Friends - I'm in trouble - and I need your help

Welcome back Vance :-)

@Imperious:

I have seen: Mo’ Better Blues, Do the Right Thing, School Daze,Boys in the hood and Bamboozled

Most of the cast are African Americans but i was making a joke about him casting an african as a German General but its not too far off from reality from the examples of his casting in other movies.

Haven’t seen all those, but some of them were not good.  It happens.

Fair enough on the joke, but it is not reality at all.  He mainly does movies about the Bronx, in black neighborhoods.  That is appropriate.  Casting black men as German generals is just stupid (but yes, funny), and not something to do since he was so interested in showing contributions of blacks in WW2 - albeit from a book.

Oliver Stone only does movies where they ridicule conservatism viewpoints, so i expect to get that in all his movies.

Ok, maybe you do, but that’s Oliver Stone.  But “only does movies” is completely wrong when you see: Natural Born Killers, Alexander, Any Given Sunday, etc., or look at most of the movies he wrote the screenplay for.

@Cmdr:

Well, I never claimed he had black nazis, but yes, I’ve seen some of his fiction.  They’re okay entertainment value, but not something I enjoyed as a primary repository for my hard earned cash.  I prefer Jerry Bruckheimer :P

I wasn’t attributing the black nazi to you.  You don’t like him, ok, that’s fine.  No need to pull something nonsensical or unrelated like Michael Moore (yes, I know you don’t like him either).

@Cmdr:

I just went to see my first movie in the Theater of the year: “An American Carol” it was hilarious!

I only went to the effort to see it in the theaters because Blockbuster is boycotting it (like they did with Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed until they lost the lawsuit.)

Good fiction huh?

Question: how can a movie rental company boycott something that just came out on screen?

@Imperious:

I saw Miracle and as i suspected it was a typical spike lee movie. He extrapolates once again south central/bronx ghetto rough language of the 1990’s in every sentence, while the Germans look like mensa candidates. The Africans are portrayed as disgusting, corrupted and uneducated soldiers ( with some exceptions) ‘looking’ for opportunities. Its like he made it to appeal to the audience that watched his other movies by trying to turn WW2 france into “Gang Wars of the Hood” and frankly their was not any way it would have worked unless it was specifically about the “buffalo soldiers” and their bravery in fighting in spite of how they were treated at home. ON this level it had a chance and intimated that and similar points but it was very weak effort.

It should be a box office bust.

I saw stroke of genious and this was better but formalistic plot sequence.

Thanks for the assessment, I will reply once I’ve seen it.  Not holding much for it with the reviews, but will save the opinion for myself.

@Chengora:

Thanks, Jen.  I’m still waiting for Tom’s Hardware to update their CPU chart, but my understanding was that Intel initially released only its two top Core 2 Duo processors for testing.  I understand that the other 3-4 lower end processors were also being tested, but I wasn’t sure which if anyone had done it yet.

I probably should just be patient, though, since DirectX 10 cards haven’t even come out.  :-D

I’m going with the 1.83 Ghz Duo in my laptop.  Should be good enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

http://imdb.com/title/tt0290296/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Space_Station_visitors

Guests and staff are associated with the following countries:
USA,
Russia,
Japan,
Italy,
Australia,
S. Africa,
UK,
France,
Canada,
Peru,
Spain,
The Netherlands,
Latvia,
Belgium,
Costa Rica

Components are also made in places around the globe.

Main Participants:
USA,
Russia,
Japan,
Canada,
Brazil,
UK, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Greece, Luxemburg, (Euro Space agency)

Up there, all alone, on the front porch to the final frontier…
They are up there advancing the cause of humankind. 
I just checked out the IMAX DVD.  Comments by astronaut and cosmonaut alike both speak of seeing the earth below without any borders.  One even said that we will not set up permanant residence on the moon as individual countries, but as allies representing all mankind.

The Imax special features pointed out a how a shot from the porthole on the Soyuz was not directly available due to the bulkiness of the camera.  The quick problem solving ideal of one cosmonaut and the skills applied by rest of the crew, they set up mirror reflective shots that were angled just right.  You would not know it was reflected if they didn’t tell you.

These people live, eat, work, sing, and make movies together up there.  Sharing for them is essential to surviving.  The main crew is 3, which will go up for a while as Soyuz and Shuttles dock to trade out crews.

All of the space agency crews are highly educated and heavily trained.  Touring guests are also well trained.  The guests so far have been highly successful technology entrepreneurs, so they also understand the discipline needed for successful trips up there.  The tourism bill at ~ $20 mil cash is high enough to prevent a fraudster from getting on board.

The contrast  to the UN is dramatic. 
Maybe its because its mostly enlightened nations that are making the effort, so the petty dictators don’t have a say.  The Russian and US space agencies show a very unified front to all the other participants, so unity of purpose for any new objective is quickly achieved.  They also have the strongest communications links for station ops.

Gas is stilll cheap. it is 2.30 where I live and my driving habits are yet to change. At least suv sales are down 20%.

Thanks ZZZ, nuff said.

But how do you grow the pie?
Is that the effort of a single player or of all of them?

Yeah, there are different ways to make that cut.
Some say Columbus, some say Fall of Byzantine…. I don’t think that you can make that up on one event. It happened around 1500, that’s good enough for me :)