Hacker Cinema
Goldfinger
1964 · Film · 110 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Special agent 007 comes face to face with one of the most notorious villains of all time, and now he must outwit and outgun the powerful tycoon to prevent him from cashing in on a devious scheme to raid Fort Knox -- and obliterate the world's economy.
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27 comments on Hacker News
The time difference between today and Hackers is the same as when the film was released and the year 1964. That's the year films like Dr. Strangelove, Goldfinger and A Fistful of Dollars was released.
You (we) are old :)
Because real life is not a Bond movie where the first thing that happens is a British actor with a bad Russian accent starts torturing you like in Goldfinger.
Plus, as the US has found out, torture has been proven a bad way to get the truth out of people, since under duress people will admit and say anything just to make the pain stop, even if they're innocent and have no valuable information.
There are many metrics that can be sampled, many challenges to normalization.
eg: https://ext.to/browse/?sort=seeds&order=desc&cat=1&q=2019
is a listing of 2019 movie torrents ranked by seeds (number of clients holding full copies of a torrent version).
A normalization challenge is to group torrent variations (1080p rips and 720p rips and WEB-DL's and BluRay and etc.) and tally up and rank interest in various films over time.
Clearly Ne Zha (2019), a Chinese Animation, Fantasy, Adventure movie was a global pirate star of that year .. should it be "normalized" by population of country of origin to smooth out the home team having a billion+ in population "bias" ?
One advantage of ranking films by year and pirate copies is it provides a pragmatic measure of "staying power"
https://ext.to/browse/?sort=seeds&order=desc&cat=1&q=1964
My Fair Lady, Dr Strangelove, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Mary Poppins, A Fistful of Dollars, and Goldfinger are still being hoarded 60 years after their release.
* https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/615453
* https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ne_zha
Until Fleming started writing the books with the films in mind, Bond was already a very different Bond.
The books are uneven, IMHO, but "Casino Royale", the first of Fleming's novels — written well before the "Dr. No" film — is enjoyable and will give you a very different Bond from what you are used to. Insecure, self-doubting, no "gadgets".... "Diamonds Are Forever" was perhaps my favorite of the books though.
(The film "Goldfinger" actually improved upon the plot of the original book in my opinion — in the book Goldfinger actually tries to steal the gold from Fort Knox.)
>Someone needs to take a look at a mirror.
irony
something one finger something something something three fingers
https://vocabulary1.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-the-phrase-if-you-point-one-finger-there-are-3-more-pointing-back-at-you?top_ans=349631723
goldfinger
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film)
>Unless you are saying that there is a shadowy secret organization that controls the world with space lasers and UAPs….
As you return home, henchman grab you, blindfold you and take you to my secret lair, then bind you to a table with a laser mounted on the ceiling pointed at the table. I walk up to the table and power on the laser and its beam slowly moves toward you between your legs.
Me: "You figured it out. SPECTRE rules the world with UAPs and space lasers!! And that's unfortunate for you."
I start to walk away...
You struggle with the bonds confining you to the table, to no avail. And with just a hint of panic in your voice:
You: "Do you expect me to talk?"
I laugh and say:
Me: "No Atotalnoob. I expect you to die."
With apologies to Ian Fleming[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film)
Edit: Fixed typo and formatting.
I saw that trick in a couple of movies, but don't rememberch which ones.
In one of them they made a whole car of gold, maybe it was Goldfinger?
In the other one, they fled the country in a boat and replaced some parts of the boat with gold. This one is better, because it's more difficult to scan the boat.
I remember reading the book "The Man Who Saved Britain" [0] (a history of Bond novels & movies) and the author was describing some of the exotic foods, such as an avocado, being something the readers were unlikely to experience in a world of currency controls and import restrictions. One thing that pops up in that book is why the package tour industry was invented and how it applied to Goldfinger.
My suspicion is that some of those "exotics" appeared only in novels and the cookbook authors never expected their readers to ever be able to make the items.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Saved-Britain-Disturbing/dp/0312426666
That's actually my favorite part of the movie! For anyone who doesn't remember the scene, Bond has just realized the true magnitude of Goldfinger's scheme, and Goldfinger calmly asks if his drink is tart enough. I've never had a mint julep so I haven't been distracted by th accuracy there, but I can see how it could be distracting fo a julep aficionado.
The book and movie are not too much alike. I re-read (most) of it recently and found it to be in the "Flemming at his worst" pile. Whereas the movie is almost certainly the best Bond movie.
One thing I did like about the book, at the beginning Bond goes for dinner in the US with an acquaintance, where they have iirc crab legs and buttered toast. It's delicious, and Bond is disgusted at the opulence of it. They begin the meal each drinking a tankard of champagne. The whole scene makes me very hungry and thirsty.
Sadly, the reader probably figures out "Moonraker" within a few chapters.
In Fleming's "Goldfinger", Goldfinger is actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. It was much more realistic to have him instead trying to destroy the gold to increase scarcity.
Say what you want about the film "Live and Let Die" but reading Fleming trying to write "jive" was just embarrassing.
"Goldfinger", worse than the movie.
"Diamonds Are Forever" much better than the movie.
Those people want to be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film)
when they grow up. The USD is backed by the "full faith and credit" of the US government which has the power to tax the productive capacity of our farms, mines, manufacturing, service and financial economy. Gold is limited in supply, I grant it that, but the existence of gold is not linked to the existence of productive capacity for anything else people want.
The best argument for gold is that the demand for gold has existed for a long time, I read somewhere that a Roman might have been paid a few pounds of gold a year which is about what an American might get paid if they got paid in gold. The best argument against it is that there is not enough gold in circulation to support a modern economy without the value of gold exploding to the point where you'd have a very hard time measuring it out. That's why goldbugs are really betting on the collapse of civilization, like that guy in the Bond movie.
> Money must be backed by something.
One of my favorite bond films is Goldfinger (1965), starring Sean Connery as James Bond and Gert Frobe as Auric Goldfinger. In the movie, Goldfinger hatches a plan (they always hatch a plan) to destroy the gold reserves at Fort Knox. This will make his own gold holdings much more valuable, but, Bond intones, it will also destroy the world's economy, since the gold in Fort Knox "backs" our money, and if it were to disappear, we'd have hyperinflation.
And I wondered about that a bit. Suppose a meteor filled with gold were to crash onto Federal Property, and they hook up some tractors and drag the thing into Fort Knox. Would this massive new pile of gold cause hyper-deflation?
Bottom line, I don't think money needs to be backed by anything. It just needs to be limited in its quantity. For example, if gold is money, then what is gold backed by? Anyway, Goldfinger is worth a watch -- great film.
I've always thought that blockhead psychology was like this.
With ordinary greed people just want to be rich. I think it pains blockheads that anybody else has anything at all.
They see somebody getting a coffee and think "it's a tragedy that they can afford a coffee, they should buy a coffee NFT from me and then I'd have all the money".
Most of us see a homeless encampment and have some feelings between "this is a humanitarian catastrophe" and "this makes me feel personally uncomfortable". The blockhead looks at this and thinks that if they had all the money nobody else would get to live in a house, everyone else would be in a homeless encampment and that would be a great thing.
Like the goldbug who fantasizes that a switch to the gold standard, however, they don't get that if, like in the movie Goldfinger, one person wound up with all the money, there wouldn't be anything left to buy with that money.
In the Bond saga (books and movies) and well before Octopussy, there was the airplane pilot in Goldfinger (the movie):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Galore
I haven't read James Fleming's book but would like to. I'm glad that the review does not explicitly claim that James Bond fights the Communists, something so often asserted by people who don't know what they're talking about. Ian Fleming created SPECTRE because he thought that the Cold War might end soon, and so wanted a nonpolitical opponent for Bond.
In the films, the USSR is Bond's opponent only in For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the silent backer in Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, but Auric Goldfinger and SPECTRE are the real enemies, and Thunderball establishes that SPECTRE is willing to work for anyone (including Western powers). Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, General Orlov in Octopussy, and Gustav Graves in Die Another Day are explicitly rogue agents.
The idea that he’s incredibly incompetent is revisionist. These movies aren’t deconstruction, and shouldn’t be. The fun is when he’s able to get out of tough situations in the spur of the moment (my favorites, like Goldfinger and For Your Eyes Only show him in credible danger several times). Interestingly, this is something the Mission Impossible series did perfectly in their last movie, better than almost all Bond movies.
With that said, I really don’t think anybody is actually threatened by Bond being a white man. Like, people have lives to live.
"The Spy Who Loved Me" was the shortest of Fleming's works that I read. But given that, I agree with the author of the article that many of the Bond books had serious failings.
I read "Live and Let Die" and was embarrassed for Fleming for his attempt to channel Joel Chandler Harris. A case where the film bettered the book.
"Goldfinger" has the villain actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. Another case where it was better in the film.
"Diamonds Are Forever" and "Casino Royale" are the books I can say I liked the most.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film) strategy, way less efficiently.
I love his Bond films, just pure fun. And, god, he was sexy. They don’t make ‘em like they used to!
Few favorites:
- You Only Live Twice (1967)
- Never Say Never Again (1983)
- Goldfinger (1964)
To nitpick, that list has at least three British films pop up in the latter half of the 20th century (Goldfinger, Diamonds are Forever and Moonraker). Relaxing to "non-Anglosphere" is still very notable though.
The Bond film Goldfinger featured a villain smuggling gold as parts of cars.
It is often asserted (for example, in the Bitcoin white paper [22]) that a cartel can double-spend Bitcoins. In a strict sense, this is true: a cartel can spend a Bitcoin by paying it to a player Alice, receiving goods or services, and then shifting the consensus choice of history to a branch where that coin is instead paid to a different player Bob. However, we argue that double-spending by a cartel has a limited payoff. Bitcoins have value because people are willing to trade them for goods and services. If players were unwilling to accept Bitcoins for trade or unwilling to spend Bitcoins for fear of having their payments nullified, the value of Bitcoins would diminish significantly as players lost confidence in the system. Worse, because players are encouraged to generate a new identity for each transaction and because identities are not linked to any side information, players cannot easily determine whether a proffered payment is coming from the double-spending cartel or an honest user. Thus, a rational player should refuse to accept any payments when there is a significant threat of double-spending.
As a cartel must outmine the entire Bitcoin network and thus outspend the entire Bitcoin network for as long as it would remain a cartel, we believe it is very unlikely that a cartel could double-spend enough to recover the cost of the attack...
As described above, a 51% cartel attack is unlikely to generate enough reward within the Bitcoin economy to be worthwhile to the attacker. However, this does not rule out the possibility of a 51% attack that aims to destroy the Bitcoin economy in order to achieve utility outside the Bitcoin economy. We call this the Goldfinger attack after the character in film who tries to undermine U.S. currency by ruining its gold backing [15]...
In all of these cases, the attacker must achieve enough utility to justify the substantial cost of an attack. We agree with Becker et al. that it is unlikely that a protest movement could muster the resources to launch a successful attack. And at present it does not appear possible to acquire a short position on Bitcoins that is large enough to justify an attack. (2013)
The Economics of Bitcoin Mining, or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries
Joshua A. Kroll, Ian C. Davey, and Edward W. Felten, Princeton University
https://www.econinfosec.org/archive/weis2013/papers/KrollDaveyFeltenWEIS2013.pdf
Some people invest in gold because they like the idea of hyperdeflation, like Goldfinger in the James Bond movie.
They're hoping everything will go to hell, the whole economy will switch to the gold standard, the price of gold will go up 1000x and they'll be the brilliant insightful people who profit.
The trouble with that scenario is that a few lead slugs can put an end to you.
Some bitcoiners believe in an attenuated version of that scenario which is technophillic, so the idea of a system in "which numbers we trust" fits into a strange ideology.
He sounds like an enthusiastic presenter, but he does not write particularly well:
"An enthusiastic audience is the best kind; to get people excited about science is a sight to behold. When it came to talking about gold and in particular the human obsession with it I showed a picture of the iconic scene in Goldfinger where Bond discovers Jill Masterson dead and gilded."
He seems from his account to be longer on enthusiasm than on content, which is well enough, I think, if one is lecturing to students in the primary grades. But--I don't know the English system--aren't these students in the secondary grades, and shouldn't we beyond the "science can be cool stuff"?
I'm pretty sure that while still in the primary grades I knew about gold's ductility, malleability, resistance to most solvents, etc., all of which tidbits, if not science do have something more to do with it than a gilded actress. Or maybe this is just sour grapes because my parents wouldn't let me see the Bond films the first time around?
I realize guns aren't allowed in hand luggage, but they should be - there's nothing actually wrong with them. It's no more inherently dangerous than having them in the luggage one takes on a bus or a train or a ship or a private car.
I can't speak to "people in many countries", but if you think having a gun on a plane is "batshit insane", my guess is that you've been fooled by Hollywood into believing a few false things. (Perhaps you saw Goldfinger but never saw the Mythbusters episode debunking it?)
A gun fired on a plane can't cause "explosive decompression". No, not even if fired through a window. The pressure difference isn't large enough to be "explosive" and the air pressure is continuously maintained - planes are constantly leaking quite a lot of air by design so leaking a little more wouldn't hurt anything.
The 9/11 gambit could work ONCE but can't work today - the front doors are locked and the passengers and crew know to resist. Committing any sort of deliberate crime on a plane is infinitely stupider in terms of likelihood of getting caught and ability to get away than committing one on the ground.
The TSA "protects" us from "movie plot threats", not actual threats. We would be on-net safer if airport security were entirely eliminated - far fewer people would die than do today as a result of it.
(TSA kills people today by making travel by air more expensive in money and time. This causes people to drive on long trips instead of fly, leading to extra deaths in auto accidents.)
Why link to the mythbusters when you could point to the guy who actually did it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7601274/The-secret-war-mission-that-inspired-Goldfinger-scene.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tazelaar
http://www.cracked.com/article_19635_6-absurd-movie-scenes-that-actually-happened_p2.html