Comment

Comment by Marc Draco on September 18, 2011 at 7:33pm

Craig, if the machine was deigned for Vista it should run 7 without too many issues. If it was designed for XP, the 7 might given problems. Laptops are particularly troublesome in this regard.

If it's just watching AVIs etc., you might be better off with a low-cost upscaling DVD player. The ones we get here play many formats without so much as a hiccup. Many Bluray machines do the same and also upscale (often better than the cheaper red-ray). Most bluray machines will also play off a USB stick which is very economical. Then there are dedicated players and (if you have an Xbox 360) you can play dirt over the home network.

So many choices. Pm me if you need more, I'm way off topic here.

Comment by Craigart14 on September 18, 2011 at 12:28pm

Thanks, Marc Draco.  I am looking for a cheap upgrade to Win 7 or a way to wipe the laptop drive and go with a clean XP install.

 

Egan, incomplete education is not a euphemism; it's a judgment made by a college professor with a doctorate in literature reading some rather sophomoric comments.  Certainty and rudeness are not exactly signs of maturity.  You have told us in your last few posts that the vast majority of atheists are irrational and that people are stupid.  You have also stated that people hold unpopular opinions only so they can feel good about themselves, so in a society full of Christians, those childish malcontents attack Christianity.  Discounting someone's opinion by blasting his or her motives is a cheap trick, otherwise known as an argument ad hominem.  It's also an attempt to poison the well.  And, since you have no knowledge of why people on this board are atheists, it simply isn't true.  The atheists I know have come to their lack of belief through study and thinking.  So leave the petulant sweeping generalizations out of the discussion.

 

The viewer does have a role in determining meaning in a film.  I'm still puzzled by the ending of Apocalypto.  Knowing Mel Gibson's religious views, I wonder how he sees the arrival of the Spanish Catholics on the beach.  I see it as the beginning of the end for millions of Native Americans.  What the filmmaker intends is unknowable and irrelevant. 

Comment by Marc Draco on September 18, 2011 at 8:35am

Hollywood produces 450 odd movies per year - that's 4500 over the last decade and you cite just one? The other two were not US based; Blind Fury was a remake of "zatoichi", I gather.

Daredevil explains to a point where his power comes from - Eli's is not explained. Close combat fighting is entirely different to firing a gun at someone hundreds of feet away - particularly when they are, fully sighted and firing back at you.

Eli seems impenetrable and untouchable.

Words might give people strength, but that suggests you don't know the bible that well and could learn a lot from other works of wisdom and history. This is, I suspect, what Craig was alluding to in the remark you view as ageism.

Allow me to put it another way, you can be born with great intelligence, but wisdom takes a lifetime.

Comment by Marc Draco on September 18, 2011 at 8:01am

"in the movie, it's rumoured to be the cause of the collapse of society..."

 

I missed that - but I think that's because I was just sitting there agog at all the plot silliness.

The message in Book of Eli is clear - the Bible is a hugely important book and is defended by some supernatural force which allows Eli to shoot with the accuracy of a sniper, at blinding speed while being unable to see; not to mention his superhuman memory.

I read a lot of screenplays - and that takes suspension of disbelief into uncharted territories beyond the ones explored in "The Last Airbender".

Comment by TNT666 on September 18, 2011 at 12:44am

As long as there are millions of books, they all exist in some degree of equality, each book's importance diluted by the vastness of the literary scene. However, in an apocalyptic end of the world scenario where 99.999% percent of books have disappeared, I would certainly place a premium on useful books, and the bible would not make the cut. It is the least useful book ever written. So preserving it would be extremely low on my list of priorities. Now if someone wanted to make a movie about preserving books high school science books, hey, I'd take that long journey.

Comment by Marc Draco on September 17, 2011 at 8:58pm

Vista machines don't do xp well, Craig. Vista is awful. I expect someone should be able to find you a cheap upgrade. Sorry, I'm too tired to comment in more detail

Comment by Craigart14 on September 17, 2011 at 8:46pm

Hey, egan, it's not ageism; it's being aware of an as yet incomplete education.  Besides, we're not judging your comments by your age; we're judging your maturity by your comments.  And the other bit isn't censorship; it's a joke about the often vague and sometimes invisible line between reality and fiction.  Of course, as an atheist, I doubt that there's anything in the KJV worth preserving--except for the Shakespeare reference in Psalm 46, the Book of Job (which believers always seem to muddle), and Ecclesiastes, which Herman Melville once called "the fine, hammered steel of woe."

 

Rakesh Kanuri:  Thanks for the suggestion, but I doubt that there's a loose connection; other disks work fine, and other programs work fine.  About halfway through an attempt to install Win XP Home, the laptop freezes.  Could there be a conflict between XP and Vista?  (There seem to be conflicts between Vista and everything else.)  Microsoft sure missed the boat on that one; they should give all Vista owners a free copy of Win 7.

Comment by rakesh kanuri on September 17, 2011 at 12:58am

Craigart14-if your getting blue screen, it is due to loose connections

Comment by Craigart14 on September 16, 2011 at 10:07pm

Regarding the whole Book of Eli thing.  If the filmmakers think that delivering the KJV to a small surviving community of intellectual guardians of knowledge is a good thing, they are wrong.  If I had known Eli was carrying the last surviving copy of the KJV, I would have invaded the movie set and burned it myself.  I don't remember the ending exactly, but is he not speaking from memory when dictating the book?  If he is blind, wouldn't he be reading the Braille?

 

Films, like books, don't always say what the director thinks they say.  In literary studies, we discarded authorial intention with the New Criticism of the 1930s.  Meaning is a collaboration between writer and reader or between filmmaker and viewer.  No author or director can totally control the meaning of a work, so interviews with directors or actors are not the final word on the meaning.  But then, there is no final word save in the minds of unsophisticated critics.

 

It was fun reading this, um, stream.  I've learned that disagreement constitutes an ad hominem attack, and that the vast majority of atheists are irrational trend followers.  It's amazing what we can learn from the younger generation. 

Comment by Craigart14 on September 16, 2011 at 9:52pm

With my computer to TV problem--the sound remains too low to hear through the HDMI connection--a friend suggested I open the sound in control panel and configure it to carry sound over HDMI.  Couldn't access sound controls; rundll32.exe is missing.  So I tried to install a Win XP Home edition I had lying around over Vista, but it would begin the install, then cut to the blue screen of death.  Vista makes it pretty hard to do much of anything; I hate it, but it came with the laptop.  So earlier today I said the hell with it and ordered a Roku streaming box.  I may test the aerodynamics of the laptop over a large body of water.

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