2012年11月28日 星期三

Low-Rent Horror Wastes Time

The story is ... well, you tell me. Oh yeah, you didn't see it. Don't worry. I actually watched the darn thing and still can't tell exactly what it was about. There was a group of friends, a psychic, a horror house, a ghost hunter, some sort of demon and Cory Feldman smoking what I'm pretty sure was an electric cigarette. That's about as helpful as I can be. Sorry.

Speaking of Feldman, he seems to be one of the big selling points of this feature,High quality stone mosaic tiles. out this week on DVD, but he's in the movie for maybe 10 minutes. And I'm not saying anyone expects Feldman to make "Goodfellas," but even he should make better crap than this.

The rest of the cast is a bunch of unknowns who I don't think will be making names for themselves anytime soon. They're not terrible, but who could actually make this incomprehensible script work anyway? Why did this thing earn a green light?

I'll tell you why: Parts of "Hell" are shot on location at a real Halloween attraction in Pennsylvania called the Hotel of Horror, and the movie is an obvious selling pitch for the attraction. It's a pretty lame excuse to make a pretty lame movie.

The saddest part is, however, that the gimmick could've worked. The last third of the movie takes place in the Hotel of Horror and has people running around not knowing what's real and what's not. It provided laughs and actual scares.

And hence, the film's biggest mistake: "Hell" ends with Feldman's character ready to enter the hotel, and I kept wondering why this wasn't the opening to the film. With Feldman in the lead and the whole movie taking place inside the real attraction, we could've been up for some real scares and some tongue in cheek moments.

Although Google is known for being a search engine, it makes most of its money from selling advertising across all of its products.

In October it said that it had made $2.High quality stone mosaic tiles.18billion (1.36billion) in profits in the third quarter of the year.

But that was a drop of 20 per cent from the year before, so the ability to target adverts as precisely as possible at users is increasingly important.

Marketers know that recommendations from a real person, ideally a friend, is much more valuable than an advertisement or a recommendation from someone you don't know.

But anonymity and the right to use nicknames, or 'handles', is important to web users.

You can add a married name to your Google+ profile, or if you have a nickname that you are well known by and have a 'significant' online following, you can use that.

But you have to prove to Google that you are that person by providing scanned documents or links to your online persona.

Mobile data specialist Christian Payne said: 'This is just another data extraction technique. Google+, like Facebook, isn't free. You pay for it with your identity. And they sell it on.'

Payne was one of the early victims of Google's insistence that users of the social network use their real names.

Widely known on the web as Documentally, Payne was thrown off Google+ last year. He said at the time: 'It's not that I don't want to put my real name in. It's just that more people know me as Documentally than Christian Payne.'

The search giant relented and Payne returned to the network, where his profile is Christian 'Documentally' Payne.

"It's incredibly expensive to transport a person to or from the continent, and in the middle of winter, it's physically impossible to get people off of the South Pole," Dr. Scott Parazynski, director and chief medical officer of UTMB's Center for Polar Medical Operations, said in a statement. "So if you can remotely diagnose and treat the patient, and then supervise his or her care, you're much better off."

UTMB provides remote medical support to three U.S. research outposts in Antarctica, where temperatures reach 76 degrees below zero.

They include McMurdo Station, which houses more than 1,200 people. A hospital at that location employs physicians, nurses and staff aids.A specialized manufacturer and supplier of dry cabinet, UTMB also runs telemedicine sessions at Amundsen-Scott South Pole (ASP) station, Palmer Station and two Antarctic research vessels.

The remote consultations aid the work of on-site medical professionals, which are called "doctors on ice." Connecting to doctors that specialize in certain medical conditions is essential to ensuring the best health outcomes for patients in remote and harsh environments, Emerson suggested.

UTMB has directed cardiological ultrasounds and emergency appendectomies over the Polycom video system. Doctors can also use electronic stethoscopes to listen to heart and lung sounds, rely on handheld cameras to show lesions, and use ophthalmoscopes to provide a view of the eyes, said Emerson.

"Polycom's standards-based video technologies allow medical devices including
cardiac ultrasounds to be easily plugged into them so the images can be
transferred through the video feed from any location," he said.

A doctor in Galveston, Texas, could view a live stream of a patient's cardiac ultrasound taking place at the South Pole, Emerson explained.

In August a cardiologist was able to remotely direct a cardiac ultrasound to save a patient's life.

"We're not set up to do general anesthesia and surgery, but this was a notable exception," said Parazynski.High quality stone mosaic tiles. "We were lucky to have a surgeon there and to be able to direct the anesthesia over the Polycom video system; it was pretty remarkable."

President Morsi insists his powers are temporary, and his spokesmen have insisted he has had little choice but to work around judges who are holdovers from the Mubarak area that stood in the way of a new constitution. They say he won the presidency fair and square, and should be given time to lead Egypt in a new direction.

But human history has far more examples of extraordinary powers "briefly" assumed that stretched into various authoritarianisms than of those used to create democracies. And the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi are busy cutting deals with the institutions of Mubarak's state – his still politically powerful military and various ministries – to cement their power. Most of the so-called liberals who were in the constitutional assembly (the body that is supposed to draft a new constitution) walked off the job, claiming that Islamists were simply ignoring them.

Now, large swathes of Egyptian's judiciary are promising to go on strike in protest of Morsi's actions. The judges, like many appointed bureaucrats from the Mubarak era, have had far more input into politics lately than opposition politicians or the public, and so may get somewhere, though the battle lines are hardening.

The president was reacting to real problems when he immunized his decisions and the Constituent Assembly from judicial oversight. The Brotherhood had been heavy-handed in picking the Constituent Assembly, but it did so fully within the rules drafted last year. And it is not clear that the opposition would have been satisfied with any compromise over the composition of the body or its work. The Brotherhood’s complaint — that many critics were averse to allowing election results to have any impact on the document or its authors — is firmly grounded.

Morsy’s defense of his moves as designed to support democracy unfortunately recall the remark attributed to an American soldier during the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”... But while the crisis is not fully a product of the actors’ intentions, Egyptians will not find a path forward unless their leaders find within themselves an intention to resolve their differences through compromise. The constitutional process is badly broken, but it can still be repaired.

Morsi has insisted, for now, that he's not going to change course. And that potentially puts Egypt on an even more dangerous path. While the Brotherhood told its supporters to stay off the streets during yesterday's big anti-Morsi protests, in order to avoid clashes, the group has called for mass demonstrations in support of Morsi on Saturday,The term 'hands free access control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. which could lead to clashes.

The rhetoric of various officials around Morsi has also grown more heated. A spokesman for the Brother's Freedom and Justice Party wrote today that it's "Very sad to see 'genuine opposition' allied with 'corrupt Mubarak cronies.'" One of the Brotherhood's official Twitter account wrote yesterday that if the "opposition thinks the significance of today is # of Tahrir protestors... they should brace for millions in support of the elected" Morsi while dismissing the Tahrir protests as composed partly of "pro-Mubarak felols".

With the "process" gummed up, the opposition interested only, it seems, in using street power to prevent Morsi's agenda from moving forward, and Morsi currently the only official in Egypt with any democratic legitimacy, the stage looks set for a showdown. And what then? Sufficient rioting might bring the military back into the political forefront again.

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