jadespider9643

I saw this movie a long time ago on TV. not sure if it was before or after the Matrix actually came out. it was probably a made for TV movie, but I can't be sure of that. It was about a guy in suburbia who became away that reality was a computer fantasy, and he somehow escaped. He found a bunch of "rebels" in a wasteland environment that were "fighting the system". But that was also a virtual reality. He escape from that one and found a bunch of elite upper management types that believed THEY were running the virtual realities. But of course that was also a virtual reality. There was a tier of reality built to house all different personalities, and he broke through all of them and eventually finds just 1 guy in a warehouse running the whole show and dieing of old age. So the main character is going to take over his job. At this point all the curtains are pulled back, and it's not like the matrix where everyone is plugged in...reality is real, but your television, your chair, your computer..they're all construction or just empty boxes with bar-codes that tell your brain you're watching TV..when you're really just sitting on a cheap chair staring at a cardboard box.

Does that sound familiar to anyone? What was the name of that movie???

I have a 93 pontiac sunbird. Hehe...It's old. It is NOT well maintained. But it is relatively low mileage (84k) for it's age.

Lots of little things are wrong, but most notably I'm concerned about the engine. The temperature gauge recently (past 6 months?) has risen higher and higher and higher...it now goes beyond the RED zone (red is marked as 260, the bottom of the scale is 100) on EVERY short trip to work(10 miles?). Slowly rising up to that point. it passes out of the red probably after about 3-4 miles. The really odd thing, is nothing seems to be hot. I set the environmental controls to hot air and it comes out COLD. I feel the hood (not the engine) and it never feels even warm. However I very recently (2-3 weeks) have started to smell the burning oil more and more. And Today....the check engine light came on at the end of my commute in. It didn't come on for the trip home though.

A guy at Jiffy lube had mentioned something about a...oil....pump..pressure...something? I forget what it was, I hadn't heard of the part before.

So what is wrong with my car? (and how much to fix?)

I've been aware of SSD technology for a while, but due to the costs I never looked much into it. Now costs are starting to come down (slightly) and for a performance gaming rig like I'm looking to build it has some appeal. But I work in tech support, so the first thing on my mind is...'how wrong can it go?' So what are the downsides? can a power surge wipe my entire hard drive? or the magnets in a big stereo speaker corrupt it? I'm only looking at fairly small ones that are well within my budget, so price is finally no longer a concern for SSD.

(This is for a desktop, not a laptop)

Our lawn mower stoped working yesterday, the metal wire that runs from the dead-man switch at the handle down to the engine broke somewhere inside it's tiny little tube. It's quite obvious that this is the problem, since you can squeeze the handle and the wire pulls out one end and you can see that it doesn't pull the wire on the other end.

How much does it cost to fix one of these at a shop, or how easy/cheap would it be to fix it ourselves? is this like a part that would be easily avaliable to joe public?

so i heard a loud crashing today, I later discovered it was all the ice from our chest freezer crashing off the sides. Obviously it's not supposed to do that, so I'm assuming it's broken. I'm doing some preliminary research into what it would cost to replace it or repair it. It's an 18.2 cu ft whirlpool chest freezer. as near as I can tell they don't make this one anymore (it's very old, I fully understand). but we don't completely fill it up really, so we could go with a 14.8 cu ft which seems to be a new standard size. I've found several in the $450-$500 range. What I can't find is anything about how much it costs to fix these things. Anyone have any experience? How much might it cost to fix the freezer? And do you think that would be a better or worse idea than buying a new one?

Oh and isn't there some thing about a tax deduction for buying "green" major appliances, does that apply with freezers?

I'm really tempted by the whole "last man on earth" concept done properly in a big budget movie, but I'm kinda worried that it might end up as a horror movie. I hate horror movies. Dramatic musical cues (or obvious lacks thereof) and scary ugly things jumping out of the darkness kind of stuff are a real turn off for me.

Can someone clarify for me....Is I am Legend a horror movie? I don't need to know if its scary, just if it belongs to that genre or if it's a more of a thinker movie like I hope it is.

there was an episode with Reginald Barclay in which Barclay goes to the holodeck and has the computer assemble piece by piece a "brain interface" or something. At one point he has to tell the computer how to create a new piece of equipment to make it work. But once it's all together he sits in the chair and takes control of the enterprise, and runs it all with his brain. (I think his brain was super-sized at the time somehow, but I forget.)

Anyone know what episode that was?

I know nothing of the book, and the trailers I've seen seem to skirt closely around the issue.

So can I get a straight plain simple answer from someone who has actually SEEN it (not read the book or watched previews).

IS this a zombie movie?

I see people yacking and blabing all the time about CO2 emmisions and trendy indicator graphs that don't tell me anything.

The hippies call it Global warming, but I've never seen someone (on either side) name a figure connected to the global average temperature. I mean...if everyone is convinced that the planet is heating up...how much? what was the average temperature planet-wide 10 years ago and what is it now? is it higher or not? and how much?

I don't think we see these figures because we can't get a reliable planet-wide reading. we get limited surface readings at random locations, and even more limited upper atmospheric readings. No one knows what the global average temperature is! So why does everyone insist it's going up?

If your all getting upset because we're hurting the ecosystem or making the planet smell funny or look grungy...say THAT. Call it Global Littering, or Global Pollution. Don't call down the end of the world and blame it on statistic we can't measue!

Any time I hear people advocating for global warming, they talk with words like "more" and "less" and "drastic changes" and other non-specific forms of measurement. Can someone please tell me the GLOBAL YEARLY AVERAGE temperature for any past year and also the GLOBAL YEARLY AVERAGE temperature for a recent year? I want to see some numbers!

My TV is old, this much I know, a Quasar. It has it's own issues, but I'm not sure if this is one of them. The DVD player is a Samsung, it's pretty old too, not as old as the TV though. They are connected thru a VCR and a RF modulator. It goes DVD -> RF Modulator -> VCR -> TV.

So the problem is when I'm trying to watch a DVD with a brightly light scenes, the bright white parts get so bright they bleed out everything else and I can't see. sometimes it's worse than others, it depends on the scene and how much bright white light there is in it.

normally I'd assume it was the TV, but this never happens when just watching TV, but my reception is so bad, I don't know if that could be countering the problem somehow.

I have a TV in the basement, it's within 5ft of the basement's outer cement wall. right now it's hooked up to a DVD player and a VCR and a RF modulator (so i can run the DVD signal past the VCR). There are so many cables running around behind this thing that it picks up a number of channels with varing quality with no antenna. (8 & 10 are strong, and 12 & 49 are pretty fuzzy, with bad weather i lose 49 pretty often)

The reception is at the leve where if I stand in just the right spot near the TV it'll kill the signal, or if it's off-day a different spot might make it viewable. What sort of options are there for an indoor antenna? Will a simple set of rabbit ears make a big difference? What if I just tie some copper wire to an exposed cable and run it around on the floor, would that do anything?

Suppose in a Presidential election you were given a 2nd set of options. You could either vote FOR any one of the cadidates, or AGANIST any one of the cadidates. You only get one vote to work with, if you vote aganist someone, it counts as a negative vote, effectively canceling out a FOR vote at a 1:1 ratio. If you're voting between only 2 choices this would be essentially pointless, of course. But when choosing between 3 or more options, this would let someone say "I don't care between these 2, but I really don't want the third one"

Under a system like this, how would you vote? FOR? or AGANIST? and why would you vote that way? and what are your feelings about using such a system?

Suppose in a Presidential election you were given a 2nd set of options. You could either vote FOR any one of the cadidates, or AGANIST any one of the cadidates. You only get one vote to work with, if you vote aganist someone, it counts as a negative vote, effectively canceling out a FOR vote at a 1:1 ratio. If you're voting between only 2 choices this would be essentially pointless, of course. But when choosing between 3 or more options, this would let someone say "I don't care between these 2, but I really don't want the third one"

Under a system like this, how would you vote? FOR? or AGANIST? and why would you vote that way? and what are your feelings about using such a system?