I actually enjoy the somewhat antiquated interface
Then you'd really love the program I use to read mail -- I use/bin/mail. I have become one of those old computing dinosaurs that I used to laugh at when I was younger.
(Well, I use/bin/mail for the first pass at reading my mail, then I use rmail in emacs for the second pass to file everything more permanently.)
In China they hit you with the "airport construction fee" when you try to leave. I believe it is 90 yuan (about US$11) for departing international flights, at least from Beijing and Shanghai. You've gotta go to the counter and pay the fee and get your little slip of paper, otherwise you don't get through the checkpoint to get to the gates. And you better not lose that little slip of paper, otherwise you go pay for another one.
I believe there is also a smaller fee for domestic flights within China, but it's been a few years so I forget how much that one was.
At least two of those games(Circus Atari and Breakout) need paddles to be played well; using a joystick for games like that is frustrating at best. Ever try playing something like Kaboom using a joystick? You can't do it.
While playing GTA3, I found myself laughing more than anything else. The violence and "offensiveness" is so over-the-top it really is funny. I get a kick out of telling my friends that I love the game, and what the game is about, because they invariably give me these odd looks like I am insane. But that's a big part of the fun of the game -- immersing myself in a world which I will never otherwise be a part of. And because it is so over-the-top, it makes the immersion more satisfying in some way.
I am a math professor, and I have occasionally made up homework problems related to GTA3 in my classes. And I've organized a couple of video game parties for students in my dept to get together and play (mostly to see if anyone can beat me at Mario Kart 64, which no one can, but we also sometimes laugh at GTA3).
I beat GTA3 long ago, but I occasionally fire it up and drive the tank around, causing tons of mayhem in a virtually indestructible vehicle. I've been thinking of replaying it from the start. And there are other things I have yet to do, like get one of the cool FBI cars (I almost got one once, but by the time the FBI is after you, it's hard to walk around on the street without getting gunned down by all the law enforcement types).
I was in Hangzhou, China this summer. The computer shops sell CD's for about US $4. They had Windows 98SE for $4, Office 2000 Pro for $4, and many many other things for $4.
I mentioned it to one friend of mine in Shanghai, and they said they thought that was a little expensive, they bought their copy of Windows98 for only about $3.:-)
From the article: I can think of nothing better than to lay in bed and browse the internet not even being near the computer.
Great! Can the mouse be used from another room? That would be really handy, being able to surf the internet from the next room away from the computer. Heck, you can even bring this mouse into the bathroom and keep on surfing the web.
I flew back from China about a month ago and got called into the luggage inspection room. They opened my checked back, and pulled out my dozen or so AA batteries right away, then poked around the other stuff a bit. I guess big blobs of batteries might get their attention when scanning luggage. Anyway, it only slowed me down for a few minutes, no big deal.
Finally we are catching up to one of the standard elements of sci-fi. E.g. one current example involving the military, on Stargate SG-1 they usually send a robot probe through the gate first, to make sure the planet they are about to has an atmosphere and isn't full of enemies ready to shoot them as soon as they step through the gate. The Stargate robots are bigger though, since they are loaded with measuring devices. They also use small remote-controlled aircraft on Stargate, another thing the US military is starting to explore. (That's one reason I like Stargate -- it's very grounded in current real life.)
Also, the guy in the third photo in the slides linked to in the article looks like he is wearing a Borg eyepiece.:-)
Another version of this is to have two questions. E.g. if you want to know how many people have shoplifted, you actually give them two questions:
1) Have you ever shoplifted? 2) Do you have any siblings? (Or some other innocuous question.)
You tell the person "Roll a die (or just mentally choose a random number between 1 and 6). If you get a 5 or 6, answer question 1. Otherwise, answer question 2." You can use the fact that there is a 1/3 chance of answering question 1, together with Bayes' Theorem, to figure out the percentage of people who said yes to question 1. People feel more confident about answering honestly, because the experiment is simple enough that most people believe the researcher doesn't know which question they answered (although some people will still be suspicious, of course).
Note: if you have them mentally choose a number between 1 and 6, you first need to do another experiment to find the percentage of people who choose 5 or 6, since it probably is not 1/3.
I read a nice little article on this subject a while back called "How to ask sensitive questions without getting punched in the nose", I believe it was in volume 3 of a series called Modules in Applied Mathematics, but I don't have it handy on my shelf. But it's a very well-known example in statistics, I believe it's called a randomized response design.
Or maybe I should say "was great". I used cxterm (Chinese xterm) under RedHat 5.0. Its input methods were great, it had some data files containing common multi-character combinations, so if you typed one or two characters, it would show you a list of guesses about what character it thought comes next, and quite often the one I wanted would be right there at the top of the list.
However, I've never been able to get it working under later versions of RedHat, i.e. RH6. I think it has something to do with the way termcap stuff was changed; under RH6, cxterm's display keeps getting mangled. I tried recompiling the sources, and I even tried just taking a statically linked executable built under RH5 and running on RH6, and it still doesn't work. In fact, I keep my old laptop running RH5, mainly so I can ssh into it and run cxterm remotely.
But the emacs that comes with later versions of RedHat can display Chinese pretty well. You want to be sure you've got the emacs-leim package installed. Emacs also has some Chinese input methods, but I can't seem to find the documentation for them, so I haven't been able to try them out yet.
Just wait, pretty soon we'll be reading articles about computers with (beowulf) clusters of mice. Although once you have more mice than you have appendages, there isn't much point to it.
Actually, that raises a serious question though -- has anyone ever used a computer with two mice, or even wanted to? Was it/would it be useful in any way? (I could see a computer with two mice in a public place, easily used by left-handed and right-handed people. Any use beyond that? Is there ever a time, other than while playing games, that two separate 2-D controls would help?)
I just build a PC using the PC-601 case by Lian Li. It's an aluminum case, I guess similar to the PC-60, but it has a bunch of ports in front (keyboard, mouse, USB, firewire, and audio in/out). It's the first time I've built a PC from parts and so the first time I bought a case separately. I like it; the case is easy to open with thumbscrews, and the hard drive cage is pretty easy to slide out. Much better than the other hard-to-open cases I've had with various pre-built PC's.
I also got an Enermax EG365P-VE 350W power supply which has a switch that controls the speed of its fan. There are three settings, so I can adjust the speed of the fan based on the tradeoff I want between temperature and noise.
This lifetime Spidey fan loved it
on
Review: Spiderman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Oops, posted my review over on the other slashdot article about Spidey today before seeing this story, where it is more appropriate. Here it is again, slightly modified.
I got my first Spidey comic when I was about 6 (27 years ago), and have been a fan my whole life. Spidey (and Fantastic Four and Superman) were part of what fueled my interest in science as a kid, since they were always inventing all sorts of cool stuff.
Going into the Spider-Man movie, I was sure there was no way it could live up to my hopes/expectations. Whenever I have this high hopes about a movie I'm always disappointed. I was even kinda bummed about the whole organic webshooters versus mechanical.
I watched the movie this afternoon. I had some little nits to pick here and there, but overall as a whole, the movie was way better than I expected.
They did so many things right. The bit with "the burglar that changed his life" was done perfectly, and that's what I most expected them to do poorly. That whole section of the movie, as he was figuring out who he was and what he could do, was very well done. There were some scenes you could tell were computer-generated, but the for the most part, the excitement of the movie made it easier to tolerate. And the movie would have been worse without those scenes, or if they had tried to do them physically with stuntmen.
The main characterization I felt was missing was that it would have been nice to have seen more background of the relation between Spidey and his Uncle Ben. Although I guess even in the original comics, we never really got that (although we heard about it plenty over the years).
Anyway, I loved it. I can't wait for the DVD. I'll probably bring my dad to watch it this weekend, since he used to be a bit of a Spidey fan too.
Wait until you see it. I got my first Spidey comic when I was about 6 (27 years ago), and have been a fan my whole life. Going into the movie, I was sure there was no way it could live up to my hopes/expectations. I was bummed about the whole organic webshooters versus mechanical.
I watched the movie this afternoon. I had some little nits to pick here and there, but overall as a whole, the movie was way better than I expected.
They did so many things right. The bit with "the burglar that changed his life" was done perfectly, and that's what I most expected them to do poorly. That whole section of the movie, as he was figuring out who he was and what he could do, was very well done. There were some scenes you could tell were computer-generated, but the for the most part, the excitement of the movie made it easier to tolerate. And the movie would have been worse without those scenes, or if they had tried to do them physically with stuntmen.
The main characterization I felt was missing was that it would have been nice to have seen more background of the relation between Spidey and his Uncle Ben. Although I guess even in the original comics, we never really got that (although we heard about it plenty over the years).
Anyway, I loved it. I can't wait for the DVD. I'll probably bring my dad to watch it this weekend, since he used to be a bit of a Spidey fan too.
After getting burned by Episode I, I won't necessarily be rushing out to see Episode II right away. Although I'm sure I'll see it not terribly long after it comes out.
But I will go see an afternoon matinee of Spider-Man on opening day (later today, Friday May 3). I've been waiting years for that movie. I grew up on Spider-Man (got my first Spidey comic when I was about 6). I just wanna say, the movie better not suck.
As for skipping out of work, I teach at Cornell. Fortunately, today is Slope Day at Cornell, the last day of classes. On Slope Day, all the students go get drunk on the big hill by the main library. It's quite a spectacle. Anyway, no one will notice/care if I take off early, and most of the students will be drunk on the slope, so I'm hoping the theater won't be too crowded (and especially hoping it doesn't fill up with drunken students).
(As a former Cornell grad student, I've participated in plenty of Slope Days myself. For this one, I'll check it out, but won't be drinking.)
Yeah, I think Chris did this deliberately. He's trying to goad people participating in the blackout (many of whom said they will still be looking at the front page) into responding. In a day or two, there will be an article about how Slashdot is being sold to Microsoft, and how everyone can soon use Passport to login automatically.
That reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a kid. A team of two humans was competing with a team of two aliens, to see which team was better at inventing stuff, or rather reproducing an invention from the other's culture.
The aliens gave the humans a perpetual motion machine as the device that they had to reproduce. Of course the humans figured it was impossible, it must be a hoax, etc. Eventually they decided it was real, and so they set out and invented one themselves.
(At the end, the aliens revealed that in fact theirs *was* a hoax. The humans had given a fake anti-gravity machine to the aliens, but the alien team couldn't reproduce it, and to avoid diplomatic problems, etc., the human team finally decided they had to invent an actual anti-grav device as well in order to get out of their predicament.)
It was an enjoyable little story, at least when I read it as a kid.
Ah, Bell & Howell. I was thinking Hewlett Packard, although Packard Bell came to mind, but I kept thinking "no, it couldn't have been Packard Bell". So I was at the wrong end of the "Hewlett Packard Bell Howell" chain.
That link you posted also confirmed something else I had vaguely remembered, that there were extra outlets on that module on the back, so you could plug the monitor into them, and have the power to the monitor automatically cut when you shut off the Apple. Hey, it may not seem like much now, but at the time it was a nice little bonus feature.
I've still got my tan Apple ][+. I really wish I had a black one.
Back when I first started using computers in the early 80's, my middle school had some Apple ][+'s. But one of them was made by another company (I think it was HP?) It was black. (We always just called it the "black apple".)
It had other cool stuff too, mainly it had an extra module covering the back, which had a volume knob on it among other things; the standard apple ][+'s had no volume knob. I always liked the black apple better than the beige apples.
I guess until every single person chooses OSS than Slashdot wont be happy
You do realize that even if Microsoft died and everyone finally was using OSS, slashdot would then turn into a huge argument of Debian versus Red Hat versus...
Not sure who CheeseburgerBlue is, or how complete a version of the film he saw. But I'm really hoping this turns out to be a good movie. I read Spider-Man as a kid in the early 70's, and that (together with Fantastic Four) was one of the things that fueled my interest in science. Peter Parker was a science geek, and also a kind of "common guy" who just accidentally picked up some superpowers.
So, I'm glad they are still emphasizing that aspect of his character in the film. I was glad when I first heard that Tobey Maguire would be playing Spidey; he seems about right. From the previews, the actress playing Aunt May doesn't look quite old/frail enough, but other than that I'm pretty happy so far.
(Minor spoiler below, but most fans probably know about it already.)
I'm a bit bummed that Spidey's webs are actually going to come out of his body in the movie, rather than from mechanical webshooters. I can see their argument, that nobody would believe a high-school science geek could invent some super polymer material that megacorporations can't even make. On the other hand, I'll be wondering, does he have to eat a lot of extra food to produce all that webbing? How quickly can he produce it? (Will he ever temporarily run out, as he did in the comics when he forgot to refill his webshooter cartridges?)
Star Wars Episode 2 I'm not so excited about. But I'll be in the theater watching Spidey on opening day. I really hope I'm not disappointed.
Will they just count what you download to your machine? I.e. will stuff downloaded from their Usenet servers count the same as stuff downloaded from outside their own network? I wonder where their bottleneck is. If the bottleneck is getting data from the rest of the world into their network, then downloading stuff from their servers wouldn't hurt too much.
Have any of the other companies that have done things like this made any distinction between the two?
Slashdot Mirror
I actually enjoy the somewhat antiquated interface
/bin/mail. I have become one of those old computing dinosaurs that I used to laugh at when I was younger.
/bin/mail for the first pass at reading my mail, then I use rmail in emacs for the second pass to file everything more permanently.)
Then you'd really love the program I use to read mail -- I use
(Well, I use
In China they hit you with the "airport construction fee" when you try to leave. I believe it is 90 yuan (about US$11) for departing international flights, at least from Beijing and Shanghai. You've gotta go to the counter and pay the fee and get your little slip of paper, otherwise you don't get through the checkpoint to get to the gates. And you better not lose that little slip of paper, otherwise you go pay for another one.
I believe there is also a smaller fee for domestic flights within China, but it's been a few years so I forget how much that one was.
At least two of those games(Circus Atari and Breakout) need paddles to be played well; using a joystick for games like that is frustrating at best. Ever try playing something like Kaboom using a joystick? You can't do it.
While playing GTA3, I found myself laughing more than anything else. The violence and "offensiveness" is so over-the-top it really is funny. I get a kick out of telling my friends that I love the game, and what the game is about, because they invariably give me these odd looks like I am insane. But that's a big part of the fun of the game -- immersing myself in a world which I will never otherwise be a part of. And because it is so over-the-top, it makes the immersion more satisfying in some way.
I am a math professor, and I have occasionally made up homework problems related to GTA3 in my classes. And I've organized a couple of video game parties for students in my dept to get together and play (mostly to see if anyone can beat me at Mario Kart 64, which no one can, but we also sometimes laugh at GTA3).
I beat GTA3 long ago, but I occasionally fire it up and drive the tank around, causing tons of mayhem in a virtually indestructible vehicle. I've been thinking of replaying it from the start. And there are other things I have yet to do, like get one of the cool FBI cars (I almost got one once, but by the time the FBI is after you, it's hard to walk around on the street without getting gunned down by all the law enforcement types).
I will be running out to get GTA:VC.
I was in Hangzhou, China this summer. The computer shops sell CD's for about US $4. They had Windows 98SE for $4, Office 2000 Pro for $4, and many many other things for $4.
:-)
I mentioned it to one friend of mine in Shanghai, and they said they thought that was a little expensive, they bought their copy of Windows98 for only about $3.
From the article: I can think of nothing better than to lay in bed and browse the internet not even being near the computer.
Great! Can the mouse be used from another room? That would be really handy, being able to surf the internet from the next room away from the computer. Heck, you can even bring this mouse into the bathroom and keep on surfing the web.
I flew back from China about a month ago and got called into the luggage inspection room. They opened my checked back, and pulled out my dozen or so AA batteries right away, then poked around the other stuff a bit. I guess big blobs of batteries might get their attention when scanning luggage. Anyway, it only slowed me down for a few minutes, no big deal.
Finally we are catching up to one of the standard elements of sci-fi. E.g. one current example involving the military, on Stargate SG-1 they usually send a robot probe through the gate first, to make sure the planet they are about to has an atmosphere and isn't full of enemies ready to shoot them as soon as they step through the gate. The Stargate robots are bigger though, since they are loaded with measuring devices. They also use small remote-controlled aircraft on Stargate, another thing the US military is starting to explore. (That's one reason I like Stargate -- it's very grounded in current real life.)
:-)
Also, the guy in the third photo in the slides linked to in the article looks like he is wearing a Borg eyepiece.
With all that beer in the chair, you'd also need to build a toilet into the thing (as seen on The Simpsons, I believe -- Homer invented it).
Another version of this is to have two questions. E.g. if you want to know how many people have shoplifted, you actually give them two questions:
1) Have you ever shoplifted?
2) Do you have any siblings? (Or some other innocuous question.)
You tell the person "Roll a die (or just mentally choose a random number between 1 and 6). If you get a 5 or 6, answer question 1. Otherwise, answer question 2." You can use the fact that there is a 1/3 chance of answering question 1, together with Bayes' Theorem, to figure out the percentage of people who said yes to question 1. People feel more confident about answering honestly, because the experiment is simple enough that most people believe the researcher doesn't know which question they answered (although some people will still be suspicious, of course).
Note: if you have them mentally choose a number between 1 and 6, you first need to do another experiment to find the percentage of people who choose 5 or 6, since it probably is not 1/3.
I read a nice little article on this subject a while back called "How to ask sensitive questions without getting punched in the nose", I believe it was in volume 3 of a series called Modules in Applied Mathematics, but I don't have it handy on my shelf. But it's a very well-known example in statistics, I believe it's called a randomized response design.
Or maybe I should say "was great". I used cxterm (Chinese xterm) under RedHat 5.0. Its input methods were great, it had some data files containing common multi-character combinations, so if you typed one or two characters, it would show you a list of guesses about what character it thought comes next, and quite often the one I wanted would be right there at the top of the list.
However, I've never been able to get it working under later versions of RedHat, i.e. RH6. I think it has something to do with the way termcap stuff was changed; under RH6, cxterm's display keeps getting mangled. I tried recompiling the sources, and I even tried just taking a statically linked executable built under RH5 and running on RH6, and it still doesn't work. In fact, I keep my old laptop running RH5, mainly so I can ssh into it and run cxterm remotely.
But the emacs that comes with later versions of RedHat can display Chinese pretty well. You want to be sure you've got the emacs-leim package installed. Emacs also has some Chinese input methods, but I can't seem to find the documentation for them, so I haven't been able to try them out yet.
Just wait, pretty soon we'll be reading articles about computers with (beowulf) clusters of mice. Although once you have more mice than you have appendages, there isn't much point to it.
Actually, that raises a serious question though -- has anyone ever used a computer with two mice, or even wanted to? Was it/would it be useful in any way? (I could see a computer with two mice in a public place, easily used by left-handed and right-handed people. Any use beyond that? Is there ever a time, other than while playing games, that two separate 2-D controls would help?)
I just build a PC using the PC-601 case by Lian Li. It's an aluminum case, I guess similar to the PC-60, but it has a bunch of ports in front (keyboard, mouse, USB, firewire, and audio in/out). It's the first time I've built a PC from parts and so the first time I bought a case separately. I like it; the case is easy to open with thumbscrews, and the hard drive cage is pretty easy to slide out. Much better than the other hard-to-open cases I've had with various pre-built PC's.
I also got an Enermax EG365P-VE 350W power supply which has a switch that controls the speed of its fan. There are three settings, so I can adjust the speed of the fan based on the tradeoff I want between temperature and noise.
Oops, posted my review over on the other slashdot article about Spidey today before seeing this story, where it is more appropriate. Here it is again, slightly modified.
I got my first Spidey comic when I was about 6 (27 years ago), and have been a fan my whole life. Spidey (and Fantastic Four and Superman) were part of what fueled my interest in science as a kid, since they were always inventing all sorts of cool stuff.
Going into the Spider-Man movie, I was sure there was no way it could live up to my hopes/expectations. Whenever I have this high hopes about a movie I'm always disappointed. I was even kinda bummed about the whole organic webshooters versus mechanical.
I watched the movie this afternoon. I had some little nits to pick here and there, but overall as a whole, the movie was way better than I expected.
They did so many things right. The bit with "the burglar that changed his life" was done perfectly, and that's what I most expected them to do poorly. That whole section of the movie, as he was figuring out who he was and what he could do, was very well done. There were some scenes you could tell were computer-generated, but the for the most part, the excitement of the movie made it easier to tolerate. And the movie would have been worse without those scenes, or if they had tried to do them physically with stuntmen.
The main characterization I felt was missing was that it would have been nice to have seen more background of the relation between Spidey and his Uncle Ben. Although I guess even in the original comics, we never really got that (although we heard about it plenty over the years).
Anyway, I loved it. I can't wait for the DVD. I'll probably bring my dad to watch it this weekend, since he used to be a bit of a Spidey fan too.
Wait until you see it. I got my first Spidey comic when I was about 6 (27 years ago), and have been a fan my whole life. Going into the movie, I was sure there was no way it could live up to my hopes/expectations. I was bummed about the whole organic webshooters versus mechanical.
I watched the movie this afternoon. I had some little nits to pick here and there, but overall as a whole, the movie was way better than I expected.
They did so many things right. The bit with "the burglar that changed his life" was done perfectly, and that's what I most expected them to do poorly. That whole section of the movie, as he was figuring out who he was and what he could do, was very well done. There were some scenes you could tell were computer-generated, but the for the most part, the excitement of the movie made it easier to tolerate. And the movie would have been worse without those scenes, or if they had tried to do them physically with stuntmen.
The main characterization I felt was missing was that it would have been nice to have seen more background of the relation between Spidey and his Uncle Ben. Although I guess even in the original comics, we never really got that (although we heard about it plenty over the years).
Anyway, I loved it. I can't wait for the DVD. I'll probably bring my dad to watch it this weekend, since he used to be a bit of a Spidey fan too.
After getting burned by Episode I, I won't necessarily be rushing out to see Episode II right away. Although I'm sure I'll see it not terribly long after it comes out.
But I will go see an afternoon matinee of Spider-Man on opening day (later today, Friday May 3). I've been waiting years for that movie. I grew up on Spider-Man (got my first Spidey comic when I was about 6). I just wanna say, the movie better not suck.
As for skipping out of work, I teach at Cornell. Fortunately, today is Slope Day at Cornell, the last day of classes. On Slope Day, all the students go get drunk on the big hill by the main library. It's quite a spectacle. Anyway, no one will notice/care if I take off early, and most of the students will be drunk on the slope, so I'm hoping the theater won't be too crowded (and especially hoping it doesn't fill up with drunken students).
(As a former Cornell grad student, I've participated in plenty of Slope Days myself. For this one, I'll check it out, but won't be drinking.)
Yeah, I think Chris did this deliberately. He's trying to goad people participating in the blackout (many of whom said they will still be looking at the front page) into responding. In a day or two, there will be an article about how Slashdot is being sold to Microsoft, and how everyone can soon use Passport to login automatically.
Oops. I think you just slashdotted the NSA's computer system.
Nope, other way around, he just NSA'ed slashdot.
That reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a kid. A team of two humans was competing with a team of two aliens, to see which team was better at inventing stuff, or rather reproducing an invention from the other's culture.
The aliens gave the humans a perpetual motion machine as the device that they had to reproduce. Of course the humans figured it was impossible, it must be a hoax, etc. Eventually they decided it was real, and so they set out and invented one themselves.
(At the end, the aliens revealed that in fact theirs *was* a hoax. The humans had given a fake anti-gravity machine to the aliens, but the alien team couldn't reproduce it, and to avoid diplomatic problems, etc., the human team finally decided they had to invent an actual anti-grav device as well in order to get out of their predicament.)
It was an enjoyable little story, at least when I read it as a kid.
Ah, Bell & Howell. I was thinking Hewlett Packard, although Packard Bell came to mind, but I kept thinking "no, it couldn't have been Packard Bell". So I was at the wrong end of the "Hewlett Packard Bell Howell" chain.
That link you posted also confirmed something else I had vaguely remembered, that there were extra outlets on that module on the back, so you could plug the monitor into them, and have the power to the monitor automatically cut when you shut off the Apple. Hey, it may not seem like much now, but at the time it was a nice little bonus feature.
I've still got my tan Apple ][+. I really wish I had a black one.
Back when I first started using computers in the early 80's, my middle school had some Apple ][+'s. But one of them was made by another company (I think it was HP?) It was black. (We always just called it the "black apple".)
It had other cool stuff too, mainly it had an extra module covering the back, which had a volume knob on it among other things; the standard apple ][+'s had no volume knob. I always liked the black apple better than the beige apples.
I guess until every single person chooses OSS than Slashdot wont be happy
...
You do realize that even if Microsoft died and everyone finally was using OSS, slashdot would then turn into a huge argument of Debian versus Red Hat versus
Someone better tell this guy from Georgia Tech.
Not sure who CheeseburgerBlue is, or how complete a version of the film he saw. But I'm really hoping this turns out to be a good movie. I read Spider-Man as a kid in the early 70's, and that (together with Fantastic Four) was one of the things that fueled my interest in science. Peter Parker was a science geek, and also a kind of "common guy" who just accidentally picked up some superpowers.
So, I'm glad they are still emphasizing that aspect of his character in the film. I was glad when I first heard that Tobey Maguire would be playing Spidey; he seems about right. From the previews, the actress playing Aunt May doesn't look quite old/frail enough, but other than that I'm pretty happy so far.
(Minor spoiler below, but most fans probably know about it already.)
I'm a bit bummed that Spidey's webs are actually going to come out of his body in the movie, rather than from mechanical webshooters. I can see their argument, that nobody would believe a high-school science geek could invent some super polymer material that megacorporations can't even make. On the other hand, I'll be wondering, does he have to eat a lot of extra food to produce all that webbing? How quickly can he produce it? (Will he ever temporarily run out, as he did in the comics when he forgot to refill his webshooter cartridges?)
Star Wars Episode 2 I'm not so excited about. But I'll be in the theater watching Spidey on opening day. I really hope I'm not disappointed.
Will they just count what you download to your machine? I.e. will stuff downloaded from their Usenet servers count the same as stuff downloaded from outside their own network? I wonder where their bottleneck is. If the bottleneck is getting data from the rest of the world into their network, then downloading stuff from their servers wouldn't hurt too much.
Have any of the other companies that have done things like this made any distinction between the two?