FileMakerFeller

When you've got the banks on one side trying to protect their old thing and Apple on the other side trying to protect their new thing, maybe it is time for the government to get involved.

Guidance is probably the best first step. Mandating approaches can be done when people with expertise can agree on the best path forward; not only do governments currently lack that expertise but the industry is experimenting with multiple approaches to see what works best so it's very unlikely that consensus will be reached.

I'm not an expert in the field by any means, but all of the developments I've seen so far indicate that artificial general intelligence - machines that can think and have agency - is far, far in the future. The biggest threat from the current landscape is misuse by human actors, so a focus on security and "defence in depth" allows for commercialisation with a measure of safety.

So are we going to see all the trolls who complained about Apple's iPhone patents now step up to defend Casetify?

"You can't legally protect a black rectangle the number 11" ?

winstoner71 said:

darkvader said:

Main takeaway from this article:  Ridley Scott is a dick.

And apparently he needs to stick to scifi and stay away from history.  Nobody cares if Alien movies are historically accurate.

Nobody truly cares if this is historically accurate, outside of history professors and some French film critics. We want to see the spectacle, the huge battlefield sequences that Scott is known for, and want to see Phoenix ham it up. That’s all. Nobody cared that Gladiator wasn’t note for note historically accurate. Good on Ridley for telling them to p*ss off, and come to think of it Adam Driver for doing the same when his film Ferrari got a ridiculous critique…we need more of that from the talent. 

I cared. Even a cursory introduction to the history of the Roman Empire shows that their success in battle came from the rigid formations they stuck to; the first battle scene in Gladiator showed a wild free-for-all and a complete lack of discipline that is antithetical to every account of the Roman Army.

The ending part of the movie where Maximus kills the Emperor and is allowed to live? Moronic.

There were plenty of ways to tell an inspiring story of a good soldier brought down by powerful enemies who then struggles through adversity to find redemption. The Gladiator movie chose none of those, and is the poorer for it.

NYC362 said:

As a retired history teacher, inaccuracies in movies often drive me nuts.  When a big film came out, I would go through a list of what it got wrong with my students.  (Braveheart, for instance was one of the worst for accuracy.).  Even good films like Hidden Figures play all sorts of games with the timelines and inventing characters that didn't exist.  Steven Spielberg did that in Schindler's List- combining two or three real people into one fictitious character. The reasons for this is usually just time. Without playing games like that, movies would be two or three times as long.  

Of course, it can get ridiculous.  I haven't yet seen Napoleon, so I can't comment on that film just yet.  The real problem is people will see a film about some historical event and not look up anything about the real version of things.  I can't watch For All Mankind because it's truly alternate view of history (of course it doesn't pretend to be factual at all) in some people's eyes will thing that's what happened.... UGH! 

Don't get me started on U-571...

Part of the problem is that even when you know the historical record, bits of the movies still come to mind when you think about the subject. It is incredibly difficult to separate the different sources after a while - then again, one should always read the historical accounts with a healthy dose of scepticism as well.

It's not a recent phenomenon, either - Rameses II erected many monuments celebrating his "victory" over the Hittites in the 13th Century BCE, each monument telling a more fanciful version of events the closer it is to Egypt. The Roman Emperor Octavian (commonly known as Augustus) deliberately publicised events during his reign as happening in a different chronological order some twenty years after the fact.

So if anyone is going to watch the Napoleon movie, I encourage them to research the available historical documents beforehand. The first time you encounter information about something you assume it is the truth, and that is very hard to shift later on.