Of the four questions you posed to yourself, one was a personal opinion (novelty), one was relative (small), and you got the other two wrong. The fan inside the dryer is rather important to its operation and quite mechanical. Seeing as how no hand dryer I've ever seen had a crank on it, I would certainly classify it as electronic. Come on, big guy, if you're going to make up questions for yourself to answer, at least make up questions you can get right.
If you restrict the time period to the last 30 years, you won't get much of an argument from any self-respecting geek. Most of the other people mentioned had a major impact in very broad fields, or even several unrelated fields. Did he have a major hand in the invention and spread of the "personal computer"? Absolutely. In 200 years will he be though of in the same class as DaVinci, Newton, or Galileo? I really doubt it. One thing we all should thank Woz and Jobs for is the addition to the English language of "The Suit" and "The Beard".
I'm using Tardis 2000 1.1 in Win98 and it is getting the time correctly from both tick.usno.navy.mil and tock.usno.navy.mil. It is 6:10pm EST, so maybe they came back in the last hour and a half.
A frighteningly small number of Americans know what the K means. On The Chris Rock show they asked a bunch of people what Y2K stood for and hardly anyone came close. My favorite wrong answer was "You To Know". My neighbors in the ghetto mostly call it "Y2G". Me? I just call it, "That one friday when I got so drunk I couldn't see."
I came into work this morning to find that the power supply on the file server had decided to kill itself last night. It was already scheduled to be replaced on Tuesday by a rack server with redundant power supplies. Even computers can say "You can't fire me, I QUIT."
Concentrating- in my distinctly layman's view- involves boiling water out of something and ending up with a more potent form of what you had before. Bombarding things with neutrons in a multimillion dollar process goes above and beyond concentrating. 1) Can someone give a good quantitative value of the ammount of radioactive particles we spew into the air by burning fossil fuels every year. I remember hearing something on Discovery a long time ago and it was obscene. 2) Congrats to everyone who has posted on this story. This is some of the most focused, intelligent posting I've seen on/. in a long time.
I thought that many pesticides were estrogenic, not just DDT. I read somewhere, (good source there, I know) that the average human sperm count has been plummeting over the last 50 years, almost entirely due to pesticide runoff in drinking water. The statistic that I remember wa that sperm counts are about half what they were before WWII. Can someone with more info and maybe a real source back this up?
Sorry, I have to call you out on the Strangelove reference. Accoring to Jack Ripper, fourinated drinking water is at the heart of a communist consipacy. Communists never drink water, only vodka, thus polluting their bolily fluids. To keep his bodily fluids pure, he drinks only grain alcohol and rain water. He explains this right before stating that he does not deny women, he merely denies them his essence, which is my favorite line in the movie. I once went on a rant about how sodium benzoate is in *everything* and that it is surely polluting our bolidly fluids. I had ingested a pretty large ammount of exstasy right before this, but I think I was on to something. Think about it.
This is the only part of the Windows EULA that seems to mention a warranty.
Manufacturer warrants that (a) the SOFTWARE will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying written materials for a period of ninety (90) days from the date of receipt...(goes on to talk about hardware)
This is kind of off topic, but funny as hell. This is Section 8 of the Windows EULA, caps lock is Microsoft's, not mine.
8. NOTE ON JAVA SUPPORT. THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN SUPPORT FOR PROGRAMS WRITTEN IN JAVA. JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ON-LINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.
Wow, that was a mighty long sentance. Bottom line, JAVA WILL KILL YOU. If Windows 98 is being trusted to run our nuclear power plants and keep Grandma's ventilator running, God help us all.
I have no doubt that you and your company completely got the shaft on this. You were blindsided by forces beyond your control and it doesn't get much worse than that. I just have a hard time believing that there wasn't *anything* you could do to get onto the net somewhere, somehow and let people know what the situation was. Two weeks ago, the company I work for moved offices and the new office didn't have the T1 hooked up like we were promised. So we dug a bunch of 14.4 modems out of a box, stuck them in our workstations, ran ugly exposed wires across the office to get to analog phone jacks, and used our personal dial-up ISPs to get online. We sent emails to people who were counting on us and let them know that things were screwed up, and that we were working our hardest to make them right. Admittedly, you got screwed over quite a bit harder than we did, but come on, I know you're smart guys. Those gold AOL CDs get 100 free hours and you can pick one up with any computer magazine at any 24 hour newsstand. If it wasn't for adversity, life would be pretty easy.
Do I think this study was scientific or even minimally documented? NO.
Having said that, I think it raises a point that the above post might be missing. It doesn't matter if the problem is the web site, or the web server, or the delivery service, or the guy that drives the forklift, the point is that things aren't working perfectly every time. Tech people are used to networks going down and hard drives crashing. Normal people who don't wear black plastic watches like to turn on their washing machines and have them work EVERY time exactly like they were expecting. Until every part of the ordering/ delivery process is completely seamless, it needs work. And I think the bottom line of the article is that there is a lot of work to be done in a lot of areas before e-commerce is really where it needs to be.
One thing that I found funny about the article was when they said that other online retailers should take a cue from Amazon.com. Don't take too much of a cue, like one click ordering, or they'll sue the pants off you.
The previous post made the comment about "Thirty year old projectors" and what ran through my mind was, "Wow, that's right, I've worked with both projectors and cameras that are older than me." And then I remembered that my workstation gets replaced every 4 months. What kind of brutal upgrade/replacement timeline would digital projectors and cameras have? 35mm cameras, which are basically motors inside a metal box, cost insane ammounts of money, but at least you can use them forever. I havn't seen anyone mention any kind of replacement/ maintenance cost on both the studios (cameras), or on the theaters (projectors). There is already a little war between theaters about who can advertise the best sound systems. Remember that theaters are offering the exact same products as their competitors and little improvements can sway people. Now imagine that instead of adding a new speaker to the theater, they have to replace or upgrade a $100,000 projector to match the theater down the street. You think $8 for a movie is a crime? Now double the theater overhead and shiver.
You're missing the point. The internet gambling people broke into his house, FORCED him to go to their web site and lose 25 grand. He should be protected from this kind of intrusive behavior. And how was he supposed to know that he could LOSE money gambling. Actually, I watched my roomate lose $350 in twenty minutes yesterday at ParadisePoker.com. Online poker- not for the faint of heart. All other online gambling- a total suckers game.
The police already use helicopters with IR to detect indoor growing operations, even in medium size cities like Indianapolis. It's the grow lights that draw thier attention. I went to a police auction and forbade my roomate from buying $2000 lights for $1 because they're just so easy to spot from the air. Also, I think the cops were going to follow the buyer home.
I mostly agree with you. Voice recognition is getting really good and more powerful hardware is helping all the time. The problem there is privacy. I don't want the guy next to me on the train to hear me dictate a personal email. I'm sure there are people on Wall Street who have some pretty important information that they'd rather not say out loud in public. Question to anyone: How effective is current software at catching whisper volume speech? Crazy idea I just had: What about a unit that looks like a phone operator mic (sitting out in front of your mouth), but it's actually a video camera that's reading your lips, not listening to the audio. That would work if you were speaking normally or just mouthing the words. I'm no linguist, but I'd bet that people *form* words a lot more similarly than they actually speak (with voice pitch and accents). Question to anyone out there who can read lips: Is it more of a science that you could teach a computer with enough rules, or is it more of an art that relies a lot on context clues and body language?
-Barry Final note: If anyone makes millions of dollars on this idea, buy me some good beer.
That commercial was the first thing I thought of when I saw the picture. The computer in the commercial has two major features that will probably need to happen before anyone can make money selling wearable computers. First, the commercial computer is voice controlled. Even simple commands like the ones you see him doing in the commercial are better than giving up a hand to control a ball mouse. Second, people will probably want a see through display. Binocluar vision keeps us from walking into large stationary objects (usually). Nature never intended for us to cover one eye with a computer display. It appeared that the monacle display in the article was opaque, but I might be wrong. The battery life probably isn't that big a deal. People are used to notebook computers with 3 hour battery lives. I don't remember the article mentioning wireless networking, but that's not too difficult to add.
-Barry
Re:Touchier than it might seem
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
I liked how you drew a distinction between "casual" and other online activities. If these unique identifiers were put into place, wouldn't it be up to individual sites to make use of them? Places like ingrammicro.com, where I regularly place orders for tens of thousands of dollars, probably would like to know that it is indeed me on the other end of that order. Sites like slashdot and cnn.com probably wouldn't use them because it's not really important to what they do. The sex industry in general (online or not) has always valued anonymity and sites using this proposed licensing system probably wouldn't be in business long. Sooner or later we're going to need an unforgable, unique way to identify ourselves online to accomplish things we want to accomplish (buy things securely, renew your passport). Why not have the system out in the open and reviewed by the world instead of being the closed domain of a few corporations or governments? I'd like to have some faith that the system will be used pragmatically, and somewhat responsibly.
I was sent the wrong drive rails for a computer at work that had to be up and running the day we got it. I ran duct tape across the inside of the case and set the drive on top of the little "hammock". A week later, I stayed late and put the rails in. Nobody ever knew. It's not quite what Appolo 13 did with their duct tape, but I did "fix" a computer with duct tape.
I was reading a thing on CNN.com about this "movie". Banks and power companies are expecting the phones to be ringing off the hook for the next week. Other industries were asking NBC what other things are portrayed as going awry so that they can increase staff on the phones if they need to. NBC has refused to tell anyone because it would decrease the "suprise". So basically, services are going to be shown failing, people will call those companies to find out what their situation is, those companies won't have enough staff to answer the phones because NBC didn't tell them to expect the surge, and people will take the busy signals to mean that their questions are being avoided because the company has no good answers. Awesome. I'm kind of cheering for as much chaos and confusion as possible. What I'm really hoping for is that a lawless mob burns down NBCs offices, but we will see.
The University of Illinois Mathematica lab has about two dozen workstations, all with beer names. Icehouse.math.uiuc.edu, miller.math.uiuc.edu...those are some good names. -Barry
Let's say that Amiga hands this group of people every patent they have, closes thier doors, and goes bankrupt. What are those patents actually WORTH? The group doesn't have the money to develop products, and no company is going to pay them for the rights to outdated technology. Basically, they would come out of the lawsuit with a patent that they could frame and hang up in the living room.
No way. The telephone operator would say "You're not Austrian, you talk like you're from a penal colony. No grossly expensive robo-dog for you!"
Did Rob say that he has one of the original batch? That boy has too much money. He needs to do something outragous, like buy a case of beer for everyone that GPLs thier code. Maybe challenge Bill Gates to an arm wrestling match to establish OS superiority.
I picked up some AMD stock 2 or 3 years ago when it became clear that Cyrix was on its way out. Since then, AMD has gone from a "catch up and take a piece of the low end market" to what we saw today, charging Intel head on. I'm still down about 25% on my investment. Cool CPUs don't make the stock price go up, earnings reports do.
-Barry
BTW: Did anyone else do a double take on "1.9 billion"?
I absolutely loved Pi, but I did shake my head when he plugged the new CPU into his old computer. It wasn't the kind of belly laughter that came from watching Jeff "iMac" Goldblum make moving graphics appear on an alien's monitor, but I did think that for all the technical advisors listed in the credits, one of them would have said something.
2) If a scientist is a female, she has long legs which are revealed at some point, and the plot surprises us in the middle of the movie by showing how she is a repressed sexual tigress.
I was just talking about this with someone yesterday. Our agreement was that the female character HAS to be a scientist, a librarian/teacher, or rarely, a secretary. They HAVE to wear glasses and they HAVE to have long hair worn back or pulled up. After their initial adversarial relationship with the handsome main character, for almost always unexplained reasons, the female character decided that she actually is maddly in love with the main character. Her transformation from geek chick into sex goddess is ALWAYS achieved in the same three steps. She must first remove her glasses. Next she removes the single object holding her hair in place (bobby pin, scrunchee, pencil). To complete her transformation, she must shake her head from side to side, resulting in her long hair tossing about and ending up perfectly in place. In the really aweful movies, the female character is instantly wearing 3 pounds of professionally applied makeup.
Slashdot Mirror
Of the four questions you posed to yourself, one was a personal opinion (novelty), one was relative (small), and you got the other two wrong. The fan inside the dryer is rather important to its operation and quite mechanical. Seeing as how no hand dryer I've ever seen had a crank on it, I would certainly classify it as electronic. Come on, big guy, if you're going to make up questions for yourself to answer, at least make up questions you can get right.
-ODB Jr.
If you restrict the time period to the last 30 years, you won't get much of an argument from any self-respecting geek. Most of the other people mentioned had a major impact in very broad fields, or even several unrelated fields. Did he have a major hand in the invention and spread of the "personal computer"? Absolutely. In 200 years will he be though of in the same class as DaVinci, Newton, or Galileo? I really doubt it. One thing we all should thank Woz and Jobs for is the addition to the English language of "The Suit" and "The Beard".
-B
I'm using Tardis 2000 1.1 in Win98 and it is getting the time correctly from both tick.usno.navy.mil and tock.usno.navy.mil. It is 6:10pm EST, so maybe they came back in the last hour and a half.
-Barry
A frighteningly small number of Americans know what the K means. On The Chris Rock show they asked a bunch of people what Y2K stood for and hardly anyone came close. My favorite wrong answer was "You To Know". My neighbors in the ghetto mostly call it "Y2G". Me? I just call it, "That one friday when I got so drunk I couldn't see."
-ODB Jr.
I came into work this morning to find that the power supply on the file server had decided to kill itself last night. It was already scheduled to be replaced on Tuesday by a rack server with redundant power supplies. Even computers can say "You can't fire me, I QUIT."
-B
Concentrating- in my distinctly layman's view- involves boiling water out of something and ending up with a more potent form of what you had before. Bombarding things with neutrons in a multimillion dollar process goes above and beyond concentrating. /. in a long time.
1) Can someone give a good quantitative value of the ammount of radioactive particles we spew into the air by burning fossil fuels every year. I remember hearing something on Discovery a long time ago and it was obscene.
2) Congrats to everyone who has posted on this story. This is some of the most focused, intelligent posting I've seen on
-Barry
I thought that many pesticides were estrogenic, not just DDT. I read somewhere, (good source there, I know) that the average human sperm count has been plummeting over the last 50 years, almost entirely due to pesticide runoff in drinking water. The statistic that I remember wa that sperm counts are about half what they were before WWII. Can someone with more info and maybe a real source back this up?
-Barry
Sorry, I have to call you out on the Strangelove reference. Accoring to Jack Ripper, fourinated drinking water is at the heart of a communist consipacy. Communists never drink water, only vodka, thus polluting their bolily fluids. To keep his bodily fluids pure, he drinks only grain alcohol and rain water. He explains this right before stating that he does not deny women, he merely denies them his essence, which is my favorite line in the movie. I once went on a rant about how sodium benzoate is in *everything* and that it is surely polluting our bolidly fluids. I had ingested a pretty large ammount of exstasy right before this, but I think I was on to something. Think about it.
-ODB Jr.
This is the only part of the Windows EULA that seems to mention a warranty.
...(goes on to talk about hardware)
Manufacturer warrants that (a) the SOFTWARE will perform substantially in accordance with the accompanying written materials for a period of ninety (90) days from the date of receipt
This is kind of off topic, but funny as hell. This is Section 8 of the Windows EULA, caps lock is Microsoft's, not mine.
8. NOTE ON JAVA SUPPORT.
THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN SUPPORT FOR PROGRAMS WRITTEN IN JAVA. JAVA TECHNOLOGY IS NOT FAULT TOLERANT AND IS NOT DESIGNED, MANUFACTURED, OR INTENDED FOR USE OR RESALE AS ON-LINE CONTROL EQUIPMENT IN HAZARDOUS ENVIRONMENTS REQUIRING FAIL-SAFE PERFORMANCE, SUCH AS IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, DIRECT LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES, OR WEAPONS SYSTEMS, IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF JAVA TECHNOLOGY COULD LEAD DIRECTLY TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.
Wow, that was a mighty long sentance. Bottom line, JAVA WILL KILL YOU. If Windows 98 is being trusted to run our nuclear power plants and keep Grandma's ventilator running, God help us all.
-Barry
I have no doubt that you and your company completely got the shaft on this. You were blindsided by forces beyond your control and it doesn't get much worse than that. I just have a hard time believing that there wasn't *anything* you could do to get onto the net somewhere, somehow and let people know what the situation was.
Two weeks ago, the company I work for moved offices and the new office didn't have the T1 hooked up like we were promised. So we dug a bunch of 14.4 modems out of a box, stuck them in our workstations, ran ugly exposed wires across the office to get to analog phone jacks, and used our personal dial-up ISPs to get online. We sent emails to people who were counting on us and let them know that things were screwed up, and that we were working our hardest to make them right. Admittedly, you got screwed over quite a bit harder than we did, but come on, I know you're smart guys. Those gold AOL CDs get 100 free hours and you can pick one up with any computer magazine at any 24 hour newsstand. If it wasn't for adversity, life would be pretty easy.
-Barry
Do I think this study was scientific or even minimally documented? NO.
Having said that, I think it raises a point that the above post might be missing. It doesn't matter if the problem is the web site, or the web server, or the delivery service, or the guy that drives the forklift, the point is that things aren't working perfectly every time. Tech people are used to networks going down and hard drives crashing. Normal people who don't wear black plastic watches like to turn on their washing machines and have them work EVERY time exactly like they were expecting. Until every part of the ordering/ delivery process is completely seamless, it needs work. And I think the bottom line of the article is that there is a lot of work to be done in a lot of areas before e-commerce is really where it needs to be.
One thing that I found funny about the article was when they said that other online retailers should take a cue from Amazon.com. Don't take too much of a cue, like one click ordering, or they'll sue the pants off you.
-Barry
The previous post made the comment about "Thirty year old projectors" and what ran through my mind was, "Wow, that's right, I've worked with both projectors and cameras that are older than me." And then I remembered that my workstation gets replaced every 4 months. What kind of brutal upgrade/replacement timeline would digital projectors and cameras have? 35mm cameras, which are basically motors inside a metal box, cost insane ammounts of money, but at least you can use them forever. I havn't seen anyone mention any kind of replacement/ maintenance cost on both the studios (cameras), or on the theaters (projectors). There is already a little war between theaters about who can advertise the best sound systems. Remember that theaters are offering the exact same products as their competitors and little improvements can sway people. Now imagine that instead of adding a new speaker to the theater, they have to replace or upgrade a $100,000 projector to match the theater down the street. You think $8 for a movie is a crime? Now double the theater overhead and shiver.
-Barry
You're missing the point. The internet gambling people broke into his house, FORCED him to go to their web site and lose 25 grand. He should be protected from this kind of intrusive behavior. And how was he supposed to know that he could LOSE money gambling. Actually, I watched my roomate lose $350 in twenty minutes yesterday at ParadisePoker.com. Online poker- not for the faint of heart. All other online gambling- a total suckers game.
-Teddy KGB
The police already use helicopters with IR to detect indoor growing operations, even in medium size cities like Indianapolis. It's the grow lights that draw thier attention. I went to a police auction and forbade my roomate from buying $2000 lights for $1 because they're just so easy to spot from the air. Also, I think the cops were going to follow the buyer home.
-Barry
I mostly agree with you. Voice recognition is getting really good and more powerful hardware is helping all the time. The problem there is privacy. I don't want the guy next to me on the train to hear me dictate a personal email. I'm sure there are people on Wall Street who have some pretty important information that they'd rather not say out loud in public.
Question to anyone: How effective is current software at catching whisper volume speech?
Crazy idea I just had: What about a unit that looks like a phone operator mic (sitting out in front of your mouth), but it's actually a video camera that's reading your lips, not listening to the audio. That would work if you were speaking normally or just mouthing the words. I'm no linguist, but I'd bet that people *form* words a lot more similarly than they actually speak (with voice pitch and accents).
Question to anyone out there who can read lips: Is it more of a science that you could teach a computer with enough rules, or is it more of an art that relies a lot on context clues and body language?
-Barry
Final note: If anyone makes millions of dollars on this idea, buy me some good beer.
That commercial was the first thing I thought of when I saw the picture. The computer in the commercial has two major features that will probably need to happen before anyone can make money selling wearable computers. First, the commercial computer is voice controlled. Even simple commands like the ones you see him doing in the commercial are better than giving up a hand to control a ball mouse. Second, people will probably want a see through display. Binocluar vision keeps us from walking into large stationary objects (usually). Nature never intended for us to cover one eye with a computer display. It appeared that the monacle display in the article was opaque, but I might be wrong. The battery life probably isn't that big a deal. People are used to notebook computers with 3 hour battery lives. I don't remember the article mentioning wireless networking, but that's not too difficult to add.
-Barry
I liked how you drew a distinction between "casual" and other online activities. If these unique identifiers were put into place, wouldn't it be up to individual sites to make use of them? Places like ingrammicro.com, where I regularly place orders for tens of thousands of dollars, probably would like to know that it is indeed me on the other end of that order. Sites like slashdot and cnn.com probably wouldn't use them because it's not really important to what they do. The sex industry in general (online or not) has always valued anonymity and sites using this proposed licensing system probably wouldn't be in business long. Sooner or later we're going to need an unforgable, unique way to identify ourselves online to accomplish things we want to accomplish (buy things securely, renew your passport). Why not have the system out in the open and reviewed by the world instead of being the closed domain of a few corporations or governments? I'd like to have some faith that the system will be used pragmatically, and somewhat responsibly.
-Barry
I was sent the wrong drive rails for a computer at work that had to be up and running the day we got it. I ran duct tape across the inside of the case and set the drive on top of the little "hammock". A week later, I stayed late and put the rails in. Nobody ever knew. It's not quite what Appolo 13 did with their duct tape, but I did "fix" a computer with duct tape.
-Barry
I was reading a thing on CNN.com about this "movie". Banks and power companies are expecting the phones to be ringing off the hook for the next week. Other industries were asking NBC what other things are portrayed as going awry so that they can increase staff on the phones if they need to. NBC has refused to tell anyone because it would decrease the "suprise". So basically, services are going to be shown failing, people will call those companies to find out what their situation is, those companies won't have enough staff to answer the phones because NBC didn't tell them to expect the surge, and people will take the busy signals to mean that their questions are being avoided because the company has no good answers. Awesome. I'm kind of cheering for as much chaos and confusion as possible. What I'm really hoping for is that a lawless mob burns down NBCs offices, but we will see.
-Dirty B
The University of Illinois Mathematica lab has about two dozen workstations, all with beer names. Icehouse.math.uiuc.edu, miller.math.uiuc.edu...those are some good names.
-Barry
Let's say that Amiga hands this group of people every patent they have, closes thier doors, and goes bankrupt. What are those patents actually WORTH? The group doesn't have the money to develop products, and no company is going to pay them for the rights to outdated technology. Basically, they would come out of the lawsuit with a patent that they could frame and hang up in the living room.
-Barry
No way. The telephone operator would say "You're not Austrian, you talk like you're from a penal colony. No grossly expensive robo-dog for you!"
Did Rob say that he has one of the original batch? That boy has too much money. He needs to do something outragous, like buy a case of beer for everyone that GPLs thier code. Maybe challenge Bill Gates to an arm wrestling match to establish OS superiority.
-ODB Jr.
I picked up some AMD stock 2 or 3 years ago when it became clear that Cyrix was on its way out. Since then, AMD has gone from a "catch up and take a piece of the low end market" to what we saw today, charging Intel head on. I'm still down about 25% on my investment. Cool CPUs don't make the stock price go up, earnings reports do.
-Barry
BTW: Did anyone else do a double take on "1.9 billion"?
I absolutely loved Pi, but I did shake my head when he plugged the new CPU into his old computer. It wasn't the kind of belly laughter that came from watching Jeff "iMac" Goldblum make moving graphics appear on an alien's monitor, but I did think that for all the technical advisors listed in the credits, one of them would have said something.
-Barry
I was just talking about this with someone yesterday. Our agreement was that the female character HAS to be a scientist, a librarian/teacher, or rarely, a secretary. They HAVE to wear glasses and they HAVE to have long hair worn back or pulled up. After their initial adversarial relationship with the handsome main character, for almost always unexplained reasons, the female character decided that she actually is maddly in love with the main character. Her transformation from geek chick into sex goddess is ALWAYS achieved in the same three steps. She must first remove her glasses. Next she removes the single object holding her hair in place (bobby pin, scrunchee, pencil). To complete her transformation, she must shake her head from side to side, resulting in her long hair tossing about and ending up perfectly in place. In the really aweful movies, the female character is instantly wearing 3 pounds of professionally applied makeup.
-Barry