When Moses appeared in that episode I was so amazed that I probably drooled all over myself. Suddenly I was 12 again. I couldn't believe that they'd slip in such an (I thought) obscure reference.
I agree about it being great (both because of the Tron reference and the context), but South Park is all about the obscure references. I haven't watched it in years, but I remember seeing the film at a theatre and being the only person who laughed at the "I... have had... enough of... YOU!" take-off on Star Trek III.
Unfortunately, NOCDs are going the way of the dodo. More and more, we are seeing mini-images that, when loaded in Daemon Tools, fool the game into thinking that the CD is present.
I actually prefer disc images to patch-style no-CD hacks. My thinking is that I'd rather be running an unmodified version of the game program, because I don't know what secondary effects a hack will have on the game.
I say that as someone who *does* hack games. I am pretty sharp, and so are most of the people who make no-CD patches, but it's not the same as being a developer who worked on the game and understands what removing a function call or forcing a particular value will do to other parts of it.
The thing to bear in mind is that pretty much all single-player games are actually two-player - the other player is the computer.
You can make that definition work, but only if you stretch it REALLY far.
My favourite type of game could be described as "exploring a new and mysterious world." Here are some notable examples:
- Soul Reaver - Metroid (2D more than 3D) - Ico - Reverse-Engineer the Commercial Game File Format
These sort of have a second player, in the form of the people who designed the game world, but I would compare them more to exploring a cave or some utility tunnels that were left open accidentally.
One small problem in your math: PS2 users basically can't go online, even if they wanted to. As a result, the sample size is about half, which means the percentage just doubled.
The GP addresses this point in the second-to-last paragraph - even if you are only looking at Xbox owners, the percentage who game online is tiny. Another way to look at it is that the PS2 outselling the Xbox by such a wide margin is a vote of "I don't care significantly about online gaming" by over 3:1.
Clearly there is a market for online-based gaming, but it's currently pretty small compared to offline. I think publishers are forgetting that because the online gamers are very vocal, and they are flooding that minority of gamers with so many titles that it's not sustainable.
I think MS and Nintendo have it right with their next-gen model - don't go out of your way to sell online gaming, sell regular gaming and then make money on casual online use like buying old SNES games or add-ons for offline titles like Oblivion. It worked really well for the cell-phone industry, and the online gamer minority is rabid enough to take care of themselves =).
Jews did not and do not believe a "son of God" is coming back. Some do believe in a messiah, but that's completely different.
I don't know if it's a common viewpoint among Jews, but a good friend of mine who is Jewish once said that she thought the idea of Jesus being special because he was "the son of God" was offensive - the idea being that in Judaism we are *all* the sons and daughters of God.
Support lines can be open 24/7 rather than the standard 9am-5pm Mon-Fri.
As hard as it may be to imagine, a long time ago American corporations actually valued their customers enough to pay for call centers in the US to be staffed around the clock.
They don't need our or anyone else's stinking IP. You've been reading too much western propaganda.
Mmm... no. Sorry.
There are a lot of bright people in China, but there are also a lot of companies out to swipe IP from other countries. The most recent example I've read about is a whole segment of the auto industry over there devoted to copying the designs of companies like Honda and Mercedes.
One of them even stole their *symbol* from Audi, which they slapped on a copy of another manufacturer's car. I thought that one was particularly funny - it reminded me of the bootleg Versace/Universal Studios "dual logo" t-shirts in Kamikaze Girls.
Your statement is the same line of thought that would promote "growing" human beings as unwilling test subjects for medical testing.
Yes, like how harvesting organs from people killed in accidents promotes "'growing' human beings as unwilling test subjects for medical testing."
Like how fertility clinics paying women for their eggs and men for their sperm promotes "'growing' human beings as unwilling test subjects for medical testing."
You're claiming your hoped-for results justify the means, whatever those may be.
That's funny, I seem to have missed the "whatever those may be" part. Maybe it's because (like many people) I don't consider it any sort of ethical issue to make use of stem cells. I don't see any need to "justify the means" because there are no "victims" to justify them to.
there would be 8 or 9 different editions of the patriot act and nobody would be sure which edition applied to them.
I think that's functionally equivalent to one edition that applies to everyone, and no one is really sure what it says, so it can be used for anything. It's similar to Microsoft naming their Office apps with ambiguous names ("Excel"), and then sitting back and watching as they end up being used for much more than their class of program is really intended for (Excel being used as a database app because Access is "too hard.")
I've actually read of suburban or rural areas where the thieves bypassed the door entirely and used a chainsaw to make their own. The lightweight construction common in many modern houses apparently makes it easier to do that than picking the lock or kicking down the door.
Also, I suspect that being able to work from the side of the house ends up being less conspicuous than standing at the door fiddling with the locks. Especially in a rural area, the sound of a chainsaw wouldn't be jarringly out of place. I grew up in one, and lots of the families there would cut their own firewood.
Electronic ignition, immobilisers, all of these toys mean the vehicle can be put out of action by an EMP that wouldn't even be noticed by an old all-mechanical Diesel truck or marine engine. I really wouldn't like a lighning strike to prevent my car from starting, and then find I couldn't get into the house because the central locking on that had failed.
If there is an EMP strong enough to take out electronics in your car, having a mechanical ignition isn't going to help. Nearly any car on the road today (barring e.g. = mid-1970s models) is going to have other electronic components in the engine.
But then, if it were me, I'd be more worried about the other effects of whatever caused the EMP than not being able to drive.
I do however agree that it's important to have a mechanical-only locking system on *at least* one entrance to your house. If I were rich, I'd love to have the front door be remote-operated like my car doors and possibly open itself (so I could carry things inside without putting them down to open it). I don't see any real advantages of the system in TFA though, because it still requires the same type of physical actions as a key.
Are you insane? Do you honestly think that government schools will teach against the government? No, because they are part of the government. Just as Catholic priests don't preach against the Pope, so will government schools not speak against the government.
Whatever.
I went to public school. Maybe things have changed in the decade since I finished high school, but plenty of my teachers taught us to question the government and its policies, had us read 1984/F451/We, etc.
It was innovative at the time of filing: 1987-04-06
How so? There were games that effectively had this even back then - the vector-display Star Wars arcade machine comes to mind, and it was released in 1983.
RTFA submitter, all they claim it to be is a higher efficiency electric motor. No self contained power source....
From TFA:
The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier.
It may be described primarily as a motor, but if it could generate excess power then it would also be a "self contained power source." Of course, it can't, but TFA does imply that it is one.
If I'm reading the text of their patent correctly, it's not for the motor, but for the magnet assembly used in the motor. Maybe I'm missing something, but even with that limitation the patent looks pretty weak. Doesn't it cover just about any use of permanent magnets in a variable configuration to modify a magnetic field?
Anyway, this looks like another in a long line of "use permanent magnets to make a perpetual motion device" concepts.
What I would consider much more useful is an application that can hunt.avi,.mpg and.mp3 files across the network and 'slurp' them back to my iPod...
One of my former coworkers added audio/video file types to the SMS inventory list on our network. It was a simple step from there for him to build a little web front end to a database query and *pow!* instant media library.
For instance one would be the Inhibitor series by Alastair Reynolds.
I was thinking of this as well. His world would make for an *awesome* film visually, but I think you're right that it wouldn't work overall.
Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars gives me similar feelings, and allegedly that one *is* being turned into a film, so maybe I'll be proven wrong. That would be neat, because I'd love to see Reynolds' stories, Anvil of Stars, Bear's Eon and Queen of Angels series, Frederick Pohl's The World at the End of Time, and Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series turned into films.
It could be a renaissance of hard SF on the screen =).
I'd say you've never read the actual screen play, based on your silly comments that are totally at odds with Gibson's own statements. Try again.
I went to the library and checked out a book called something like "Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay," so I'm pretty sure I did read it.
I know that Gibson meant it to turn out differently - as I said, I interview him years ago and he said as much. But what I don't see is concrete evidence that the film that was made was substantially different than the one the director shot.
I do realize that studios can change the overall feel of a film - look at the theatrical release of Alien3 versus the pseudo-Director's Cut that's on DVD now - but I don't think even the possibility of a truly good film exists in the footage that was shot for Johnny Mnemonic.
Gibson mentioned numerous scenes and ideas that were cut. Like a scene with Street Preacher delivering a sermon NUDE before congregations of N.A.S. victims, on the virtue of post-humanity and cybernetic augmentation.
To me personally, a scene like that wouldn't really have improved the film. What I would have liked to see is something that I believe Gibson mentioned once about making Johnny Mnemonic as a low-budget black and white short. A short, indie film that more or less followed the plot of the short story would have been great. All of the things that were added on to make it feature-length dectracted from it IMO - especially because I felt like many of them were borrowed from his more recent books (which I am very fond of, but I don't like the mixing of the two).
Gibson is one of my favourite writers - I don't like any novels *better* than the ones he writes, and Neuromancer is bar none the best book I've ever read - but I think his track record WRT film and television indicates that something gets lost in the transition. Johnny Mnemonic the film and the first X-Files episode he co-wrote were mediocre. The second X-Files episode he wrote was downright awful.
I guess part of it is that most of his writing seems very serious to me, but none of the TV and film he's worked on does (with the exception of No Maps For These Territories, but that's non-fiction). Johnny Mnemonic the short story felt very claustrophobic, tense, and suspenseful. The movie dispensed with that by throwing in a bunch of unnecessary humour and unbelievable comic book characters.
Read Gibson's published screenplay for Johnny Mnemonic, as well his blog.
I read the published screenplay in book form, and I only noticed one difference between it and the film - it has the standard action movie "big bad guy that everyone thinks is dead gets up again and the heroes have to shoot him one more time" thing (which was edited into being a feint in that direction for the final release).
Is there another version I'm missing? I don't think I would have genuinely liked it no matter how it was re-edited. The short story is a favourite of mine because it feels raw and realistic, versus the Jerry Bruckheimer-esque film. I actually tend to like Bruckheimer films for what they are, I just didn't like seeing that particular short story turned into one.
I guess a big part of it is that the short story felt very lonely to me, whereas the film was more like Keanu Reeves and Girl From Starship Troopers finding a quasi-family in Ice-T and his band of merry men.
I agree with the GP that Neuromancer would be difficult if not impossible to film. I interviewed Gibson many years ago and he said that the problem with any film based on a novel is that the readers get a perfect one-off custom film in their head when they read the book, and no film is going to match up with that. I thought Peter Jackson did a great job with LotR, but look at how many Tolkien fans complained about it.
MAYBE if Ridley Scott circa 1983, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and David Cronenberg all teamed up to direct a 10+ hour long film, and they were given access to a multi-billion dollar budget and complete creative independence from the studio, they could come close.
Yes, it does! It asks whatever it's attached to for its key, and refuses to work if it gets the wrong answer.
My point is that that's not an intrinsic way of knowing for sure. As long as what's on the other side does a credible job of pretending to be a piece of trusted hardware (IE by giving the right responses), the drive will act accordingly.
There's no way around this. If the drive works with hardware that is genuine, it must by definition work with hardware that pretends in every way to be genuine when talking to the drive. Think of it as a Matrix for DRM'd devices.
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When Moses appeared in that episode I was so amazed that I probably drooled all over myself. Suddenly I was 12 again. I couldn't believe that they'd slip in such an (I thought) obscure reference.
I agree about it being great (both because of the Tron reference and the context), but South Park is all about the obscure references. I haven't watched it in years, but I remember seeing the film at a theatre and being the only person who laughed at the "I... have had... enough of... YOU!" take-off on Star Trek III.
I forgave the film its flaws after watching one of the "outtakes" on the DVD. "It's Arthur Dent, motherfuckers! Do panic!"
The BBC miniseries is still far superior, but I think they both fall well short of the book.
Unfortunately, NOCDs are going the way of the dodo. More and more, we are seeing mini-images that, when loaded in Daemon Tools, fool the game into thinking that the CD is present.
I actually prefer disc images to patch-style no-CD hacks. My thinking is that I'd rather be running an unmodified version of the game program, because I don't know what secondary effects a hack will have on the game.
I say that as someone who *does* hack games. I am pretty sharp, and so are most of the people who make no-CD patches, but it's not the same as being a developer who worked on the game and understands what removing a function call or forcing a particular value will do to other parts of it.
The thing to bear in mind is that pretty much all single-player games are actually two-player - the other player is the computer.
You can make that definition work, but only if you stretch it REALLY far.
My favourite type of game could be described as "exploring a new and mysterious world." Here are some notable examples:
- Soul Reaver
- Metroid (2D more than 3D)
- Ico
- Reverse-Engineer the Commercial Game File Format
These sort of have a second player, in the form of the people who designed the game world, but I would compare them more to exploring a cave or some utility tunnels that were left open accidentally.
One small problem in your math: PS2 users basically can't go online, even if they wanted to. As a result, the sample size is about half, which means the percentage just doubled.
The GP addresses this point in the second-to-last paragraph - even if you are only looking at Xbox owners, the percentage who game online is tiny. Another way to look at it is that the PS2 outselling the Xbox by such a wide margin is a vote of "I don't care significantly about online gaming" by over 3:1.
Clearly there is a market for online-based gaming, but it's currently pretty small compared to offline. I think publishers are forgetting that because the online gamers are very vocal, and they are flooding that minority of gamers with so many titles that it's not sustainable.
I think MS and Nintendo have it right with their next-gen model - don't go out of your way to sell online gaming, sell regular gaming and then make money on casual online use like buying old SNES games or add-ons for offline titles like Oblivion. It worked really well for the cell-phone industry, and the online gamer minority is rabid enough to take care of themselves =).
GAIM, The GIMP, guliverkli, Gentoo, kcron, vi, Mandriva... are these names any more appealing?
I think "guliverkli" manages to actually roll ONTO the tongue.
I assume all the non-contractors have company approved (and tested) anti-virus software on their laptops.
Exactly. Although I am a punk-ass.
Jews did not and do not believe a "son of God" is coming back. Some do believe in a messiah, but that's completely different.
I don't know if it's a common viewpoint among Jews, but a good friend of mine who is Jewish once said that she thought the idea of Jesus being special because he was "the son of God" was offensive - the idea being that in Judaism we are *all* the sons and daughters of God.
That's great but what if someone introduces a virus through other means i.e usb key, infected laptop, etc. Firewall won't help much internally
Exactly.
Every virus that's hit the company I work at while I've been there was brought in on a laptop by a contractor.
It's a grammar nazi blitzkrieg!
(sorry, not directed at any particular member of the conjugatenmacht)
Support lines can be open 24/7 rather than the standard 9am-5pm Mon-Fri.
As hard as it may be to imagine, a long time ago American corporations actually valued their customers enough to pay for call centers in the US to be staffed around the clock.
They don't need our or anyone else's stinking IP. You've been reading too much western propaganda.
Mmm... no. Sorry.
There are a lot of bright people in China, but there are also a lot of companies out to swipe IP from other countries. The most recent example I've read about is a whole segment of the auto industry over there devoted to copying the designs of companies like Honda and Mercedes.
One of them even stole their *symbol* from Audi, which they slapped on a copy of another manufacturer's car. I thought that one was particularly funny - it reminded me of the bootleg Versace/Universal Studios "dual logo" t-shirts in Kamikaze Girls.
Your statement is the same line of thought that would promote "growing" human beings as unwilling test subjects for medical testing.
Yes, like how harvesting organs from people killed in accidents promotes "'growing' human beings as unwilling test subjects for medical testing."
Like how fertility clinics paying women for their eggs and men for their sperm promotes "'growing' human beings as unwilling test subjects for medical testing."
You're claiming your hoped-for results justify the means, whatever those may be.
That's funny, I seem to have missed the "whatever those may be" part. Maybe it's because (like many people) I don't consider it any sort of ethical issue to make use of stem cells. I don't see any need to "justify the means" because there are no "victims" to justify them to.
there would be 8 or 9 different editions of the patriot act and nobody would be sure which edition applied to them.
I think that's functionally equivalent to one edition that applies to everyone, and no one is really sure what it says, so it can be used for anything. It's similar to Microsoft naming their Office apps with ambiguous names ("Excel"), and then sitting back and watching as they end up being used for much more than their class of program is really intended for (Excel being used as a database app because Access is "too hard.")
I've actually read of suburban or rural areas where the thieves bypassed the door entirely and used a chainsaw to make their own. The lightweight construction common in many modern houses apparently makes it easier to do that than picking the lock or kicking down the door.
Also, I suspect that being able to work from the side of the house ends up being less conspicuous than standing at the door fiddling with the locks. Especially in a rural area, the sound of a chainsaw wouldn't be jarringly out of place. I grew up in one, and lots of the families there would cut their own firewood.
Electronic ignition, immobilisers, all of these toys mean the vehicle can be put out of action by an EMP that wouldn't even be noticed by an old all-mechanical Diesel truck or marine engine. I really wouldn't like a lighning strike to prevent my car from starting, and then find I couldn't get into the house because the central locking on that had failed.
If there is an EMP strong enough to take out electronics in your car, having a mechanical ignition isn't going to help. Nearly any car on the road today (barring e.g. = mid-1970s models) is going to have other electronic components in the engine.
But then, if it were me, I'd be more worried about the other effects of whatever caused the EMP than not being able to drive.
I do however agree that it's important to have a mechanical-only locking system on *at least* one entrance to your house. If I were rich, I'd love to have the front door be remote-operated like my car doors and possibly open itself (so I could carry things inside without putting them down to open it). I don't see any real advantages of the system in TFA though, because it still requires the same type of physical actions as a key.
Are you insane? Do you honestly think that government schools will teach against the government? No, because they are part of the government. Just as Catholic priests don't preach against the Pope, so will government schools not speak against the government.
Whatever.
I went to public school. Maybe things have changed in the decade since I finished high school, but plenty of my teachers taught us to question the government and its policies, had us read 1984/F451/We, etc.
It was innovative at the time of filing: 1987-04-06
How so? There were games that effectively had this even back then - the vector-display Star Wars arcade machine comes to mind, and it was released in 1983.
RTFA submitter, all they claim it to be is a higher efficiency electric motor. No self contained power source....
From TFA:
The technology claims to be able to increase magnet motor efficiency substantially, even over the 100% barrier.
It may be described primarily as a motor, but if it could generate excess power then it would also be a "self contained power source." Of course, it can't, but TFA does imply that it is one.
If I'm reading the text of their patent correctly, it's not for the motor, but for the magnet assembly used in the motor. Maybe I'm missing something, but even with that limitation the patent looks pretty weak. Doesn't it cover just about any use of permanent magnets in a variable configuration to modify a magnetic field?
Anyway, this looks like another in a long line of "use permanent magnets to make a perpetual motion device" concepts.
What I would consider much more useful is an application that can hunt .avi, .mpg and .mp3 files across the network and 'slurp' them back to my iPod...
One of my former coworkers added audio/video file types to the SMS inventory list on our network. It was a simple step from there for him to build a little web front end to a database query and *pow!* instant media library.
or put your head on one.....
I've seen this done years ago using a regular video projector. The effect is... unsettling.
For instance one would be the Inhibitor series by Alastair Reynolds.
I was thinking of this as well. His world would make for an *awesome* film visually, but I think you're right that it wouldn't work overall.
Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars gives me similar feelings, and allegedly that one *is* being turned into a film, so maybe I'll be proven wrong. That would be neat, because I'd love to see Reynolds' stories, Anvil of Stars, Bear's Eon and Queen of Angels series, Frederick Pohl's The World at the End of Time, and Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series turned into films.
It could be a renaissance of hard SF on the screen =).
I'd say you've never read the actual screen play, based on your silly comments that are totally at odds with Gibson's own statements. Try again.
I went to the library and checked out a book called something like "Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay," so I'm pretty sure I did read it.
I know that Gibson meant it to turn out differently - as I said, I interview him years ago and he said as much. But what I don't see is concrete evidence that the film that was made was substantially different than the one the director shot.
I do realize that studios can change the overall feel of a film - look at the theatrical release of Alien3 versus the pseudo-Director's Cut that's on DVD now - but I don't think even the possibility of a truly good film exists in the footage that was shot for Johnny Mnemonic.
Gibson mentioned numerous scenes and ideas that were cut. Like a scene with Street Preacher delivering a sermon NUDE before congregations of N.A.S. victims, on the virtue of post-humanity and cybernetic augmentation.
To me personally, a scene like that wouldn't really have improved the film. What I would have liked to see is something that I believe Gibson mentioned once about making Johnny Mnemonic as a low-budget black and white short. A short, indie film that more or less followed the plot of the short story would have been great. All of the things that were added on to make it feature-length dectracted from it IMO - especially because I felt like many of them were borrowed from his more recent books (which I am very fond of, but I don't like the mixing of the two).
Gibson is one of my favourite writers - I don't like any novels *better* than the ones he writes, and Neuromancer is bar none the best book I've ever read - but I think his track record WRT film and television indicates that something gets lost in the transition. Johnny Mnemonic the film and the first X-Files episode he co-wrote were mediocre. The second X-Files episode he wrote was downright awful.
I guess part of it is that most of his writing seems very serious to me, but none of the TV and film he's worked on does (with the exception of No Maps For These Territories, but that's non-fiction). Johnny Mnemonic the short story felt very claustrophobic, tense, and suspenseful. The movie dispensed with that by throwing in a bunch of unnecessary humour and unbelievable comic book characters.
Read Gibson's published screenplay for Johnny Mnemonic, as well his blog.
I read the published screenplay in book form, and I only noticed one difference between it and the film - it has the standard action movie "big bad guy that everyone thinks is dead gets up again and the heroes have to shoot him one more time" thing (which was edited into being a feint in that direction for the final release).
Is there another version I'm missing? I don't think I would have genuinely liked it no matter how it was re-edited. The short story is a favourite of mine because it feels raw and realistic, versus the Jerry Bruckheimer-esque film. I actually tend to like Bruckheimer films for what they are, I just didn't like seeing that particular short story turned into one.
I guess a big part of it is that the short story felt very lonely to me, whereas the film was more like Keanu Reeves and Girl From Starship Troopers finding a quasi-family in Ice-T and his band of merry men.
I agree with the GP that Neuromancer would be difficult if not impossible to film. I interviewed Gibson many years ago and he said that the problem with any film based on a novel is that the readers get a perfect one-off custom film in their head when they read the book, and no film is going to match up with that. I thought Peter Jackson did a great job with LotR, but look at how many Tolkien fans complained about it.
MAYBE if Ridley Scott circa 1983, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, and David Cronenberg all teamed up to direct a 10+ hour long film, and they were given access to a multi-billion dollar budget and complete creative independence from the studio, they could come close.
Yes, it does! It asks whatever it's attached to for its key, and refuses to work if it gets the wrong answer.
My point is that that's not an intrinsic way of knowing for sure. As long as what's on the other side does a credible job of pretending to be a piece of trusted hardware (IE by giving the right responses), the drive will act accordingly.
There's no way around this. If the drive works with hardware that is genuine, it must by definition work with hardware that pretends in every way to be genuine when talking to the drive. Think of it as a Matrix for DRM'd devices.