or hell, i'd just be happy with a domain that doesn't require someone to enter two adjacent letters that share a key when using multitap (e.g. mo in mobi or om in com)
how about net? or org? all those letters on different keys, so nice.
or, even better, how about.dam? lets us enter just the first char on multitap....
sure, a mobile domain is great, but how about making is usable on a mobile phone...
Now, I might just be so phenomenally stupid that this isn't even worth thinking about, but, if I had a traditional wireless network, like a linksys ap and a buncha wireless cards, and i were to buid a meshAP, could my current nodes connect with that meshAP?
Could i just plug it in somewhere else in my house and have it work? or, would the mesh have to be separate from the wifi network, with it's own gateway AP?
and if so, could my wife's iBook with an airport card still connect to the mesh?
All of the mesh networking sites seem to think the answer to this question is just so basic so as to be not worth answering...
the other cool part is that the.beat thing is also a timezone-less time. @500 is 1200 GMT, @999 is 2359 GMT.
kinda a sad part to it, it used to be one of the ways that the time was displayed on cnn.com (a fairly mainstream site, if I had to find one) but when the internet bubble started to collapse, then they removed it in favor of more traditional time stuff.
oh well. It would be cool to have a global timesystem that gained wide use. I tried setting my personal time to GMT once, but it was kinda tough always having to subtract 8 (or 7 in the summer) whenever someone asked me the time. Wellm to be honest, every once in a while, if i was in a surly mood, I would just give them the time in GMT when they ask.
Further, according to Nintendo's 2000 Annual Report, their sales to third parties for Japan come in at US$1.486M, where as their American third party sales come in at US$2.865M
Do you maybe mean the video game market in Japan?
The population of Japan (according to the CIA World Factbook 2001) is approx. 126,771,662, whereas the population of the US (according to the same source) is about 278,058,881. So, unless these are some sort of freakishly large dwarfs i think your statement might be erroneous.
In the past, the FCC has regulated what constitutes a relatively minor part of the American Experience (tm). When I say minor I am comparing telephone, telegraph and radio transmissions to things like National Security, Defense, Education, the Envrionment, Housing, etc. All of these things have a 'Secretary of' and the FCC, as yet, does not. The arenas (namely the internet) in which the FCC operates are becoming more central to American life every day. The internet will (or does) need an advocate in government, to shepard (for lack of a better word) its growth throughout this century. Also, the net faces unique challanges since it does not fall under the jurisdiction of any one country, and as such, is an internation resource. Given all this, do you think it is likely that a president in the near future will create a Department of Information, or rather a department whose job it is to regulate, safeguard, and develop the resources of our national communications medium?
actually, a few of us at USC (univ of so cal) are starting a geek frat... Eta Alpha Kappa.... if it doesnt make sense, think about what a capital eta looks like.... heh
Apparently @Home is looking for the little bit of extra revenue
they can get by selling additional IPs to people (like me) who have more
than one computer.
The TOS seem to say that they prohibit traffic through PPTP and IPSec, and both of those types of traffic are easy enough to detect. I just dont understand why they would do that... I suppose that they don't want people copying huge chunks of stuff though smb or anything.... but even still it is a weird provision
VPN is a system by which a remote computer can log into a lan as though it were in the same subnet. the main methods of doing this are PPTP (windows VPN) and IPSec (other vpn's).
A private network is completely different from a VPN. Whereas a VPN allows one computer to be connected to another network, a private network is just a network that uses the private IP networks. These are 10.0.0.0/8 for large installations and 192.168.0.0/16 for smaller ones. You can set up a private network any way you like, and by its very nature, it is undetectable. Now, if you want to connect your private network to the internet or some other network, you just have to put in a new interface and set up that machine as a gateway using ipchains or whatever. Private networks are completely undetectable to someone who is not actually logged in to your gateway machine. You only need one IP....
I've been running a private network from behind one pacbel dsl IP since last july.... it works just fine
no. if the xray passed through, the film would be completely exposed... since they are partially blocked, that is why x-ray photography of the human body works... if they passed straight through, you'd just see a totally black slide....
Unfortuantely it doesn't. The reason that all that we can see is visible light is due to the fact that only the wavelengths between ~400 and ~700nm are permeable to water. and water is what fills our eyeballs. Now, i don't know if you refilled your eyes with some other, more radiation friendly fluid, if the rods and cones in you eye could support the expanded range (but i doubt it). But once you did that, you could get a chip to enable outside frequencies.... pretty cool, eh?
I find it kind of strange that/. will rail against doubleclick so much, yet, did you ever notice that when a SuSE ad comes up, it uses doubleclick... you know, those cute ones with the UF characters and robert heinlein references... Just thought that this was kind of funny....and quietly unsetteling i suppose....
Well, I'm pretty sure that you mean Under Penalty of Perjury, since perjury is a charge, not a state. And since you can only perjure yourself in a court of law or in a sworn statement, I don't think that that is the case. Please post more info about what exactly you mean. thanks.
It sounds like what is needed is a type of VirtualID, I believe that versign was trying to do something like this. How would it be done so that it was secure and worked across machines?
Would a model like the AmEx Blue work? A gov't issued ID with a smart chip that could be read by the computer to verify identity. That would be kind of cool.
On one hand, it would be nice to have one card with a smart chip that functioned as cash, credit and all forms of ID, but on the other hand it would be kind of scary b/c with all that in one place it would seem as though it would be easy and disastarous to steal something of that nature. But an interesting thought to be sure.
There's also the problem of hardware complaince with this type of thing... If you had one of these cards and coupled it with some sort of biometric, that would be nearly flawless and pretty safe, but putting these readers and scanners on every piece of computing equipment would be difficult and expensive. But I imagine that this would be just the type of thing that credit card companies, banks and merchants would jump on, it would cut their fraud costs to nearly nothing.
Anyone think it's feasible? (I doubt that it is....)
I think that the real issue here is not about anonymity in online forums and such, but more about people worried about being stalked and that sort of thing. This is an infrastructure concern. The thing about the net is that when you send a piece of information, it gets coppied so many times along the way, just so it can get there all is one piece. Don't get me wrong, this is a Good Thing (TM), but there just might be a better way. I think that most of the privacy/anonymity stuff would go away if data integrity on the net increased substantailly.
I mean, how worried would you really be if any and all information you sent on the next were completely unbreakable (i.e. one-time pad encryption or something)? I dont think that the anonymity is about ideas, the only reason for someone to want anonymity in a system where they have nothing to fear is criminal activity. If you didn't have to worry about identity theft issues, you wouldn't need to be anonymous unless you were doing something illegal.
Now, ACs don't flame me, i realize that in a forum like this anonymity is good because sometimes something might need to be said that would piss off a bunch of people, and you dont want to invite retaliation upon yourself.
In fact, anonymity is a must for public discussions, if you want to talk about people wanting to change things, they enarly always do it anonymously, mainly for the reason that they don't want to get fsckin killed! Think about the american revolution. Most of the literature that turned public opinion was written by Jefferson and others, but under the pen name of Publius. Without these "Publius Papers" the american revolution would not have found the popular support that it did, and that it needed.
Anonymity is necessary in a repressive system, unfortuanately, repressive systems dont tend to allow it, so i guess it's necessary in all systems.
I suppose that the bottom line here is that anonyminity is needed, illegal activity is going to happen, and we just have to take the bad with the good.
I agree with you that the only concievable use of this machine (in the near future at least) is to provide o2 to manned missions. In the far future (i.e. one where we;ve warmed up mars some way or another) it would just make more sense to take a few billion acorns than these machines. This is certainly a short term solution.
But it isn't like Mars is too small to retain an O2 atmosphere, in fact, mars has a fair amount of N2 and CH4 in its atomosphere, both far lighter. So the problem with the machine is not one of keeping the o2 on mars, it is more an issue of the logistics of getting enough of these machines there to transform the atomosphere. Hence the earlier remark on acorns. Either that, or once the planet is warmed up, then there would concievably be open water on mars, just take up a few trillion algae and let them do the same thing that they did to the earth.
That reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote, something along the lines of:
Some argue that if anyone were to ever completely understand the universe, it would me immediaetly replaced with something infinetly more complicated and inexplicable. Others argue that this has already happened
don't kill me if that isn't it exactly, just chuckle quitely to yourself:)
could someone post a ars type explanation or link to one on the specific differences between Tru64 and Linux.... Architecture and efficiency wise... thanks.
I have no problem with paying for access, wht i do have a problem with is buying Bernie Ebers a 52-foot yacht and 35 cars. There's a lot of waste and I think that properly administered, it could be a good thing.
I'm going to assume for a moment that this was a troll, and I'm also going to assume that they unknowingly (or knowingly, it's not important) brought up a very important point for discussion (although not completely on topic).
Why should you have to pay someone when you make a telephone call? You don't pay for email, except in a very obtuse way. What I think this issue is whether or not access to PUBLIC networks should be free or not. IMHO, there is no excuse for charging for any kind of network. Public network infrastructure, power, phone, net, everything should be nationalized. End of story. Right now, we might pay a few dollars for a universal access surcharce, but that's not what it's about. The phone company expects you to believe that it costs them on a per minute basis to keep up their networks. It doesn't. MCI/Worldcom's cost is about US$0.02 per minute, and you know what, most of that goes to pay telemarketers. There is absolutely no reason why we all can't pay, say, a $70 annual telecommunications tax, and have unlimited connectivity.
It is of course easy to argue that that's where it's going anyway and why bother with all that nasty government stuff. Well, that's what we have government for. The government should be progressive as well as protective. I mean hell if we pay all this money in taxes, shouldn't the government do something insofar as looking towards the future is concerned?
People around here seem to have a problem with monopolies. I don't. Just so long as they're not unregulated, controlling, tyranical monopolies. If MS had always had an open source approach, can you imagine how much better of a product it would be? No more waiting 3 years for a bugfix, etc. But the thing is a monopoly, properly used can be a good thing. In monopolies, you don't have non-compatible equipment to deal with or any of that. And if that monopoly answers to the GAO or some organization, then you wouldn't have things going on like AT&T charging US$0.35/min when it was completely unnescessary.
If we had a national telecom monopoly with progressive leadership, I think that universal access in this country with a reasonable fee is not an unreasonable thing to consider. DSL a couple dozen IPv6 addresses to every home!
And here, the argument that if we take away monetary rewards, we take away incentive for development just doesn't work. It's not like this service would be giving away free OC-192s to Digex or anything. Anyone who wanted to get more than their 'fair share' will have to pay for it. There will still be a market for high band products and services becuase the public network will need it, and there will always be private networks. On the consumer side, this national monopoly would have to fund R&D to be constantly improving the quality of service.
Of course there is the question of practicality and likelyhood. Is it practical? yes. Is it a good idea? yes. Will it ever happen? no.
Here's why not. All the phone companies are not interested in going out of business anytime soon. Bernie Ebers (head of worldcom) does not want to give up his billions in stock to accept a slightly smaller salary to better life in this country. Theres one reason all these guys are in it, money.
There are so many people who would hate it, not because it would threaten their livelyhood, but because it might reduce the value of their stock, if we had a free, high-speed, IPv6 network with say ten billion ip addresses reserved for phones worldwide.
But wouldn't you love it? If you could dial a 10 digit number into your IP-Phone (TM) and be connected to anyone, anywhere in the world?
It's pie in the sky i know, but isn't it fun to dream?
Unfortunately those tend to just be animations. They have just a small amount of screen time and don't have to do muh, so the cgi artists just dream up the sweetest looking thing that they can think of. kind of dissapointing from a tech standpoint, but then again, that's movie magic for you...
p.s. i;m a film editor, so i didn't just pull that COMPLETELY out of my ass (just mostly:)
The movie was great, up until Cruise stopped climbing the mountain. From there the entire thing was messy, thrown together and hopelessly simple. Audiences went in craving the twists of M:I, or perhaps the raised bar given to the action genre by films like the matrix, or perhaps some mind-numbingly realistic visual effects, a la Dinosaur. But no. It was obvious how the movie would end after the first ten minutes, and you wanted it to end after the first 15, the action was a lazy bach to the matrix's chopin, and the visual effects were non-existant. I just am at a loss for words describing the horrible state of the script. The only redeeming feature of the script was Hopkins' line "Difficult should be a walk in the park." The editor of this film just didnt seem to understand how to edit an action sequence. It doesn't work if all you have is slow motion money shots, you have to build up to them with high speed rock-em sock-em action. Further, if the editor had edited the movie so that no frames were duplicated, it would have been more like 100 minutes instead of the excruciating 126 that it ended up being. And quite honestly, i think that woo finished the thing, slapped it in the can and send it to the processor. the editor proceded to edit it on a movieola and no effects were added whatsoever.
Oh, and the music! don't get me started on the music. When you were at the most tense, action packed moment of the movie, the music was trying to put you to sleep! I don't know why, but it was. But for all these fault, i do not blame the star, director, editor, composer or writer. The editor is a member of A.C.E. not something easy to do, and something to be applauded. The writer, Robert Towne, wrote Chinatown, an incredible movie. The Director, John Woo, a master of his craft. Tom Cruise, a wonderful action hero. The composer wrote lovely music.
But you wonder, if everyone is so fscking wonderful, why did the movie suck so much? Well, i would have to say that the blame rests solely on the one who made sure the everything came together in just the right way. The producer. Because in this movie, i assure you that nothing came together the right way. well, maybe the credits did, but i was too disgusted to watch those...
my final verdict... I want my 126 Minutes back, don't waste your time.
That's an awesome episode, but I don't think that that is possible. All stuff about warp drive aside, the story was improbable because neutrinos travel at the speed of light. Also, the 'solar sail' phenomenon is based on the fact that the particles of solar wind have mass and thus impart their momentum to the spacecraft. Neutrinos are (nearly?) massless. So, even in the extraordinarily unlikely occurance that it would be hit by a neutrino, it wouldn't do much. I say unlikely becuase trillions of neurtrinos pass through a cubic meter of the earth every second, but they usually don't hit anything. There was a really cool article in wired a while ago about a neutrino detector that they were building if you're interester (sorry, but I can't remember precisely which issue, sometime in the last six months, but you can just search on wired.com).
But I definately agree with you that this is frighteningly interesting. I think that it is awesome that NASA is again starting to show some leadership and vision, although it probably won't be able to have the same motivating force of a president, it should still be exceedingly cool.
Slashdot Mirror
or hell, i'd just be happy with a domain that doesn't require someone to enter two adjacent letters that share a key when using multitap (e.g. mo in mobi or om in com)
.dam? lets us enter just the first char on multitap....
how about net? or org? all those letters on different keys, so nice.
or, even better, how about
sure, a mobile domain is great, but how about making is usable on a mobile phone...
Now, I might just be so phenomenally stupid that this isn't even worth thinking about, but, if I had a traditional wireless network, like a linksys ap and a buncha wireless cards, and i were to buid a meshAP, could my current nodes connect with that meshAP?
Could i just plug it in somewhere else in my house and have it work? or, would the mesh have to be separate from the wifi network, with it's own gateway AP?
and if so, could my wife's iBook with an airport card still connect to the mesh?
All of the mesh networking sites seem to think the answer to this question is just so basic so as to be not worth answering...
the other cool part is that the .beat thing is also a timezone-less time. @500 is 1200 GMT, @999 is 2359 GMT.
kinda a sad part to it, it used to be one of the ways that the time was displayed on cnn.com (a fairly mainstream site, if I had to find one) but when the internet bubble started to collapse, then they removed it in favor of more traditional time stuff.
oh well. It would be cool to have a global timesystem that gained wide use. I tried setting my personal time to GMT once, but it was kinda tough always having to subtract 8 (or 7 in the summer) whenever someone asked me the time. Wellm to be honest, every once in a while, if i was in a surly mood, I would just give them the time in GMT when they ask.
but then again, i'm a bit of a jerk.
Here is a little quote for wet your appetite
technically, you don't wet your appetite, you whet it.
just fyi, no big deal.
Further, according to Nintendo's 2000 Annual Report, their sales to third parties for Japan come in at US$1.486M, where as their American third party sales come in at US$2.865M
Do you maybe mean the video game market in Japan?
The population of Japan (according to the CIA World Factbook 2001) is approx. 126,771,662, whereas the population of the US (according to the same source) is about 278,058,881. So, unless these are some sort of freakishly large dwarfs i think your statement might be erroneous.
In the past, the FCC has regulated what constitutes a relatively minor part of the American Experience (tm). When I say minor I am comparing telephone, telegraph and radio transmissions to things like National Security, Defense, Education, the Envrionment, Housing, etc. All of these things have a 'Secretary of' and the FCC, as yet, does not. The arenas (namely the internet) in which the FCC operates are becoming more central to American life every day. The internet will (or does) need an advocate in government, to shepard (for lack of a better word) its growth throughout this century. Also, the net faces unique challanges since it does not fall under the jurisdiction of any one country, and as such, is an internation resource. Given all this, do you think it is likely that a president in the near future will create a Department of Information, or rather a department whose job it is to regulate, safeguard, and develop the resources of our national communications medium?
soon @hakfrat.org and hakusc.org
get me at gezick@gezick.net
Apparently @Home is looking for the little bit of extra revenue they can get by selling additional IPs to people (like me) who have more than one computer.
The TOS seem to say that they prohibit traffic through PPTP and IPSec, and both of those types of traffic are easy enough to detect. I just dont understand why they would do that... I suppose that they don't want people copying huge chunks of stuff though smb or anything.... but even still it is a weird provision
VPN is a system by which a remote computer can log into a lan as though it were in the same subnet. the main methods of doing this are PPTP (windows VPN) and IPSec (other vpn's).
A private network is completely different from a VPN. Whereas a VPN allows one computer to be connected to another network, a private network is just a network that uses the private IP networks. These are 10.0.0.0/8 for large installations and 192.168.0.0/16 for smaller ones. You can set up a private network any way you like, and by its very nature, it is undetectable. Now, if you want to connect your private network to the internet or some other network, you just have to put in a new interface and set up that machine as a gateway using ipchains or whatever. Private networks are completely undetectable to someone who is not actually logged in to your gateway machine. You only need one IP....
I've been running a private network from behind one pacbel dsl IP since last july.... it works just fine
no. if the xray passed through, the film would be completely exposed... since they are partially blocked, that is why x-ray photography of the human body works... if they passed straight through, you'd just see a totally black slide....
i have asked slash and andover, slash sai to talk to andover, and andover hasnt said a thing.... lateron
Unfortuantely it doesn't. The reason that all that we can see is visible light is due to the fact that only the wavelengths between ~400 and ~700nm are permeable to water. and water is what fills our eyeballs. Now, i don't know if you refilled your eyes with some other, more radiation friendly fluid, if the rods and cones in you eye could support the expanded range (but i doubt it). But once you did that, you could get a chip to enable outside frequencies.... pretty cool, eh?
lateron
Well, I'm pretty sure that you mean Under Penalty of Perjury, since perjury is a charge, not a state. And since you can only perjure yourself in a court of law or in a sworn statement, I don't think that that is the case. Please post more info about what exactly you mean. thanks.
Would a model like the AmEx Blue work? A gov't issued ID with a smart chip that could be read by the computer to verify identity. That would be kind of cool.
On one hand, it would be nice to have one card with a smart chip that functioned as cash, credit and all forms of ID, but on the other hand it would be kind of scary b/c with all that in one place it would seem as though it would be easy and disastarous to steal something of that nature. But an interesting thought to be sure.
There's also the problem of hardware complaince with this type of thing... If you had one of these cards and coupled it with some sort of biometric, that would be nearly flawless and pretty safe, but putting these readers and scanners on every piece of computing equipment would be difficult and expensive. But I imagine that this would be just the type of thing that credit card companies, banks and merchants would jump on, it would cut their fraud costs to nearly nothing.
Anyone think it's feasible? (I doubt that it is....)
I mean, how worried would you really be if any and all information you sent on the next were completely unbreakable (i.e. one-time pad encryption or something)? I dont think that the anonymity is about ideas, the only reason for someone to want anonymity in a system where they have nothing to fear is criminal activity. If you didn't have to worry about identity theft issues, you wouldn't need to be anonymous unless you were doing something illegal.
Now, ACs don't flame me, i realize that in a forum like this anonymity is good because sometimes something might need to be said that would piss off a bunch of people, and you dont want to invite retaliation upon yourself.
In fact, anonymity is a must for public discussions, if you want to talk about people wanting to change things, they enarly always do it anonymously, mainly for the reason that they don't want to get fsckin killed! Think about the american revolution. Most of the literature that turned public opinion was written by Jefferson and others, but under the pen name of Publius. Without these "Publius Papers" the american revolution would not have found the popular support that it did, and that it needed.
Anonymity is necessary in a repressive system, unfortuanately, repressive systems dont tend to allow it, so i guess it's necessary in all systems.
I suppose that the bottom line here is that anonyminity is needed, illegal activity is going to happen, and we just have to take the bad with the good.
or something like that.
But it isn't like Mars is too small to retain an O2 atmosphere, in fact, mars has a fair amount of N2 and CH4 in its atomosphere, both far lighter. So the problem with the machine is not one of keeping the o2 on mars, it is more an issue of the logistics of getting enough of these machines there to transform the atomosphere. Hence the earlier remark on acorns. Either that, or once the planet is warmed up, then there would concievably be open water on mars, just take up a few trillion algae and let them do the same thing that they did to the earth.
Anyway, just an idea....
Some argue that if anyone were to ever completely understand the universe, it would me immediaetly replaced with something infinetly more complicated and inexplicable.
Others argue that this has already happened
don't kill me if that isn't it exactly, just chuckle quitely to yourself :)
could someone post a ars type explanation or link to one on the specific differences between Tru64 and Linux.... Architecture and efficiency wise... thanks.
I have no problem with paying for access, wht i do have a problem with is buying Bernie Ebers a 52-foot yacht and 35 cars. There's a lot of waste and I think that properly administered, it could be a good thing.
I'm going to assume for a moment that this was a troll, and I'm also going to assume that they unknowingly (or knowingly, it's not important) brought up a very important point for discussion (although not completely on topic).
Why should you have to pay someone when you make a telephone call? You don't pay for email, except in a very obtuse way. What I think this issue is whether or not access to PUBLIC networks should be free or not. IMHO, there is no excuse for charging for any kind of network. Public network infrastructure, power, phone, net, everything should be nationalized. End of story. Right now, we might pay a few dollars for a universal access surcharce, but that's not what it's about. The phone company expects you to believe that it costs them on a per minute basis to keep up their networks. It doesn't. MCI/Worldcom's cost is about US$0.02 per minute, and you know what, most of that goes to pay telemarketers. There is absolutely no reason why we all can't pay, say, a $70 annual telecommunications tax, and have unlimited connectivity.
It is of course easy to argue that that's where it's going anyway and why bother with all that nasty government stuff. Well, that's what we have government for. The government should be progressive as well as protective. I mean hell if we pay all this money in taxes, shouldn't the government do something insofar as looking towards the future is concerned?
People around here seem to have a problem with monopolies. I don't. Just so long as they're not unregulated, controlling, tyranical monopolies. If MS had always had an open source approach, can you imagine how much better of a product it would be? No more waiting 3 years for a bugfix, etc. But the thing is a monopoly, properly used can be a good thing. In monopolies, you don't have non-compatible equipment to deal with or any of that. And if that monopoly answers to the GAO or some organization, then you wouldn't have things going on like AT&T charging US$0.35/min when it was completely unnescessary.
If we had a national telecom monopoly with progressive leadership, I think that universal access in this country with a reasonable fee is not an unreasonable thing to consider. DSL a couple dozen IPv6 addresses to every home!
And here, the argument that if we take away monetary rewards, we take away incentive for development just doesn't work. It's not like this service would be giving away free OC-192s to Digex or anything. Anyone who wanted to get more than their 'fair share' will have to pay for it. There will still be a market for high band products and services becuase the public network will need it, and there will always be private networks. On the consumer side, this national monopoly would have to fund R&D to be constantly improving the quality of service.
Of course there is the question of practicality and likelyhood. Is it practical? yes. Is it a good idea? yes. Will it ever happen? no.
Here's why not. All the phone companies are not interested in going out of business anytime soon. Bernie Ebers (head of worldcom) does not want to give up his billions in stock to accept a slightly smaller salary to better life in this country. Theres one reason all these guys are in it, money.
There are so many people who would hate it, not because it would threaten their livelyhood, but because it might reduce the value of their stock, if we had a free, high-speed, IPv6 network with say ten billion ip addresses reserved for phones worldwide.
But wouldn't you love it? If you could dial a 10 digit number into your IP-Phone (TM) and be connected to anyone, anywhere in the world?
It's pie in the sky i know, but isn't it fun to dream?
"This is not mission diffiult, it's mission impossible. Difficult should be a walk in the park for you."
Sure the line's pretty funny, but the deadpan delivery really kicked the ass!
p.s. i;m a film editor, so i didn't just pull that COMPLETELY out of my ass (just mostly :)
Oh, and the music! don't get me started on the music. When you were at the most tense, action packed moment of the movie, the music was trying to put you to sleep! I don't know why, but it was. But for all these fault, i do not blame the star, director, editor, composer or writer. The editor is a member of A.C.E. not something easy to do, and something to be applauded. The writer, Robert Towne, wrote Chinatown, an incredible movie. The Director, John Woo, a master of his craft. Tom Cruise, a wonderful action hero. The composer wrote lovely music.
But you wonder, if everyone is so fscking wonderful, why did the movie suck so much? Well, i would have to say that the blame rests solely on the one who made sure the everything came together in just the right way. The producer. Because in this movie, i assure you that nothing came together the right way. well, maybe the credits did, but i was too disgusted to watch those...
my final verdict... I want my 126 Minutes back, don't waste your time.
But I definately agree with you that this is frighteningly interesting. I think that it is awesome that NASA is again starting to show some leadership and vision, although it probably won't be able to have the same motivating force of a president, it should still be exceedingly cool.