Hacker Cinema
Demolition Man
1993 · Film · 115 min
Directed by Marco Brambilla
In 1996, brash L.A. detective John Spartan and maniac killer Simon Phoenix are both sentenced to decades in a cryogenic prison as punishment for a rescue mission gone wrong. When Phoenix escapes 36 years later to wreak havoc on the future, Spartan is awakened to capture his nemesis the old-fashioned way.
19 positive1 negative62 neutralfrom 82 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
83 comments on Hacker News
> multiple grownup movies opening widely at the same time (“Demolition Man,”
I've never heard Demolition Man described as a grownup movie before.
If a movie is well made then it is as long or as short as it needs to be. If it isn't then it's not.
Recently rewatched Demolition Man (1993) where criminals are frozen in cryostasis and then reanimated – a very prescient film. All I could think of was Demolition Pig
> Minister for Victims and Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls
Violence? This act of choking most of the time is requested by women themselves. It's the woman who fantasizes about it and asks her partner to perform it. I have never heard or read anywhere that the guy initiated it, simply because it adds nothing to the overall pleasure for him. Actually, women's fantasies are usually more messed up than men's on average, and you can compare the porn that men mostly watch vs the dark fantasies that women read in their books. Women's fantasies are usually about abduction, abuse, stalking, pain, among others. There's always this theme whenever you read about domestic violence or really anything bad in relationships or families, including things like manipulation and abuse. You always find that the man is portrayed as bad, the woman as the victim, a completely biased language as it's never the other way around, while in reality both can commit abuse. Males usually do so in physical form but females usually in emotional and mental form, which is far worse, and you can ask anyone who had an abusive mother.
Back to the ‘choking’ part, how will they regulate other forms of choking? And without going vulgar about it, hands aren't necessarily used, so can a woman accuse the man within the coming 3 years of the intimate event (per the article) after he had a “specific oral sex” with her and she choked on it? What if it's the other way around, the woman is big and was over the man's face? Will the same rule apply? This is a silly law and it's surprising it's already been in place since 2021. Probably in 10 years sexual intimacy will be done how it was in the Demolition Man movie, zero physical contact!
> What government enforcement are you on about?
UK and EU are defacto making Petrol/Diesel cars production uneconomical / illegal. California IIRC are also has a deadline for Petrol/Diesel cars IIRC.
> And why a massive downgrade?
The biggest ones for me are:
1) Range. I have a 700 mile range on my car. My old car before that could do 600 miles. I can travel from one end of the UK to another with 1/2 fuel stops. I have family I see regularly on the other side of the country. I can do the trip in 4 providing good traffic In an Electric vehicle that time is 5-7 hours due to the extra stops required. I know this because my mother and step father recently came to visit me and they have an electric vehicle. If you regularly do longer trips even 30 minutes off the road is a long time. I don't stop for anything other than a bathroom break when I do a long journey.
2) Charging time. I live in an apartment. I would need to charge the car away from home. That is a massive PITA IMO. I spend maybe 5 minutes in a petrol station, compared to 30 minutes at a charger.
3) Almost every modern vehicle car has a bunch of annoyances in the vehicle. The electric cars I have seen have this dialled up to 11.
4) Cost. Electric vehicles are really expensive IMO. I can get a cheap second hand diesel for a few thousand in reasonable condition.
> And why don't you change the channel off of Fox occasionally?
Snarky responses like this is why people become resentful. Just because people have a different view point to yours doesn't mean they have been brainwashed by someone.
A lot of us are happy with the vehicles we already have. I simply do not have an interest in ever owning an electric vehicle. I also prefer older vehicles and bikes because they are simpler and I prefer the way they operate.
A lot of these themes btw was explored by Demolition Man with Sly Stallone. The "resistance" figures to the "regime" are eating meat and driving a v8 muscle car.
I suggest you watch that, it is a fun movie and Sandra Bullock looks gorgeous in it.
Thanks for the Demolition Man reference. Great movie, and apt!
A lot of cultures have some sort of starving relic.
Maybe a simple national dish made with very cheap ingredients, or an old story around a very important staple crop. Some deep, deep memory that persists for a long time.
These are the opposite of thanksgiving, or other harvest and abundance cultural relics.
I don't think the USA has that starving myth. This cold war episode is as close as they get, and it is from the perspective of "the other". Maybe the dust bowl?
Cinema is not shy exploring ideas adjacent to this concept (Wall-E, Idiocracy, Demolition Man, Interstellar, to name a few). It, somehow, self-acknowledges that absense of a starving myth by reversing what their abundance means. Almost as if it wanted to have it, and it's ashamed of being spoiled.
Reminds me of the movie "Demolition Man", where everything was assisted by AIs.
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
I'm pretty sure my idea was literally a mash-up of Phantom 2040 "resource wars" with Demolition man "franchise wars."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_2040
> It is the year 2040, all environmental disasters and the economic Resource Wars from the early 21st century have decimated the fragile ecosystem balance of an Earth once teeming with life.
The first part of this episode is near identical to my mental picture of the "franchise wars:"
https://youtu.be/Kg8bPDGmhnU?si=MhzsBy83h8yTi6Ux&t=59
I'm surprised how easy it was for me to figure this out and find confirmation.
For those that need more context
From the movie Demolition Man https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlcDHlK_RoY
> Taco Bell won the franchise war and is the only restaurant remaining.
Foe those who don't know - which included myself until about 30 seconds ago - this is a reference to the 1993 film Demolition Man.
Demolition Man (movie) joke... but the AI bot wars stuff makes it still relevant to the conversation so this is both funny and cautionary / discussion worthy material.
Heh, Demolition Man is a great film. I had the fortune to randomly rediscover it before it was recently re-recognized as incredibly prescient. It was a cool experience, made all the better because I was totally surprised by it. I had zero expectations and just thought it was a dumb fun action movie. It was actually great.
But as to your real question: well, tune in, man. :)
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
I regret to inform you that waterfall planning is often considered a fail state in the toilet development world (and a messy one to clean up).
I can however recommend the Spiral Model [1] as a lesser known Waterfall variation, which carries a heavier focus on risk management. It resembles a conch shell, and may require up to three attempts [2] to get your toilet development process correct.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)
I used to live near there and had to troll: https://www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/dotqa6/very_disappointed_in_irvines_sign_on_i5/
There’s a movie from the 1990s called Demolition Man. Always wondered if the setting was inspired by Irvine.
Seriously though… if you added light rail and turned things like the Irvine Spectrum Center into mixed use you could get a start.
SoCal being so car dependent is absurd. The weather is so nice. You want to be outside.
Office Space, Demolition Man, Fight Club, City of Ghosts (2004), The Big Short, Ghost Dog, Slacker, most Tarantinos, various 60s italo-westerns, BTTF 1 & 2.
But there's a lot more movies coming to mind that deserve a 2nd watching imo, just haven't done so yet. Eg. most Coen Bros ones come to mind.
They are referencing the 1993 movie Demolition Man
If you extend the window a little bit, along Yes Minister, Idiocracy and Demolition Man (the last two being a documentary of our time filmed 20y ago).
NY is becoming more and more surveilled. I just watched Demolition Man again for the third time in 30 years. Great movie!
The mayor of a municipality in Istanbul proudly announced that they built walls around a small city park to keep kids safe.
And I was the only weirdo who asked why they didn’t put measures in place against speeding drivers instead.
People see completely normal to take their kids to this walled garden that looks like a prison yard with a few trees and a playground.
This hysteria of every stranger must be a criminal and everything is dangerous successfully pushed people into compartments.
Eastern Europe is honestly much more free than all the places I’ve been. To be honest, Eastern Europe does have safety problems but it’s mostly about self harm caused by nihilism, maybe that’s part of the reason why people don’t freak out about everything in first place but when I’m in Eastern Europe I feel significantly less stressed than when I’m in the UK or Turkey.
Maybe an approach somewhere between Eastern European nihilism and Western “everything is extremely important” mentality must be reached.
Put the speed bumpers against the maniacs and let the kids learn how to operate without the safety nets.
Like at the ending of “Demolition Man” movie, maybe some of us need to take stuff a bit more seriously and others relax a bit.
Utopia is not achievable, and the path to hell is laid with good intentions.
> There is a limit if one wants a functioning society that is on the whole safe and high trust.
We all have different thresholds on where that limit lies. In the film Demolition Man, Dr. Raymond Cocteau's vision of a safe San Angeles did not allow sports, swearing, eating meat, or consuming sugar or caffeine because they are "bad" for you.
Kids don't learn to write novels in literature class either - you've missed the point of such classes.
The point is to read and be exposed to different sorts of literature. This is much easier to do this with material that students are actually interested in instead of 150-year-old romance novels. And as a bonus, the students are a bit more likely to understand the symbolism and references than they would in an old book - the older literature is honestly more suited for a class that hooks both history and literature in the same course.
Literature classes are consumption courses, too, and lead a few to develop a lifelong reading (and consumption) habit, btw. We definitely watched movies based on books: Part of my high school Lit class was doing a comparison between A Brave New World and Demolition Man. (We also had a 12-page senior paper, mine was on Kurt Vonnegut. But that's beside the point.)
And perhaps part of the issue is that you haven't really read a lot of graphic novels so you misunderstand the depth that they can have, especially if you get into more obscure titles.
It's a reference to the 1993 Stallone Movie Demolition Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)
A cop gets "frozen" as a punishment and when he gets reawoken the world has changed. Including the toilets. They now use 3 seashells instead of paper.
It's a meme from the movie Demolition Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnuOa7tDco
Then make it mandatory to have all the vehicles equipped with 'Dingibility', just like in the movie Demolition Man :-)
And finally 30 years after the film it is Madzda which offers a driver personalization system based on facial recognition similar to what has been imagined in Demolition Man: https://youtu.be/uCG5UZYEYeE
> Are we living inside of the movie demolition man now?
It's worse. The germaphobes in Demolition Man seemed tolerant and reasonable compared to today's reality.
https://www.google.com/search?q=police+arrest+park+children+playing+COVID
I have to imagine that movie night at Stanford CS consists of Demolition Man, Judge Dredd and Robocop, followed by a hackathon where they try to build imitations of what they saw.
The 1993 movie Demolition Man had Schwarzenegger as a past (ie. prior to the main action in 2032) president by virtue of a constitutional amendment.
Schwarzenegger's political career began in 2003 as Governor of California, and an "Arnold Amendment" was actually proposed shortly after that, but didn't get any traction:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Opportunity_to_Govern_Amendment
Demolition Man is foundational to growing up and having good taste in movies
See also: Star Trek the next generation (series)
Look just accept that all "meat" in the future will be vegan. i.e. "Taco Bell Is Vegan in the Future" Article:[0]) according to the movie 'Demolition Man'. :)_
[0] https://www.livekindly.com/taco-bell-is-vegan-demolition-man/
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
Demolition Man is the most prophetic sci-fi movie every made. I even wrote about it: https://papa-andy.medium.com/these-movie-classics-aged-in-curious-ways-90a799d18534
Demolition man. Iconic scene where he gets a bunch of tickets for using profanity as a substitute for toilet paper. What a bizarre movie and what a bizarre idea of a future that was.
I grew up in Manchester, NH and I still was frequently going there to visit family when the Segway was introduced.
I had numerous Segway experiences when I was there, including watching cops test them out behind an abandoned shopping center (looked like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)) and getting chased off the sidewalk by Victory Park by somebody barrelling down it in a Segway.
Kamen was notorious as an eccentric character, and this story reminds me of how the "meritocracy" is noisy and puts people in positions of influence on the basis of luck more than anything else and often leads to erratic results.
Demolition Man was great documentary, wasn't it?
As the documentary Demolition Man shows, we communicated using jingles.
To frame this in terms of Stallone movies, do you see the future being more like Demolition Man or more like Judge Dredd?
In the movie Demolition Man, Wesley Snipes is a cryogenically frozen prisoner who wakes up in a utopian future and is able to run amok because everyone has become so wimpy.
Like it or not, I think this is relevant here, when we see people making a petition or I literally saw a post on LinkedIn from the UN urging Russia to stop. I don't know much about the situation overall, but applying a peacetime "we signed a petition" lens to it just seems silly. If western nations want to get serious about it (and like I say, I don't understand the conflict enough to have a strong opinion but would default to staying out of it), there are ways, but silly gestures like this are like the unarmed police in demolition man telling Wesley Snipes to stop and then being flummoxed when he ignores them and goes on a crime spree
This is so many consider Demolition Man an extremely underrated movie. It actually projected life differently. I also summise, it's why it's not as popular a sci-fi flick. Im eager for it's remake someday.
You ever see the movie Demolition Man?
OMG - what a coincidence is the timing of this thread as I happen to re-watch Demolition Man last night. Fun movie from 1993 that touches on the absurdity of both things we allow and things we don't allow.
A society where:
- you are held responsible for other people's feelings, and for their feelings as a result of your words and actions, and:
- anything that causes anyone to feel bad, is looked down upon by the collective
Is tyranny by the emotionally stunted.
The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more. Humans are beautiful in their diversity, their wildness, and their distrust of authority, and there's been a definite attempt to domesticate people on all fronts (funny, there was a discussion here days ago about domesticated animals having 15-35% smaller brains). Societal cohesion is the Borg, not a utopia. And I just watched Demolition Man yesterday (fantastic movie), this immediately reminds me of the "verbal morality fines" they hand out.
The most fundamental piece of applicable psychology is the idea that you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, period. You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow. What's wrong with that? Now there's a human right to use Twitter unhindered? They just spent the last decade telling us there wasn't!
Besides it seems clear we've already swung far too far in the "style over content" direction. People hate on Nassim Taleb because he dares insult lobbyists and people he considers scientific frauds; would he be put in jail if he lived in the UK?
Big Tech is being used to engineer a new kind of society, and I don't like it. It seems Web 3.0 is the only thing able to fight this dynamic.
Ever since the movie "Demolition Man", it should be obvious why biometrics are a bad idea. (Yeah I know they also can try to scan for signs of life like blood flow - still, I don't like it).
Even without the Demolition Man scenario, an even worse issue is that you can't change your biometrics in case somebody steals them. Fake fingerprints are already easy to do, other things surely can be cloned, too.
Alien, The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, Terminator, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, The Sixth Sense, Back to the Future, eXistenZ, Gattaca, The Arrival, 2001 space Odissey, the Shining, Trainspotting, Ground Hog day, Dune, Dark city, Tron, Demolition man, Total Recall, Robocop, The city of lost children...
Nuanced, scify, full of smart details or mind bending films are not new.
In fact, it's really hard to innovate now, because so much as already being covered.
Why does the Taco Bell from the image look like how the Taco Bell restaurant looked like in the movie Demolition Man ?
I feel like I'm Stallone in the movie Demolition Man.
> Your own device should not betray you.
Apple devices already betray their "owners", and they've been doing it for a long time.
You can't repair them.
You can't run your own software.
You can't use a better, more compliant web browser.
Businesses have to pay a 30% tax.
Businesses are forced to use login with Apple and forfeit a customer relationship.
Businesses have to dance to appease Apple. Their software gets banned, randomly flagged, or unapproved for deployment, sometimes completely on a whim.
Soon, more iDevices and Apple Pay will lead to further entrenchment. Just like in the movie Demolition Man, everything will eventually be Apple. Your car, your movies, your music, your elected officials.
It seems like every movie I found entertaining but a stretch in the 90s is becoming reality:
* Demolition Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)
* Enemy of the State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
* Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
* The Net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(1995_film)
I think verhoven has a particular sense of humor and while he himself labels some of his movies satire I think he makes a particular kind of low brow action movie first and foremost. Its more "demolition man" than "a modest proposal". Labelling the whole thing as a Satire and pretending to be above Hollywood audiences is part of his sense of humor imo.
Demolition Man (1993), for anyone wondering :)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/
Three movies for freedom lovers:
* Logan's Run ... It really is safe outside
* Demolition Man ... "You see, according to Cocteau's plan I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think; I like to read."
* Gattaca ... "I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin. No, we now have discrimination down to a science."
The way they talked about it expanding and it’s softness I thought it was a new crash absorption technology like in Demolition Man (the movie with Bullock, Stallone and Snipes) where it instantly fills the car
The movie Demolition Man has predicted this future with social distancing and (for movie purposes) automating fines for speech. The only thing missing is every restaurant being a Taco Bell.
people are strong believers that if they are in the side of "good" they can voice their opinions freely as long as they don't hurt "others opinions" note that this others opinions will change every day/months/political agenda make sense just like when Amy said "sexual preference" and the dictionary deemed it as offensive the day after. we are living in an idiocracy of the good equal to the one of the Z movie demolition man.
Also from the moment you not in this axis of the good anymore you'll be deemed nazi, fake news, banned by social media. it is crazy to see that all the newspaper took the russian collusion seriously at first (and even do it know while many investigations couldnt find it) but their first reaction to a biden article is to ban it.
We are living in a democracy of the good where the good is defined by a minority of overly violent only entitled personalities
> Now all restaurants are Taco Bell
Or was it Pizza Hut?[1]
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/alternateversions
Every time I see these posts, I think of Demolition Man:
> Now all restaurants are Taco Bell. Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the franchise wars.
Out of all the dystopian sci-fi movies, who would have thought Demolition Man would have it right?
> That you tried to do something so absurdly inappropriate that there isn't even a proper technical way to explain why it was wrong and why it could not work? Like, the server could not even begin to understand what you tried to accomplish with that request.
The "Blank Stare" response code. Or maybe the "Stunned Stare And Slowly Backing Away" response code.
Something at the other end:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
> 420 Enhance Your Calm (Twitter)
>> Returned by version 1 of the Twitter Search and Trends API when the client is being rate limited; versions 1.1 and later use the 429 Too Many Requests response code instead.[74] The phrase "Enhance your calm" comes from the 1993 movie Demolition Man, and its association with this number is likely a reference to cannabis.
Visually:
https://http.cat/420
Seems meta. As far as references to ads in movies I enjoy Demolition Man. I loop the classy cover of the jingle for Jolly Green Giant from time to time to endear me to my (close) colleagues. It's burnt deep, whelp time for a listen.
Still, to doubt police need the tools that they nationally use, and to keep equating their needs with the general population, is willfully misinterpreting/miscasting the situation. Even a locksmith is allowed tools outside what the public is allowed. Are police to be just well-meaning neighbors with no ability to do more than gently admonish? Witness the movie "Demolition Man" when cops of the future (actually more like therapists) were steamrollered by a criminal from the past.
Taken at pure sensory value, yup, you're completely correct. These are an extremely lossy compression of physical intimacy. It's like watching a 4k movie compressed to like 4 pixels of monochrome color.
However, you really have to look at the surrounding situation and mental state of the user to get why any of this matters. When you've got enough endorphins flowing, the slightly augmentation to sensory input can have a multiplicative effect. Since the brain regulates whatever your reality is, it's our job to fuck with that (in good ways) more than it is to make some completely mechanically/physically correct 1:1 recreation of sex with another person.
Let's say you're stuck with audio/video chat for intimate relations. But you've added some touch via teledildonics! Sure, it's crappy touch, but someone you want actually touching you but for some reason can't can now at least control that touch!
The media loves to spin sex tech as "this will replace sex in the future" a la Demolition Man or whatever, but that is both the wrong goal and complete bullshit. The fun part of all of this for me is building machines and interfaces to do what people and their genitals can't, and providing technology to build those interfaces/machines to see what other people come up with when freed from the tyranny (allow me my melodrama here) of human form.
This also allows us to build new forms of intimacy, possibly very, very silly forms. As an example: I work with cam models a lot, trying to build interfaces that aren't quite as a objectifying as the usual cam room. One time, I worked with a model and her fan club to hook up Rocket League (yes, the cars in hats playing soccer rocket league) to a sex toy, so any time the controller vibrated, her sex toy vibrated. There's video of how this works (and the software I used to do it and the github repo) here:
https://intiface.com/ghr
Now, this probably sounds like some weird as hell sex. Cam model is on camera, nude, using a toy, playing 3 v 3 rocket league with up to 5 cam room customers. However, this means that the normal rules of rocket league get bent. Players were no longer interested in goals, but rather, in how to cause the model's controller (and therefore toy) to vibrate. This might mean crashing into cars (Hi JG Ballard fans!), trying to get goals when the model was close to a goal to make big explosions, etc... It ended up in all of these continuously shifting team/social structures as people would join/leave, figure out new things, etc... Everyone ended up playing for hours, everyone had a really good time, and it was interactive for both the model and the customers.
So, basically, you've gotta look at these as new forms of sex, not replacements for what we've got. They may not even be good forms of sex, but hey, if everyone's consenting, no one gets hurts, and even maybe it turns out to be a buggy horrible mess, it's fun to try, right?
Demolition Man (1993)
A police officer and an escaped criminal are unfrozen in a cheerful future dystopia. Mostly a classic action movie but with some interesting future flavor and a few good situational jokes.
Yeah, I like the idea of stolen cars being found very quickly, but there's a huge potential for this to be abused and used for robo-fining, which would truly be awful, and reminds me a lot of that 90s movie "Demolition Man".
Taco Bell loosely belongs to (maybe better to say "is inspired by" or "owes origins to") a class of regional and traditional fusion food called "Texmex". It's a uniquely North American comfort food class that naturally developed over a long period of cultural intermixing along the border region between Texas and Mexico and includes influences from native food traditions, various European immigrant food prep techniques and some locally developed ideas.
I've read that at some point, Lebanese immigrants to Mexico also brought the shawarma/gyro with them and further contributed. I think it fills the same kind of food niche that Doner Kebabs fill in Europe, cheap, fast, unhealthy and filling. It's also an ideal foodtype for post-drunken late-night eating. Tacos seem to originate as a slang term used for mining charges in 18th century Mexican silver mines. At some point, somebody wrapped some meat in a tortilla and sold them as cheap laborer food.
Taco Bell was started by a guy named Glenn Bell back in the 1960s, he organized the menu, standardized on hard taco shells and a franchise model. They eventually discovered a kind of niche as a late night college food because you could easily get a couple days worth of food for cheaper than just about anywhere else -- and despite appearances has a very strong food safety record. Taco Bell is also the target of jokes about being low quality "garbage". (a common joke is that you can pick up your food at the counter and then go flush it down the toilet and cut out the middle man). Still, if you work late nights or went to college as an American, you probably ate a lot at Taco Bell and eventually developed a taste for it. If you've ever watched the movie "Demolition Man" it's a subtle joke throughout the movie that's culturally very funny to Americans.
I've never encountered a proper version of Tex-Mex outside of North America even though lots of places give it a good try. When I travel outside of the U.S. for long periods of time, it's the one kind of food I start to incessantly crave. I've noticed this among other Americans as well. Once, while doing work in Asia in an American enclave, a pop-up Taco Bell showed up charging 3 times the normal price and missing some ingredients and the line was 2 hours long.
They've tried to adopt "higher quality" ingredients and reform themselves in the past, but it's just not in their corporate DNA. More recently, they've decided to embrace their "crap food, fast and cheap" image and have developed an ever changing menu that brings in other junk food stuffs from sister brands. There's probably more food science than food in some of the menu items, but you can think of it as the cheapest molecular gastronomy meal you'll ever have.
Among immigrant friends to the U.S., most of them have their first taste of Taco Bell and think it's similarly revolting, but after a few years in the U.S. the cheapness and ubiquity of it kind of enters the diet. I know of a few people who returned to their home countries and have tried to work with Taco Bell to open franchises locally - and they all hated it the first time they ate it. My wife, a Korean immigrant, craves Taco Bell at times.
I've already encountered a minor version of this with the film "Demolition Man": when I first saw it on UK TV, it mentioned Pizza Hut at one point, but more recently it was on again and that line was overdubbed really badly to say "Taco Bell".
It's a weird thing to watch an film turn out differently to how you rememebered it when you're not told it's a different cut. Feels like low-grade gaslighting.
(Another example is the translation of "天下" - Tianxia - in the film Hero, which is both critical to the film and translated differently in different versions)
Does anyone remember the movie Demolition Man(1993) and the scene where someone calls into the police department, and the human picks up the phone and says: "Greetings and salutations. Welcome to the emergency line of the San Angeles Police Department. If you'd prefer an automated response, press 1 now."
At the time, they were making fun of automated phone trees and the joke was that they would get so good people would prefer them in the future.
I think many people already think that day is here. How many folks prefer to use an online form or chat instead of a phone call? Most of those systems are just automation with a human checking their work.
Soon the human will be out of the loop.
"at a time", wasn't the movie "demolition man" showed us the physical danger of biometrics (/s)
I just don't understand, if the vehicle is totally autonomous how is it going to get down my friends mile long driveway that is little more than two gravel tracks with grass in the middle and find a place on his grass to park while missing all the ruts.
I hear all this talk about better infrastructure, however what about the places in the middle of nowhere.
I see more of the Tesla, with self drive being in the future. Kind of like the movie demolition man.
Reminds me of the movie "Demolition Man". For those who don't know, this is a Sylvester Slallone futuristic movie where a thug named Simon Phoenix wakes up from a cryo-prison somewhere around 2032. But LA is a pacifist utopia now, and the cops are all "nicey nicey" without any weapons with them, so who is going to stop Simon now?
I think, as a society, we are progressing towards that kind of pacifist utopia.
Movies like to exploit this fear (e.g., Demolition Man when Wesley Snipes takes out the eye of a doctor to escape the prison), and it's understandable. It really comes down to when a biometric is a good fit for a system. For the average person with a laptop MS is doing a great thing. And just like any new piece of tech, there is a responsibility of the user to understand the implications and restrictions that come with it. From the video i can't see any indication that MS could prevent forced login (dead or alive), thus using this may require that you separately encrypt your data.
Define offensive. if I think cat photos are offensive would I be in my rights to kick someone out of a conference? I'm not sure what the "offense" was. If someone says "damn," that might be offensive to my dad, but to my coworkers that might be completely fine.
In this case, there was nothing anti-women or racist that any reasonable person would infer. So where's the line? Perhaps we could create some new Orwellian language for conferences and have everyone in a tape delay so the offensive-content censors would have time to bleep it out. Reminds me of the swearing fines in that movie Demolition Man.
I guess it depends to what extent you think TV drives culture versus reflects it.
It is kind of amusing to look at certain old movies and see how much less-believable they've become, particularly the ones that implied urban crime was going to get much worse before getting better (if ever.)
Ex: Robocop, Judge Dredd, Escape from New York, the introductory portion of Demolition Man...
Well, if it makes you feel better, Wesley Snipes did an AMA on Reddit a few days ago, and someone asked him if there would be a Demolition Man sequel.
He responded politely, but basically said "people need to be allowed to forget that movie". So you are good.
It's always possible that the end result will be a hybrid one that's somewhere in-between the two visions (particularly with other variants, as it seems like Google's primarily targeting an urban environment). There are already concepts for retractable steering wheels [1] that could be combined with retractable pedals to handle situations that require manual control. Hell, the movie Demolition Man had them way back in the 90s alongside with plenty of cheesy acting.
[1] http://www.webdev.trw.com/sites/default/files/TRW_OSS_SWS%20RetractableSW_English_2013.pdf
Watch the Demolition Man "sex scene": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/
Actually, yes, grocery stores in Germany may sell porn (if they sell magazines). From more classy stuff like Playboy and FHM to just downright cheap and simple porn magazines. Slightly hidden away so you only see the titles, of course. (And England has the famous "page three girls" in their newspapers.)
Of course it's Apple's legal right to deny what they want. That doesn't mean that I think it's right that they have that right. Apple is a quasi-monopoly, and people are dependent on them. There is no second app store for iOS devices really. A more fitting analogy would be when the postal service would decline to transport mail with porn in it. Would that be a good situation?
I'm sure if they would take away the porn magazines (even if the grocery stores just use their legal right to stock only whatever products they want), many people would scream bloody murder. But in the digital world, we are so used to clean walled gardens, that nobody cares. It's a bit like the movie Demolition Man...
Reminds of the sex scene from the movie Demolition Man with Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock. Here's the link to the particular scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs [May be nsfw]
Actually you will find that Amory Lovins has done a lot of research into the costs of making cars ( http://www.rmi.org/Autos ) which I suspect feeds into the article's analysis.
There are challenges of course, when you collide with something at 70 - 80 MPH and you're in a composite material vehicle without a steel frame the energy gets distributed in harder to control ways. Its not an unsolvable problem [1] but it is another wrench in general acceptance.
Another challenge is of course 'style' points but styles change so its less of an issue. I expect that the continued high cost of oil will keep these sorts of ideas popping up. I hope that some of them get to production so that we can iron out the other problems.
[1] In the forgettable movie "Demolition Man" a collision system which fills the car with foam is presented. That is actually an actually proposed solution but one where false starts are hard to recover from.
watch the movie Demolition man. It's from 1993 and you see the first appearance of a tablet like an iPad ..
I recently watched the Demolition Man for the first time, and not expecting much was pleasantly surprised.
It is better than your average bland sci-fi actioner for 90s and 00s. Sure, the action is about the same as in other movies of the genre, but the biting satire brings it above the fold.
" Yet respondents states that Canadians dislike America on a whole more since Obama took office than before, and that Canadians feel less safe visiting the US than before."
Funny you mention that. I just took a train tonight from Vancouver Canada, to Seattle WA. The difference between the two places for night and day, and what you just said sums it up perfectly.
When I got on the train on the Canadian side, the streets are bustling with activity, they're also clean. Homelessness is a problem, but overall the city is kept in good shape and business is booming. The train station is old, but kept in good repair, with many travellers milling about.
I get off the train in Seattle and I see a crumbling train station that can't even afford to replace its light bulbs. The moment I walk out the door I am accosted by a group of homeless folk. I am yet accosted by more homeless folk as I make my way to the bus stop. As I ride the bus downtown the streets are deserted, there's homeless folk everywhere, people picking fights in streets... it's like a bad 80s dystopian movie come to life. It reminds me of Demolition Man without the open firefights in the streets. I've lived here for several months now and I do not feel safe walking these streets at night. Hell, sometimes I don't feel safe walking these streets in broad daylight. There's garbage everywhere, poverty at levels I could not even imagine before moving from Canada. There are shootings in my neighbourhood weekly. People I've mentioned this to blame me for living downtown, and imply that this comes with living in an urban centre. I call bullshit: I've lived downtown in 3 different Canadian cities, and none were anywhere this bad. One is also much larger and denser than this one.
I've only been to a handful of other American cities - but if Seattle is the best you've got (and by national rankings it's pretty far up the list of good cities), you guys have a big, big, big problem.
Identifiable brands are ususally obfuscated unless the brand owner pays to advertise their brand (at least in the USA). Look at sitcoms on TV. The husband drinks beer out of a can that is red & white like a Budweiser can, but it clearly isn't a Budweiser can. Product placement is usually paid for, like Taco Bell did in the movie "Demolition Man".