Re:Hmmmm, interesting. It still sucked.
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If you think AI was even superficially similar to Blade Runner, you need to watch one or both of the movies again. Both movies deal with human-shaped robots in the not-too-distant future. That's where the similarities end.
If the mechas are advanced enough to build an exact physical replica of the mother from the boy's memories they must be advanced enough to build a mother's psyche that *cannot* be distinguished from the real thing by the boy.
First of all, there was no physical replica. Most of the third act takes place inside David's brain, as evidenced by the overexposed look of the film. But even if there were, it's a long way from that to creating a simulation of a personality.
I just expected a story about A.I. to deal with this stuff rather than be about the human condition
Stories about computers and artificial intelligence are boring, not even worth listening to. Stories about the human condition can be entertaining, enlightening, perplexing, and so on. You shouldn't be too surprised, I think.
Re:Why not assume David is in the Matrix?
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I know that a program (the ultimate basis of any AI) is extensible
That's the whole point, though. If you open the floodgate by saying that David can grow-- extend, whatever-- the story kind of collapses.
Why couldn't the deception last more than a day? [...] Therefore, why can't they build him another mecha, a mother mecha, designed to meet his expectations exactly, and to have complementary expectations.
Because David loved Monica. He didn't love a shallow simulation of Monica. He could not have been happy forever with a simulation. He would have begun to doubt, and then all would have been lost.
In my opinion the notion that you can make minds that can love but cannot have a real reaction to their own love, is nonsensical
Remember that the object was to build a child. David was built to be emotionally immature. That is, he was built to love without question (once imprinted), and to act solely based on that love. If you're not comfortable with calling it love, call it tropism. It amounts to the same thing. For what is love, but the response that the feeling of love generates inside us?
But the question of whether or not David really could love is beside the point. The movie is about responsibility and morality, and in order to explore those questions you have to posit a robot who loves. Without that, the whole story kind of becomes meaningless.
On the other hand, assuming you can actually build minds that are "doomed to love", then clearly making such minds would be immoral
Exactly. That's the whole point. The first scene of the movie sets up this premise, and the rest of the movie executes it. The conclusion, misanthropic as it is, is that humans are capable of building machines that are moral and compassionate, despite the fact that we ourselves are not.
Nothing in the final scenes suggests that they are going to kill the kid.
Listen to the what the Blue Fairy says. Listen to what the narrator says. Then watch the very last scene carefully. The implication is so clear, it's impossible to imagine that it wasn't deliberate.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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As for the one day thing that still doesn't make sense if they planned to kill him as he slept the first night.
David could never sleep.
I honestly can't remember if the narrator indicated that David dies or not.
The metaphor is clear. The narrator says that Monica was fast asleep, more than asleep, for if he should shake her she would never rouse. Then he says that David went to sleep, too. Given the fact that David states without qualification that he can never go to sleep, the meaning is clear.
The message wasn't so cryptic, it was quite simple- the first AI with real emotions will undoubtedly suffer in a world of humans that don't accept their validity.
I don't think so. The theme is much bigger than that. The theme is laid out in the very first scene of the movie: "In the beginning, didn't God create Adam to love Him?" The theme is the tragedy of hubris.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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Plus, Dr. Hobby's goal was to create a mecha who could grow.
No, definitely not. He said he wanted to create an eternal image of a perfect child, never growing, never changing. Self-motivation, yes. Growth or transcendence? Definitely not a design feature.
That is why the uber-mechas were so interested in David.
No, the uber-mechas were interested in David simply because he was old. "This robot is an original," they said. "He knew living people."
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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1. Why did they first suggest that his mother couldn't be recovered without DNA?
Remember that when they first found David under the ice, one of the mecha did something to him. He placed his hand over David's forehead. At this point the movie cuts to an oversaturated scene set in David's house, where he talks to the Blue Fairy. "And what, after all this time, have you come to ask me?" she asks. "Please make me a real boy, so my Mommy will love me and let me stay with her," he says. "David, I will do anything that is possible," says the Blue Fairy, "but I cannot make you a real boy."
David then asks where he is. "We read your mind, and it's all here," says the Blue Fairy. "There's nothing too small that you didn't store for us to remember. We so want you to be happy. You are so important to us, David. You are unique in all the world."
So there's a really critical point here. Earlier, the mecha said, "This machine [meaning the amphibicopter] was trapped under the wreckage before the freezing. Therefore, these robots are originals. They knew living people." The mecha value David for his memories. They have a very selfish reason to keep him around. Humans in the same situation would have kept David alive simply for his archaeological value. The mecha, however, make a different choice.
Then David asks, "Will Mommy be coming home soon?" The Blue Fairy replies, "David, she can never come home because 2,000 years have passed, and she is no longer living." That's when Teddy shows the hairs to the David. David holds the hairs out to the Blue Fairy and says, forcefully, "Now you can bring her back, can't you." The movie cuts to a shot of the mecha narrator, who pauses for the briefest of moments. In a resigned voice, he says, "Give him what he wants." It is in this moment that the narrator has accepted that David can never be happy as long as he exists. Programmed only to love, and only to love Monica, any continued existence for him would be filled with misery. The narrator then make the only truly selfless and compassionate choice of any character in the movie: to give David the illusion of a day with his mother, and then to end him.
Hair-- not hair follicles, but just hair-- has no DNA in it. It would not be possible to reconstruct a person in any physical sense from just cut hair. But the mecha had David's memories-- "There's nothing too small that you didn't store for us to remember"-- and could give him peace. If the illusion had lasted for more than a single day, David might have begun to doubt. So the mecha limited the time arbitrarily, and at the end of that one day, they euthanized David.
This may seem like Trekkie-style technical bickering, but why wouldn't the advanced mecha's just upgrade him
Because the fundamental conceit of the film is that David cannot transcend himself. Human beings can transcend: they can change, grow, evolve. But David, as a robot, could have no character arc. Bolting on an upgrade would have been as cheap an ending as turning David into a real boy would have been.
For some reason I found ET uplifiting and touching and AI remarkably sad.
AI was remarkably sad. A younger filmmaker, I think, couldn't have made that movie. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, AI is definitely from Spielberg's post-Schindler period.
Re:It WAS ressurection for a DAY
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the mecha had captured her "soul" and placed it within the new body, which is why it would only last for a day
No, that doesn't add up. The person we see in Act III is only vaguely reminiscent of the person we see in Act I. It's pretty clear that the Act III Monica is just the product of David's memories and hopes.
Remember, Act I Monica is no stranger to hysterics. Awakening in her house with no memory of how she got there and no trace of her real son or her husband would have sent her over the edge. The speech by the narrator to David is just a polite fiction, just as a parent would tell a child that the presents under the tree came from Santa Claus, or that a dead pet had gone to doggie Heaven.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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ok if they were mecha, why were they excavating the ice?
"This machine was trapped under the wreckage before the freezing. Therefore these robots are originals. They knew living people."
Same reason we excavate: to learn about the past. Records, even when they exist, can be incomplete. Mecha knowledge of the old cities was sketchy even in David's time-- remember Gigolo Joe's comment about "Man-hattan?"-- and would certainly not have been filled in any during the intervening years.
My tastes run to Witness or Bladerunner (both Ford's best)
How could you forsake The Mosquito Coast?Blade Runner is a great movie, but Ford's performance wasn't that much to write home about. Wooden-by-design. But The Mosquito Coast is a great piece of film.
Das Boot (way better war movie than Pvt. Ryan)
I guess you have a different definition of "better war movie" than I do. I can't even compare Das Boot and Saving Private Ryan. They're completely different works, as far as I can see. The only thing they have in common is that they're both set during a war.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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Well, if nothing else, he clearly failed to get most of us to understand the ending;-)
Oh, that's no crime. Hardly anybody understands 2001, right? Besides, a teacher of mine once said, "Great art is always subject to a variety of interpretations."
(I wrote more about this in my journal. Check it out, won't you?)
Re:Agree w/Author -- Taken Away and Dropped On Mar
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Steven apparently wrote the checks and had meetings once in a while to oversee what everyone else was doing.
If I had to take a wild-ass guess, I'd say that Spielberg probably backed the production with his reputation and good name. I'm sure this miniseries cost a fortune to produce, and DreamWorks probably wouldn't have been able to raise the money to do it if it hadn't been for Spielberg's involvement.
But again, that's just a guess.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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It's arguable whether at the end of the uber-mechas destroyed him, or whether he simply committed suicide by going to "sleep".
I don't believe David could have committed suicide. He wasn't programmed to. The fact that he was limited by his programming is sort of central to the whole movie. If he had been able to "turn himself off," then why couldn't he also have been able to stop loving Monica? The fact that David could never, ever transcend, could never become "a real boy," is critical to the story. His killing himself would have been an act of transcendence, and I think it would have taken away from the internal integrity of the story.
That's why I stick to the uber-mecha euthanasia interpretation.
(Do check out my latest journal entry for more on this subject. Plug, plug.)
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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I've expanded these ideas a bit in a journal article, here. Give it a read, tell me what you think.
Slashdot really needs a feature for sending private messages.
Re:The Worst Part!!! TollHouse cookies
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Um... dude, "toll house cookie" is another name for chocolate chip cookie. The chocolate chip cookie was invented in the 1930's by a woman named Wakefield who owned the Toll House Inn just outside of Whitman, Massachusetts. She was trying to make chocolate cookies, but substituted semisweet chocolate for baker's chocolate. Instead of melting into the dough, the little pieces of chocolate stayed intact. The cookies were a big hit, and became known as "toll house cookies" after the inn.
It's very common for people who were raised in the 40's and 50's to say "toll house cookies" instead of "chocolate chip cookies." My mom was born in 1930, and she said "toll house cookies" all her life.
Uh, rather than looking at an incomplete list on NetFlix (wtf?) why don't you look at the canonical source. On that list you've got films like Minority Report, AI, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, The Lost World, Schindler's List, and Jurassic Park. And that's just what he's done in the past ten years. Of his three biggest flops-- Hook, Always, 1941-- two of them made a small profit at the box office. And his best films-- Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun, The Color Purple-- are some of the greatest movies ever made.
Re:Agree w/Author -- Taken Away and Dropped On Mar
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After the weekend though, it felt as if Spielberg decided to take a nap and let one of his assistants take over.
Seeing as how Spielberg had nothing to do with the story, the writing, the directing, or the editing, that's not too hard to believe.
To take the "Short stories" and blend them together is a tough job.
That's not what happened here. The entire miniseries was written by Leslie Bohem. It consists of a very tightly plotted story that covers more than half a century. It might look disjoint at first, but viewed from a distance it's actually not at all.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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its the stuff Spielberg added that made AI horrible
I don't know about that. Try reading this for my opinion on the whole matter.
Re:Spielberg Over the Hill?
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We meet an alien race that is smart enough to figure out how to resurrect the dead, but isn't quite smart enough to figure out how to do it for more than one day. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard.
It's ridiculous because you completely misunderstood it. They weren't aliens. They were highly sophisticated mecha. Humans became extinct in the 2,000 year interval, but mecha survived and evolved by reproducing themselves. The "aliens" you see are the end result of 2,000 years of mecha evolution.
And they didn't resurrect the dead. They initially told David that they would be unable to resurrect his mother because they lacked her DNA, but when Teddy presented the hairs, they had to improvise. "Give him what he wants," said the narrator. They created, out of David's memories, an image of his mother, and let him interact with her for one day. Why only one day? Because they wanted to give David a sense of peace before euthanizing him.
See, the key to understanding this movie is to know that the human characters were all selfish and cruel-- intentionally or otherwise-- and that the mecha characters were all innocent and pure. David, especially, had to be innocent; he was programmed to be. The uber-mecha were the culmination of this: they were supremely innocent, supremely kind, supremely compassionate. When they found this primitive mecha under the ice, they recognized him for what he was. They knew that he was capable of feeling, but not of learning or growing. So they did what the humans, in their arrogance, could not. They destroyed him.
Last shot - cyberboy frozen in the block of ice staring at the blue fairy. Credits. Much better ending.
Sorry, but I disagree. The existing ending is overwhelmingly powerful, if one understands it.
With the advent of the net the cost of distributing software is essentially zero
Since when? I'll give you one concrete example from my experience. SGI distributes software updates and other things (freeware, etc.) over the Internet. They do this-- or did, up until recently-- through Genuity's San Jose data center. The cost of the service to SGI, including bandwidth and colocation and whatnot, is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars per month. SGI figures it's less than sending out lots of CDs, though, so it's worth it to them.
According to a guy I know who worked, until recently, for Genuity, Sun had the same basic deal, but on an even larger scale.
The cost of distributing software over the Internet is nowhere close to zero.
there is a rapidly growing pool of high quality free software... that will inevitably commoditize all general purpose software so that its effective cost to us will approach zero.
Consider MSC.Nastran. There's no free alternative for finite element analysis. The world of software is bigger than web browsers and email clients, okay? The cost of producing and distributing quality software will never approach zero.
The fact that you could make exactly the same argument for Union Carbide or Enron should give you pause.
It doesn't, though. I know some people, indirectly, through friends, who lost not only their jobs when Enron collapsed, but their savings, too. Most of their accumulated wealth was tied up in Enron stock, and when it lost its value, they lost their life savings. It doesn't matter whether Enron's executives were practicing unethical accounting or not. The collapse of that company was a very bad thing.
The root of it is: what should the balance of power be between corporations and the overall good of the people?
To continue the rant, by the time TNG came around the audience was much more sophisticated.
I'm not sure I buy this. There were some extremely sophisticated stories in the original run of Star Trek; remember "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield?" That one was a pretty effective race parable. (Remember, one alien was white on his left side and black on his right side, and the other alien was the other way around. Rather than beating the audience over the head with this fact, they saved it for a big reveal during the climax of the show.) Likewise "The Next Generation" had some silly stories as well, particularly early in its run.
They put a huge amount of work into Nautilus, and it all would have been lost if it wasn't GPL.
But what you're missing is that Eazel might have had a chance of staying in business if they hadn't given their software away. They still probably would have folded, because Linux users just aren't a big enough market to sell software to, but they would have at least had some kind of revenue prospects. Since they were bound by the GPL, Eazel essentially became a short-lived non-profit charity organization. In other words, a flash in the pan. The fact that the flash left residue in the form of GPL-licensed software doesn't change the fact that it was just a flash.
Are profits the only measure of goodness?
No, but when companies go out of business (like mine did) and people lose their jobs (like I and my employees did), it's a very bad thing. Companies that incorporate GPL-licensed software into their products, either through derivation or just simply through linking, find it much harder to stay in business. How long do you think Honda would last if it were legally forced to give its cars away for free?
How is this good for anyone, except them?
Your us-versus-them approach is fallacious. Hollywood, like Slashdot, Microsoft, and the state of Alabama, is made up of people. Those people deserve to have jobs. If a major movie studio goes out of business, people lose their jobs, and that's a bad thing.
Likewise, when a software company goes out of business, it's a bad thing.
Some Slashdotters love to hop up and down on the us-versus-them, little-people-versus-evil-corporations thing, but they're wrong. The "evil corporations" are just groups of people, and when those people lose their jobs, it's had for everybody.
So out with the deep science, diplomacy, and politics, and in with fist fights and the Captain getting the girl - every week.
Isn't it possible, just possible, that deep science, diplomacy, and politics make for frightfully boring television? TV can be stupid, offensive, pandering, insulting, as long as it's entertaining. The only capital crime for a TV show, the only unforgivable sin, is to be boring.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think AI was even superficially similar to Blade Runner, you need to watch one or both of the movies again. Both movies deal with human-shaped robots in the not-too-distant future. That's where the similarities end.
If the mechas are advanced enough to build an exact physical replica of the mother from the boy's memories they must be advanced enough to build a mother's psyche that *cannot* be distinguished from the real thing by the boy.
First of all, there was no physical replica. Most of the third act takes place inside David's brain, as evidenced by the overexposed look of the film. But even if there were, it's a long way from that to creating a simulation of a personality.
I just expected a story about A.I. to deal with this stuff rather than be about the human condition
Stories about computers and artificial intelligence are boring, not even worth listening to. Stories about the human condition can be entertaining, enlightening, perplexing, and so on. You shouldn't be too surprised, I think.
I know that a program (the ultimate basis of any AI) is extensible
That's the whole point, though. If you open the floodgate by saying that David can grow-- extend, whatever-- the story kind of collapses.
Why couldn't the deception last more than a day? [...] Therefore, why can't they build him another mecha, a mother mecha, designed to meet his expectations exactly, and to have complementary expectations.
Because David loved Monica. He didn't love a shallow simulation of Monica. He could not have been happy forever with a simulation. He would have begun to doubt, and then all would have been lost.
In my opinion the notion that you can make minds that can love but cannot have a real reaction to their own love, is nonsensical
Remember that the object was to build a child. David was built to be emotionally immature. That is, he was built to love without question (once imprinted), and to act solely based on that love. If you're not comfortable with calling it love, call it tropism. It amounts to the same thing. For what is love, but the response that the feeling of love generates inside us?
But the question of whether or not David really could love is beside the point. The movie is about responsibility and morality, and in order to explore those questions you have to posit a robot who loves. Without that, the whole story kind of becomes meaningless.
On the other hand, assuming you can actually build minds that are "doomed to love", then clearly making such minds would be immoral
Exactly. That's the whole point. The first scene of the movie sets up this premise, and the rest of the movie executes it. The conclusion, misanthropic as it is, is that humans are capable of building machines that are moral and compassionate, despite the fact that we ourselves are not.
Nothing in the final scenes suggests that they are going to kill the kid.
Listen to the what the Blue Fairy says. Listen to what the narrator says. Then watch the very last scene carefully. The implication is so clear, it's impossible to imagine that it wasn't deliberate.
As for the one day thing that still doesn't make sense if they planned to kill him as he slept the first night.
David could never sleep.
I honestly can't remember if the narrator indicated that David dies or not.
The metaphor is clear. The narrator says that Monica was fast asleep, more than asleep, for if he should shake her she would never rouse. Then he says that David went to sleep, too. Given the fact that David states without qualification that he can never go to sleep, the meaning is clear.
The message wasn't so cryptic, it was quite simple- the first AI with real emotions will undoubtedly suffer in a world of humans that don't accept their validity.
I don't think so. The theme is much bigger than that. The theme is laid out in the very first scene of the movie: "In the beginning, didn't God create Adam to love Him?" The theme is the tragedy of hubris.
Plus, Dr. Hobby's goal was to create a mecha who could grow.
No, definitely not. He said he wanted to create an eternal image of a perfect child, never growing, never changing. Self-motivation, yes. Growth or transcendence? Definitely not a design feature.
That is why the uber-mechas were so interested in David.
No, the uber-mechas were interested in David simply because he was old. "This robot is an original," they said. "He knew living people."
1. Why did they first suggest that his mother couldn't be recovered without DNA?
Remember that when they first found David under the ice, one of the mecha did something to him. He placed his hand over David's forehead. At this point the movie cuts to an oversaturated scene set in David's house, where he talks to the Blue Fairy. "And what, after all this time, have you come to ask me?" she asks. "Please make me a real boy, so my Mommy will love me and let me stay with her," he says. "David, I will do anything that is possible," says the Blue Fairy, "but I cannot make you a real boy."
David then asks where he is. "We read your mind, and it's all here," says the Blue Fairy. "There's nothing too small that you didn't store for us to remember. We so want you to be happy. You are so important to us, David. You are unique in all the world."
So there's a really critical point here. Earlier, the mecha said, "This machine [meaning the amphibicopter] was trapped under the wreckage before the freezing. Therefore, these robots are originals. They knew living people." The mecha value David for his memories. They have a very selfish reason to keep him around. Humans in the same situation would have kept David alive simply for his archaeological value. The mecha, however, make a different choice.
Then David asks, "Will Mommy be coming home soon?" The Blue Fairy replies, "David, she can never come home because 2,000 years have passed, and she is no longer living." That's when Teddy shows the hairs to the David. David holds the hairs out to the Blue Fairy and says, forcefully, "Now you can bring her back, can't you." The movie cuts to a shot of the mecha narrator, who pauses for the briefest of moments. In a resigned voice, he says, "Give him what he wants." It is in this moment that the narrator has accepted that David can never be happy as long as he exists. Programmed only to love, and only to love Monica, any continued existence for him would be filled with misery. The narrator then make the only truly selfless and compassionate choice of any character in the movie: to give David the illusion of a day with his mother, and then to end him.
Hair-- not hair follicles, but just hair-- has no DNA in it. It would not be possible to reconstruct a person in any physical sense from just cut hair. But the mecha had David's memories-- "There's nothing too small that you didn't store for us to remember"-- and could give him peace. If the illusion had lasted for more than a single day, David might have begun to doubt. So the mecha limited the time arbitrarily, and at the end of that one day, they euthanized David.
This may seem like Trekkie-style technical bickering, but why wouldn't the advanced mecha's just upgrade him
Because the fundamental conceit of the film is that David cannot transcend himself. Human beings can transcend: they can change, grow, evolve. But David, as a robot, could have no character arc. Bolting on an upgrade would have been as cheap an ending as turning David into a real boy would have been.
For some reason I found ET uplifiting and touching and AI remarkably sad.
AI was remarkably sad. A younger filmmaker, I think, couldn't have made that movie. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, AI is definitely from Spielberg's post-Schindler period.
the mecha had captured her "soul" and placed it within the new body, which is why it would only last for a day
No, that doesn't add up. The person we see in Act III is only vaguely reminiscent of the person we see in Act I. It's pretty clear that the Act III Monica is just the product of David's memories and hopes.
Remember, Act I Monica is no stranger to hysterics. Awakening in her house with no memory of how she got there and no trace of her real son or her husband would have sent her over the edge. The speech by the narrator to David is just a polite fiction, just as a parent would tell a child that the presents under the tree came from Santa Claus, or that a dead pet had gone to doggie Heaven.
ok if they were mecha, why were they excavating the ice?
"This machine was trapped under the wreckage before the freezing. Therefore these robots are originals. They knew living people."
Same reason we excavate: to learn about the past. Records, even when they exist, can be incomplete. Mecha knowledge of the old cities was sketchy even in David's time-- remember Gigolo Joe's comment about "Man-hattan?"-- and would certainly not have been filled in any during the intervening years.
The compromise between sci-fi and mainstream always sucks.
Yeah. Lord knows movies like The Empire Strikes Back and Wrath of Khan we'd be better off without.
(Part XVII in the "Everything Sucks But Me" series.)
My tastes run to Witness or Bladerunner (both Ford's best)
How could you forsake The Mosquito Coast? Blade Runner is a great movie, but Ford's performance wasn't that much to write home about. Wooden-by-design. But The Mosquito Coast is a great piece of film.
Das Boot (way better war movie than Pvt. Ryan)
I guess you have a different definition of "better war movie" than I do. I can't even compare Das Boot and Saving Private Ryan. They're completely different works, as far as I can see. The only thing they have in common is that they're both set during a war.
Well, if nothing else, he clearly failed to get most of us to understand the ending ;-)
Oh, that's no crime. Hardly anybody understands 2001, right? Besides, a teacher of mine once said, "Great art is always subject to a variety of interpretations."
(I wrote more about this in my journal. Check it out, won't you?)
Steven apparently wrote the checks and had meetings once in a while to oversee what everyone else was doing.
If I had to take a wild-ass guess, I'd say that Spielberg probably backed the production with his reputation and good name. I'm sure this miniseries cost a fortune to produce, and DreamWorks probably wouldn't have been able to raise the money to do it if it hadn't been for Spielberg's involvement.
But again, that's just a guess.
It's arguable whether at the end of the uber-mechas destroyed him, or whether he simply committed suicide by going to "sleep".
I don't believe David could have committed suicide. He wasn't programmed to. The fact that he was limited by his programming is sort of central to the whole movie. If he had been able to "turn himself off," then why couldn't he also have been able to stop loving Monica? The fact that David could never, ever transcend, could never become "a real boy," is critical to the story. His killing himself would have been an act of transcendence, and I think it would have taken away from the internal integrity of the story.
That's why I stick to the uber-mecha euthanasia interpretation.
(Do check out my latest journal entry for more on this subject. Plug, plug.)
I've expanded these ideas a bit in a journal article, here. Give it a read, tell me what you think.
Slashdot really needs a feature for sending private messages.
Um... dude, "toll house cookie" is another name for chocolate chip cookie. The chocolate chip cookie was invented in the 1930's by a woman named Wakefield who owned the Toll House Inn just outside of Whitman, Massachusetts. She was trying to make chocolate cookies, but substituted semisweet chocolate for baker's chocolate. Instead of melting into the dough, the little pieces of chocolate stayed intact. The cookies were a big hit, and became known as "toll house cookies" after the inn.
It's very common for people who were raised in the 40's and 50's to say "toll house cookies" instead of "chocolate chip cookies." My mom was born in 1930, and she said "toll house cookies" all her life.
Here is a DVD'd list of his film work
Uh, rather than looking at an incomplete list on NetFlix (wtf?) why don't you look at the canonical source. On that list you've got films like Minority Report, AI, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, The Lost World, Schindler's List, and Jurassic Park. And that's just what he's done in the past ten years. Of his three biggest flops-- Hook, Always, 1941-- two of them made a small profit at the box office. And his best films-- Schindler's List, Empire of the Sun, The Color Purple-- are some of the greatest movies ever made.
After the weekend though, it felt as if Spielberg decided to take a nap and let one of his assistants take over.
Seeing as how Spielberg had nothing to do with the story, the writing, the directing, or the editing, that's not too hard to believe.
To take the "Short stories" and blend them together is a tough job.
That's not what happened here. The entire miniseries was written by Leslie Bohem. It consists of a very tightly plotted story that covers more than half a century. It might look disjoint at first, but viewed from a distance it's actually not at all.
its the stuff Spielberg added that made AI horrible
I don't know about that. Try reading this for my opinion on the whole matter.
We meet an alien race that is smart enough to figure out how to resurrect the dead, but isn't quite smart enough to figure out how to do it for more than one day. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard.
It's ridiculous because you completely misunderstood it. They weren't aliens. They were highly sophisticated mecha. Humans became extinct in the 2,000 year interval, but mecha survived and evolved by reproducing themselves. The "aliens" you see are the end result of 2,000 years of mecha evolution.
And they didn't resurrect the dead. They initially told David that they would be unable to resurrect his mother because they lacked her DNA, but when Teddy presented the hairs, they had to improvise. "Give him what he wants," said the narrator. They created, out of David's memories, an image of his mother, and let him interact with her for one day. Why only one day? Because they wanted to give David a sense of peace before euthanizing him.
See, the key to understanding this movie is to know that the human characters were all selfish and cruel-- intentionally or otherwise-- and that the mecha characters were all innocent and pure. David, especially, had to be innocent; he was programmed to be. The uber-mecha were the culmination of this: they were supremely innocent, supremely kind, supremely compassionate. When they found this primitive mecha under the ice, they recognized him for what he was. They knew that he was capable of feeling, but not of learning or growing. So they did what the humans, in their arrogance, could not. They destroyed him.
Last shot - cyberboy frozen in the block of ice staring at the blue fairy. Credits. Much better ending.
Sorry, but I disagree. The existing ending is overwhelmingly powerful, if one understands it.
With the advent of the net the cost of distributing software is essentially zero
Since when? I'll give you one concrete example from my experience. SGI distributes software updates and other things (freeware, etc.) over the Internet. They do this-- or did, up until recently-- through Genuity's San Jose data center. The cost of the service to SGI, including bandwidth and colocation and whatnot, is measured in the tens of thousands of dollars per month. SGI figures it's less than sending out lots of CDs, though, so it's worth it to them.
According to a guy I know who worked, until recently, for Genuity, Sun had the same basic deal, but on an even larger scale.
The cost of distributing software over the Internet is nowhere close to zero.
there is a rapidly growing pool of high quality free software... that will inevitably commoditize all general purpose software so that its effective cost to us will approach zero.
Consider MSC.Nastran. There's no free alternative for finite element analysis. The world of software is bigger than web browsers and email clients, okay? The cost of producing and distributing quality software will never approach zero.
The fact that you could make exactly the same argument for Union Carbide or Enron should give you pause.
It doesn't, though. I know some people, indirectly, through friends, who lost not only their jobs when Enron collapsed, but their savings, too. Most of their accumulated wealth was tied up in Enron stock, and when it lost its value, they lost their life savings. It doesn't matter whether Enron's executives were practicing unethical accounting or not. The collapse of that company was a very bad thing.
The root of it is: what should the balance of power be between corporations and the overall good of the people?
What does the GPL have to do with this?
To continue the rant, by the time TNG came around the audience was much more sophisticated.
I'm not sure I buy this. There were some extremely sophisticated stories in the original run of Star Trek; remember "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield?" That one was a pretty effective race parable. (Remember, one alien was white on his left side and black on his right side, and the other alien was the other way around. Rather than beating the audience over the head with this fact, they saved it for a big reveal during the climax of the show.) Likewise "The Next Generation" had some silly stories as well, particularly early in its run.
They put a huge amount of work into Nautilus, and it all would have been lost if it wasn't GPL.
But what you're missing is that Eazel might have had a chance of staying in business if they hadn't given their software away. They still probably would have folded, because Linux users just aren't a big enough market to sell software to, but they would have at least had some kind of revenue prospects. Since they were bound by the GPL, Eazel essentially became a short-lived non-profit charity organization. In other words, a flash in the pan. The fact that the flash left residue in the form of GPL-licensed software doesn't change the fact that it was just a flash.
Are profits the only measure of goodness?
No, but when companies go out of business (like mine did) and people lose their jobs (like I and my employees did), it's a very bad thing. Companies that incorporate GPL-licensed software into their products, either through derivation or just simply through linking, find it much harder to stay in business. How long do you think Honda would last if it were legally forced to give its cars away for free?
How is this good for anyone, except them?
Your us-versus-them approach is fallacious. Hollywood, like Slashdot, Microsoft, and the state of Alabama, is made up of people. Those people deserve to have jobs. If a major movie studio goes out of business, people lose their jobs, and that's a bad thing.
Likewise, when a software company goes out of business, it's a bad thing.
Some Slashdotters love to hop up and down on the us-versus-them, little-people-versus-evil-corporations thing, but they're wrong. The "evil corporations" are just groups of people, and when those people lose their jobs, it's had for everybody.
So out with the deep science, diplomacy, and politics, and in with fist fights and the Captain getting the girl - every week.
Isn't it possible, just possible, that deep science, diplomacy, and politics make for frightfully boring television? TV can be stupid, offensive, pandering, insulting, as long as it's entertaining. The only capital crime for a TV show, the only unforgivable sin, is to be boring.