I always maintained that Win2K was such a good OS specifically because of the competition Microsoft was getting from open source, they didn't want to be caught napping and wake up to find Linux as a good desktop solution. This theory kind of fell apart with Vista, I have no idea what that steaming pile is in response to.
Ah, that's the one. Terminator Salivation, I keep miscalling it. About as bad as a friend who always read "destiny" as "density" so he'd keep saying "So when I was playing Spear of Desnity --fuck, destiny! So when I was playing SOD..." Heh. Fun to prank him on this. Hold our hands out dramatically to him say "Screw up everything you say, Luke, it is your density!"
If you'd seen The Dark Knight, you'd have seen this trailer.
Nope. They skipped it for us. Saw 007 which I hope hope hope they don't screw up, they had a few others that were utterly forgettable to the point I don't remember what they were, but no Watchmen.
I disagree. That scene earlier perfectly well demonstrated what he was almost capable of doing when pushed. If Batman hadn't shown up at that time, who knows what would have happened then and there? And I can totally see the murderous rage directed towards Gordon's corrupt cops. He told Gordon these guys were dirty, Gordon stood up for them, and Dent got burned (literally!). Now I guess that Gordon thought that Dent was a political guy, looking to score points regardless of whether the cops were dirty or not. So Gordon is dealing with betrayal of his own, guys he went to bat for were really on the take. So I can see Dent wanting to kill Gordon but I don't quite see him making the transfer of guilt onto the kids. If anything, I would have seen him feeling fully vindicated killing cops all the way up to Gordon, be fully ready to pull the trigger, but hesitate when he sees the family. I think that might have been more tragic. The way it played out, the person that was Dent was gone, there's nothing left inside that shell but a psychopathic remnant. If he'd paused when he saw the kid, it would have shown there was still humanity left inside which makes it all the more tragic when he goes to Arkham or is killed in some convenient fall from a tall building. Ever notice how many of Batman's enemies get killed in falls? Note to self: if I ever fight Batman, I will do so on the ground.
It's somewhat conceivable, if you buy the notion that certain laws of physics are absolutely unbreakable. Which is to say... space flight can't get any faster, energy generation doesn't get any more efficient... etc etc. So it's conceivable that an entire galaxy will get "capped out" because of basic logistics limitations and the fact that energy ain't free... and isn't getting any cheaper.
True. The two limits to technological development would be as you said, unbreakable physics, as well as cultural. If the dominant culture had a moral injunction against further research, you could see technology capped by force. See Mandarin China, Shogunate Japan, or the Imperium as presented in Dune.
The idea of technological stagnation doesn't strike me as oddly as the presence of futuristic hardware minus the sort of technology we've already developed. Galactica was funny about that, especially seeing as they use ships that look like they could be in the same universe as Star Wars. In the new Galactica series, there was that flashback bit with young Adama's first dogfight. Ok, I can suspend disbelief with fighters shooting bullets at each other in space but when he chases the Raiders into the atmosphere, there he is trying to hit them with bullets at supersonic speeds while real world fighters in the same environment would be using BVR missiles.
We can also consider the droid. Droids are already smarter than our robotic systems in the current day but we never saw droid fighters in the original Star Wars. They get introduced in the new trilogy but are lame, manned fighters always kick more ass which, of course, utterly silly. That's about as silly as saying swords beat guns just so long as it's a katana and looks neat.
Yeah, I know: ultimately they do things because they look cool, not because they make any rational sense. But if you catch yourself thinking by mistake it all becomes crazy.
But the Israeli group *did* exist, they *were* given the autonomy to do that work, the management *did* recognize the merits of it and decide to change course, and the production people *did* make it happen! That's not luck! If you don't understand how remarkable all of that is, you've never worked for a huge company.
The real question is how likely this will be repeated for the next product.
We don't know how much autonomy this group was granted initially, we don't know how much effort went into this, we don't know what sort of management battles were fought to avoid the smart decision here.
If Intel has good management, this sort of feat would be easily repeatable and good products will continue to be brought to market. If this smart move turns out to be more of a fluke, if we don't see anything like it again, then it was luck.
I think it was Patton who said that the army that wins the war is the one that makes the fewest mistakes. AMD has done well taking advantage of Intel's shortcomings. Then again, Intel can afford to blow through a lot of cash in order to get it right; AMD has far less buffer in that regard.
Then we'd need to train a bunch of people... (Score:5, Insightful)
and replace them as they 'fail'... that way we've always got a batman.
That always seemed like a better way of handling an avenger sort of character like this. Use a face-obscuring costume so there's no way to tell one masked man from another but don't have multiple ones operating together so baddies would guess there has to be more than one but will never have a clue as to how large the organization is or how many.
I always liked the idea of the two-king system of Sparta, a king could be lost in battle and yet there would still be a king. With rulers using doubles to protect themselves from assassination, it seemed like the next step would be to adopt an official royal uniform that again hid the face and body so there would be no telling who was the king. Have a dozen of these guys running around and there's no telling who's the active king and who isn't. But then again, this also means that it's easier for an impostor to come in and claim he's got authority. Heh. So much fun.
bad guy: The next one who makes a noise answers to me!
No different from the heroic legends of heroic people doing heroic things from Gilgamesh to Jesus to Zorro to Clint Eastwood's "man with no name."
In realistic terms, a gunfight is just Russian roulette with the other guy holding the gun. Even if you are a skilled marksman, there is a high probability you would die in that one gunfight. If you win, the odds are no better for your next gunfight. If we had the statistics for real people who get themselves involved in multiple gunfights, we'd see a significant winnowing. So why do we have stories featuring characters wading into meat grinder battles and coming out intact? It's the economy of storytelling. It's tough to tell a compelling narrative if all the characters die two minutes after you meet them. So you end up with the silliness of limited plot-specific invulnerability. As Vicious said to Spike in Cowboy Bebop, "You're the only one who can kill me. I go into gunfights with a sword, for fuck's sake. Ok, it's a katana so it does confer a certain badass factor that a scimitar or rapier lacks but seriously, I'm charging gunmen from across a room and slicing them to death without taking a hit. Hell, I bet when I fight you, I'll probably be able to get so close you'll have to parry my strikes with your gun in the most ridiculous fashion possible. And at the end of the fight, you'll kill me because I'm the villain but I'll probably still mortally wound you. Oh, and when my sword catches the light a certain way, the flash will make a 'steel kissing steel' sound, even though I didn't touch anything."
I find that realistic shooter games are good reality checks for just how lethal the battlefield is. Often times you don't see the guy who gets you. There's no telling who even has you in a line of sight at any given time. And there's always the chance for panic. The better shooters can pace the encounters so you're not seeing anyone for a second, then someone comes out of nowhere. The realism is high enough that it makes you jump and spray erratically, just as keyed up as you would be in real life. And damn, you can understand how people can miss at close ranges.
But the other point about the athletic prowess is also astute. A Batman character is not just like an Olympian (note how astounded everyone was that a 40-yr old could compete as a swimmer), he's taking injuries like an NFL linebacker. His body would be destroyed by the he reached middle-age.
But you know, there's one Batman question I've been dying to ask: just where does he find all the buildings to swing off of? Same with Spidey. They could be arriving at a shack in the middle of a salt flat and they'll still be swinging in off of something. What, a convenient low-flying jet?
Office has Groove for smaller businesses... I've never tried it though, I like Sharepoint too much, especially since I'm a.NET dev and it integrates really well with Team Foundation server.
You like Sharepoint? Wow. Does the kool-aid help cut the taste of the cum in your mouth?
I work at a non-profit. While we use Office internally, some of the groups are shifting to Google Docs for community outreach. Why? Because there's no software to buy, information can be shared between remote and local users, updated instantly.
I've tried using Word's version tracking features and they tend to fall down. Google Docs will allow simultaneous editing but it's auto-save feature needs work. It saves every 30 seconds so you can end up with a thousand edits that don't really mean anything. Two features that need to be added: the first feature is a data edit session. If Joe reviews the document, he can open a session, make his changes, and close the session. So when I want to see what Joe did, all I have to do is hit a filter that says "Highlight Joe's last session." Or maybe I could say "highlight all of Joe's changes." The other feature that would be great is versioning. After I finish my first draft, I promote the document to second draft and continue editing. Then I can track changes between draft 1 and draft 2, 3, etc, Joe's contributions between draft 1, 2, etc.
At this point in time, Excel is the only Microsoft application I actually like. Google has a way to go to equal that. But for data aggregation, Google Spreadsheets work just fine. Anyone can open the sheets, enter data, and I can copy and paste into Excel for anything more. Nobody has to own Excel or download anything, they can enter the data from any desktop in the world. Word gets grudging credit as the only good option for funky printing requirements. I haven't tried out OO for this yet, it may be up to snuff now.
Where Word really chaps my ass is that there's been no improvements in what's broken since I first started using it. Styles is borked, formatting is borked, there's little flexibility in layouts, tables are buggy, trying to size ANYTHING becomes an exercise in frustration because you cannot position by pixel but by arbitrary jumps, etc, etc. None of these problem areas are addressed, we're just buying the same old broken code with new turd polish each and every version.
Microsoft is still the king for now but there are dozens of companies and open source projects in the race to smoke their asses. If they keep standing still, they're going to be in it like kippers. Office 2007? Fucker can't even share user resources properly. If I want to share contacts from 2007 to someone with 2003, I have to go onto his fucking machine and add myself in as an alternate mailbox. I have to go into tools, mail servers, exchange, add it in. WTF? And the stupid mail invite that goes out when you invite someone, nevermind getting permissions proper when it does things automagically. Grr!
There's a difference between a silent film and a film that lacks verbal dialogue. A silent film has NO sound, and relies on subtitles for dialogue. Old silent films had a live organist or band to provide the music.
A film without verbal dialogue is just that, a film without dialogue. It can still contain sounds. Wall E has a tremendous amount of dialogue, played out through the robots vocalization and how they act. You watch it and you begin to realize how much can be communicated without using a verbal language.
And just look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. From beginning credits to Angel Eyes sitting at the table and talking to the man he was about to kill, it's a ridiculous amount of time without any talking. But it works! The tension that builds up is thick enough to cut with a knife.
Y'know, I haven't seen the movie, but I really find this to be impossible. Indeed, the lack of dialogue is the single biggest reason I'm not going to see the movie until I, at the very least, pirate it to see if it's any good: stories without dialogue don't work. Period. There's a reason why we quit making silent movies, and it really disappointed me that Pixar is taking a step backward in that regard.
You know what also sucked? Radio dramas. Stories without pictures suck. I will right now say it is absolutely impossible to make a good story with just words. The people who listened to them were all congenital idiots. What were humans doing around campfires for thousands of years? Just making due with what they had. The moment we could combine pictures with those words, bada-boom-bada-bing, campfires became passe. And for good reason! People who listen to talking books are philistines and possibly communist.
I've given up on any hope for a manned successor to the shuttle, at least as far as NASA is concerned. I've gotten my geek hope burned too many times on the hype.
If this thing ever gets off the ground, I will be surprised. But even if it does at that, I imagine the design will be as flawed and compromised as the shuttle's.
They were able to make a roach cute. And no, not some Disneyesque anthropomorphic huggable buggable plushified abomination to be mass-marketed to yowling ankle-biters everywhere, no, no, no! This was a realistic roach, the kind that makes me reach for a shoe and go Khrushchev on its filthy self. My family went to see this movie together and my own mother, my earliest memories of which involve her screaming hysterically and attacking palmetto bugs with a toilet plunger wielded with the sort of two-hand grip reserved for viking warhammers, she found the roach cute! She gasped when Wall-E rolled over it that last time, thinking it might be dead.
If Pixar can make her identify and sympathize with a realistic roach, the animators at those other studios should just hang up their keyboards and go home.
Regular-sized squid are actually the most plentiful source of protein on the planet, far out-stripping cattle, chicken and tuna. If we would just eat them instead...
You forgot bugs. They're the hands-down winner, not just in terms of bio-mass but in human diet, too. Man eating bugs!
How much pee do they need? This looks like a job for beer!
Re:"what Leander thinks are the takeaways..."
on
Inside Steve's Brain
·
· Score: 1
A couple of decades ago, a bestseller entitled "In Search of Excellence" purported to explain factors that made companies successful. If I recall correctly, their examples of some of the best-managed high-tech companies included Atari, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Wang Laboratories.
As early as 1984 it was apparent, to certain analysts, that the book's choice of companies was poor to indifferent. Business Week ("Oops. Who's excellent now?", November 5, 1984) observed that of 43 'excellent' companies one-third were in financial difficulties within five years of Peters and Watermans' surveys. The failings were particularly obvious in the high technology sector, where companies such as Atari, Data General, DEC, IBM, Lanier, NCR, Wang Labs, Xerox and others did not produce excellent results in their balance sheets in the 1980s.
Rick Chapman titled his book on high-tech marketing fiascoes, "In Search of Stupidity," as a nod to Peters's book and the disasters that befell many of the companies it profiled. He notes that "with only a few exceptions... [the excellent companies were] large firms with dominant positions in markets that were senescent or static."
Tom Peters also admitted to bullshitting liberally in that book, pulling his facts out of his as without even having the courtesy of a wipe-off.
Slashdot Mirror
Distance. Jupiter is 4.2AU away as the crow flies
That's one crow I gotta see.
I always maintained that Win2K was such a good OS specifically because of the competition Microsoft was getting from open source, they didn't want to be caught napping and wake up to find Linux as a good desktop solution. This theory kind of fell apart with Vista, I have no idea what that steaming pile is in response to.
Ah, that's the one. Terminator Salivation, I keep miscalling it. About as bad as a friend who always read "destiny" as "density" so he'd keep saying "So when I was playing Spear of Desnity --fuck, destiny! So when I was playing SOD..." Heh. Fun to prank him on this. Hold our hands out dramatically to him say "Screw up everything you say, Luke, it is your density!"
If you'd seen The Dark Knight, you'd have seen this trailer.
Nope. They skipped it for us. Saw 007 which I hope hope hope they don't screw up, they had a few others that were utterly forgettable to the point I don't remember what they were, but no Watchmen.
Who watches the Watchmen trailer?
Oh, right. That would be us.
Waiting for the part about the spoiled rich girl falling down the bad block chute.
I don't want to know anything about a product that makes me think of tall black drag queens.
Reminds me of a funny conversation with a friend who doesn't follow politics closely.
friend: Man, I don't think the Dems have any good candidates running this year.
me: Yeah, but i know you won't go Republican.
friend: Hell, no! But there's one guy they all seem to be going on about, who is it, Rupal?
me: I think you're thinking about Ron Paul.
friend: What's the difference?
me: One's a tall, black drag queen, the other is a fringe libertarian candidate.
friend: Heh. What are the chances of either of them getting the nomination?
me: About the same.
Because then the Joker says, kill 10 people or I'll blow up a hospital.
Or kill 100 people or I'll blow up a hospital.
Or kill 1000 people or I'll blow up a hospital.
The moment you accept killing one innocent person is OK to save many more innocent people
But this was an accountant. It's like landing a fish, the flopping about is just nerve impulses, it doesn't really feel anything.
I disagree. That scene earlier perfectly well demonstrated what he was almost capable of doing when pushed. If Batman hadn't shown up at that time, who knows what would have happened then and there? And I can totally see the murderous rage directed towards Gordon's corrupt cops. He told Gordon these guys were dirty, Gordon stood up for them, and Dent got burned (literally!). Now I guess that Gordon thought that Dent was a political guy, looking to score points regardless of whether the cops were dirty or not. So Gordon is dealing with betrayal of his own, guys he went to bat for were really on the take. So I can see Dent wanting to kill Gordon but I don't quite see him making the transfer of guilt onto the kids. If anything, I would have seen him feeling fully vindicated killing cops all the way up to Gordon, be fully ready to pull the trigger, but hesitate when he sees the family. I think that might have been more tragic. The way it played out, the person that was Dent was gone, there's nothing left inside that shell but a psychopathic remnant. If he'd paused when he saw the kid, it would have shown there was still humanity left inside which makes it all the more tragic when he goes to Arkham or is killed in some convenient fall from a tall building. Ever notice how many of Batman's enemies get killed in falls? Note to self: if I ever fight Batman, I will do so on the ground.
Disappearing Pencil Trick!
Bearing this in mind, I don't think I ever want to see the Joker play "hide the salami" with Harley Quinn.
It's somewhat conceivable, if you buy the notion that certain laws of physics are absolutely unbreakable. Which is to say... space flight can't get any faster, energy generation doesn't get any more efficient... etc etc. So it's conceivable that an entire galaxy will get "capped out" because of basic logistics limitations and the fact that energy ain't free... and isn't getting any cheaper.
True. The two limits to technological development would be as you said, unbreakable physics, as well as cultural. If the dominant culture had a moral injunction against further research, you could see technology capped by force. See Mandarin China, Shogunate Japan, or the Imperium as presented in Dune.
The idea of technological stagnation doesn't strike me as oddly as the presence of futuristic hardware minus the sort of technology we've already developed. Galactica was funny about that, especially seeing as they use ships that look like they could be in the same universe as Star Wars. In the new Galactica series, there was that flashback bit with young Adama's first dogfight. Ok, I can suspend disbelief with fighters shooting bullets at each other in space but when he chases the Raiders into the atmosphere, there he is trying to hit them with bullets at supersonic speeds while real world fighters in the same environment would be using BVR missiles.
We can also consider the droid. Droids are already smarter than our robotic systems in the current day but we never saw droid fighters in the original Star Wars. They get introduced in the new trilogy but are lame, manned fighters always kick more ass which, of course, utterly silly. That's about as silly as saying swords beat guns just so long as it's a katana and looks neat.
Yeah, I know: ultimately they do things because they look cool, not because they make any rational sense. But if you catch yourself thinking by mistake it all becomes crazy.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
But the Israeli group *did* exist, they *were* given the autonomy to do that work, the management *did* recognize the merits of it and decide to change course, and the production people *did* make it happen! That's not luck! If you don't understand how remarkable all of that is, you've never worked for a huge company.
The real question is how likely this will be repeated for the next product.
We don't know how much autonomy this group was granted initially, we don't know how much effort went into this, we don't know what sort of management battles were fought to avoid the smart decision here.
If Intel has good management, this sort of feat would be easily repeatable and good products will continue to be brought to market. If this smart move turns out to be more of a fluke, if we don't see anything like it again, then it was luck.
I think it was Patton who said that the army that wins the war is the one that makes the fewest mistakes. AMD has done well taking advantage of Intel's shortcomings. Then again, Intel can afford to blow through a lot of cash in order to get it right; AMD has far less buffer in that regard.
Then we'd need to train a bunch of people... (Score:5, Insightful)
and replace them as they 'fail' ... that way we've always got a batman.
That always seemed like a better way of handling an avenger sort of character like this. Use a face-obscuring costume so there's no way to tell one masked man from another but don't have multiple ones operating together so baddies would guess there has to be more than one but will never have a clue as to how large the organization is or how many.
I always liked the idea of the two-king system of Sparta, a king could be lost in battle and yet there would still be a king. With rulers using doubles to protect themselves from assassination, it seemed like the next step would be to adopt an official royal uniform that again hid the face and body so there would be no telling who was the king. Have a dozen of these guys running around and there's no telling who's the active king and who isn't. But then again, this also means that it's easier for an impostor to come in and claim he's got authority. Heh. So much fun.
bad guy: The next one who makes a noise answers to me!
[bad guy gets hit in the head]
bad guy: Who the FUCK did that?!
blackbelt jones: Batman, motherfucker!
No different from the heroic legends of heroic people doing heroic things from Gilgamesh to Jesus to Zorro to Clint Eastwood's "man with no name."
In realistic terms, a gunfight is just Russian roulette with the other guy holding the gun. Even if you are a skilled marksman, there is a high probability you would die in that one gunfight. If you win, the odds are no better for your next gunfight. If we had the statistics for real people who get themselves involved in multiple gunfights, we'd see a significant winnowing. So why do we have stories featuring characters wading into meat grinder battles and coming out intact? It's the economy of storytelling. It's tough to tell a compelling narrative if all the characters die two minutes after you meet them. So you end up with the silliness of limited plot-specific invulnerability. As Vicious said to Spike in Cowboy Bebop, "You're the only one who can kill me. I go into gunfights with a sword, for fuck's sake. Ok, it's a katana so it does confer a certain badass factor that a scimitar or rapier lacks but seriously, I'm charging gunmen from across a room and slicing them to death without taking a hit. Hell, I bet when I fight you, I'll probably be able to get so close you'll have to parry my strikes with your gun in the most ridiculous fashion possible. And at the end of the fight, you'll kill me because I'm the villain but I'll probably still mortally wound you. Oh, and when my sword catches the light a certain way, the flash will make a 'steel kissing steel' sound, even though I didn't touch anything."
I find that realistic shooter games are good reality checks for just how lethal the battlefield is. Often times you don't see the guy who gets you. There's no telling who even has you in a line of sight at any given time. And there's always the chance for panic. The better shooters can pace the encounters so you're not seeing anyone for a second, then someone comes out of nowhere. The realism is high enough that it makes you jump and spray erratically, just as keyed up as you would be in real life. And damn, you can understand how people can miss at close ranges.
But the other point about the athletic prowess is also astute. A Batman character is not just like an Olympian (note how astounded everyone was that a 40-yr old could compete as a swimmer), he's taking injuries like an NFL linebacker. His body would be destroyed by the he reached middle-age.
But you know, there's one Batman question I've been dying to ask: just where does he find all the buildings to swing off of? Same with Spidey. They could be arriving at a shack in the middle of a salt flat and they'll still be swinging in off of something. What, a convenient low-flying jet?
Office has Groove for smaller businesses... I've never tried it though, I like Sharepoint too much, especially since I'm a .NET dev and it integrates really well with Team Foundation server.
You like Sharepoint? Wow. Does the kool-aid help cut the taste of the cum in your mouth?
(me = dreading our upcoming sharepoint installation, already OD'd on synergistic marketspeak.)
I work at a non-profit. While we use Office internally, some of the groups are shifting to Google Docs for community outreach. Why? Because there's no software to buy, information can be shared between remote and local users, updated instantly.
I've tried using Word's version tracking features and they tend to fall down. Google Docs will allow simultaneous editing but it's auto-save feature needs work. It saves every 30 seconds so you can end up with a thousand edits that don't really mean anything. Two features that need to be added: the first feature is a data edit session. If Joe reviews the document, he can open a session, make his changes, and close the session. So when I want to see what Joe did, all I have to do is hit a filter that says "Highlight Joe's last session." Or maybe I could say "highlight all of Joe's changes." The other feature that would be great is versioning. After I finish my first draft, I promote the document to second draft and continue editing. Then I can track changes between draft 1 and draft 2, 3, etc, Joe's contributions between draft 1, 2, etc.
At this point in time, Excel is the only Microsoft application I actually like. Google has a way to go to equal that. But for data aggregation, Google Spreadsheets work just fine. Anyone can open the sheets, enter data, and I can copy and paste into Excel for anything more. Nobody has to own Excel or download anything, they can enter the data from any desktop in the world. Word gets grudging credit as the only good option for funky printing requirements. I haven't tried out OO for this yet, it may be up to snuff now.
Where Word really chaps my ass is that there's been no improvements in what's broken since I first started using it. Styles is borked, formatting is borked, there's little flexibility in layouts, tables are buggy, trying to size ANYTHING becomes an exercise in frustration because you cannot position by pixel but by arbitrary jumps, etc, etc. None of these problem areas are addressed, we're just buying the same old broken code with new turd polish each and every version.
Microsoft is still the king for now but there are dozens of companies and open source projects in the race to smoke their asses. If they keep standing still, they're going to be in it like kippers. Office 2007? Fucker can't even share user resources properly. If I want to share contacts from 2007 to someone with 2003, I have to go onto his fucking machine and add myself in as an alternate mailbox. I have to go into tools, mail servers, exchange, add it in. WTF? And the stupid mail invite that goes out when you invite someone, nevermind getting permissions proper when it does things automagically. Grr!
but your cheese is the foulest thing that anyone has ever had the gaul to pass off as food.
If you really want to talk about gaul, look at France.
There's a difference between a silent film and a film that lacks verbal dialogue. A silent film has NO sound, and relies on subtitles for dialogue. Old silent films had a live organist or band to provide the music.
A film without verbal dialogue is just that, a film without dialogue. It can still contain sounds. Wall E has a tremendous amount of dialogue, played out through the robots vocalization and how they act. You watch it and you begin to realize how much can be communicated without using a verbal language.
And just look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. From beginning credits to Angel Eyes sitting at the table and talking to the man he was about to kill, it's a ridiculous amount of time without any talking. But it works! The tension that builds up is thick enough to cut with a knife.
Y'know, I haven't seen the movie, but I really find this to be impossible. Indeed, the lack of dialogue is the single biggest reason I'm not going to see the movie until I, at the very least, pirate it to see if it's any good: stories without dialogue don't work. Period. There's a reason why we quit making silent movies, and it really disappointed me that Pixar is taking a step backward in that regard.
You know what also sucked? Radio dramas. Stories without pictures suck. I will right now say it is absolutely impossible to make a good story with just words. The people who listened to them were all congenital idiots. What were humans doing around campfires for thousands of years? Just making due with what they had. The moment we could combine pictures with those words, bada-boom-bada-bing, campfires became passe. And for good reason! People who listen to talking books are philistines and possibly communist.
I've given up on any hope for a manned successor to the shuttle, at least as far as NASA is concerned. I've gotten my geek hope burned too many times on the hype.
If this thing ever gets off the ground, I will be surprised. But even if it does at that, I imagine the design will be as flawed and compromised as the shuttle's.
They were able to make a roach cute. And no, not some Disneyesque anthropomorphic huggable buggable plushified abomination to be mass-marketed to yowling ankle-biters everywhere, no, no, no! This was a realistic roach, the kind that makes me reach for a shoe and go Khrushchev on its filthy self. My family went to see this movie together and my own mother, my earliest memories of which involve her screaming hysterically and attacking palmetto bugs with a toilet plunger wielded with the sort of two-hand grip reserved for viking warhammers, she found the roach cute! She gasped when Wall-E rolled over it that last time, thinking it might be dead.
If Pixar can make her identify and sympathize with a realistic roach, the animators at those other studios should just hang up their keyboards and go home.
Regular-sized squid are actually the most plentiful source of protein on the planet, far out-stripping cattle, chicken and tuna. If we would just eat them instead...
You forgot bugs. They're the hands-down winner, not just in terms of bio-mass but in human diet, too. Man eating bugs!
How much pee do they need? This looks like a job for beer!
A couple of decades ago, a bestseller entitled "In Search of Excellence" purported to explain factors that made companies successful. If I recall correctly, their examples of some of the best-managed high-tech companies included Atari, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Wang Laboratories.
Oh, how I hated that book. College profs thought it was the dog's bollocks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_Of_Excellence
As early as 1984 it was apparent, to certain analysts, that the book's choice of companies was poor to indifferent. Business Week ("Oops. Who's excellent now?", November 5, 1984) observed that of 43 'excellent' companies one-third were in financial difficulties within five years of Peters and Watermans' surveys. The failings were particularly obvious in the high technology sector, where companies such as Atari, Data General, DEC, IBM, Lanier, NCR, Wang Labs, Xerox and others did not produce excellent results in their balance sheets in the 1980s.
Rick Chapman titled his book on high-tech marketing fiascoes, "In Search of Stupidity," as a nod to Peters's book and the disasters that befell many of the companies it profiled. He notes that "with only a few exceptions... [the excellent companies were] large firms with dominant positions in markets that were senescent or static."
Tom Peters also admitted to bullshitting liberally in that book, pulling his facts out of his as without even having the courtesy of a wipe-off.