Acutally, no, time and time again bullshit arguments were rolled out against SDI and given tons of press.
"Put mirrors on the outside of the missiles." Despite the fact that SDI was developing kinetic interceptors, not lasers. Not that mirrors will stop a laser, mind you.
"Spin the missiles." And watch them rip themselves to shreds: ICBMs are actually fairly fragile. They're not built to spin like that. It's like spinning a volleyball to protect it from a rifle bullet.
"Launch dummy warheads." When the enemy can already barely afford the missiles to launch real warheads, they're supposed to buy three times as many so they can launch dummies? Right. And inflatable dummies CAN be detected (particle beams make good mass detectors, and inflatable dummies don't fly properly within the atmosphere). Dummies the same weight as the real warheads only reduce the number of warheads you can launch. It's like sending out a bomber full of fake bombs. Nobody would do that.
"Launch more missiles." Firstly, this is an inherent admission that the system works against the number of missiles you have now. Secondly, can you afford to BUY more missiles? And how many years will it delay your plans to attack? Do your missiles cost more than the additional defenses to shoot them down?
"Make new missiles that can avoid the countermeasures." If you have to replace your missile fleet to overcome the defense, the defense obviously worked. You can try again next generation, but missile defense won't be sitting still either.
"We don't need missile defense." We have already been attacked by ballistic missiles (the Scuds in the Gulf war). The need IS proven.
When these arguments were inevitably shown to be flawed, there was never any press, though. Sad, really.
Ballistic missile defense is absolutely needed, we're already far beyond the "was SDI a good idea?" phase.
Remember, the US has already been attacked with ballistic missiles (the Scud attacks during the Gulf war). Our defenses didn't do all that well.
We have the ability to create defenses that will work. The kinetic energy interceptors developed by SDI worked. The software to run them worked.
Lastly, if you think 9-11 was bad, imagine an ICBM attack on Manhatten. Even with conventional high-explosive warheads, it would be devastating. And our nuclear arsenal might not be a deterrant, because we would almost certainly not return a non-WMD attack with a nuclear one (pesky ethics).
When reading about Apex DVD players, I found that some models, like the $65 AD-1200s use a normal IDE DVD drive run off their proprietary circuit board.
So, if you could replace their circuit board with a small motherboard, you could turn the Apex DVD player into a mini-PC. You would have to drill out a bunch of holes in the back, or buy a cheap ATX case and chop it apart and use it to hold the motherboard and provide the connector holes. you would also probably need a small PC power supply.
I haven't gotten past the "hmm" stage with this one yet, but it has possibilities.
The big problem would be keeping heat down to a reasonable level. Maybe go for a low-heat or underclocked CPU, and do the decoding on a Hollywood Plus card?
However, it is telling that over 50% of New York citizens do not own cars: Most people get by either living near where they work (not to mention living near everything else too), or taking public transit.
I wonder, though, how many of those 50% simply can't afford a car on top of the already high cost of living in the city. Especially considering how expensive it would be to insure and park it.
I will admit this, though: when I visit New York, I drive to a train station in Jersey, and take the train into the city. Inside the city I go around on foot. For a touristy day-trip, having a car in the city is more hassle and expense than it's worth. Of course I'm not buying anything bulky, and I'm in good enough health to walk around all day, and I only go when the weather is good.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the majority of cars you see on the streets of New York are indeed privately owned passenger cars, not emergency services and cabs. And you forgot to mention trucks, because the city's food and other supplies sure don't get delivered by subway.
Apparently lots of people do need to get around the city in cars.
Don't get me wrong, I love the New York Subway, and wish we had something more like it in Philadelphia. But it's not the end-all and be-all of transportation. Alternatives are good.
The problem is, many books are liked by some and disliked by others, sometimes with vivid intensity on both sides. Take A Game of Thrones, #1 on that list. I utterly hated it, even though it was well-written, and wished I had never picked it up, because the good parts were buried in 800 pages of tedious side plots and futility.
I've found that Amazon reviews are almost always skewed towards the positive, because of the way their review system works. The negative reviews wind up buried 5 pages down, and they're still swamped by all the idiots saying "best book ever." Of course, Amazon is in the business of selling books, and thus has little incentive to provide negative reviews.
What I want to find out is something like "you'll like this if" but "you won't like this if." I haven't found such a site yet.
Another "The Shuttle Sucks - But My Hypothetical Saturn-5-Moon-Colony Idea Rules"
Except that I didn't propose a Saturn V or moon colony.
See the trouble was that the US Public diden't give a shit about the Saturn 5, only the Military/Airplane companies had the clout to get somthing though a Congress that would rather spend money feeding retards.
I wasn't debating history, I was saying it was a bad call, for reasons I stated which you have failed to refute.
So yes, your Saturn 5.1 would have been great - by it never would have been built. I'd rather have the crappy shuttle that is actually running, than somthing that never would have gotten off the crayon drwaing board.
Again, I never proposed building a Saturn V.I. I simply pointed out that the Shuttle program failed to meet its own stated goals, and not by a narrow margin. And again, Saturn V, at the time the decision was made, was already off the drawing board and in production.
So become Benovelent Dictator of these United States - and eventually the Satrun 5.1 will get built. And we can go meet the moon people.
And, while you're at it, throw the doors open for any other company that can put payload x into orbit y for z dollars.
Here's the deal:
You build a launch system and run 2 successful test flights (say, putting aluminum girders and panels and robots up near ISS, so later on we can build a space station that doesn't suck), and we buy 10 launches in 10 years.
You pay your own R&D. If you can't make the launches for the price you bid, you eat the extra cost. At any rate, US Gov doesn't sign a contrct with you until we see the launches. And to be sure, we'll put aside the first 5 launches for unmanned payloads.
You would have to put it into law that NASA and DOD would be forced to buy the launches, so that the next president or congress couldn't weasel out of it.
It gets the NASA beaurocracy almost completely out of the picture, as well as the congressional pork that would otherwise interfere with efficiency.
And, it would get real competition back in. What we're seeing here is the Old Boy's Club of Space.
Firstly, no, the shuttle's primary mission is to launch stuff into space. If all we wanted to do was "learn stuff," we could do it far more economically using subscale unmanned test vehicles.
Secondly, the shuttle was originally supposed to save money vs. the Saturn V. It doesn't. It is at minimum an order of magnitude more expensive to run than the staged rockets it replaced. Just how expensive is not clear: it depends how much of the cost of its infrastructure you include in the cost of a launch. But the absolute minimum I've seen quoted is 300 million a launch, and that does not include infrastructure at all. Compare it to a cost of 20 million for a commercial flight of a Soviet space capsule, which includes both payments on infrastructure and a profit margin. And, because the shuttle was designed at the command of politicians and beaurocrats, the infrastructure is spread all over the country, to spread out the pork and give work to each of the beaurocrats' petty little domains. Why, for instance, didn't we just build the shuttle factory adjacent to the launch site, and cut out the cost of transporting it across the country? Why weren't the landing fields adjacent to the launch site from day one? Why use expensive and dangerous booster rockets? Why build the booster rockets using completely different technology than the main engines? Because it was a beaurocratic clusterfuck, that's why.
The shuttle was supposed to be reusable, so that it could be turned around quickly and relaunched. Instead, it takes months to refit a shuttle.
The shuttle was supposed to be safer than the systems it replaced. Obviously, Challenger blew up, the Saturn V's did not (the crew of Apollo 1 died in a ground test of the capsule, not the rocket). But also, one has to look at the underlying problem of operational complexity: the shuttle is just too damn complicated. It is a credit to the people involved that it has flown as safely as it has.
There were supposed to be many shuttles, flying every few weeks, which would have made each launch less expensive by spreading out the infrastructure costs more. Instead, there are a handful of shuttles, flying about once a year. They're too expensive to build, and take too much time to refit.
I'm not even going to talk about it landing at airports.
Lastly, when you look at Shuttle, you have to point out that at the time we stopped production of the Saturn V, we HAD THE SATURN V ALREADY. The space shuttle cost billions to develop, on top of what we had already spent to develop the Saturn V. Worse, it set the space program back at least 20 years. Hell, we still don't have a replacemnt for the Saturn V.
You know, I'm always annoyed when people bring up Freud in polite conversation. Granted, it was a joke this time, but.
To quote Sam & Max, "You're on the cutting edge of third-grade humor."
I've always thought that Freud's genius lay not in providing any particular insight into the human mind and soul, but rather in selecting imagery so vague that it can be applied to almost anything. Because almost everything in the universe is either kind of round or kind of elongated.
It's about the R&D dollars, son. Sony is apparently throwing what, a billion, 2 billion dollars into the PS3's development?
The XBox also had an R&D budget in the billions of dollars.
The hardware can then be sold at a loss, while Microsoft still makes enough money on game sales to keep up with Sony, who is $$$ in the hole until they sell enough PS2's.
Except that everything I've read on the subject says that it's Sony who's making money on their hardware from day one, and Microsoft who is losing money on each XBox and hoping to make it up in volume. What are your sources?
Furthermore, from the worldwide sales numbers, Microsoft isn't even keeping up with Nintendo, much less Sony.
From what I have read, both the Sony and Nintendo systems are much simpler to manufacture than the XBox, because they have fewer chips and fewer boards and fewer moving parts.
Supposedly we'll see a significant price drop in the US PS2 after E3 at the end of May. This is still just a rumor, but it seems plausible. I would wait to see.
PS2 has enough good games out now to justify buying one, and more are on the way. Plus there are many games available used. That makes it a wise buy.
Wait for PS3? Why not wait for PS4 while you're at it? IMHO, it's better to wait until after the first price cut for a console, then jump on board.
There are downsides to using computer parts instead of a custom design.
One is that the total size of the console is significantly larger than its competitors, which makes it a pain to fit into an already crowded entertainment center.
Also, the custom-designed PS2s and Gamecubes are apparently much cheaper to manufacture in bulk, because they have fewer parts.
Lastly, I don't see how designing a new mobo, gpu and cpu is necessarily simpler than designing a new console-style console.
I should also add that NO add on for consoles has ever been successful.
That's the common wisdom, like "consoles are always sold at a loss," but it's really not true.
Some examples of successful add-ons:
Playstation Analog Controller
Playstation Dance Pads (not as successful as the analog controller, but they've carved out a healthy niche market for themselves).
With the exception of the analog pads, which were eventually made the new standard, it's more accurate to say that add-ons tend to be at least an order of magnitude less successful than the parent console. So you need a big enough consumer base to support your niche markets. The current playstation 2 has a big enough market to support an online adapter as long as the hardware works. It's been proven by the Dreamcast that enough gamers will sign up for good online games to make it profitable, and the Dreamcast market was much smaller than PS2's.
I agree with the rest of your post, though. Especially that it's really all about the games.
I have a black IBM G96 monitor, which has a 19" Trinitoron tube in it and is oh so sweet, but it wasn't cheap, and you can't buy it at your local store.
Spray-painting is kind of awkward, since to do it right you really have to disassemble the monitor, and there is apparently a shock hazard there.
Any experiences with other makes of black monitor? When I did my search, these were the companies I found that were selling black monitors:
Acer
Antec
Compaq
IBM
Micron
Nokia
Toshiba
Viewsonic
I also found Directron to be handy, as they have a whole page full of black system components.
I haven't found a good black keyboard yet. Ideally, they'd start making the good IBM buckling-spring keyboards in black again, and it has been rumored they will, but I have yet to see them for sale. Right now I have a cheapo $19.00 IBM black keyboard, but it really sucks and I want to get rid of it.
Any suggestions? Spray paint is not a good suggestion for the keyboard, since you lose all the lettering.
And for the fine detailing work, on things like nonremovable floppy and DVD drive bezels, get a matte or glossy black paint marker so that you can paint it in place without having to disassemble it.
I got my paint marker at a gun store, where they are sold as touchup markers to fill in scratches on black milspec finishes, but I think art stores carry them too.
Black is pretty sweet, especially once you get a black IBM monitor with a Trinitron tube, like my stealth black G96.
Maybe this is a good movie, but watching the ads made me think of all the movies that were "Die Hard on a bus" or "Die Hard on a cruise ship" or "Die Hard on an airplane."
Our plucky hero, unarmed and trapped inside a building/bus/aircraft carrier full of bad guys must find cunning/gutsy ways to fight back and survive.
Now, some of the movies influenced by Die Hard were good movies (Die Hard on a bus == Speed, Die Hard on a plane == Air Force One), but the formula still gets old after a while.
Couple that with the fact that David Fincher is a director I can very much take or leave, and I think I'll wait for DVD.
Japan's reaction to X-Box was VERY weird. I mean, those people buy A LOT of junk. They live through the junk. They date and fish and hallucinate through the consoles. Japan is the pinnacle of consumption-based philosophy. Why didn't they go for the X-Box? National pride? It was as if old Yancy told everyone that they should ignore the american toy.
And did X-Box have dating and fishing and hallucinating games when it launched in Japan?
Doubt it. Those games all come out for PS2, which has enough market share to support niche markets. "Hmm," says Japanese Consumer, "think I'll get a PS2."
I was really hoping B5:LotR would get picked up as a series.
While the Legends of the Rangers tv-movie wasn't the greatest thing ever committed to screen, I thought that like pizza, not so great B5 is still pretty good, and MUCH better than anything Trek has put out lately.
When I went to see Phantom Menace for the second time, my friends I saw the movie with didn't know Palpatine was the Emperor. They were surprised when I mentioned it in passing.
I only knew because I had picked it up through fanboy channels around the time Jedi came out.
Slashdot Mirror
Acutally, no, time and time again bullshit arguments were rolled out against SDI and given tons of press.
"Put mirrors on the outside of the missiles." Despite the fact that SDI was developing kinetic interceptors, not lasers. Not that mirrors will stop a laser, mind you.
"Spin the missiles." And watch them rip themselves to shreds: ICBMs are actually fairly fragile. They're not built to spin like that. It's like spinning a volleyball to protect it from a rifle bullet.
"Launch dummy warheads." When the enemy can already barely afford the missiles to launch real warheads, they're supposed to buy three times as many so they can launch dummies? Right. And inflatable dummies CAN be detected (particle beams make good mass detectors, and inflatable dummies don't fly properly within the atmosphere). Dummies the same weight as the real warheads only reduce the number of warheads you can launch. It's like sending out a bomber full of fake bombs. Nobody would do that.
"Launch more missiles." Firstly, this is an inherent admission that the system works against the number of missiles you have now. Secondly, can you afford to BUY more missiles? And how many years will it delay your plans to attack? Do your missiles cost more than the additional defenses to shoot them down?
"Make new missiles that can avoid the countermeasures." If you have to replace your missile fleet to overcome the defense, the defense obviously worked. You can try again next generation, but missile defense won't be sitting still either.
"We don't need missile defense." We have already been attacked by ballistic missiles (the Scuds in the Gulf war). The need IS proven.
When these arguments were inevitably shown to be flawed, there was never any press, though. Sad, really.
Jon Acheson
Ballistic missile defense is absolutely needed, we're already far beyond the "was SDI a good idea?" phase.
Remember, the US has already been attacked with ballistic missiles (the Scud attacks during the Gulf war). Our defenses didn't do all that well.
We have the ability to create defenses that will work. The kinetic energy interceptors developed by SDI worked. The software to run them worked.
Lastly, if you think 9-11 was bad, imagine an ICBM attack on Manhatten. Even with conventional high-explosive warheads, it would be devastating. And our nuclear arsenal might not be a deterrant, because we would almost certainly not return a non-WMD attack with a nuclear one (pesky ethics).
Jon Acheson
I take it you're not referring to the absentee ballots that Gore's team threw out?
Jon Acheson
When reading about Apex DVD players, I found that some models, like the $65 AD-1200s use a normal IDE DVD drive run off their proprietary circuit board.
So, if you could replace their circuit board with a small motherboard, you could turn the Apex DVD player into a mini-PC. You would have to drill out a bunch of holes in the back, or buy a cheap ATX case and chop it apart and use it to hold the motherboard and provide the connector holes. you would also probably need a small PC power supply.
I haven't gotten past the "hmm" stage with this one yet, but it has possibilities.
The big problem would be keeping heat down to a reasonable level. Maybe go for a low-heat or underclocked CPU, and do the decoding on a Hollywood Plus card?
Jon Acheson
I wonder, though, how many of those 50% simply can't afford a car on top of the already high cost of living in the city. Especially considering how expensive it would be to insure and park it.
I will admit this, though: when I visit New York, I drive to a train station in Jersey, and take the train into the city. Inside the city I go around on foot. For a touristy day-trip, having a car in the city is more hassle and expense than it's worth. Of course I'm not buying anything bulky, and I'm in good enough health to walk around all day, and I only go when the weather is good.
Jon Acheson
Yeah, or cost less to run than the big rockets it replaced.
Jon Acheson
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the majority of cars you see on the streets of New York are indeed privately owned passenger cars, not emergency services and cabs. And you forgot to mention trucks, because the city's food and other supplies sure don't get delivered by subway.
Apparently lots of people do need to get around the city in cars.
Don't get me wrong, I love the New York Subway, and wish we had something more like it in Philadelphia. But it's not the end-all and be-all of transportation. Alternatives are good.
Jon Acheson
Check out this site for obsessive fanboy analysis.
Jon Acheson
The problem is, many books are liked by some and disliked by others, sometimes with vivid intensity on both sides. Take A Game of Thrones, #1 on that list. I utterly hated it, even though it was well-written, and wished I had never picked it up, because the good parts were buried in 800 pages of tedious side plots and futility.
I've found that Amazon reviews are almost always skewed towards the positive, because of the way their review system works. The negative reviews wind up buried 5 pages down, and they're still swamped by all the idiots saying "best book ever." Of course, Amazon is in the business of selling books, and thus has little incentive to provide negative reviews.
What I want to find out is something like "you'll like this if" but "you won't like this if." I haven't found such a site yet.
Jon Acheson
Except that I didn't propose a Saturn V or moon colony.
I wasn't debating history, I was saying it was a bad call, for reasons I stated which you have failed to refute.
Again, I never proposed building a Saturn V.I. I simply pointed out that the Shuttle program failed to meet its own stated goals, and not by a narrow margin. And again, Saturn V, at the time the decision was made, was already off the drawing board and in production.
Or travel to far-out Planet You.
Jon Acheson
And, while you're at it, throw the doors open for any other company that can put payload x into orbit y for z dollars.
Here's the deal:
You build a launch system and run 2 successful test flights (say, putting aluminum girders and panels and robots up near ISS, so later on we can build a space station that doesn't suck), and we buy 10 launches in 10 years.
You pay your own R&D. If you can't make the launches for the price you bid, you eat the extra cost. At any rate, US Gov doesn't sign a contrct with you until we see the launches. And to be sure, we'll put aside the first 5 launches for unmanned payloads.
You would have to put it into law that NASA and DOD would be forced to buy the launches, so that the next president or congress couldn't weasel out of it.
It gets the NASA beaurocracy almost completely out of the picture, as well as the congressional pork that would otherwise interfere with efficiency.
And, it would get real competition back in. What we're seeing here is the Old Boy's Club of Space.
Jon Acheson
Firstly, no, the shuttle's primary mission is to launch stuff into space. If all we wanted to do was "learn stuff," we could do it far more economically using subscale unmanned test vehicles.
Secondly, the shuttle was originally supposed to save money vs. the Saturn V. It doesn't. It is at minimum an order of magnitude more expensive to run than the staged rockets it replaced. Just how expensive is not clear: it depends how much of the cost of its infrastructure you include in the cost of a launch. But the absolute minimum I've seen quoted is 300 million a launch, and that does not include infrastructure at all. Compare it to a cost of 20 million for a commercial flight of a Soviet space capsule, which includes both payments on infrastructure and a profit margin. And, because the shuttle was designed at the command of politicians and beaurocrats, the infrastructure is spread all over the country, to spread out the pork and give work to each of the beaurocrats' petty little domains. Why, for instance, didn't we just build the shuttle factory adjacent to the launch site, and cut out the cost of transporting it across the country? Why weren't the landing fields adjacent to the launch site from day one? Why use expensive and dangerous booster rockets? Why build the booster rockets using completely different technology than the main engines? Because it was a beaurocratic clusterfuck, that's why.
The shuttle was supposed to be reusable, so that it could be turned around quickly and relaunched. Instead, it takes months to refit a shuttle.
The shuttle was supposed to be safer than the systems it replaced. Obviously, Challenger blew up, the Saturn V's did not (the crew of Apollo 1 died in a ground test of the capsule, not the rocket). But also, one has to look at the underlying problem of operational complexity: the shuttle is just too damn complicated. It is a credit to the people involved that it has flown as safely as it has.
There were supposed to be many shuttles, flying every few weeks, which would have made each launch less expensive by spreading out the infrastructure costs more. Instead, there are a handful of shuttles, flying about once a year. They're too expensive to build, and take too much time to refit.
I'm not even going to talk about it landing at airports.
Lastly, when you look at Shuttle, you have to point out that at the time we stopped production of the Saturn V, we HAD THE SATURN V ALREADY. The space shuttle cost billions to develop, on top of what we had already spent to develop the Saturn V. Worse, it set the space program back at least 20 years. Hell, we still don't have a replacemnt for the Saturn V.
Jon Acheson
You know, I'm always annoyed when people bring up Freud in polite conversation. Granted, it was a joke this time, but.
To quote Sam & Max, "You're on the cutting edge of third-grade humor."
I've always thought that Freud's genius lay not in providing any particular insight into the human mind and soul, but rather in selecting imagery so vague that it can be applied to almost anything. Because almost everything in the universe is either kind of round or kind of elongated.
Jon Acheson
The XBox also had an R&D budget in the billions of dollars.
Except that everything I've read on the subject says that it's Sony who's making money on their hardware from day one, and Microsoft who is losing money on each XBox and hoping to make it up in volume. What are your sources?
Furthermore, from the worldwide sales numbers, Microsoft isn't even keeping up with Nintendo, much less Sony.
From what I have read, both the Sony and Nintendo systems are much simpler to manufacture than the XBox, because they have fewer chips and fewer boards and fewer moving parts.
Jon Acheson
It would cost too much. Gamepads should be cheap, so you can buy 4 of them and play party games.
What I want to know is, why have a memory card slot for each controller? I've never used the ones on the multi-tap, ever.
Just put 2 memory stick slots in the console (for trading saves), and you're good.
Jon Acheson
Supposedly we'll see a significant price drop in the US PS2 after E3 at the end of May. This is still just a rumor, but it seems plausible. I would wait to see.
PS2 has enough good games out now to justify buying one, and more are on the way. Plus there are many games available used. That makes it a wise buy.
Wait for PS3? Why not wait for PS4 while you're at it? IMHO, it's better to wait until after the first price cut for a console, then jump on board.
Jon Acheson
There are downsides to using computer parts instead of a custom design.
One is that the total size of the console is significantly larger than its competitors, which makes it a pain to fit into an already crowded entertainment center.
Also, the custom-designed PS2s and Gamecubes are apparently much cheaper to manufacture in bulk, because they have fewer parts.
Lastly, I don't see how designing a new mobo, gpu and cpu is necessarily simpler than designing a new console-style console.
Jon Acheson
That's the common wisdom, like "consoles are always sold at a loss," but it's really not true.
Some examples of successful add-ons:
With the exception of the analog pads, which were eventually made the new standard, it's more accurate to say that add-ons tend to be at least an order of magnitude less successful than the parent console. So you need a big enough consumer base to support your niche markets. The current playstation 2 has a big enough market to support an online adapter as long as the hardware works. It's been proven by the Dreamcast that enough gamers will sign up for good online games to make it profitable, and the Dreamcast market was much smaller than PS2's.
I agree with the rest of your post, though. Especially that it's really all about the games.
Jon Acheson
Spray-painting is kind of awkward, since to do it right you really have to disassemble the monitor, and there is apparently a shock hazard there.
Any experiences with other makes of black monitor? When I did my search, these were the companies I found that were selling black monitors:
I also found Directron to be handy, as they have a whole page full of black system components.
I haven't found a good black keyboard yet. Ideally, they'd start making the good IBM buckling-spring keyboards in black again, and it has been rumored they will, but I have yet to see them for sale. Right now I have a cheapo $19.00 IBM black keyboard, but it really sucks and I want to get rid of it.
Any suggestions? Spray paint is not a good suggestion for the keyboard, since you lose all the lettering.
Jon Acheson
And for the fine detailing work, on things like nonremovable floppy and DVD drive bezels, get a matte or glossy black paint marker so that you can paint it in place without having to disassemble it.
I got my paint marker at a gun store, where they are sold as touchup markers to fill in scratches on black milspec finishes, but I think art stores carry them too.
Black is pretty sweet, especially once you get a black IBM monitor with a Trinitron tube, like my stealth black G96.
Jon Acheson
Maybe this is a good movie, but watching the ads made me think of all the movies that were "Die Hard on a bus" or "Die Hard on a cruise ship" or "Die Hard on an airplane."
Our plucky hero, unarmed and trapped inside a building/bus/aircraft carrier full of bad guys must find cunning/gutsy ways to fight back and survive.
Now, some of the movies influenced by Die Hard were good movies (Die Hard on a bus == Speed, Die Hard on a plane == Air Force One), but the formula still gets old after a while.
Couple that with the fact that David Fincher is a director I can very much take or leave, and I think I'll wait for DVD.
Jon Acheson
And did X-Box have dating and fishing and hallucinating games when it launched in Japan?
Doubt it. Those games all come out for PS2, which has enough market share to support niche markets. "Hmm," says Japanese Consumer, "think I'll get a PS2."
Jon Acheson
There are Ethernet CF cards already on the market.
Although, that loses you the CF slot.
Jon Acheson
I was really hoping B5:LotR would get picked up as a series.
While the Legends of the Rangers tv-movie wasn't the greatest thing ever committed to screen, I thought that like pizza, not so great B5 is still pretty good, and MUCH better than anything Trek has put out lately.
Jon Acheson
When I went to see Phantom Menace for the second time, my friends I saw the movie with didn't know Palpatine was the Emperor. They were surprised when I mentioned it in passing.
I only knew because I had picked it up through fanboy channels around the time Jedi came out.
Jon Acheson