Hacker Cinema
Thunderball
1965 · Film · 130 min
Part of James Bond Collection
Directed by Terence Young
A criminal organization has obtained two nuclear bombs and are asking for a 100 million pound ransom in the form of diamonds in seven days or they will use the weapons. The secret service sends James Bond to the Bahamas to once again save the world.
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7 comments on Hacker News
I've never really been a bond fan, but of course the craig era eschews much of the almost 100% of the camp of previous generations. Except (and you'll need to pardon me, i've seen each of these movies at most once and they don't really stick in my brain at all) maybe the villan who's face had been eaten by acid or something, it's not jawz or oddjob levels of camp but it's getting there.
Earlier bonds i've seen a few here and there but missed many. Like I've seen moonraker, but never thunderball, view to a kill but not goldeneye, octopussy but not never say never again. I couldn't tell you what any of the plots were (other than i'm pretty sure they go to a moon base in moonraker) or which villan goes with which film. Bond, to me, has always been kind of a mystery to me, how do these terrible films keep getting made?
I will also say that 'yes' to thor rangnarok, no to 'love and thunder' which i thought got mired in too many plots and had too many inappropriately timed jokes. Like do the Jane arc or do the Gor arc, but if you do either right they don't both fit in the film. So instead they opted to do a half assed version of each.
bilsbie says:>"I wish someone would invent scuba lite."<
"Oxygen rebreather" I was going to say, but the first image at https://www.divein.com/diving/rebreather/ set me back a ways. The diver looks like a giant version of a wolf spider.
The WWII oxygen re-breather was a smaller-than-SCUBA unit for shallow dives used primarily by special forces (it recycled your exhalations removing the CO2 and produced fewer bubbles at the surface to reveal your presence). It has been decades since I looked at this tech and at first glance it seems oxygen re-breathers have only grown bulkier.
So-called "mini-SCUBA" tanks are available priced in the low hundreds of USD:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=a+smaller+scuba+setup&ia=web
Finally there's a DIY version based on the James Bond movie "Thunderball":
"Working 007 Mini Scuba Tank! - Breath Underwater With This Spy Gadget"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqLt_G2dhCI
Once you accept lossy compression, it becomes a question of what level and type of "lossy" you're willing to accept, and how clever the "compression" algorithm can be.
If I want to compress the movie Thunderball -- a sufficiently clever "compression" algorithm could start with the synopsis at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(film) add in some images of Sean Connery, and generate the film. That's...maybe a 100K to 1 compression ratio?
If the algorithm itself understands "Sean Connery" then you could (theoretically) literally feed in the text description and achieve a reasonable result. I've seen Thunderball, but it was years ago and I don't remember the plot (boats?). I'd know the result was different, but I likely wouldn't be able to point to anything specific.
>I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples.
>A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
This was true during the Cold War, too. In the Bond films, Soviet Russia is the enemy in exactly one film, For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the implied power behind the throne in two, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. In every other entry in the series, the villains are SPECTRE and a variety of madmen, predominantly the billionaire type.
Another example is the frequently made claim that "Muslims are always the villains in Hollywood". It is far, far, far easier to name films in which "Islamophobia" is the greater evil than the opposite, both before and after the September 11 attacks on the US. The Sum of All Fears is one example in which the book's Islamic villains are explicitly replaced (by "neo-Nazis") for the film.
While you are probably technically right, I think you are over estimating the risks involved. The booster will be under a parachute, travelling relatively slowly, and there will clearly be many safety precautions and features involved. They will certainly have a stringent check list before proceeding with the attempt as well as some sort of fail safe cutting of the lies if something goes wrong.
I would expect the chance of a serious accident to be very low.
Also keep in mind these sort of mid air captures were well practiced by the US during the Cold War to capture returning photographic film from spy satellites. Although that was with airplanes not helicopters. A variation of it is actually shown at the end of James Bond Thunderball where he and the girl are rescued from a life raft via a balloon and capturing plane.
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.
Won't work. One of the fundamental principles is that A patent is a sword, not a shield. Owning a patent doesn't shield you from litigation, it simply allows you to litigate against others.
The "patent arsenal" idea is that if you have a trove of patents, you can respond to competitors by cross-licensing. The competitor won't sue you if they don't want to be sued in turn, a kind of mutual non-agression pact.
This doesn't work against a patent troll, who is not in business and cannot be sued on the basis of any patent. I apologize in advance if this simile is offensive, but I think patents are a little like nuclear weapons. They are very effective as a deterrent against other fully functioning countries attacking you, because they know that even if they "win" the war, they will lose.
But what is their value against terrorists? Nothing, because the terrorists do not have anything you can attack with a nuclear weapon. Worse, if you put a nuclear weapon in the hands of a criminal mastermind, you face extortion on a massive scale (see the movie "Thunderball").