I think they're trying to say that the guy runs 14 ecomm websites spread across 79 servers and it runs so well that he has nothing to do except sit in his office doodling with his slinky. Now, most network admins would probably be taking the euphemistic approach to that rather than the literal, but who's to say?
Well, many devices I own already have AC->DC converters either built-in or in a block. DC would be more effecient for these. Also, you have to realize that they aren't exactly going to be running high-power refrigerators, air-conditioners, or washing machines on this feed. It will probably be used for communications, and other, more vital functions (I'm thinking water filtering, food preperation, etc, but I don't know how Costa Rica works).
I remember it being called Pret a Porter: Ready to Wear or something to that effect. Not like it's at all relevant. American movies have translated titles in Europe half the time as well. I just went through Greece, Austria, Germany, and France and I probably saw three different translated titles for "The Mummy Returns." Then again, "Antitrust" was always the same. One translation that I thought was pretty impressive was changing "Lola Rennt" to "Run Lola Run." It used an American cultural symbol in with a form of the original title to make an interesting translation. Titles are going to be translated - live with it. It's not just dumb american audiences. Books are the same way. I just read Camus' The Plague... not Le' Plague or something to that extent. Similarly, I saw billions of copies of John Grishiams (spelling, sorry) Die Jury in Germany and Austria. Now, the translation I understand, but why the hell would any country adopt that author besides America? Then again, Germany also adored David Hasselhoff for awhile, so who knows?
Search back in Slashdot for AIDS and Nanotech and you'll find a story that will destroy your entire argument.
While I doubt we'll have nanobots flying around and patroling the world in the next decade, your view is quite short-sighted. No shit Bio-tech seems wonderful to you - it already has major results... DNA recombination in bacteria as one huge example. Somehow I doubt nanotech will stagnate at its current state of buckyballs/tubes with theoretical applications. Biotech certainly went beyond Watson/Crick theorizing the structure of DNA. Sure, people are going a bit crazy with nanotech prophecies (thanks in no small part to The Diamond Age), but to flat out deny any possible impact of nanotechnology is insanity. I can guarantee you we'll be able to make a microrobot that can do a complex job before we can engineer a microbe to do the same thing (unless that job is intrinsically biological like most other biotech applications). Biotech is undoubtedly impressive, but it, like nanotech, has limits.
Admitedly the backup in customs is also a by-product of the problamatic airline situation - my problem was precipitated by a mass arrival of planes into USAir's Philly terminal. It's pretty small as far as internation terminals go. Still, though I don't fly internationally often, I had another long wait coming into Atlanta from Jamaica, and Atlanta has a huge international terminal.
Regarding lacking an American passport, the countries I visited (with the exception of France) all had open borders. Somewhat different from America eh? It was a little dissapointing that I couldn't fill up my passport with stamps though. Just one coming into Amsterdam and another from a confused passport checker in Munich who really wasn't supposed to stamp it anyway. But yeah, your right that being American carries influence internationally. I'd argue, however, that it shouldn't.
Actually, I just didn't feel like wasting Slashdot's space by explaining the whole situation. I waited in line for imigration (over an hour) and then moved on to customs. Rather than wait an hour in line for the "no items to declare" officer, I took my form over to the "items to declare" desk because there was no line. Much quicker that way. But yes, you do have to declare if you have under $400 so long as some items are intended to be sold or as gifts. You just don't have to pay a tariff unless it's above $400.
And Alf: Der Film may have cost just 49 shillings (3 bucks), but its priceless in my book.
My thoughts exactly. As an American, I find it disgusting that our reputation as the "land of the free" has basically been whittled down to allowing businesses almost any freedom they desire. Hell, with DMCA, etc, businesses have more rights than I do. I just got back from a month long visit to Europe. I never spent more than 30 seconds in a customs line. When I came back to the US through Philidelphia, I had to wait two hours in line to declare my copy of "Alf: Der Film" - had I been even luckier I may have had a friendly customs agent search my inner cavaties for cocain. Land of the free indeed.
Re:First impressions of A.I.
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Review: A.I.
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· Score: 2
Without the John Williams score and the exposition, the ending would have been bearable, if not perfect. You are so right about the differences between Spielberg and Kubrick's musical choices for their movies. In a Spielberg movie you can almost always count on a John Williams score. This simply means a rehashing of every other John Williams score. Either a fast moving "adventure" theme or his patented emotionally manipulative theme. In this movie, we get both. Kubrick, on the other hand, chooses from a range of composers to fit the film. In Full Metal Jacket you get Flight of the Valkries booming over the shore. Clockwork Orange utilizes Beethoven's 9th to perfection. Just look at the variation there. Every time I see a Spielberg movie, I'm insulted that he picks the same bloody music to elicit the same reactions from every movie. Shouldn't there be a different meaning to say, the end of AI and the end of Jurassic Park? Why do they have the same music?
I will say that I dug the ambient music/sounds in the forest chase scene. That whole scene was excellent. The only qualm I had was with the neon "dogs" that were sicced on the robots. This was probably Kubrick's idea, and it's clever to a point (reminiscent of dog hunting - brutality for pleasure - etc.), but the execution is pretty horrible. Seems like a mix between Batman 4, Blade Runner, and The Running Man. Other than that it's an excellent introduction to the Flesh Fair.
Sorry for the extended digression there, but basically for me the movie would have gone from interesting to good by simply removing the exposition and making more intelligent musical choices. I also had problems with the alien/robot design (hello CE3K), but I suppose it's bearable. Not to mention the scientific voodoo at the end.
Re:But did Kubrick write the meta-science?
on
Review: A.I.
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· Score: 2
The basic idea is that the Prof. Hobby guy meticulously mapped the human neuron and, I assume, made a program that simulating a few of them acting together. That's what he said in the first few minutes of the movie anyway. I would go farther, but it would go into spoiler territory (not that it's terribly important to the movie as Spielberg completely ignores this thread in favor of the who Pinnochio fairy tale - though they are somewhat related).
OK, the ending could have been good. No shit theyh weren't aliens - I'm just saying go watch CE3K where the aliens are unveiled and then watch both the first time David is introduced and the first time the ultra-futeristic-robots are on-screen. I had three main problems with the ending - visual style, overuse of exposition (which really lasted the entire movie), and typical Spielberg-esque emotional manipulation. Yeah, I realize Spielberg is quite talented at getting a John Williams score in D-Minor, showing people crying/dying, and complimenting it with slow camera pans/zooms to get the audience into the movie, but it doesn't work for me. Suprisingly, it didn't even work for the audience I saw it with either. He had the opportunity to make the robot encounter into a great suprise ending (well, it was expected, but so are most suprise endings). It was horribly executed. It should have left me pondering its meaning when I left, but I don't have to, because the robot explained it all for me for 10 minutes. I really don't have to think about the Pinnochio allusion either because its meaning was hammered into me about four times in the movie (first reading, boy's request for blue fairy, dr. know, coney island, good god can a metaphore be so drawn out). Not to mention that the "we can only bring mommy back for a day due to the space-time-continuum" voodoo bullshit was pretty rediculous. That might have been Kubrick's idea, but it was still bull. How would the universe revolve around the human day when humans themselves are extinct? Doesn't the ending prove the lack of existence of some spiritual defense of humanity?
You're right that Spielberg's made great and shitty movies. Jaws is great, Indy is great, CE3K is great, Schindler's List is good. But this is just not particularly good in either the typical-spielberg-entertainment sense or the artistic-merit sense. It won't be a box office smash. It'll probably be #1 this weekend because of the shear number of competing movies, but it won't next weekend. The whole movie felt like it was the Cliff's Notes Complete version Spielberg made of Kubrick's ideas. Again, I know that Kubrick wanted Spielberg to direct this, but I don't know how happy he would've been.
And no, every last bit of it was not Kubrick. He would not have used a JW score (look at his past strategic reuse of classic music to aid his movies - Beethoven's 9th in Clockwork, Flight of the Valkries in Full Metal Jacket). He would not have had slick CE3K robots. He wanted David to be a robot rather than a boy - physically. Again, Spielberg has liscense to change all that. My problem is just that he tried to keep all of Kubrick's plans/themes while imposing his own directing style - the emotionally manipulative, overly expository one. When Spielberg used his Indy/Jaws style for the Rouge City scenes among others, it mostly worked.
Basically I can't like this movie, but I'll still come back to watch it a few more times (though I may fast-forward through a bit of the ending). It's interesting to watch in the same sense that something like Survivor is - to try and figure out what went on behind the scenes to make the movie. I don't like the movie because it thought I was an idiot (though according to you, this is a proper accusation), but I still enjoyed watching it to figure out just where Spielberg went wrong. It could have been great; he could have made it great; he obviously didn't, however, and that's why I liked watching it.
Hehe, I just got back from that. I can't believe Spielberg spliced in CE3K footage for the last half hour of the movie. I know special effects are expensive, but that's pretty rediculous - plus he had a perfectly good ending a half hour before.
It's still an interesting movie though. It's not good in the traditional sense, but it sure had me entertained if only for trying to pick apart the movie and figure out which bits came from Kubrick and which from Speilberg. I have the odd feeling that Kubrick probably came up with the Pinnochio allusion, but some how I doubt he would have shoved it down the audience's throat and explained it over and over. Still, the movie would have been much worse had Spielberg tried to emulate Kubrick (he did to a point, but really only so far as going with slow pacing and using Kubrick's drawings/ideas for shot setup). At least the movie didn't say, "You know David - that's the first man eh?" - oh wait, it did. The really awkward thing is that the movie could have been good. At least the ewok.... errr teddy bear was entertaining.
It's not a movie that entertains me, but it's still my favorite Spielberg movie next to Jaws. Oh wait, it also follows the Indy trilogy. Really he should either stick to those types of movies or stop trying to make movies that have some sort of underlying meaning and then tagging them with a John Williams score and computerized aliens.
This would be best done as a plug-in rather than detracting from the need to kill the existing mozilla bugs and get to a final product. The lack of a feature is not a bug. Everyone who's voting for 76537 should get together and create a gesture-browsing plug-in rather (in the same way as Total Recall implements crash-recovery).
In the field of medicine, the training will almost always be payed for assuming that the trainee has a steady job. Doctors who run their own practice obviously don't apply, as well as many temporary nurses and the like, but if you are employed as a nurse/doctor and need continuing education to keep certification it will almost always be payed for.
Cool. It's good to know that the military doesn't always screw up. Like I said, I wasn't sure it was true - that is an incredibly detailed story for someone to make up though... I'll have to look into that. That puts this movie one step ahead of The Patriot as far as historical accuracy goes in my book:)
Nope. He's right. Journalists must follow the Price-is-Right-guidelines at all times. Since saying 60 years would obviously be over the actual amount, it would eliminate Jon from the year-guessing game and, ultimately, take away any chance at reaching the Showcase Showdown. Now, why 50 instead of 59? Clearly, like all modern journalists, Jon must round to the nearest ten. Unfortunately, this rule is not analagous with a TV gameshow, so it is much more difficult to explain.
Though I haven't seen the movie yet, apparently it has Miller receiving a medal for his valor (read this in some review). In actuality, he died later in the war and the navy refused to give him the medal until years after his death. Again, second hand information, but if it's true it's pretty ironic.
Somehow I think that most modern laptops would need some sort of air circulation for the chip. Compare this to the g4 cube - no fan, yet it needs a 1/2ft^3 heatsink and a bunch of vents to properly cool. Even my TiVo with its 50Mhz powerpc processor has a large fan. Even if Apple could make a Gx based laptop without a fan, it would need circulation. I suppose they could, say, use the Ti Powerbook as its own heatsink, but then it would get extremely toasty and probably fail to function in a hot environment. Now, a lower-powererd waterproof PDA would be cool. I have an epod that I modified and it definitely has the capability to be made waterproof. No ventilation at all. All I would need to do would be to seal the joints, create some sort of sealed pushbuttons, and make the touchscreen work through a waterproof shield.
By the way, I got my TiVo for free in their essay contest a while back and it broke. I think I'm going to part it out tomorrow. Is there anything besides the hard drive(s) and fan that would be useful? I guess I could unhook the IR reciever and see if I could hook it to the IR header on my motherboard... possibly the TV tuner would be a normal bt848 card or something since that has pretty robust Linux support.
Plus it's slashdotted and that isn't helping much with my attempts at access.
Re:CYAN DIDN'T DEVELOP THIS GAME - AMEND/DELETE TH
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Myst III: Exile Review
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· Score: 2
Somehow, I imagine that they either get royalties from the sales of Myst III or have some contract against slandering it (though in this case, it wouldn't be slander as it's true). Though I bet the Millers are as rich as eskimo kings at this point, they probably will still tend to their financial interests and let the users battle it out on this one. Then again, perhaps they have souls? In my experience, ethics are rarely found in any sort of business, so who knows.
Yeah, apparently they stuck in all the pro-fedex messages (I haven't seen the movie, but from the trailer it seemed like Hanks was extremely dedicated to delivering some package on time - so much that he missed christmas dinner or something) in order to counter the obvious negative message sent by hurling a purple fedex plane into the water. I think if you go and search Ebert's Q&A section at suntimes.com you will find something on this. Then again I may have seen it somewhere else.
Sorry, but I have a problem with antitele-evangelists. Like it or not, TV is THE popular artistic medium of the last few generations. Hell, even music, which stood beside television is now pretty much controlled by its advertising on television (note that I'm concentrating solely on popular music here). I don't think it's particularly healthy that people watch television more than they sleep (or whatever that statistic is up to now), but I still recognize its cultural significance. I don't watch much TV, but I'm certainly not going to eschew it and say it's totally worthless. Television is very much akin to computers and books in that if you use them passively you get no benefit. Computers and books have much the same effect if you simply play video games and read books. Unless you go and write computer programs or prose you aren't exactly making memories of a brain full of creative work. The main problem with TV is that it's so damn easy to use passively and so difficult to become an active part in. It's easy to write a book, but not to produce a TV show. That said, since so many people watch TV and, despite your pleas, they aren't going to stop, you should be like Michael Moore, Jon Stewert, Ken Burns, etc and try and make TV a more valuable medium rather than simply blasting it. Sure, a majority of TV programming is worthless, but don't blame the newspaper for the news eh?
Interestingly, the most obvious product placements often aren't payed for. Austin Powers' beatle in AP2 was not payed for by VW. Likewise, FedEx didn't have a hand in Castaway. On the other hand, most cars in commercial movies (with the exception of AP2 I suppose) are payed for. There are always glaring examples of product placement in summer/fall movies *COUGH* Denise Richards defusing nuke with Jornado in Bond *COUGH*
Many non-payed-for ads are removed for TV release. For example, a coke can in Mallrats was digitally erased for TV because Coke probably didn't want their image tarnished on ABC. There is probably a good chance that Subway didn't even pay for their placement in Happy Gillmore. Otherwise, I doubt Fox (or whatever network showed it) would take the effort to remove the references. It's not because their contract was up or anything that the references were removed. Odds are that it was because the TV network showing the movie was afraid of getting sued.
IANAL;TINLA (I am not a lawyer; This is not legal advice)
If you are going to spell out an acronym, why use it in the first place? Possibly it would be germaine if you used it multiple times in your post, but in this case, the acronym (and the associated description) makes up nearly 15% of the post. Sorry to whine, but this is one of my top 10 Slashdot pet peeves (not that I can list the other 9, but I know them when I see them damn them!) (Oh yeah, one of the other 9 is over use of parenthesis) (another is making posts on a simple point overly long by not ending the damn thing quickly enough).
But here in this worldwide forum I'm discovering a multivarious universe of pluralistic view I never see on TV.
My TV-weakened brain is having trouble parsing that sentence, but if you never see a multivarious universe of pluralistic view on TV, doesn't that mean that you always see something else - and thus that you are constantly watching TV. As this negates your previous assertion, I can only assume that you peak through your neighbors' windows and watch their TV, as yours, as stated, has been tossed out.
Personally, I find the most interesting thing about TV is trying to detect the corporate agenda while watching. This, I think, was why Survivor was popular. You can truly judge someone's intelligence by seeing how they watch Survivor (though by merely watching it one starts with a minor intelligence handicap). Roughly 3/4 of people will get fooled by the editors and claim to know what's coming only to have it, quite suprisingly, turn around in the last 2 minutes. Trying to see beyond what TV editors want you to see is the only valuable thing on TV for me (well, that and the Daily Show).
I realize that many waste away their lives in front of the TV, but I just don't get people who claim to be somehow superior because they avoid it at all cost. That's tantamount to one of Gutenberg's contemporaries clinging to his local bard and claiming that print is a detriment. Obviously, TV is under corporate control, but it is still of cultural value. Like it or not, it's the medium that defines the last two generations. Music probably defined the two before that, but TV still had a huge role. Really, is something like Saturday Night Live any more mindless than Chaucer?
Instead of engaging in the "art of conversation" and railing on the mindless masses from your perch of artistic piety, you should try and start a competing medium yourself. Or, since the public seems rathered entrenched in the TV culture, try to create some sort of intellectually stimulating TV program. Criticizing TV watching isn't going to eliminate it because the people on TV won't broadcast your criticism. You have to show them another mode of media through the existing form. I imagine word of mouth spread news of the printing press, that handbills advertised the sales of radios at Sears, and that there were radio ads for TVs. Going back to word of mouth isn't going to eliminate television slaves - you need a better solution. Or you can just sit on your ass and complain about it... which if you think about it isn't much more productive than watching an episode of South Park anyway.
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I think they're trying to say that the guy runs 14 ecomm websites spread across 79 servers and it runs so well that he has nothing to do except sit in his office doodling with his slinky. Now, most network admins would probably be taking the euphemistic approach to that rather than the literal, but who's to say?
Well, many devices I own already have AC->DC converters either built-in or in a block. DC would be more effecient for these. Also, you have to realize that they aren't exactly going to be running high-power refrigerators, air-conditioners, or washing machines on this feed. It will probably be used for communications, and other, more vital functions (I'm thinking water filtering, food preperation, etc, but I don't know how Costa Rica works).
I remember it being called Pret a Porter: Ready to Wear or something to that effect. Not like it's at all relevant. American movies have translated titles in Europe half the time as well. I just went through Greece, Austria, Germany, and France and I probably saw three different translated titles for "The Mummy Returns." Then again, "Antitrust" was always the same. One translation that I thought was pretty impressive was changing "Lola Rennt" to "Run Lola Run." It used an American cultural symbol in with a form of the original title to make an interesting translation. Titles are going to be translated - live with it. It's not just dumb american audiences. Books are the same way. I just read Camus' The Plague ... not Le' Plague or something to that extent. Similarly, I saw billions of copies of John Grishiams (spelling, sorry) Die Jury in Germany and Austria. Now, the translation I understand, but why the hell would any country adopt that author besides America? Then again, Germany also adored David Hasselhoff for awhile, so who knows?
Search back in Slashdot for AIDS and Nanotech and you'll find a story that will destroy your entire argument.
While I doubt we'll have nanobots flying around and patroling the world in the next decade, your view is quite short-sighted. No shit Bio-tech seems wonderful to you - it already has major results... DNA recombination in bacteria as one huge example. Somehow I doubt nanotech will stagnate at its current state of buckyballs/tubes with theoretical applications. Biotech certainly went beyond Watson/Crick theorizing the structure of DNA. Sure, people are going a bit crazy with nanotech prophecies (thanks in no small part to The Diamond Age), but to flat out deny any possible impact of nanotechnology is insanity. I can guarantee you we'll be able to make a microrobot that can do a complex job before we can engineer a microbe to do the same thing (unless that job is intrinsically biological like most other biotech applications). Biotech is undoubtedly impressive, but it, like nanotech, has limits.
Admitedly the backup in customs is also a by-product of the problamatic airline situation - my problem was precipitated by a mass arrival of planes into USAir's Philly terminal. It's pretty small as far as internation terminals go. Still, though I don't fly internationally often, I had another long wait coming into Atlanta from Jamaica, and Atlanta has a huge international terminal.
Regarding lacking an American passport, the countries I visited (with the exception of France) all had open borders. Somewhat different from America eh? It was a little dissapointing that I couldn't fill up my passport with stamps though. Just one coming into Amsterdam and another from a confused passport checker in Munich who really wasn't supposed to stamp it anyway. But yeah, your right that being American carries influence internationally. I'd argue, however, that it shouldn't.
Actually, I just didn't feel like wasting Slashdot's space by explaining the whole situation. I waited in line for imigration (over an hour) and then moved on to customs. Rather than wait an hour in line for the "no items to declare" officer, I took my form over to the "items to declare" desk because there was no line. Much quicker that way. But yes, you do have to declare if you have under $400 so long as some items are intended to be sold or as gifts. You just don't have to pay a tariff unless it's above $400.
And Alf: Der Film may have cost just 49 shillings (3 bucks), but its priceless in my book.
My thoughts exactly. As an American, I find it disgusting that our reputation as the "land of the free" has basically been whittled down to allowing businesses almost any freedom they desire. Hell, with DMCA, etc, businesses have more rights than I do. I just got back from a month long visit to Europe. I never spent more than 30 seconds in a customs line. When I came back to the US through Philidelphia, I had to wait two hours in line to declare my copy of "Alf: Der Film" - had I been even luckier I may have had a friendly customs agent search my inner cavaties for cocain. Land of the free indeed.
Without the John Williams score and the exposition, the ending would have been bearable, if not perfect. You are so right about the differences between Spielberg and Kubrick's musical choices for their movies. In a Spielberg movie you can almost always count on a John Williams score. This simply means a rehashing of every other John Williams score. Either a fast moving "adventure" theme or his patented emotionally manipulative theme. In this movie, we get both. Kubrick, on the other hand, chooses from a range of composers to fit the film. In Full Metal Jacket you get Flight of the Valkries booming over the shore. Clockwork Orange utilizes Beethoven's 9th to perfection. Just look at the variation there. Every time I see a Spielberg movie, I'm insulted that he picks the same bloody music to elicit the same reactions from every movie. Shouldn't there be a different meaning to say, the end of AI and the end of Jurassic Park? Why do they have the same music?
I will say that I dug the ambient music/sounds in the forest chase scene. That whole scene was excellent. The only qualm I had was with the neon "dogs" that were sicced on the robots. This was probably Kubrick's idea, and it's clever to a point (reminiscent of dog hunting - brutality for pleasure - etc.), but the execution is pretty horrible. Seems like a mix between Batman 4, Blade Runner, and The Running Man. Other than that it's an excellent introduction to the Flesh Fair.
Sorry for the extended digression there, but basically for me the movie would have gone from interesting to good by simply removing the exposition and making more intelligent musical choices. I also had problems with the alien/robot design (hello CE3K), but I suppose it's bearable. Not to mention the scientific voodoo at the end.
The basic idea is that the Prof. Hobby guy meticulously mapped the human neuron and, I assume, made a program that simulating a few of them acting together. That's what he said in the first few minutes of the movie anyway. I would go farther, but it would go into spoiler territory (not that it's terribly important to the movie as Spielberg completely ignores this thread in favor of the who Pinnochio fairy tale - though they are somewhat related).
OK, the ending could have been good. No shit theyh weren't aliens - I'm just saying go watch CE3K where the aliens are unveiled and then watch both the first time David is introduced and the first time the ultra-futeristic-robots are on-screen. I had three main problems with the ending - visual style, overuse of exposition (which really lasted the entire movie), and typical Spielberg-esque emotional manipulation. Yeah, I realize Spielberg is quite talented at getting a John Williams score in D-Minor, showing people crying/dying, and complimenting it with slow camera pans/zooms to get the audience into the movie, but it doesn't work for me. Suprisingly, it didn't even work for the audience I saw it with either. He had the opportunity to make the robot encounter into a great suprise ending (well, it was expected, but so are most suprise endings). It was horribly executed. It should have left me pondering its meaning when I left, but I don't have to, because the robot explained it all for me for 10 minutes. I really don't have to think about the Pinnochio allusion either because its meaning was hammered into me about four times in the movie (first reading, boy's request for blue fairy, dr. know, coney island, good god can a metaphore be so drawn out). Not to mention that the "we can only bring mommy back for a day due to the space-time-continuum" voodoo bullshit was pretty rediculous. That might have been Kubrick's idea, but it was still bull. How would the universe revolve around the human day when humans themselves are extinct? Doesn't the ending prove the lack of existence of some spiritual defense of humanity?
You're right that Spielberg's made great and shitty movies. Jaws is great, Indy is great, CE3K is great, Schindler's List is good. But this is just not particularly good in either the typical-spielberg-entertainment sense or the artistic-merit sense. It won't be a box office smash. It'll probably be #1 this weekend because of the shear number of competing movies, but it won't next weekend. The whole movie felt like it was the Cliff's Notes Complete version Spielberg made of Kubrick's ideas. Again, I know that Kubrick wanted Spielberg to direct this, but I don't know how happy he would've been.
And no, every last bit of it was not Kubrick. He would not have used a JW score (look at his past strategic reuse of classic music to aid his movies - Beethoven's 9th in Clockwork, Flight of the Valkries in Full Metal Jacket). He would not have had slick CE3K robots. He wanted David to be a robot rather than a boy - physically. Again, Spielberg has liscense to change all that. My problem is just that he tried to keep all of Kubrick's plans/themes while imposing his own directing style - the emotionally manipulative, overly expository one. When Spielberg used his Indy/Jaws style for the Rouge City scenes among others, it mostly worked.
Basically I can't like this movie, but I'll still come back to watch it a few more times (though I may fast-forward through a bit of the ending). It's interesting to watch in the same sense that something like Survivor is - to try and figure out what went on behind the scenes to make the movie. I don't like the movie because it thought I was an idiot (though according to you, this is a proper accusation), but I still enjoyed watching it to figure out just where Spielberg went wrong. It could have been great; he could have made it great; he obviously didn't, however, and that's why I liked watching it.
Hehe, I just got back from that. I can't believe Spielberg spliced in CE3K footage for the last half hour of the movie. I know special effects are expensive, but that's pretty rediculous - plus he had a perfectly good ending a half hour before.
.... errr teddy bear was entertaining.
It's still an interesting movie though. It's not good in the traditional sense, but it sure had me entertained if only for trying to pick apart the movie and figure out which bits came from Kubrick and which from Speilberg. I have the odd feeling that Kubrick probably came up with the Pinnochio allusion, but some how I doubt he would have shoved it down the audience's throat and explained it over and over. Still, the movie would have been much worse had Spielberg tried to emulate Kubrick (he did to a point, but really only so far as going with slow pacing and using Kubrick's drawings/ideas for shot setup). At least the movie didn't say, "You know David - that's the first man eh?" - oh wait, it did. The really awkward thing is that the movie could have been good. At least the ewok
It's not a movie that entertains me, but it's still my favorite Spielberg movie next to Jaws. Oh wait, it also follows the Indy trilogy. Really he should either stick to those types of movies or stop trying to make movies that have some sort of underlying meaning and then tagging them with a John Williams score and computerized aliens.
Actually, I heard Napster already moved to filter all John Tesh songs to preempt any similar suits.
This would be best done as a plug-in rather than detracting from the need to kill the existing mozilla bugs and get to a final product. The lack of a feature is not a bug. Everyone who's voting for 76537 should get together and create a gesture-browsing plug-in rather (in the same way as Total Recall implements crash-recovery).
In the field of medicine, the training will almost always be payed for assuming that the trainee has a steady job. Doctors who run their own practice obviously don't apply, as well as many temporary nurses and the like, but if you are employed as a nurse/doctor and need continuing education to keep certification it will almost always be payed for.
Cool. It's good to know that the military doesn't always screw up. Like I said, I wasn't sure it was true - that is an incredibly detailed story for someone to make up though... I'll have to look into that. That puts this movie one step ahead of The Patriot as far as historical accuracy goes in my book :)
Nope. He's right. Journalists must follow the Price-is-Right-guidelines at all times. Since saying 60 years would obviously be over the actual amount, it would eliminate Jon from the year-guessing game and, ultimately, take away any chance at reaching the Showcase Showdown. Now, why 50 instead of 59? Clearly, like all modern journalists, Jon must round to the nearest ten. Unfortunately, this rule is not analagous with a TV gameshow, so it is much more difficult to explain.
Though I haven't seen the movie yet, apparently it has Miller receiving a medal for his valor (read this in some review). In actuality, he died later in the war and the navy refused to give him the medal until years after his death. Again, second hand information, but if it's true it's pretty ironic.
Somehow I think that most modern laptops would need some sort of air circulation for the chip. Compare this to the g4 cube - no fan, yet it needs a 1/2ft^3 heatsink and a bunch of vents to properly cool. Even my TiVo with its 50Mhz powerpc processor has a large fan. Even if Apple could make a Gx based laptop without a fan, it would need circulation. I suppose they could, say, use the Ti Powerbook as its own heatsink, but then it would get extremely toasty and probably fail to function in a hot environment. Now, a lower-powererd waterproof PDA would be cool. I have an epod that I modified and it definitely has the capability to be made waterproof. No ventilation at all. All I would need to do would be to seal the joints, create some sort of sealed pushbuttons, and make the touchscreen work through a waterproof shield.
By the way, I got my TiVo for free in their essay contest a while back and it broke. I think I'm going to part it out tomorrow. Is there anything besides the hard drive(s) and fan that would be useful? I guess I could unhook the IR reciever and see if I could hook it to the IR header on my motherboard... possibly the TV tuner would be a normal bt848 card or something since that has pretty robust Linux support.
Plus it's slashdotted and that isn't helping much with my attempts at access.
Somehow, I imagine that they either get royalties from the sales of Myst III or have some contract against slandering it (though in this case, it wouldn't be slander as it's true). Though I bet the Millers are as rich as eskimo kings at this point, they probably will still tend to their financial interests and let the users battle it out on this one. Then again, perhaps they have souls? In my experience, ethics are rarely found in any sort of business, so who knows.
Yeah, apparently they stuck in all the pro-fedex messages (I haven't seen the movie, but from the trailer it seemed like Hanks was extremely dedicated to delivering some package on time - so much that he missed christmas dinner or something) in order to counter the obvious negative message sent by hurling a purple fedex plane into the water. I think if you go and search Ebert's Q&A section at suntimes.com you will find something on this. Then again I may have seen it somewhere else.
Sorry, but I have a problem with antitele-evangelists. Like it or not, TV is THE popular artistic medium of the last few generations. Hell, even music, which stood beside television is now pretty much controlled by its advertising on television (note that I'm concentrating solely on popular music here). I don't think it's particularly healthy that people watch television more than they sleep (or whatever that statistic is up to now), but I still recognize its cultural significance. I don't watch much TV, but I'm certainly not going to eschew it and say it's totally worthless. Television is very much akin to computers and books in that if you use them passively you get no benefit. Computers and books have much the same effect if you simply play video games and read books. Unless you go and write computer programs or prose you aren't exactly making memories of a brain full of creative work. The main problem with TV is that it's so damn easy to use passively and so difficult to become an active part in. It's easy to write a book, but not to produce a TV show. That said, since so many people watch TV and, despite your pleas, they aren't going to stop, you should be like Michael Moore, Jon Stewert, Ken Burns, etc and try and make TV a more valuable medium rather than simply blasting it. Sure, a majority of TV programming is worthless, but don't blame the newspaper for the news eh?
Interestingly, the most obvious product placements often aren't payed for. Austin Powers' beatle in AP2 was not payed for by VW. Likewise, FedEx didn't have a hand in Castaway. On the other hand, most cars in commercial movies (with the exception of AP2 I suppose) are payed for. There are always glaring examples of product placement in summer/fall movies *COUGH* Denise Richards defusing nuke with Jornado in Bond *COUGH*
Many non-payed-for ads are removed for TV release. For example, a coke can in Mallrats was digitally erased for TV because Coke probably didn't want their image tarnished on ABC. There is probably a good chance that Subway didn't even pay for their placement in Happy Gillmore. Otherwise, I doubt Fox (or whatever network showed it) would take the effort to remove the references. It's not because their contract was up or anything that the references were removed. Odds are that it was because the TV network showing the movie was afraid of getting sued.
IANAL;TINLA (I am not a lawyer; This is not legal advice)
If you are going to spell out an acronym, why use it in the first place? Possibly it would be germaine if you used it multiple times in your post, but in this case, the acronym (and the associated description) makes up nearly 15% of the post. Sorry to whine, but this is one of my top 10 Slashdot pet peeves (not that I can list the other 9, but I know them when I see them damn them!) (Oh yeah, one of the other 9 is over use of parenthesis) (another is making posts on a simple point overly long by not ending the damn thing quickly enough).
But here in this worldwide forum I'm discovering a multivarious universe of pluralistic view I never see on TV.
... which if you think about it isn't much more productive than watching an episode of South Park anyway.
My TV-weakened brain is having trouble parsing that sentence, but if you never see a multivarious universe of pluralistic view on TV, doesn't that mean that you always see something else - and thus that you are constantly watching TV. As this negates your previous assertion, I can only assume that you peak through your neighbors' windows and watch their TV, as yours, as stated, has been tossed out.
Personally, I find the most interesting thing about TV is trying to detect the corporate agenda while watching. This, I think, was why Survivor was popular. You can truly judge someone's intelligence by seeing how they watch Survivor (though by merely watching it one starts with a minor intelligence handicap). Roughly 3/4 of people will get fooled by the editors and claim to know what's coming only to have it, quite suprisingly, turn around in the last 2 minutes. Trying to see beyond what TV editors want you to see is the only valuable thing on TV for me (well, that and the Daily Show).
I realize that many waste away their lives in front of the TV, but I just don't get people who claim to be somehow superior because they avoid it at all cost. That's tantamount to one of Gutenberg's contemporaries clinging to his local bard and claiming that print is a detriment. Obviously, TV is under corporate control, but it is still of cultural value. Like it or not, it's the medium that defines the last two generations. Music probably defined the two before that, but TV still had a huge role. Really, is something like Saturday Night Live any more mindless than Chaucer?
Instead of engaging in the "art of conversation" and railing on the mindless masses from your perch of artistic piety, you should try and start a competing medium yourself. Or, since the public seems rathered entrenched in the TV culture, try to create some sort of intellectually stimulating TV program. Criticizing TV watching isn't going to eliminate it because the people on TV won't broadcast your criticism. You have to show them another mode of media through the existing form. I imagine word of mouth spread news of the printing press, that handbills advertised the sales of radios at Sears, and that there were radio ads for TVs. Going back to word of mouth isn't going to eliminate television slaves - you need a better solution. Or you can just sit on your ass and complain about it