I have to agree with you. I'll admit that it took some getting used to, but after an adjustment period, there really is nothing wrong with the ribbon. It works pretty well.
I bet the fuckers still don't allow for a distinct count within pivot tables, no matter that this has been a glaring omission ever since they introduced the damn things. But they'll have gobs ginchy keen bullshit that brings nothing to the table in this version, you betcha!
I disagree. It is the loss of the ability for people to write the narrative form. Hypertext-like writing is a convenient crutch for writers who cannot integrate ideas into the normal flow of their work.
Agreed. It's lazy writing. BSG was an atrocious offender here. B5 had flaws but really stands up, especially upon repeated viewings.
In real life, one man follows another man into a room intent on killing him. He has a motive, of course, and it was more than likely established a long time ago. What happens in that room is anyone's guess. Anything could happen.
Writing needs to be like that. The outcome in the room could be anything. Perhaps the killer has second thoughts. Perhaps the would-be victim turns the tables and kills the other guy. Maybe the killer succeeds. Maybe in the confrontation a new piece of information slips and puts everything in a new context for the killer. But god damn it, the motive needs to be firmly established! If the victim screwed the killer over at some point, there has to be foreshadowing. If the killer has been planning this murder since the start of the story, we need foreshadowing. Otherwise it looks like something completely pulled out of someone's ass.
Nothing ruins drama more than cheap ass-pulls. "All will be revealed." Bullshit. You just made that up at the last minute and the holes are big enough to push a dyson sphere through.
We hear this "everything's already there, been there, done that". But in reality we have a lack of innovation in products and markets because of a rather large monopoly that has stifled competition at every turn, even after being convicted. It isn't that we have one OS to rule them all that's helped us get to where we are, it is inspite of that that we are where we are. We have continued to penetrate new markets, to educate people, to bring products such as tablet computing and smart phones inspite of being smothered from the top.
There's an old saying that goes "You can give a monkey a computer and he'll use it but probably just to crack open walnuts." The IT failures I've seen come from a lack of vision, a lack of understanding, and a lack of follow-through. It's like watching someone turning an electric screwdriver by hand because they don't realize there's a power switch.
It's a false line of reasoning to say "Just because I can't think of a better way nobody else can, either." But it's really hard to improve on what we've got. Look at the mouse. I can make a lot of complaints about it but have we yet found an input tool to make the mouse completely a thing of the past? No. It's just like we haven't really found a good replacement for the keyboard. People keep trying but I think it's safe to say the computers of the next decade will come with mice and keyboards.
We're going to be going through a system upgrade at my job. The old system is pretty crappy, no argument there, but we're still not even using it properly. Back to what I said above, failures in vision and understanding. I'll do my best to see that we can make a change of it this time but we're likely to be back to using the system to a fraction of its full ability.
For general office computing, we've had everything we've needed for years. There's not much I'm doing right now that couldn't have been done in the late 90's. Spreadsheets have been around for ages, same with word processing. I was really impressed with getting two screens and the Apple guys scoffed and said they had that twenty years ago. And while I haven't had much experience with Amiga, evangelists tell me the OS was awesome and did all sorts of cool stuff that Windows couldn't duplicate for a decade.
There's stuff I'm doing at home I couldn't have done years ago, mainly with video. Didn't have the storage capacity, didn't have the bandwidth, didn't have the ability to render properly. It's taken some horsepower to deliver the great video we see today. But basic office apps? There hasn't really been anything innovative in Office for years. I can't imagine what we would need more horesepower for in the next few years. Yes, that sounds pretty stupid, 640k being enough for anyone. The $2500 word-processing computer from 1985 (a lot more inflation-adjusted, maybe $3500?) has the shit kicked out of it by the cheapest emachine on the market and that thing has gobs of power to spare. Of course, what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. And if not Microsoft then HP and other purveors of shitty bloatware.
All that being said, I just don't see what else could be done on the corporate desktop. Things are fast as fuck. There's not any compelling improvement I can think of that would justify running out and buying more kit. At best I think we're going to continue seeing software that could have been written efficiently with the tools of yesterday written with the tools of today that will require the computers of tomorrow to run with any kind of speed. But if the performance hit is taken at the server, old desktops will be fine.
Here's the real question -- how's the money in phone systems these days? It's all proprietary shit and the units cost a few hundred a pop but they're solid state and completely interchangeable. Maybe we'll finally see convergence with a smart terminal built into the flatscreen monitor, keyboard, mouse plug into it, terminal and phone plug into ether at the wall jack? Total cost, $400?
Interestingly, that could describe Hans Reiser has well. I think it's the disease of our profession.
Oh, please. It's called being human. We're naturally more inclined to distrust those different from us and trust those who are like us. Grifters will prey on their own ethnic groups because there's naturally less suspicion. A black man is going to scam other blacks more successfully than whites. A white woman is going to scam other whites easier. And if you share a religion, why, that makes you all the safer! Because no good Christian would ever scam another Christian. And it's always easier to find sympathy for a pretty person than for an ugly one. Human nature.
As geeks, we're naturally willing to give Hans the benefit of the doubt because we identify with him. It takes time to read the case and realize just how screwed up the guy is. Bernie Madoff got away with what he did for so long because Jews weren't expecting to get fucked over by a pillar of their community. Christians have a lot more experience with that sort of thing. Likewise, other rich people weren't expecting a fraud from a guy of his pedigree. He was in all the right clubs, he was an outstanding member of the uppper class.
Don't make us geeks out like we're the only stupid ones. There's plenty of stupid to go around here.
What went wrong was that they premiered on Sprint. If they'd been on Verizon from the beginning, VZW would have had it's flagship next-gen smartphone six months earlier, and Palm would have it's device on the largest network in the US. I cannot for the life of me understand why Android and Palm phones debut on 2nd class carriers like TMobile and Sprint.
Did they get better terms than they would have from Verizon?
Not trying to be a troll here, but... and maybe I'm not understanding the whole case correctly. I've followed the articles on Slashdot for a while. In my opinion: if the city hires you, you are subservient to the city. You do not give passwords to your inferiors. Ever. You do, however, give passwords to your superiors when asked. Always. They hired you, after all. They are your bosses
I've mostly avoided this kind of horseshit but here's an example for you, real life. A senior VP of the company was having huge battles with management and was on his way out. The grapevine did not know of this, they really played it close to the vest. So I had no idea there were problems. He asks me how to get his information out of his personal directories on the server and onto his laptop. (Yes, he's a VP. They're really that stupid.) Given that this is a direct request from a superior, I ask if he just wants a copy. No, he specifically wanted everything moved. I told him that this violated our policy on "thou shalt not store important stuff you don't want to lose on a laptop." He told me that wasn't a concern here. So, not able to disobey a direct order, I showed him how to do it. His directory was scrubbed clean. But immediately thereafter I went to shadowcopy and restored a copy of the last save into the IT forensics folder. This didn't seem kosher and I wanted to make sure we had a nice, clean copy in case of shit hitting fans.
It was a huge mess and there were lawsuits after he left but we were protected from any of the backsplash. But this was so typical of poor communications in the company. They would fire employees and not let IT know about it for a week. Employees with remote access to the big ol' important database of things we don't want people to fuck with if they're disgruntled. They'd fire employees over the phone without bothering to get back equipment. Fortunately, we kept records so when management wanted to know where a given laptop was, we could tell them who forgot to pick it up at termination.
In retrospect, I don't see a good solution for our sysadmin here. He stuck by his guns and got fucked. But if he handed over the passwords in clear violation of company policy upon a direct and illegal order, he could also be prosecuted. I could see getting fired for it -- people get fired for bullshit reasons all the time -- but jail time is simply out of line.
I hear they're going to call the results Portable Data Objects, PDO for short. All of the files will end in.PDO. The Vatican is going need a lot of resources to handle all of these PDO files.
This was not a verdict that we came to lightly. There were very difficult points to overcome in reaching it. We were not allowed to let our emotions or biases determine the matter, because if they could there may have been a different outcome. Quite simply, we followed the law.
This is like that psych experiment where a test subject is given a buzzer and a set of questions. A lab assistant plays the role of another test subject behind a screen. The buzzer is supposed to deliver a shock for every wrong question. It doesn't, of course, but the lab assistant acts like it does. With each wrong question he screams louder, wimpers, begs to stop the experiment. The official-looking SCIENTIST in his WHITE LAB COAT reassures the skeptical test subject that the experiment should continue. Some subjects will walk about but others will keep administering shocks for unanswered questions even after the man behind the screen is no longer making any noises. Unconscious? Dead? Doesn't matter. The man in the white coat told me what to do. He has AUTHORITY.
If the case never should have come to trial, find him not guilty. The charges are obviously bullshit. Where is it written that conscience and compassion have no place in our courts? Ok, mandatory sentencing says we have to leave our brains at the door but fuck that.
Naively looking at Ironman (well, 1) as a science fiction movie (it does star a technology-loving closet-nerd after all) shows that it gets most science stuff wrong as usual.
Ignoring the effects such harsh accelerations would have on a person (and the lack of an internal waste management system), it e.g. suffers from The One Secret Prototype syndrome. Technology is tightly coupled with the first implementation, and nobody but the creator understands it and nobody ever copied the blueprints. Research is done by the Lone Scientist, in this case at least a Good Guy and not a fringe groups which makes absurd advances on their own, and without anyone else noticing. Other effects of technology such as the quite advanced AI available and the power source per-se are ignored to concentrate on the action part. I wonder how well part 2 does in these areas.
The trick for any sort of super-hero story is to have only a few absurd assumptions and then try to scrupulously follow logic in how they play out. It's just like with the usual science fiction idea of inventing a technology and seeing how things play out based upon it. Star Trek is an example of that done poorly. So they invent a transporter which is a matter disassembler/assembler. Well, what if you took something apart and put it back together differently? Use simple feedstocks to create complex products. Ok, that's the replicator. Kudos for them thinking of that. But this means you could also reverse aging by disassembling a person and reassembling them younger. This would completely change society and is overlooked by the writers.
For an Iron Man suit to work like we see in the movies, you're pretty much talking about god-tech. A tremendous compact power source for starters, probably the energy density of a small atom bomb. There would have to be gravity manipulation tech inertial dampening. Really smart AI to keep the suit doing what the operator means and not what it thinks he means. His "push people back and break things" hand weapons would also be some form of gravity manipulation, a force beam. And then there's the way of cancelling out the reaction since the force it takes to knock a guy two hundred feet and make a dent in a wall two stories up would also be hitting back at the Iron Man suit. Maybe a surge in localized gravity to anchor the feet to the ground? The Army's Hardman suit, an attempt at making a powered exoskeleton, had tremendous problems with the limb augmentation. They never put a test operator in it because they thought they'd break bones.
The tech is certainly more than 20 years out. A hundred years? Two hundred? Hard to say. But it's completely out of place in a modern setting. It's like watching the 6 Million Dollar Man with their giant banks of computers with spinning tape reels. Shit, we can barely make passable thought controlled cybernetic limbs in 2010, let alone anything that could turn an amputee into superman!
RDJ is charismatic. The first film was fun. It may be the best looking BluRay I own. But most of us went in with relatively low expectations and were impressed. That doesn't mean the first film deserved all the praise it got. It doesn't hold up really well to repeat viewings. There isn't a whole lot of great action or tension.
Watch Iron Man again. Then watch Dark Knight again. Tell me Iron Man is in the same class.
Iron Man is a perfect popcorn movie. You're absolutely correct, RDJ has tremendous charisma. He's one of those genuinely fun characters to watch. Plays Stark perfectly. There were also plenty of laughs built into the story. The only real weakness with the movie is that the villain was underdeveloped. But seeing as this was also an origin movie, there's only so much that can be shoehorned in. Good action, good laughs, a complete surprise. The whole premise of a super suit is absurd, naturally. And building one in a cave with scrap metal? Don't let Osama get a hold of this guy. But like any good movie of this nature, it embraced the absurdity and then followed through with it. So many moments of "Oh, wow. Now that's cool." Loved seeing him develop the idea and go through the mental process of accepting his new role.
I saw it on a free preview and went in expecting to still feel ripped off. Was completely surprised. A light, fun, enjoyable movie that leaves you grinning like a 12-yr old when it's done. This really shouldn't be all that difficult to do but so many movies screw it up. As I understand it, the movie was sort of a happy accident. The producers said they spent so much time on developing the effects for the suit, they'd forgotten to write a story for the rest of the movie. All of RDJ's best lines were adlibbed, were not in the script. It really should have been a mess but somehow wasn't. My only fear is that they try to replicate this for the next movies and we end up with tedious, over-processed crap like the usual mindless comic book movies.
/. says "Spoiler-free" First line of article says "spoiler-light." I'm glad they said that so I could stop reading and save myself the blind rage I would have been in.
That would have been great prep for going to see a Daredevil movie.
Their time has passed; the only reason why we don't know it yet is because we haven't had the war that will settle the matter. If WWII didn't occur we'd still be under the misapprehension that the battleship is the queen of the seas. You don't tend to see the abandonment of a series of tactics and technology that have been successful in the past until they have led to utter ruin in a modern war. It took the tank to finally settle the question of cavalry's supremacy and it still took two world wars to drive that point home. The Italians made mounted charges against the Soviets. Whoops. According to the records, the stories of Polish mounted charges against the Wermacht were propaganda.
Where's the link to the Onion? There has to be a link to the Onion. There was another article lacking an Onion link, about how coon meat is making a comeback in Detroit. Abandoned neighborhoods are reverting to wilderness and the hunting's getting better. Again, where's the Onion link? I don't want this to be real.
He pretended to be a female nurse in order to instruct others on how to commit suicide.
No, he was goading people into committing suicide by presenting a sympathetic ear, the female bit of course being a big incentive for his lonely victims.
Suicide pacts are fairly common in Japan. You get suicidal people meeting on the net and forming dysfunctional little suicide support groups. They don't want to die alone so they get together to kill themselves, usually C02 poisoning from a charcoal grill. You just go to sleep and don't wake up. Often times the peer pressure of having a group will sweep people along to do things they would have lost gumption for if alone.
These people might have killed themselves without his influence but he could very well have been the impetus to push them over the edge. I've known people who got their rocks off with manipulating people but this really takes it just about as far as it could go.
This man must be a 4chan god, a living avatar of Anonymous, the inherent contradiction of an individual embodiment of collective asshattery whose very existence generates lulz.
Whats it called again? The one with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta... Where they like, take the guys face off, and then his face is off, so then they take the other guys face off, and put it on the other guys face. And then the guy without a face is really put off by it, so he gets the doctor to take the first offed face and put it back on him. So their faces are swapped. And then they have an epic face off with a climactic finish.
God I wish I could just remember the name of that movie...
Apple's only moral responsibility is to let their users do whatever they feel like, and they have failed.
I think it would be more like a hotel saying "There's a TV and DVD player in your room. We're not going to provide porn on the pay-per-view but if you bring your own, we can't control what you put in the player, nor do we care. If you go to porn sites on the wifi, we don't care. But we're not putting it on pay-per-view to make money off of it." That's a fair moral stance to take. But all hotels have porno on the TV because it makes so much money.
All Jobs has to say is that they're not going to put the apps in the store because of the immense backlash but you can get it via the browser. He's being particularly dickish here.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree with you. I'll admit that it took some getting used to, but after an adjustment period, there really is nothing wrong with the ribbon. It works pretty well.
Stockholm Syndrome. Sad, really.
I bet the fuckers still don't allow for a distinct count within pivot tables, no matter that this has been a glaring omission ever since they introduced the damn things. But they'll have gobs ginchy keen bullshit that brings nothing to the table in this version, you betcha!
At least it's funnier than The Big Bang Theory.
You hate XKCD too, right?
I disagree. It is the loss of the ability for people to write the narrative form. Hypertext-like writing is a convenient crutch for writers who cannot integrate ideas into the normal flow of their work.
Agreed. It's lazy writing. BSG was an atrocious offender here. B5 had flaws but really stands up, especially upon repeated viewings.
In real life, one man follows another man into a room intent on killing him. He has a motive, of course, and it was more than likely established a long time ago. What happens in that room is anyone's guess. Anything could happen.
Writing needs to be like that. The outcome in the room could be anything. Perhaps the killer has second thoughts. Perhaps the would-be victim turns the tables and kills the other guy. Maybe the killer succeeds. Maybe in the confrontation a new piece of information slips and puts everything in a new context for the killer. But god damn it, the motive needs to be firmly established! If the victim screwed the killer over at some point, there has to be foreshadowing. If the killer has been planning this murder since the start of the story, we need foreshadowing. Otherwise it looks like something completely pulled out of someone's ass.
Nothing ruins drama more than cheap ass-pulls. "All will be revealed." Bullshit. You just made that up at the last minute and the holes are big enough to push a dyson sphere through.
I thought AOL was supposed to be more popular with the pedobear crowd.
No it's not. One could "be gay" buy never have sex with another person of the same sex. Just as slashdotters can "be straight" and remain virgins.
A hypothetical situation, surely.
We hear this "everything's already there, been there, done that". But in reality we have a lack of innovation in products and markets because of a rather large monopoly that has stifled competition at every turn, even after being convicted. It isn't that we have one OS to rule them all that's helped us get to where we are, it is inspite of that that we are where we are. We have continued to penetrate new markets, to educate people, to bring products such as tablet computing and smart phones inspite of being smothered from the top.
There's an old saying that goes "You can give a monkey a computer and he'll use it but probably just to crack open walnuts." The IT failures I've seen come from a lack of vision, a lack of understanding, and a lack of follow-through. It's like watching someone turning an electric screwdriver by hand because they don't realize there's a power switch.
It's a false line of reasoning to say "Just because I can't think of a better way nobody else can, either." But it's really hard to improve on what we've got. Look at the mouse. I can make a lot of complaints about it but have we yet found an input tool to make the mouse completely a thing of the past? No. It's just like we haven't really found a good replacement for the keyboard. People keep trying but I think it's safe to say the computers of the next decade will come with mice and keyboards.
We're going to be going through a system upgrade at my job. The old system is pretty crappy, no argument there, but we're still not even using it properly. Back to what I said above, failures in vision and understanding. I'll do my best to see that we can make a change of it this time but we're likely to be back to using the system to a fraction of its full ability.
For general office computing, we've had everything we've needed for years. There's not much I'm doing right now that couldn't have been done in the late 90's. Spreadsheets have been around for ages, same with word processing. I was really impressed with getting two screens and the Apple guys scoffed and said they had that twenty years ago. And while I haven't had much experience with Amiga, evangelists tell me the OS was awesome and did all sorts of cool stuff that Windows couldn't duplicate for a decade.
There's stuff I'm doing at home I couldn't have done years ago, mainly with video. Didn't have the storage capacity, didn't have the bandwidth, didn't have the ability to render properly. It's taken some horsepower to deliver the great video we see today. But basic office apps? There hasn't really been anything innovative in Office for years. I can't imagine what we would need more horesepower for in the next few years. Yes, that sounds pretty stupid, 640k being enough for anyone. The $2500 word-processing computer from 1985 (a lot more inflation-adjusted, maybe $3500?) has the shit kicked out of it by the cheapest emachine on the market and that thing has gobs of power to spare. Of course, what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. And if not Microsoft then HP and other purveors of shitty bloatware.
All that being said, I just don't see what else could be done on the corporate desktop. Things are fast as fuck. There's not any compelling improvement I can think of that would justify running out and buying more kit. At best I think we're going to continue seeing software that could have been written efficiently with the tools of yesterday written with the tools of today that will require the computers of tomorrow to run with any kind of speed. But if the performance hit is taken at the server, old desktops will be fine.
Here's the real question -- how's the money in phone systems these days? It's all proprietary shit and the units cost a few hundred a pop but they're solid state and completely interchangeable. Maybe we'll finally see convergence with a smart terminal built into the flatscreen monitor, keyboard, mouse plug into it, terminal and phone plug into ether at the wall jack? Total cost, $400?
Interestingly, that could describe Hans Reiser has well. I think it's the disease of our profession.
Oh, please. It's called being human. We're naturally more inclined to distrust those different from us and trust those who are like us. Grifters will prey on their own ethnic groups because there's naturally less suspicion. A black man is going to scam other blacks more successfully than whites. A white woman is going to scam other whites easier. And if you share a religion, why, that makes you all the safer! Because no good Christian would ever scam another Christian. And it's always easier to find sympathy for a pretty person than for an ugly one. Human nature.
As geeks, we're naturally willing to give Hans the benefit of the doubt because we identify with him. It takes time to read the case and realize just how screwed up the guy is. Bernie Madoff got away with what he did for so long because Jews weren't expecting to get fucked over by a pillar of their community. Christians have a lot more experience with that sort of thing. Likewise, other rich people weren't expecting a fraud from a guy of his pedigree. He was in all the right clubs, he was an outstanding member of the uppper class.
Don't make us geeks out like we're the only stupid ones. There's plenty of stupid to go around here.
What went wrong was that they premiered on Sprint. If they'd been on Verizon from the beginning, VZW would have had it's flagship next-gen smartphone six months earlier, and Palm would have it's device on the largest network in the US. I cannot for the life of me understand why Android and Palm phones debut on 2nd class carriers like TMobile and Sprint.
Did they get better terms than they would have from Verizon?
Not trying to be a troll here, but... and maybe I'm not understanding the whole case correctly. I've followed the articles on Slashdot for a while. In my opinion: if the city hires you, you are subservient to the city. You do not give passwords to your inferiors. Ever. You do, however, give passwords to your superiors when asked. Always. They hired you, after all. They are your bosses
I've mostly avoided this kind of horseshit but here's an example for you, real life. A senior VP of the company was having huge battles with management and was on his way out. The grapevine did not know of this, they really played it close to the vest. So I had no idea there were problems. He asks me how to get his information out of his personal directories on the server and onto his laptop. (Yes, he's a VP. They're really that stupid.) Given that this is a direct request from a superior, I ask if he just wants a copy. No, he specifically wanted everything moved. I told him that this violated our policy on "thou shalt not store important stuff you don't want to lose on a laptop." He told me that wasn't a concern here. So, not able to disobey a direct order, I showed him how to do it. His directory was scrubbed clean. But immediately thereafter I went to shadowcopy and restored a copy of the last save into the IT forensics folder. This didn't seem kosher and I wanted to make sure we had a nice, clean copy in case of shit hitting fans.
It was a huge mess and there were lawsuits after he left but we were protected from any of the backsplash. But this was so typical of poor communications in the company. They would fire employees and not let IT know about it for a week. Employees with remote access to the big ol' important database of things we don't want people to fuck with if they're disgruntled. They'd fire employees over the phone without bothering to get back equipment. Fortunately, we kept records so when management wanted to know where a given laptop was, we could tell them who forgot to pick it up at termination.
In retrospect, I don't see a good solution for our sysadmin here. He stuck by his guns and got fucked. But if he handed over the passwords in clear violation of company policy upon a direct and illegal order, he could also be prosecuted. I could see getting fired for it -- people get fired for bullshit reasons all the time -- but jail time is simply out of line.
I hear they're going to call the results Portable Data Objects, PDO for short. All of the files will end in .PDO. The Vatican is going need a lot of resources to handle all of these PDO files.
This was not a verdict that we came to lightly. There were very difficult points to overcome in reaching it. We were not allowed to let our emotions or biases determine the matter, because if they could there may have been a different outcome. Quite simply, we followed the law.
This is like that psych experiment where a test subject is given a buzzer and a set of questions. A lab assistant plays the role of another test subject behind a screen. The buzzer is supposed to deliver a shock for every wrong question. It doesn't, of course, but the lab assistant acts like it does. With each wrong question he screams louder, wimpers, begs to stop the experiment. The official-looking SCIENTIST in his WHITE LAB COAT reassures the skeptical test subject that the experiment should continue. Some subjects will walk about but others will keep administering shocks for unanswered questions even after the man behind the screen is no longer making any noises. Unconscious? Dead? Doesn't matter. The man in the white coat told me what to do. He has AUTHORITY.
If the case never should have come to trial, find him not guilty. The charges are obviously bullshit. Where is it written that conscience and compassion have no place in our courts? Ok, mandatory sentencing says we have to leave our brains at the door but fuck that.
Naively looking at Ironman (well, 1) as a science fiction movie (it does star a technology-loving closet-nerd after all) shows that it gets most science stuff wrong as usual.
Ignoring the effects such harsh accelerations would have on a person (and the lack of an internal waste management system), it e.g. suffers from The One Secret Prototype syndrome. Technology is tightly coupled with the first implementation, and nobody but the creator understands it and nobody ever copied the blueprints. Research is done by the Lone Scientist, in this case at least a Good Guy and not a fringe groups which makes absurd advances on their own, and without anyone else noticing. Other effects of technology such as the quite advanced AI available and the power source per-se are ignored to concentrate on the action part. I wonder how well part 2 does in these areas.
The trick for any sort of super-hero story is to have only a few absurd assumptions and then try to scrupulously follow logic in how they play out. It's just like with the usual science fiction idea of inventing a technology and seeing how things play out based upon it. Star Trek is an example of that done poorly. So they invent a transporter which is a matter disassembler/assembler. Well, what if you took something apart and put it back together differently? Use simple feedstocks to create complex products. Ok, that's the replicator. Kudos for them thinking of that. But this means you could also reverse aging by disassembling a person and reassembling them younger. This would completely change society and is overlooked by the writers.
For an Iron Man suit to work like we see in the movies, you're pretty much talking about god-tech. A tremendous compact power source for starters, probably the energy density of a small atom bomb. There would have to be gravity manipulation tech inertial dampening. Really smart AI to keep the suit doing what the operator means and not what it thinks he means. His "push people back and break things" hand weapons would also be some form of gravity manipulation, a force beam. And then there's the way of cancelling out the reaction since the force it takes to knock a guy two hundred feet and make a dent in a wall two stories up would also be hitting back at the Iron Man suit. Maybe a surge in localized gravity to anchor the feet to the ground? The Army's Hardman suit, an attempt at making a powered exoskeleton, had tremendous problems with the limb augmentation. They never put a test operator in it because they thought they'd break bones.
The tech is certainly more than 20 years out. A hundred years? Two hundred? Hard to say. But it's completely out of place in a modern setting. It's like watching the 6 Million Dollar Man with their giant banks of computers with spinning tape reels. Shit, we can barely make passable thought controlled cybernetic limbs in 2010, let alone anything that could turn an amputee into superman!
RDJ is charismatic. The first film was fun. It may be the best looking BluRay I own. But most of us went in with relatively low expectations and were impressed. That doesn't mean the first film deserved all the praise it got. It doesn't hold up really well to repeat viewings. There isn't a whole lot of great action or tension.
Watch Iron Man again. Then watch Dark Knight again. Tell me Iron Man is in the same class.
Iron Man is a perfect popcorn movie. You're absolutely correct, RDJ has tremendous charisma. He's one of those genuinely fun characters to watch. Plays Stark perfectly. There were also plenty of laughs built into the story. The only real weakness with the movie is that the villain was underdeveloped. But seeing as this was also an origin movie, there's only so much that can be shoehorned in. Good action, good laughs, a complete surprise. The whole premise of a super suit is absurd, naturally. And building one in a cave with scrap metal? Don't let Osama get a hold of this guy. But like any good movie of this nature, it embraced the absurdity and then followed through with it. So many moments of "Oh, wow. Now that's cool." Loved seeing him develop the idea and go through the mental process of accepting his new role.
I saw it on a free preview and went in expecting to still feel ripped off. Was completely surprised. A light, fun, enjoyable movie that leaves you grinning like a 12-yr old when it's done. This really shouldn't be all that difficult to do but so many movies screw it up. As I understand it, the movie was sort of a happy accident. The producers said they spent so much time on developing the effects for the suit, they'd forgotten to write a story for the rest of the movie. All of RDJ's best lines were adlibbed, were not in the script. It really should have been a mess but somehow wasn't. My only fear is that they try to replicate this for the next movies and we end up with tedious, over-processed crap like the usual mindless comic book movies.
/. says "Spoiler-free" First line of article says "spoiler-light." I'm glad they said that so I could stop reading and save myself the blind rage I would have been in.
That would have been great prep for going to see a Daredevil movie.
Their time has passed; the only reason why we don't know it yet is because we haven't had the war that will settle the matter. If WWII didn't occur we'd still be under the misapprehension that the battleship is the queen of the seas. You don't tend to see the abandonment of a series of tactics and technology that have been successful in the past until they have led to utter ruin in a modern war. It took the tank to finally settle the question of cavalry's supremacy and it still took two world wars to drive that point home. The Italians made mounted charges against the Soviets. Whoops. According to the records, the stories of Polish mounted charges against the Wermacht were propaganda.
Where's the link to the Onion? There has to be a link to the Onion. There was another article lacking an Onion link, about how coon meat is making a comeback in Detroit. Abandoned neighborhoods are reverting to wilderness and the hunting's getting better. Again, where's the Onion link? I don't want this to be real.
I've been using the internet for years and I ain't hooked yet. *clicks refresh repeatedly*
Hey, preacher. Leave them kids alone. All in all it's just another dick in a funny hat.
He pretended to be a female nurse in order to instruct others on how to commit suicide.
No, he was goading people into committing suicide by presenting a sympathetic ear, the female bit of course being a big incentive for his lonely victims.
Suicide pacts are fairly common in Japan. You get suicidal people meeting on the net and forming dysfunctional little suicide support groups. They don't want to die alone so they get together to kill themselves, usually C02 poisoning from a charcoal grill. You just go to sleep and don't wake up. Often times the peer pressure of having a group will sweep people along to do things they would have lost gumption for if alone.
These people might have killed themselves without his influence but he could very well have been the impetus to push them over the edge. I've known people who got their rocks off with manipulating people but this really takes it just about as far as it could go.
This man must be a 4chan god, a living avatar of Anonymous, the inherent contradiction of an individual embodiment of collective asshattery whose very existence generates lulz.
Whats it called again? The one with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta... Where they like, take the guys face off, and then his face is off, so then they take the other guys face off, and put it on the other guys face. And then the guy without a face is really put off by it, so he gets the doctor to take the first offed face and put it back on him. So their faces are swapped. And then they have an epic face off with a climactic finish.
God I wish I could just remember the name of that movie...
Battlefield Earth.
The guy fucked up. He fucked up so bad it's gone past serious to not just epic fail but epoch fail. Apple should just run with it.
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac.
PC: Hi, I'm a PC.
Engineer: And I'm the idiot who lost the prototype iPhone.
Mac: Ouch.
PC: Wow. So that explains the sign around your neck? (points to sign reading "iDiot")
Engineer: Yeah. Steve told me I had to wear it.
PC: I lost a prototype Windows Mobile phone once.
Engineer and Mac: (reaction shots indicating sympathy)
PC: Actually I lost dozens of them, intentionally, hoping the tech blogs would take the bait. (casts eyes down.) Nobody cared.
Mac: (pats PC's shoulder consolingly.) Oh, PC, that's because Windows Mobile sucks.
Apple's only moral responsibility is to let their users do whatever they feel like, and they have failed.
I think it would be more like a hotel saying "There's a TV and DVD player in your room. We're not going to provide porn on the pay-per-view but if you bring your own, we can't control what you put in the player, nor do we care. If you go to porn sites on the wifi, we don't care. But we're not putting it on pay-per-view to make money off of it." That's a fair moral stance to take. But all hotels have porno on the TV because it makes so much money.
All Jobs has to say is that they're not going to put the apps in the store because of the immense backlash but you can get it via the browser. He's being particularly dickish here.