two friends who went to see this trash with me. I liked the first movie, and I like campy, comic book hero movies in general, so I am not expecting high drama, oscar quality acting, or intriguing plot. What I do expect is that such a movie accentuate those qualities that make such a movie what it is. Plot can be anything from useless to good, doesn't matter. Acting can suck, or be stunning, no problem. But at least be true to the genre!
For instance, this is basically a martial-arts movie. So why zoom in and cut up the fight scenes so poorly that all you see are flailing limbs? And why not try to make the CGI seamlessly blend with the live actors (e.g. early fight between Snipes and his love interest in front of the big bank of lights). I want to see good cinematography for the fights in a martial arts movie, not an incomprehensible blur.
And since it is also science fiction, at least the everyday science could be consistent with our universe. Light doesn't bend around and flow like blue fire. Filters over the white light flashlights on the weapons were supposed to filter UV, so why did they look blue? Wouldn't they look red? And I am so tired of night-vision goggles that glow red! Why would you want to present such a perfect target in the dark? Good science fiction either creates it's own internally consistent laws of physics,(in the case of some strange, otherworldly locale or far in the future) or it extends our own, if the time and place is current. This thing mixes the two, making mush.
Finally, for any tale, internal consistency is a must. Why carry hundreds of pounds of silver ammo and assault weapons (into the sewers) when they already know the new guys are not allergic to silver and absorb magnum gun blasts while healing instantly. Why not just plant all the individual UV grenades and set them off remotely, instead of packing them into a box so that they all shine light up (even though the light penetrated the sides of the box and bent down tunnels, see above). Why didn't the vamps use the blackout suits (that they already have in the beginning of the film) with special sunglasses when they went down to use the UV bombs? It goes on and on.
So it was not a serious movie, but that's ok. What's not OK, is that it was a very poor example of the movie it wanted to be.
My comment when the end credits rolled pretty much sums it up - "two words: Highlander Two"
Mod parent up! It is in vogue to hammer NASA everytime anything related to space goes awry, but the reality is that something is wrong with the spacecraft that BOEING built. NASA doesn't own it, doesn't take delivery, doesn't pay money for it, until it is healthy and in the correct orbit.
NASA buys all sorts of hardware from private industry, and federal purchasing regs mandate that the deliverables must satisfy the spec in the purchase order prior to the invoice being paid. This applies equally to spacecraft as it does to computers or flashlights or anything else.
I imagine if the news media got hold of a story about NASA receiving a new PC from Gateway that had a bad stick of RAM installed, we would have a similar bunch of posts about NASA screwing up.
Besides, space flight is not easy, nor risk free. Just like any other technologically intensive activity, things go wrong. Unfortunately, unlike the everyday foul-ups and equipment failures that happen everywhere, NASA's are shown live on TV.
The census is only legally authorized to *count* the population. All the other sundry data they collect is the result of a(nother) government power grab. Of course the constitution is becoming more and more just so much bird cage-liner.
I bet Sirius is owned in whole or in part by media conglomerates who are members of the Evil Axis (RIAA, MPAA). With that in mind, doesn't this make sense? They are just trying to shut down another way for people to trade copyrighted content.
Another thought- eliminating competition: What if 802.11 really becomes ubiquitous, blanketing the countryside with access. At that point, couldn't the smart boys and girls start routing the traffic independently, i.e. a new network "above" the internet? With appropriate hardware, and good enough coverage, Gnutella or Freenet type P2P could replace satellite music services with the People's own Radio Free Network.
The corporations are quite used to using the laws of the land to control the people, and I see this as just anoter example. Laws are easy to buy.
I guess I don't know what the big deal is. There have been two global positioning satellite-based systems for years - The US GPS, and the Russian GLONASS (see http://www.rssi.ru/SFCSIC/SFCSIC_main.html). Ok, the US Gov't presumably can't control that one either. Of course, in the hypothetical instance that someone were denied access to the GPS, and then chose to use GLONASS or the proposed EU system to target US interests, how long do you suppose the satellites in that other system would remain un-toasted? After all, there has been an awful lot of money spent on SDI, which is designed to kill space vehicles. Satellites are sitting ducks compared to ballistic delivery systems. Maybe the US doesn't want to have to explain destruction of hardware belonging to other NATO nations.
The navy has a degaussing station near Norfolk Naval base (and probably others near big bases). They use it to degauss entire ships. The ships, being predominately steel, pick up residual magnetic fields from sailing though the earth's magnetic field. They need to periodically remove these residual fields. They float the ship in, then connect big cables over top of the vessel, and send big currents through the coils. Not sure how it affects internal equipment, but I suppose that the hull shields most of it the same way the shielding in your computer speakers prevents the voice coil magnets from screwing up your monitor. If you have an old color monitor you don't care about, put a magnet near the screen sometime. (ooh, a rainbow!) As this falls in the same category of fun as microwaving CDs, don't expect the degaussing circuits to fix the result anytime soon. in other words, don't do this to a monitor you wanna use.
Slashdot Mirror
I can only hope that the columbiadisater.com web site will be a tribute site, and not some lame ambulance chasing. So far, DNS doesn't resolve it.
one man's "art form" is most everyone else's smoking heap of shit.
What they propose to do is protest environmental damage done by SUVs by making their own environmental damage.
Glorious.
With a projected cost of $2-2.5k for the hardware, I doubt this will knock off sat radio for those who only want audio. A Sirius or XM rcvr is a couple hundred bucks, and the monthly sub is $10-12, similar to this. Since I would think sat radio is going to find more of a market with truck drivers and sales types, who mostly travel alone, (So nobody in the back seat to watch video), audio-only will predominate.
True, transflective would work, but can they be made in color? I have a Newton with such a screen, and I think my palm m105 is like that too, though when the light is turned on, the palm screen inverts, so I don't know exactly what tech it has. I do know both of those are very visible in daylight. For reference, the frontlight for GBA (afterburner) is constructed with a fresnel-type lens, that shines most of the light from the edge-mounted LEDs onto the front face of the LCD. There is some leakage out the edges, though.
Actually, be glad it is frontlit. Because that means the LCD is Reflective Vs. Transmissive. And why does that make me happy? Because, like an iPaq, you can use it outdoors without it washing out. Backlit displays (see "Laptops") are useless in the sun (or under other bright ambient conditions.
I have put several Afterburners in GBA'a and it turned them from useless curios to wonderful, fun gaming devices. I don't feel too sorry for the Afterburner guy, as someone has said, because there are millions of GBA's out there that will want to be modded once the kiddies see how much cooler the GBA SP looks than their GBA/wormlight.
These ideas have been prototyped for several years now, and every time a law-enforcement organization tests them, they've determined the risk of *not operating when needed* to be too high. Bottom line is that the tech is not foolproof, and I doubt it ever will be. Unless it is foolproof, cops will not allow themselves to be disarmed like this.
Good linkage, and points out something critical to the discussion. DEcoders were free for personal use, but ENcoders were supposed to be paid for. So the question is, does my copy of LAME have a paid-up license? I doubt it.
Conclusion: They have had the royalties in place for encoders, but have not enforced them, and Redhat shipped them anyway. Now that they have royalties for the decoders, why is RH (and everyone else) running scared?
Or am I missing something?
I can't get images from "Spock's Brain" out of my head...
Damn funny. Pity my Sword of Moderation is at the smithy for sharpening right now...
Oh, yeah... Thanks for the reminder on reliability. I forgot that I had to get the unit replaced about a week after I first got it. It was getting it's brains all scrambled, and needing to be rebooted about once a day. The current unit has been working pretty well, considering the power here is not the cleanest, (My pwrchute logs on the linux machine are full of brownouts and overvoltages), and so the 501 has been rebooted a couple times in the last year.
My buddy has to reboot his TiVO about that often, (~2/yr) so I guess it is a symptom of these things just being computers after all.
This is probably OT, but I know there are many aspects of the Dish PVR 501 that are not apparent from the literature available on it, and my personal experiences might help you make the decision of whether to buy one (I don't know anything about the 701, so some of this might have been "fixed" in that model).
I've had the dish PVR 501 for almost a year now, and my friend has a TiVO that he has bumped up to 90 hours, & added ethernet to. Certainly, the PVR 501 was a pretty good deal, but looking back, and comparing with TiVO, I believe if I had to choose again, I would go with TiVO.
The Dish unit has some advantages over a stock TiVO, such as 35 hours at full resolution, where the TiVO was 14 hours. Of course the upgraded TiVO beats it hands down on storage, but truthfully, I never seem to fill up more than about 15-20 hours anyway.
The real difference in the dish unit, is that it is nowhere near as smart as the TiVO, in that it has no "suggestions" or the "thumbs up/dn" rating system, or the "get all Clint Eastwood films" sort of programming. The Dish is strictly a VCR- like device, ie pick a time and it records that show. If a show gets pushed back for a ball game, or etc, It is supposed to follow it, but I have not seen that happen.
I get local channels off of cable, and where the TiVO has an input and a tuner for cable/antenna broadcasts, and can record just as easily from my buddy's DirecTV unit as his cable feed, my dish 501 only records from satellite. I keep forgetting to tune in to Enterprise, where if I could set up the PVR to record it, I would watch it when I wanted.
The Dish 501 interface is fine for scheduling a show, by picking it off the on-screen guide, but to remove a timed event, you have to go to a separate menu, which doesn't list the show name, but only the time/channel. It makes it inconvenient to edit your recording setups.
I really like the unit, it is vastly better and more convenient than vhs tapes, but between the TiVO and the Dish PVR 501, the TiVO is certainly the cooler unit. I noticed in the ads lately that the new TiVOs are coming with more capacity off the shelf, so that is not really an issue anymore.
He he he, touche!
For what it's worth, if a game was good, it would be much more likely to get finished. If it really sucked, (poor gameplay, irritating plot, etc.) it would not get a lot of time wasted on it. You can evaluate a lot about a game without finishing it to see the (usually lame) ending movie. Some games are "finishable" early, for example flight simulators - you don't need to fly every mission to truly evaluate the whole game. You try to pick out a good sampling of the different types of missions, and play those missions all the way through.
Same goes for fighting games, casino games, etc. Adventure games are an example of ones I would try my best to finish (though the previews of those were often not finished, since the game itself was often not complete). But even games that were complete crap, I would play as much as I could stand, just to try to be as fair as possible.
Like I said, it was a hobby, and I never claimed to finish a game if I didn't.
Yeah, I spent a couple of years "in the biz". I was not paid, but worked voluntarily on an online-only game rag that has since bitten the dust. Anyway, before the speculation gets too thick on this thread, I'll throw out some info on the job of game reviewer, and how the subject of perks and such fit in.
Our mag was not one of the biggies, though we had a pretty fair readership. Aside from the publishers sending us games, and hardware companies sending us joysticks and stuff for review, there was not much else. Much of the hardware had to be returned after the write-up, but the games didn't. So, sure, I didn't buy a game for a couple years, and ended up with a few controllers and even a few sound and video cards.
The print guys definitely got more attention from the publishers, especially at E3, where they all got the special invitations to the vendor parties, and they may have even gotten some of the perks that the article implies, I don't know. The parties we did get invited to were often much like those timeshare gigs where you have to listen to a bunch of marketing hype in order to get a few chicken nuggets and two free beers, and maybe a can cooler printed with the game logo.
There was no real incentive to skew reviews. We got more games than we could reasonably play, and kept getting them from a publisher even if we had just poo-poo'd one from that publisher. One thing we tried to do, was to be objective. No game is completely bad, and we tried to point out any good points, even if the overall score was low. For instance a game might have had crappy controls, bad graphics, poor AI, and even an ugly box, but if it had good audio and soundtrack, we said so.
Then, the publisher would quote the line that said "Killer soundtrack and realistic audio effects..." on the "press" section of the game's web site and they just wouldn't mention that we thought the thing was sheer tedium to play. And they would send us another box full of games the next week.
If I had not written fair, honest reviews, pretty soon, no one would believe me. It makes no sense to lie to your readers. It was funny, I would usually head out on the web to read the other site's reviews of a game after I had posted mine. More than once I would flame a particularly bad game, only to find that some other guys were raving about it. I wondered at the time if there was some sort of "playola" going on or if my opinions were just that much different. But I never ran across any proof.
Incidentally, as for game reviewing = "vagina testing", well, allow me to dispute that somewhat. First of all, I often had been assigned two or three games per week. Which means I almost never finished a game, since I also have a day job and a family. Had this been my living, I imagine I would have had considerably more assignments, and so the result would have been the same. Also, you have to write the reviews, which takes time, writing skill, and overall, a desire to write. I dare say that not everyone who wants to play lots of games also wants to produce the equivalent of an english paper after each one. Luckily, I can spell, and write reasonably well, and so I enjoyed the writing as well as the game playing.
Of course to write a critical review, you must do more than just play. You must play while honestly evaluating the various elements of the experience, and maybe even pausing to take notes, or replaying a section just to verify some item or glitch you did not get a good look at the first time.
Often you are playing beta or even alpha quality games for previews, and so crashes and configuration hassles are not uncommon. You don't generally have time to play much on advanced levels, because you want to get to as much of the game environment as you can in a short time.
Yes it was a lot of fun, especially at first, and rewarding most of the time, but it was definitely not the easiest, sweetest gig you could imagine. Eventually, I burned out, and bid the reviewer's podium adieu. It was at least a year before I played another computer game after that.
Sorry, the /. editors chopped out the paragraph that "that" refers to. The paragraph is the one in their document that discusses how previous efforts to kill/repeal things like UTICA, DMCA had failed.
http://www.fatchucks.com/
My letter to the editor of my local paper, in case anyone wants to use any of it in theirs:
Dear Editor:
A dangerous bill (S2048) has been introduced by Senator Hollings (SC). This so-called "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA)" is a federal mandate for the inclusion of "copy prevention" into the hardware of every digital device and into all software sold in the US.
The bill was designed and paid for by media companies such as Disney to further control the public's use of digital content in the name of "preventing piracy". What it really prevents is "Fair Use": the ability to use legally purchased music and movies on a device of your choice, (mp3 players, computers), and to make backup copies, "mix" CDs, recordings on digital tape, etc. It specifies federal enforcement through huge fines and prison time.
S2048 will cripple US companies in the global market. Intel, Gateway, Dell, etc. will be forced to build this technology into every digital device, adding to cost and sabotaging overseas sales.
PCs capable of upgrade by non-licensed technicians will be illegal. The PC will be reduced to a sealed "set top" box that can only be used to play content from approved providers. Media without copy protection will not be supported. Forget recording your own guitar licks or home movies without a content creation license.
Educate yourself (http://www.eff.org), then contact your senators and tell them you refuse to be treated as a thief and to vote NO on S2048.
****
It was more detailed, but I had to edit it to 250 words, or they wouldn't accept it.
PROBABLY SPOILERS, but what the hell, if I help someone save their $6, I have done a good deed.
Finally, one person who agrees with me and the two friends who went to see this trash with me. I liked the first movie, and I like campy, comic book hero movies in general, so I am not expecting high drama, oscar quality acting, or intriguing plot. What I do expect is that such a movie accentuate those qualities that make such a movie what it is.
Plot can be anything from useless to good, doesn't matter. Acting can suck, or be stunning, no problem. But at least be true to the genre!
For instance, this is basically a martial-arts movie. So why zoom in and cut up the fight scenes so poorly that all you see are flailing limbs? And why not try to make the CGI seamlessly blend with the live actors (e.g. early fight between Snipes and his love interest in front of the big bank of lights). I want to see good cinematography for the fights in a martial arts movie, not an incomprehensible blur.
And since it is also science fiction, at least the everyday science could be consistent with our universe. Light doesn't bend around and flow like blue fire. Filters over the white light flashlights on the weapons were supposed to filter UV, so why did they look blue? Wouldn't they look red? And I am so tired of night-vision goggles that glow red! Why would you want to present such a perfect target in the dark? Good science fiction either creates it's own internally consistent laws of physics,(in the case of some strange, otherworldly locale or far in the future) or it extends our own, if the time and place is current. This thing mixes the two, making mush.
Finally, for any tale, internal consistency is a must. Why carry hundreds of pounds of silver ammo and assault weapons (into the sewers) when they already know the new guys are not allergic to silver and absorb magnum gun blasts while healing instantly. Why not just plant all the individual UV grenades and set them off remotely, instead of packing them into a box so that they all shine light up (even though the light penetrated the sides of the box and bent down tunnels, see above). Why didn't the vamps use the blackout suits (that they already have in the beginning of the film) with special sunglasses when they went down to use the UV bombs? It goes on and on.
So it was not a serious movie, but that's ok. What's not OK, is that it was a very poor example of the movie it wanted to be.
My comment when the end credits rolled pretty much sums it up - "two words: Highlander Two"
Don't waste your time/$
Mod parent up! It is in vogue to hammer NASA everytime anything related to space goes awry, but the reality is that something is wrong with the spacecraft that BOEING built. NASA doesn't own it, doesn't take delivery, doesn't pay money for it, until it is healthy and in the correct orbit.
NASA buys all sorts of hardware from private industry, and federal purchasing regs mandate that the deliverables must satisfy the spec in the purchase order prior to the invoice being paid.
This applies equally to spacecraft as it does to computers or flashlights or anything else.
I imagine if the news media got hold of a story about NASA receiving a new PC from Gateway that had a bad stick of RAM installed, we would have a similar bunch of posts about NASA screwing up.
Besides, space flight is not easy, nor risk free. Just like any other technologically intensive activity, things go wrong. Unfortunately, unlike the everyday foul-ups and equipment failures that happen everywhere, NASA's are shown live on TV.
The census is only legally authorized to *count* the population. All the other sundry data they collect is the result of a(nother) government power grab. Of course the constitution is becoming more and more just so much bird cage-liner.
I bet Sirius is owned in whole or in part by media conglomerates who are members of the Evil Axis (RIAA, MPAA). With that in mind, doesn't this make sense? They are just trying to shut down another way for people to trade copyrighted content.
Another thought- eliminating competition:
What if 802.11 really becomes ubiquitous, blanketing the countryside with access. At that point, couldn't the smart boys and girls start routing the traffic independently, i.e. a new network "above" the internet? With appropriate hardware, and good enough coverage, Gnutella or Freenet type P2P could replace satellite music services with the People's own Radio Free Network.
The corporations are quite used to using the laws of the land to control the people, and I see this as just anoter example. Laws are easy to buy.
I guess I don't know what the big deal is. There have been two global positioning satellite-based systems for years - The US GPS, and the Russian GLONASS (see http://www.rssi.ru/SFCSIC/SFCSIC_main.html). Ok, the US Gov't presumably can't control that one either.
Of course, in the hypothetical instance that someone were denied access to the GPS, and then chose to use GLONASS or the proposed EU system to target US interests, how long do you suppose the satellites in that other system would remain un-toasted? After all, there has been an awful lot of money spent on SDI, which is designed to kill space vehicles. Satellites are sitting ducks compared to ballistic delivery systems.
Maybe the US doesn't want to have to explain destruction of hardware belonging to other NATO nations.
Yeah, but play the "Brown note" and have loads of laughs!
Ahh, but give a couple million monkeys Office XP on Windows XP, and voila!
XP self replicates! Or maybe you would get an improved OS...
The navy has a degaussing station near Norfolk Naval base (and probably others near big bases). They use it to degauss entire ships. The ships, being predominately steel, pick up residual magnetic fields from sailing though the earth's magnetic field. They need to periodically remove these residual fields. They float the ship in, then connect big cables over top of the vessel, and send big currents through the coils. Not sure how it affects internal equipment, but I suppose that the hull shields most of it the same way the shielding in your computer speakers prevents the voice coil magnets from screwing up your monitor.
If you have an old color monitor you don't care about, put a magnet near the screen sometime. (ooh, a rainbow!) As this falls in the same category of fun as microwaving CDs, don't expect the degaussing circuits to fix the result anytime soon. in other words, don't do this to a monitor you wanna use.