OSS isn't a monolithic group, like Microsoft. It's comprised of hundreds of thousands of separate developers working on tens of thousands of projects. Which of those developers are making this claim?
1. To be the saviour of computing from Microsoft
Which OSS projects have made this claim?
2. Brag about how 'uber' they are
Again, which OSS projects have made this claim? There are definitely OSS fanboys who like to trumpet OSS, but in my experience, the actual people writing OSS projects don't do this very much.
At any rate, I said in my original post that there certainly were OSS developers who were arrogant, and why that arrogance was less scornworthy than Microsoft's. So I'm not sure what we're arguing about, since we basically said the same thing.
The Slashdot crowd already brags enough to be classiedfied as arrogant. They bassical brag about how uber they are, and if they release bad software or a bug is found they claim it will be fixed shortly...
What software has "the Slashdot crowd" released, exactly? I wasn't aware they were working on any collective projects.
(unless your mozilla and you just don't publish the bug until you fix it, no matter how long you knew about it)
All known Mozilla bugs are listed on Bugzilla, aren't they? It may not be quite the same as sending out a press release, but they don't appear to be trying to hide anything. At least, not as a systemic thing; I'd be surprised if NONE of the Mozilla developers had ever hidden ANYTHING from the public, but then I wouldn't claim that they hadn't.
My bad; I didn't know it wasn't part of the spec. Nonetheless, MS has in the past both spoken of its commitment to open web standards (and partly implementing them is not much of a commitment), and from what I've been able to find with a little Googling, MS stated sometime around 2000 that they intended to implement the full PNG spec, which they haven't. So even if it's not a bug, it's at least a broken promise.
But, to be fair, there are many who run around claiming that oss is inherently more secure than closed source software. While I agree it is silly to blame the developers themselves, I think it is valid to make the point that some oss advocates are wrong.
I would think that whether or not OSS development methods are inherently more secure (or stable, or featureful, or efficient, etc.) than closed development methods is a separate argument from whether Microsoft deserves extra scorn because of its attitude.
I can't imagine that there are really that many people who claim that OSS produces software with no bugs, are there? Yes, I'm aware of the various rhetoric spewed by both sides, but claiming that OSS produces better software is reasonable. (Whether it's true is another story, but on the surface it's a reasonable thing to say.)
I guess I'd want to be sure what it is you think OSS advocates are wrong about before I go off trying to prove you wrong (assuming that, once I know what you're talking about, I disagree with you), so let's start from there.;)
There's a particular comment which we'll see about a thousand times on this thread alone, the gist of which will be, "See? Even open source has bugs/security holes! It's no better than Microsoft!"
The reason we bash Microsoft for its bugs and security holes is not because they have bugs and holes; the reason is that Microsoft paints itself as the savior of computing, as software that will make your life infallibly better and easier, and along the way has made quite a lot of unethical business decisions. They basically brag about how uber they are, and then they release crappy software and frequently take forever to fix certain bugs (or simply never fix them -- e.g. PNG transparency in IE. What's it at, 3 years and counting? 4?).
The guys who write open source stuff like GdkPixBuf, on the other hand, have not (to my knowledge) done these things. They are thus not deserving of scorn; they write software, release it, and say, "I wrote this because I needed it. If you want to try it out, here you go. Have fun; I don't promise anything."
That's why we mock Microsoft for its bugs and not the GDK team.
(To be fair, I'm certain that there are some OS projects whose developers are as arrogant as Microsoft, but they at least do not have the unethical business history Microsoft does, nor do they (still!) have a monopoly on desktop OSes that they continue to abuse to the detriment of everyone except themselves. It's one thing to be an asshole when you're nobody important; it's quite another when you have a great deal of power.)
You make it sound as if Bill Gates intentionally went out of his way to make Kildall's life miserable.
Did you actually read my post? The very first sentence was:
Not that this is what happened with Gates and Kildall,
I was attacking the idea that someone cannot be at all responsible for someone else's suicide; I said (nor implied) nothing about whether Bill Gates was specifically responsible for Kildall's suicide. (I didn't even know who Kildall was until after I posted and went and looked it up.)
It's possible that Gates was partially responsible, but the facts I can find are scant; I don't have enough information to say whether Gates was at all responsible for Kildall's death. The links I found didn't even suggest that Kildall committed suicide (both Wikipedia and another page mention that he fell off a ladder), so I'm not even sure where the suicide idea comes from.
It appears Bill has truly acted altruistically here.
A truly altruistic donation, in my view, would have been anonymous and would have been with no strings attached -- "Here's $20 million. Do whatever you want with it. - Anonymous" With his name still attached to it, and with it going to build a building that will be named after him, he reaps the publicity benefits. Altruism means that you get nothing out of the deal; you only give. (Well, nothing measurable; maybe you feel real good about it.)
How can we reconcile this seeming incongruity? By adopting the following reasoning: "$20 million for a building?! People on this planet are still starving to death! The ego!"
Yes, because everyone on Slashdot has the same simplistic attitude toward Bill Gates.
Funny thing about Carnegie Mellon -- there's a lot of people there who spell Microsoft with a dollar sign and refer to it as the "evil empire," yet every Microsoft presentation is standing-room only.
Are you sure the people crowding the MS presentations are the same ones who claim to hate MS otherwise? Maybe it's Howard Stern syndrome -- used to be that the people who spent the most time listening to his show per day were the ones who hated him the most. I guess they got off on the outrage. Could be the same deal.
Or it could just be that CMU is a school really, really into computers, and so there's lots of MS haters AND MS boosters there -- enough to fill a presentation hall when MS shows up, and enough more to bash MS the rest of the time.
If you take the decision to kill yourself, no external factor is to blame.
Not that this is what happened with Gates and Kildall, but if I were to (for example) manipulate a person's life so as to get them fired from their job, bury them under a mountain of debt, cause problems with his marriage, and generally make his life a living hell, and then he committed suicide, you don't think I would bear ANY of the responsibility for it? I certainly do. And lesser actions of mine would similarly bear a smaller, but nonzero, responsibility.
Saying that external factors cannot affect a person's decision to commit suicide doesn't seem reasonable. It's the same as saying that external factors cannot affect us at all, for any reason. Even if I did the evil things above, I certainly wouldn't be entirely to blame for his suicide (after all, he pulled the trigger, or took the pill, leapt off the bridge, whatever), but if I set up circumstances to the point where he felt like he had no way out, I would be at least partly culpable, by any reasonable moral standard. (I don't know if I could be held legally liable, in a criminal sense, although I probably could be successfully sued in civil court for wrongful death, or somesuch, assuming that his family could provide evidence).
I don't think that responsibility is always (or even usually) as simple as "one person is completely responsible for this." If a person commits a crime, and if external circumstances can affect that, then that person is still ultimately responsible, but it doesn't mean that we should relieve him of any responsibility and let him off scot-free, NOR does it mean that we should blame him entirely and not take a hard look at what society is doing that might encourage him to be criminal.
This really is getting off-topic; maybe I'll write a journal entry about it.
I'll repeat MY points again, and I won't go down the road of your insane interpretations of these points:
I have oberved that Hollywood release, within a one year lapse, the same basic movie repeatedly, under different names from different companies.
This is changing some of the connotative and denotative elements of your original argument, but that's fine, it's still more or less the same point.
My observation is that there is a definate pattern to this. I advanced a vague notion of why this might be happening. You attacked the observation by explaining in great detail why the vague explanation can't be it. That's stupid, arrogant and insulting.
It's stupid to point out why someone is incorrect about something? It's arrogant, when you know more about why something happens than they do? It's insulting? Now I'm confused; should I just have let your original post stand, even though it advanced a theory that I know to be false? I assume that's not what you mean. Do you mean that you agree with my explanation, but think I was rude about presenting it?
My obsevation is valid, the "why" is unknown to me.
I explained the "why" in my original response. You have not yet given any arguments as to why my explanation is incorrect.
Plot. Not premise.
Semantics. Unimportant.
*dirtside chokes on his water and coughs for a minute*
Are you serious? Changing whether you're talking about the plot or premise makes your argument COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! They're DIFFERENT! Jesus. No wonder we're having so many problems communicating.
Like I said, call it plot, premise, whatever. I call it "basic idea". Like "Alien invasion", or "Haunted House", or "Object from the sky". The house might be an appartment, the invasion might be time travelling borgs or society-infiltrating inverse-legged grey aliens. Its the concept. The thing that can be expressed in a trailer. The essence.
The "thing that can be expressed in a trailer" is the premise. "Alien invasion" is the plot premise; "haunted house" is a setting (and more specifically, a subgenre of horror). They are not comparable; there is no element known as "the essence" of a movie. I think what you're grasping for is the idea that these movies share a common core element, but the category of what they share is not common. "Alien invasion" is a bunch of events; "Steve Prefontaine" is a protagonist (there were two biopics about Pre back in 1997/1998). These movies do not commonly share a premise, plot, or setting; what they share is some specific, highly identifiable element, and there's no specific name for that, like "premise" or "plot" or "protagonist" or "essence" or "thing that can be expressed in a trailer."
Basically, you're using the wrong terminology.
But it was a volcano. You're obtuse about this.
It wasn't any of those other things. They had the same fad.
Ah, here it begins: "They had the same fad." Thus implying that the reason that these core elements showed up in multiple movies is because one studio decided to make a movie on that topic, and then another studio decided to copy that core element. I already debunked this idea in my original response, and you have not yet addressed that topic at all -- and suddenly you're just claiming that this is the way it is, without a single shred of evidence.
Do you have any particular evidence that the reason the Power Rangers' creature was in a volcano was because they knew about Dante's Peak and Volcano? Does the fact that "Turbo" came out between Dante's Peak and Volcano affect this at all? Surely if they were following the fad, it would have come out later.
My point is about movie fads. Saying that they could have not followed the fad doesn't invalidate the fact that the
There are 16 year old slashdotters who might like to read a good book without having its ending spelled out to them by inconsiderate people. Its common courtesy. You fail to use, that irritates me.
Your repeated typographical and grammatical mistakes annoy me. Good, now we both have reasons to find each other annoying. Moving on.
I was pointing out the differences to illustrate why I thought you were wrong to call it "ripping off." Explicitly stating the nature of the endings was necessary because someone who was unfamiliar with "Childhood's End" would not necessarily understand why they were different [...] I certainly could have put in a "spoiler" tag, but then I think that the number of people who A) read my post, B) didn't know the ending of "Childhood's End," and C) became or will become upset about my revealing it, can probably be counted on the knuckles of one finger.
The fact that I need to point this out is why I think you are not intelligent:
You felt the need of revealing the ending because you want to illustrate it to people unfamiliar with it.
Your logic for not using the spoiler tag is that you don't think there is enough people who will read it that don't know the ending.
Do you see how this is contradictory, or do you need it spelled out for you even more?
No, but apparently you do: I consider the number of people who meet A and B and C insignificant, but not the number of people who meet only criteria A and B. To rephrase, I think there are more people who would need to understand the ending than would be annoyed at having it spoiled for them. Maybe my estimate is wrong, but my logic isn't. Actually, my estimate can't be wrong, I don't think: The number of people who didn't know the ending (B) cannot be smaller than the number of people who would get upset that I spoiled it (C), because C is a strict subset of B. Although I suppose people who did know the ending could be upset that I spoiled it for other people.
In that event, I misstated the conditions: C) consists of people who would be upset that I spoiled the ending for them only. I am ignoring those who get upset on other peoples' behalf because of plot spoilers.
Again, you don't get it. Possibly deliberatly, you might be a clever troll. Inteligent and evil, it happens.
No, the considerate part refers to the revealing of plot details. And again, the age of the work in question is completely irrelevent to the possibility that someone might read your post before reading the book. The fact that you don't understand this is why I question your intelligence.
What I don't quite get is your insistence that, because someone made a logical error (which I did not, as explained just above), they can be characterized as "unintelligent." That is not remotely rational.
Tell me, what is the amount of harm that is your limit?
Much like the legal system, I have to look at it on the case by case basis. Spoiling the ending of a book for a couple of people, I consider insignificant.
I do hope your willingness to casually inflict harm stops before that. Being a jackass that can't talk about a book or movie without stating the punch of the story is one thing
Because, you know, because I spoiled something this one time, I'm completely incapable of preventing myself from spoiling any book or movie that I might discuss. Yeah. Why do you keep calling me unintelligent, and then make ridiculous generalizations like this?
but raping innocents, that's an order of magnitude above the villany you have shown in this thread!
Yes, because there's no way that I was making a sarcastic point about how you are exaggerating the harm caused by the spoiler reveal.
They both have the same premise: A dormant volcano will erupt and kill lots of people unless our heros do something about it.
I noticed that your post said nothing about the other point (why these multiple movies happen), so I'm going to assume you concede that point.
I just noticed that your original post in this thread said:
Look into it deeper, and you will find that every year the same basic plot is made into at least 3 major studio movies.
Plot. Not premise. You were talking about plots, not premises, and you yourself have said they're different (plot is the whole story, premise is where it begins). So which is it? Hollywood makes multiple movies with the same plot or same premise? We've already agreed that they DO make movies with a similar core element but I don't know if it's reasonable to characterize them as having the same story, just because they have a similar core element.
Again, dormant volcano, will kill many people, heroes must save the day. What? Doesn't count 'cause its got power rangers innit?
This one doesn't count because the danger comes from some kind of creature imprisoned inside the volcano, not from the volcano itself. The volcano is immaterial and incidental to the story; the creature could be imprisoned under a seabed or in a magic vault or inside a sandwich without changing the core of the story. In "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak," the volcanoes themselves are the threat. Replace the volcano in those stories with another threat (asteroid, earthquake, aliens) and the story fundamentally changes.
Also, on the other thread we're arguing on, you seem to think that a premise can be really specific: 1) City-sized alien spaceships 2) appear suddenly, then 3) hover silently for a while over 4) large Earth metropolises. Yet here, a premise can contain as few as two elements: "1) A dormant volcano will erupt and kill lots of people 2) unless our heros do something about it." Of course, the second half of the premise is also part of the premise of every story ever, and so can be removed from the premise, meaning that it only contains one element: "A volcano threatens a city."
Reducing a premise to one element does not mean two movies share a plot or premise.
1996: Alien invasions!
* Indepedance Day
* Mars Attacks
* The Arrival
* Star Trek: First Contact
This I agree with; ID4, MA, and The Arrival all share the same basic premise (although the plots diverge wildly): aliens are trying to take over Earth. I wouldn't quite put ST: FC in with the others, because it was part of a franchise, and it had certain other elements that radically alter the plot (the aliens actually succeed in conquering Earth; the heroes use time travel to go back in time and stop them).
1997: Volcanos!
1998: Comets/Meteors!
Two movies each. Already explained why the Power Rangers movie should not be considered a "volcano" movie.
1999: Haunted houses!
* House on haunted hill
* 6th sense
* The Haunted
The Sixth Sense is not a "haunted house" movie by any stretch--
WARNING!!! SCRAMEUSTACHE IS EXTREMELY SENSITIVE ABOUT SPOILERS, AND YOU MIGHT BE TOO! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN "THE SIXTH SENSE," I RECOMMEND YOU NOT READ FURTHER!! THAT IS ALL!!
--of the imagination. The ghost is the protagonist, rather than an adversary (or secondary character), he is not evil, there is no particular house that's haunted (Malcolm is free to go where he wants; he doesn't even know he's dead until the end).
All you've demonstrated is that, since 1996, there has been at least one year where there were three movies distributed by one of the major Hollywood studios that all had a very similar
It makes me sad to share a love of Firefly with you. Alas.
There was no use of you telling me what the story is since its blindingly obvious I'm familiar with it.
I was pointing out the differences to illustrate why I thought you were wrong to call it "ripping off." Explicitly stating the nature of the endings was necessary because someone who was unfamiliar with "Childhood's End" would not necessarily understand why they were different (or at least might not be willing to accept my word on that fact, without knowing the nature of the endings). Too, someone who had once read Childhood's End, but had forgotten what happened, would certainly be happy for the reminder.
I certainly could have put in a "spoiler" tag, but then I think that the number of people who A) read my post, B) didn't know the ending of "Childhood's End," and C) became or will become upset about my revealing it, can probably be counted on the knuckles of one finger. There's a legal doctrine called de minimis; I'm going to callously assume that not everyone knows what it means, and quote here from law.com:
adj. (dee-minnie-miss) Latin for "of minimum importance" or "trifling." Essentially it refers to something or a difference that is so little, small, minuscule or tiny that the law does not refer to it and will not consider it. In a million dollar deal, a $10 mistake is de minimis.
In essence, the amount of harm caused by my spoiler reveal is insignificant. Moving on.
An intelligent, considerate person would have been able to discuss it without spelling out the ending of the story.
Ah, a subtle (?) implication that I'm neither intelligent nor considerate! I wasn't aware that refusal to publicly reveal the ending to a forty-six-year old novel was a prerequisite for intelligence and consideration. I suppose that it's the most logical standard by which to measure intelligence. I mean, problem-solving ability, learning capacity, ability to think abstractly; what are these when compared to the ability to refrain from revealing plot details from half-century-old fiction? I am both chagrined and humbled.
They don't limit it to "aliens invade with flying saucers".
They rip it off with "Aliens show up surprisingly on earth one day with giant city-sized spaceships, place them over major cities, let them hover silently for a while".
I'm curious if there is some objective standard by which one can determine if a premise is "ripped off," and not merely "similar." Is it due to the number of specific elements of the premise? What constitutes a discrete element? If they had not appeared suddenly, but had been hovering silently over metropolises in giant spaceships, would that be "ripped off"? What if the spaceships were the size of houses, but hovered silently over metropolises? You seem to identify four major elements of this "rip off" (1. giant spaceships, 2. appearing suddenly, then 3. hovering silently, 4. over metropolises), and I wonder whether if they had only used 2 or 3 of those elements, it would constitute a rip-off. What if they'd had one or two days' warning that the big ships were coming? And the ships were only suburb-sized? And made a weird buzzing noise instead of being silent? And only hovered over medium-sized cities?
But this is just pedantry; my ultimate point is that it is not useful in any way to characterize their usage as a "rip off," and thus implicitly deserving of scorn and derision, when the resolution of the stories differs from the original. (Especially when it differs so drastically, viz. peaceful transcendence vs. planetary domination (or attempt at thereof).)
Yeah, I'm gonna write a story about a highschool boy who's bitten by a radioactive spider that gives him spider powers, but then he becomes rich and famous by using his gifts to publically become a war hero who helps def
Nice. I point out that your post is totally off-topic,
Even though it was on topic. Somehow you don't seem to be able to grasp this relatively simple concept.
and I'm supposed to be the troll here? Nice try, but no.
Oh, that was just a general insult; I don't mean that you're actually a troll in the usual Slashdot sense. Why you chose to be so hostile with your original post, I have no idea, considering that what I originally posted was a nice, calm bit of discussion about flywheels.
As a result, I decided to take out some of my aggression on you, as you presented a nice, convenient target.
A quick look at your stats shows that you get moderated as a troll regularly.
Not sure what stats you mean; there's one troll mod listed on my last 24 posts, and I guess I don't consider revealing the ending of a 50-year old novel to be a "spoiler," let alone a troll.
Now take a look at my info page... See any "Troll" mods? Guess not.
That proves you're better than me! Of course, if you want to measure dick lengths, your last 24 posts have combined mods of +2, while mine have combined mods of +11 (the earlier post at 1 was posted without karma bonus). Looks like you're either unable to post things that are interesting, insightful, or informative; or you're just not willing to risk unpopular moderations and maybe keep your posts in check. Who knows?
Oh, but that's not all. Let's look at your website. There's a few good quotes on it like "I hunt you down like a dog" "Your mom" and "If you don't like the page, BITE ME". And if that didn't make it offensive enough
Offensive to who? Dogs and your mom, or people who are unable to bite things?
you have a picture of your wife on there too.
And this is relevant how, exactly? I think I'm beginning to understand why you so rarely get modded up. Unable to comprehend simple concepts, attack targets that are completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, can't even count for Christ's sake.
You don't have to go into full blown spoiler territory (i.e. revealing the overseers goals when that is the question asked throughout most of the book)
Blah blah whiny spoiler-cakes deep in a Slashdot thread. Moving on.
to tell me I was only referring to the premise.
Yeah, but your point was that they "ripped off" Clarke by having the same premise. I don't agree that they ripped off Clarke any more than Chasing Amy rips off a Shakespeare comedy because it has the same basic premise of "boy meets girl."
If they'd had the same premise and then used it to get to the same (or a similar) conclusion, that would be another story, but to call using a similar premise in order to go in a completely different direction "ripping off" is absurd.
I didn't say "greenlighted", I said "released the same year". 3 movies with the same basic plot released in a one-year time frame is very common.
You didn't say "released the same year," you said:
you will find that every year the same basic plot is made into at least 3 major studio movies.
That is quite distinct from "released," is much closer to "greenlighted and put into production," and in any case still has nothing to do with your last point, which is the one I was actually refuting:
Its as though one studio starts making a film, and the others rush into production with a basic description "comets will destroy the earth, a team with spaceships try to stop it", "haunted house", "alien invasion", "airplane crashes", "superhero", etc.
I was refuting this statement, not the one that says that multiple movies with the same basic premise come out each year. I was explaining the reason for it (coincidence), and refuting your proposed reason (deliberate copying).
Anyway, the ONLY example you gave of 3 movies with similar premises (and they aren't that similar) was the Matrix/Existenz/13th Floor one. All the others were pairs of movies. Can you name other groups of 3 movies that came out within a year of each other and all had the same premise? ("Same genre," like superhero movies or horror movies, does not mean the same premise.)
Armageddon and Deep Impact had the same premise: A giant asteroid is going to hit Earth, and we have to stop it. Dante's Peak and Volcano don't really have the same premise, they just have the same primary element: a volcano. The premise of Dante's Peak is that a supposedly extinct volcano is going to erupt and destroy a peaceful mountain town. The premise of Volcano is that a previously unknown volcano erupts under Los Angeles, and the heroes have to figure out how to save as many lives as possible.
Since you apparently have the approximate intelligence of used flypaper, I'll try to use small words and speak slowly. (However, I will fail, just because I like using big words to insult people.)
What? Do you want a story about flywheels posted on the front-page of/. every week?
Yes, that's what I meant. By "that's what I meant," of course, I mean, "you'd have to be a fucking retard to think that's what I meant."
There has been plenty of discussion about flywheels before.
I meant that I hadn't seen anybody mention flywheels yet in this discussion. Naturally you assume I meant that I had never heard ANYONE mention flywheels, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to assume, if you're a clinical imbecile.
What exactly do you want?
I want your gonads to be torn to shreds by a pack of rampaging weasels.
You bring this up out of nowhere, and don't relate it to the story in the slightest.
Except that I wrote:
It's not a highly developed technology yet, but mostly because we have little need for large-scale energy storage (because we have enough power plants that can provide peak production when it's usually needed), but flywheels combine well with intermittent generation technologies like wind and solar.
...which ties it in to the fact that this story is about wind power generation. Even if I hadn't written the italicized part above, discussion of energy storage technologies actually ties in quite well to stories about energy generation. However, you'd actually have to have functioning neurons in order to comprehend this, and so I can understand why you're doing your impression of a subliterate lamppost.
In conclusion, fuck you, you useless trolling wanker.
No; because it's fun to bitch at people who are ignorant about the language, or blindly apply certain language rules because they're stupid.
Just because we know that he meant "scenarios" doesn't mean we think it's acceptable to try and pluralize it in an absurd way. It's painful and annoying to read, and I try to get people to stop it when they do painful, annoying things to me.
Eye doo knot suh pose ewe wood mined if eye rote like dis, even though ewe kin figger owt wut I meen? Of course you would, it's hard to read and it's annoying. Just because he only misspelled one word doesn't mean we should ignore it; otherwise you have to arbitrarily decide that a certain number of errors per sentence are okay, but beyond that you can start complaining. I like to take a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to absurd shit like "scenarii," even though I'll ignore it when someone makes a simple typo. (And sometimes I don't have the particular desire or energy to point out annoying mistakes, such as putting an extra space between the last word in the sentence and the question mark which follows it.)
And instead of coming up with a new idea and story, they rehash the old ones. And if the old ones don't fit a demographic or specific plot, it's altered to match it.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with an original idea, not to mention write a great script based on it, and then make a good movie based on that script? This is not something trivial, no matter how easy you think it might be.
Yes, certainly the studios could probably work a bit harder to reduce the crap level, but keep in mind that they are not motivated by the desire to create art -- they are, as businesses, motivated by money.
Movies like I-Robot and A Sound of Thunder were great as sci fi stories, but movies took the very concept of those stories and twisted it into another action thriller with special effects. The movies are practically the same damn thing, and the written stories are drastically different!
There's a lot of great science fiction literature which does not translate well to movie format. Mainstream audiences are not going to be all that enthralled with a lengthy description of the sociological structure of the spiders' planet in "A Deepness in the Sky," and since SF movies are expensive to produce, big studios are not going to spend big money making a movie for a tiny audience. The social-experimentation aspect of SF does not translate all that well, and that's often what makes a particular SF work great.
If a studio can make more money by turning "I, Robot" into a crappy Will Smith action movie than it can by a literal translation, why would they do the latter and not the former? It would be stupid, from a business point of view. If you really want a more literal movie translation, then get off your ass and produce one.
Now, sometimes remakes or book based movies are okay. This is because the director puts his artistic interpretation on the books that's based on art, not money.
The majority of the time that adapted books make a good movie, it's because the material of the book is suited to a movie version. The Harry Potter books have lots of neat visual writing, which translates well; "Stranger in a Strange Land" would be really, really hard to translate literally, because a lot of it is about Valentine's reaction to human society.
Remakes are an entirely different story than book adaptations. The best movies to remake are well-known but not great or beloved movies from 30 years ago, like The Thomas Crown Affair. (I haven't seen the original; I really liked the remake when I saw it (partly because I worship Rene Russo like a goddess), but when I saw it again a couple years later, I realized it was kind of misogynistic, and the ending was a little too pat, and blah blah blah complaint-cakes.) Remaking "classics" like Psycho is a terrible idea, although I have heard the theory that Gun Van Sant basically took a bullet for Hollywood by remaking Psycho, so that nobody else would have to do it (because it was one of those ideas that was hovering around, and sooner or later some asshat executive was going to say, "Hey, let's remake a great classic!" and so Van Sant said, "Let's head 'em off at the pass," and made a bland, pointless version, just to demonstrate that remaking a great movie is a terrible idea).
Hollywood types create screenplays based off of kneejerk reactions of what will make money, not the quality of the work. "Hey, that Bradbury story was cool, but let's turn it into a thriller to attract more people. Who cares if it changes the theme, we need to make shitloads of money."
That's because the "Hollywood types" you're referring to are movie executives, who are in it for the money. I don't like the crap they produce any more than you do, but to fault them for being money-grubbing is missing the point. Hollywood studios are businesses, not art schools. The fact that they occasionally
it's the second hit (don't put quotes around the search terms) and you can view it as HTML.
I read the decision and I guess I don't understand it either; maybe the judgment is ignoring copyright law because the original agreement was made in 1951, before the copyright expired (in 1954), so the whole suit is from the point of view of a copyrighted work. So if you look at just this decision, it looks like the copyright is still in effect and this contract is still relevant; but if you take this decision in conjunction with the fact that the work is in the public domain (which is not at issue in this suit), THEN it becomes essentially pointless.
It's possible that the decision means that, even though it's in the public domain, the Wellses signed a contract saying that they would not sell the rights to a television broadcast to anyone else, and they tried to do so anyway. But why they would try to do so if it was in the public domain already, I have no idea.
Not quite accurate. It's quite common that two movies get greenlighted around the same time that have the same basic premise or story; 3 movies at once is extremely rare.
It has nothing to do with one studio finding out that another one has been greenlighted, then rushing to copy it; it's just a matter of probabilities. Of the thousands of screenplays and pitched ideas that studios buy each year, there's a significant change that there will be at least two that are on the same basic idea.
The last thing a major studio's going to do is deliberately copy the same idea as another studio (and of course there are always exceptions, but this is the general rule). It doesn't make financial sense. Look at it like a timeline:
- It begins with studio A buying a script about, let's say, a giant asteroid smashing into the Earth. Let's assume studio B finds out the very same day that this script was bought, and decides (that day) to make its own giant asteroid movie. - Studio A has a huge lead-time because the screenplay has already been written; Studio B is months behind (despite what you may think about the quality of the movies that come out, writing a good, original screenplay is really fucking hard). So if it wants to beat studio A's film to theaters, it needs to cut a lot of corners both on the script and on preproduction. - Studio B STILL has to hope that, even if they do cut those corners, they finish their movie first. The more they rush, the worse the movie is going to be; but taking longer means they risk coming out second with a movie that is still not going to be very good. - On the flipside, if B deliberately takes longer so that it comes out with its movie months after A, it has to hope that its movie ends up being better than A's, because otherwise it will just look like an also-ran. This is not trivial.
There are little independent producers/studios that will make cheap rip-offs in order to glom onto the media frenzy accompanying a big movie (witness the numerous cheap asteroid strike direct-to-video movies that came out right around the same time as Armageddon), but that's a different story, because those movies have a tiny budget and the leftover hype from the Big Hollywood Version can easily turn them a profit. Paramount is not going to see Universal buy a script about a volcano exploding and rush its own into production.
If they both happen to have bought the same story around the same time, and then one announces that it's going into production, the other might then rush its own into production -- but they've already got the script, so it's a more even race (and since they've already spent the money on buying the script, they don't want to waste that investment. Nevermind that 95% of the scripts they buy, they never make, but when there's suddenly a competitor to a particular script they bought, it makes them macho).
The weirdest one that I remember is the twobiopics about Steve Prefontaine, a fairly obscure distance runner.
And by the way, "V" and "Independance Day" both ripped off Arthur C. Clark's premise for "Childhood's End": Giant city sized spaceships suddenly show up and proceed to silently hover over every major metropolis on earth, omniously.
Yeah, except "Independence Day" followed up with the aliens blowing up all the major cities and trying to exterminate humanity, whereas "Childhood's End" is about the aliens trying to help humanity advance to transcendence.
I would be surprised if CE was the first time anyone had written the idea of giant spaceships appearing over Earth cities.
Slashdot Mirror
At any rate, I said in my original post that there certainly were OSS developers who were arrogant, and why that arrogance was less scornworthy than Microsoft's. So I'm not sure what we're arguing about, since we basically said the same thing.
My bad; I didn't know it wasn't part of the spec. Nonetheless, MS has in the past both spoken of its commitment to open web standards (and partly implementing them is not much of a commitment), and from what I've been able to find with a little Googling, MS stated sometime around 2000 that they intended to implement the full PNG spec, which they haven't. So even if it's not a bug, it's at least a broken promise.
I can't imagine that there are really that many people who claim that OSS produces software with no bugs, are there? Yes, I'm aware of the various rhetoric spewed by both sides, but claiming that OSS produces better software is reasonable. (Whether it's true is another story, but on the surface it's a reasonable thing to say.)
I guess I'd want to be sure what it is you think OSS advocates are wrong about before I go off trying to prove you wrong (assuming that, once I know what you're talking about, I disagree with you), so let's start from there. ;)
There's a particular comment which we'll see about a thousand times on this thread alone, the gist of which will be, "See? Even open source has bugs/security holes! It's no better than Microsoft!"
The reason we bash Microsoft for its bugs and security holes is not because they have bugs and holes; the reason is that Microsoft paints itself as the savior of computing, as software that will make your life infallibly better and easier, and along the way has made quite a lot of unethical business decisions. They basically brag about how uber they are, and then they release crappy software and frequently take forever to fix certain bugs (or simply never fix them -- e.g. PNG transparency in IE. What's it at, 3 years and counting? 4?).
The guys who write open source stuff like GdkPixBuf, on the other hand, have not (to my knowledge) done these things. They are thus not deserving of scorn; they write software, release it, and say, "I wrote this because I needed it. If you want to try it out, here you go. Have fun; I don't promise anything."
That's why we mock Microsoft for its bugs and not the GDK team.
(To be fair, I'm certain that there are some OS projects whose developers are as arrogant as Microsoft, but they at least do not have the unethical business history Microsoft does, nor do they (still!) have a monopoly on desktop OSes that they continue to abuse to the detriment of everyone except themselves. It's one thing to be an asshole when you're nobody important; it's quite another when you have a great deal of power.)
It's possible that Gates was partially responsible, but the facts I can find are scant; I don't have enough information to say whether Gates was at all responsible for Kildall's death. The links I found didn't even suggest that Kildall committed suicide (both Wikipedia and another page mention that he fell off a ladder), so I'm not even sure where the suicide idea comes from.
A poor American looks up at the rich man's mansion on the hill, and says, "One day, I'll be that bastard."
A poor Irishman looks up at the rich man's mansion on the hill, and says, "One day, I'll kill that bastard."
Or it could just be that CMU is a school really, really into computers, and so there's lots of MS haters AND MS boosters there -- enough to fill a presentation hall when MS shows up, and enough more to bash MS the rest of the time.
Saying that external factors cannot affect a person's decision to commit suicide doesn't seem reasonable. It's the same as saying that external factors cannot affect us at all, for any reason. Even if I did the evil things above, I certainly wouldn't be entirely to blame for his suicide (after all, he pulled the trigger, or took the pill, leapt off the bridge, whatever), but if I set up circumstances to the point where he felt like he had no way out, I would be at least partly culpable, by any reasonable moral standard. (I don't know if I could be held legally liable, in a criminal sense, although I probably could be successfully sued in civil court for wrongful death, or somesuch, assuming that his family could provide evidence).
I don't think that responsibility is always (or even usually) as simple as "one person is completely responsible for this." If a person commits a crime, and if external circumstances can affect that, then that person is still ultimately responsible, but it doesn't mean that we should relieve him of any responsibility and let him off scot-free, NOR does it mean that we should blame him entirely and not take a hard look at what society is doing that might encourage him to be criminal.
This really is getting off-topic; maybe I'll write a journal entry about it.
This is changing some of the connotative and denotative elements of your original argument, but that's fine, it's still more or less the same point.
It's stupid to point out why someone is incorrect about something? It's arrogant, when you know more about why something happens than they do? It's insulting? Now I'm confused; should I just have let your original post stand, even though it advanced a theory that I know to be false? I assume that's not what you mean. Do you mean that you agree with my explanation, but think I was rude about presenting it?
I explained the "why" in my original response. You have not yet given any arguments as to why my explanation is incorrect. Plot. Not premise.
*dirtside chokes on his water and coughs for a minute*
Are you serious? Changing whether you're talking about the plot or premise makes your argument COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! They're DIFFERENT! Jesus. No wonder we're having so many problems communicating.
The "thing that can be expressed in a trailer" is the premise. "Alien invasion" is the plot premise; "haunted house" is a setting (and more specifically, a subgenre of horror). They are not comparable; there is no element known as "the essence" of a movie. I think what you're grasping for is the idea that these movies share a common core element, but the category of what they share is not common. "Alien invasion" is a bunch of events; "Steve Prefontaine" is a protagonist (there were two biopics about Pre back in 1997/1998). These movies do not commonly share a premise, plot, or setting; what they share is some specific, highly identifiable element, and there's no specific name for that, like "premise" or "plot" or "protagonist" or "essence" or "thing that can be expressed in a trailer."
Basically, you're using the wrong terminology.
Ah, here it begins: "They had the same fad." Thus implying that the reason that these core elements showed up in multiple movies is because one studio decided to make a movie on that topic, and then another studio decided to copy that core element. I already debunked this idea in my original response, and you have not yet addressed that topic at all -- and suddenly you're just claiming that this is the way it is, without a single shred of evidence.
Do you have any particular evidence that the reason the Power Rangers' creature was in a volcano was because they knew about Dante's Peak and Volcano? Does the fact that "Turbo" came out between Dante's Peak and Volcano affect this at all? Surely if they were following the fad, it would have come out later.
Your repeated typographical and grammatical mistakes annoy me. Good, now we both have reasons to find each other annoying. Moving on.
No, but apparently you do: I consider the number of people who meet A and B and C insignificant, but not the number of people who meet only criteria A and B. To rephrase, I think there are more people who would need to understand the ending than would be annoyed at having it spoiled for them. Maybe my estimate is wrong, but my logic isn't. Actually, my estimate can't be wrong, I don't think: The number of people who didn't know the ending (B) cannot be smaller than the number of people who would get upset that I spoiled it (C), because C is a strict subset of B. Although I suppose people who did know the ending could be upset that I spoiled it for other people.
In that event, I misstated the conditions: C) consists of people who would be upset that I spoiled the ending for them only. I am ignoring those who get upset on other peoples' behalf because of plot spoilers.
What I don't quite get is your insistence that, because someone made a logical error (which I did not, as explained just above), they can be characterized as "unintelligent." That is not remotely rational.
Much like the legal system, I have to look at it on the case by case basis. Spoiling the ending of a book for a couple of people, I consider insignificant.
Because, you know, because I spoiled something this one time, I'm completely incapable of preventing myself from spoiling any book or movie that I might discuss. Yeah. Why do you keep calling me unintelligent, and then make ridiculous generalizations like this?
Yes, because there's no way that I was making a sarcastic point about how you are exaggerating the harm caused by the spoiler reveal.
I noticed that your post said nothing about the other point (why these multiple movies happen), so I'm going to assume you concede that point.
I just noticed that your original post in this thread said:
Plot. Not premise. You were talking about plots, not premises, and you yourself have said they're different (plot is the whole story, premise is where it begins). So which is it? Hollywood makes multiple movies with the same plot or same premise? We've already agreed that they DO make movies with a similar core element but I don't know if it's reasonable to characterize them as having the same story, just because they have a similar core element.
This one doesn't count because the danger comes from some kind of creature imprisoned inside the volcano, not from the volcano itself. The volcano is immaterial and incidental to the story; the creature could be imprisoned under a seabed or in a magic vault or inside a sandwich without changing the core of the story. In "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak," the volcanoes themselves are the threat. Replace the volcano in those stories with another threat (asteroid, earthquake, aliens) and the story fundamentally changes.
Also, on the other thread we're arguing on, you seem to think that a premise can be really specific: 1) City-sized alien spaceships 2) appear suddenly, then 3) hover silently for a while over 4) large Earth metropolises. Yet here, a premise can contain as few as two elements: "1) A dormant volcano will erupt and kill lots of people 2) unless our heros do something about it." Of course, the second half of the premise is also part of the premise of every story ever, and so can be removed from the premise, meaning that it only contains one element: "A volcano threatens a city."
Reducing a premise to one element does not mean two movies share a plot or premise.
This I agree with; ID4, MA, and The Arrival all share the same basic premise (although the plots diverge wildly): aliens are trying to take over Earth. I wouldn't quite put ST: FC in with the others, because it was part of a franchise, and it had certain other elements that radically alter the plot (the aliens actually succeed in conquering Earth; the heroes use time travel to go back in time and stop them).
Two movies each. Already explained why the Power Rangers movie should not be considered a "volcano" movie.
The Sixth Sense is not a "haunted house" movie by any stretch--
WARNING!!! SCRAMEUSTACHE IS EXTREMELY SENSITIVE ABOUT SPOILERS, AND YOU MIGHT BE TOO! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN "THE SIXTH SENSE," I RECOMMEND YOU NOT READ FURTHER!! THAT IS ALL!!
--of the imagination. The ghost is the protagonist, rather than an adversary (or secondary character), he is not evil, there is no particular house that's haunted (Malcolm is free to go where he wants; he doesn't even know he's dead until the end).
All you've demonstrated is that, since 1996, there has been at least one year where there were three movies distributed by one of the major Hollywood studios that all had a very similar
I was pointing out the differences to illustrate why I thought you were wrong to call it "ripping off." Explicitly stating the nature of the endings was necessary because someone who was unfamiliar with "Childhood's End" would not necessarily understand why they were different (or at least might not be willing to accept my word on that fact, without knowing the nature of the endings). Too, someone who had once read Childhood's End, but had forgotten what happened, would certainly be happy for the reminder.
I certainly could have put in a "spoiler" tag, but then I think that the number of people who A) read my post, B) didn't know the ending of "Childhood's End," and C) became or will become upset about my revealing it, can probably be counted on the knuckles of one finger. There's a legal doctrine called de minimis; I'm going to callously assume that not everyone knows what it means, and quote here from law.com:
In essence, the amount of harm caused by my spoiler reveal is insignificant. Moving on.
Ah, a subtle (?) implication that I'm neither intelligent nor considerate! I wasn't aware that refusal to publicly reveal the ending to a forty-six-year old novel was a prerequisite for intelligence and consideration. I suppose that it's the most logical standard by which to measure intelligence. I mean, problem-solving ability, learning capacity, ability to think abstractly; what are these when compared to the ability to refrain from revealing plot details from half-century-old fiction? I am both chagrined and humbled.
I'm curious if there is some objective standard by which one can determine if a premise is "ripped off," and not merely "similar." Is it due to the number of specific elements of the premise? What constitutes a discrete element? If they had not appeared suddenly, but had been hovering silently over metropolises in giant spaceships, would that be "ripped off"? What if the spaceships were the size of houses, but hovered silently over metropolises? You seem to identify four major elements of this "rip off" (1. giant spaceships, 2. appearing suddenly, then 3. hovering silently, 4. over metropolises), and I wonder whether if they had only used 2 or 3 of those elements, it would constitute a rip-off. What if they'd had one or two days' warning that the big ships were coming? And the ships were only suburb-sized? And made a weird buzzing noise instead of being silent? And only hovered over medium-sized cities?
But this is just pedantry; my ultimate point is that it is not useful in any way to characterize their usage as a "rip off," and thus implicitly deserving of scorn and derision, when the resolution of the stories differs from the original. (Especially when it differs so drastically, viz. peaceful transcendence vs. planetary domination (or attempt at thereof).)
As a result, I decided to take out some of my aggression on you, as you presented a nice, convenient target.
Not sure what stats you mean; there's one troll mod listed on my last 24 posts, and I guess I don't consider revealing the ending of a 50-year old novel to be a "spoiler," let alone a troll. That proves you're better than me! Of course, if you want to measure dick lengths, your last 24 posts have combined mods of +2, while mine have combined mods of +11 (the earlier post at 1 was posted without karma bonus). Looks like you're either unable to post things that are interesting, insightful, or informative; or you're just not willing to risk unpopular moderations and maybe keep your posts in check. Who knows? Offensive to who? Dogs and your mom, or people who are unable to bite things? And this is relevant how, exactly? I think I'm beginning to understand why you so rarely get modded up. Unable to comprehend simple concepts, attack targets that are completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, can't even count for Christ's sake.Man! This is more fun than I've had all day.
If they'd had the same premise and then used it to get to the same (or a similar) conclusion, that would be another story, but to call using a similar premise in order to go in a completely different direction "ripping off" is absurd.
Anyway, the ONLY example you gave of 3 movies with similar premises (and they aren't that similar) was the Matrix/Existenz/13th Floor one. All the others were pairs of movies. Can you name other groups of 3 movies that came out within a year of each other and all had the same premise? ("Same genre," like superhero movies or horror movies, does not mean the same premise.)
Armageddon and Deep Impact had the same premise: A giant asteroid is going to hit Earth, and we have to stop it. Dante's Peak and Volcano don't really have the same premise, they just have the same primary element: a volcano. The premise of Dante's Peak is that a supposedly extinct volcano is going to erupt and destroy a peaceful mountain town. The premise of Volcano is that a previously unknown volcano erupts under Los Angeles, and the heroes have to figure out how to save as many lives as possible.
In conclusion, fuck you, you useless trolling wanker.
No; because it's fun to bitch at people who are ignorant about the language, or blindly apply certain language rules because they're stupid.
Just because we know that he meant "scenarios" doesn't mean we think it's acceptable to try and pluralize it in an absurd way. It's painful and annoying to read, and I try to get people to stop it when they do painful, annoying things to me.
Eye doo knot suh pose ewe wood mined if eye rote like dis, even though ewe kin figger owt wut I meen? Of course you would, it's hard to read and it's annoying. Just because he only misspelled one word doesn't mean we should ignore it; otherwise you have to arbitrarily decide that a certain number of errors per sentence are okay, but beyond that you can start complaining. I like to take a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to absurd shit like "scenarii," even though I'll ignore it when someone makes a simple typo. (And sometimes I don't have the particular desire or energy to point out annoying mistakes, such as putting an extra space between the last word in the sentence and the question mark which follows it.)
Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with an original idea, not to mention write a great script based on it, and then make a good movie based on that script? This is not something trivial, no matter how easy you think it might be.
Yes, certainly the studios could probably work a bit harder to reduce the crap level, but keep in mind that they are not motivated by the desire to create art -- they are, as businesses, motivated by money.
There's a lot of great science fiction literature which does not translate well to movie format. Mainstream audiences are not going to be all that enthralled with a lengthy description of the sociological structure of the spiders' planet in "A Deepness in the Sky," and since SF movies are expensive to produce, big studios are not going to spend big money making a movie for a tiny audience. The social-experimentation aspect of SF does not translate all that well, and that's often what makes a particular SF work great.
If a studio can make more money by turning "I, Robot" into a crappy Will Smith action movie than it can by a literal translation, why would they do the latter and not the former? It would be stupid, from a business point of view. If you really want a more literal movie translation, then get off your ass and produce one.
The majority of the time that adapted books make a good movie, it's because the material of the book is suited to a movie version. The Harry Potter books have lots of neat visual writing, which translates well; "Stranger in a Strange Land" would be really, really hard to translate literally, because a lot of it is about Valentine's reaction to human society.
Remakes are an entirely different story than book adaptations. The best movies to remake are well-known but not great or beloved movies from 30 years ago, like The Thomas Crown Affair. (I haven't seen the original; I really liked the remake when I saw it (partly because I worship Rene Russo like a goddess), but when I saw it again a couple years later, I realized it was kind of misogynistic, and the ending was a little too pat, and blah blah blah complaint-cakes.) Remaking "classics" like Psycho is a terrible idea, although I have heard the theory that Gun Van Sant basically took a bullet for Hollywood by remaking Psycho, so that nobody else would have to do it (because it was one of those ideas that was hovering around, and sooner or later some asshat executive was going to say, "Hey, let's remake a great classic!" and so Van Sant said, "Let's head 'em off at the pass," and made a bland, pointless version, just to demonstrate that remaking a great movie is a terrible idea).
That's because the "Hollywood types" you're referring to are movie executives, who are in it for the money. I don't like the crap they produce any more than you do, but to fault them for being money-grubbing is missing the point. Hollywood studios are businesses, not art schools. The fact that they occasionally
The original text of the decision can be found here:
e s/May%202002/Hallmarkdec040202.wpd (no idea what format this is; WordPerfect document?) but if you search google for the terms:
http://www.nycourts.gov/comdiv/Law%20Report%20Fil
wells v paramount 2002 new york
it's the second hit (don't put quotes around the search terms) and you can view it as HTML.
I read the decision and I guess I don't understand it either; maybe the judgment is ignoring copyright law because the original agreement was made in 1951, before the copyright expired (in 1954), so the whole suit is from the point of view of a copyrighted work. So if you look at just this decision, it looks like the copyright is still in effect and this contract is still relevant; but if you take this decision in conjunction with the fact that the work is in the public domain (which is not at issue in this suit), THEN it becomes essentially pointless.
It's possible that the decision means that, even though it's in the public domain, the Wellses signed a contract saying that they would not sell the rights to a television broadcast to anyone else, and they tried to do so anyway. But why they would try to do so if it was in the public domain already, I have no idea.
IANAL.
Not quite accurate. It's quite common that two movies get greenlighted around the same time that have the same basic premise or story; 3 movies at once is extremely rare.
It has nothing to do with one studio finding out that another one has been greenlighted, then rushing to copy it; it's just a matter of probabilities. Of the thousands of screenplays and pitched ideas that studios buy each year, there's a significant change that there will be at least two that are on the same basic idea.
The last thing a major studio's going to do is deliberately copy the same idea as another studio (and of course there are always exceptions, but this is the general rule). It doesn't make financial sense. Look at it like a timeline:
- It begins with studio A buying a script about, let's say, a giant asteroid smashing into the Earth. Let's assume studio B finds out the very same day that this script was bought, and decides (that day) to make its own giant asteroid movie.
- Studio A has a huge lead-time because the screenplay has already been written; Studio B is months behind (despite what you may think about the quality of the movies that come out, writing a good, original screenplay is really fucking hard). So if it wants to beat studio A's film to theaters, it needs to cut a lot of corners both on the script and on preproduction.
- Studio B STILL has to hope that, even if they do cut those corners, they finish their movie first. The more they rush, the worse the movie is going to be; but taking longer means they risk coming out second with a movie that is still not going to be very good.
- On the flipside, if B deliberately takes longer so that it comes out with its movie months after A, it has to hope that its movie ends up being better than A's, because otherwise it will just look like an also-ran. This is not trivial.
There are little independent producers/studios that will make cheap rip-offs in order to glom onto the media frenzy accompanying a big movie (witness the numerous cheap asteroid strike direct-to-video movies that came out right around the same time as Armageddon), but that's a different story, because those movies have a tiny budget and the leftover hype from the Big Hollywood Version can easily turn them a profit. Paramount is not going to see Universal buy a script about a volcano exploding and rush its own into production.
If they both happen to have bought the same story around the same time, and then one announces that it's going into production, the other might then rush its own into production -- but they've already got the script, so it's a more even race (and since they've already spent the money on buying the script, they don't want to waste that investment. Nevermind that 95% of the scripts they buy, they never make, but when there's suddenly a competitor to a particular script they bought, it makes them macho).
The weirdest one that I remember is the two biopics about Steve Prefontaine, a fairly obscure distance runner.
I would be surprised if CE was the first time anyone had written the idea of giant spaceships appearing over Earth cities.