I think I still liked Star Wars after The Phantom Menace. Attack of the Clones killed the franchise for me. I saw Revenge of the Sith on DVD at a family member's house to get it over with, I haven't paid attention to the franchise since, and I gather I'm not missing much.
I want to shoot a movie in like, Portland Maine, and then some characters decide to go to Mexico, and "Mexico" is just Portland, Oregon with a heavy sand colored filter over the lens.
I have a kind of strange property. Me and my parents live next door to each other (this corner of this city block has been in my family for nearly a century) and we've got a bunch of relatively small areas of grass. It would be nice to automate at least some of it, but robotic mowers either require burying a wire around the perimeter of the area they're allowed in and have very dumb algorithms that make them somewhat inefficient, or they're smarter but require satellite uplinks and proprietary services.
I know of a few cases in religious buildings where stairs were designed to have a mystical effect. In Angkor Wat, for example, the stairs have a steep and tall tread pattern. Commoners weren't used to them so they'd be exhausted, but the local monks were used to them so they could ascend and descend with ease.
Yeah, my LG EnV2. It was a more physically pleasurable thing to use than any phone I've had since, because I switched to Android after that. That first Android phone, an LG Ally, was kinda slick too, not as ergonomic and touch screens are a mistake, but...it still felt like progress. Things got better or more capable. I've had like four phones since that Ally, and even though they've gotten objectively more powerful as computers, they don't functionally do much more.
Problem 1: They make the same DTMF tones that severe weather alerts do. That particular tone should mean "Immediate risk to YOUR life" such as a flash flood, severe thunderstorm or tornado. Using the same tone for amber alerts (or silver alerts, for missing old people) is just crying wolf. How many people are going to go "FOR FUCK'S SAKE I'M IN BED I'M NOT JOINING A MANHUNT" and mute such an alert without reading it, and then it's gonna be about a tornado?
Side problem: I learned something from Technology Connections a month or two ago that I've known since I was four. Almost all fire alarms sound a cadence of three short bursts. When I was in kindergarten, our school used the normal bells for the emergency alarm system, we were taught that groups of 3 short bursts on the bell was the fire alarm, but they taught it as if that's how it works at this school and not universally. I bet the alert noises your phone makes, you know the government screeches? I bet those carry meaning they haven't even tried to teach the public, in either the exact tone or beep sequence.
Problem 2: It seems to assume that every adult in half a state is going to drop what they're doing and fod walk the world looking for this kid (or geezer). Almost no one is, in large part because no one has been trained as to how. I guess the idea is you're supposed to be out driving, get that alert, remember the details including the license plate number of the vehicle, and then call 911. Has that ever even once happened? Especially since:
Problem 3: The message isn't persistent or retrievable. It's a push notification. If you dismiss it, possibly to get it to stop making noise so you can concentrate on reading it, it vanishes. There's no message history to find it in, no real way to go "Hey wait a second, is that the car the amber alert was talking about?" 22 minutes later.
It does kind of come off as a very political "I am assembling a task force to create a solution to these dastardly crimes" solution.
I like harder sci-fi. Very often it will explore "what if it's like now, but this one thing is different?" You get to explore the human condition a bit more that way.
Softer sci-fi tends to be just fantasy that refuses to say the word "magic" out of pure marketing, and they end up being either the same old hero's journey told and retold in current generation's slang, or sloppily handled allegory.
I think I still liked Star Wars after The Phantom Menace. Attack of the Clones killed the franchise for me. I saw Revenge of the Sith on DVD at a family member's house to get it over with, I haven't paid attention to the franchise since, and I gather I'm not missing much.