Actually, Lucas made the SW movies very cheaply. Phantom was only $110M and the other two were comparable. They actually came in UNDER budget... very rare for the film industry.
That's what you get when you pay for movies out of pocket. Lucas financed ep. 1 out of pocket, and IIRC (and I usually don't) he was the primary backer for 2 & 3. By financing the films himself, he kept the toy rights, just like he did the last time around.
That fact in part explains why some big studio movies are so f'ing bad. Take "The Incredible Hulk" for example. You can bet that John Woo wasn't kicking much of his own money at the production. It's easy to go overboard when you're spending someone else's money. (Just ask my corporate purchasing agent.....)
The real solution from an automotive perspective is to federally mandate gas milage standards
That's already in effect, though in a rather cryptic and ineffective manner. Each automaker has to meet a certain cumulative MPG rating. 1 Ford Festiva @ 40 mpg + 1 Explorer @ 15 mpg = 27.5 mpg average for Ford. That's part of the reason Ford (and GM, and others) produce ungodly ugly, tiny, gas sipping crapmobiles that few people buy. It offsets the effect of the H2's, Escalades, and Expeditions that people are buying. Or at least were buying.
Actually there's been a lot of buzz going around about Peter Jackson's involvement in a remake of Paul Brickhill's The Dambusters. He's been alternately lined up to produce or direct, depending on which rag sheet you read.
Granted, it's another one of Jackson's vanity projects ("Before you try to tell me why I can't remake 'King Kong', let me remind you of how many B-B-B-B-B-Billion dollars my flicks just grossed worldwide."), but me and the other 500 warbird nerds left in the world are looking forward to it, so long as they don't do it with "Matrix:reloaded"-esqe crap CGI. That may put a kink in the shooting schedule for "The Hobbit"
I'll throw out my totally uninformed opinion out there, hopefully to have it quashed by someone "in the know."
Exit signs and emergency lighting that work on backup power are required by building codes. Why not require a small, adjustable, signal repeater in every large building / on every floor of a major building? Obviously I'm just pulling a solution out of thin air, but why isn't something like this pushed harder? The hardware can't be that hard to lay your hands on, and by putting the onus on the business rather than the county, it saves money. Hell, subsidize them for buildings that need a retrofit.
But then I supposed it's harder to do that than it is to suckle at the juicy tit of federal Homeland Security money. Why be practical when you can put an 11 million dollar spending bill on your re-election resume.
Not to sound like an HP shill, but since i work on them all f'ing day.....
Their all-in-one lasers are decent. They suck in large environments because the software supplied just isn't intuitive. It *should* work one way. It does in a completely different fashion, but after banging your head against it long enough, it will do what you want it to. This specifically is a problem for multi-user environments and affects the lower-end multi-functions like the 3020. They get a bit better the higher you go, but in the end you get the feeling that they want you to drop a few grand on a 4345 and be done with it.
(I'm convinced that the software CD for the 3020 should just autorun a text file that says "fuck you, figure it out yourself.")
If you spend a little more, you'll get nicer hardware features (you've got to climb the ladder a bit before you get into a built-in NIC / print server) but they've at least learned that "hey, instead of reinventing the wheel, hows about we just slap a scanner on top of a 1320n, call it a "multifunction" and knock off early for beer and peanuts."
Inkjet printers are shit. They've pretty much always been shit, they will continue to be shit. It's the zen of printing. I've owned Epson's, Canon's, and I work on HP's for a living. HP is the best of a bad lot in inkjets. They're all cheaply made disposable electronics, plain and simple. There are no servicable parts outside of the cartridges and maybe, if you're lucky, the print head. So building in the level of quality a consumer should expect just isn't cost effective anymore. Oh how I wish it was....
Now, when it comes to lasers, HP still makes some decent kit. But it's not 1993 anymore. You can't buy a full size Laserjet 4 and expect to run it for the next 12 years. But their big iron is still the class of the market. I've got 4050's and 8100's that have run in the millions of pages and are still faithfully chugging along. Even the smaller laserjets (the 1300 series in particular), while a royal PITA to work on, are for the most part are relieable. That's more than can be said for Lexmark, Tally, or any of the other builders. There have been debacles (Ever seen a laserjet 1100? Actually, ever seen a laserjet 1100 that's not in the process of being thrown from a rooftop?), but they're still the class of the industry, like it or not.
I am just a bit sad that I think of HP as "the printer guys." Back in the day they were all about innovation. we're having good luck with their switches, maybe there's still hope.
Part of the justification for junk fax laws is that there is a tangible material loss from unsolicited faxes. Junk snail mail still requires that a company shell out the cost of printing, materials, postage, etc. With junk faxes, that cost is transferred to the fax machine's owner. Paper and toner are easily accountable losses. One junk fax equals two cents worth of paper, four cents in toner, etc. Whereas the best tangible loss you can argue with junk e-mail is a waste of bandwidth.
Now, before you go bouncing off the walls about how a "time is money", I agree. The time I waste with spam does have an eventual monetary cost. But there's not as direct of a consumables cost with junk e-mail vs. junk faxes. If I'm a corporate beancounter, I can sit down and figure the losses spam causes by coming up with a big formula, charts, graphs, and the like. And It'll get me no where. But I can put a nice, direct cost on junk faxes. Five toner carts., two reams of paper. That's tangible. That gets a law passed.
(yeah, I know, there's lost bandwidth, lost electricity, lost productivity, etc. But the gist of the junk fax law is "don't waste the stuff I paid for." The junk fax laws could have been written around the lost electricity and phone service (which would have easily equated to the losses cause by spam), but they weren't. Yeah obfuscated short sighted laws!)
I think you underestimate the reality-resistance of the People's Republic of Ann Arbor.
You mean like their ability to "Think globally, don't bother doing anything locally." They're more concerned with playing to the constituancy of "Berkeley East" types than actually accomplishing anything.
You might see Ann Arbor become a fully covered hotspot, but I can't see Comcast & AT&T sitting back and let their 15 and 50 dollar a month cash cows get eaten alive. They'll throw together some poorly worded legislation (Vote "No" on prop. XYZ, help prevent our children from not accessing not child unfriendly websites!) then doing a blitz ad campaign to draw out the church goers.
This all sounds well and good, but Washtenaw county is the heart of Comcast country. They will find their way into the state legislature's pocketbooks and have this initiative put to sleep like a sick dog.
This is nothing more than election year pipe dreaming.
Random ISS question here: Are the shuttle dockings ever used to give the ISS a slight nudge to counteract a decaying orbit? I know the ISS isn't going to drop back into the atmosphere anytime in the near future, but i wonder if there are any adjustments made to its orbit by the shuttle of the supply rockets.
I would guess some percentage would be the unauthorized use of leaked or stolen non-volume license keys. The rest of that 20% could be anything or nothing.
I recently ran into an issue with compaq restore disks and WGA. We recieved a batch of Compaq Deskpro's, complete with the shiney happy license sticker and restore disks. Trying to load up windows from scratch proved to be a pain (driver hell, compaq seems to use multiple components that can each use any opne of 15 different signed XP drivers.) so I loaded XP pro from the restore disk.
The install went fine, but once windows update got to the WGA tool, things took a turn. validating via the WGA tool failed unexpectedly. A quick google turned up a direct link to a microsoft validation page, and a couple clicks later, everything is loaded and valid.
So does that mean that hacking a parking meter will net you a few years on a Georgia chain gang (or a SCSI Daisy Chain gang?) with Dragline, Coco, and Babalugats?
Billy West (Fry) has confirmed this on his site as well. And he seems to be the one that has his pulse on the project as well as anyone not named Cohen or Groening. He has made it very clear that Fry is one of his favorite Characters and that he'd love to play the character again.
At the moment the new plan is 3 direct to DVD movies and 13 New Episodes to air when comedy central assumes the rebroadcast rights to Futurama from Cartoon network / Adult Swim. Bottom line, there will be new Futurama content. With Black Jack. And Hookers.
but nobody involved has any interest in picking it back up. *cries*
It's not that there's no interest. Adult Swim doesn't bother trying because Zim is a Viacom (nickelodeon's parent company) product. Their motto is, "If you wanna watch it, watch it here or no where else." Viacom has quickly rebuffed any attempt by Williams Street to pickup any of their stuff. That's why you don't see classic Nick stuff like Doug, Zim, or Ren and Stimpy on any other network. Viacom controls the rights, and won't come up off of them for love nor money.
(I refuse to believe that partial birth abortion that they called those new Ren and Stimpy Episodes ever happened. Ever. You hear me? They're unepisodes.)
Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the US is required to ~"pursue plans to reduce and liquidate their stockpiles"
Who says we're not reducing our stock piles? We're looking at building new weapons while disposing of old ones. Dispose of 50 old bombs and replace them with 10 new bombs. Net reduction of 40 weapons while liquidating old stockpiles. As for Iran, the idea of non-proliferation, as childish and unfair as it sounds (like most treaties are), is taken to mean that "No one else developes, or gets help developing" nukes. We get the toys, you can't have them. Sounds silly from a treaty standpoint, but isn't really that bad of an idea.
The same basic reduction & elimination strategy is being used with chemical and biological agents. The "Oh lookie at how peace loving we are. We're reducing our stockpiles in accordance with the such-and-such treaty" angle gets touted when in reality the weapons we've got are nasty, deteriorating, leaky cold war vintage crap that was going away in the first place because it was as useless then as it is now. Only this time some politician gets a pat on the back when they're destroyed instead of just the demolitions guy at the disassembly facility.
The overall number of nuclear weapons in the US and USSR has been dropping for decades. As the weapons increased in power and accuracy, the need for thousands of convential type "Atom Bombs" and short range nukes has decreased. Many small booms are more expensive and harder to maintain than a few hundred really, really, big booms.
Depending on which story you believe, They're either theives, or they've accepted stolen property. They found a phone, the owner has contacted them saying he wants it back. He can prove it's his. Pretty much end of story. He didn't relinquish ownership just because he forgot it.
If you believe they bought it off the cabbie then again, back to the first line. The owner has come forward, can prove the phone is his, and wants it back. The cab driver is guilty of selling stolen goods.
Most cabs I've taken don't have discount electronics stores in them. So even if they bought it I'm sure they didn't think to themselves "wow, it's my lucky day. I've come across a splendid opportunity from a respectable legitmate business man."
They're wrong, the owner is right. He's a douche, but he's also right.
It's been running for a couple days (the whole thing started on the 6th), but I think slashdot finally took it over the edge. The pics are/were nothing special, a young latina (mexican american?) girl, a really big mexican guy. Sorry, no porn. There were some links to the girl, her boyfriend, and the fat guy's myspace pages, for those that get off on geocities-level craptacular page layouts.
The whole thing is a giant internet pissing contest. Initially it was funny, and I hope the guy gets his sidekick back, but at the same time there's a whole lot of internet lawyering going on there that's pretty childish. The back and forth between the owner and the people that have the sidekick has gone on for about a day too long. It was funny to see the theives act like idiots, it was funny to see the owner thump them. But now it's down to a guy arguing with idiots and getting beaten by experience. The guy needs to realize that nothing he says is going make these folks magically wake up and say "OMFG, I was so wrong. Here's your phone back, sorry for the trouble. Peace be with you."
Her sidekick didn't get hacked via bluetooth. The just used a really simple, easy to guess password and her web access (Sidekicks dont actually store much data, they ship photos & the address book off to the T-mobile servers.). IIRC she used the name of that little rat dog she used to carry around.
Her "incident" touched off a series of B-list celebs getting their sidekick data plasted around the web. I think Fred Durst was another one that was caught the same way.
Wow. GM took to building Pinto's even after they were such a tremendous failure with Ford? That's a marketing, engineering, and sales disaster all in one!
It's been said before, but the Pinto was actually no more unsafe than other cars of the era. Ford did have a chance to make the car safer, but opted to go cheap (it was an economy car after all) instead. Another case of bad publicty actually being worse than no publicity at all.
Re:Wouldn't compressed air have been better?
on
Droids on the ISS
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"Who knew flammable and inflammable meant the same thing?"
Re:Wouldn't compressed air have been better?
on
Droids on the ISS
·
· Score: 4, Informative
whoops i'm a total farking tard. disregard completely, utterly and totally.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Lucas made the SW movies very cheaply. Phantom was only $110M and the other two were comparable. They actually came in UNDER budget... very rare for the film industry.
That's what you get when you pay for movies out of pocket. Lucas financed ep. 1 out of pocket, and IIRC (and I usually don't) he was the primary backer for 2 & 3. By financing the films himself, he kept the toy rights, just like he did the last time around.
That fact in part explains why some big studio movies are so f'ing bad. Take "The Incredible Hulk" for example. You can bet that John Woo wasn't kicking much of his own money at the production. It's easy to go overboard when you're spending someone else's money. (Just ask my corporate purchasing agent.....)
The real solution from an automotive perspective is to federally mandate gas milage standards
That's already in effect, though in a rather cryptic and ineffective manner. Each automaker has to meet a certain cumulative MPG rating. 1 Ford Festiva @ 40 mpg + 1 Explorer @ 15 mpg = 27.5 mpg average for Ford. That's part of the reason Ford (and GM, and others) produce ungodly ugly, tiny, gas sipping crapmobiles that few people buy. It offsets the effect of the H2's, Escalades, and Expeditions that people are buying. Or at least were buying.
Easy. He just uses his right arm to put on his left, then his left arm to put on his right. Duh.
Actually there's been a lot of buzz going around about Peter Jackson's involvement in a remake of Paul Brickhill's The Dambusters. He's been alternately lined up to produce or direct, depending on which rag sheet you read.
Granted, it's another one of Jackson's vanity projects ("Before you try to tell me why I can't remake 'King Kong', let me remind you of how many B-B-B-B-B-Billion dollars my flicks just grossed worldwide."), but me and the other 500 warbird nerds left in the world are looking forward to it, so long as they don't do it with "Matrix:reloaded"-esqe crap CGI. That may put a kink in the shooting schedule for "The Hobbit"
I'll throw out my totally uninformed opinion out there, hopefully to have it quashed by someone "in the know."
Exit signs and emergency lighting that work on backup power are required by building codes. Why not require a small, adjustable, signal repeater in every large building / on every floor of a major building? Obviously I'm just pulling a solution out of thin air, but why isn't something like this pushed harder? The hardware can't be that hard to lay your hands on, and by putting the onus on the business rather than the county, it saves money. Hell, subsidize them for buildings that need a retrofit.
But then I supposed it's harder to do that than it is to suckle at the juicy tit of federal Homeland Security money. Why be practical when you can put an 11 million dollar spending bill on your re-election resume.
Not to sound like an HP shill, but since i work on them all f'ing day.....
Their all-in-one lasers are decent. They suck in large environments because the software supplied just isn't intuitive. It *should* work one way. It does in a completely different fashion, but after banging your head against it long enough, it will do what you want it to. This specifically is a problem for multi-user environments and affects the lower-end multi-functions like the 3020. They get a bit better the higher you go, but in the end you get the feeling that they want you to drop a few grand on a 4345 and be done with it.
(I'm convinced that the software CD for the 3020 should just autorun a text file that says "fuck you, figure it out yourself.")
If you spend a little more, you'll get nicer hardware features (you've got to climb the ladder a bit before you get into a built-in NIC / print server) but they've at least learned that "hey, instead of reinventing the wheel, hows about we just slap a scanner on top of a 1320n, call it a "multifunction" and knock off early for beer and peanuts."
Inkjet printers are shit. They've pretty much always been shit, they will continue to be shit. It's the zen of printing. I've owned Epson's, Canon's, and I work on HP's for a living. HP is the best of a bad lot in inkjets. They're all cheaply made disposable electronics, plain and simple. There are no servicable parts outside of the cartridges and maybe, if you're lucky, the print head. So building in the level of quality a consumer should expect just isn't cost effective anymore. Oh how I wish it was....
Now, when it comes to lasers, HP still makes some decent kit. But it's not 1993 anymore. You can't buy a full size Laserjet 4 and expect to run it for the next 12 years. But their big iron is still the class of the market. I've got 4050's and 8100's that have run in the millions of pages and are still faithfully chugging along. Even the smaller laserjets (the 1300 series in particular), while a royal PITA to work on, are for the most part are relieable. That's more than can be said for Lexmark, Tally, or any of the other builders. There have been debacles (Ever seen a laserjet 1100? Actually, ever seen a laserjet 1100 that's not in the process of being thrown from a rooftop?), but they're still the class of the industry, like it or not.
I am just a bit sad that I think of HP as "the printer guys." Back in the day they were all about innovation. we're having good luck with their switches, maybe there's still hope.
Part of the justification for junk fax laws is that there is a tangible material loss from unsolicited faxes. Junk snail mail still requires that a company shell out the cost of printing, materials, postage, etc. With junk faxes, that cost is transferred to the fax machine's owner. Paper and toner are easily accountable losses. One junk fax equals two cents worth of paper, four cents in toner, etc. Whereas the best tangible loss you can argue with junk e-mail is a waste of bandwidth.
Now, before you go bouncing off the walls about how a "time is money", I agree. The time I waste with spam does have an eventual monetary cost. But there's not as direct of a consumables cost with junk e-mail vs. junk faxes. If I'm a corporate beancounter, I can sit down and figure the losses spam causes by coming up with a big formula, charts, graphs, and the like. And It'll get me no where. But I can put a nice, direct cost on junk faxes. Five toner carts., two reams of paper. That's tangible. That gets a law passed.
(yeah, I know, there's lost bandwidth, lost electricity, lost productivity, etc. But the gist of the junk fax law is "don't waste the stuff I paid for." The junk fax laws could have been written around the lost electricity and phone service (which would have easily equated to the losses cause by spam), but they weren't. Yeah obfuscated short sighted laws!)
I think you underestimate the reality-resistance of the People's Republic of Ann Arbor.
You mean like their ability to "Think globally, don't bother doing anything locally." They're more concerned with playing to the constituancy of "Berkeley East" types than actually accomplishing anything.
You might see Ann Arbor become a fully covered hotspot, but I can't see Comcast & AT&T sitting back and let their 15 and 50 dollar a month cash cows get eaten alive. They'll throw together some poorly worded legislation (Vote "No" on prop. XYZ, help prevent our children from not accessing not child unfriendly websites!) then doing a blitz ad campaign to draw out the church goers.
This all sounds well and good, but Washtenaw county is the heart of Comcast country. They will find their way into the state legislature's pocketbooks and have this initiative put to sleep like a sick dog.
This is nothing more than election year pipe dreaming.
Who in their right mind would use Wiki as a 'source' document?
Short answer: Too many people.
I've read through tons college level papers that cite wikipedia as a source for factual information. That is scary.
Random ISS question here: Are the shuttle dockings ever used to give the ISS a slight nudge to counteract a decaying orbit? I know the ISS isn't going to drop back into the atmosphere anytime in the near future, but i wonder if there are any adjustments made to its orbit by the shuttle of the supply rockets.
I would guess some percentage would be the unauthorized use of leaked or stolen non-volume license keys. The rest of that 20% could be anything or nothing.
I recently ran into an issue with compaq restore disks and WGA. We recieved a batch of Compaq Deskpro's, complete with the shiney happy license sticker and restore disks. Trying to load up windows from scratch proved to be a pain (driver hell, compaq seems to use multiple components that can each use any opne of 15 different signed XP drivers.) so I loaded XP pro from the restore disk.
The install went fine, but once windows update got to the WGA tool, things took a turn. validating via the WGA tool failed unexpectedly. A quick google turned up a direct link to a microsoft validation page, and a couple clicks later, everything is loaded and valid.
So does that mean that hacking a parking meter will net you a few years on a Georgia chain gang (or a SCSI Daisy Chain gang?) with Dragline, Coco, and Babalugats?
Billy West (Fry) has confirmed this on his site as well. And he seems to be the one that has his pulse on the project as well as anyone not named Cohen or Groening. He has made it very clear that Fry is one of his favorite Characters and that he'd love to play the character again.
At the moment the new plan is 3 direct to DVD movies and 13 New Episodes to air when comedy central assumes the rebroadcast rights to Futurama from Cartoon network / Adult Swim. Bottom line, there will be new Futurama content. With Black Jack. And Hookers.
but nobody involved has any interest in picking it back up. *cries*
It's not that there's no interest. Adult Swim doesn't bother trying because Zim is a Viacom (nickelodeon's parent company) product. Their motto is, "If you wanna watch it, watch it here or no where else." Viacom has quickly rebuffed any attempt by Williams Street to pickup any of their stuff. That's why you don't see classic Nick stuff like Doug, Zim, or Ren and Stimpy on any other network. Viacom controls the rights, and won't come up off of them for love nor money.
(I refuse to believe that partial birth abortion that they called those new Ren and Stimpy Episodes ever happened. Ever. You hear me? They're unepisodes.)
You think maybe you could pickup Invader Zim on the way home? I've been craving some new episodes of that as well....
Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the US is required to ~"pursue plans to reduce and liquidate their stockpiles"
Who says we're not reducing our stock piles? We're looking at building new weapons while disposing of old ones. Dispose of 50 old bombs and replace them with 10 new bombs. Net reduction of 40 weapons while liquidating old stockpiles. As for Iran, the idea of non-proliferation, as childish and unfair as it sounds (like most treaties are), is taken to mean that "No one else developes, or gets help developing" nukes. We get the toys, you can't have them. Sounds silly from a treaty standpoint, but isn't really that bad of an idea.
The same basic reduction & elimination strategy is being used with chemical and biological agents. The "Oh lookie at how peace loving we are. We're reducing our stockpiles in accordance with the such-and-such treaty" angle gets touted when in reality the weapons we've got are nasty, deteriorating, leaky cold war vintage crap that was going away in the first place because it was as useless then as it is now. Only this time some politician gets a pat on the back when they're destroyed instead of just the demolitions guy at the disassembly facility.
The overall number of nuclear weapons in the US and USSR has been dropping for decades. As the weapons increased in power and accuracy, the need for thousands of convential type "Atom Bombs" and short range nukes has decreased. Many small booms are more expensive and harder to maintain than a few hundred really, really, big booms.
typical case of american blind justice.....
Depending on which story you believe, They're either theives, or they've accepted stolen property. They found a phone, the owner has contacted them saying he wants it back. He can prove it's his. Pretty much end of story. He didn't relinquish ownership just because he forgot it.
If you believe they bought it off the cabbie then again, back to the first line. The owner has come forward, can prove the phone is his, and wants it back. The cab driver is guilty of selling stolen goods.
Most cabs I've taken don't have discount electronics stores in them. So even if they bought it I'm sure they didn't think to themselves "wow, it's my lucky day. I've come across a splendid opportunity from a respectable legitmate business man."
They're wrong, the owner is right. He's a douche, but he's also right.
It's been running for a couple days (the whole thing started on the 6th), but I think slashdot finally took it over the edge. The pics are/were nothing special, a young latina (mexican american?) girl, a really big mexican guy. Sorry, no porn. There were some links to the girl, her boyfriend, and the fat guy's myspace pages, for those that get off on geocities-level craptacular page layouts.
The whole thing is a giant internet pissing contest. Initially it was funny, and I hope the guy gets his sidekick back, but at the same time there's a whole lot of internet lawyering going on there that's pretty childish. The back and forth between the owner and the people that have the sidekick has gone on for about a day too long. It was funny to see the theives act like idiots, it was funny to see the owner thump them. But now it's down to a guy arguing with idiots and getting beaten by experience. The guy needs to realize that nothing he says is going make these folks magically wake up and say "OMFG, I was so wrong. Here's your phone back, sorry for the trouble. Peace be with you."
Her sidekick didn't get hacked via bluetooth. The just used a really simple, easy to guess password and her web access (Sidekicks dont actually store much data, they ship photos & the address book off to the T-mobile servers.). IIRC she used the name of that little rat dog she used to carry around.
Her "incident" touched off a series of B-list celebs getting their sidekick data plasted around the web. I think Fred Durst was another one that was caught the same way.
* The GM Pinto
Wow. GM took to building Pinto's even after they were such a tremendous failure with Ford? That's a marketing, engineering, and sales disaster all in one!
It's been said before, but the Pinto was actually no more unsafe than other cars of the era. Ford did have a chance to make the car safer, but opted to go cheap (it was an economy car after all) instead. Another case of bad publicty actually being worse than no publicity at all.
"Who knew flammable and inflammable meant the same thing?"
whoops i'm a total farking tard. disregard completely, utterly and totally.
Is it any wonder I failed chem?