Hacker Cinema
Knight Rider
1982 · TV series · 48 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Glen A. Larson
ActionAdventureScience FictionFantasyCrime
Michael Long, an undercover police officer, is shot while investigating a case and left for dead by his assailants. He is rescued by Wilton Knight, a wealthy, dying millionaire and inventor who arranges life-saving surgery, including a new face and a new identity--that of Michael Knight. Michael is then given a special computerized and indestructible car called the Knight Industries Two Thousand (nicknamed KITT), and a mission: apprehend criminals who are beyond the reach of the law. The series depicts Michael's exploits as he and KITT battle the forces of evil on behalf of the Foundation for Law and Government.
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45 comments on Hacker News
First time I heard the word "ramjet" was as a kid watching the Goliath episode of Knight Rider. Definitely not a documentary, but the word stuck. Then the Blackbird showed up in some plane book, and that was that. Ramjets back in the news. Kid me is having a great morning.
What does that have to do with streaming services?
Probably 80% of what is watched is from the last year, a lot of it from the last month. Most of the rest is from the past couple decades. The original US copyright law of 1790 allowed for 28 years.
I mean, I agree current copyright is too long. It's just not that relevant to streaming. Not a lot of people are looking to watch old episodes of Knight Rider for free. (Those who are, I salute you.)
What a low value piece of writing. I had to hunt around the episode to find if he describes why, etc, but couldn't be arsed wasting more than a minute of my time.
But, "AI in cars" is interesting. I guess it's already possible to build a clone of the KITT computer from the Knight Rider using LLM. (Is this a millennial reference, or a boomer one?). Although I wonder what features would make it more than a gimmick. Something like, "Michael, that Tesla has been following us for more than 15 miles. I ran the plates and it's..."
> Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.
Maybe in 100 years. The talking car was more intelligent than Siri, Alexa or Hey Google.
It is not that we are not able to "talk" to computers, it is that we "talk" with computers only so that they can collect more data about us. Their "intelligence" is limited to simple text underestanding.
Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Germany, I've been brainwashed by US movies and sitcoms, 90% of the things I've watched was from the US - Magnum P.I, Simon & Simon, The Fall Guy, Kojak, A-Team, Golden Girls, Mary Taylor Moore, Lou Grant, MacGyver, Knight Rider, Night Court, Family Ties, Miami Vice, The Wonder Years, Facts of Life, Love Boat, and on and on and on.
I know the US better than many parts of Germany.
Season one, episode eight of Magnum, P.I. was entitled, “The Ugliest Dog in Hawaii.”
There are, of course, episodes of both Knight Rider and The A Team that share that tile, though.
While I am appreciative that you want to demonstrate precisely how useless LLMs are, I wonder if perhaps you could do something more productive than make work for me.
FWIW most of the top charting music of the 90s, 80s and so on were also "worse" and have mostly been forgotten. Few songs remain popular or regain popularity. A lot of chart hits are really just springboarding off "you had to be there" cultural moments or experiences or simply a general "vibe" that are fleeting and trivial enough not to stick around even in nostalgia.
As an extreme example, I'd argue the popularity of David Hasselhoff's I've been looking for freedom in Germany is almost entirely a result of "retconning" (if not fabricating) its supposed popularity at the time of its original release. It would have probably been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been rediscovered "ironically" in the context of ridiculous claims about its influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, I remember owning a casette of the album as a kid only because "it's the guy from Knight Rider". For adult women his claim to fame was co-starring alongside Pamela Anderson in Baywatch as one of the few men regularly appearing bare-chested on daytime television - I'd say his musical talents played a very small role in his original popularity and it's telling nobody remembers any other songs than the one he performed on a TV show. He was never considered good, he was just a familiar face (and body) and made a catchy tune.
English isn't an ideal language to describe what kinds of "charisma" an AI could have, but I don't think it's at all foolish or improbable to say than an AI system could have profound and indeed superhuman charisma.
Worshipping gods is an old human sport, and it wouldn't need *much* encouragement for humans to see an AI system as a sort of "village god" –– the kinds of entities which were worshipped all over the world before One Big God religions became common. A "Tesla Kami" which talks from your Tesla, and also talks for The Teslas, and also talks for Tesla, Inc. for example could be highly charismatic and not even slightly humanoid in appearance.
If you think I'm joking, consider the Knight Rider TV series with a talking car. Cars can have charisma even if they don't talk, but add a voice-and-mind and we're off to the races, so to speak.
Charisma is a funny thing.
Etymology seldomly works as an argument. Tesla didn't use 'autopilot' because it works like the autopilot of a plane, but because normal people associate the word with concepts they learned from tv shows for decades, think knight rider.
> in essence, morality plays.
A lot of TV series of the time were... A-Team, Knight Rider, MacGeyver.The difference was characters looking back at our generations, shaking heads how stupid and immature we behaved in our times. TNG delivered a utopy in a convincing and exciting way.
> themes from the Bible and Graeco-Roman mythology
That's true for a lot of stories/saga: Star Wars, LOTR, GoT etc.You have a hero with doubts, going on a journey to save something, living through adventures. (Nicely explained in Joseph Campbell's "The hero with a thousand faces")
Until today, I haven't found anything similar, that gave an idea of a better future for mankind that's achievable and explained without lecturing.
Oh, and unconnected short story episodes are gone. I miss that.
This article seems to be written by a religious zealot, and the fact that the article opens mentioning his concern of whether or not his friends at church nod in approval or not about what he does is very telling.
I have 2 young kids, and I select what they can watch. And I'm aware that when I was a kid I watched lots of violent shows like Tom and Jerry like someone else said, or even Dragon Ball which is a million times more violent, but I hesitate to let them watch other much more innocuous shows.
I'm an atheist, so I'm not burdened with religious prejudices, and I'm very open minded, I think everyone has a right to sleep with and love whoever they want, and to identify themselves as whoever they want, I also think no one should be discriminated against because of their skin tone, nationality, beliefs, identity, disabilities or anything else.
But I also understand the outrage against wokism. There is an episode in Ridley Jones which is a show for young kids, where there is a bison saying that it's non-binary and what are their preferred pronouns. This is completely unnecessary for the plot and those are subjects that go miles above the heads of the intended audience. Also in many of the latest Disney productions and other shows in Netflix there's been a lot of queer characters and gay/lesbian relationships, which is not necessarily a problem depending how it is treated, specially if the production is for teenagers and adults, but I think it's completely unnecessary and kind of force feeding to include that kind of topics in the shows for the youngest kids. That trend also brings us ludicrous contradictions like an upcoming version of Snow White and the 7 dwarves, which are not actually dwarves, I think there's maybe 1 dwarf only.
Having said that, there's so many examples of religious extremisms taking things to the, erm, well, extremes. And I'm not going to even mention Muslim Theocracies because I think those are ultimate level of autocratic religion fuelled fascist regimes. But for example in Catholic Poland, the children's show Teletubbies was banned because they said the purple teletubbie was gay.
I think there are lots of shows in Netflix that it would be wise to don't allow your kids to watch, depending on their age of course. But the concerns the article raises about Paw Patrol are honestly laughable. There's a lot of illogical things in kid's shows. Just look Spongebob Squarepants and you'll see that they're under the water but most of the time physics and everything else behaves as if they're not. In Paw Patrol I always asked myself how a 10 year old doesn't seem to have adult supervision and seems to have unlimited resources and money to fund his organization. But again, in this show puppies talk and can drive cars, so you can't expect it to be based on reality. Of course in this show there will always be some kind of trouble which the Paw Patrol will happily solve, but there wouldn't be much of a show if that wasn't the case, isn't it? I can think of many series I watched when I was a kid and teenager, that also show a different problem or villain in every episode, actually that's the case for a large number of series. Just think of those oldies Knight Rider, McGuiver, A Team... The same critiques applied to Paw Patrol in the article would applie to all of them.
Also it calls the Mayor in Paw Patrol tyrannical when there's no evidence of repression or autocracy in the show, and I find it funny that he fantasizes with a resistance composed of poets and religious types. As if religious types weren't on the oppressing end of autocracies most of the time along history.
I didnt know what it was called, but the use of screams like this across alot of tv and film did make it a bit laughable in some places. Watching the A-Team and some Westerns is where it springs to mind.
Its like the tyre screeching noise when watching things like knight rider, another sound effect that was perhaps used in excess in inappropriate places, like on dusty dirty tracks! Still as a kid, you dont care so much about that as it just adds to the experience.
It leaves me wondering if some sound engineers where trolling the audience in subtle but laughable ways.
Still if its a genuine thing, and not some Asch conformity experiment being carried out, its good that its been preserved for history.
I had a "OMG, we live in the future!" moment reading this headline, isn't this what computers in sci-fi movies do (ok admittedly there aren't a lot of sci-fi movies where office work is the plot): you ask it to do something like yo would an assistant, and it delivers you the results. Something like "Computer, scan planet for lifeforms" on Star Trek.
Maybe someone should build a KITT from Knight Rider using ChatGPT (just for his sass, leave out the self-driving part, that's Elon's department (/s)).
There was an episode of Knight Rider where Kitt turned evil and did this to Michael!
Married with children was very popular in Germany because of how well it was translated.
Seinfeld was also translated but it was awfully done so people didn't watch it and it stopped running on tv.
Knight Rider was also very popular and the acting was way better than the original because of the translators.
It is quite interesting what effect dubbing of movies and tv shows can have on the perception of it.
I see it as the battle between the jocks and the nerds. As frankly from my few decades in the industry, who becomes upper middle management are all the people who you dislike (or they you) in high school. It's just them trying to justify their value to those that truly built or are deemed to be responsible to build out a product/company for the benefit of the shareholders/investors.
This is the sort of environment that leads to [non]great ideas like 'swarming' resources on current 'fad/trend' projects (Mythical Man Month) or rapid development of features at a pace beyond what it took to deliver the 1.0 product (tech-debt inhibiting growth causing tech-death) which causes them to just "reinvent/reboot" the idea with yet another different spin.
You are seeing it in movies where even the scope of time they perform it is getting shorter and shorter. It's not like people are remaking Cyrano De Bergerac despite it's time being due (Roxanne with Steve Martin is my last recall) but they have to retread ideas from my own adulthood yet skip over others - like why reboot DeGrassi and not BJ and the Bear let alone Knight Rider or any of the dozens of other tech influence tv series of our youth.
The reason I think is mostly due to fear. Fear of risking what they didn't like before for something they felt was awesome but not influence by - like Sex in the City or even Return of the Jedi.
If it weren't for the amount of time that has gone by, I wouldn't be surprised if within the next 10 years there isn't an attempt to reboot Firefly with the hope that it hooks as much as people pine for it to have stayed on today.
We're told that most decisions are due to the investors wanting return on money invested - but if the employees are a large holder of the company shares, doesn't that mean that if they collectively feel willing to risk a different tact that it should be abided? Now-a-days it seems that those who are vocal and can pull it off become "king"... like Twitter.
To be fair, he used to be huge in the 80s, 90s, with Knight Rider and Baywatch being essential TV shows for every kid.
Now I guess he's just a washed out actor, I didn't even realize he's still touring
This would make a perfect episode if Knight Rider ever got another reboot.
There’s a video floating around out there somewhere from the 80s show Knight Rider. One of the things about that car was that it could drive itself. I always assumed they used some sort of complex remote control system to film those scenes, but the video clearly shows that it’s just a guy wearing a suit that looks like the seat in the car. I guess simple wins out over cool.
EDIT: Here’s a link to the tweet with the video. https://twitter.com/BryanPassifiume/status/1335636896488120321?s=20&t=svIdjEpEKr8BdlyN0kdDgg
> I don't remember what I used to talk to my friends about when I was in high school.
Gossip, mostly. Talking about your peers, who said what, how terrible teachers are for making us actually do work, commenting on style or the lack thereof, etc. Also, while there were fewer TV series, they still existed. Star Trek, B5, Knight Rider, Airwolf, etc.
This was my childhood in the 80's!
I don't remember TF1 being more boring than the other two, but Antenne 2 definitely had a block of Japanese cartoons in the afternoon. I'm pretty sure all three channels had state funding to some extent or another. They all ran commercials between programs. They would never interrupt a program with commercials. If you watched a movie, or even a TV program, you could expect to watch it all the way through without bathroom breaks. Popular contemporary American films were dubbed into French, but films that were considered more culturally significant (say, directed by John Ford or Akira Kurosawa) were shown in the original language and subtitled if necessary.
I was about twelve or thirteen when Canal+ came along. The content was scrambled so you couldn't really watch it without a subscription, but that's where the porn was, and you could tell what was happening on screen if you squinted right.
Then came La Cinq, the first completely private TV channel. Here, movies and TV programs were interrupted with commercial breaks. There was a lot of American programming and it was always dubbed, never subtitled. They played stuff like Knight Rider and Airwolf in the afternoon, so I put up with the commercial breaks which were still far shorter and less frequent than on American television.
OK, now that I'm actually awake, I'll try to finish answering per the OP's request:
Briefly mention the reason for the attribution. Or in other words write your heart out about why you love your field and why you love "the" books.
For starters, the 3 books mentioned are the only three that really stand out to me as having specifically related to my interest in computing. But it's not fair to say that I credit them solely with sparking my passion for computing. In fact, despite being an avid reader who reads a number of books that most people would probably find ludicrous, I would probably credit more of my interest in computing to other factors. Those would include TV shows I watched as a kid (Whiz Kids, Knight Rider, Automan, Max Headroom, etc.), movies (War Games, Tron, and years later The Matrix), magazines (in the 90's I was constantly devouring issues of PC Magazine, Byte, Computer Shopper, and suchlike), and early exposure to text adventure games and so on.
I'd also credit some books that sparked my overall interest in science / technology / engineering, if not computing specifically. Like a book on electronics that I borrowed from the high-school library over and over again until the cover was falling off (literally), a biography of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, etc.
All of that said, the three books do stand out as having been influential to me. Here's why:
The Soul of a new Machine - Kidder took a story that a lot of people would probably find very dry and boring, and made it into high adventure, involving a fascinating cast of characters. It's easy to read this book and come away with the feeling that creating a new computer is The Most Important Thing Ever. For my high-school aged self, that was profound.
Neuromancer - one of my first exposures to the idea that computers were more than just fancy calculators, or utilitarian tools, and rather a gateway to an entirely different world. No, an entirely different kind of world. The idea of "cyberspace" and the adventuring that could happen there... wow. Ever since reading Neuromancer I think I've secretly, on some inner level, been hoping for the day when we achieve VR or simulations that are that immersive and engaging, to the point of truly feeling like you're entering another world. Watching The Matrix definitely amplified that.
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - there are parts of this book that are of dubious veracity, especially some of the parts about Mitnick. Nonetheless, for me at age 24 or so, reading this was my first introduction to the idea that there were specific subcultures associated with computing, and frankly some of the exploits that these characters engaged in seemed rather exciting, if not even enticing. Who read this and didn't want to change the Class of Service on a friend's phone to "payphone" so they would pick up to dial and get the "Please deposit 25 cents for the next 5 minutes" message? C'mon, admit you. You all did.
Hrm. As a nerd growing up in the rural midwest (b.1972) (hundreds of miles from a significant population center, there were some entertainment concepts that were born (Tron, Max Headroom, Knight Rider) that were pretty neat to a 12-17 year-old. 8-bit computer mags were fun to collect--the 8-bit market had some distinctive architectures (z80, 65xx, 8088) that made it fun to try to create similar programs for different systems; some mags would publish the source code for a game or utility for multiple systems in the same issue--it was fun to try with our own code.
Other than that, the 80's were shit. The economy tanked. Rural America embraced Reaganomics during the campaign. Didn't turn out to be such a good deal for most of us, BUT...
We Gen-X rats were fed Superior Bullshit.
The 80's had the Star Wars Project. It is worth looking up--basically, we (the US) ran a (supposedly) successful con on the Soviet Union. Around $61 billion dollars was spent to incite a false tech race with the hope of siphoning Soviet resources into research that neither country had a hope of viably creating. The Reagan admin's winning card was having the money to cover the bluff (that money was doled out on legal contracts with not-altogether-clear film footage of some pieces of in-flight ICBM interdiction tech being dropped every few years).
How much that project contributed to the end of the USSR? Dunno. But it was cool!
Oh, and the Internet was wee. Most nerd comms were done by way of "borrowing time" on one of the corporate X25 networks (chat with a few primitive bulletin-board type systems) or by BBS. I don't know if that actually contributed to the 80's un/pleasantness, but they were fun (as long as you could dodge the bill).
The 80's might also have been the last complete decade that no one was arrested for letting their kids play outside by themselves.
I have never seen it, but am aware of the low brow reputation. If you genuinely like it, could you tell me what you like about it? I recently saw some old episodes of Knight Rider and admit that the show was fun.
> ...cut to ads 15 seconds before the break... HDCP is a PITA...
You know what really grinds my gears? This! It's not that hard to find a suitable splice point, most TV shows even have a natural break as part of the episode! Youtube sometimes does it during Colbert at a point which ruins the comedic rhythm.
> ...A-Team, Knight Rider, and MacGuyver...
I have similar taste; I swore there was a period of time I watched all 3 of these on the same streaming network, but I checked again and see only MacGuyver on Paramount/CBS. Which is an example of another poor user experience -- shows hop between platforms, so you're never actually sure that you have access, until you go to watch, and it's gone.
"the failure of particular media verticals to monetize and adequately understand the landscape of the industry they operate in" doesn't apply as directly as the author would hope.
The failing "sell records at the record store" model is one thing, but the model for the rights to include music in television shows, movies, plays, video games and such is a different one.
If the maker of a game like Grand Theft Auto pays the rights holder to use music in a game then it is worth something to the game maker because it is exclusive -- and it wouldn't be if that exclusivity wasn't enforced.
It's not as if they are afraid people would watch your stream because they don't want to pay for a music streaming service or buy records.
The rules have always lagged practice in this area. The DVD release of 1980s TV show Knight Rider was hung up for years because of negotiations over the sound track, which was packed with contemporary music, some of which they got the rights for, some of which they replaced with covers, some of which got replaced completely. At the time nobody thought about the DVD rights.
> (even getting TV shows from the UK, a western country, was hard, because they were on PAL. people used to "camera copy", running a VCR from one system to a TV, and videorecording that with a camera running the other system)
Some time ago I watched some documentary about people watching western movies in, IIRC, Romania during the Cold War. There was a flourishing black market industry, some people smuggled VHS tapes in their cars over the border (either hiding the tapes in their car, or then by bribing the border guards), others who knew English (e.g. school teachers) spent their evenings dubbing movies to the local language in somebody's home studio. And then because few people had TV sets and VCR's, people had makeshift movie salons in somebody's apartment.
In Estonia, people built TV antennas to receive transmissions from Finland; Finnish and Estonian are fairly close to each other, and in Finland foreign programs are typically subtitled rather than dubbed making it easy to understand. So people in Estonia were fairly familiar with Western TV series like Dallas or Knight Rider.
Kid culture behind the Iron Curtain is particularly interesting, since for some reason censorship wasn't as strong there. So you have kids classics like Uspensky's Uncle Fyodor, which, if you read a little between the lines, contains some pretty harsh criticism of the system.
Am I the only one thinking of the first episode of knight rider? Where Michael Knight fell asleep while driving and had to prentend he was a deaf guy with a bad neck.
Very often I like watching old shows. I find many new ones to be overloaded with style and cuts. I feel that it only appeals to new generation that buy into it. When I run into a Columbo episode, I'm so liking the slow pacing, the simplicity, the filming; even with the shallow bits at times.
Also there's a format thing, the only way they could decorate shows was with freeze and a bit of thrill jingle. I kindof like this way.
There's also the spirit of the day. 70s to 80s shows were often sunny forever life style. It's soothing.
Even supercars shows, with highly disturbingly bad effects [1] have a stupid simple formula that I find honest, even if it's often dumb. It's just entertainment, I find it less pretentious in a way.
[1] be ready for a shock if you ever watch Knight Rider again.
* SPOILER *
That's how they made Knight Rider "driverless" scenes (http://www.knightriderarchives.com/knight_rider/season_one/give_me_liberty_or_give_me_death/nitpicks/images/04238.jpg <= can't find a clear shot, but if you find episodes online, it's pretty easy to see the double depth seat and raised up armrests)
Huh. Cool to see this get some space on the HN front page. I created the Tumblr https://moviecode.tumblr.com/ a few years ago and I've started this channel to go a little deeper into some of the examples. Hope people like it.
Next up: two episodes of Knight Rider, Westworld (1973) and Swordfish.
Today I learned that Markov chain generation = "AI."
Shame on Ars staff for conflating this parlor trick as "artificial intelligence," and failing to explain how this rather simple process works.
For fucks sake, they find the raw screenplay of a movie like Knight Rider, regex out the crap, download a Markov chain generator off of github, and train their model on the text. And of course by "training", I mean they run a single command to process the text document, and wait. Why this is described as a "...long short-term-memory recursive machine-learning algorithm" probably has to do with the fact that Ars has their hand in promoting these short films.
When I grew up, I was influenced by media like Knight Rider, A-Team, MacGyver and other TV shows. Oh and documentaries about the Great Canyon and other beautiful areas. I loved (american) English. I always had a dream to visit the USA. Not to live the "american dream" and get rich but just to experience the culture and scenery. During the past 10 years though this desire has completely gone away. This is due to the political climate and disrespect for foreigners privacy. I never went there even though I could do so easily. I travelled all over Europe (easy, being a EU citizen) and now traveling a lot in Asia.
I know of several businesses that have chosen not to send their staff to the USA anymore to trade shows or clients. My company used to send someone to a media summit every year. Last time they declined the visa for that person without providing any reason. It makes no sense. The focus is shifting: the US used to be the biggest market that everyone strived to cater to. Not anymore. Banks are more and more reluctant to use USD, Euro is preferred. When I go to a bank anywhere in the world I suddenly have to fill out a questionaire about not being a US citizen, having no phone number there, never having lived there and on and on. I have nothing to do with the US so why are they bothering me with this crap? Imagine if every country requested such a thing, you'd sit there a week answering questions. Oh and banks in Asia are starting to not take on US customers at all from what I heard.
When even people like Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) are having issues obtaining visas (https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/10/shamir/), something must be completely wrong with the way immigration is handled.
I hope the USA can turn this ship around, right now it looks like it's heading directly for the iceberg with full throttle.
I really like the long arcs of today's top end TV. It's funny, I was thinking the other day that when I just want a short self-contained piece of entertainment, I reach for a movie. Which is a complete reversal from 15 to 20 years ago.
Also, have you watched any of the newer TV shows? They have astronomical budgets, better than some movies. And certainly better than 1980s TV. Knight Rider may have had practical car stunts, but it also had bad writing, bad acting, and bad directing. Modern TV has elevated all those things dramatically.
am I the only one thinking about the old tv show "Knight Rider" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083437/
Im not sure how it is today but when I grew up in Finland in the 80s all the most popular tv-series for kids where in English only. Of the top of my head: The Transformers, Inspector Gadget, M.A.S.K., He-Man, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Care bears, Smurfs, Postman pat, DJ Kat show, and then non-cartoon shows like like MacGyver, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Quantum Leap, Rescue 911, etc.
We also watched some some non-English tv shows like the Swedish "Bjornes magasin" and the Finnish "Pikku Kakkonen". But these shows where not as cool and not as plentiful as those English tv shows.
It is a parody on '80s action comedy. That's exactly how I understood it. Given that films like The Naked Gun themselves are a parody, Kung Fury came out pretty much as it did :)
References here are obviously Knight Rider and the like.
Yes, the screen didn't look great in the Gizmodo review. He summed it up nicely with : "it just becomes a >£200 way of reminding you that yes, you own a smartphone."
The use-cases of "dictating a message whilst walking down the street" is a bit odd too - do you want people talking to their wrists all the time? It'll like being in a never-ending episode of Knight Rider.
>That's the kind of description you get out of an episode of Knight Rider
Well, yeah, it's exactly that: a description, and a fantastic one at that. It makes no guarantees or even assertions about the efficacy of the changes. Instead, it plays up this explosive scenario, then concludes that they hope the changes will help prevent fires.
And, there's a reason it's not written in technical, engineering jargon with test results, etc. Instead, it reads like a Hollywood screenplay. Judging from your comparison to Knight Rider, it appears to be working.
>That is damned amazing engineering
So, I mean what engineering are you hailing as amazing here, with regard to the new announcement that was gushed over higher up in the thread? The part you quoted just briefly references bolting some plates on the undercarriage amidst a lot of hyperbolic crash talk from the pre-plates days.
Sure, there can be great engineering alongside good PR. The auto itself without the newly announced iron man suit is an impressive piece of engineering.
I'm simply saying that I wouldn't gush over the new announcement. The guy walking away without injuries was pre-crash plates and we have no evidence that the plates will actually help or to what extent. Just sensational, cool-sounding descriptions. There are a lot of things for which Musk deserves credit as a visionary, but this bit of PR could have just as easily been the brainchild of a relatively astute PR staffer talking to an engineer over lunch.
It's like the origin story of Knight Rider TV show car Kitt.
Very ironically, when I was reading your story, the first thing that came to my mind was a Knight rider episode (No Big Thing) as there was also a somewhat similar trick pulled in that episode... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620860/
http://www.angelfire.com/mn/nn/Knightrider.html (No Big Thing)
After reading the article I assumed that Knight Ridder was a typo for Knight rider the tv show
And now we can have a big list of nostalgia which disappointed us. Like when I recently watched a Knight Rider episode for the first time after a dozen years and suddenly realize, how bad the actors and plots are.
German readers should probably revisit the TKKG novels for a particular disappointing experience.