Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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Taken?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh, something else I forgot to mention. It's arguable whether at the end of the uber-mechas destroyed him, or whether he simply committed suicide by going to "sleep". The latter might be more likely since he appeared to voluntarily close his eyes. Of course, the uber-mechas may have known that by fulfilling his quest, that would cause him to turn off.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
on
Taken?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Great analysis. I also believe that A.I. is a vastly underrated and misunderstood movie.
So they did what the humans, in their arrogance, could not. They destroyed him.
This is not quite accurate. The humans did recognize that he was not capable of growing and/or learning, which is why they stated early on that these models, once imprinted, would have to be destroyed and couldn't be given to another owner. That's why the mother sent him off in the first place.
Other than that, I completely agree with you. That's the most interesting thing about the movie: it demonstrates that to be truly human requires all the negative traits, as well as the positive ones. They only built mecha with the positive traits, which meant they would never be fully human.
However, I tried searching for my digital camera ("canon powershot s40"), and it impressively found a lot of results. But when looked at the sites with very low prices, the price was much higher than the one that Google had listed! Like, $407 versus $480 or something like that.
I'm not sure where the price came from, and it might need some more refinement, but it started me thinking about how sites might defeat the Froogle search. If I was unscrupulous, I would try and detect when Google's IP address was searching me and send back a "special" page with a much lower price.
I'm not sure how Google is going to defeat that, short of using lots and lots of different IP addresses.
I don't mean for this to sound like a flame, but exactly what do you expect? People are biased. It might be a matter of taste, or a matter of honesty, or a matter of psychology (canonical example of the latter: Mac fans).
Read a lot of opinions, and ignore the ones that can't give supporting evidence for why their opinion is the way it is. Weigh the evidence, and decide what is important to you.
The other option is try to find publications that provide relatively unbiased comparisons of similar products. Consumer Reports is a particularly good one, although I don't always agree with how they rank things. But they generally tell you how they came to their conclusions.
But if you really care about the sound quality and want to hear what was recorded, even the best CD reproduction doesn't come close to good analog.
You know, I really think that the first CD manufacturer that comes out with a CD player that artificially creates analog distortion, hiss, wow-and-flutter, etc to create a more "natural" sound will make a zillion dollars.:)
Just for the record, you're not hearing what was "really recorded", you're hearing music distorted in a way that happens to sound pleasing to you. Nothing wrong with that, just like many people like the distortion of tube amplifers which creates a "warm" sound. But it's all distortion effects. CD = true, undistorted sound.
First, Java is a language. [...] doesn't mean that all other implementations are slow.
Java is an environment as well as a language. Unless this Java grid is planning to throw away the JVM, I think it's fair to say that it's probably using that standard Java environment. I'm not ruling out that a "magic" JVM might come along that somehow overcomes all the baggage of how Java is designed, but so far we've not seen this. Given the current state of technology, it seems foolish to me to throw away all that performance.
Based on my own experience, Java is on the average about 1/10th the speed of an equivalent C program, although clearly it depends on what you're doing. Where Java is particularly bad is very data intensive work, such as string manipulation. Where I was particularly appalled at Java's performance was XML parsing.
Java works best when it's a "glue" mechanism to pass communication between systems. Where it is not appropriate IMO is very computationally intensive applications, which presumably would be what you would use a grid for.
A JAVA based computing initiative?? I have to say, that's one of the stupidest things I've heard in a long time. I guess I can kind of understand the attraction of being able to use the grid across various architectures, but you're throwing away (at least) 90% of your computing power.
Java has its place, but it just seems silly to use it for this purpose.
All you've proven with all of that is if you don't know how to drive large vehicles, then you can roll the vehicle. If you don't drive them like a sports car, they're not going to roll in normal conditions.
As for your story about an SUV getting clipped, etc, that sounds a lot like someone saying, "I never wear seat belts, because what if I went off the road into a lake? I would be a dead man!" Sure, that's one scenerio... but the odds of a seat belt saving you are are much higher than a seat belt killing you. I look at weight the same way. You're much more likely to be involved in a collision (rear-ender, most likely) than a spin off the road or a rolling accident. And if I have some jackass drunk driver like your sports car driver plowing into my family, I want to make sure it's my family coming out alive, not the drunk.
Nazi Germany announced that they will begin harvesting Jews for spare parts. A spokesman stated that "we understand that this is controversial in many people's minds, and that many believe that Jews are human beings. But we see this as a question of choice, and given the many benefits that will arise from this research, we feel the good outweighs any political considerations.
Exactly. You only have to look at those insane "indy media" sites, or hell, look at Kuro5hin to see what happens when the lunatics run the asylum.
As much contempt as I have for the national media and professional reporters in general (they are generally the least intelligent people in any profession), they at least half-try to check facts and do multiple sourcing.
We are never going to have a machine that is truly "human". Let me explain.
That doesn't mean we won't have intelligent machines that can do just about anything intellectually that a human can do. A human being is more than just a smart computer. Our behavior is governed not only by the higher logic of our brain, but also by millions of years of bizarre -- often obsolete -- instincts. If you yanked a brain out of a body and hooked it to a computer, it would no longer be truly human because of the lack of hormonal responses that come from every part of the body.
It's simply going to be too hard/impractical and, frankly, useless to make an intelligent machine that mimicked every hormonal reaction and instinctual mechanism.
We will have intelligent machines, but we will never have human machines.
Who's the guy that had the theory that oil in the ground is NOT old dinosaurs, but actually bacteria in the hot ground? And that we will never run out of oil because it will replenish itself?
I would imagine that theory gets some boosting from this.
I'm not saying "pay for access" is right, but on the other hand, who should politicians listen to? Someone who controls an industry and affects millions of people (like Microsoft) or Joe L33t who has no perspective beyond his own limited world?
It's kind of like when you advertise a job and get hundreds of resumes back that look basically the same. Personally, anyone who has misspelled words goes straight into the trash can to thin the herd. That may sound unfair to people who send resumes, but you have to use SOME method of thinning since you can't interview hundreds of people.
Politicians need some sort of method to thin the herd of people who give advice. I really think that's at the root of this, rather than simplistic corruption that many make this out to be. They have to choose SOMEBODY to talk to, so they might as well choose people who have been good to them in the past. In other words, it's loyalty at work, not bribery.
What's so "astounding" about it? Linux is just an operating system. It runs programs. It provides disk I/O. It does not do rendering. It's the applications that do anything "astounding".
In other words, all this really proves is that the operating system is pretty much irrelevent for this sort of work, not that Linux is particularly suited to it (other than being inexpensive).
I'm not saying that they're necessarily intechangeable tools, only that Visio's user interface is soooo much better, not to mention infinitely more stable.
I don't have all that much to add, except -- God, Rational Rose was one of the buggiest, worst-designed pieces of software I've ever used. The one time I had to use it I prayed that someone over there would buy a copy of Visio to learn how a diagramming tool SHOULD be designed.
I always found it hysterically ironic that a tool that was touted by its makers as the ultimate way to develop software demonstrated so poorly its own usefulness.
Maybe after buying it IBM will run it into the ground ala Lotus. We can only hope.
Now I wasn't writing down the stats when I was watching the movie, but that sounds like a good idea and that's something I'll do when I rent it.
Here's something else to ask yourself. If Moore is just a honest man in search of the truth, why does he feel the need to make anyone look like a baffoon in his movies? Your answer may be "he doesn't, he's just showing what they themselves say". But you know that's a cop-out. You can make anyone look like an idiot depending on how you cut the film. Moore obviously knew that his subject was going to look like an idiot, and that the subject obviously wasn't intending that. Why not take some extra time to give the subject a chance to fill out his argument?
Then there was this quote from another IMDB poster...
I agree with some of the flaws critics have noted...sometimes Moore does target the wrong people (e.g., going after Dick Clark because a woman who worked at one of his theme restaurants for minimum wage is a mother of a little boy that accidentally shot and killed a classmate).
So why go after Dick Clark? Because he gave Moore some juicy film to use?
The thing about Moore is that he obviously has some talent for invoking emotion (obviously), and raising questions. If only he would use that talent for good instead of evil.
But then he probably wouldn't make as much money, or get as many accolades from the Hollywood left.
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Oh, something else I forgot to mention. It's arguable whether at the end of the uber-mechas destroyed him, or whether he simply committed suicide by going to "sleep". The latter might be more likely since he appeared to voluntarily close his eyes. Of course, the uber-mechas may have known that by fulfilling his quest, that would cause him to turn off.
Great analysis. I also believe that A.I. is a vastly underrated and misunderstood movie.
So they did what the humans, in their arrogance, could not. They destroyed him.
This is not quite accurate. The humans did recognize that he was not capable of growing and/or learning, which is why they stated early on that these models, once imprinted, would have to be destroyed and couldn't be given to another owner. That's why the mother sent him off in the first place.
Other than that, I completely agree with you. That's the most interesting thing about the movie: it demonstrates that to be truly human requires all the negative traits, as well as the positive ones. They only built mecha with the positive traits, which meant they would never be fully human.
Wow, that's very, very cool.
However, I tried searching for my digital camera ("canon powershot s40"), and it impressively found a lot of results. But when looked at the sites with very low prices, the price was much higher than the one that Google had listed! Like, $407 versus $480 or something like that.
I'm not sure where the price came from, and it might need some more refinement, but it started me thinking about how sites might defeat the Froogle search. If I was unscrupulous, I would try and detect when Google's IP address was searching me and send back a "special" page with a much lower price.
I'm not sure how Google is going to defeat that, short of using lots and lots of different IP addresses.
I don't mean for this to sound like a flame, but exactly what do you expect? People are biased. It might be a matter of taste, or a matter of honesty, or a matter of psychology (canonical example of the latter: Mac fans).
Read a lot of opinions, and ignore the ones that can't give supporting evidence for why their opinion is the way it is. Weigh the evidence, and decide what is important to you.
The other option is try to find publications that provide relatively unbiased comparisons of similar products. Consumer Reports is a particularly good one, although I don't always agree with how they rank things. But they generally tell you how they came to their conclusions.
CD does an awesome job of recreating complex high frequency wave forms, huh?
As a matter of fact, it does. What that link doesn't tell you (which I'm pretty suprised by -- that site is usually pretty good) is that:
a) the distortion caused by digital encoding is WELL below human's ability to detect, and
b) the distortion caused by vinyl (which is a pretty crude mechanism) is WAY above those stair steps on the guy's chart.
This poster has already covered all this territory better than I could, along with lots of links.
But if you really care about the sound quality and want to hear what was recorded, even the best CD reproduction doesn't come close to good analog.
You know, I really think that the first CD manufacturer that comes out with a CD player that artificially creates analog distortion, hiss, wow-and-flutter, etc to create a more "natural" sound will make a zillion dollars. :)
Just for the record, you're not hearing what was "really recorded", you're hearing music distorted in a way that happens to sound pleasing to you. Nothing wrong with that, just like many people like the distortion of tube amplifers which creates a "warm" sound. But it's all distortion effects. CD = true, undistorted sound.
First, Java is a language. [...] doesn't mean that all other implementations are slow.
Java is an environment as well as a language. Unless this Java grid is planning to throw away the JVM, I think it's fair to say that it's probably using that standard Java environment. I'm not ruling out that a "magic" JVM might come along that somehow overcomes all the baggage of how Java is designed, but so far we've not seen this. Given the current state of technology, it seems foolish to me to throw away all that performance.
Based on my own experience, Java is on the average about 1/10th the speed of an equivalent C program, although clearly it depends on what you're doing. Where Java is particularly bad is very data intensive work, such as string manipulation. Where I was particularly appalled at Java's performance was XML parsing.
Java works best when it's a "glue" mechanism to pass communication between systems. Where it is not appropriate IMO is very computationally intensive applications, which presumably would be what you would use a grid for.
A JAVA based computing initiative?? I have to say, that's one of the stupidest things I've heard in a long time. I guess I can kind of understand the attraction of being able to use the grid across various architectures, but you're throwing away (at least) 90% of your computing power.
Java has its place, but it just seems silly to use it for this purpose.
According to this Press Release the French have (accidentally) produced six nuclei of tetraneutron (nucleus with four neutrons and no protons).
Did they surrender soon afterward?
(sorry)
Hanging the turntable from the ceiling from chains and springs, so you and your friends could dance without making the needle skip.
Hey, nothing that a 500 pound piece of marble can't fix. :)
All you've proven with all of that is if you don't know how to drive large vehicles, then you can roll the vehicle. If you don't drive them like a sports car, they're not going to roll in normal conditions.
As for your story about an SUV getting clipped, etc, that sounds a lot like someone saying, "I never wear seat belts, because what if I went off the road into a lake? I would be a dead man!" Sure, that's one scenerio ... but the odds of a seat belt saving you are are much higher than a seat belt killing you. I look at weight the same way. You're much more likely to be involved in a collision (rear-ender, most likely) than a spin off the road or a rolling accident. And if I have some jackass drunk driver like your sports car driver plowing into my family, I want to make sure it's my family coming out alive, not the drunk.
Nazi Germany announced that they will begin harvesting Jews for spare parts. A spokesman stated that "we understand that this is controversial in many people's minds, and that many believe that Jews are human beings. But we see this as a question of choice, and given the many benefits that will arise from this research, we feel the good outweighs any political considerations.
I realize it's not the popular or cool thing to criticize SUVs,
Huh??? I don't know what world you're living in, but in my world it's oh-so-trendy to bash SUVs.
Personally, I like weight. Lots and lots of weight.
How about $1Million? Would it REALLY fucking cramp Mel's style? Or Tom Cruise's?
Why are you blaming the actors? What are they supposed to do, say "No thanks, that's too much money"?
If Mel Gibson can attract enough people to the movie to make that much money, who should get the money?
Exactly. You only have to look at those insane "indy media" sites, or hell, look at Kuro5hin to see what happens when the lunatics run the asylum.
As much contempt as I have for the national media and professional reporters in general (they are generally the least intelligent people in any profession), they at least half-try to check facts and do multiple sourcing.
Well, Mad Max is supposed to be pretty weather-beaten. :)
I was tempted to agree with you, but actually dude is younger than you might think. He's only 46. Not like, say, Harrison Ford who is 60.
We are never going to have a machine that is truly "human". Let me explain.
That doesn't mean we won't have intelligent machines that can do just about anything intellectually that a human can do. A human being is more than just a smart computer. Our behavior is governed not only by the higher logic of our brain, but also by millions of years of bizarre -- often obsolete -- instincts. If you yanked a brain out of a body and hooked it to a computer, it would no longer be truly human because of the lack of hormonal responses that come from every part of the body.
It's simply going to be too hard/impractical and, frankly, useless to make an intelligent machine that mimicked every hormonal reaction and instinctual mechanism.
We will have intelligent machines, but we will never have human machines.
Who's the guy that had the theory that oil in the ground is NOT old dinosaurs, but actually bacteria in the hot ground? And that we will never run out of oil because it will replenish itself?
I would imagine that theory gets some boosting from this.
I'm not saying "pay for access" is right, but on the other hand, who should politicians listen to? Someone who controls an industry and affects millions of people (like Microsoft) or Joe L33t who has no perspective beyond his own limited world?
It's kind of like when you advertise a job and get hundreds of resumes back that look basically the same. Personally, anyone who has misspelled words goes straight into the trash can to thin the herd. That may sound unfair to people who send resumes, but you have to use SOME method of thinning since you can't interview hundreds of people.
Politicians need some sort of method to thin the herd of people who give advice. I really think that's at the root of this, rather than simplistic corruption that many make this out to be. They have to choose SOMEBODY to talk to, so they might as well choose people who have been good to them in the past. In other words, it's loyalty at work, not bribery.
Maybe make it a HOWTO rather than a Mini-HOWTO? Hell, I could write a mini-HOWTO right here...
SECURE
1) Don't use strcpy.
2) Don't assume data coming in from the world is within valid limits
EFFICIENT
1) Avoid moving/copying large amounts of data whenever possible. Work in place.
EASY
1) Don't redefine the language using macros (e.g., define BEGIN {, #define END })
2) Comment your source
3) Use The One True Brace Style. All others are heretical crap.
Damn, now what do I do with the rest of my day?
What's so "astounding" about it? Linux is just an operating system. It runs programs. It provides disk I/O. It does not do rendering. It's the applications that do anything "astounding".
In other words, all this really proves is that the operating system is pretty much irrelevent for this sort of work, not that Linux is particularly suited to it (other than being inexpensive).
I'm not saying that they're necessarily intechangeable tools, only that Visio's user interface is soooo much better, not to mention infinitely more stable.
I don't have all that much to add, except -- God, Rational Rose was one of the buggiest, worst-designed pieces of software I've ever used. The one time I had to use it I prayed that someone over there would buy a copy of Visio to learn how a diagramming tool SHOULD be designed.
I always found it hysterically ironic that a tool that was touted by its makers as the ultimate way to develop software demonstrated so poorly its own usefulness.
Maybe after buying it IBM will run it into the ground ala Lotus. We can only hope.
Now I wasn't writing down the stats when I was watching the movie, but that sounds like a good idea and that's something I'll do when I rent it.
Here's something else to ask yourself. If Moore is just a honest man in search of the truth, why does he feel the need to make anyone look like a baffoon in his movies? Your answer may be "he doesn't, he's just showing what they themselves say". But you know that's a cop-out. You can make anyone look like an idiot depending on how you cut the film. Moore obviously knew that his subject was going to look like an idiot, and that the subject obviously wasn't intending that. Why not take some extra time to give the subject a chance to fill out his argument?
Then there was this quote from another IMDB poster...
So why go after Dick Clark? Because he gave Moore some juicy film to use?
The thing about Moore is that he obviously has some talent for invoking emotion (obviously), and raising questions. If only he would use that talent for good instead of evil.
But then he probably wouldn't make as much money, or get as many accolades from the Hollywood left.