Top Five Film Trilogies

I’ve been catching up on Filmspotting over the last few weeks (more alone driving – it actually works out well to be a bit behind, because it takes longer for many films to be released here, and many films I only get around to seeing once they hit DVD (and Fatso) anyway).  In #324 the top 5 list was trilogies, and I found I could come up with a list myself.

I have more stringent rules than Adam/Matty: the trilogy must tell a continuous story in all three films – it’s ideal if each film can stand alone as well, but there must be an overarching storyline that connects the three.  This means that a pair of sequels doesn’t count (e.g. Toy Story, Die Hard (before #4), Mission Impossible (before #4)), and it can’t be a ‘triple-feature’ (i.e. three films that are just connected in some way).  Like Filmspotting, all three films had to be good (e.g. no Matrix or Back to the Future).  This actually narrows it down a lot (most sets of three are movie+sequel+sequel or triple-features).

My top five:

  1. The Bourne Trilogy (The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum).  #3 on the Filmspotting (joint) top 5.  I guessed they’d pick this, and it’s well deserved.
  2. Star Trek 2-4 (The Wrath of Kahn, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home).  Not normally considered a trilogy (but I’m certainly not the first to think that), but it is really – there’s a continuous story that runs through all three (clearest in the first two), although they stand especially well alone (better than the Star Wars films do), and if Episodes IV-VI can be considered a trilogy, then these ought to be able to as well.  These are clearly the best three of all the Star Trek films (including the 2009 one), and it’s often hard to rank them against each other  – i.e. the films in the trilogy are (for the most part) equally good, which is not common.
  3. Star Wars IV-VI (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi).  Not considered for the Filmspotting lists because Star Wars (IV: A New Hope) is in the “pantheon”.  It’s pretty clear why these are great films (especially for the time), and they stand reasonably well on their own (much better than LotR), but definitely tell a continuous story.  Placed low because they are really #4, #5, and #6 in a series of six films (but they qualify because of the amount of time between the release of the first ones, and because they were released in this order, not #1, #,2, #3, (long gap), #4, #5, #6).
  4. The Lord of the Rings (Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, all extended editions).  These are not great adaptations (the worst bits are all additions, and many parts are just badly done), but if you forget about the source material, then they are a really good set of films.  Placed low because (a) if you do consider the source material they are considerably worse, and (b) they don’t stand on their own very well at all.
  5. X-Men (X-Men, X2, The Last Stand).  I really struggled to come up with a number five (it was the Star Wars prequels for a long time, but having all six on the list is too much of  a cheat).  These films aren’t great, but they are ok, and there is something of an overall story, although they mostly stand alone.
Since writing this, I finally got around to seeing the Millennium Trilogy, and I’d put those at #2, bumping everything else down (sorry X-Men!).  The films are pretty dark, and I’m don’t usually watch many subtitled films, but they were very good, and clearly a trilogy, and of approximately equal quality (the first being the best, and oddly the third being the weakest).

Why the Government should ignore the People

The infamous “Section 92A” that so riled people up, was this (in full):

92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers

(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.

(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

This is entirely reasonable.  All it says is that there has to be a policy – it says nothing about the policy other than it must be ‘reasonably implemented’ (where the court gets to decide what is “reasonable”), and that there has to be some way to get to termination of an account in repeat infringement cases.

Despite what huge numbers of people claimed: there is no “guilt on accusation” here and there is no “3 strikes” here. However, through the bad reporting that is unfortunately common now, that’s what people believed, and they made a huge fuss about it, and the Government cravenly caved in to pressure from “the People” and have come up with a new version.  I can’t post the full text of the new version here, because it’s 18 sections long.

With S92A, it was up to the ISPs (or “IPAP”s) to decide what a suitable policy was.  Given that writing policy is hard work, it’s likely that there would end up being a fairly boilerplate policy adopted by most ISPs, but there was no requirement for a central policy.  A “reasonable” policy could be that (a) the rights holder must have proved in court or through the Tribunal that an infringement took place, and (b) the termination would be for no more than one day per infringement (recall that file sharing may involve hundreds of infringements in a single case).  Probably the major ISPs would have had something closer to what’s now law, with a system of warnings and notices and probation periods, but it would be up to the ISP and if the consumers cared, then they could chose based on this policy.  Certainly the policy could “reasonably” have required more than 3 infringements.

Importantly, if the policy needed adjustment (perhaps to limit the number of infringement notices from a single rights holder to counter blanket accusations), that would be something that the ISP could decide to do and implement at any time.  What we have now instead is a policy that’s enshrined in law, so the Government needs to pass an amendment to change anything (and given the ruckus each time this is touched, that seems unlikely).

The irony here is that if “the People” had just (a) read the original version, and (b) shut up about it, or if the Government had ignored the People, we would have had a much simpler and more flexible law that most people would probably have been happier with.  (There are other changes in the Amendment, like the definition of an ISP/IPAP, that are genuinely superior – I’m referring only to the infringement policy).

Instead, we now do have a “3 strikes” law (but it’s not “guilt on accusation”).  However, if you actually bother to take the time to read it, it’s really not that bad (unless you’re guilty of illegal file-sharing, of course.  In that case you need to (a) campaign for copyright reform if you honestly believe that it should be legal, and (b) stop breaking the law).  I much prefer the old version where the policy wasn’t in law, but since “the People” more-or-less killed that possibility, this is probably as good as we’ll get.  Note how many hoops have to be jumped through in order to get a 6-month account suspension – it’s really not going to be that common.

(Note, too, that there’s nothing preventing you from opening an account with another provider (assuming they’ll have you, and probably they won’t care).  This is unlike (e.g.) driving-related cases where you are forbidden to drive at all for a period of time.  Imagine if someone convicted of a DUI wasn’t allowed to drive that vehicle for 6 months, but could drive anything else!).

I can see two potential problems with the Amendment, both unfortunately reasonably likely.

  1. Because this is an election year and because people don’t understand what they are riled up about, the Amendment gets overturned (or amended again) in a year or so – we need some stability here, even if the law isn’t perfect.  Perhaps then the people that work on this stuff could start figuring out the copyright issue in more totality and leave file-sharing alone.  (i.e. how long should copyright last? should computer code be copyrightable? should we get rid of copyright altogether?)
  2. The courts get convinced that penalties should be foolishly high (there are plenty of US cases that could be used as examples here).  For example, if the work is a song, and there is evidence that 1,000 people gained access to that song through the infringer, then the absolute maximum penalty should be $2390 ($2.39 to buy the song from iTunes x1000).  In nearly all cases it should be considerably less, because (a) not all of the 1,000 people would have purchased the song (so the damages do not apply), (b) the cost of the song is often much less, and (c) the sharing may have increased sales in some cases (evidence of this should be provided).  It would be much better if the law restricted the fine to something that reflected damages (i.e. no punitive fines).  I’m hopeful that this won’t happen – if you look at judgements in New Zealand most often the punishment is far less than what “reasonable people” could consider merited – so if anything we may get the opposite effect, where the fines are extremely minimal.

(I do absolutely agree that passing the Amendment under an urgency created to deal with the earthquake is extremely inappropriate.  My guess is that there was room to put it in, so they wanted it out of the way (particularly as far before the election as possible).  More care should be taken by the Government about what gets dealt with under urgency – this is hardly the first inappropriate example).

An actual problem with the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill

The most glaringly wrong part of the Amendment is this:

122PB Application of section 122C to cellular mobile networks

(1) An IPAP need not comply with either of the obligations in section 122C(1) in respect of the services it provides by way of a cellular mobile network.

(2) Subsection (1) is repealed with the close of 31 July 2013 (but see subsection (3)(c)).

(3) The Governor-General may, by Order in Council made on the recommendation of the Minister, do all or any of the following:

(a) repeal this section:

(b) repeal subsection (2):

(c) amend subsection (2) by replacing the date specified in that subsection with any other date, whether that date is earlier or later than the one it replaces:

(d) revoke or amend any Order in Council made under this section (the principal order), but only if the repeal, amendment, or revocation effected by the principal order has not taken effect.

(4) The powers in subsection (3) may be exercised more than once.

This makes absolutely no sense.  A rights violation doesn’t change based on the medium used – why should it matter if the Internet access is via cellular data, microwave, satellite, fiber, copper DSL, or copper dial-up?  Even the authors of the Amendment clearly know that it makes no sense, which is why there’s the built-in expiry and ability to remove it at essentially any earlier time (or, crazily, extend it).

Unless the point is to encourage everyone to illegally file-share over cellular data?  Given that the prices are higher, I’m sure the providers would be happy with that…

Guilt if not denied, not guilt on accusation

Once again, many New Zealanders are saying incredibly incorrect things about copyright law – most of them because they are parroting other people in a twisted Chinese whispers style of journalism.  People are calling the latest changes “guilt on accusation”.  All you have to do is actually read the amendment (which is not something that many do) and you can tell that is not the case.

The relevant part of the amendment is this:

122MA Infringement notice as evidence of copyright infringement

(1) In proceedings before the Tribunal, an infringement notice is conclusive evidence of the following:

(a) that each incidence of file sharing identified in the notice constituted an infringement of the right owner’s copyright in the work identified:

(b) that the information recorded in the infringement notice is correct:

(c) that the infringement notice was issued in accordance with this Act.

(2) An account holder may submit evidence, or give reasons, that show that any 1 or more of the presumptions in subsection (1) do not apply with respect to any particular infringement identified in an infringement notice.

(3) If an account holder submits evidence or gives reasons as referred to in subsection (2), the rights owner must satisfy the Tribunal that the particular presumption or presumptions are correct.

What this says is that if you are accused and you do not deny the accusation then the tribunal does not need to consider additional evidence – they can get on with the rest of their work.  As soon as you say “no, this wasn’t a rights violation”, or “there’s a mistake here”, or “this notice wasn’t in the right form”, the burden is explicitly on the rights holder to prove guilt.  In case this is “TL;DR”, it’s the final words: “the rights owner must satisfy the Tribunal that the particular presumption or presumptions are correct.

This is doesn’t mean you are guilty until proven innocent – this means that if you can’t be bothered denying the accusation, then the Tribunal doesn’t have to waste a lot of time looking at evidence.  If you’re innocent, all you need to do is point that out, and you are presumed to be correct until proven otherwise.

Possible gmail break-in

When I logged into gmail this morning, I saw the message that I dread the most – detection of an unusual access.  There was a connection (two days ago) from a server in Malaysia, although it’s actually an AWS server (Amazon web services).

There are two possibilities: the good one is that this is something that I’ve previously given access to my account, accessing it via an alternate method (e.g. Backupify can access my mail to back it up, and they use AWS) so that it showed up an unusual.  The bad one is that someone was using AWS to bulk-attack accounts and got in.

In favour of the good one, as far as I can tell, no email was sent – I can’t see anything amiss at all.  The email account is the central lockbox for everything, of course, so it’s possible that it was just used to break into other things, or the email content was retrieved.  My password (changed now, of course) was a random 8-character string of lower-case alphanumeric characters, so not particularly simple to break (although not difficult either, given sufficient resources).  I never give out the password to anything that I do not completely trust, and nor do I give out access via other methods (e.g. oauth, openid) unless I trust those services too.

I had intended to turn on two-factor identification, but hadn’t got to it yet.  I’ve done that now, for the main account at least.  My password is now over 30 characters long, including upper and lower case and punctuation – I probably should have changed this a while ago too.

For now, I’m leaning towards the good possibility, so I won’t be completely resetting everything that can send a password reminder to my gmail account.  I’ll be keeping an eye on things as closely as I can in the next week or so, though.  If you see anything suspicious come from me, please let me know.

More pitching (scifi.stackexchange.com)

The elevator pitch discussion died down, but I’ve been thinking about this over the last few weeks.  As I noted earlier, I’m not a great pitcher, but perhaps I can get something good enough together that others can then work on.

DVD extras meets user generated content.

I like the idea of starting the pitch with a mashup of something that the pitchee is likely to be familar with (harking back to Donaldson’s thought that all good ideas come from the collision of two separate ideas).  In addition, “user generated content” is fairly buzzword-y, which I generally dislike, but is probably appropriate for a pitch.  I’m referring only to the best DVD extras, of course, but I think that is implied (also the best of user generated content), and “Book extras” if there was such a thing, as well.

Imagine if you could set the questions on the DVD extras for your favourite TV show or movie – or if you had extras for your favourite book.  You get answers about what, how and why things happened both in-universe, and in reality, from people who are intimately familiar with not just that one work, but the entire science fiction and fantasy genres – people that can pull together expert and interesting answers about how this work relates to other genre fiction and to the world. They’ll even explain what stories you should move to next if you loved particular aspects of this one.

This doesn’t include story identification – but the pitch doesn’t need to include every topic, and it doesn’t fit with the “DVD extras” analogy.  It hits some marks that I think are particularly important:

  • It’s not just about focusing in on one universe – it’s about having knowledge across the entire genre/genres.
  • It’s about the in-universe world, but also about how the fiction impacts reality.
  • It punches the question words “what”, “how”, and “why” (“who” is probably better answered by IMDB, “where” probably by Wikipedia, and “which” could cover too many things).  This emphases (subtlety) that this is a Q&A site (as does “answers” later on), but also what sort of questions are most appropriate: especially “why”.
  • DVD extras are generally narrated by experts (cast, crew, authors).  The site isn’t necessarily going to have the foremost expert (e.g. the author) for every question, but it is about getting expert opinion.

It does include recommendations (although I try to make it clear that they need to be very specific).  My opinion follows the original meta discussion: as long as they are specific enough to invite good (subjective) answers, then they’re ok.  Actually, they’re not just ok, but the type of question that users will really love the site for.  I’m sure many people will add books to their reading lists by reading interesting, detailed, answers on the site – not just these ones, but certainly including them.

Figuring FAQ (scifi.stackexchange.com)

The scifi.stackexchange.com community (or more accurately, the meta.scifi.stackexchange.com community) is still trying to figure out what’s on-topic, even though it doesn’t appear that the meta consensus directly influences the actual reality of the site.

When I last left the search for an elevator pitch, I wondered whether the FAQs of the other (launched) sites would be a fertile ground for inspiration. So, here goes – this is the same list of sites as last time:

Web apps is fairly straightforward (although they interestingly single out “adult content” sites as off-topic).  Gaming is nice and short, with an all-inclusive policy (with two exceptions: recommendations and shopping).  Ubuntu’s FAQ barely says anything about what’s ok – I guess the implication is that anything related to Ubuntu is on-topic.  Webmasters is similarly short, with no exclusions.  Game development has a brief list of sub-topics that are considered acceptable, and an explanation of how to choose between StackOverflow and that site.

The three that I think do the best job (in terms of something that scifi.stackexchange.com can emulate) are photography, cooking, and mathematics.

Photography is an interesting case – they link to a few meta discussions, and they have some off-topic examples that seem obvious (programming, website development, graphic design) but must have caused problems at some point.

Cooking reads very nicely – there are clear examples of what’s on-topic, and some examples of what’s not on topic.  There’s a link to questions tagged “faq” on meta (scifi.stackexchange.com has used “on-topic-discussion” for the same purposes I think).

Mathematics doesn’t just have on-topic and off-topic suggestions, but also suggestions for topics that are on-topic but might get better answers elsewhere.  I think this is a great addition.  The off-topic examples are quite limited, but it’s probably quite obvious what’s ok on the site.

Does this help with figuring things out for scifi.stackexchange.com?  Not as much as I hoped.  The results of the ‘on topic – off-topic’ meta-meta discussion can probably be turned into the on/off topic bullet points that are common; we should try and include a link to an appropriate meta tag as well, and links to other sites (like writers.stackexchange.com) for some examples would be great too.

    Pitching (scifi.stackexchange.com)

    There are currently 15 StackExchange sites that have launched (i.e. made it past beta), excluding the original trilogy. The “elevator pitch” questions on their meta sites are:

    I hoped to find some inspiration for the scifi.stackexchange.com elevator pitch by examining these successful sites.  Unfortunately (or perhaps not?) the majority of these questions focus on “taglines” rather than pitches – i.e. single sentences or sentence fragments that would take under a second to “pitch” (perhaps elevators are much faster in the US! – the blog post does say single-sentence).

    It seems like this is mostly because of the history of StackExchange around this time – a decision was made to change from unique domains for each site (e.g. seasonedadvice.com) to generic subdomains of stackexchange.com (e.g. cooking.stackexchange.com) with unique branding.  As a result, the focus is typically on the branding – and in some cases is filled with complaints about that decision (maths, for some reason, has a bunch of answers concerned about commercialisation of the site in their elevator pitch question).

    So Apple, Unix/Linux, CS-theory, English, TeX/LaTeX, photography, game development, webmasters, Ubuntu, and web applications aren’t really of any inspirational use.  There are some short pitches at gaming.stackexchange.com, but not very many.

    I’m guessing that another reason that the pitches are so short is that it’s more clear what the site is.  If you’re familiar with StackOverflow, then it seems reasonably obvious what apple.stackexchange.com is.  This isn’t always the case – for example, is cooking.stackexchange.com only for professionals? (No).

    So my hunt must continue. In the meantime, interest in this question on scifi.stackexchange.com has died down a little – which is probably bad, not good.  I’m thinking now that the best way to get this resolved is to indeed answer it myself (but community wiki, so that others can improve and especially shorten!), with perhaps one sentence and one paragraph versions.

    Perhaps the FAQ’s of the launched sites will be more inspiring – that’s where I’m heading next (I’m also reading through several of the other meta sites, so that might also offer some illumination).

    Dealing with recommendations (scifi.stackexchange.com)

    One of the problems that scifi.stackexchange.com faces that isn’t unique to that site is “recommendation” questions. These are a specific type of list question (which are generally ill-suited to the sites), where each answer offers one possible recommendation, and the votes cast are not just “that’s a good answer” or “that’s a bad answer”, but votes for (and less often, against) a suggestion. StackOverflow has a long history of problems with these sorts of questions (e.g. “favourite programming cartoon” and “great programming quotes“).  With few exceptions, these questions are closed, often not before they gather huge numbers of votes, answers, and answer votes.

    I don’t really see a huge problem with these questions myself – if they are “community wiki” then they aren’t just a way to gather huge amounts of reputation, the voting has merit (if something is popular, it is likely for a reason), and the format does fit (unlike discussions, for example).  I can understand that a specific site might choose to disallow them (e.g. StackOverflow), but others (e.g. programmers.stackexchange.com) could allow them.  I don’t think that having the majority (or even just a non-small percentage) of a site’s questions be ones of this type would do much for the quality, but in moderation they seem ok.

    I doubt this would ever be allowed by the powers that be at StackExchange, but I think the following would be a great system for scifi.stackexchange.com:

    • Once a month a new meta.scifi.stackexchange.com question is opened that asks what this month’s recommendation (or perhaps more generally, poll) question should be.  People make suggestions and up/down vote the ideas that they like (yes, a poll about a poll – however, poll questions seem to be acceptable on meta sites).
    • One a month, the most popular answer of the previous month’s meta question is created (e.g. by a moderator, ensuring that the question is community wiki).

    I think this strikes a great middle-ground.  These types of questions are generally incredibly popular, and that would help get people coming to the site (something that scifi.stackexchange.com needs, but others, e.g. StackOverflow, do not, since it’s already at near saturation).  Since there would only be one of these each month (others would be close-voted, with comments pointing to the relevant meta discussion) they wouldn’t dominate the site (even one a week would presumably be only noise compared to the number of other questions).  Many more users would find themselves interacting with the meta site – hopefully some of these would explore more than just the one question they came for, and end up participating in community building, support, moderation, and so forth – perhaps these users would otherwise not have ever visited the meta site.

    Other arguments against these types of questions tend to be: they age badly (this could still be true, but hopefully the pre-asking meta stage would assist with that, and there’s always down-votes), they provoke discussion (discussion answers/comments can be flagged, discussion in chat is a good thing), and they don’t provide interesting answers (I totally disagree – especially in the context of a Q&A site dedicated to fiction).