Saw the interview, too. I think there is a quid-pro-quo with Charlie Rose and Hollywood: He does a certain number of interviews with people who make less than stellar movies, shall we say, but that allows him to arrange interviews with people from Hollywood who might otherwise say no. I have don't problem with the trade and on occasion even the people involved with the movies no one is going to watch are interesting. Alec Baldwin actually talked about this during one interview. He said "Of course we (he and the other actors on the show) are making the rounds to promote the movie, but at least we like talking to you." Pretty open about what was going on, but this it was Alec Baldwin after all...

There are two reasons I would like to see "Blackhat": The cinematography and Tang Wei. I'm curious to see how Tang Wei is in an American movie after she was blacklisted in China. She seems likes a capable actor so I would like to see her get new opportunities.

As for Chris Hemsworth, I thought he was good in "Rush". The movie was quite enjoyable and had plenty of interesting technical details for the geek audience. Maybe Ron Howard will make a movie about hacking. I think he would do a good job of it.

In most places outside the US, science isn't accepted as something that can be so casually threatened by special interests working against all objectively observable sources of information.

I've been following the wider skeptical movement here in the US for a while now. Perhaps earlier on (over a decade ago), challenges to the scientific consensus on things like global warming had some legitimacy as a real movement - but by now, it really is just a shill movement. Every existing doubt remaining is NOT in terms of the science being wrong, but rather which implication of the science is most correct. Yes, you can always find a theory or person willing to speculate in any direction you want - but nothing that still constitutes a challenge to the science of global warming anymore. It's observed from space, observed from dozens of major lines of evidence, observed from all known history we can trace, observed from watching other planets, and passes every known line of meta-analysis that uses an actual scientific process.

It's only here in the US (or perhaps OPEC nations) that none of that really ends up mattering to what a person at random gets to hear. Don't get me wrong - nowhere is science really reported without a million biases, just the same as no scientist or agency perfect - but we really do distort our science reporting with a huge amount of false controversy. It's just painful to see how much of that twisted interpretation of so much science so heavily represented in so many of these slashdot stories.

And so often,l it's from the libertarian side, which also weirds me out - again, I come in as a close follower of the skeptical movement (got a JREF card in my wallet), which is filled to the brim with libertarian ideals. It weirds me out, because in order to have a meaningfully free society, it seems absurd that the overwhelming push is to close off so much from objective observable truth, and to use the constant barrage of logical fallacies so rampant in the global warming denial popularizers toolset.

Honestly, just follow more lines of evidence, in just about any direction you want - the pattern of global warming, and it's predictable (if chaotic at some scales) effects are as much a science as anything I've seen. The studies themselves come from all sorts of people - but they all get to the same places in wonderfully surprising ways, and the overall picture is rather resilient by this point. Skepticism should mean looking for truth, eliminating where we're lying to ourselves, and at this point, the only folks consistently lying have been the folks in steadfast and unobserving denial.

Ryan Fenton

Two countries, they share a short border area with Russia

Makes for interesting questions: Do they have fiber running through Russia, too? Did China decide to shut down the NK internet? If NK has a connection through Russia, did they go along with the idea? Or did the US or someone else do something to the internal NK infrastructure? All of the above assumes the NK blackout is not the decision of the NK government.

> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.

What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!

> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.

Nature did it. We can do it.

> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".

This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.

> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs ...

Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.

Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.

Don't forget "American Graffiti", arguably a classic and made when Ford was not well known. Lucas wasn't either.

Getting bought out for a ton of cash. Sadly, that's not what happened here.

Good article on Bloomberg View about this. It's not the panacea some think it is.

In other words, ff you get an advance copy of the catalog, you will know what is in the movie.

To this day I don't understand how Lucas could make something as good as "American Graffiti" and an entire collection as mediocre as "Star Wars", other than using them to sell toys. If it wasn't for Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and James Earl Jones in the original movie, my guess is that it would have flopped. It's sort of surprising to me that so many people with technical backgrounds like the SW series, given all of the science the movies completely disregard:

• Sound in space
• Spacecraft that make banked turns in a vacuum
• Breathable atmosphere almost everywhere
• No variation in gravity on different planets
• Humans flying spacecraft while AI sits in the back seat
• Humans aiming and shooting weapons while AI sits in the back seat
• Large formations of spacecraft in close proximity even though they can move at hyper-light speed
• etc, etc

The SW franchise strikes me as a series of repackaged westerns with WWII themes and an abundance of special effects. I like sci-fi that leaves you wondering about possibilities you never thought of before. I don't know why Hollywood has such a hard time with sci-fi given the example of "2001, A Space Odyssey". Not that 2001 was such a great movie given how disjointed it was, but the weightlessness, lack of sound in space, and of course the impossibility of understanding HALs AI made those sequences very alien and intriguing. (Martin Scorsese's comment that Dave Bowman shutting down HAL was actually a murder scene made the question of AI even more interesting.) "Terminator", "Predator", and "Alien" were all better, IMHO. I think all of the Philip K. Dick derived movies were better than SW, too. When it comes to SW, the stories leave little or nothing to the imagination, the antithesis of what good sci-fi should do. But then again, the movies are really just ads for toys and promotions at Burger King. In that regard, they make a lot of money so I will not argue with them as a business proposition. Now "Get off my lawn!"

Still low compared to college dorm/cheap apartment ratio of about 10 years ago - those folks are spreading out, and spreading expectations.

We sometimes see ideas spreading 'virally', but really, largely shared ideas are often established generationally - the 'viral' ideas are usually just those ideas exposing and exploiting those slowly growing generational ideas that have been growing as people's desires and needs shift.

Wifi is an expression of this expanding set of generations desire to be ever connected to faster information and resources through computers.

It's a neat time to have grown up in - and I don't think we've fully imagined all the places we can go with it.

It's sort of a 'real' version of the previous generation's largescale exploration of meditation, medication and spirituality, only made consistent, shareable, but oddly balkanized. For instance, there's still awesome music involved in all of it, but more sort of everyone's flavor of the month, and seemingly fewer universal classics than previous generations.

Ryan Fenton

Come on, Miracleman - I just really liked that comic series.

Linky

I know, I know, it's legally impossible, but hey, I can always hope for a miracle, man!

Kimota!

Ryan Fenton

Just wanted to thank you for the links. I was especially pleased to find that Python is supported!