You probably also have that first line setting on. If your settings will display the first line of the email, your inbox looks like a list of lines of text. Turn that feature off and you will see the subject lines only like a normal email account.
I can certainly respect that opinion. His movies aren't for everyone. I only mention him specifically because he makes a conscious effort to ensure his movies are not sold off like the film of the year and leaves no room for sequels.
Wait, you wrote a simple python script to yank the top 250 movies off of imdb, and sort them according to year and decade?
You officially win slashdot, this site will now close.
...
In all seriousness I blame advertising. Curse this society so capable of advertisement! T.V., radio, billboards, Internet, viral advertising, previews like you wouldn't believe! (That previews guy plays up *every* movie like that, eh?) I would wager that there are roughly equal numbers of "good" movies (good a relative term to the viewer of course) per year since the thirties.
The problem is there are so many more average to bad movies being produced in recent years that it seems like movies are continually getting worse and worse. This is especially so with movies that are advertised as "the next big blockbuster", "the film of the summer/year/decade/century", etc. so we are led to believe we are going to see a good movie but really it's just average. I realized this stuff a few years ago: "Pay it forward", "The Majestic", and "Hart's War" were all advertised that way. "War of the Worlds" and "Red eye" are some recent examples I can think of. Not that they were terrible movies, but they were advertised like they were the film of the year. Since 2000, how many movies (besides LOTR) can you think of that are actually great films? I count only a few out of the top 50 off of that top 250 list at imdb, and some are foreign films I've never heard of. Then think again about how many trailers you've seen in the last few years which talk like their films are shoe-ins for Oscar glory? (And what's the deal with "Snakes on a Plane"?)
Another contributer are sequels which are not designed to be trilogies but are obviously just money grabbers. How about the sequels to "The Matrix", or "Spiderman"? Back to the Future III anyone? Have you met the Fockers? Oceans 12? My sister hated Pirates of the Carribean 2. The sequels were decent but the originals deserved to be stand-alone films. They have watered down the masterpiece that is the original. Of course the advertisers play up the trilogy theme trying to focus our attention on how cool the sequel will be. I'd say watching the original begins with a passive attitude before but finishes with a high. The sequel feeds off of this high as you begin but usually trails off to a passive attitude in the end leaving the entire story wanting.
Case in point: The last two Pictures of the Year were Million Dollar Baby and Crash. I had personally only first heard of these films at Oscar time. Case in point: I've found that M. Night Shyamalan understands this stuff well. All his films are stand-alone (Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and now Lady in the Water which I haven't seen yet). In interviews he indicated how he didn't want any of these movies to be advertised as "From the director who brought you..." because he wants the movie to do itself justice. The trailers make the audience enter the film with a sense of mystery and leave with a sense of satisfaction. The trailers do not advertise themselves as huge blockbusters, but just as good movies. Nor do they feed off of the success of others, but simply sell themselves because they are good movies.
My advise for finding good movies: pay only minimal attention to the advertising. If you read and hear a ton about it and the commercials seem like the movie will blow you away, it definately won't. Take in only enough information to get an idea for what the movie is about. If you like the idea, you'll like the movie. I usually wait for Oscar time to see which film I never heard of wins big. Those are the ones I like the most. I found "The Pianist", "Crash", and "Hotel Rwanda" that way - all of which were good films.
(I should also mention that another contributer is the advancement of our household technology. People don't need to go to the theater to get a good movie experience when they can get even better at home. Not to mention the proliferation of pirated movies available for free
It isn't healthy to mix what you do with your free time with what you do during work hours. There will be unnecessary overlap and it isn't fair to you or anyone else around you (home or work).
Use your free time to take up another or a new interest. Everybody needs to have variations in their lives.
Point 4 is really saying that we ourselves *are* the gods. We can control the fire, the weather, the animals, etc. through our *own* superior logic and science. I suppose the next step may be a turn to our technology (like A.I.) to control everything for us in some sort of utopian form in the most perfect way so we (as erroneous humans) don't have to.
Point 4 personally troubles me because we also know that not all humans are equal in thought process and many cannot be trusted. I wish all humans could behave in a logical manner that is truly beneficial to all in every way, but unfortunately there is always a need for someone or something higher up to bestow guilt and keep people in line and thus religion will not disappear during this epoc. (Sadly, there are some people who feel no guilt at all). People have tendencies to be selfish, greedy, angry, failures in reasoning, pride, you name it. Given the innate flaws of humans, I don't think religion should ever be given up, but the sooner we skip over step 4 (ie. assuming *we* are perfect gods) the better.
This is problematic. CAPTCHAs worked for a while too. The truth is that something that isn't a permanent solution will just pose a problem tomorrow. We need to find a solution that will never be broken. One of the key elements for these kinds of tests are that they must be simple to use/understand/pass for humans and impossible to use/pass for automated programs. Such a flash form would not guarantee a prevention of automation (if a human can type it, why can't a program?) and it borders on "hassle" for human users.
I did my undergrad thesis on reverse Turing tests (a family which CAPTCHAs are part of). Here are the main categories I could identify which can be utilized to effectively and (hopefully) easily prevent automation:
1. Text based passwords Pro: People are used to them, quick-n-easy Con: Subject to brute force attacks, trivial to automate a login once you have the password 2. Graphical passwords Pro: Can use a larger set of images than characters, easy to remember Con: time consuming, can only present a small set of images at once, variable screensizes (pdas to big screen TVs), not good for accessibility, no native support in basically ANY application, not easily scalable 3. Text based questions (eg. which word in this sentence is underlined? "Mary had a little ___"...) Pro: quick-n-easy, not necessarily subject to brute force attacks, Con: Does not cross over the language barrier well, broken with google queries and sophisticated algorithms, not easy to build a whole set and even harder to do it automatically, requires a large set with no repetition - not easily scalable at all 4. Graphical based questions (eg. How many people are in this photo? What animal is this?) Pro: quick-n-easy, extremely difficult to automate Con: Does not cross over the language barrier well, not easy to build a whole set and even harder to do automatically, accessibility issues, requires a large set with no repetition - not easily scalable at all 5. Puzzles (eg. Put (ie. click-n-drag) the basketball into the basket, do a "virtual" jigsaw puzzles ) Pro: Effective (requires some thought and control of the mouse) Con: Can be time consuming, unfamiliar, not trivial to create or automatically create, no native support in basically any application, can be difficult for children, elderly, or those of lower intelligence, accessibility issues, device input issues (does it require a mouse?). Not scalable at all. 6. Games (eg. miniature-pacman) Pro: Effective (requires a little intelligence to beat the game), can be fun Con: time consuming, unfamiliar, almost impossible to automatically create, no native support anywhere, device input issues, can be difficult for those of lesser intelligence or slow reflexes, accessibility issues. Not scalable at all. 7. CAPTCHAs Pro: Some are effective, easy to deploy, starting to become familiar to users Con: Many are or can be broken, some are too hard for humans, sometimes there are language issues, some accessibility issues 8. Biometrics Pro: Most perfect form (how can an automated program provide, say, it's own fingerprint?) Con: Unfamiliar to most users, Uncomfortable to many users, no guarantees of live data (record and playback techniques would be effective), not well-deployed, some techniques are not effective for some users (eg. voice recognition for anyone who cannot speak)
Out of these, some of the best techniques for deployment might be to automatically wrap mailto tags with some javascript (say via server-side scripting) which won't display the email address until the user passes the above.
Use trusted reverse turing test authorities like certificate authorities to provide and verify reverse turing tests such as CAPTCHA images.
Include native support in software which will prevent automatically tampering with key areas (eg. registry, startup areas)
Bottom line, there are plenty of effective techniques, but they are not all easy to deploy, and they are not all perfect at their job. I truly believe there will never be a perfect solution until biometric devices can somehow guarantee that the biometric data being received is live and not replayed (perhaps through an encrypted timestamp or something)
Quite frankly, I don't care who wins. Looking through all the candidates, I am just REALLY excited to see any one of those on this site instead of what we have now.
You're giving away *my* cipher! I already use it for all my communications. Oh well, Maybe it's time to move on to something stronger like applying it four times
Check out what the local community colleges are emphasizing in their course curriculum and tailor your lessons for them in this way.
Encourage the kids to develop an interest in this stuff. Then, when the time comes, encourage the older teens to apply for IT programs at a local college and earn a degree in that field and make computers a career. So if they see that local college X does courses in web design, and you already taught them web design, they be very willing to make a career out of it. This might be a goal that seems feasible to them and this should prepare them to live a stable life in the future which they haven't experienced before.
Autocomplete -> "Reduce typing effort with AutoComplete, which suggests common words and phrases to complete what you are typing. -- www.openoffice.org"
With a bit of experience, you can type documents many orders faster than without.
What's the deal with Google Preview? I found 99% of all hits in a google search did NOT display an image. Just a white box. I ended up uninstalling it. Did I miss an essential config setting or something?
Maybe someone can help me out with this question: Why does the Elder Scrolls series get so little attention? Everytime I read or hear talk of an RPG, a big single player game, detailed games, whatever these games have, Morrowind NEVER gets mentioned. It's like outside of a select set of RPG enthusiasts, nobody has ever heard of Morrowind (or Oblivion for that matter).
Delicious should serve to enhance their search results. Not only have their crawlers identified a particular site as relevant, actual human beings have personally identified those sites as worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
Many VIPs Eagerly Mediated: Just Slightly Under Nine.
You probably also have that first line setting on. If your settings will display the first line of the email, your inbox looks like a list of lines of text. Turn that feature off and you will see the subject lines only like a normal email account.
If some "bubble" capable of bending light were invented, what would others see right where you are standing? Just an empty shadow?
I can certainly respect that opinion. His movies aren't for everyone. I only mention him specifically because he makes a conscious effort to ensure his movies are not sold off like the film of the year and leaves no room for sequels.
Wait, you wrote a simple python script to yank the top 250 movies off of imdb, and sort them according to year and decade?
...
You officially win slashdot, this site will now close.
In all seriousness I blame advertising. Curse this society so capable of advertisement! T.V., radio, billboards, Internet, viral advertising, previews like you wouldn't believe! (That previews guy plays up *every* movie like that, eh?) I would wager that there are roughly equal numbers of "good" movies (good a relative term to the viewer of course) per year since the thirties.
The problem is there are so many more average to bad movies being produced in recent years that it seems like movies are continually getting worse and worse. This is especially so with movies that are advertised as "the next big blockbuster", "the film of the summer/year/decade/century", etc. so we are led to believe we are going to see a good movie but really it's just average. I realized this stuff a few years ago: "Pay it forward", "The Majestic", and "Hart's War" were all advertised that way. "War of the Worlds" and "Red eye" are some recent examples I can think of. Not that they were terrible movies, but they were advertised like they were the film of the year. Since 2000, how many movies (besides LOTR) can you think of that are actually great films? I count only a few out of the top 50 off of that top 250 list at imdb, and some are foreign films I've never heard of. Then think again about how many trailers you've seen in the last few years which talk like their films are shoe-ins for Oscar glory? (And what's the deal with "Snakes on a Plane"?)
Another contributer are sequels which are not designed to be trilogies but are obviously just money grabbers. How about the sequels to "The Matrix", or "Spiderman"? Back to the Future III anyone? Have you met the Fockers? Oceans 12? My sister hated Pirates of the Carribean 2. The sequels were decent but the originals deserved to be stand-alone films. They have watered down the masterpiece that is the original. Of course the advertisers play up the trilogy theme trying to focus our attention on how cool the sequel will be. I'd say watching the original begins with a passive attitude before but finishes with a high. The sequel feeds off of this high as you begin but usually trails off to a passive attitude in the end leaving the entire story wanting.
Case in point: The last two Pictures of the Year were Million Dollar Baby and Crash. I had personally only first heard of these films at Oscar time.
Case in point: I've found that M. Night Shyamalan understands this stuff well. All his films are stand-alone (Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and now Lady in the Water which I haven't seen yet). In interviews he indicated how he didn't want any of these movies to be advertised as "From the director who brought you..." because he wants the movie to do itself justice. The trailers make the audience enter the film with a sense of mystery and leave with a sense of satisfaction. The trailers do not advertise themselves as huge blockbusters, but just as good movies. Nor do they feed off of the success of others, but simply sell themselves because they are good movies.
My advise for finding good movies: pay only minimal attention to the advertising. If you read and hear a ton about it and the commercials seem like the movie will blow you away, it definately won't. Take in only enough information to get an idea for what the movie is about. If you like the idea, you'll like the movie. I usually wait for Oscar time to see which film I never heard of wins big. Those are the ones I like the most. I found "The Pianist", "Crash", and "Hotel Rwanda" that way - all of which were good films.
(I should also mention that another contributer is the advancement of our household technology. People don't need to go to the theater to get a good movie experience when they can get even better at home. Not to mention the proliferation of pirated movies available for free
Get your quick 'n easy version of IE7 straight from the main website: www.ie7.com
see other players go broke because you OWN boardwalk
In Monopoly:Soviet edition, boardwalk owns you.
It better max out somewhere. Wikipedia will be hellish.
I was about to post something similar to this.
It isn't healthy to mix what you do with your free time with what you do during work hours. There will be unnecessary overlap and it isn't fair to you or anyone else around you (home or work).
Use your free time to take up another or a new interest. Everybody needs to have variations in their lives.
Point 4 is really saying that we ourselves *are* the gods. We can control the fire, the weather, the animals, etc. through our *own* superior logic and science. I suppose the next step may be a turn to our technology (like A.I.) to control everything for us in some sort of utopian form in the most perfect way so we (as erroneous humans) don't have to.
Point 4 personally troubles me because we also know that not all humans are equal in thought process and many cannot be trusted. I wish all humans could behave in a logical manner that is truly beneficial to all in every way, but unfortunately there is always a need for someone or something higher up to bestow guilt and keep people in line and thus religion will not disappear during this epoc. (Sadly, there are some people who feel no guilt at all). People have tendencies to be selfish, greedy, angry, failures in reasoning, pride, you name it. Given the innate flaws of humans, I don't think religion should ever be given up, but the sooner we skip over step 4 (ie. assuming *we* are perfect gods) the better.
This can more appropriately be attributed to the word "banana" than the fruit itself.
Seems like it would work for a while.
This is problematic. CAPTCHAs worked for a while too. The truth is that something that isn't a permanent solution will just pose a problem tomorrow. We need to find a solution that will never be broken. One of the key elements for these kinds of tests are that they must be simple to use/understand/pass for humans and impossible to use/pass for automated programs. Such a flash form would not guarantee a prevention of automation (if a human can type it, why can't a program?) and it borders on "hassle" for human users.
I did my undergrad thesis on reverse Turing tests (a family which CAPTCHAs are part of). Here are the main categories I could identify which can be utilized to effectively and (hopefully) easily prevent automation:
...)
1. Text based passwords
Pro: People are used to them, quick-n-easy
Con: Subject to brute force attacks, trivial to automate a login once you have the password
2. Graphical passwords
Pro: Can use a larger set of images than characters, easy to remember
Con: time consuming, can only present a small set of images at once, variable screensizes (pdas to big screen TVs), not good for accessibility, no native support in basically ANY application, not easily scalable
3. Text based questions (eg. which word in this sentence is underlined? "Mary had a little ___"
Pro: quick-n-easy, not necessarily subject to brute force attacks,
Con: Does not cross over the language barrier well, broken with google queries and sophisticated algorithms, not easy to build a whole set and even harder to do it automatically, requires a large set with no repetition - not easily scalable at all
4. Graphical based questions (eg. How many people are in this photo? What animal is this?)
Pro: quick-n-easy, extremely difficult to automate
Con: Does not cross over the language barrier well, not easy to build a whole set and even harder to do automatically, accessibility issues, requires a large set with no repetition - not easily scalable at all
5. Puzzles (eg. Put (ie. click-n-drag) the basketball into the basket, do a "virtual" jigsaw puzzles )
Pro: Effective (requires some thought and control of the mouse)
Con: Can be time consuming, unfamiliar, not trivial to create or automatically create, no native support in basically any application, can be difficult for children, elderly, or those of lower intelligence, accessibility issues, device input issues (does it require a mouse?). Not scalable at all.
6. Games (eg. miniature-pacman)
Pro: Effective (requires a little intelligence to beat the game), can be fun
Con: time consuming, unfamiliar, almost impossible to automatically create, no native support anywhere, device input issues, can be difficult for those of lesser intelligence or slow reflexes, accessibility issues. Not scalable at all.
7. CAPTCHAs
Pro: Some are effective, easy to deploy, starting to become familiar to users
Con: Many are or can be broken, some are too hard for humans, sometimes there are language issues, some accessibility issues
8. Biometrics
Pro: Most perfect form (how can an automated program provide, say, it's own fingerprint?)
Con: Unfamiliar to most users, Uncomfortable to many users, no guarantees of live data (record and playback techniques would be effective), not well-deployed, some techniques are not effective for some users (eg. voice recognition for anyone who cannot speak)
Out of these, some of the best techniques for deployment might be to automatically wrap mailto tags with some javascript (say via server-side scripting) which won't display the email address until the user passes the above.
Use trusted reverse turing test authorities like certificate authorities to provide and verify reverse turing tests such as CAPTCHA images.
Include native support in software which will prevent automatically tampering with key areas (eg. registry, startup areas)
Bottom line, there are plenty of effective techniques, but they are not all easy to deploy, and they are not all perfect at their job. I truly believe there will never be a perfect solution until biometric devices can somehow guarantee that the biometric data being received is live and not replayed (perhaps through an encrypted timestamp or something)
You know, the one pronounced Fronkensteen
Quite frankly, I don't care who wins. Looking through all the candidates, I am just REALLY excited to see any one of those on this site instead of what we have now.
Here's some Simpsons:
"One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me."
"We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly.
Heh, it reads like an IT ad. Here's the next line...
But thanks to the miracle of Monit and Munin, we've managed to keep our server...alive!
And for extra security, always apply it twice.
You're giving away *my* cipher! I already use it for all my communications. Oh well, Maybe it's time to move on to something stronger like applying it four times
Check out what the local community colleges are emphasizing in their course curriculum and tailor your lessons for them in this way.
Encourage the kids to develop an interest in this stuff. Then, when the time comes, encourage the older teens to apply for IT programs at a local college and earn a degree in that field and make computers a career. So if they see that local college X does courses in web design, and you already taught them web design, they be very willing to make a career out of it. This might be a goal that seems feasible to them and this should prepare them to live a stable life in the future which they haven't experienced before.
So which is jesus, mortal or immortal? My head is spinning here.
Jesus, according to Christianity, is both fully human and fully God (not *a* god, but one of the three representations of *the* God).
I'm sure in many cases, faith is the only thing that can stabalize a spinning head.
Autocomplete -> "Reduce typing effort with AutoComplete, which suggests common words and phrases to complete what you are typing. -- www.openoffice.org"
With a bit of experience, you can type documents many orders faster than without.
What's the deal with Google Preview? I found 99% of all hits in a google search did NOT display an image. Just a white box. I ended up uninstalling it. Did I miss an essential config setting or something?
Maybe someone can help me out with this question:
Why does the Elder Scrolls series get so little attention? Everytime I read or hear talk of an RPG, a big single player game, detailed games, whatever these games have, Morrowind NEVER gets mentioned. It's like outside of a select set of RPG enthusiasts, nobody has ever heard of Morrowind (or Oblivion for that matter).
What gives?
We've already apologized for Bryan Adams on several occasions.
Unfortunately, Celine Dion is simply inexcusable and unforgivable.
Delicious should serve to enhance their search results. Not only have their crawlers identified a particular site as relevant, actual human beings have personally identified those sites as worthwhile.