According to this Bif Fish only had a small, limited release in the US prior to Jan 9, 2004. Isn't it possible that this means it was considered a 2004 movie by the academy, and not in the running for a 2003 Oscar?
Its surprising to see the well liked but little seen roles getting nods.
No, it's not. Ebert has been grinding that particular axe for decades. The two things which matter most to him in the world are: 1. Calling attention to obscure movies he considers noteworthy. 2. Opposition to the trend of digital projection.
Cancer, war, third-world poverty, etc... all that takes a back seat to what really matters, that some Iranian subtitled childrens' movie is not being shown in nearly as many cities as he wishes it was.
Further, and more disturbingly, you're essentially saying that the government can do ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING it wants to in the short term
No I'm not.
I'm saying that, unlike many parts of the world, we have a system in place of judging bad laws against a document which promises the defense of our liberties. Politicians who pass bad law still must answer to the people who elect them. Pass enough bad laws which are judged by the people to be bad enough, and your party can lose power (as the Democrats did in 92... and the Republicans might in 04, if enough people arrive at the opinion that the Democrats can do better.)
Oh really? What in the Patriot Act would have stopped terrorists with legal credentials (even if illegally obtained) from boarding then taking over the planes?
You misunderstood my point. I'll try to be more clear.
I didn't say it would have stopped the 9/11 attacks had it been in place at the time. I said that the stepped-up enforcement powers have helped avert subsequent attacks of the same scale (thousands could have been killed.) I'm not speaking hypothetically, I'm speaking of actual would-be mass-murderers who have been caught and stopped because of our improved enforcement efforts.
If no one 'got their panties in a wad' do you think we would be seeing any of this act declared unconstitutional??
Right, because 12-year olds venting about how much they think Ashcroft sucks on Slashdot is the reason why this court ruled the way they did. What really makes the system work is manic, knee-jerk hysteria.
If Congress and the President were 'doing their best' and temporarily doing a power grab to defend us poor Americans from the evil terrorist infidels, then why didn't they include a sundown measure in the act where by it would expire after x,y,z number of years?
They did. It expires soon unless Congress votes to extend it (which Bush is calling for, but probably won't get unless certain compromises and concessions are made to the opposition party. Another example of the system working the way it should.)
No act should be hurried through Congress because our President wants to go to war and his opposition is being called unpatriotic.
The PATRIOT Act had nothing to do with war. It was a domestic enforcement bill. It was hurried through Congress because people were outraged that the federal government had been doing such a poor job of defending against terrorists prior to the PATRIOT Act. Had no bill been passed in early 2002, the public outcry would have been deafening. You can argue that it was not as effective as it could have been, and/or not as fair as it could have been, but failing to pass something in that session would have been political suicide for everybody involved.
It will be proof that the system works if and when the appeals are exhausted and the ruling still stands.If, indeed, the constitution supports the view that it should be overturned, yes.
I am not quite as certain as you are that this specific provision is all that troubling from a constitutional rights perspective, but I am still pleased that it is being subjected to the process of judicial review. This is how things are supposed to be done around here.
Wait... saying that "Law is a complex topic upon which reasonable people can disagree." gets moderated as flamebait!? I have a strong suspicion I'm being "bitchslapped." Oh well, I have karma to burn. I'll just repeat myself with the +1 bonus turned on this time:
Law is a complex topic upon which reasonable people can disagree. That's why we have more than one Supreme Court justice. You will notice that a 9-0 decision does not happen often on the big issues. It's also why we have more than one political party.
On the other hand, there's enough legal education and know-how in the system right now (most Senators and a sizeable # of Congressmen are either lawyers or have been in service for a number of years) to have been able to make the decision that its unconstitutional and not even bothered to vote for or sign it in the first place.
Law is a complex topic upon which reasonable people can disagree. That's why we have more than one Supreme Court justice. You will notice that a 9-0 decision does not happen often on the big issues. It's also why we have more than one political party.
This might astonish you, but some people can read 342 page documents. Some people can even get all the way through texts that are much longer! Go to one of these places called "book stores" and you will see many such amazing individuals, reading 400 page long tomes for entertainment! The same goes for these other places you've obviously never been but may have heard of, called "libraries."
When the PATRIOT act was signed into law, I didn't like a lot of it, but I was one of the people saying "don't get your panties in a wad. Congress and the President are doing their best at legally stepping up enforcement, and due to the urgency they're doing so by re-treading RICO laws. Anything which turns out to be unconstitutional will get struck down by the courts, and life will go on."
Sure enough, some of those provisions of the new law are being tested against our constitutional rights via the court system. This is how our system of government is supposed to work. Bravo for American government!
There's still a few more elements I would like to see struck down, but some of the enforcement powers in PATRIOT have also made a difference in our ability to avert another attack on the scale of what we saw in 2001. Our democratic system of checks and balances is not perfect, and certainly not efficient, but it seems to work better than anything else that I've seen.
Actually, even though I just ripped you a little, on reflection I could see how there's some utility in taking advantage of the "luggable" nature of the old Macs for Lan party stuff, especially if there's already a monitor waiting for you at the site. On thing I would change if that's the use you intend is I would replace the "window" where the monitor used to be with a big-assed fan. A 5" cooling fan would not need to turn very fast to move a lot of air through the case, resulting in a PC that's not only small, but nice and quiet. If you have no intention of mounting a small monitor in that space, this would be a good way to take advantage of it. Something to think about for future modifications.
The original mac was the first user friendly personal computer (not counting that IBM machine released a few years earlier who's name eludes me at this moment in time).
Um... Apple ][, anyone? Definately user friendly (as a Commodore owner, I was insanely jealous of my Apple-owning friends), and definately the first fully-assembled personal computer you could buy.
Back to history class you go, kid!
P.S. I was also unimpressed with your case mod. Putting yet another AMD board into yet another box is not all that interesting, even if it is the former case of a Mac. Andy Inhatko was far, far cooler when he was the first to turn one into a fish tank, all those years ago. Also, I've seen old all-in-one Macs turned onto bongs, which also had a novelty of its own.
If you had turned it into an all-in-one machine that ran a modern OS, or had found some interesting applications for using it with the long-obsolete hardware that it had (such as a home automation server, a popular choice for those old Macs), then that would have been something newsworthy. This is just a poorly-vented PC case which wasted a great old machine. No major loss, since it was trash-bound anyway, but hardly newsworthy.
I was getting a haircut the other day. I didn't want a whole inch off. So I asked for a centimeter taken off. The stylist had to ask me how long a centimeter was.
So? Being somebody with a better education than a hair stylist, you could have politely told her that you wanted a little less than half an inch taken off, and moved on with life.
The amazing thing is not that the English System has lasted so long in the US, but that Napoleon's system was adopted so quickly in Europe. The reason is simple: until the early 20th Century, most of Europe was ruled by dictators and monarchs, who could tell you to use their chosen measuring system and like it. In the US, the system which would get used is the one which the most people were using, and nobody really had enough power to change it.
The English still use pints to measure beer for much the same reason... there's only so much that even people under a monarchy will put up with. Drop inches in favor of cm if you must, but don't you dare mess with the beer.:)
Another demonstration of how much clearer metric is than standard. Fail to notice a single letter, and you are off by a factor of 10. Much easier than inches, you betcha.
More useful than changing our measuring systems to universal base ten would be to change our verbal language of numbers to base ten with a more consistant nomenclature. There's a great deal of evidence that words like "Thirteen" and a different name for every x10^1 increment (twenty, thrity, forty, instead of something like "two-ten, three-ten, four-ten," which is what we do for hundreds and thousands) cause English speakers to master basic math a lot more slowly than those with superior counting systems.
So, you're saying that all of the parts of your car's drive and steering systems should have about a third of an inch of loose play on them at the very least?
Sometimes it makes sense for things to fit tightly.
If one believes western media, Iraq is a nation under constant seige, in which the plumming and electricity is absent for large swaths of the nation, and order is just barely maintained by the massive presense of unwelcome US troops. Also, many in the west believed that Iraq under Saddam was a very backwards and un-developped place (apart from military development), and one was not likely to find many computers at all, let alone connected ones.
So, as somebody who's actually there and actually knows what life is like for a techno-geek in today's Iraq, perhaps you could give us a detailed account about current network infrastructure, how easy or difficult it is to buy computer parts, how much Iraqi people (and Iraqi computer geeks in particular) use Internet technologies to connect to one another (e-mail, blogs, instant messaging, the web, etc.), what cultural attitudes in Iraq concerning the Internet, the global community, and the West, etc.
Most people in the United States (which is where most of the readers of/. come from) know very little about day-to-day life in Iraq. A detailed account would probably be very educational and broadening.
Yea, but American Graffiti, THX 1138, and Star Wars were all really good movies, so he was a good director at one point. Why he choses to make such crappy Star Wars prequels now is difficult to explain.
You would think that the man who once talked Francis Ford Coppola into making "The Godfather" would have enough judgment to recognize how awful his recent movies were turning out before he released them.
Monotheist religions, especially Christianity and it's prodigious children, state that we are the only intelligent life in the universe...
The three major monotheist religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Their sacred texts, the source of most (if not all) of their dogma, are the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. Kindly site a sinlge line from any of these three books which states that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.
I'll tell you what, I'll save you some time on that assignment, and tell you that you can't. There is no such statement of doctorine in any of these religions.
Ture, but in the days of the old "B" pictures, some film-makers took the opportunity to make a guaranteed-success movie and used it to make a good work of art. Hollywood never cared much what the content of a B picture was, as long as had a thrilling title and came in under budget. Sometimes the result was garbage like the films lompooned on MST3k, but every once in a while, a director would realize: "Hey, I'm getting the chance to make a movie here. That's something 99% of the people who want to make movies never get. I should take full advantage of the opportunity." Whenever that happened, we got movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
I wish that the "under-$20 Million" wide distribution industry had more people that understand that. If they did, we would get a lot more flawed-yet-fun direct to video movies like "The Cube" and a lot fewer pieces of crap like "Resident Evil."
Slashdot Mirror
According to this Bif Fish only had a small, limited release in the US prior to Jan 9, 2004. Isn't it possible that this means it was considered a 2004 movie by the academy, and not in the running for a 2003 Oscar?
No, it's not. Ebert has been grinding that particular axe for decades. The two things which matter most to him in the world are: 1. Calling attention to obscure movies he considers noteworthy. 2. Opposition to the trend of digital projection.
Cancer, war, third-world poverty, etc... all that takes a back seat to what really matters, that some Iranian subtitled childrens' movie is not being shown in nearly as many cities as he wishes it was.
More likely, it demonstrates that I paid closer attention to a previous post, which called it about a third of an inch, than the original article.
No I'm not.
I'm saying that, unlike many parts of the world, we have a system in place of judging bad laws against a document which promises the defense of our liberties. Politicians who pass bad law still must answer to the people who elect them. Pass enough bad laws which are judged by the people to be bad enough, and your party can lose power (as the Democrats did in 92... and the Republicans might in 04, if enough people arrive at the opinion that the Democrats can do better.)
You misunderstood my point. I'll try to be more clear.
I didn't say it would have stopped the 9/11 attacks had it been in place at the time. I said that the stepped-up enforcement powers have helped avert subsequent attacks of the same scale (thousands could have been killed.) I'm not speaking hypothetically, I'm speaking of actual would-be mass-murderers who have been caught and stopped because of our improved enforcement efforts.
Right, because 12-year olds venting about how much they think Ashcroft sucks on Slashdot is the reason why this court ruled the way they did. What really makes the system work is manic, knee-jerk hysteria.
If Congress and the President were 'doing their best' and temporarily doing a power grab to defend us poor Americans from the evil terrorist infidels, then why didn't they include a sundown measure in the act where by it would expire after x,y,z number of years?
They did. It expires soon unless Congress votes to extend it (which Bush is calling for, but probably won't get unless certain compromises and concessions are made to the opposition party. Another example of the system working the way it should.)
No act should be hurried through Congress because our President wants to go to war and his opposition is being called unpatriotic.
The PATRIOT Act had nothing to do with war. It was a domestic enforcement bill. It was hurried through Congress because people were outraged that the federal government had been doing such a poor job of defending against terrorists prior to the PATRIOT Act. Had no bill been passed in early 2002, the public outcry would have been deafening. You can argue that it was not as effective as it could have been, and/or not as fair as it could have been, but failing to pass something in that session would have been political suicide for everybody involved.
I am not quite as certain as you are that this specific provision is all that troubling from a constitutional rights perspective, but I am still pleased that it is being subjected to the process of judicial review. This is how things are supposed to be done around here.
Law is a complex topic upon which reasonable people can disagree. That's why we have more than one Supreme Court justice. You will notice that a 9-0 decision does not happen often on the big issues. It's also why we have more than one political party.
Law is a complex topic upon which reasonable people can disagree. That's why we have more than one Supreme Court justice. You will notice that a 9-0 decision does not happen often on the big issues. It's also why we have more than one political party.
This might astonish you, but some people can read 342 page documents. Some people can even get all the way through texts that are much longer! Go to one of these places called "book stores" and you will see many such amazing individuals, reading 400 page long tomes for entertainment! The same goes for these other places you've obviously never been but may have heard of, called "libraries."
When the PATRIOT act was signed into law, I didn't like a lot of it, but I was one of the people saying "don't get your panties in a wad. Congress and the President are doing their best at legally stepping up enforcement, and due to the urgency they're doing so by re-treading RICO laws. Anything which turns out to be unconstitutional will get struck down by the courts, and life will go on."
Sure enough, some of those provisions of the new law are being tested against our constitutional rights via the court system. This is how our system of government is supposed to work. Bravo for American government!
There's still a few more elements I would like to see struck down, but some of the enforcement powers in PATRIOT have also made a difference in our ability to avert another attack on the scale of what we saw in 2001. Our democratic system of checks and balances is not perfect, and certainly not efficient, but it seems to work better than anything else that I've seen.
Actually, even though I just ripped you a little, on reflection I could see how there's some utility in taking advantage of the "luggable" nature of the old Macs for Lan party stuff, especially if there's already a monitor waiting for you at the site. On thing I would change if that's the use you intend is I would replace the "window" where the monitor used to be with a big-assed fan. A 5" cooling fan would not need to turn very fast to move a lot of air through the case, resulting in a PC that's not only small, but nice and quiet. If you have no intention of mounting a small monitor in that space, this would be a good way to take advantage of it. Something to think about for future modifications.
Um... Apple ][, anyone? Definately user friendly (as a Commodore owner, I was insanely jealous of my Apple-owning friends), and definately the first fully-assembled personal computer you could buy.
Back to history class you go, kid!
P.S. I was also unimpressed with your case mod. Putting yet another AMD board into yet another box is not all that interesting, even if it is the former case of a Mac. Andy Inhatko was far, far cooler when he was the first to turn one into a fish tank, all those years ago. Also, I've seen old all-in-one Macs turned onto bongs, which also had a novelty of its own.
If you had turned it into an all-in-one machine that ran a modern OS, or had found some interesting applications for using it with the long-obsolete hardware that it had (such as a home automation server, a popular choice for those old Macs), then that would have been something newsworthy. This is just a poorly-vented PC case which wasted a great old machine. No major loss, since it was trash-bound anyway, but hardly newsworthy.
So? Being somebody with a better education than a hair stylist, you could have politely told her that you wanted a little less than half an inch taken off, and moved on with life.
The amazing thing is not that the English System has lasted so long in the US, but that Napoleon's system was adopted so quickly in Europe. The reason is simple: until the early 20th Century, most of Europe was ruled by dictators and monarchs, who could tell you to use their chosen measuring system and like it. In the US, the system which would get used is the one which the most people were using, and nobody really had enough power to change it.
The English still use pints to measure beer for much the same reason... there's only so much that even people under a monarchy will put up with. Drop inches in favor of cm if you must, but don't you dare mess with the beer. :)
Or "Zardoz." :)
Another demonstration of how much clearer metric is than standard. Fail to notice a single letter, and you are off by a factor of 10. Much easier than inches, you betcha.
More useful than changing our measuring systems to universal base ten would be to change our verbal language of numbers to base ten with a more consistant nomenclature. There's a great deal of evidence that words like "Thirteen" and a different name for every x10^1 increment (twenty, thrity, forty, instead of something like "two-ten, three-ten, four-ten," which is what we do for hundreds and thousands) cause English speakers to master basic math a lot more slowly than those with superior counting systems.
That would be 0.435 miles.
We use decimal fractions of miles all the time in the US when measuring long distances. We even have 0.1 mile markers on all of our highways.
Next question.
Sometimes it makes sense for things to fit tightly.
So, as somebody who's actually there and actually knows what life is like for a techno-geek in today's Iraq, perhaps you could give us a detailed account about current network infrastructure, how easy or difficult it is to buy computer parts, how much Iraqi people (and Iraqi computer geeks in particular) use Internet technologies to connect to one another (e-mail, blogs, instant messaging, the web, etc.), what cultural attitudes in Iraq concerning the Internet, the global community, and the West, etc.
Most people in the United States (which is where most of the readers of /. come from) know very little about day-to-day life in Iraq. A detailed account would probably be very educational and broadening.
You would think that the man who once talked Francis Ford Coppola into making "The Godfather" would have enough judgment to recognize how awful his recent movies were turning out before he released them.
His point is still valid. Watch "Logan's Run." That's what sci-fi adventures prior to Star Wars looked like.
The three major monotheist religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Their sacred texts, the source of most (if not all) of their dogma, are the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran. Kindly site a sinlge line from any of these three books which states that we are the only intelligent life in the universe.
I'll tell you what, I'll save you some time on that assignment, and tell you that you can't. There is no such statement of doctorine in any of these religions.
Love, oh love oh loveless love
We set our hearts on goldless gold
From milkless milk, and silkless silk
We are growing used to soulless souls
I wish that the "under-$20 Million" wide distribution industry had more people that understand that. If they did, we would get a lot more flawed-yet-fun direct to video movies like "The Cube" and a lot fewer pieces of crap like "Resident Evil."