If sysadmins were more consistently good, we wouldn't need to manufacture a day to "appreciate" them. One of the reasons sysadmins are under appreciated is because a non-trivial percentage of them aren't worth spit. Sure, I've worked with some incredible admins and appreciated every second of their time. But I've worked with some pretty clueless idiots who had no business whatsoever coming anywhere near a computer. Nobody remembers the good admins because everything just works and no one needs to call them. Unfortunately, that means that the only admins you really do remember are the ones who couldn't figure out how to pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel. And that is what is really not fair for the good admins and why they are under appreciated.
So, for all the good admins out there, kudos to you. You should be appreciated on more than just one day arbitrarily chosen out of the year. For the rest, well, mother always said if you didn't have anything nice to say don't say anything. I don't have anything to say to you.
This order is a lot like an unarmed bobby trying to prevent crime, yelling "STOP! Or I'll shout 'STOP' again!"
I guess it's too much to ask for politicians to understand anything more complex than a digital wristwatch. As such, they have no clue that this measure will have virtually no effect. But what's worse is the telecom companies who are using this as an excuse to put in all sorts of anti-competitive filtering and so forth. How long until we find out that they were "inadvertently" blocking access to legitimate websites that just so happen to be run by their competitors?
Does this mean that I as an engineer may at some point in the future be able to make millions off of my inventions instead of having to hand them over to my employer?
Read your employment contract. Most likely you surrender all rights to the things you produce in exchange for your pay and benefits. In this case, Lucas just showed up and bought some stuff from a shop. The shop had no affiliation with Lucas except to sell him what he bought (without a contract). As a result, the intellectual property is covered by the 15 year copyright. The guy who originally produced the suits doesn't even have a claim to the original rights. Though with the original molds, he'll be able to charge more for the suits he makes.
I fully expect that we will never see a deal like this in a Hollywood movie ever again. Lucas lost access to a revenue stream by not having a contract. Hollywood executives will never let that happen again. Expect to see every purchase of everything made to be done with huge contracts. Or most of the prop production will move exclusively in house with paid employees having no rights to the things they produce.
While this certainly is a victory for this guy, things will change in the movie industry. No longer will props be bought without huge contracts that take away every single right of the people who design and build them. I foresee this causing the elimination of most independent shops designing and developing props. Movie studios will instead go to (or create their own) industrial prop houses and hire cheap talent to crank out props. The really good artists will be replaced by wage slaves just showing up for a paycheck. Sadly, winning this battle may eventually cause the war to be lost.
All of that would help for sure. But records can be doctored after the fact. Tamper proof seals aren't ever really tamper proof. The chain of custody is only as strong as the people who are in it. That being said, all of that should still be mandatory in every district in the country. It won't prevent fraud but, like you say, fraud would require a lot more effort. That would reduce the occurrence of fraud and that's never a bad thing.
When I saw the Florida recount, I saw people who didn't want chads to fall off delicately handling each and every ballot while those who wanted them to get knocked off were handling them roughly. All in plain view of the cameras.
I agree that electronic voting, especially with closed source software, is far more vulnerable than paper ballots. But there's still plenty of methods to perpetrate fraud with paper ballots too, not the least of which is to add or remove ballots. What good is recounting paper votes when someone has stuffed the ballot box with extra ballots? The recount will only serve to confirm the fraudulent vote.
What recount? The recount of the same ballots that were stuffed? What is that going to show? It doesn't take much to falsify the rolls to account for the extra (or missing) ballots. Hell, dead people have been voting in Chicago religiously for decades.
I could care less about if someone else things I'm affluent because I have an iPhone 5, or if I'm "trendy" because of it, or anything else.
Really? How much less could you care? A lot? Not much? The way you wrote this post it seems like you intended to say that you couldn't care less. I mean, I personally could care less about bad grammar. A lot less. But I do care. That's why I could care less. It seems to me that there are a lot of people out there who couldn't care less about their own bad grammar.
There's a lot more chances to defraud elections when it comes to "ballot stuffing". Ballots can magically disappear just as easily as they can appear. Ballots don't have to be stuffed at the polling place. They can be pre-stuffed. They can be post-stuffed. And, as we have seen with "hanging chads", the actions of the counters can cause punch out bits to fall off. Though thankfully most districts have eliminated punch cards of any kinds and are going to writing on paper instead. The key problem in paper ballots is that there is a human element required in handling ballots.
I agree in principle that an election system connected to the internet is probably easier to manipulate through hacking than paper ballots. But unless every single one of the ballots are handled in view of a camera 24/7, you're going to have fraud. Hell, it's even possible to defraud the election with cameras in place if you know what you're doing. Illusionists have been tricking people while doing everything in plain view for centuries.
Elections are part of politics. Politics involves money and power. Money and power bring corruption. Corruption brings fraud. I don't want to sound defeatist but really, that's just the way this world works.
Apple makes a decent phone that integrates well with other Apple products. The target demographic of Apple is the consumer electronics user, not the serious computer user. They only use computers to accomplish something else. They don't use computers for the sake of using computers. The polished and (reasonably) well integrated user interface is simple and lets them get on with doing what they want to do without getting in their way. The iPhone4 was better than the 3. Apple has a track record of solid and steady improvements, rather than some companies who completely redesign their user interface every time they come out with a major release. *cough* *cough* Microsoft *cough* *cough* When I'm happy with an appliance, I'm very likely to want to buy another one of the same brand when it's time to replace and/or upgrade. I don't see why the iPhone would be any different.
You think so? Ballot stuffing has a long and glorious history in elections around the world. Since ballots have no way to track them back to the person casting the vote, there's no way to tell if someone actually cast any ballot. That kind of anonymity is a perfect breeding ground for fraud.
Most of the accusations of voter fraud stem from one horrible shortcoming in American elections. Quite simply, it's a lack of transparency. If the election work was done out in the open for all to see, we wouldn't have so much fraud. But that's exactly why it's done in secret. Both sides WANT fraud. When things aren't going their way they want to have all sorts of leverage to shift the election to them. Ballot stuffing has a long and glorious tradition in this country. The Republicans are being accused today, though there isn't any hard evidence that would convict beyond a reasonable doubt (again, transparency). The Democratic machine in Chicago is legendary for their fraud. If elections were done out in the open where people could see what's going on, a lot of this fraud would become substantially more difficult.
But here's the kicker. It really doesn't make all that much difference who actually gets elected. We had a Republican who got us into two wars. He was replaced by a Democrat promising to get us out of war but all he did was get us involved in a third war. Every time one party takes over, they seem to outspend the party they just replaced. And it doesn't matter which party replaces which, the spending just keeps going up. For all of the talk about about the other issues, it seems to me that day to day life doesn't change. All of the bickering about the hot button topics (abortion, gay rights, gun rights, the environment, etc.) is just a way for the parties to pander to the masses, keeping them distracted from what's actually going on behind the curtain. I firmly believe that the Tea Party movement was engineered by the Republicans to distract the more radical portion of their base. They get themselves in a lather about everything, yelling slogans and rallying against big government but end up voting for the Republican candidate as a means of voting against the Democrat. Win for the Republican machine.
I've said it for a long time. The only real difference between the parties is who they take money from and who they give it to.
Once you have a few years under your belt, the masters does start to make a real difference in the quality of the candidate. Right out of school, not so much.
I'm actually considering going back to school again. A lot has changed since I took my last class. It's time for me to freshen up my skills. Since I'm terrible in project management, I need to stay up to date in order to keep working on newer technology.
The building of crap is mostly driven by bean counters trying to spend as little as they have to in order to make a product. A robot can make a good quality piece that is far more consistent and virtually free of any flaws day in and day out. All it needs is to be building a part that's integrated into a quality design and you can have fantastic results. The drive to make everything as cheaply as they can in order to drive up profit margin is what drives poor quality. Not the fact that a robot is making it.
I'm not suggesting that you lie about your degree and leave it off your resume. I'm just going off the decades of experience I have with college grads that have no experience. A masters degree doesn't necessarily make you any better at engineering. Sure, you passed a bunch of classes and probably did a big research project. That's great. I still have to train you pretty extensively when you get here. And depending on how big of an ego the new grad has, the training may be more or less difficult. If you're a new grad but you have real experience working in a real job, even as an intern, I find that you're substantially more likely to be a better employee right out of the gate.
Personally, I find that 2 years of real world experience is far more valuable than a masters degree at first. Once you have some experience to build on, a masters makes a lot more sense. Once you have a few years under your belt, the masters does start to make a real difference in the quality of the candidate. Right out of school, not so much.
This same tired rhetoric has been shoveled out for centuries. When we transitioned from agrarian to industrial economies, everyone was forecasting the doom of civilization. We were losing all of the artisan skills and replacing the poor downtrodden workers with machines operated by less skilled workers. When the assembly lines started up decades later, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the skilled machine operator was being replaced by the unskilled assembly line worker. Of course, when more automation was added to the assembly line and the first robots appeared, everyone was in a panic about how the skilled assembly line worker was being replaced by the button pushing monkeys.
Guess what. Civilization didn't collapse then. It's not going to collapse now. If anything, our standard of living has improved dramatically over the centuries. Even the poor (in the US at least) have homes, cars, big screen TVs and enough food to be suffering from an obesity epidemic.
No maybe about it. While it's not unheard of for a masters student to excel out of the gate, it's certainly more of an exception rather than a rule. Kudos for finding a good program that did help you. Would that all masters programs were like that.
It's been my experience in the engineering field that going straight through school to the masters degree is far less useful than getting the bachelors, working for a while and then getting the masters (or concurrently getting the masters while you're working your first job out of undergrad). The academic type can come out of a masters program and still not know squat about actually getting things done, making them basically useless. On the other hand, those of us who have gotten a bachelors, worked a while, and then gone back for the masters really do get more value.
When I see a resume pass my desk that is for someone who went straight through to a masters, I'm actually less likely to recommend them. They often don't have any better real world skills but they cost more to employ while you get them trained. In fact, they tend to be harder to train as they are so completely immersed in academia and have a hard time making the transition to the real world. On the other hand, internship experience while going straight through school does compensate quite a bit. A few terms doing real work while going to school makes all the difference.
I would see that growing food would be counter productive to generating electricity. In order to make maximum use of the facility, you want as much energy as you can to heat the air. And you want an air path with as little turbulence as possible to facilitate flow through the tower. Plants in the greenhouse would a) consume some of the captured solar energy, lowering the amount of heat imparted to the air and; b) provide obstructions to the flow of air. Certainly you can mitigate some of these effects. However, the constant influx of fresh air would take away a lot of the captured heat, which is the point of having a greenhouse to grow plants.
All of that aside, I wonder about the necessity of a greenhouse keeping plants warm in Arizona. I don't think warmth is as much a problem in Arizona as it is elsewhere but that's just me.
All I'm suggesting is that there are so many unresolved threads stemming from this movie. I personally find that threads like that distract from the movie.
I will say that this prequel is better than many others simply because they're not working with (or against) an established movie. While, in my (not so) humble opinion, they spent too much time laying the ground work for the following movie, they did have a freedom to make it its own movie rather than being forced to plug neatly into something that was already done. It's not as bad as taking a hugely popular movie and writing a prequel 20 years later, filled with horrible dialog and bad acting;)
The elder Stark finding the cube on the bottom of the sea means Tony will have it around for his work in upcoming movies.
The fact that the main bad guy what's-his-name, got shot into the cosmos just like Thor and Loki means he'll be back for sure. The tie-in with Norse mythology and getting the cube in Norway was no coincidence.
They surely didn't get all of the red skull agents and scientists. They surely missed some of the technology as well. The possibility of them coming back is there, probably with their former leader.
The red skull scientist they did capture will still probably play a role, if only in the early history of SHIELD.
The quick 5 second scene where they drew CA's blood for genetic analysis will surely mean they're recreate whatever they injected him with. Though why the doctor didn't keep any notes on how he made it is entirely a plot device that you have to suspend disbelief on. But we'll certainly see it again.
No, this movie was all about setup and leaving stuff behind for the next movies.
This movie, like a lot of the others in the Avengers series suffer from the exact same thing. They can't stand on their own. Sure, the effects were good. The writing wasn't half bad. The acting was pretty decent. But the entire story was servicing the inevitable sequel. As a result, the film itself wasn't very interesting. Everything seemed to be there specifically to set up for the next movie. Sure, there was the "fight/chase scene" that concluded the movie with a little resolution but it wasn't a very satisfying ending. So it doesn't stand on its own but it didn't generate in me an overwhelming anticipation of the sequel either. Every part of it said "there's going to be more in the next movie" without really building the anticipation. It really felt like they were just rushing through everything to make sure they had the bases covered for the movie next year. The underlying story for this movie really didn't really engage me.
That being said, it is a decent movie. It's worth seeing on the big screen in the theater. The story may have been flimsy and cliche but the characters themselves were developed pretty well. Like I said above, the writing and acting were acceptable. The effects were pretty good too. You have to suspend your disbelief on a lot of things but this is a movie based on a comic book so that's a given. And if you do that, the movie is enjoyable.
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If sysadmins were more consistently good, we wouldn't need to manufacture a day to "appreciate" them. One of the reasons sysadmins are under appreciated is because a non-trivial percentage of them aren't worth spit. Sure, I've worked with some incredible admins and appreciated every second of their time. But I've worked with some pretty clueless idiots who had no business whatsoever coming anywhere near a computer. Nobody remembers the good admins because everything just works and no one needs to call them. Unfortunately, that means that the only admins you really do remember are the ones who couldn't figure out how to pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel. And that is what is really not fair for the good admins and why they are under appreciated.
So, for all the good admins out there, kudos to you. You should be appreciated on more than just one day arbitrarily chosen out of the year. For the rest, well, mother always said if you didn't have anything nice to say don't say anything. I don't have anything to say to you.
This order is a lot like an unarmed bobby trying to prevent crime, yelling "STOP! Or I'll shout 'STOP' again!"
I guess it's too much to ask for politicians to understand anything more complex than a digital wristwatch. As such, they have no clue that this measure will have virtually no effect. But what's worse is the telecom companies who are using this as an excuse to put in all sorts of anti-competitive filtering and so forth. How long until we find out that they were "inadvertently" blocking access to legitimate websites that just so happen to be run by their competitors?
Does this mean that I as an engineer may at some point in the future be able to make millions off of my inventions instead of having to hand them over to my employer?
Read your employment contract. Most likely you surrender all rights to the things you produce in exchange for your pay and benefits. In this case, Lucas just showed up and bought some stuff from a shop. The shop had no affiliation with Lucas except to sell him what he bought (without a contract). As a result, the intellectual property is covered by the 15 year copyright. The guy who originally produced the suits doesn't even have a claim to the original rights. Though with the original molds, he'll be able to charge more for the suits he makes.
I fully expect that we will never see a deal like this in a Hollywood movie ever again. Lucas lost access to a revenue stream by not having a contract. Hollywood executives will never let that happen again. Expect to see every purchase of everything made to be done with huge contracts. Or most of the prop production will move exclusively in house with paid employees having no rights to the things they produce.
While this certainly is a victory for this guy, things will change in the movie industry. No longer will props be bought without huge contracts that take away every single right of the people who design and build them. I foresee this causing the elimination of most independent shops designing and developing props. Movie studios will instead go to (or create their own) industrial prop houses and hire cheap talent to crank out props. The really good artists will be replaced by wage slaves just showing up for a paycheck. Sadly, winning this battle may eventually cause the war to be lost.
All of that would help for sure. But records can be doctored after the fact. Tamper proof seals aren't ever really tamper proof. The chain of custody is only as strong as the people who are in it. That being said, all of that should still be mandatory in every district in the country. It won't prevent fraud but, like you say, fraud would require a lot more effort. That would reduce the occurrence of fraud and that's never a bad thing.
When I saw the Florida recount, I saw people who didn't want chads to fall off delicately handling each and every ballot while those who wanted them to get knocked off were handling them roughly. All in plain view of the cameras.
I agree that electronic voting, especially with closed source software, is far more vulnerable than paper ballots. But there's still plenty of methods to perpetrate fraud with paper ballots too, not the least of which is to add or remove ballots. What good is recounting paper votes when someone has stuffed the ballot box with extra ballots? The recount will only serve to confirm the fraudulent vote.
Yea right. Next thing you're going to tell me is that the sun will come up tomorrow no matter what.
What recount? The recount of the same ballots that were stuffed? What is that going to show? It doesn't take much to falsify the rolls to account for the extra (or missing) ballots. Hell, dead people have been voting in Chicago religiously for decades.
I could care less about if someone else things I'm affluent because I have an iPhone 5, or if I'm "trendy" because of it, or anything else.
Really? How much less could you care? A lot? Not much? The way you wrote this post it seems like you intended to say that you couldn't care less. I mean, I personally could care less about bad grammar. A lot less. But I do care. That's why I could care less. It seems to me that there are a lot of people out there who couldn't care less about their own bad grammar.
There's a lot more chances to defraud elections when it comes to "ballot stuffing". Ballots can magically disappear just as easily as they can appear. Ballots don't have to be stuffed at the polling place. They can be pre-stuffed. They can be post-stuffed. And, as we have seen with "hanging chads", the actions of the counters can cause punch out bits to fall off. Though thankfully most districts have eliminated punch cards of any kinds and are going to writing on paper instead. The key problem in paper ballots is that there is a human element required in handling ballots.
I agree in principle that an election system connected to the internet is probably easier to manipulate through hacking than paper ballots. But unless every single one of the ballots are handled in view of a camera 24/7, you're going to have fraud. Hell, it's even possible to defraud the election with cameras in place if you know what you're doing. Illusionists have been tricking people while doing everything in plain view for centuries.
Elections are part of politics. Politics involves money and power. Money and power bring corruption. Corruption brings fraud. I don't want to sound defeatist but really, that's just the way this world works.
Apple makes a decent phone that integrates well with other Apple products. The target demographic of Apple is the consumer electronics user, not the serious computer user. They only use computers to accomplish something else. They don't use computers for the sake of using computers. The polished and (reasonably) well integrated user interface is simple and lets them get on with doing what they want to do without getting in their way. The iPhone4 was better than the 3. Apple has a track record of solid and steady improvements, rather than some companies who completely redesign their user interface every time they come out with a major release. *cough* *cough* Microsoft *cough* *cough* When I'm happy with an appliance, I'm very likely to want to buy another one of the same brand when it's time to replace and/or upgrade. I don't see why the iPhone would be any different.
You think so? Ballot stuffing has a long and glorious history in elections around the world. Since ballots have no way to track them back to the person casting the vote, there's no way to tell if someone actually cast any ballot. That kind of anonymity is a perfect breeding ground for fraud.
Most of the accusations of voter fraud stem from one horrible shortcoming in American elections. Quite simply, it's a lack of transparency. If the election work was done out in the open for all to see, we wouldn't have so much fraud. But that's exactly why it's done in secret. Both sides WANT fraud. When things aren't going their way they want to have all sorts of leverage to shift the election to them. Ballot stuffing has a long and glorious tradition in this country. The Republicans are being accused today, though there isn't any hard evidence that would convict beyond a reasonable doubt (again, transparency). The Democratic machine in Chicago is legendary for their fraud. If elections were done out in the open where people could see what's going on, a lot of this fraud would become substantially more difficult.
But here's the kicker. It really doesn't make all that much difference who actually gets elected. We had a Republican who got us into two wars. He was replaced by a Democrat promising to get us out of war but all he did was get us involved in a third war. Every time one party takes over, they seem to outspend the party they just replaced. And it doesn't matter which party replaces which, the spending just keeps going up. For all of the talk about about the other issues, it seems to me that day to day life doesn't change. All of the bickering about the hot button topics (abortion, gay rights, gun rights, the environment, etc.) is just a way for the parties to pander to the masses, keeping them distracted from what's actually going on behind the curtain. I firmly believe that the Tea Party movement was engineered by the Republicans to distract the more radical portion of their base. They get themselves in a lather about everything, yelling slogans and rallying against big government but end up voting for the Republican candidate as a means of voting against the Democrat. Win for the Republican machine.
I've said it for a long time. The only real difference between the parties is who they take money from and who they give it to.
I did in one of my follow on posts.
Once you have a few years under your belt, the masters does start to make a real difference in the quality of the candidate. Right out of school, not so much.
I'm actually considering going back to school again. A lot has changed since I took my last class. It's time for me to freshen up my skills. Since I'm terrible in project management, I need to stay up to date in order to keep working on newer technology.
The building of crap is mostly driven by bean counters trying to spend as little as they have to in order to make a product. A robot can make a good quality piece that is far more consistent and virtually free of any flaws day in and day out. All it needs is to be building a part that's integrated into a quality design and you can have fantastic results. The drive to make everything as cheaply as they can in order to drive up profit margin is what drives poor quality. Not the fact that a robot is making it.
I'm not suggesting that you lie about your degree and leave it off your resume. I'm just going off the decades of experience I have with college grads that have no experience. A masters degree doesn't necessarily make you any better at engineering. Sure, you passed a bunch of classes and probably did a big research project. That's great. I still have to train you pretty extensively when you get here. And depending on how big of an ego the new grad has, the training may be more or less difficult. If you're a new grad but you have real experience working in a real job, even as an intern, I find that you're substantially more likely to be a better employee right out of the gate.
Personally, I find that 2 years of real world experience is far more valuable than a masters degree at first. Once you have some experience to build on, a masters makes a lot more sense. Once you have a few years under your belt, the masters does start to make a real difference in the quality of the candidate. Right out of school, not so much.
This same tired rhetoric has been shoveled out for centuries. When we transitioned from agrarian to industrial economies, everyone was forecasting the doom of civilization. We were losing all of the artisan skills and replacing the poor downtrodden workers with machines operated by less skilled workers. When the assembly lines started up decades later, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the skilled machine operator was being replaced by the unskilled assembly line worker. Of course, when more automation was added to the assembly line and the first robots appeared, everyone was in a panic about how the skilled assembly line worker was being replaced by the button pushing monkeys.
Guess what. Civilization didn't collapse then. It's not going to collapse now. If anything, our standard of living has improved dramatically over the centuries. Even the poor (in the US at least) have homes, cars, big screen TVs and enough food to be suffering from an obesity epidemic.
Sorry but I just don't agree with your FUD here.
Maybe atypical but it worked for me.
No maybe about it. While it's not unheard of for a masters student to excel out of the gate, it's certainly more of an exception rather than a rule. Kudos for finding a good program that did help you. Would that all masters programs were like that.
It's been my experience in the engineering field that going straight through school to the masters degree is far less useful than getting the bachelors, working for a while and then getting the masters (or concurrently getting the masters while you're working your first job out of undergrad). The academic type can come out of a masters program and still not know squat about actually getting things done, making them basically useless. On the other hand, those of us who have gotten a bachelors, worked a while, and then gone back for the masters really do get more value.
When I see a resume pass my desk that is for someone who went straight through to a masters, I'm actually less likely to recommend them. They often don't have any better real world skills but they cost more to employ while you get them trained. In fact, they tend to be harder to train as they are so completely immersed in academia and have a hard time making the transition to the real world. On the other hand, internship experience while going straight through school does compensate quite a bit. A few terms doing real work while going to school makes all the difference.
It was probably someone who stopped reading at "greenhouse"
I would see that growing food would be counter productive to generating electricity. In order to make maximum use of the facility, you want as much energy as you can to heat the air. And you want an air path with as little turbulence as possible to facilitate flow through the tower. Plants in the greenhouse would a) consume some of the captured solar energy, lowering the amount of heat imparted to the air and; b) provide obstructions to the flow of air. Certainly you can mitigate some of these effects. However, the constant influx of fresh air would take away a lot of the captured heat, which is the point of having a greenhouse to grow plants.
All of that aside, I wonder about the necessity of a greenhouse keeping plants warm in Arizona. I don't think warmth is as much a problem in Arizona as it is elsewhere but that's just me.
All I'm suggesting is that there are so many unresolved threads stemming from this movie. I personally find that threads like that distract from the movie.
I will say that this prequel is better than many others simply because they're not working with (or against) an established movie. While, in my (not so) humble opinion, they spent too much time laying the ground work for the following movie, they did have a freedom to make it its own movie rather than being forced to plug neatly into something that was already done. It's not as bad as taking a hugely popular movie and writing a prequel 20 years later, filled with horrible dialog and bad acting ;)
Several things were left for sequels.
No, this movie was all about setup and leaving stuff behind for the next movies.
This movie, like a lot of the others in the Avengers series suffer from the exact same thing. They can't stand on their own. Sure, the effects were good. The writing wasn't half bad. The acting was pretty decent. But the entire story was servicing the inevitable sequel. As a result, the film itself wasn't very interesting. Everything seemed to be there specifically to set up for the next movie. Sure, there was the "fight/chase scene" that concluded the movie with a little resolution but it wasn't a very satisfying ending. So it doesn't stand on its own but it didn't generate in me an overwhelming anticipation of the sequel either. Every part of it said "there's going to be more in the next movie" without really building the anticipation. It really felt like they were just rushing through everything to make sure they had the bases covered for the movie next year. The underlying story for this movie really didn't really engage me.
That being said, it is a decent movie. It's worth seeing on the big screen in the theater. The story may have been flimsy and cliche but the characters themselves were developed pretty well. Like I said above, the writing and acting were acceptable. The effects were pretty good too. You have to suspend your disbelief on a lot of things but this is a movie based on a comic book so that's a given. And if you do that, the movie is enjoyable.