Julio Laredo wrote:
"Michael Baldwin, Bruce" wrote in message
oups.com...
It was screening on TV the other night so I thought I'd watch it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120647/
Man, talk about crap.

I happened to see only a few minutes of it, once. It's use of cliches
showed the thinking behind the writing was way too conservative for my
tastes.

I know what you mean. Almost every film made nowdays is formulaeic.

Starts off with some kid with with a ****ant little scope (not even a
Mead!) discovering a comet or assteriod. So what does he do? Calls
some turkey in Nevada who is laughingly supposed to be a professional
asstronomer.

It is essential in effective satire that the satirist have some modicum of
knowledge of the subject be satirized. Let's see how you stack up.

Ah, so it was satire. Yeah, I can see how that makes sense now.

Most comet discoveries have been by amateurs, and one of the 2002 winners of
the Edgar Wilson Award used binoculars.

They give out awards for this? A0L!

And not everyone would head right to CBAT, it would be
within the realm of possibility that an amateur would try to contact someone
he considered a professional for verification.

To verify what? That he saw a comet?

So, here, your satire was off the mark. Strike one.

That clown is sitting in what looks like a radio scope station
listening to classical music (what else?). After he's told, he looks
for it himself. Not sure how he gets an image of it the way he did
with a radio scope, but he does.

Radio telescope stations do have optical scopes for aiming the dishes, and
are often used in
conjunction with the radio images. Here, too, your satire is off the mark.
Strike two.

Are they located on top of mountains by themselves or in arrays? Did
the film show an optical scope being used?

Then, get this, he transfers it to floppy disk! What the hay! Is he
using OS/2 or something? Let me guess. His crappy software is written
in FORTRAN too.

I guess you think that optical disks and XP have been around forever; they
have not.

The film was made in '98. The Internet had been around a while by
then.

If you were paying attention, the movie came out in 1998, which means
shooting would have begun at least 2 years before.

Are you sure about that? Don't forget these types of films are usually
set in the future. Would be kind of dumb to set something like this in
the past, don't you think?

In that time frame nearly
all computers had floppy drives, and since the coordinates for the object
would be in a relatively small text file, a floppy would have been a very
reasonable method to store the information.

So would email.

Strike three. You have proven yourself to be inept and I can see no reason
to go further since whatever you would have to opine would be of no merit.

Sounds more like your batting average needs some work.