Without the sun, the machines sought out a new energy source to survive. So no, no one stopped to think, because there wasn't an opportunity to do so.
Apparently not the machines, either, because their "new energy source" (biological heat and electricity) was really just another mechanism for converting solar power.
Fuck, who knows if they even had a stupid thing like PID in the first place?
Obviously, I was not implying that they must have been using a *nix box, but if it is a computer network, they would be pretty shortsighted to build one in which they could not monitor network traffic... and the story established that disconnecting somebody killed them, so trace the traffic, kill the connection, and you got one more dead rebel. Cause they needed to get into the "oracle's" mainframe and all the other networks were down.
Whatever. The fact is that they established that they had another interface choice available (the console) which was actually judged by some characters as being superior, and operations via console don't carry the risk of an agent killing you, so why use a potentially lethal interface when you can reach the "oracle" or whatever from behind a nice safe monitor.
We also know that they had the ability to program artificial avitars (like "the woman in the red dress"), so why not send those in to do your dirty work, and let the rebels relax on the ship?
None of this takes away from what a fun movie it was, but people who try to call this a "hacker move" or a "sci fi movie" and take it seriously need to recognize that it fell very short of the mark to be anything of the sort. Its a superhero story with lots of cool fights and effects. Nothing more.
Oh, by the way, I don't "sit around the office watercooler and discuss all of the inaccuracies or plausibility in the various Star Trek episodes" either, because Star Trek is also not really very good science fiction". It's a show. Watch it for what it is, and enjoy it.
Same goes for The Matrix. The Matrix is fun to watch. Not good science fiction, really, but good film-making.
Damn, some people can be touchy. I dare to mention that The Matrix is really more of a wire-fu fantasy than science fiction, and people immediately assume that I'm part of the army of critics who are proud of how much they hated it. Let me clarify (a lot, so it might sink in): I liked The Matrix. I liked it. That means I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good movie.
Next time, respond to what I said, not to what you think might have been my motivation.
I didn't say it had to be reality, I said it had to follow it's own rules. In other words, when a sci fi story explains how something works, you should not see things happening that are inconsistant with that explanation.
Some examples of really well-done science fiction in films include "2001", "Dark City", "Pi", "Dune", "Brazil", "Metropolis", "Sphere", "Terminator", hell, even "Cherry 3000"... dozens more, that's just what came to mind in the few seconds it took me to write this.
More amusing yet is where the word "rosebud" really came from.
Orson Wells heard that "rosebud" was a pet-name that Hearst gave to his young girlfriend's gentalia.
Wells figured if he was going to piss off Hearst, he might as well do it right, so Kane's dying word was "Rosebud", and it was an expression of desire to recapture his lost youth and innocence.
Pretty nasty shot at the man when you think about it.
1. motion is easy... just fire the cameras in series instead of all at once. same tech, same concept.
2. The Gap ad (and the beer ad) both came out before "Lost in Space".
IIRC, the beer ad was the first time it was ever used (commercialy anyway... the concept was worked out first, then shopped around to ad producers and film-makers), and it was followed shortly afterwards by a the Gap swing-dancing ad, which integrated the wrap-around with regular motion cameras.
Later Lost in Space used it, but found that when they used it on motionless people, it looked like the camera was panning around a bunch of maniquens, so they added a tiny ammount of motion so you would know it was still the actors.
By the way, if you are thinking of renting Lost in Space to see this early version of the effect in action, don't bother... it's a shitty movie.
As I once said before on a previous Matrix-discussion thread (jeez... there have been a lot of them here), the difference between science fiction and pure magical fantasy is that science fiction should follow its own rules, and characters should behave as though they live in a world where those rules apply.
From the very beginning of Morpheus's explanation, there are problems. The evil robots were solar powered, so man blots out the sun... Wouldn't somebody have stopped to think that biological organisms (like us) are also solar powered, and that blotting out the sun would kill us all?
Okay, so evil robots build a mental playground for their "crops" of humans to live in... setting aside the flaws in this speculation (there's no sunlight to produce vegitaion for people to eat, and feeding the dead to the living would be one of the least successful attempts at a perpetual motion machine ever; a comatose body is just as easy to draw from as a person in the "matrix"; etc.), setting aside that this exact concept was done before (an old Dr. Who episode, in which the Doctor enters "the matrix", a powerful networked computer that you connect your brain to, in order to battle his rival in a surreal computer-generated environment), there is the simple problem that the evil robots have total control of the Matrix.
Agent Smith believed that keeping Morpheus alive was important, because he wanted information, but once he had Morpheus, Neo was meaningless to him. If the robots are the sysadmins of the matrix, why chase him around, shooting virtual bullets at him with a virtual gun? Why not just send a "kill -9" to Neo's PID, and be rid of him?
Another problem... the "children of zion" explain that by staring at the console, they can understand the Matrix far better than somebody burdened with the mental GUI of going into it... so why go in at all? Why not hack a command prompt for yourself, and avoid the totally unneccesary risk of plugging your brain into a network run by evil robots?
In really good sci fi, it makes more sense the more you think about it. With films like The Matrix, it makes less sense the more you think about it.
That's why The Matrix, while being a fun wire-fu movie, is simply not good science fiction.
Re:wtf should he need to be a "big fan" of that Po
on
The Art Of The Matrix
·
· Score: 1
I saw both, and The Replacements was a little bit worse.
Superman IV suffered from crappy writing and ham-fisted film making, but The Replacements had all that and Keanu playing a conflicted and remorseful quarterback. (You can tell he's conflicted and remorseful because the keep showing him alone while sad music plays).
Still, let us not forget that Gene Hackman was also in "Postcards From The Edge". Gene Hackman is a great actor, but he's batting about.250 when it comes to starring in good movies.
Re:wtf should he need to be a "big fan" of that Po
on
The Art Of The Matrix
·
· Score: 2
I mostly agree with you. Dark City thought out the sci fi better, and was a much better example of science fiction, but The Matrix was a hoot.
The thing is, the creators of The Matrix did not really set out to do sci-fi. They wanted to do a comic-book style superhero series, with lots of wire-fu for the fighting. The first of three films to be an "origin" story, and setting everything in a computer-game world makes the wire-fu credible.
I think the effect of the helicopter sending ripples through the glass of a skyscraper as Trinity crashes into the opposite window is 3 seconds of film that earned the price of admission right there... certainly a better-looking effect than anything Lucas's CGI team was able to come up with.
All that said, the story for The Matrix is pretty silly, filled with holes and bad ideas, and stupid moments like when the "oracle" turns out to be an elderly, matronly, black lady living in a slum who says "not what you expected, is it" when she was excactly what we expected.
The one point where I disagree is where you say that KR is not a bad actor, but a limited one. He is a horrible actor! he can say "woah" with a dumbfounded look fairly well, but in every scene he has ever had where he actually needs to say more than one line, he stinks up the whole picture.
His stardom began with "Bill and Ted's Excelent Adventure", when he was an idiot 20-something who utterly failed to portray an idiot teenager with any degree of believabilty. Things went downhill from there. Films like "Much Ado" and "Dracula" would grind to a halt every time Keanu opened his mouth.
The one thing that saved him is action films. We are so used to seeing action films that star people who speak little or no English that a bad actor who overannounciates everything seems pretty good by comparison. Keanu can chug right along making action flicks like Speed and The Matrix, and it will never really matter that he can't act.
Re:wtf should he need to be a "big fan" of that Po
on
The Art Of The Matrix
·
· Score: 2
I mostly agree with you. Dark City thought out the sci fi better, and was a much better example of science fiction, but The Matrix was a hoot.
The thing is, the creators of The Matrix did not really set out to do sci-fi. They wanted to do a comic-book style superhero series, with lots of wire-fu for the fighting. The first of three films to be an "origin" story, and setting everything in a computer-game world makes the wire-fu credible.
I think the effect of the helicopter sending ripples through the glass of a skyscraper as Trinity crashes into the opposite window is 3 seconds of film that earned the price of admission right there... certainly a better-looking effect than anything Lucas's CGI team was able to come up with.
All that said, the story for The Matrix is pretty silly, filled with holes and bad ideas, and stupid moments like when the "oracle" turns out to be an elderly, matronly, black lady living in a slum who says "not what you expected, is it" when she was excactly what we expected.
The one point where I disagree is where you say that KR is not a bad actor, but a limited one. He is a horrible actor! he can say "woah" with a dumbfounded look fairly well, but in every scene he has ever had where he actually needs to say more than one line, he stinks up the whole picture.
His stardom began with "Bill and Ted's Excelent Adventure", when he was an idiot 20-something who utterly failed to portray an idiot teenager with any degree of believabilty. Things went downhill from there. Films like "Much Ado" and "Dracula" would grind to a halt every time Keanu opened his mouth.
The one thing that saved him is action films. We are so used to seeing action films that star people who speak little or no English that a bad actor who overannounciates everything seems pretty good by comparison. Keanu can chug right along making action flick like Speed and The Matrix, and it will never really matter that he can't act.
The real beautiful part about that commercial is that NBCi announced that they are shutting down last Monday, but the commercial is still running! I just saw it during Conan last night in the Twin Cities.
Looks like the dumb dot-com moments keep on coming.
Also of note: Of all the services offered by NBCi, what generated the most buzz was their pretty spokesmodel (reminiscent of the sock puppet spokesman for pets.com, which became their hottest seller).
Hey, now there's a model for bailing out NBCi.com... nude movies of the "pick a word, click it, get information" girl.
So what you are saying is, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury... I'm just a cave man. I was trapped under ice for thousands of years and unfrozen by your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me..."
Okay so China has a communist dictatorship, is that worse than being a country that acts like a spoilt bully in a sandpit at kindergarten?
Yes.
One that throws its weight around at the UN to get the UN to serve its needs (bugger everyone else), and yet fails to pay its UN fees.
Oh... you mean like the former Soviet Union. Or France? Or China? The UN is an institution which is mostly of Europeans, for Europeans, and of Europeans. We provide most of the UN's armed forces, but have very little say over where they are deployed (no more say that China has, for example).
Oh, so they have ICBM's targeted at your cities... oh thats really bad, I feel so sorry for you. Maybe its because you have ICBM's targetted at them?
Yes. I did not say they lacked the right to have their missiles targeted at us. I was pointing out that ANY country would be insane not to monitor a rival nation who has nuclear attack capability. That includes us, and them.
As for the last few lines of what you wrote, how about reading them and realising you are exibiting the same childish nonsense that the US as a country does.
It was meant to be funny. Shop around and see if you can afford to get a sense of humor.
As the writer of the parent comment, I can tell you that it was intended as a joke. moderation totals (so far): +2 Funny, -1 Overrated, +1 Insightful, -1 Troll.
So 2 moderators got the humor, anyway.
As for the post that was not modded up... he posted as an AC after hundreds of posts have already gone by. Nobody is reading these threads any more beyond people looking at replies to their comments, so there is nobody left to moderate them. (Other than bitter people with a grudge, hence the late "Troll" mod that was done to my post).
I agree that his post had a lot of interesting points, although they have all been said by now several times. It's the nature of/. discussions that we start repeating each other after a while.
Sabre rattling is one thing. Holding military personell as prisoners is quite another. If the crew of that plane is held for much longer, this stops being a mere diplomatic squabble, and becomes a hostage crisis.
I seriously hope that China is smart enough not to let it come to that.
the bombing of chinese embassy during Kosovo war 2 years ago had negative effect on this insident. you can't compare this one to the incidents during cold war.
You say that as if no Americans or Soviets were ever accidentally killed during the cold war. Some of us are old enough to remember that the USSR/US relationship during that period was FAR MORE hostile than the current one between the US and China.
These are the facts:
1. China is (and wants to remain) a trade partner of the US. Continued trade is in the best interest of both countries
2. China has been a political rival of the US ever since Chairman Mao took over.
3. Political rivals spy on each other.
4. To avoid cold wars turning into hot wars, international rules and guidelines have been established for handling these situations.
5. China has chosen to ignore these guidelines, by damaging a US plane in international waters, forcing it to land in China, taking the crew hostage, and salvaging the plane for whatever secrets they can find. All of these actions ignore established treaties and protocols, none of the US actions can be faulted at this point.
As for the embassy bombing... We accidentally took out a French embassy in the 80's when we were bombing Lybia. Then, as now, we apologized for the incident, stating (quite truthfully) that any time you bomb an enemy, you risk damaging surrounding buildings which may belong to people you do not intend to attack. France has yet to take Americans hostage in the wake of that incident.
Um... it's a common 4-prop plane, and the "highly secret spying equipment" was probably just radio surveillance gear that was made in Taiwan. If the Chinese can learn anything from common hardware like that, then they must be further behind us than we suspected.
On behalf of all Americans, let me say that I am sorry.
I am sorry that we dared to fly a plane in international waters without your permission. We will be sure to check with you next time.
I am sorry that we were trying to keep an eye on a communist dictatorship who has ICBM's targeted at our cities. I don't know what we were thinking.
I am also deeply sorry that we crashed into your ran into your little fighter jet with our big, lumbering 4-prop spy plane. I'm sure that the jet pilot had absolutely no chance of getting out of the way, and the accident is entirely our fault.
Oh yes, and I would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused by the trouble of holding 24 of our people. Please allow us to reimburse you for all the food that these freeloading hostages have been eating at your expense.
Lastly, let me assure you that the next time we hold a vote over Most Favored Nation status for China, and when we vote about China's admission to the WTO, and when China is considered to host the 2008 Olympics... I sincerely promise you that we will, at that time, say "fuck off and die you damned red commie bastards!"
Linux is perpetually improving, and the Linux experience that somebody would have today is vastly better than the one they would have had 3 years ago... But if they tried Linux 3 years ago and rejected it, the likelyhood of them giving it another shot today is not so great.
Perhaps they should take a marketing tip from the big software companies, and rename the product every time there's a.x version update. Instead of "Linux, (kernel 2.4)", it's "LinuxPro" or "Linux2000" or "SuperLinux".
A lame-assed marketing name would really serve to announce to the world that a new kernel update is Something New.
But I thought that the whole point that ESR was trying to make in "The Cathedral and The Bazarre" was that a company that "has the power of size and money" can not possibly outproduce an army of open-source code hackers. Are you saying that ESR was wrong?
Everything you said about hacking is absolutely correct, except one...
The limit of what damage hackers can do has not yet been discovered, but we know that it is high.
As a very simple example, the first destructive worm was a hacker experiment gone awry.
Taking down a medical database at a hospital might slow down the ER staff just enough to kill somebody who otherwise might have lived. Hacking is an important method for learning about how things work, but to say that it can do no real harm is a little misleading.
I recall when I was a young kid we had a teacher that insisted that "you can not damage computer hardware with software"... we of course saw that as a great hacking challenge. One of the kids in our class wrote a small program that caused both of an Apple]['s floppy drives to spin (and keep spinning) simultaniously. Run it overnight, and burn out the power supply. A fairly simple trick, but not bad for a 10 year-old kid.
A hacker can do tremendous ammounts of damage, both deliberately and by mistake, when rummaging through an unfamiliar system looking for weaknesses. Most good hackers, like good wilderness campers, do their best to leave no trace of their visit, but not all hackers are good hackers... and even the good ones were green and ignorant once.
The biggest danger malicious hackers pose is not dumping private information. There's the danger of theft. There's also the danger of higher maintenence costs (both in preventative security and disaster recovery).
That said, I know of no case where a malicious hacker has done as much damage to a company as bad software design. Looking through that lens, the most effectively destructive hacker in history is Bill Gates. (Not because Microsft's software is the worst, there have definately been worse software companies through the years, but because Microsoft's bad software has been put on more critical systems than anybody else's.)
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently not the machines, either, because their "new energy source" (biological heat and electricity) was really just another mechanism for converting solar power.
Fuck, who knows if they even had a stupid thing like PID in the first place?
Obviously, I was not implying that they must have been using a *nix box, but if it is a computer network, they would be pretty shortsighted to build one in which they could not monitor network traffic... and the story established that disconnecting somebody killed them, so trace the traffic, kill the connection, and you got one more dead rebel. Cause they needed to get into the "oracle's" mainframe and all the other networks were down.
Whatever. The fact is that they established that they had another interface choice available (the console) which was actually judged by some characters as being superior, and operations via console don't carry the risk of an agent killing you, so why use a potentially lethal interface when you can reach the "oracle" or whatever from behind a nice safe monitor.
We also know that they had the ability to program artificial avitars (like "the woman in the red dress"), so why not send those in to do your dirty work, and let the rebels relax on the ship?
None of this takes away from what a fun movie it was, but people who try to call this a "hacker move" or a "sci fi movie" and take it seriously need to recognize that it fell very short of the mark to be anything of the sort. Its a superhero story with lots of cool fights and effects. Nothing more.
Same goes for The Matrix. The Matrix is fun to watch. Not good science fiction, really, but good film-making.
Damn, some people can be touchy. I dare to mention that The Matrix is really more of a wire-fu fantasy than science fiction, and people immediately assume that I'm part of the army of critics who are proud of how much they hated it. Let me clarify (a lot, so it might sink in): I liked The Matrix. I liked it. That means I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good movie.
Next time, respond to what I said, not to what you think might have been my motivation.
Some examples of really well-done science fiction in films include "2001", "Dark City", "Pi", "Dune", "Brazil", "Metropolis", "Sphere", "Terminator", hell, even "Cherry 3000"... dozens more, that's just what came to mind in the few seconds it took me to write this.
Well done, AC. Funny stuff. Posts like that are the reason I still read at 0. I hope you get modded way up.
Orson Wells heard that "rosebud" was a pet-name that Hearst gave to his young girlfriend's gentalia.
Wells figured if he was going to piss off Hearst, he might as well do it right, so Kane's dying word was "Rosebud", and it was an expression of desire to recapture his lost youth and innocence.
Pretty nasty shot at the man when you think about it.
2. The Gap ad (and the beer ad) both came out before "Lost in Space".
IIRC, the beer ad was the first time it was ever used (commercialy anyway... the concept was worked out first, then shopped around to ad producers and film-makers), and it was followed shortly afterwards by a the Gap swing-dancing ad, which integrated the wrap-around with regular motion cameras.
Later Lost in Space used it, but found that when they used it on motionless people, it looked like the camera was panning around a bunch of maniquens, so they added a tiny ammount of motion so you would know it was still the actors.
By the way, if you are thinking of renting Lost in Space to see this early version of the effect in action, don't bother... it's a shitty movie.
From the very beginning of Morpheus's explanation, there are problems. The evil robots were solar powered, so man blots out the sun... Wouldn't somebody have stopped to think that biological organisms (like us) are also solar powered, and that blotting out the sun would kill us all?
Okay, so evil robots build a mental playground for their "crops" of humans to live in... setting aside the flaws in this speculation (there's no sunlight to produce vegitaion for people to eat, and feeding the dead to the living would be one of the least successful attempts at a perpetual motion machine ever; a comatose body is just as easy to draw from as a person in the "matrix"; etc.), setting aside that this exact concept was done before (an old Dr. Who episode, in which the Doctor enters "the matrix", a powerful networked computer that you connect your brain to, in order to battle his rival in a surreal computer-generated environment), there is the simple problem that the evil robots have total control of the Matrix.
Agent Smith believed that keeping Morpheus alive was important, because he wanted information, but once he had Morpheus, Neo was meaningless to him. If the robots are the sysadmins of the matrix, why chase him around, shooting virtual bullets at him with a virtual gun? Why not just send a "kill -9" to Neo's PID, and be rid of him?
Another problem... the "children of zion" explain that by staring at the console, they can understand the Matrix far better than somebody burdened with the mental GUI of going into it... so why go in at all? Why not hack a command prompt for yourself, and avoid the totally unneccesary risk of plugging your brain into a network run by evil robots?
In really good sci fi, it makes more sense the more you think about it. With films like The Matrix, it makes less sense the more you think about it.
That's why The Matrix, while being a fun wire-fu movie, is simply not good science fiction.
Superman IV suffered from crappy writing and ham-fisted film making, but The Replacements had all that and Keanu playing a conflicted and remorseful quarterback. (You can tell he's conflicted and remorseful because the keep showing him alone while sad music plays).
Still, let us not forget that Gene Hackman was also in "Postcards From The Edge". Gene Hackman is a great actor, but he's batting about .250 when it comes to starring in good movies.
The thing is, the creators of The Matrix did not really set out to do sci-fi. They wanted to do a comic-book style superhero series, with lots of wire-fu for the fighting. The first of three films to be an "origin" story, and setting everything in a computer-game world makes the wire-fu credible.
I think the effect of the helicopter sending ripples through the glass of a skyscraper as Trinity crashes into the opposite window is 3 seconds of film that earned the price of admission right there... certainly a better-looking effect than anything Lucas's CGI team was able to come up with.
All that said, the story for The Matrix is pretty silly, filled with holes and bad ideas, and stupid moments like when the "oracle" turns out to be an elderly, matronly, black lady living in a slum who says "not what you expected, is it" when she was excactly what we expected.
The one point where I disagree is where you say that KR is not a bad actor, but a limited one. He is a horrible actor! he can say "woah" with a dumbfounded look fairly well, but in every scene he has ever had where he actually needs to say more than one line, he stinks up the whole picture.
His stardom began with "Bill and Ted's Excelent Adventure", when he was an idiot 20-something who utterly failed to portray an idiot teenager with any degree of believabilty. Things went downhill from there. Films like "Much Ado" and "Dracula" would grind to a halt every time Keanu opened his mouth.
The one thing that saved him is action films. We are so used to seeing action films that star people who speak little or no English that a bad actor who overannounciates everything seems pretty good by comparison. Keanu can chug right along making action flicks like Speed and The Matrix, and it will never really matter that he can't act.
The thing is, the creators of The Matrix did not really set out to do sci-fi. They wanted to do a comic-book style superhero series, with lots of wire-fu for the fighting. The first of three films to be an "origin" story, and setting everything in a computer-game world makes the wire-fu credible.
I think the effect of the helicopter sending ripples through the glass of a skyscraper as Trinity crashes into the opposite window is 3 seconds of film that earned the price of admission right there... certainly a better-looking effect than anything Lucas's CGI team was able to come up with.
All that said, the story for The Matrix is pretty silly, filled with holes and bad ideas, and stupid moments like when the "oracle" turns out to be an elderly, matronly, black lady living in a slum who says "not what you expected, is it" when she was excactly what we expected.
The one point where I disagree is where you say that KR is not a bad actor, but a limited one. He is a horrible actor! he can say "woah" with a dumbfounded look fairly well, but in every scene he has ever had where he actually needs to say more than one line, he stinks up the whole picture.
His stardom began with "Bill and Ted's Excelent Adventure", when he was an idiot 20-something who utterly failed to portray an idiot teenager with any degree of believabilty. Things went downhill from there. Films like "Much Ado" and "Dracula" would grind to a halt every time Keanu opened his mouth.
The one thing that saved him is action films. We are so used to seeing action films that star people who speak little or no English that a bad actor who overannounciates everything seems pretty good by comparison. Keanu can chug right along making action flick like Speed and The Matrix, and it will never really matter that he can't act.
Looks like the dumb dot-com moments keep on coming.
Also of note: Of all the services offered by NBCi, what generated the most buzz was their pretty spokesmodel (reminiscent of the sock puppet spokesman for pets.com, which became their hottest seller).
Hey, now there's a model for bailing out NBCi.com... nude movies of the "pick a word, click it, get information" girl.
So what you are saying is, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury... I'm just a cave man. I was trapped under ice for thousands of years and unfrozen by your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me..."
Yes.
One that throws its weight around at the UN to get the UN to serve its needs (bugger everyone else), and yet fails to pay its UN fees. Oh... you mean like the former Soviet Union. Or France? Or China? The UN is an institution which is mostly of Europeans, for Europeans, and of Europeans. We provide most of the UN's armed forces, but have very little say over where they are deployed (no more say that China has, for example).
Oh, so they have ICBM's targeted at your cities... oh thats really bad, I feel so sorry for you. Maybe its because you have ICBM's targetted at them?
Yes. I did not say they lacked the right to have their missiles targeted at us. I was pointing out that ANY country would be insane not to monitor a rival nation who has nuclear attack capability. That includes us, and them.
As for the last few lines of what you wrote, how about reading them and realising you are exibiting the same childish nonsense that the US as a country does.
It was meant to be funny. Shop around and see if you can afford to get a sense of humor.
We are not right because we are Americans, we are right because we did nothing wrong.
So 2 moderators got the humor, anyway.
As for the post that was not modded up... he posted as an AC after hundreds of posts have already gone by. Nobody is reading these threads any more beyond people looking at replies to their comments, so there is nobody left to moderate them. (Other than bitter people with a grudge, hence the late "Troll" mod that was done to my post).
I agree that his post had a lot of interesting points, although they have all been said by now several times. It's the nature of /. discussions that we start repeating each other after a while.
I seriously hope that China is smart enough not to let it come to that.
You say that as if no Americans or Soviets were ever accidentally killed during the cold war. Some of us are old enough to remember that the USSR/US relationship during that period was FAR MORE hostile than the current one between the US and China.
These are the facts:
1. China is (and wants to remain) a trade partner of the US. Continued trade is in the best interest of both countries
2. China has been a political rival of the US ever since Chairman Mao took over.
3. Political rivals spy on each other.
4. To avoid cold wars turning into hot wars, international rules and guidelines have been established for handling these situations.
5. China has chosen to ignore these guidelines, by damaging a US plane in international waters, forcing it to land in China, taking the crew hostage, and salvaging the plane for whatever secrets they can find. All of these actions ignore established treaties and protocols, none of the US actions can be faulted at this point.
As for the embassy bombing... We accidentally took out a French embassy in the 80's when we were bombing Lybia. Then, as now, we apologized for the incident, stating (quite truthfully) that any time you bomb an enemy, you risk damaging surrounding buildings which may belong to people you do not intend to attack. France has yet to take Americans hostage in the wake of that incident.
Um... it's a common 4-prop plane, and the "highly secret spying equipment" was probably just radio surveillance gear that was made in Taiwan. If the Chinese can learn anything from common hardware like that, then they must be further behind us than we suspected.
On behalf of all Americans, let me say that I am sorry.
I am sorry that we dared to fly a plane in international waters without your permission. We will be sure to check with you next time.
I am sorry that we were trying to keep an eye on a communist dictatorship who has ICBM's targeted at our cities. I don't know what we were thinking.
I am also deeply sorry that we crashed into your ran into your little fighter jet with our big, lumbering 4-prop spy plane. I'm sure that the jet pilot had absolutely no chance of getting out of the way, and the accident is entirely our fault.
Oh yes, and I would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused by the trouble of holding 24 of our people. Please allow us to reimburse you for all the food that these freeloading hostages have been eating at your expense.
Lastly, let me assure you that the next time we hold a vote over Most Favored Nation status for China, and when we vote about China's admission to the WTO, and when China is considered to host the 2008 Olympics... I sincerely promise you that we will, at that time, say "fuck off and die you damned red commie bastards!"
I hope this apology makes our feelings clear.
During the cold war, a Soviet spy plane (spying on America from International waters) had to make an emergency landing in Alaska.
How did we handle this? Did we snoop around in the plane? Detain the pilots as hostages? Demand an apology from the Russians?
No. We refueled their plane and sent them on their way.
I think that answers your question.
1. I am not a "Linux advocate". Just an occational Linux user.
2. I did not say it was an unusual thing. I just said that Linux improvements are not marketed as well as improvements to other operating systems.
3. I really wish more people around here would respond to what I actually say, instead of respond to what they thinkmy personal perspective might be.
Linux is perpetually improving, and the Linux experience that somebody would have today is vastly better than the one they would have had 3 years ago... But if they tried Linux 3 years ago and rejected it, the likelyhood of them giving it another shot today is not so great.
Perhaps they should take a marketing tip from the big software companies, and rename the product every time there's a .x version update. Instead of "Linux, (kernel 2.4)", it's "LinuxPro" or "Linux2000" or "SuperLinux".
A lame-assed marketing name would really serve to announce to the world that a new kernel update is Something New.
Just a thought.
But I thought that the whole point that ESR was trying to make in "The Cathedral and The Bazarre" was that a company that "has the power of size and money" can not possibly outproduce an army of open-source code hackers. Are you saying that ESR was wrong?
It was a movie about a crypto expert who used work for the government, but was suddenly left "out in the cold".
It also has what was probably one of the earliest phone phreaking scenes ever made, if not the first.
The limit of what damage hackers can do has not yet been discovered, but we know that it is high.
As a very simple example, the first destructive worm was a hacker experiment gone awry.
Taking down a medical database at a hospital might slow down the ER staff just enough to kill somebody who otherwise might have lived. Hacking is an important method for learning about how things work, but to say that it can do no real harm is a little misleading.
I recall when I was a young kid we had a teacher that insisted that "you can not damage computer hardware with software"... we of course saw that as a great hacking challenge. One of the kids in our class wrote a small program that caused both of an Apple]['s floppy drives to spin (and keep spinning) simultaniously. Run it overnight, and burn out the power supply. A fairly simple trick, but not bad for a 10 year-old kid.
A hacker can do tremendous ammounts of damage, both deliberately and by mistake, when rummaging through an unfamiliar system looking for weaknesses. Most good hackers, like good wilderness campers, do their best to leave no trace of their visit, but not all hackers are good hackers... and even the good ones were green and ignorant once.
The biggest danger malicious hackers pose is not dumping private information. There's the danger of theft. There's also the danger of higher maintenence costs (both in preventative security and disaster recovery).
That said, I know of no case where a malicious hacker has done as much damage to a company as bad software design. Looking through that lens, the most effectively destructive hacker in history is Bill Gates. (Not because Microsft's software is the worst, there have definately been worse software companies through the years, but because Microsoft's bad software has been put on more critical systems than anybody else's.)