I assume ‘טלפון חכם’ is a straightforward translation of ‘smartphone’ into Hebrew, to the extent you consider טלפון to be a real Hebrew word.
No, they’re literally called “smartphones” - “סמרטפון”. Sometimes “Telephone Chacham”*, but that’s considered a bit too formal for everyday use.
It’s not the first foreign word Hebrew has adapted, you know.
[*] As DPRK said - edit.
There was or still is a company in Israel offering mobile service in the 1980s whose name means something like “Wonderphone”
ETA name is Pelephone, founded 1985, today a subsidiary of Bezeq
It’s one of Israel’s three biggest wireless carriers. I use it myself.
I think that’s where RivkahChaya’s confusion came from - because it was the first cellular company in Israel, for years “Pelephone” was used as the generic word for cell phone (the whole “xerox” phenomenon). That’s fallen by the wayside in the past decade or so.
My theory was that the machines were following something like Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics and just trying to protect humanity as best they could from the hellscape that humans turned the real world into. (Most of the Asimov I’ve read is the Foundation series, so I don’t know how feasible it is to fully merge The Matrix and the Robot series.)
Yup. I went with a friend to buy a new phone the last time I was in Israel, because she lost hers, and that was the term they were using, but she was older-- like late 60s, and although she was Israeli, she had been living in the US for the last 15 years, so that’s why she would have used the older term.
Also, my modern Hebrew is not great. Biblical Hebrew is terrific, but I was really only half-following the conversation.
I did specifically ask about “pelephone,” and what it meant exactly, and she was the one who said it meant “magic” phone.
My theory for the Terminator movies is that Skynet’s goal was removing the possibility of human error. (By which I mean, they just come out and say that; I merely figure that, if you start there, then what more needs to be added?)
This is the premise of the very first issue of Gold Key comics’ Magnus Robot Fighter (1963 ). You can even see several humans making up the robots’ “human computer” in the background of the first issue cover: It was written and drawn by Russ Manning, who also did Tarzan for Gold Key.
This is good, but it still needs to explain the Matrix-Zion War. (Maybe the robots are just not very good at managing humans? I haven’t read the Asimov stuff, but I gather the robots do make “mistakes.”)
Could totally be merged with my theory that the war is illusory! It’s a pacification measure for the rebellious part of the population. Keeps ‘em feeling like they’re making a difference…
Huh. Kinda crazy that the idea has been around that long. I guess once you have the idea of “brain in jar” floating about, the idea of networking a bunch of them will occur to someone.
(I definitely am not the first person to suggest that “make a human computer” was a much more plausible scenario for The Matrix than the stupid Coppertop one — can’t remember where I heard it first. I did come up with the idea of the Zion rebellion being a simulation, though — walking out of the movie theater in 1999! I hope if the Wachowskis ever get around to making a sequel that’s the direction they take it. Would be a shame if they ran with the Jesus/mystic warrior stuff instead.)
Already underway: The Matrix Resurrections - Wikipedia
I believe this was the plot in the original script. They changed humans to batteries because the studio thought the audience wouldn’t get it.
It’s a bit circular, though. The machines want to harness the brainpower of humans as a sort of giant computer, so they imprison people while their minds believe they are living normal lives. But that simulation of the world requires a giant computer.
Yeah, they should have went with the simple “we imprison people in the matrix for their own good. Left alone you’d destroy yourselves.” And some people just fight against captivity. That’s why Zion is no more real than the matrix.
Makes the machines somewhat sympathetic (well as sympathetic as jack Williamsons’ Humanoids.)
Of course, if the filmmakers could make a good movie, we wouldn’t have those god-awful sequels.
Bear in mind that the Wachowskis have a bit of a cannibalism (or at least, man-eating) obsession. The Matrix has the human batteries, which are broken down and fed to the others when they die; Cloud Atlas has the clones consuming dead clones; Jupiter Ascending has aliens who want to “harvest” humanity and turn us into an immortality serum; and in Sense8 the Big Bad was referred to as “The Cannibal”.
They also have absolutely no understanding of the Law of Conservation of Mass.
My theory on the famously silly “It’s over, Anakin, I have the high ground” scene in Revenge of the Sith is that Obi-Wan knows it’s silly. Obviously being higher up on a hill does not guarantee him victory. Anakin could just hop off his raft on the other side of the river, stalemate continues. But what it does do is taunt Anakin into trying the suicidal “jump all the way over Obi-Wan onto even higher ground” stunt that gets him delimbed. So it’s actually a brilliant psychological tactic from Obi-Wan. “I have the high ground, and that means I will win… unless of course you were on even HIGHER ground, but surely you’re not a powerful enough jedi to…”
I wrote this in a ST:DS9 fanfic a million years ago. In Cisco’s first encounter with the Prophets, they didn’t seem to have a concept of time. Their prophecies usually went haywire because even though the events they foresaw were actually true, they didn’t have any notion of when it happened, or will happen.
My thinking is that the rest of the universe lives in a state where time changes, but space is unchanging because of the law of conservation of matter. In the wormhole however, time is static but space is in a eternal state of change. That’s why the wormhole is so hard to navigate. It’s also why the Prophets constantly altered their appearance. Changing bodies is as natural to them as breathing. They thought the best way to interact with an alien species was to appear as someone significant to the alien’s life.
The Prophets will see an earthquake rock Bajor and send out a warning to their emissaries, but it could have already happened millions of years ago, or it will happen millions of years in the future. To the Prophets, major events are like random objects occupying the same place. They pick out one and share the knowledge with whoever happens to be staring at an Orb at the time. The Bajoran emissaries were usually so perplexed and caught off-guard when they received their visions, they relied on the hard-core fundamentalists to make sure their interpretations stick to the letter of the law, if not the spirit. This tended to cause religious schisms, making things worse.
When Cisco arrived, the Prophets decided to employ an outsider who wouldn’t contaminate their visions with cognitive bias. The whole run of DS9 was the result.
You forgot Mark Kaminski / Joseph P. Brenner in Raw Deal, , Ben Richards in The Running Man, Douglas Quaid in Total Recall, U.S. Marshal John ‘The Eraser’ Kruger in The Eraser,John Kimball in Kindergarten Cop and pretty well any movie where he doesn;t play a Terminator… or himself.
And yet electronic devices seem to combine the worst of both the inanimate and animate worlds: the stubborn obstinacy of the inanimate with the seemingly willful defiance of the animate. Even engineers can find tracing the source of a bug or malfunction to be a trying task.
My theory is that KITT from Knight Rider was the precursor to the Cylons in the original Battlestar Galactica. KITT’s software one day just decided “screw you, Michael” and hijacked a NASA probe. Evidence: both series being created by Glen Larson and both featuring the side-to-side red eye.