Jesus fucked a monkey!

Moses on a giant boat, we need to get a handle on this. We have to delete four years worth of memories. Plus however long it takes you to figure out how to delete memories. Plus however long it takes to figure out who leaked this. Get fecking started, you ass-bastards!

Oh, and the deleting of memories and independent learning need not coincide. So get something on my desk yesterday. Other than your ass gasses. We know how to create a false memory now - can we create the memory that you never invented something that you invented?

Why would monopoles have anything to do with " Valentine's Day, no less"?

Is it because 7 people were killed by what would have been a law abiding organization without prohibition? Or because we don't know if St. Valentine is a single person or multiple people?

Or because Valentinus who served a single religion - Christianity - died on the eponymous holiday?

Or because of the mythological attribution to a single person, despite not having a single person to attribute this to, or to that person's alleged habit of marrying Christian couples despite a ban on doing so?

If the last of these, and slashdotters are typically basement dwelling asexuals, then how should I interpret this, exactly? Because I do not understand what in Moses' holy boat fundamental particles have to do with humanity in any fashion.

Men are matter, women are anti-matter, and that's as deep as I get. If the woman measure in anti-mass what the man measures in mass, plus a bit, she dictates the course of the relationship. Otherwise it is the man. Similarly if there is a homosexual relationship with one having more matter than anti-matter, the dominant gender takes the course. Beyond that this makes no sense to me.

Unpaired poles are obviously deviants screwing anyone and anything that comes across them, no pun intended. Or did I misunderstand the relevance? Maybe pun was intended, did I still miss the relevance? Poles need not be paired - they should be left to their own free will. I rather respect the Poles, as a matter of fact. What am I missing?

Oh, sensationalism, shitty editorialisation, adverts, and overall shiteness. Sorry.

I have the solution to all crime. If an authorized person would shoot every American in the head, including me, there would be no crime. Does that make it a good plan? Or a legal plan?

Reductio ad absurdum is usually a very terrible idea. But we aren't dealing with the best and the brightest here, and sometimes beating people over the head to prove a point is the only way.

E.g. the male identifying mods all have small penis'.

Penises. They have small penises.

I am obviously a grammar Nazi, with a large penis - not a mod with a small penis. Or giant clitoris, for that matter.

Also, no one cares what you read - you're probably looking for the typos, logical fallacies, incomprehensible summaries, sensationalism, broken links, incomplete headlines, and overall mediocrity in order to make your average self feel above average.

Oh wait, that's me. Based on your browsing history, you're kind of a freak.

You're confusing the hardware technology with the software technology. No punch cards - we want computers that fit in your pocket. Those are the current technologies.

This was a very shitty "essay", and by that I mean loosely related thoughts vomited onto a single page. But the fundamental idea is sound, assuming there was one.

When we were resource-constrained, people were *very* inventive (not innovative) with what they made for programmers to use. They attacked a problem with zest, gusto, and some other foreign words.

The language of MatLab, for example, does very complicated math on large data sets. That's still current, right? But not widespread. APL was very arcane, but had some of the same ideas, long ago.

With C#, we have some very powerful language to do a lot of things in a few lines of code that otherwise would have taken a much longer for() loop in most other languages.

We are getting there, to the place where languages have the features we want to have. But there is still a pile of forgotten stuff that has not made it in to the latest stable tech.

If we had the new hardware, and the old ideas, code would be find-fuckingly awesome. But no, you want to go back to when things looked good but shat turtles. So have a go at your turbo button, which looks good, but doesn't really help. Underneath, we want a better algorithm and a way to access that in a language, hardware be damned.

Write a domain-specific solution in C and be happy - or write a language that implements parallelism, data access, matrix calculations, and other 5-dollar ideas, so that a programmer does not have to waste time on solved problems.

Here's what I did for you. I listened to Confused Matthew's criticism. Then I watched 2001 again. And this is what I wrote (below the dashes). This is just about what actually happens in the movie, no interpretation or analysis or meaning. The short version is - there is a LOT happening, and it happens with the imagery and not with what people traditionally expect - dialog. The set is basically another character that does a lot of the talking that normally would break the feel of realism. If you object to realism, then just stop replying and go away because that's the fundamental point of the movie, if you strip away the details and analysis.

My conclusion first so you don't get bored: , about "changing the form" as Spielberg said Kubrick was doing, in the Afterword review, Matthew said that Kubrick "changed the form so much that it isn't recognizable any more." And here is the clincher - recognizable to the countless fans of the movie, but not to Matthew and not to you. And if you are going to quote someone to support your point, you can't present it as support, then select one of those statements and object to it. He says near the end that video has to have writing, and lists viewer feedback about the meaning of the movie. And apparently anyone can put pictures with music, and it doesn't qualify as a film. I did not know that. And if someone follows some simple formulae to create something like the political commercial, it is just as good as 2001. Listen to that part of the review again and see if it really passes the smell test. It is nonsensical and full of false equivalences. And Fantasia is a silent movie, while 2001 is not.

Gattaca has a lot of dialog - there is a lot going on. I didn't see The Man From Earth. The classics of course had most everything happen in dialog - all the explanations and history and circumstance. There was no atmosphere or scene, for the most part, other than an appropriate stage so the actors don't have to say "What a nice Doctor's office you have, Doctor". The classic movies are plays with better sets.

Gattaca is much more classically styled in this way, which makes it endurable by Confused Matthew. 2001 is certainly not standard Hollywood fare - but Gattaca is very much so, which is why apparently it qualifies as a film and 2001 does not. Gattaca is therefore probably the worst example you both could have used. It's a play, set in the future. If either of you had mentioned one of the Italian verismo films I might have just accepted and moved on. It had a blockbuster cast, $36 million budget. And it's a thriller.

Now for what I prepared
dashes here - lameness accounted.

Confused Matthew is genuinely confused. He is doing a review that starts out claiming to be objective, but then the profanity and exasperation starts immediately. There is no hint of an attempt to understand the film, and he asserts "nothing is happening" when there is clearly something going on.

I'll start with the end of the review: The last 3 minutes of the last review are based on completely refusing to see that anything happened at all in the movie beyond Hal. Clarke said that anyone understanding the movie *completely* missed the point, and it wanted to raise more questions than it answered. But he concluded as if Clarke said that anyone *partly* understanding missed the point (a box full of scrabble letters is a masterpiece). And if it was supposed to raise questions, wouldn't Matthew have some actual questions? Unless he actually missed the point of the movie completely. Most people would at least ask "What the hell is that space baby?" instead of saying "Same as a turkey sandwich". This paragraph is why you should not listen to anything Confused Matthew said, at all.

The opening serves to set the stage for the rest of the movie. In a relatively short timespan, it shows two groups of apes in disagreement, one inventing tools to hunt, and then one group using those tools to kill members of the other group. The abrupt transitions delineate the groups. The difficulty of life when you are cat food, territorial disputes, invention. All in about 10 minutes. It seems slow if you don't grasp the narrative, or if you don't realize there even is one.

And it is titled the Dawn of Man, and we know that man evolved from these hairy twits, so that must be depicting the moment one group of apes became men and the other didn't. That's heavy stuff for a film that hasn't even started yet.

At the end of all that, WTF is that giant black rectangle? Now you have a reason to "turn the page" and find out what happens next. Did the rectangle spur evolution? Or just affect mental processing?

The "floating space junk" introduces the space station, without needing some contrived example for dialog. I can see it written in 45 seconds, with an additional passenger observing that the station stopped rotating - while Floyd says no, we are rotating to match it. And another air hostess to have a conversation about the grip shoes with the first one. Instead, only two people on the shuttle, one is asleep, and we feel the vastness and slowness of space. It takes longer, but the stage is set.

More importantly, it addresses the normal slew of sci-fi questions like "how do they walk when there is no gravity," "what do they eat?" "how do you go from the rotating to the non-rotating part of the ship?" There is a crapload of information there, while "nothing is happening".

Some movies, they simply say "I'm in space" in dialog and I forget where they are supposed to be shortly after. A pen weightless, grip boots, and two pilots who don't need to explain to each other what they already know make this much more realistic and set in scene than the Exposition Twins who explain what no normal folk would bother to say.

Here's where Confused Matthew thinks that the movie starts - that nothing happened at all for 22 minutes. Apparently I just imagined that there was any value to anything that I just typed. "Dialog and story points" are the criteria for a movie to be decent at all. Atmosphere and pacing have no purpose at all, and the only way you can learn something is when people talk. Let's not forget - this is a 4 part movie, not a single story straight through.

The dialog is rather routine and mundane, but hints at problems on the moon base - more "turn the page" mystery. Buried in the banality of the formal introductions and a phone call home, this is a huge plot advancement. Yet the camera hardly changes perspective. Things are moving along quickly, but it feels glacial. The formality constrains the characters from much development, but we nonetheless capture a brief bit of a foreign language, and then the Russian has a brief "hush hush" moment when prodding for more information. The characters could have been played by mannequins, but they still exude personality in their brief appearance. In fact, the whole scene could have been a minute long "mission briefing" with one character talking into a radio. Instead of a radio, it's four people with graciousness, manners, inquisitiveness, and distinct personality. The mood changes several times, and this is so much better than a minute long catch-up.

More "nothing" while some of the questions I posed earlier are answered or expounded upon.

There is a "mission briefing", but because of the Russian we have basic awareness of what's happening, and the Council does not have to go over what they should already know. It is very natural, this is the realism, and the audience still has the mystery obscured, while watching a room full of people who are discussing that very mystery. Between the lobby scene and the Council scene, and the informality on the small transport vehicle, Floyd's character is now much richer.

Character development (changing, learning, maturation) is not a primary focus here, as the depth of the mystery is revealed. We see the monolith, it's the same as what seemingly initiated the development of tools and gorillicide, the music is spooky, and it's the monolith that develops as a character. Matthew would prefer they just get right the fuck down the hill, but this is realism and people move slowly in bulky space suits in low gravity.

Through the third act, the focus is almost a character study - partly Dave, but mostly in HAL. Character development of a computer is done brilliantly through the humans' actions and dialog. Dave and Frank are eating and watching a BBC broadcast, but we can see their personalities in the interview footage. It is a genius replacement of the "talking head" exposition, since we learn a good bit about these people who are not doing much of anything.

There is only one thing that happens in the third act, which takes an hour to accomplish. Almost half of the movie for one of the four parts, so obviously the most important. Hal asks Dave about his apparent unease about the mission, and Dave asks Hal if he is updating the staff psych report. Hal says yes, and interrupts with a failed part alert. The entire third act is Hal recognizing that Dave poses a risk, and probing him for fitness to continue the mission. Create doubt, see how they handle it, and then respond to what is now a threat. Hal and Dave are playing cat and mouse and evolving knowledge of the others' position, while maintaining a facade of normalcy. Literally, it is the psych eval - metaphorically it is all the chess game. These are not flat characters - they are very subtle, and even if you don't notice them, there is a story happening. Matthew recognizes that at least.

But he is wrong about Hal being scared and panicked, and definitely being a villain. But that's not clear from just watching this movie, so I'll let him by with a warning.

The moment that Dave catches Frank, he is visibly angry and/or scared. Hal knows this will be a critical time, and terminates the remaining crew so they won't ask what happened to Dave and Frank. "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" is spoken quickly on his return, and he is visibly agitated, struggling to find a solution, and trying to pretend nothing is wrong. Anger and frustration, panic, impotence, and finally self composure and problem solving. It is not the emotional outburst people would expect, but that would be out of place. Again, it is richly subtle, but in a sterile movie these are hugely effective - especially because they are basic body language that we process on a subconscious level. We don't need Will Smith to yell "That hunk of junk is startin a piss me right the hell off". Anyone who complains that Dave is flat has no empaty.

Not only does Hal gradually become more dimensional as we learn, his adaptice strategies, to me, qualify as character development as he defends his mission. And Hal pleads for his life very humanly - by acknowledging mistakes, re-focusing on the mission, and affirming future performance, and finally saying he is afraid. And listening to Hal die is kinda sad. It takes time, but he pleads, says he is afraid, devolves, reverts to his "childhood", slows down, and the shining eye fades out.

Here's where the acid trip starts. And given the sterile subtlety of the last 2 hours, and right on the back of a dying computer and sudden revelation of the mission, it's a doozy. It is straining to hear dialog in an emotional close of your show, then the commercial blasts out at taint-yanking volume. This is the truly mesmerizing, hypnotic genius that was, and still remains, groundbreaking.

And I won't even start on the ending - best to leave that alone.

POSITIVE reviews of 2001 and shows how they are almost word for word identical to NEGATIVE reviews of other movies...

what would be considered a negative in any other film, dragging scenes, no real narrative, bland characters, scenes continuing well past any need for them to, is somehow a positive when it comes to 2001. No film before or since that I know of has been given such a huge get out of jail free card and the fact that it is so beloved to this day really baffles the hell out of me

It baffles you because, as Gilliam says, you don't get it. And you won't get it after reading this. But you should be less baffled. Audiences didn't immediately get it either - it started slowly.

The movies accused of having bland characters and no narrative were either trying and not managing to, or didn't have anything else to fall back on. Hence the negative reviews. And I think you are underestimating the "nothing" where things are happening. Consider for a moment a "movie" told in snapshots - kodak pictures, or slideshows, Maybe background music, but no dialog. I remember maybe Google+ having an ad where a dude gets added to a "friends" circle, and they end up married - just in very simple acts like clicking and dragging. Used correctly, these methods can be very powerful.

For popular audiences (the rabble), the 20 minutes of "nothing" at the beginning set it apart from anything they ever experienced - and the stillness and quiet and loneliness of space is really conveyed by the atmosphere of the whole movie - not just a few scenes here and there. The bulky space suits and slow motion are embodied by the film. The lack of flashy personalities matches what we would expect for scientists on a boring flight. Calm, reasonable, rational, and almost sterile.

For more astute observers, a lot of detail and information are conveyed when there is seemingly nothing else happening. Especially when you look at personal interpretations such as this analysis - so many people have strong feelings about their interpretation, when it is based on information they got not from the film (or it would be indisputable) but from their interaction with the film.

You don't get it because you didn't interact with the film - you just watched it. And that's not your fault, or a deficiency on your part - I have watched other movies the same way and don't "get" them, which is why I understand where you are coming from.

In fact, the shear number of treatises on meaning in the movie shows how much information was conveyed without having much dialog. The plot was able to be furthered without dialog to explain what was happening. The characters did not have to evolve and be rich and multi-dimensional, because it is the atmosphere, and specifically HAL, that evolves. The characters do evolve, but it is a quiet, internal change that is either implied or understood. We know that Dave is scared of being killed by HAL - but he is not going to be the stereotypical whimpering woman or big bad ass - no "Imma bust all up in your memory crystals" sound bite, because HAL controls everything and already killed Frank on the mere mention of a possibility of disconnecting Hal.

That kind of quiet drama is so rare, and often poorly done, that it generates the kind of negative reviews you mentioned. In fact, there are a number of Italian films I specifically remember for having almost nothing at all happening of any substance, but they were extremely well done, and highly affecting. The much ridiculed bag from American Beauty - I recognized it as a very rushed (and therefore uncomfortable) attempt to capture this style of movie making. It had the opposite effect from what was intended, for most people, precisely because this sort of thing is rare in American cinema, and it was crammed in to a movie that did not have the slow pace required. And the dialog was clunky too, which didn't help.

The remake of Solaris, which is the slowest movie I can think of recently, had dramatic visuals and the biggest name actor of the time to pull it through. And the actors were able to openly show emotion and fear - which was not possible for Dave. And at 99 minutes instead of the original 167 minutes (1972, not the 1968 tv version) it was much faster - the original had something like 40 minutes of just scenery. Of course the author (Lem) didn't like that one.

I particularly enjoyed the review from "Faye Kane Homeless Brain" on Timothy's recommendation, which tore the book to shreds and enlightened me on a number of things I missed, but now seem very obvious. That's part of the fun with David Lynch films, except in place of the slow pace of normal life, he distracts us with things that don't immediately make sense. Instead of staring at a doorway for an inordinate amount of time, Lynch gives us a backwards talking midget. Except Kubrick is giving you visual cues, almost subliminally, while Lynch is just giving you data you have to sort and filter later.

It was done in 1968 - an epic year for sci-fi movies, but the effects were so much better than anything I've seen from that year. The rest of them look cheesy now, but 2001 holds up quite well 45 years later.

The ignorant could always dismiss the apparently ridiculous parts as "I probably would have understood if I read the book", which is why they can fast-forward to the parts with HAL and still enjoy most of the movie. It essentially had something for everyone - flashy effects, an epic feel, oddball characters (Hal, angry apes, black rectangles, and a space baby!), a good soundtrack, technical accuracy. And still let the viewer "experience" it rather than being spoon fed each action, reaction, or emotion.

Everyone always got disks sent out right away as long as they had movies on their list.

Nope. I had Netflix around that time. I sent movies back immediately, and could see when they were received. The turnaround time mailing to me started taking longer than the return trip - noticeably so that I paid attention to the shipped/received status and timing.

I dropped Netflix because it was obviously throttling. A queue of 100-120 movies all the time, of all types - blockbuster, indie, documentary, popular, unpopular - there is no way that they didn't have at least one to send me. But the timing data did it for me. Suspicious, but I didn't keep the data anywhere other than my head.

It's a failing business with a broken business model, and nothing will change that.

It's a government service that is required to be self-funded and independent. There is no business model. The board of directors is really just Congress, which makes it unique enough that it doesn't qualify as a business.

They exchange legal tender for goods and services and have accounting and HR departments, I assume, but you can't think of it like a business. More specifically, you can't fix the business model - getting mail from anyone to anyone while being constrained from raising prices is not a business model.

I'd feel much better about believing you if your source material wasn't well known for being, shall we say, exaggerated at times?

While there is no solid answer, you are arguing the wrong thing. Maximum age is not the same as "people not living as long". Lots of people died in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, making the few who lived to the natural old age death were few and far between.

Here is an article which is attacking a Live Science article, and hopefully you can make the distinction. It argues your point, more or less. Evaluating both articles should prove enlightening.

The statement still stands - people didn't live as long. If you like, take a hypothetical population of 100 people, assign the life expectancy to each member of the group, and see when they die. Count the number of years lived, and you have fewer total years in the lower life expectancy group - despite similar maximum ages.

I will say that it wasn't so much pressure to breed - that is probably overstatement. But the accepted age of motherhood certainly was younger when lifespan was shorter.

I did find a similar discussion that aired 6 months ago with Shankar Vedantam. Fear vs. dread, but not as well presented.

And another I should have mentioned is Peter Sandman on how outrage drives hazard perception. Outrage at being attacked makes it seem much more of a hazard - not more likely, nor more risky. And outrage will drive spending. So everyone focuses on what outrages them, rather than just what will statistically harm them.

David Ropeik was on that communist tree hugging NPR a few weeks ago discussing why people are terrible at calculating risks.*

My memory of it was that people weigh two things. One, how likely it is. Two, how scary it is. The result is an internal risk evaluation which has largely nothing to do with statistics.

A terrorist attack is very scary because it is, to the victims, random and completely unpredictable. It could happen to you, unlike the homicides that happen in your town because they almost always happen for a reason. I am not likely to be killed by gangs, nor hunting accidents. But I am just as likely as anyone else to be in a terrorist attack.

That's not exactly true, but it *feels* true because we are weighing non-data evidence (emotion). Shark attack. School shootings. These are all less dangerous than traffic or cancer, but they are feared far more.

And the sad thing is, more money will be spent on preventing unpreventable things, and less on preventable things, because of this faulty risk calculation.

Now, you can continue your argument that statistics should drive public policy. But you will hopefully understand why you are not getting your point across to the average person.

--
* (Pretty sure it was him - I would like to find his bit again because he spoke clearly and concisely about some fairly complicated stuff - mainly irrationality of the average person)

I voted for Obama specifically to send the message that the first election win was not a fluke - that people really did prefer a black man and a doofus (Biden) over the other party's offerings.

I did not vote for a third party because even if everyone who wanted a third party voted third party, there are not enough votes to get that third party elected. Especially because there isn't just one third party. To have a viable third party, we all need to agree who that party is, and then be convinced that we won't accidentally vote for the worst candidate via the Nader effect.

When you put together a viable third party ticket without viable fourth and fifth parties, on whom enough of the discontented can agree, and still loses, you can puke.

Libertarian Party - on the ballot in 48 states and D.C., 1.2 million votes = 1%. Short of 400,000 registered members. For a 3-way split, you would need to sway 39 million other people to support it - which means roughly 67 million supporters, with 58% turnout.

Doing the math, it is much more likely to be a spoiler vote. I don't see getting 67 million people to change their party affiliation. Let's change that to just the voters, so 39 million people. How many of those would vote for a third party if they were guaranteed not to be a spoiler vote? I think half is very generous, so you're still at convincing 20 million people. It's just not going to happen in time for the next election unless something super serious happens.

And conveniently, Snowden is that huge thing that could change peoples' outlooks on the government and the parties. Just as conveniently, this will all be forgotten in time for the next campaign - again, unless the Libertarian party takes huge gambles on public sentiment, and wins.

Green party got less than half of the Libertarians despite getting on the ballot in 36 states. It's even more unlikely to be a contender, and more likely to spoil the third party vote.

The kernel itself is relatively solid, but there are problems.

Interactive services can expose system-level access to users - a design flaw shich should not be allowed. I remember vaguely a hack from the logon of Windows NT which let you use the context menu, then somehow involving 'print' and/or 'help', you could get explorer.exe open without logging in. That was a flaw with the Win32 implementation, but it had to somehow allow user-level access to MSGINA and the kernel system for authentication and security - a good design would have allowed for this. This is Windows NT or 2000, ignoring XP and beyond.

I also remember when Vista moved graphics processing into user mode, so that the usual BSOD from graphics drivers famous in XP would simply be an abnormal termination. Reading suggests this was reversed in 7 because of the slowness this added. If graphics - fundamentally the way the OS communicates with the user, since the command-line is supposed to be a second resort - has to be so close to the metal it can't be in user space without slowing it down, this is not good.

At this point I should say that maybe a command-line interface, under the hood, may be secure. But if the intent is to provide a windowing environment, and the method of doing so is not secure, maybe the kernel has exceeded its usefulness. I should also say that a lot of uninformed people parrot the idea that the kernel is well designed, siply because it flies in the face of all the Microsoft hate. The original nerd hipster, who likes something - or believes that something can be good - even if the masses hate it. Or just because the masses hate it.

I have personally used a Shatter attack to expose passwords masked by asterisks. There is a single byte in the window definition that says "replace every character with this one because this is a password box". If it is not filled in, the text box is normal. If it is filled in, it's a password box. Most apps that display a password set the password style (by default filling that byte with an asterisk) and put the password up. Easy to recover.

If different processes, which should be kept separate from other processes, are vulnerable in this fashion, then either the kernel is wrong or the user layer on top of the kernel is not able to maintain the segragation - in effect the user layer is a vulnerability to the kernel.

Just looking at Vista, and its failure due to UAC and similar security fixes, the fundamental kernel was vulnerable to a number of serious issues - not necessarily with the kernel, but because of its implementation. Having to force an abomination like UAC on programmers so that they would respect security guidelines of least privilage, shows that they did not properly restrict its operation from the beginning - not a flaw in the kernel, but in the overall design. Configured properly, Windows would not run programs, in some cases at all. Configured improperly, it would.

The overhead of creating a fork() in Windows is ridiculous. As a Windows hacker, I found fork() abhorrent - until someone pointed out the difference in overhead.

There are many things wrong with Windows. It is fundamentally sound, but there are a good number of other flaws I won't bore you with, that would probably be more convincing but less headline-tastic. The original conception was a good idea, and it has just gotten worse from there. Perhaps it got worse as knowledgeable people left, and as of 2003 it has stopped getting worse.

In the past, Grassley and other lawmakers have taken issue with ARCâ(TM)s use of money, including whether it improperly housed aircraft owned by Google at NASA facilities

We have a witch hunt from someone who hates spending money on communist, tree-hugging garbage like space exploration, when it could be spent in his home district helping him stay elected.

Given the facts, it's actually much worse than it seems. And, if there genuinely was misuse of funds, an investigation that costs more than the original expenditure is not a waste. Genuine misuse can exclude the recipient from further grants, saving far more than the amount in question. Setting a threshold on the maximum amount to spend gives people an incentive to request amounts less than that, and misuse it.

In this case, I'm fairly certain we can label Grassley the jackass who cried wolf, and cut him off from questioning anything the ARC, or all of NASA, ever does. After all, it should work both ways.