I’ve been to an NFL game twice, and it’s so much worse in person. At home at least the ad breaks are a chance to go to the bathroom or get a snack. At the game it’s not worth getting out of your seat and trudging up to the concourse because 2 minutes isn’t long enough for that. So, instead, you sit and wait for the action to resume.
It also makes it more clear that a lot of the long timeouts are purely TV-based.
There are plenty of time-outs that have to do with the state of the game: teams calling time-outs to discuss a plan, a time-out after a point is scored while the sides change, the 2-minute warning, the break after the 1st and 3rd quarters, and so-on. But, you also get explicit TV timeouts that are called by the TV networks when it’s been too long since the last commercial.
In the stadium when that happens the offense might be in a flow, and the defense may be wobbling. But, the TV networks need to show their ads, so the network calls a timeout. Meanwhile, the players just stand around on the field, ready for the next play until the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_timeout#/media/File:NFL_Sideline_Television_Coordinators.jpg lowers his bright orange glove.
I’m pretty sure they’re talking association football. Gridiron football “matches” (which are called games in the US) are 60 minutes of clock-on time but more than 2 hours if you count all the ad breaks and clock-stopped time. The 90 minute figure only makes sense for association football. And yes, it’s at least a billion people watching them every week.
Hacking is really a “montage” type activity, but is treated as something you can show in real time.
Like, imagine the A-Team building some weapon out of spare parts but you had to watch the entire build process including measuring, cutting, screwing up the cut, throwing away the part and trying again…
Or, imagine a martial arts film where the hero trains for the big fight… and you include the entire training regimen, showing them getting up at 6am each day to do sit-ups, then following the entire morning run…
Really a hacking sequence should have those zoomed-in calendars with days flipping by and getting crossed out.
If they really need the hack to be in the critical path of the action, it should only be something like:
Boss: We need to hack the satellite!
Hacker: What model is it?
Boss: It’s a… let me see… KU-STRZ-4 out of Azerbaijan.
Hacker: A 4-series? We’re in luck, NSA’s been sitting on a exploit for that model.
Otherwise it’s as stupid as:
Boss: We need to defeat Scar Killer in the Kumite tomorrow.
Soldier: I did some basic unarmed combat in boot camp, but…
Boss: You have 24 hours, get training!
Next day, the soldier is massively jacked and is throwing flip kicks etc.
Yeah, the “magic device” they discover that makes encryption obsolete is unrealistic, as is the way it “decrypts” what shows up on their screens. But, the rest of it is really realistic, down to probing individual leads of a chip to see what kinds of signals they emit.
Mr. Robot was the best depiction of hacking I can think of. It was fairly realistic while being entertaining too. It shows that anybody who actually wanted to be realistic in a hacking movie could do it, they just choose not to.
Offtopic, but it’s interesting that 3 of the 4 suits are “classes” (paladin, fighter, wizard) and the 4th is more of a role “healers” for hearts.
That gets me thinking, I’d like to see a fantasy game / story where the healers were the arcane magic users (sorcerers, wizards, mages) and the faith-based magic users were purely offensive magic users. Like, a wizard concentrates and weaves fire and water together to cause a fever to break. A sorcerer calls upon supernatural forces to pull the corruption out of a wound. Meanwhile a priest calls down lightning bolts or causes earthquakes, etc. but is unable to offer healing at all.
Eventually, if things keep progressing, they’ll be able to do certain things like factoring primes faster than conventional computers. But, the clock rate will probably always be abysmal.
Kindles too. You can jailbreak them and get a shell. They’re so much more useful when they’re jailbroken. They can read multiple other formats, they can get books from a fileserver on your local network, the jailbroken reader app is better, etc.
Yeah, it used to be just web servers in a data center. Bigger systems used mainframes. Consumer electronics used custom RTOSes or other custom boards. Now it’s everywhere. It’s used in the biggest systems, like the computers that power virtually every Google product, and the smallest systems. It’s almost not worth it not to use Linux when building a tiny device because it makes the dev cycle so much shorter.
Of all the new uses of Mickey we’re now seeing, one thing I really hope is to see Mickey showing up on murals in kindergartens and daycares. This is really what it means for the character to be entering the public domain. He’s has been a part of American, if not world culture for decades, but that part of the culture has been illegal for people to use.
Finally, after nearly a century of Disney getting absolute control, that cultural element finally belongs to everyone. Now parents and caregivers can paint images of Mickey and make kids happy without having to get permission from Disney.
It’s tricky. Sometimes changing things truly is a creative act. A big portion of Disney’s portfolio is from retelling European fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, etc. It would be hard to argue that they added nothing of value when they remade those fairy tales. In many cases, people wouldn’t recognize the original stories because Disney changed so much.
OTOH, it seems like bullshit when tiny elements are changed. For example, the Conan-Doyle estate has sued because although Sherlock Holmes was in the public domain, they said that was only the stories where he was aloof and analytic. They said that in stories published in the 1920s he was more capable of empathy, so any depiction of Holmes where he was empathetic infringed on their copyright.
If I were on a jury deciding this sort of thing, I’d require that there be something brand new. For example, Beauty and The Beast is public domain, and as long as someone is making an animated movie based on that story the default assumption should be that they’re inventing new aspects based on the public domain story, not based on the Disney movie. OTOH if they have an animated candle / candelabra, it’s reasonable to assume that infringes on the new character created by Disney.