The problem with that advice is that is almost impossible to set up a huge deal without any prior deals. Finding a supplier willing to sell you, say, $100,000 worth of cocaine takes some pretty serious connections, connections you are unlikely to have unless you have worked your way up the supply chain. And if you haven't sold before, where are you going to offload that much cocaine even if you do find a supplier? In $1000 increments to 100people? Pretty risky, even if you can find 100 people that want $1000 worth of your cocaine.
In that respect, drugs are like any other commodity. It is not really that easy to become a large distributor - first you have to find a larger distributor willing to sell to you, then you have to find consumers or smaller distributors willing to buy from you. This is hard enough without the added paranoia that surrounds illegal commodities.
I'll start by saying that I do not hate law enforcement. It is a necessary evil. However, I do feel MY rights as a citizen should never be infringed to enable law enforcement. This merely becomes a priority of laws dilemma - which laws are okay to break in order to enforce others laws? And for some reason, my priority list include my rights at the top of the list; law enforcement officials' lists tend to put law enforcement privileges and safety at the top of the list. And while I can empathize with this position, I dislike it. Law enforcement officers already have a tremendous amount of power, physically and legally, compared to other citizens. The default position of society should be to automatically question any increase in law enforcement power, even more stringently examine a decrease in the citizenry's powers/privileges in the name of law enforcement. It is law enforcements job to protect me, not my job to protect them. If a law enforcement officer feels that his job is unnecessarily risky, he is always free to quit. I don't really have the option of "quitting" my citizenry.
Just b/c a person does not support Bush and his administration, does not mean that person is a Democrat. Maybe he is a Republican that doesn't like Bush? There are lots of reasons to disapprove of the Bush administration that fall outside of traditional political cheer-leading.
Let's see: ordering pizza, confused when performing simple task of dialing phone, paranoid for large portion of the day about "the man" showing up. I know what you were doing, you filthy hippie!:)
Maybe Japanese actually spend time looking at the face, while Americans are looking somewhere else and catching a glimpse of the mouth by chance.
Or maybe Americans actually spend time looking at the face, while Japanese are looking somewhere else and catching a glimpse of the eyes by chance. Or maybe it is a cultural difference; Americans look for emotional clues in the mouth, Japanese look for cultural clues in the eyes. Maybe someone should run a study to determine which of these theories has some supporting evidence...
The article reasons that Japanese attempt to suppress their emotions, but that cannot be the case. Looking into a person's eyes is very intimate interaction while looking at their lips would be more akin to hiding emotion.
TFA is referring to the emotion of the person being looked at. yes, looking in the eyes is more intimate. That is why the Japanese look there for clues; the eyes are harder to keep impassive than the rest of the face. Americans, who are more expressive, can be read by looking at the mouth. Maybe they should have put a sentence in the article making this more explicit, maybe right after the sentence about Japanese people being less expressive...
This got a +5, Insightful? Maybe/. needs a '+1, mods didn't RTFA' mod. It would at least make some of the moderation around here more honest.
Ok. I disagree; I subscribe to a theory of personal responsibility, not communal, but I can respect a fairly applied ethic even if I don't share it.
Dude, you need to try to learn something more about the Shinto religion.
I have some familiarity with Shinto; not much, but some. It was not the motivation for the kamikaze pilots, despite the name of the "divine wind". Nationalism (some would say jingoism) and bushido combined to produce the kamikaze.
Do you really think a guy would climb into an airplane cockpit and crash into an enemy ship if he wasn't absolutely sure about his afterlife?
Yes; you don't? Your earlier post, unless I misunderstood you, seemed to imply that you didn't find anything admirable in religion, and yet you seem to imply that only faith in the afterlife can inspire self-sacrifice. I find several things to admire about someone who sacrifices himself in the name of a perceived "right" or "good", even if he is misguided. Please note, I said sacrifices himself, not others.
Religious people should accept the responsibility for all the bad effects that religion can bring. If religion can be used to convince people to kill, maim, perform terrorist acts, then everybody who preach or practice religion has a share of responsibility for that.
Do you feel the same way about other groups? Say, computer geeks? I mean, computers can and have been used to do some bad stuff; do all people that promote computers deserve to share in the responsibility for the bad acts perpetrated using computers?
There could exist other kinds of nutjobs, but it would be rather difficult to convince an atheist to commit a suicide terrorist act, for instance.
Not really. I mean, I don't know if they were atheists or not, but religion had nothing to do with Japanese Kamikazes in WWII, for example. People can become fanatical about almost anything, which in turn can lead to extreme behavior. Religion was (and is) a powerful tool for a long time, so has been misused more so than any other tool. But that is really all it is; a tool used to convince people to behave in a certain way. Sometimes the behavior is bad, sometimes it is good. It is no more honest to pretend the good doesn't exist than it is to pretend the bad doesn't.
You've got it backwards. There is no legislation requiring the Party to honor any state's primary. So, if the state wants the Party to even consider its candidates, they have to play by the Party's rules.
Thanks for the tip. I'd never heard of a link between Pythagorean theory and natural vibrations. I found this site with some interesting geometry discussing that.
In the US in 1850, the life expectancy at birth was around 40 years for both men and women. By 1900, it was around 50 years. By 1950, after the introduction of these antibiotics, it was 66 for men and 72 for women.
Actually, advances in nutrition and public health (think sanitation) contributed much more to the increase in life expectancy in the 20th century than modern medicine. Infant (and early childhood) mortality rates drag down a population's life expectancy a great deal; the mother's nutrition and the cleanliness of the baby's environment play a much larger role in reducing infant mortality (thus increasing life expectancy) than breakthroughs in medicine. Here's a decent Wikipedia article that hits the highlights.
everyone can't possess all freedoms at once. If everyone possesses all freedoms, only the strongest truly have any freedom. If I can kill you without any consequences from others, and you are weaker than me, you have only the freedoms I allow you to have. The idea of granting freedom by limiting it is really the idea of maximizing everyones' real freedoms by reaching the ideal compromise. Of course, no one can agree where this compromise should be drawn.
[Imus] didn't toe any Leftist line and should therefore be silenced.
I suppose that is technically true. Blatant sexist and racist remarks do run contrary to established "Leftist" principles, so in that sense constitute not toeing the line. And I agree those remarks are unsuitable for a public figure, so mean Imus should be deprived of his public venue. But saying it the way you did makes you sound a tad paranoid.
Kerry's stupid "if you're dumb, you join the Army" (paraphrased) remark.
I agree Kerry's remark was clumsy and stupid. However, I think you have the word paraphrase confused with "misrepresent". A much more accurate paraphrase would be "If you're dumb, you involve the country in an unwinable war in Iraq". You see, he was criticizing Bush, his political opponent, not Army soldiers, his hoped-for constituents. The clumsiness of his remark comes from the fact that a person could easily misconstrue it the way you (and others) did. An experienced politician should never leave themselves so open to interpretation by their opponents.
So again, I agree with your conclusions about Kerry's statement, but just like with Imus, your argument in support of those conclusions seem designed to make a reasonable person uncomfortable agreeing with you.
Or "what you know about who was blowing whom on that business trip to Baltimore last October, did I mention I happened to have footage from the web-cam set up in that conference room?"
Just in case you ever get tasked with "hacking" a Windows machine b/c of a forgotten/lost password, try this. I can tell you first hand it works like a charm on XP. Pretty scary how easy this is, really, but at least it requires physical access.
I agree that there is certainly a place for knowledge of the compiler behavior in programming, but it is not terribly widespread. Taking your example, what if my business rules change and I no longer need to process even numbers of independent integers, but instead 3 dependent integers? Your optimization is no longer useful. What if I need to port my application to a different architecture? Your optimization is no longer useful. In the majority of programming environments today, portability and flexibility of code is of much greater importance than optimization. Hardware is fast and cheap, programmers are not. Especially when your network latency is the bottleneck; who cares if the machine takes an extra few cycles? Obviously, there are still areas where code is tied to a specific device and should be optimized for that device, where size and speed of an application are critical. But the majority of programmers aren't developing for these platforms; for those programmers, knowledge of machine-level behavior will rarely increase their paying skills enough to be worth the investment in learning.
Having said that, true geeks have at one point or another learned what is going on at the machine-level, and probably written a few toy programs (at least) in assembler. Unfortunately (or not), not all programmers are true geeks; I would venture to guess that most are not.
Wow, I had never heard of an age limit on spray paint. But a little Googling reveals all sorts of schemes for restricting the sell of spray paint and permanent markers! Thanks for the tip.
If I don't want a particular purchase "remembered," I don't use the card and pay cash.
Just this weekend, I went into a Lowe's Hardware to pick up a can of spray paint. I went thru the self-checkout and paid cash b/c it was like $4 or something. Before the machine would continue my purchase, it required me to put in my telephone # in order to "verify my purchase".
Okay, so my phone # is not really 111-111-1111, but still, I was quite disturbed by the BLATANT attempt to track my cash purchase.
The constitution of the USA allows you to bear arms. If a contract you accepted violates those rights, then the contact is voided.
Uhm, that is not true at all. There are many places you aren't allowed to carry weapons (school grounds, public buildings in my state, my house, etc.). The right to bear arms doesn't mean you have the right to carry them wherever you want. If you agree to a contract stating you will come paint my house, and in the contract it states you won't bring a weapon onto my property, that is a perfectly valid contract, and you will be in breach if you bring a weapon onto my property.
Thanks, you just showed me my new background image. I do like to change it up every so often; normally I go http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ and browse the archive until something strikes my fancy.
I have to jump in here, b/c this is almost painful. From the Wikipedia article: In the Northern Hemisphere the streams are most commonly found between latitudes 30N and 70N for the polar jet stream, and between latitudes 20N and 50N for the subtropical stream.
So, your bands of west -> east traveling winds migrate in latitude. The winds still blow west -> east, but at a more northerly or southerly latitude than it did a month ago. You are correct in what you say, but MadnessASAP is referring to a different aspect of the system and postulating that this behavior might cause problems. The direction of the winds has nothing to do with his observation.
The comment alone is enough to get him removed from the case for conflict of interest He is a prosecutor. His job is to try to get a conviction of every defendant, preferably with as harsh a penalty as allowed under the law, mostly. There are of course all sorts of exceptions to this statement, but as a general rule of thumb, it works pretty well. So no, I don't think even a serious comment on the defendant frying would be a conflict of interest. Maybe indicative that the guy is an ass, but no conflict of interest.
somebody with legal, govt granted power.
Nope, you're thinking of the judge. The prosecutor has no legal authority, merely (supposed) expertise in convincing judges and/or juries that he is correct concerning the legal question at hand. That's why this can't be considered a threat - he doesn't get to make that decision.
Of course there would be a chance. Britain would simply have to provide "probable cause" and the US would extradite. It is entirely reasonable for the US to hold foreign nations to the same standards as the US government is held before the US agrees to act. As a matter of fact, one of the many, many flaps recently (concerning the US govt) has been the US transporting prisoners to jurisdictions with slacker regulations regarding torture and using the local standards as justification for their behavior. I'm not saying the UK's standard of evidence is nearly as atrocious as torture; I'm just saying that it is generally frowned on as hypocritical to outsource suspects to a different location with lower standards of treatment, proof, punishment, etc. So actually, by that token, I agree the UK shouldn't extradite in this case. Surely the fellow broke a British law, and can be punished under it? If the US punishment is likely to be harsher than UK law allows, I would say UK gov't has an obligation to NOT extradite.
As for a balanced treaty, your article makes it sounds like the UK chose the standard to which they wished to hold US extradition requests. We said "you must be this tall to ride" and the UK said "fine, you can be a bit shorter if you like". What in that implies the treaty is therefore invalid? Both sides got what they wanted.
I don't know about you, but the worst thing about the Matrix to me is it complete under-achievement. It is based on the concept that the world is just a VR simulation we are all experiencing as an elaborate prison system for our minds. THAT is a very interesting idea that raises some interesting questions. Keanu, having spent his whole life as a thermal battery, wouldn't have a functioning musculature (honestly, why would the machines bother growing his legs and arms?). How would a society composed of naturally born humans really incorporate such people? What are the potential complications of "downloading" skill-sets? What technologies did the humans develop to compensate for the lack of solar energy? To what purpose would they go about freeing just one or two people, i.e. what advantage might such people have over natural born humans (other than the mystic bullshit the movie had)? What political or technical issues prevented them from unplugging everyone if the machines really depended on them for energy? Answering some of these, or other, questions could have made for a great sci-fi story. The Matrix had such potential!
But yeah, instead we get the kung-fu farting. A decent B action movie with some admittedly innovative cinematography for the action scenes. Oh, and in the last two, a lot of philosophical floundering about disguised as a bad plot. Such a waste...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that advice is that is almost impossible to set up a huge deal without any prior deals. Finding a supplier willing to sell you, say, $100,000 worth of cocaine takes some pretty serious connections, connections you are unlikely to have unless you have worked your way up the supply chain. And if you haven't sold before, where are you going to offload that much cocaine even if you do find a supplier? In $1000 increments to 100people? Pretty risky, even if you can find 100 people that want $1000 worth of your cocaine.
:-)
In that respect, drugs are like any other commodity. It is not really that easy to become a large distributor - first you have to find a larger distributor willing to sell to you, then you have to find consumers or smaller distributors willing to buy from you. This is hard enough without the added paranoia that surrounds illegal commodities.
And yeah, by cocaine, I mean cookies
I'll start by saying that I do not hate law enforcement. It is a necessary evil. However, I do feel MY rights as a citizen should never be infringed to enable law enforcement. This merely becomes a priority of laws dilemma - which laws are okay to break in order to enforce others laws? And for some reason, my priority list include my rights at the top of the list; law enforcement officials' lists tend to put law enforcement privileges and safety at the top of the list. And while I can empathize with this position, I dislike it. Law enforcement officers already have a tremendous amount of power, physically and legally, compared to other citizens. The default position of society should be to automatically question any increase in law enforcement power, even more stringently examine a decrease in the citizenry's powers/privileges in the name of law enforcement. It is law enforcements job to protect me, not my job to protect them. If a law enforcement officer feels that his job is unnecessarily risky, he is always free to quit. I don't really have the option of "quitting" my citizenry.
Just b/c a person does not support Bush and his administration, does not mean that person is a Democrat. Maybe he is a Republican that doesn't like Bush? There are lots of reasons to disapprove of the Bush administration that fall outside of traditional political cheer-leading.
Let's see: ordering pizza, confused when performing simple task of dialing phone, paranoid for large portion of the day about "the man" showing up. I know what you were doing, you filthy hippie! :)
Maybe Japanese actually spend time looking at the face, while Americans are looking somewhere else and catching a glimpse of the mouth by chance.
/. needs a '+1, mods didn't RTFA' mod. It would at least make some of the moderation around here more honest.
Or maybe Americans actually spend time looking at the face, while Japanese are looking somewhere else and catching a glimpse of the eyes by chance. Or maybe it is a cultural difference; Americans look for emotional clues in the mouth, Japanese look for cultural clues in the eyes. Maybe someone should run a study to determine which of these theories has some supporting evidence...
The article reasons that Japanese attempt to suppress their emotions, but that cannot be the case. Looking into a person's eyes is very intimate interaction while looking at their lips would be more akin to hiding emotion.
TFA is referring to the emotion of the person being looked at. yes, looking in the eyes is more intimate. That is why the Japanese look there for clues; the eyes are harder to keep impassive than the rest of the face. Americans, who are more expressive, can be read by looking at the mouth. Maybe they should have put a sentence in the article making this more explicit, maybe right after the sentence about Japanese people being less expressive...
This got a +5, Insightful? Maybe
Certainly they do share that responsibility,
Ok. I disagree; I subscribe to a theory of personal responsibility, not communal, but I can respect a fairly applied ethic even if I don't share it.
Dude, you need to try to learn something more about the Shinto religion.
I have some familiarity with Shinto; not much, but some. It was not the motivation for the kamikaze pilots, despite the name of the "divine wind". Nationalism (some would say jingoism) and bushido combined to produce the kamikaze.
Do you really think a guy would climb into an airplane cockpit and crash into an enemy ship if he wasn't absolutely sure about his afterlife?
Yes; you don't? Your earlier post, unless I misunderstood you, seemed to imply that you didn't find anything admirable in religion, and yet you seem to imply that only faith in the afterlife can inspire self-sacrifice. I find several things to admire about someone who sacrifices himself in the name of a perceived "right" or "good", even if he is misguided. Please note, I said sacrifices himself, not others.
Religious people should accept the responsibility for all the bad effects that religion can bring. If religion can be used to convince people to kill, maim, perform terrorist acts, then everybody who preach or practice religion has a share of responsibility for that.
Do you feel the same way about other groups? Say, computer geeks? I mean, computers can and have been used to do some bad stuff; do all people that promote computers deserve to share in the responsibility for the bad acts perpetrated using computers?
There could exist other kinds of nutjobs, but it would be rather difficult to convince an atheist to commit a suicide terrorist act, for instance.
Not really. I mean, I don't know if they were atheists or not, but religion had nothing to do with Japanese Kamikazes in WWII, for example. People can become fanatical about almost anything, which in turn can lead to extreme behavior. Religion was (and is) a powerful tool for a long time, so has been misused more so than any other tool. But that is really all it is; a tool used to convince people to behave in a certain way. Sometimes the behavior is bad, sometimes it is good. It is no more honest to pretend the good doesn't exist than it is to pretend the bad doesn't.
You've got it backwards. There is no legislation requiring the Party to honor any state's primary. So, if the state wants the Party to even consider its candidates, they have to play by the Party's rules.
Thanks for the tip. I'd never heard of a link between Pythagorean theory and natural vibrations. I found this site with some interesting geometry discussing that.
In the US in 1850, the life expectancy at birth was around 40 years for both men and women. By 1900, it was around 50 years. By 1950, after the introduction of these antibiotics, it was 66 for men and 72 for women.
Actually, advances in nutrition and public health (think sanitation) contributed much more to the increase in life expectancy in the 20th century than modern medicine. Infant (and early childhood) mortality rates drag down a population's life expectancy a great deal; the mother's nutrition and the cleanliness of the baby's environment play a much larger role in reducing infant mortality (thus increasing life expectancy) than breakthroughs in medicine. Here's a decent Wikipedia article that hits the highlights.
everyone can't possess all freedoms at once. If everyone possesses all freedoms, only the strongest truly have any freedom. If I can kill you without any consequences from others, and you are weaker than me, you have only the freedoms I allow you to have. The idea of granting freedom by limiting it is really the idea of maximizing everyones' real freedoms by reaching the ideal compromise. Of course, no one can agree where this compromise should be drawn.
[Imus] didn't toe any Leftist line and should therefore be silenced.
I suppose that is technically true. Blatant sexist and racist remarks do run contrary to established "Leftist" principles, so in that sense constitute not toeing the line. And I agree those remarks are unsuitable for a public figure, so mean Imus should be deprived of his public venue. But saying it the way you did makes you sound a tad paranoid.
Kerry's stupid "if you're dumb, you join the Army" (paraphrased) remark.
I agree Kerry's remark was clumsy and stupid. However, I think you have the word paraphrase confused with "misrepresent". A much more accurate paraphrase would be "If you're dumb, you involve the country in an unwinable war in Iraq". You see, he was criticizing Bush, his political opponent, not Army soldiers, his hoped-for constituents. The clumsiness of his remark comes from the fact that a person could easily misconstrue it the way you (and others) did. An experienced politician should never leave themselves so open to interpretation by their opponents.
So again, I agree with your conclusions about Kerry's statement, but just like with Imus, your argument in support of those conclusions seem designed to make a reasonable person uncomfortable agreeing with you.
Or "what you know about who was blowing whom on that business trip to Baltimore last October, did I mention I happened to have footage from the web-cam set up in that conference room?"
Just in case you ever get tasked with "hacking" a Windows machine b/c of a forgotten/lost password, try this. I can tell you first hand it works like a charm on XP. Pretty scary how easy this is, really, but at least it requires physical access.
I agree that there is certainly a place for knowledge of the compiler behavior in programming, but it is not terribly widespread. Taking your example, what if my business rules change and I no longer need to process even numbers of independent integers, but instead 3 dependent integers? Your optimization is no longer useful. What if I need to port my application to a different architecture? Your optimization is no longer useful. In the majority of programming environments today, portability and flexibility of code is of much greater importance than optimization. Hardware is fast and cheap, programmers are not. Especially when your network latency is the bottleneck; who cares if the machine takes an extra few cycles? Obviously, there are still areas where code is tied to a specific device and should be optimized for that device, where size and speed of an application are critical. But the majority of programmers aren't developing for these platforms; for those programmers, knowledge of machine-level behavior will rarely increase their paying skills enough to be worth the investment in learning.
Having said that, true geeks have at one point or another learned what is going on at the machine-level, and probably written a few toy programs (at least) in assembler. Unfortunately (or not), not all programmers are true geeks; I would venture to guess that most are not.
Strap it on. With all the action I get, I could power NY city, baby!
Wow, I had never heard of an age limit on spray paint. But a little Googling reveals all sorts of schemes for restricting the sell of spray paint and permanent markers! Thanks for the tip.
If I don't want a particular purchase "remembered," I don't use the card and pay cash.
Just this weekend, I went into a Lowe's Hardware to pick up a can of spray paint. I went thru the self-checkout and paid cash b/c it was like $4 or something. Before the machine would continue my purchase, it required me to put in my telephone # in order to "verify my purchase".
Okay, so my phone # is not really 111-111-1111, but still, I was quite disturbed by the BLATANT attempt to track my cash purchase.
I know it is wrong, but I couldn't resist clicking on your link to see what would happen. I'm so very, very ashamed...
The constitution of the USA allows you to bear arms. If a contract you accepted violates those rights, then the contact is voided.
Uhm, that is not true at all. There are many places you aren't allowed to carry weapons (school grounds, public buildings in my state, my house, etc.). The right to bear arms doesn't mean you have the right to carry them wherever you want. If you agree to a contract stating you will come paint my house, and in the contract it states you won't bring a weapon onto my property, that is a perfectly valid contract, and you will be in breach if you bring a weapon onto my property.
IANAL yadda yadda
Thanks, you just showed me my new background image. I do like to change it up every so often; normally I go http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ and browse the archive until something strikes my fancy.
I have to jump in here, b/c this is almost painful. From the Wikipedia article: In the Northern Hemisphere the streams are most commonly found between latitudes 30N and 70N for the polar jet stream, and between latitudes 20N and 50N for the subtropical stream.
So, your bands of west -> east traveling winds migrate in latitude. The winds still blow west -> east, but at a more northerly or southerly latitude than it did a month ago. You are correct in what you say, but MadnessASAP is referring to a different aspect of the system and postulating that this behavior might cause problems. The direction of the winds has nothing to do with his observation.
The comment alone is enough to get him removed from the case for conflict of interest
He is a prosecutor. His job is to try to get a conviction of every defendant, preferably with as harsh a penalty as allowed under the law, mostly. There are of course all sorts of exceptions to this statement, but as a general rule of thumb, it works pretty well. So no, I don't think even a serious comment on the defendant frying would be a conflict of interest. Maybe indicative that the guy is an ass, but no conflict of interest.
somebody with legal, govt granted power.
Nope, you're thinking of the judge. The prosecutor has no legal authority, merely (supposed) expertise in convincing judges and/or juries that he is correct concerning the legal question at hand. That's why this can't be considered a threat - he doesn't get to make that decision.
Of course there would be a chance. Britain would simply have to provide "probable cause" and the US would extradite. It is entirely reasonable for the US to hold foreign nations to the same standards as the US government is held before the US agrees to act. As a matter of fact, one of the many, many flaps recently (concerning the US govt) has been the US transporting prisoners to jurisdictions with slacker regulations regarding torture and using the local standards as justification for their behavior. I'm not saying the UK's standard of evidence is nearly as atrocious as torture; I'm just saying that it is generally frowned on as hypocritical to outsource suspects to a different location with lower standards of treatment, proof, punishment, etc. So actually, by that token, I agree the UK shouldn't extradite in this case. Surely the fellow broke a British law, and can be punished under it? If the US punishment is likely to be harsher than UK law allows, I would say UK gov't has an obligation to NOT extradite.
As for a balanced treaty, your article makes it sounds like the UK chose the standard to which they wished to hold US extradition requests. We said "you must be this tall to ride" and the UK said "fine, you can be a bit shorter if you like". What in that implies the treaty is therefore invalid? Both sides got what they wanted.
I don't know about you, but the worst thing about the Matrix to me is it complete under-achievement. It is based on the concept that the world is just a VR simulation we are all experiencing as an elaborate prison system for our minds. THAT is a very interesting idea that raises some interesting questions. Keanu, having spent his whole life as a thermal battery, wouldn't have a functioning musculature (honestly, why would the machines bother growing his legs and arms?). How would a society composed of naturally born humans really incorporate such people? What are the potential complications of "downloading" skill-sets? What technologies did the humans develop to compensate for the lack of solar energy? To what purpose would they go about freeing just one or two people, i.e. what advantage might such people have over natural born humans (other than the mystic bullshit the movie had)? What political or technical issues prevented them from unplugging everyone if the machines really depended on them for energy? Answering some of these, or other, questions could have made for a great sci-fi story. The Matrix had such potential!
But yeah, instead we get the kung-fu farting. A decent B action movie with some admittedly innovative cinematography for the action scenes. Oh, and in the last two, a lot of philosophical floundering about disguised as a bad plot. Such a waste...