In the interview, Sophia Stewart claims she sent the Wachowski Brothers her manuscript for "Third Eye" in or around 1986. The Terminator (the original movie) was released in 1984 according to the IMDB entry (and thus must have been in production since at least 1982, movies don't get made overnight ya know).
My first thought was, did she then send her manuscript back in time by 4 years? Okay, so I dismissed her initially too. But then she does say her manuscript was written by 1981, so there is at least a window of possibility when this could have happened.
Doing a little more poking around, some other interesting things that I gleaned from IMDB's trivia page for The Terminator - apparently there was already a lawsuit for that script by Harlan Ellison, with whom James Cameron reached a settlement that included giving him script writing credits for supposedly having used parts of two Ellison-written episodes of the Outer Limits and a short story.
The one thing that does make me suspicious is this blurb: "The initial draft for the movie was sold to Cameron's wife, Gale Anne Hurd for the price of $1 only."
But the primary script writing credit is given to James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. So why no credit for the person they supposedly bought the original script from?
At the very least it sounds like there might be some suspect lineage to the Terminator script as well. So maybe she's not entirely crazy, and maybe this isn't just a case of generally similar sci-fi themes in scripts originating from different sources.
The books they send to the IRS don't break down individual movie profits, they report aggregate profits for the business, and are probably more-or-less honest. Or rather, as honest as any company's are, which is to say, you report as high profits as you can to shareholders, and as low as you can to the IRS, such that it will stand a modicum of scrutiny.
The reports they send to the film-makers are broken down for the individual film, and of course, how you attribute various costs and revenues are easier to fudge. Especially if, say, the studio is collecting fees for various services against the movie's revenues - i.e. transferring profits to the studio's bottom line while keeping the individual films unprofitable.
We are looking for a mainframe CICS C++ programmer with 12 years of Java experience, and an excellent aesthetic sense for web design, who can also do a pirouette on command, with perfect form. Uhh, and salary is 45k. In New York City.
By "pure" quantum mechanics, I meant nonrelativistic QM, explicitly excluding things like the Dirac equation or the Klein-Gordon equation. However, as I remember, as soon as you actually start *doing* anything with those otherwise pristine but rather limited "relativistic QM" equations, you often end up with a bunch of time derivatives liberally strewn about. But like I said, it's been a while, and what I remember best is plain vanilla QM.
And this frustratingly vague article makes a meaningless argument.
It tries to use the fact that we observe no disappearing people, or other strange temporal modifications as an argument that such things don't happen, and are thus impossible. But if somebody actually changed the way a wave function collapsed at some time in the past, why on earth would we expect to remember things from the way it was "before" it had been changed, since the change by definition happened in our own past, and thus to us it always occurred the way it now occurs? This isn't a logical argument. And it explains part of the aesthetic appeal of the many-worlds interpretation.
In pure quantum mechanics, time is a special property because wave function collapse via quantum operators (i.e. "observation") is a privileged thing that moves in only one direction. In general relativity, time doesn't have a privileged status. I don't see how you are going to reconcile that basic difference without coming up with a more complete theory (i.e. quantum gravity, GUT, etc.), but then again, my undergrad physics major knowledge is a bit rusty five years later.
What Nasarius said (though I appear to be on his foes list, I definitely agree with him on this one). There's no excuse for this sort of thinking. Our high school system, at least public high schools, definitely have some major issues in this country.
But if you felt the same way about college, you simply weren't making an effort, or were going to a very crappy school beneath your ability levels. If you can't afford or get into a top private school, then a good state university affords plenty of opportunities for anybody to thoroughly challenge themselves, you just might need to put a bit more work into it.
I really don't see how scientific research rewards "conventional and predictable thinking". Are you suggesting that you are just so much more brilliant than your professors that they fail to recognize your brilliance? Because progress requires a mix of creative, unconventional thinking and the knowledge of work that comes before you to avoid repeating the mistakes of your predecessors. Without both of these, progress comes to a halt.
In any case, you seem to have a strange notion of "working for others". Let me clue you in, mate. Even if you are an entrepreneur, business owner, etc. you are still working for others, unless you already have so much fuck-you money that you answer to nobody. So I have learned from personal experience.
In any case, I fail to see what going to college has to do with working for others. The vast majority of people work for others, whether or not they went to college, and the vast majority of entrepreneurs went to college, whether or not that is relevant to the day-to-day of their current jobs.
Lucas may be a shitty writer and mediocre director, but he clearly has a decent grasp on Roman history, as the political saga backdrop of Star Wars is mostly a transposition to the sci-fi setting of the rise of Caesar Augustus to the Principate. Augustus invented the practice of assuming imperial authority and cloaking it in the niceties and language of the Republic, using the Senate as an instrument to justify and prop up his regime, etc. Heck, the fragmentation of the Republic and civil strife of the Clone Wars in Star Wars even resembles the infighting and factionalism that preceded the Augustan reign.
It's a topic that every American ought to be forced to study extensively in school. I firmly believe that the decline in study of the classics and the attitude that the Graeco-Roman era is "politically incorrect" to focus too much attention on in our history classes, are largely responsible for making such large crops of terrible citizens who don't understand the responsibilities of being a voting member of society and are so easily manipulated by our political leaders.
If our children just read Plato's take on oratory and the political process, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and a couple books on Augustus and the rise of the principate and transition to empire, we'd be much better off as a nation.
The audio engineers just processed it differently, I'm guessing. I mean, I can notice a slight difference, but it doesn't really bother me in any meaningful way. Maybe the droids got a frigging tuneup in the intervening 20 years.
You basically just described the difference between debt and equity. Equity -> ownership stake -> claim on future profit stream. Debt -> loan backed by collateral -> no direct claim on future profits.
If you want to loan money to a company betting that they'll be able to pay it back, with odds stacked in your favor, you can. It's called corporate debt, AKA "junk bonds" (at least in the case of higher yield debt). The bondholder likewise can't walk into the company and fire the CEO. Usually the debt holder doesn't have as much direct upside potential as an equity holder, however, but may be able to use more leverage and a less liquid market to earn superior returns.
In terms of equities, since the only thing that drives value is the fact that your stock certificate or shares held in street name give you a claim on future profits, it's not clear why you'd want to buy those shares if you didn't have a say over the company's operations. What the hell would the incentive for management to perform properly be? What would stop them from just siphoning off profits into their own pockets? How would large share allocations be sold off in IPOs, how would private equity deals be done, etc. etc. etc.
In short, it works this way because it makes sense. The market for non-voting shares might be of interest to retail investors, but the institutionals wouldn't want to touch it, and thus it would lack the liquidity, volume and efficiency they bring to the market.
Don't worry, I'm sure Lucas will have this all "fixed up" for the Super Special Edition Editor's Cut of Ep. 3. Padme won't die, and the youngling padawans will attack Anakin first, so he doesn't seem so "evil".
The amazing thing is the company still has a market cap of almost 20 million dollars (152MM shares outstanding at 13 cents a piece). You could short this thing blind and make money. Too bad no retail broker will let you short a piece of turd 13 cent OTC BB stock like this. And uhh... it's times like this when regulation SHO sucks.:)
Honestly, there's nothing wrong with failing at a legitimate business venture. The problem with this isn't failure, it's that it was never a legitimate business venture. They had no product, no titles, no plan, just a wittle tiny office space and lots of time and energy devoted to raising funds and defrauding investors. This has been clear from the first moment I read anything about these guys.
Agreed for Firefox, some version of the MSI installer process has been around for some time and this same issue has been discussed dozens of times in the Firefox Forums on MozillaZine.
Maybe it's not super fancy, but from what little I know of AD/Windows network administration stuff (not much), I would think that the MSI installer should do the trick just fine.
Parent should be modded up, pretty much answers the entire question.
An adulterer? Geez, I mean I can't keep my pants on around women either. I scarcely even consider that a flaw.
A quick Google search reveals that a lot of people seem to have a serious dislike for Mother Teresa - perhaps her reputation isn't quite so well deserved.
You are right - worshipping an inherently flawed human is a somewhat silly idea. As for fame, yes, it does usually go to those with enough ego to claim their victories loudly and publicly, but I think the suggestion that it always goes to the exploiter is a bit overreaching.
Ahh, that does resolve a rather long-standing point of historical confusion for me. I never really got the impression that Newton was the kind of person who would freely share credit with others, especially given his legendary paranoia and tendency to hoarde his research to himself. So it never did quite make sense that he would go out and make such a magnanimous gesture as to share credit for all his work with his predecessors.
I think I buy the sarcasm explanation. Which makes it all the more funny that the quotation is regularly cited in entirely serious contexts.
This guy redefines the phrase "piece of shit". I'd really hate to see their shitty little publications go out of business. No, seriously. I'd shed a tear or two for that.
What the fuck are you doing working as a Senior Programmer? There's a home in our marketing department for you, which comes with a high six-figure salary and a 40 hour work week!
- Delacroix Winthrop III CEO, Multi-Billion Dollar Fortune 500 Company
Right, the problem is that this was done all bass-ackwards - you need to find a market that exists first, whether you want to sell commercial software or open source software/services.
If the market exists here, which it might, though it sounds like a modest-sized niche to me, then get companies that need this kind of software to pay you to implement the features they need. This is called "sales". It is the core of every software business. If you want to earn money on the project, then you need to sell it, whether it's a commercial or Open Source product.
I disagree. I don't know if I've ever met a scientific "fanatic". What would a scientific fanatic look like? Since scientists believe in a process and method for refining interpretations of the world, and in falsifiability as a prerequisite for objective proof, I can't imagine what a scientific fundamentalist would look like.
There are definitely scientists who adhere to inaccurate views in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but these people generally come around eventually because they are scientists - if they don't, they get ostracized by the mainstream pretty fast (and by virtue of their refusal to accept evidence, cease to be meaningfully "scientific"). There are plenty of areas where scientists strongly disagree with each other's opinions, but I see this as part of the process. I don't know if I'd say either of these situations correspond to fanaticism among scientists.
Insisting that intelligent design is a non-falsifiable and unnecessary theory isn't fanatical in any way.
So, lemme get this straight: they fired the people in an unprofitable part of their business and expanded into profitable endeavours. God, that sounds absolutely evil. Err... maybe that's just basic sound business practice?
Upper management may or may not be rotten, but you don't really explain what was "evil" about their actions.
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In the interview, Sophia Stewart claims she sent the Wachowski Brothers her manuscript for "Third Eye" in or around 1986. The Terminator (the original movie) was released in 1984 according to the IMDB entry (and thus must have been in production since at least 1982, movies don't get made overnight ya know).
My first thought was, did she then send her manuscript back in time by 4 years? Okay, so I dismissed her initially too. But then she does say her manuscript was written by 1981, so there is at least a window of possibility when this could have happened.
Doing a little more poking around, some other interesting things that I gleaned from IMDB's trivia page for The Terminator - apparently there was already a lawsuit for that script by Harlan Ellison, with whom James Cameron reached a settlement that included giving him script writing credits for supposedly having used parts of two Ellison-written episodes of the Outer Limits and a short story.
The one thing that does make me suspicious is this blurb: "The initial draft for the movie was sold to Cameron's wife, Gale Anne Hurd for the price of $1 only."
But the primary script writing credit is given to James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. So why no credit for the person they supposedly bought the original script from?
At the very least it sounds like there might be some suspect lineage to the Terminator script as well. So maybe she's not entirely crazy, and maybe this isn't just a case of generally similar sci-fi themes in scripts originating from different sources.
You seem to have an anger problem. Perhaps you should try therapy?
LOL, awesome post.
The books they send to the IRS don't break down individual movie profits, they report aggregate profits for the business, and are probably more-or-less honest. Or rather, as honest as any company's are, which is to say, you report as high profits as you can to shareholders, and as low as you can to the IRS, such that it will stand a modicum of scrutiny.
The reports they send to the film-makers are broken down for the individual film, and of course, how you attribute various costs and revenues are easier to fudge. Especially if, say, the studio is collecting fees for various services against the movie's revenues - i.e. transferring profits to the studio's bottom line while keeping the individual films unprofitable.
We are looking for a mainframe CICS C++ programmer with 12 years of Java experience, and an excellent aesthetic sense for web design, who can also do a pirouette on command, with perfect form. Uhh, and salary is 45k. In New York City.
By "pure" quantum mechanics, I meant nonrelativistic QM, explicitly excluding things like the Dirac equation or the Klein-Gordon equation. However, as I remember, as soon as you actually start *doing* anything with those otherwise pristine but rather limited "relativistic QM" equations, you often end up with a bunch of time derivatives liberally strewn about. But like I said, it's been a while, and what I remember best is plain vanilla QM.
Yes, it sounds similar.
And this frustratingly vague article makes a meaningless argument.
It tries to use the fact that we observe no disappearing people, or other strange temporal modifications as an argument that such things don't happen, and are thus impossible. But if somebody actually changed the way a wave function collapsed at some time in the past, why on earth would we expect to remember things from the way it was "before" it had been changed, since the change by definition happened in our own past, and thus to us it always occurred the way it now occurs? This isn't a logical argument. And it explains part of the aesthetic appeal of the many-worlds interpretation.
In pure quantum mechanics, time is a special property because wave function collapse via quantum operators (i.e. "observation") is a privileged thing that moves in only one direction. In general relativity, time doesn't have a privileged status. I don't see how you are going to reconcile that basic difference without coming up with a more complete theory (i.e. quantum gravity, GUT, etc.), but then again, my undergrad physics major knowledge is a bit rusty five years later.
What Nasarius said (though I appear to be on his foes list, I definitely agree with him on this one). There's no excuse for this sort of thinking. Our high school system, at least public high schools, definitely have some major issues in this country.
But if you felt the same way about college, you simply weren't making an effort, or were going to a very crappy school beneath your ability levels. If you can't afford or get into a top private school, then a good state university affords plenty of opportunities for anybody to thoroughly challenge themselves, you just might need to put a bit more work into it.
I really don't see how scientific research rewards "conventional and predictable thinking". Are you suggesting that you are just so much more brilliant than your professors that they fail to recognize your brilliance? Because progress requires a mix of creative, unconventional thinking and the knowledge of work that comes before you to avoid repeating the mistakes of your predecessors. Without both of these, progress comes to a halt.
In any case, you seem to have a strange notion of "working for others". Let me clue you in, mate. Even if you are an entrepreneur, business owner, etc. you are still working for others, unless you already have so much fuck-you money that you answer to nobody. So I have learned from personal experience.
In any case, I fail to see what going to college has to do with working for others. The vast majority of people work for others, whether or not they went to college, and the vast majority of entrepreneurs went to college, whether or not that is relevant to the day-to-day of their current jobs.
Lucas may be a shitty writer and mediocre director, but he clearly has a decent grasp on Roman history, as the political saga backdrop of Star Wars is mostly a transposition to the sci-fi setting of the rise of Caesar Augustus to the Principate. Augustus invented the practice of assuming imperial authority and cloaking it in the niceties and language of the Republic, using the Senate as an instrument to justify and prop up his regime, etc. Heck, the fragmentation of the Republic and civil strife of the Clone Wars in Star Wars even resembles the infighting and factionalism that preceded the Augustan reign.
It's a topic that every American ought to be forced to study extensively in school. I firmly believe that the decline in study of the classics and the attitude that the Graeco-Roman era is "politically incorrect" to focus too much attention on in our history classes, are largely responsible for making such large crops of terrible citizens who don't understand the responsibilities of being a voting member of society and are so easily manipulated by our political leaders.
If our children just read Plato's take on oratory and the political process, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and a couple books on Augustus and the rise of the principate and transition to empire, we'd be much better off as a nation.
Seriously, the last time a girl had a pants/no pants continuity error in my apartment, I knew I was in for a good night.
And if it were Natalie Portman, let's just say there'd be some serious petrification and hot grits going on.
The audio engineers just processed it differently, I'm guessing. I mean, I can notice a slight difference, but it doesn't really bother me in any meaningful way. Maybe the droids got a frigging tuneup in the intervening 20 years.
You basically just described the difference between debt and equity. Equity -> ownership stake -> claim on future profit stream. Debt -> loan backed by collateral -> no direct claim on future profits.
If you want to loan money to a company betting that they'll be able to pay it back, with odds stacked in your favor, you can. It's called corporate debt, AKA "junk bonds" (at least in the case of higher yield debt). The bondholder likewise can't walk into the company and fire the CEO. Usually the debt holder doesn't have as much direct upside potential as an equity holder, however, but may be able to use more leverage and a less liquid market to earn superior returns.
In terms of equities, since the only thing that drives value is the fact that your stock certificate or shares held in street name give you a claim on future profits, it's not clear why you'd want to buy those shares if you didn't have a say over the company's operations. What the hell would the incentive for management to perform properly be? What would stop them from just siphoning off profits into their own pockets? How would large share allocations be sold off in IPOs, how would private equity deals be done, etc. etc. etc.
In short, it works this way because it makes sense. The market for non-voting shares might be of interest to retail investors, but the institutionals wouldn't want to touch it, and thus it would lack the liquidity, volume and efficiency they bring to the market.
What's scary about this is that it implies that the guy translating the script into Spanish did a better job than Lucas writing it in English.
Don't worry, I'm sure Lucas will have this all "fixed up" for the Super Special Edition Editor's Cut of Ep. 3. Padme won't die, and the youngling padawans will attack Anakin first, so he doesn't seem so "evil".
The amazing thing is the company still has a market cap of almost 20 million dollars (152MM shares outstanding at 13 cents a piece). You could short this thing blind and make money. Too bad no retail broker will let you short a piece of turd 13 cent OTC BB stock like this. And uhh... it's times like this when regulation SHO sucks. :)
Honestly, there's nothing wrong with failing at a legitimate business venture. The problem with this isn't failure, it's that it was never a legitimate business venture. They had no product, no titles, no plan, just a wittle tiny office space and lots of time and energy devoted to raising funds and defrauding investors. This has been clear from the first moment I read anything about these guys.
Agreed for Firefox, some version of the MSI installer process has been around for some time and this same issue has been discussed dozens of times in the Firefox Forums on MozillaZine.
Maybe it's not super fancy, but from what little I know of AD/Windows network administration stuff (not much), I would think that the MSI installer should do the trick just fine.
Parent should be modded up, pretty much answers the entire question.
An adulterer? Geez, I mean I can't keep my pants on around women either. I scarcely even consider that a flaw.
A quick Google search reveals that a lot of people seem to have a serious dislike for Mother Teresa - perhaps her reputation isn't quite so well deserved.
You are right - worshipping an inherently flawed human is a somewhat silly idea. As for fame, yes, it does usually go to those with enough ego to claim their victories loudly and publicly, but I think the suggestion that it always goes to the exploiter is a bit overreaching.
Ahh, that does resolve a rather long-standing point of historical confusion for me. I never really got the impression that Newton was the kind of person who would freely share credit with others, especially given his legendary paranoia and tendency to hoarde his research to himself. So it never did quite make sense that he would go out and make such a magnanimous gesture as to share credit for all his work with his predecessors.
I think I buy the sarcasm explanation. Which makes it all the more funny that the quotation is regularly cited in entirely serious contexts.
This guy redefines the phrase "piece of shit". I'd really hate to see their shitty little publications go out of business. No, seriously. I'd shed a tear or two for that.
Dear AstroDrabb,
What the fuck are you doing working as a Senior Programmer? There's a home in our marketing department for you, which comes with a high six-figure salary and a 40 hour work week!
- Delacroix Winthrop III
CEO, Multi-Billion Dollar Fortune 500 Company
Right, the problem is that this was done all bass-ackwards - you need to find a market that exists first, whether you want to sell commercial software or open source software/services.
If the market exists here, which it might, though it sounds like a modest-sized niche to me, then get companies that need this kind of software to pay you to implement the features they need. This is called "sales". It is the core of every software business. If you want to earn money on the project, then you need to sell it, whether it's a commercial or Open Source product.
I disagree. I don't know if I've ever met a scientific "fanatic". What would a scientific fanatic look like? Since scientists believe in a process and method for refining interpretations of the world, and in falsifiability as a prerequisite for objective proof, I can't imagine what a scientific fundamentalist would look like.
There are definitely scientists who adhere to inaccurate views in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but these people generally come around eventually because they are scientists - if they don't, they get ostracized by the mainstream pretty fast (and by virtue of their refusal to accept evidence, cease to be meaningfully "scientific"). There are plenty of areas where scientists strongly disagree with each other's opinions, but I see this as part of the process. I don't know if I'd say either of these situations correspond to fanaticism among scientists.
Insisting that intelligent design is a non-falsifiable and unnecessary theory isn't fanatical in any way.
So, lemme get this straight: they fired the people in an unprofitable part of their business and expanded into profitable endeavours. God, that sounds absolutely evil. Err... maybe that's just basic sound business practice?
Upper management may or may not be rotten, but you don't really explain what was "evil" about their actions.
"No I swear, I don't just look at the posts, I read it for the filings!"