This movie is an absolute classic. This is the machoist movie ever made. Schwarzenegger in his prime, Carl Weathers, Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Bill Duke--I don't think the line up could have been any better except if they added Sly Stallone."Predator" is one of the rare movies from the 80's that I can watch again and again and not feel as though it's dated. The action was great, the lines were memorable and the predator was a beast."Predator" was a fresh addition to the action movie genre. No fighting gangs, or terrorists, or enemy nations--this was the toughest of the extraterrestrials versus the toughest on Earth. Man they don't make 'em like this anymore.
Consider that so many of the roles that Arnold Schwarzenegger takes on are so similar, including Predator, and yet this film is so much better than most of the others. I enjoy watching his movies just because he's such a watch-able guy, even in his bad movies (which are many), but I think the thing that really makes Predator stand out is its simplicity. The movie starts, the guys get dropped in the jungle, lots of blood and carnage flies across the screen, and the movie simply ends. No romance, no complex back story, no soldier struggling with problems in his past or even trauma caused by the horrible things he experiences during the movie. This is one of the things that made First Blood so good. It may turn out to be a movie about a lot of muscle-bound meatheads in the woods, but it doesn't insult the audience or try to apply complexity to a story that can't support it.Interestingly, the movie features two eventual governors. Jesse Ventura even wrote a book which was released while he was the governor of Minnesota and he used his favorite line in this movie as the title. And the book's actually pretty interesting; there are some funny stories in it about things that went on while they were filming this movie. Arnold, on the other hand, is actually (and thankfully) given a relatively small amount of stupid one-liners, which are an idiotic byproduct of hard action movies that I've never really understood the necessity for. They don't reveal anything about the characters who say them, they don't add to the story or further the plot, and with rare exceptions, they're not funny. But I guess comic relief has to come from somewhere, and since complexity is not a requisite for movies like this, I can't really expect a lot of thought being put into the comedic content either.I watched Predator having never seen it from beginning to end and having just re-watched the original Alien. I am currently in the process of re-watching both series', for obvious reasons. One thing that I notice about both of them is the way they take their time in introducing the enemies which, in both films, are aliens. Predator doesn't waste much time dwelling on the origin of the alien, we pretty much assume it came from a space ship that flashed across the screen at the opening of the movie. Alien, on the other hand, went into remarkable detail about where its alien came from. What Predator does do, very effectively, I think, is that it has the guys fighting some very human enemies, which allows the movie to later take its sweet time in having them realize that the new enemy is not human at all. This is also, incidentally, weakly rehashed in the sequel, using the secrecy of this mission and team as an excuse to have more guys who don't know what's going on.The death scenes are actually pretty tasteful, given the genre. They are just gory enough to illustrate the violence of the enemy without being gratuitous. Just enough is shown to show how vicious the alien is, and there are some strange things done to and with the bodies that make you wonder about the alien's intentions or needs. The first deaths suggest vengeance if not some sort of ritual, but later ones suggest that the alien may be feeding off of his (or her) victims. Oddly enough, it is not until the awful Predator 2 that we learn that it kills for sport.Yes, the movie occasionally gets embarrassingly macho, but the skill with which it is put together far overshadows any tough-guy goofiness. Consider, for example, the ease with which the movie switches from showing the guys hunting the alien to their realization that they are the ones being hunted. In some cases, this transition takes place during a single shot and with virtually no movement in the shot at all except a change in someone's expression. It is truly a fight between a group of predators, which we understand because they are human like us, and a single predator whose powers and weaknesses are unknown. It's not Oscar material, needless to say, but it's a great action movie in part because it already knows that.
Predator torrent
In Washington, some occurrences of Columbia torrent salamanders are in protected areas (for example, state designated Natural Area Preserves), while some riparian habitat protections occur through forest practice rules and habitat conservation plans. Temperature sensitivity and limited dispersal ability makes this species potentially sensitive to climate change.
The Columbia torrent salamander is a small, aquatic, stream-adapted salamander (rarely more than 2.2 inches snout to vent length). The head is small with a short, rounded snout The body is relatively long with short limbs and a short tail. Coloration is beige-brown above and yellow to orange yellow below. White speckling on the body tends to be more concentrated along the sides. Black speckling also exists, but is very reduced to fine flecking, also mostly along the sides. In general, this species lacks the dark dorsal (topside) and ventral (underside) spotting or blotching that is prominent in the Cascades torrent salamander.
Columbia torrent salamanders have large prominent eyes. The large size of the eyes (eye diameter approximately equal to snout length), relatively short, rounded snout and generally prominent yellow component to the belly color are features that help distinguish torrent salamanders from other Washington salamanders.
The color pattern and morphology of torrent salamander species are similar and variable; therefore, torrent salamander species are best identified by collection locality and how that relates to the documented ranges of each species.
Superficially, metamorphosed torrent salamanders resemble woodland salamanders (Plethodon species) and ensatina, but torrent salamanders lack nasolabial grooves and a constriction at the base of the tail (unique to ensatina). Torrent salamanders and rough-skinned newts have a similar color pattern, but differ in overall appearance with newts being stockier, having a thicker skin that is often rough (in the terrestrial phase) and lacking costal grooves.
Columbia torrent salamanders occur in mature, coastal, coniferous forests where they inhabit relatively cold, permanent streams, seepages, and waterfall splash zones. Stream segments tend to be shallow, slow flowing, and have gravel or rock rubble with low levels of silt. They tend to be more abundant in streams with northerly aspects and steep gradients. During rainy wet periods, metamorphosed individuals may occasionally be found in wet terrestrial forest settings away from streams or seepages.
The salamanders are active year round, but the reproductive ecology is not well known. The mating season is probably prolonged similar to other torrent salamander species. Only five nests have been found, presumably because the eggs are laid in inaccessible recesses in head-water streams and seeps.
The Columbia torrent salamander is native to the coastal ranges of southwestern Washington and northwestern Oregon. Distribution in Washington is restricted to the Willapa Hills, and distribution within the range is patchy. They can be locally common in suitable habitat.
This map from the Washington Herp Atlas illustrates the distribution of Columbia torrent salamander in Washington based on records in the WDFW database as of 2016. If you see this species in areas that are not indicated on the map or have more recent observations (less than 10 years), please share your observation using the WDFW wildlife reporting form.
Evidence of child abuse, including child pornography, is often readily available via the Web thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites. BitTorrent software poses a particular problem for stopping the trade of these illicit images because it breaks the files into pieces and sends them from one computer to the next via different paths without passing through any centralized servers. This has for the most part rendered cops and security experts powerless to trace the origins of the files and catch the predators.Recently, however, engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have developed promising new software to automate the tracking of BitTorrent content and hopefully help law-enforcement officials solve this puzzle. The key is locating the images quickly by focusing on new files coming out of RSS feeds and entering P2P networks, before they can be widely distributed.The more times a file has been downloaded via a P2P network the more widely distributed the contents of that file are, making it much more difficult to track, says Robert Patton, an applied software engineering researcher at Oak Ridge who is developing the software with Thomas Potok, head of the lab's Applied Software Engineering Research Group.Child predators can share images, videos or other content by first creating a small descriptor file, or "torrent," that can be distributed via the Web or e-mail. The torrent file will tell anyone interested in downloading this content how to contact a "tracker" computer that coordinates the matching of consumers with suppliers. Because of the way BitTorrent works, the consumer ends up getting different pieces of content from multiple computers with different IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.Oak Ridge's software grabs the torrent file and immediately investigates the IP addresses of the different computers from which pieces of the file are stored. Based on data-traffic patterns, the software then prioritizes IP addresses to be investigated, creating a short list of suspects for cops to investigate.The federal government estimates that more than five children die every day as a result of child abuse. As it is, law enforcement has the resources to work on less then 1 percent of the caseload, says Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children, a nonprofit based in Knoxville, Tenn. Oak Ridge's automated winnowing of suspects is expected to be a valuable time-saver for law enforcement hunting down those computers and their owners. Currently cops have too many IP addresses, most of them dead ends, to investigate.Oak Ridge's work on the BitTorrent tool began in early 2010 when the association asked researchers at Oak Ridge and law enforcement officials from Tennessee and Virginia to educate them on the pervasiveness of child abuse and exploitation, much of it shared on the Internet. The idea was for the association to connect Oak Ridge's scientists with law enforcement overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem and hindered by technical challenges. The Knoxville Police Department, home of the Tennessee Internet Crimes against Children Task Force, expressed interest in Oak Ridge's work soon after meeting the researchers.Oak Ridge's software means that sophisticated methods of data analysis may soon be in the hands of law enforcement officials. Two police departments are now testing it, although Weeks declined to identify them. "This is a Geiger counter for locating predatory pedophiles," he says. "Instead of radiation, it finds the presence of child abuse images."The biggest concern about the software at this point is whether its use will hold up in court or allow potential offenders to get off on some technicality. If the software does prove successful, however, "there will be one less excuse for inaction, which is what we have now," says Weeks, who adds that he has brought the software to the attention of top law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "This is an entirely new field really, what we would call child-rescue technology, and it uses the same sorts of tools and methods as are used in counterterrorism." 2ff7e9595c
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