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Undisputed II

 

Plot

Visiting the Russian Federation for a series of boxing matches, George "Iceman" Chambers is subsequently framed for possession of Heroin and sent to prison. There, he discovers a series of illegal full-contact Mixed Martial Arts matches dominated by inmate Yuri Boyka. The prison officials arrange these fights and place large side-bets to make a personal profit, often at the expense of the fighters.

Once inside, the warden and legal adviser for Chambers state that if he fights Yuri in the ring, he will likely get an expedited appeal and early release. He initially refuses, but after spending time in demeaning physical labor in the prison's sewer system and experiencing firsthand the brutality of the guards, he reluctantly agrees. He is rescued from both forms of humiliation by a crippled inmate, Crot (Eli Danker). Both fighters train hard for the match, though Chambers still relies on his boxing background while Boyka prepares a series of deadly kicks, throws, and grappling combinations designed to humiliate his opponent in the ring. Prior to the fight however, Boyka's friends force George's cellmate, Steven, who is acting as his cornerman, to spike his water with a light sedative during the fight.

During the fight, Chambers is somewhat taken by surprise at the flurry and variety of Boyka's attacks, but manages to hold his own through the first round by keeping his distance, staying calm, and dealing out painful punching combinations whenever possible. At the end of the first round, Steven slips the drugged water into Chambers' mouth and he takes a few sips. During the second round, he starts to lose his focus and begins taking more and more punishment until Boyka knocks him out with a devastating flying kick. Following the fight, Steven kills himself out of guilt.

After the fight, Chambers (having learnt of the truth from Crot) confronts Boyka, believing that he was responsible for drugging him, and the warden, for going back on the deal. Boyka coldly tells him that he does not need drugs to win, and the warden denies knowledge of the deal. Upon learning of the truth, Boyka is furious, believing himself to be the first practitioner of the "ultimate fighting form,". Chambers asks for a rematch mainly to ensure his release. He makes a bet that he can defeat Boyka to win his freedom, though the officials also offer a substantial cash incentive to make sure that Chambers trains hard.

Chambers seeks help from Crot, who then reveals that he helped train Boyka in his fighting style. Crot is actually a former soldier and martial arts expert who committed murder in order to protect his family. However, he feels this guilt so acutely, as well as a feeling of alienation from his family, that he has resigned himself to permanent confinement. Even so, his desire to see justice for both Chambers and Boyka inspires him to reeducate Chambers in mixed martial arts techniques. Working together, the two practice grapples, holds, and kicks which stretch Chambers' abilities. As the training continues and Chambers improves, the two begin to form a bond and relate their individual philosophy of fighting. Chambers begins to extend his mental discipline from the ring into his private life, while Crot begins catching some of Chambers' ambition, specifically and narrow and slim hope that he might one day be released and reconcile with his family.

Near the end of the training, Crot teaches Chambers a devious leg Joint lock designed to end the fight. He somberly instructs Chambers to use it to its full effectiveness if he gets the opportunity. Since Boyka enjoys brutalizing his opponents and other inmates with a passion that borderlines on sadism, and his mixture of personal pride and high tolerance for pain make it unlikely that he will submit, Crot instructs Chambers not to hesitate and to break Boyka's leg to end the fight if he gets the chance. Chambers agrees, but privately believes that he can fight Boyka to a knock-out.

Once the fight begins it is apparent to all the viewers that the combatants are much more evenly matched and Chambers is much more impressive in his style. The fight is long and intense, with flurries of combinations, grapples, and throws traded between the two. Eventually, Chambers realizes that Boyka will not lose consciousness, will not submit, and will likely knock him out if the fight goes on too long. Chambers alters his strategy and manages to get Boyka in the joint lock and ends the fight by breaking Boyka's leg, proving that he is the undisputed new champion of the prison.

Shortly thereafter, Chambers is released from prison and uses his winnings to buy Crot's freedom as well. In a final scene, he wheels Crot, who is now cleaned up and in possession of several gifts, to a train station to meet with his estranged niece in a happy reunion. Crot thanks Chambers for giving him the remainder of the winnings to start his life again, while Chambers expresses his gratitude for the help and training. Crot then meets with his niece and the two embrace for the first time.

Cast

Michael Jai White as George Chambers

Scott Adkins as Uri Boyka

Eli Danker as Crot/Nikolai

Violeta Markovska as Crot's niece

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Fuel Cells

The principle of the fuel cell (FC) is similar to that of the electrical storage battery. However, whereas the battery has a fixed stock of chemical reactants and can ‘‘run down,’’ the fuel cell is continuously supplied (from a separate tank) with a stream of oxidizer and fuel from which it generates electricity. Electrolysis—in which passage of an electrical current through water decomposes it into its constituents, H2 and O2—was still novel in 1839 when a young Welsh lawyer–scientist, William Grove, demonstrated that it could be made to run in reverse. That is, if the H2 and O2 were not driven off but rather allowed to recombine in the presence of the electrodes, the result was water— and electrical current.

The mechanism of electrical generation was not fully understood until development of atomic theory in the twentieth century. Like a battery, an FC has two electrodes connected via an electrical load and physically separated by an electrolyte—a substance that will selectively pass either positive ions (acidic electrolyte) or negative ions (alkaline electrolyte). Oxidizer (e.g., O2) enters at one electrode and fuel (e.g., H2) at the other. At the cathode (the electrically positive electrode) atoms of fuel occasionally ionize, forming positively charged ions and free electrons. This is accelerated by a catalyst at the electrodes as well as suitable conditions of temperature and pressure. Similarly at the negative electrode (anode), oxidizer atoms spontaneously form negative ions. Then, depending on electrolyte, either positive or negative ions migrate through it to combine with ions of opposite polarity, while electrons (unable to pass through the electrolyte) flow through the electrical load from anode to cathode.

While the Second Law of Thermodynamics severely limits the efficiency of heat engines operating at practical temperatures, fuel cells can extract more power out of the same quantity of fuel compared to traditional combustion, since the hydrogen fuel is not converted to thermal energy, but used directly to produce mechanical energy. In principle, an FC consuming pure hydrogen and oxygen and producing liquid water can achieve an efficiency of 94.5 percent with an open-circuit potential of 1.185 volts. In practice a variety of losses cannot altogether be eliminated, but achievable efficiencies are considerably greater than those of most heat engines. Multiple cells connected in series supply higher voltages.

Practical challenges include electrolyte–electrode chemistry and physical properties, catalysts, fuel and oxidizer composition and purity, internal electrical losses, corrosion and other destructive chemical reactions, and a host of mechanical issues. Efficiency, silence, and lack of polluting emissions stimulated great interest, however. In searching for suitable systems, twentieth century researchers developed various approaches, most named for their electrolytes. Most of the developments in the field have come as a result of proprietary interests and the work of corporate
teams of researchers.

Alkaline FCs (AFCs)
From the 1930s Francis Bacon of the U.K., followed later by U.S. researchers, turned from acidic electrolytes to more tractable potassium hydroxide (KOH). Bacon also pioneered use of porous electrodes through which gaseous reactants diffused. The first major application of FC technology was in the U.S. space program where AFCs provide power (and potable water) for the space shuttles. The need for extremely pure H2 and O2 made AFCs uneconomic for more mundane applications.
Molten carbonate FCs (MCFCs)
MCFCs grew out of SOFC research (see below). In the 1950s Dutch investigators G.H.J. Broers and J.A.A. Ketelaar turned to molten lithium-, sodium, and potassium carbonates as electrolytes, as did Bacon in the U.K. At typical 650_C operating temperatures, MCFCs produce waste heat in a form useful for industrial purposes or to power turbines for added electrical output. High temperatures relax the need for costly catalysts while their carbonate chemistry is tolerant of carbon monoxide (CO), which as an impurity is problematic for alkaline fuel cells. However chemical and mechanical problems have thus far impeded wide application.

Phosphoric Acid FCs (PAFCs)
Interest in phosphoric acid as an electrolyte emerged slowly until the mid-1960s, after which PAFCs rapidly became the first FCs to see significant commercialization. At around 200_C, PAFC waste heat may be used to reform (convert) hydrocarbons or coal to H2 for fuel or power an auxiliary turbine. PAFCs are relatively tolerant of CO but sulfur must be separated. Units up to 250 kilowatts output are sold for fixed-site power applications and experimental units have shown promise in buses. Problems center on internal chemical reactions and corrosion.

Proton-Exchange Membrane FCs (PEMFCs)
In the early 1960s Thomas Grubb and Leonard Niedrach of General Electric in the U.S. developed a polymer membrane which, moistened with water, served as an effective and stable electrolyte. Initial space application attempts in the 1960s revealed reliability problems (and led to adoption of AFCs) but further development has held out strong promise for ground and marine vehicle applications as well as small fixed generators. Operating temperatures of less than 100_C and high power relative to size and weight, suit PEMFCs especially. Platinum catalysts are necessary and the H2 fuel must be essentially free of CO. By century’s end PEMFCs had shown some promise of being adaptable to liquid methanol in place of H2 fuel.

Solid-Oxide FCs (SOFCs)
Beginning in the 1930s experimenters first in Switzerland and Russia sought high-temperature (around 1000_C) solid ceramic electrolytes. At such temperatures, reactions proceed rapidly without costly catalysts and many fuel stocks can be reformed to produce H2 within the SOFC, while the waste heat can be used for many purposes. But physical and chemical problems of high-temperature operation have been difficult and it remained uncertain at century’s end how well the promise of SOFCs could be realized.

Metal FCs (MFCs)
To avoid problems of H2 supply or conversion some FC developers turned, late in the century, to metal fuels, usually zinc or aluminum. Electrolytes include liquid KOH and proton-exchange membranes. Waste products are metal oxides.

Conclusion
Over the twentieth century FCs moved from laboratory curiosity to practical application in limited roles and quantities. It is very possible that the twenty-first century will see them assume a major or even dominant position as power sources in a broad array of applications. Obstacles are largely economic and the outcome will be influenced by success in development of competing systems as well as FCs themselves.

Related Video: How Fuel Cells Work

Killer Elite 2011

Killer Elite is a 2011 action film starring Jason Statham, Clive Owen, Robert De Niro, Yvonne Strahovski, and Dominic Purcell. The film is based on the 1991 novel The Feather Men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and is directed by Gary McKendry.

Plot

In 1980, mercenaries Danny Bryce (Jason Statham), Hunter (Robert DeNiro), Davies (Dominic Purcell), and Meier (Aden Young) are in Mexico to assassinate a man. Danny unwittingly kills him in front of his young son, then is injured during the getaway. Affected by this outcome, Danny retires and returns to his native Australia.

One year later, Danny is summoned to Oman where Hunter is being held captive. He meets with the Agent (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who arranges missions for mercenaries, and learns that Hunter accepted a $6 million job but failed to accomplish it. If Danny doesn't complete Hunter's mission, Hunter will be executed.

Danny is introduced to Sheikh Amr, a deposed king of a small region of Oman who wants Danny to kill three former SAS agents—Steven Harris (Lachy Hulme), Steven Creeg, and Simon McCann—for killing his three eldest sons during the Dhofar Rebellion. Danny must videotape their confessions and make their deaths look like accidents, and he must do it before the terminally ill Sheikh dies. This will allow the Sheikh's fourth son, Bakhait (Firass Dirani), to regain control of the desert region his father had ruled. If Danny fails, Hunter will be killed. Danny reunites with Davies and Meier. They agree to help him in exchange for a share of the money.

As Danny and Meier sneak into the house of their first target, Steven Harris, in Oman, Davies questions local bar patrons about former SAS members. This is reported to the Feathermen, a secret society of former operatives protecting their own. Their head enforcer, Spike Logan (Clive Owen), is sent to investigate.

After Harris has confessed on videotape, Danny and Meier take him to the bathroom. Their plan is to break his neck using a hammer with tiles similar to those of the bathroom floor to make it appear that Harris slipped and broke his neck. Danny is distracted by the arrival of Harris's girlfriend and when he returns to the bathroom he finds that Meier was forced to kill Harris hastily in a struggle.

Back in London, Davies discovers the second target, Steven Cregg, preparing for a long nighttime march in wintry weather at a local SAS base. Davies pretends to be a civilian having car problems outside the base's fence, allowing Danny to infiltrate the base. There he drugs Cregg's coffee to induce shock and cause Cregg to die of hypothermia during the march. Danny, in uniform, follows Cregg on the march, and a delirious Creeg confesses on videotape to Danny before he dies.

Going to their last target, Simon McCann, currently a mercenary, they rig a truck to respond to remote control with the help of a new and inexperienced team member, Jake (Michael Dorman). As McCann is on his way to a fake job interview, Meier and Jake take control of the truck from another car and cause it to move in front of McCann's car, killing him. However, Logan and his men were watching over McCann. A gun fight in the docks ensues, and Meier is accidentally killed by Jake due to his lack of experience.

Danny returns to Oman and gives the Sheikh the last taped confession, which he has faked. Hunter is released and returns to his family, while Danny heads back to Australia and reunites with his girlfriend, Anne (Yvonne Strahovski), a childhood acquaintance. Soon, he is informed by the Agent that there is one last man who participated in the Sheikh's sons' murders and that this man, Ranulph Fiennes, is about to release a book about his experiences as a member of the SAS.

Danny tells Anne to go to France with Hunter to protect her while he carries out the last job. The Sheikh’s son confirms that Harris was an innocent man. Logan, meanwhile, traces Danny through the Agent and sends a team to protect the author, but Jake distracts them, allowing Danny to infiltrate the building and shoot the author. He chooses to only wound the author, however, but takes pictures that appear to show him dead. Logan chases and captures Danny, taking him to an abandoned warehouse, but he is interrupted when an agent from the British government arrives and reveals that the British government is behind the events because of the Sheikh's valuable oil reserves. A three-way battle ensues, with Danny escaping and Logan shooting the government agent.

Danny and Hunter head to Oman to give the Sheikh the pictures. However, Logan arrives first and confronts the Sheikh, telling him that the pictures are fake and then stabbing him to death. The Sheikh's son does not care and gives the money, which was intended for Danny and Hunter, to Logan. Hunter spots Logan leaving, and they chase after him, along with the Sheikh's men.

After stopping the Sheikh's men, Danny and Hunter confront Logan on a desert road. Danny says that Logan can keep the money (though Hunter takes some of the money for his expenses and his family). They give Logan the remainder, telling him that he'll need it to start a new life away from the government after killing the government agent and acting against the wishes of the Feathermen and the British government. Danny says that it's over for him and that Logan must make up his own mind. They leave him there, saying they'll send a cab for him from the airport. Danny meets with Anne in France to start anew. His fate is left unknown.

Cast

Jason Statham as mercenary Danny Bryce

Clive Owen as ex-SAS officer Spike Logan

Yvonne Strahovski as Anne Frazier

Robert De Niro as Hunter

Dominic Purcell as Davies

Aden Young as Meier

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as The Agent

Ben Mendelsohn as Martin

Grant Bowler as Captain James Cregg

Matthew Nable as Pennock

Jamie McDowell as Diane

Chris Anderson as Finn

George Murphy as ADR Voice

Firass Dirani as Bakhait

All About Basketball

Basketball is a recreational and competitive sports with widespread appeal across age, gender, class, regional, and national lines, which reflects the game’s broadly based origins and early development. The game is played by two teams of five players, who attempt to score points by throwing a ball through an elevated hoop attached to a pole. Basketball was made in the United States, but by a Canadian. Devised by and for young white Protestant male competitors, it was quickly adopted by Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and females. Originally designed for exercise and the inculcation of moral values, it soon became a commercial pastime celebrated the world over.

Whatever the global appeal of soccer (association football), basketball is the game most played and most watched by people around the world. Hoops rattle throughout Asia, as well as Africa and South America. Professional leagues thrive in Europe,and even in distant Australia. In the United States, basketball attracts more participants and spectators than do football and baseball combined.In all,basketball is played by an estimated 200 million people on all continents. No other sport has enjoyed such recent increases in popularity, both in terms of those who play and the number of spectators. Some of basketball’s appeal can be explained by its unique status as a team game that is relatively simple, inexpensive, and easy to produce. People happily play one-on-one. In its  organized form, the game requires only five players at a time, half as many as a baseball or football team. Compared to most team sports, basketball needs little space and minimal equipment to play, and it leaves participants with few bruises and broken limbs. It can be played, and enjoyed, by female youths on a playground court or by an over-the-hill gang of businessmen on lunch break as well as by seasoned collegians and professionals.

The International Federation of Amateur Basketball has governed international play since the 1930s; the Olympics are the principal forum for competition. The United States, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia have dominated international hoops since the 1950s. In recent years, televised competition has enhanced both the scope of basketball’s global appeal and the quality of play.

History
Basketball was literally created overnight, the result of an assignment posed by a physical education teacher in December 1891 at a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) training college in Springfield,Massachusetts. A Canadian student, James Naismith (1861–1939), rose to the challenge of constructing an active indoor winter game that would prove attractive to young men.He typed up a rudimentary set of rules, had a janitor nail up peach baskets along the railing at each end of the Springfield gym, and invited his colleagues to toss a soccer ball into one of the two baskets. The first game consisted of two 15-minute halves, with 5 minutes’ rest between. Naismith’s physical education class numbered 18, so 9 men played on each team. Players had to pass the ball; no dribbling was allowed at first. That inaugural game was hardly a spectacle that anyone would recognize today.

Within its first decade basketball changed dramatically. Dribbling quickly became an acceptable means of moving the ball around the court. Standard team size was readjusted to seven, and finally set at five. The value of a field goal, originally set at three points, was changed to two points; foul shots, too, counted three at first, but were soon changed to one. Equipment also changed. By 1895 the old soccer ball was replaced by a slightly larger leather-covered basketball; peach baskets gave way to mesh-wire baskets with strings and pulleys that released the ball, and finally to a bottomless cord net fixed to an iron rim. Metal screens also made an early appearance behind baskets, in order to keep balcony spectators from guiding or deflecting shots.As more solid substance provided greater consistency for angled shots, wooden backboards became standard by the turn of the century.

In 1895, Naismith left Springfield for medical school and a YMCA job in Denver, largely leaving the supervision of basketball to his old Springfield colleague, Luther Gulick (1861–1918).Within the following year, Gulick and the YMCA passed the mantle of guardianship over to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Committed to amateur (“gentlemanly”) sport, the AAU required players and teams to pay a fee and “register” their intention to comply with the amateur code and to compete only against other registered teams.

This policy played havoc with the many teams sponsored by local YMCAs, athletic clubs, settlement houses, churches, schools, and colleges who not only competed with each other but also indiscriminately played against whatever local or touring Professional teams they could schedule. Professional squads made their presence felt early in the history of basketball. In November 1896, a team in Trenton, New Jersey, rented the Masonic Temple, charged 25 cents for admission, and shared the profits after paying expenses. They also introduced a distinctive piece of equipment. A 12-foothigh mesh-wire fence, presumably designed to keep the ball in play, separated players from spectators. For more than two decades, professionals played within a cage of mesh-wire or net, causing basketball to be called the “cage” game.

Never did the AAU register a majority of the basketball teams in the United States. In 1905 seven coaches of powerful college teams drew up their own set of rules. Three years later the newly formed National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) assumed responsibility for the rules governing college basketball. Finally, in 1915 the NCAA,AAU, and YMCA joined forces in establishing a single rules committee to oversee any further changes in basketball throughout North America. While refining its form and governance, Naismith’s new game expanded rapidly. Nearby colleges and athletic clubs embraced it as a competitive antidote to onerous gym exercises during New England’s frigid winters. One of the first converts to the game was Senda Berenson (1861–1954), a gymnastics instructor at Smith College.Early in 1892 she introduced the game to her female students, but divided the court into three equal sections and kept players confined to a single section in order to avoid exhaustion.Within the following year this distinctive form of “women’s basket ball” was being played not only at neighboring Mt. Holyoke College but also at distant Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, Louisiana, and at the University of California in Berkeley.

For a time, though, basketball remained primarily a YMCA commodity. Its place of origin—an aggressive new training college for YMCA leaders—ensured immediate widespread exposure. Copies of Springfield’s campus weekly, the Triangle, were mailed out regularly to every YMCA in North America. In the January 1892 issue of the Triangle, Naismith described his new game and heartily recommended it to YMCA leaders everywhere. Those leaders, in turn,wrote to the editor of the Triangle with news about the popularity of basketball as it was introduced to more than 200 YMCA gyms in the United States and Canada.

Many of those YMCA chapters and gyms were set on college campuses, especially in the Midwest and Pacific coast regions. Moreover, Springfield graduates— Naismith’s old classmates and fellow athletes—found teaching and coaching jobs in college programs,where they eagerly introduced basketball. High schools especially responded to that gospel, for the game proved useful for physical education classes and interscholastic competition. The women’s game was played with great passion, particularly in Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas high schools. By 1900 high school championship tournaments were held in conjunction with commercial exhibitions in Boston, Buffalo, and Chicago. In 1903 Gulick created a Public School Athletic League for New York City and supervised the construction of basketball courts in both elementary and high schools throughout the city. Within a decade,more than a dozen of the major cities in the United States sponsored similar city-wide leagues for public school athletes.

Basketball also thrived in rural and small-town schools. Hoops not only fed rural school and town pride; it also provided entertainment sorely lacking in remote places. After 1909, when the agricultural colleges of Iowa and Montana produced the first high school state basketball tournaments, land-grant institutions from Maine State College to Washington State College fulfilled their public service purposes by providing space and publicity for annual high school championship playoffs. In the 1920s national tournaments for public and parochial (Catholic) high schools began; by 1925 more than 30 state championship teams were competing at the National Interscholastic Tournament at the University of Chicago.

Early professional leagues also held tournaments to close out their seasons, but barnstorming proved to be the more lucrative route. Around the turn of the century, the Buffalo “Germans” and the New York “Wanderers” emerged as the premier professional teams that traveled afar competing with the best local talent available in armories, dance halls, and high school gyms. Their successors included the Troy Trojans and “Globe Trotters” from upstate New York, but the most successful of all the early touring teams was the Original Celtics. Founded in Manhattan in 1914, the Original Celtics capitalized on the use of the automobile as a popular means of transportation.At their barnstorming pinnacle in the 1920s, they often appeared in southern and western towns previously unreached by the railway. The loosely structured, theatrical character of Professional basketball made the game uniquely attractive to ambitious first-generation Americans.Heroes of the cage game had names like Dehnert,Holman, Lapchick, Friedman, Borgmann, Husta, and Chismadia. All were of East European or Irish heritage; most were Catholic or Jewish. African Americans, too, laid early claims on professional basketball as a means of fun and success. Founded in 1922, the all-black Harlem Renaissance Five quickly became the strongest opposition to the dominance of the Original Celtics.

Most spectator sports took a beating during the economic troubles that began in 1929, but the Depression worked to the advantage of high school and college basketball in the United States.As unemployment mounted, families found themselves unable to spend freely on commercialized amusements, causing social life in the local college and school to take on more importance. Basketball became a weekly social events.At the end of the decade of the 1930s, no less than 95 percent of all U.S. high schools sponsored varsity basketball teams.

A newly formed program, the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), also made much of basketball’s sociable and socially healthy potential. Begun in 1930 as an antidote to juvenile delinquency in Chicago, the CYO was the Catholic equivalent to the Protestant YMCA and the Jewish Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA). The CYO initially received most publicity for its sponsorship of interracial boxing tournaments, but basketball was always high on its agenda. Chicago’s CYO and B’nai B’rith champions met annually on the basketball court.

Basketball also went visibly international in the 1930s.At the hands of YMCA enthusiasts, the game had been introduced all over the world shortly after its creation. By 1930, fifty nations had adopted the sport. Despite the economic hardships, representatives from Asia and Africa as well as Europe convened in 1932 to form the International Federation of Amateur Basketball (FIBA). Chinese and Japanese students who had learned the game from YMCA missionaries before World War I introduced basketball at the University of Berlin in the mid-1930s. Nazi propagandists overlooked the game’s YMCA origins and gave it their stamp of approval on the grounds that basketball required not only speed and stamina but also an aggressive spirit that allegedly characterized the true German. At the Berlin Games of 1936, basketball became an official Olympic sport. Unfortunately,most of those games were played outdoors in a downpour of rain, with a U.S. squad beating a Canadian team, 19–8. By the mid-1930s, American basketball was thriving at the college level, particularly in New York City where promoter Ned Irish (1905–1982) arranged doubleheaders at Madison Square Garden featuring the best western teams against eastern powers St. John’s University, New York University, and Long Island University. Building on the foundation of these intersectional doubleheaders, the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) was created in 1938 as the first intercollegiate championship playoff. Some 16,000 spectators turned out to see Temple University win the first NIT. Impressed with that successful event, college coaches in 1939 created the NCAA tournament. Their first playoffs, at Northwestern University, suffered from inadequate publicity. The NCAA tournament remained second fiddle until 1951, when scandals discredited the NIT.

Despite the game’s growth during the 1930s, it was perceived by the American public as a second-rate sport.Not only did it lack the cachet of a major Professional organization until the late 1940s, it had modest national media coverage save the minuscule game summaries of YMCA, professional barnstorming teams, or amateur contests in local daily newspapers. The most significant watershed in basketball’s rise to international stature came during World War II. U.S. servicemen introduced the game to people the world over, and government-sponsored cultural Exchange tours fueled a steady flow of U.S. teams and coaches to all parts of the globe.

The Post–World War II Era
The American collegiate game enjoyed the national and international limelight until the early 1950s. Coached by the winningest coach in basketball history— Adolph Rupp (1901–1977)—Kentucky was the biggest winner of the period.Apart from a few tournament appearances by southern schools, basketball languished in football’s shadows in part because the region’s most talented black players were excluded from the leading teams and national tournaments. Formidable black college teams (for example, 1950s power Tennessee A&I coached by African American John McLendon, a Naismith student from Kansas) were forced to compete exclusively against each other in relative obscurity  Gamblers wagered millions of dollars weekly on the major games, triggering a national controversy in 1950–1951 when several New York City teams were implicated in a point-shaving scandal. By the time of this well-publicized scandal, the previously unpopular professional game was in the midst of a fundamental transformation. The pros were renowned for their physical, pushing, grabbing, and defensively oriented style played by a tough, beerdrinking, ethnically diverse group of industrial workers, many of whom had served stints in the military. Respectability came in 1946 when 11 businessmen— skilled in hockey and entertainment promotion—organized the Basketball Association of America (BAA) and brought a cleaner brand of basketball to a mainstream, middle-class audience. The newly formed BAA competed with a less profit-oriented and more knowledgeable, civic-minded National Basketball League (formed in 1937)—located in smaller midwestern, industrial cities. The two struggling leagues merged and formed the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1949. The number of NBA franchises shrank to eight teams in 1954 as the well-financed, large-city franchises forced the smaller ones to relocate or fold.By the end of its first decade, the young NBA unquestionably showcased the best basketball in the world. The African

American Influence
The transformation of the professional game into its elegant, fast-paced, high-scoring contemporary mode derived from an increasingly innovative style of play centered around big men and an emergent generation of innovative African American players. The conservative horizontal offenses of the 1940s became more daring and vertical in the 1950s when quick forwards like “Jumping” Joe Fulks (1921–1976) and Kenny Sailors (1922–) popularized the jumpshot, and coaches developed tall players and built teams around them. As late as 1947, only 25 players on the 12 NBL teams were 6 feet, 6 inches (1.98 meters) tall or taller, reflecting the popular wisdom that large players were too clumsy and ill suited to the game’s demands.Those stereotypes were forever shattered by George Mikan (1924–) (6 feet, 10 inches [2.08 meters]),Bob Kurland (1924–) (7 feet [2.13 meters]) and Ed Macauley (1928–) (6 feet, 8 inches [2.03 meters]), whose dominance near the basket prompted the young NBA to widen the free throw lane and penalize goal tending. The most revolutionary rule change in the professional game,however,was the introduction of the 24-second clock in 1954,which prevented deliberate offensive stalling and thereby increased scoring by 30 percent over the following five years. The influence of a  black basketball aesthetic was just as revolutionary. Derived from the faster, louder, stop-and-go play of the cement, urban (particularly Harlem) courts, young black players learned that the game was not just about weaves and standard patterns, but also about explosive speed, deception, and slam dunks. Like improvisational jazz music of the 1950s, the emergent black style of play defied the established standards of traditional “white” performance. The Harlem Globetrotters was the most innovative team of the era, whose stars Reece “Goose”Tatum (1921–1967) and Marques Haynes (1926–) integrated improvisational bits from professional comedians and circus clowns into their performance. Organized in 1927 by a Jewish immigrant, Chicagoan Abe Saperstein, the barnstorming ’Trotters took their exciting court antics to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Despite the stellar quality of black basketball, the American professional ranks remained racially segregated until the early 1950s. Earl Lloyd (1928–), Chuck Cooper (1926–), and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton (1922–) were the first African Americans to play in the NBA in 1950, but the league remained 80 percent white as late as 1960. Though the way was opened up by the Harlem Renaissance, Globetrotters, and several collegiate teams, it was in the NCAA’s Division I that the African American style burst through the locked doors of integrated national competition. Black collegians Bill Russell (1934–), Wilt Chamberlain (1936–), Elgin Baylor (1934–), Oscar Robertson (1938–), and Connie Hawkins (1942–) elevated the game to new levels in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, two white coaches devised systems that made black style integral to their teams’ personas and became the two longest running dynasties in basketball history. Arnold “Red” Auerbach (1917–), a feisty street-smart strategist born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrants, became coach of the Boston Celtics in 1950 and assembled a superb,balanced team around center Bill Russell. They won 11 NBA championships between 1959 and 1969. John Wooden (1910–), a devout Muscular Christian from small-town Indiana, built powerhouse teams at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) around stellar centers such as Lew Alcindor (1947–) (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and won nine national titles between 1964 and 1975.

Women’s Basketball
Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, U.S. women’s basketball became a true varsity sport. Teams had six players, and the court was divided so that the three forwards did the scoring and the three guards covered the backcourt. In 1971 the U.S. Congress passed Title IX legislation, which prohibited sex discrimination at federally funded academic institutions. Thereafter, teams were reduced to five and women were freed from the limits imposed by the halfcourt game. Increased funds to women’s athletics attracted first-rate coaches such as former collegian and Olympic star Pat Head Summitt (1952–) of Tennessee, who recruited players from a growing pool of quality high school talent. When the NCAA took control of women’s basketball in the late 1970s the large universities with strong programs (such as UCLA, Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, and USC) eclipsed traditional small college powerhouses and shifted the production of women’s basketball from New England and the Midwest to southern and western states. The NCAA’s prestigious Final Four tournament conferred the truly national scope of women’s basketball in 1982 and through increased network television coverage, expanded attendance 90 percent during the decade by the early 1990s.

The Olympics embraced women’s basketball in the 1976 Montreal Games. The Soviets won the gold medal in the 1976 and 1980 Games against an impressive field that included strong Chinese and Korean teams. In the aftermath of the 1976 Games, collegiate All-American stars Ann Meyers (1955–) of UCLA and Nancy Lieberman (1958–) of Old Dominion dominated U.S. women’s basketball. Both played in the 1976 Olympics, but their influence came later when they became the first women to be drafted by men’s professional teams, and then led the short-lived Women’s Professional League in 1979–1980. Four years later the United States, led by African American stars Cheryl Miller and Lynette Woodard (the first female member of the Harlem Globetrotters), defeated the Soviets 83–60 in the 1984 Games. In 1988 they repeated by defeating Yugoslavia for  another gold medal, which firmly established them as the world power of women’s basketball. In recent years, the women’s traditional “finesse” game has increasingly come to resemble the speedier, powerful, vertical male version.

The Modern Era
The era of stalwart professional dynasties ended with the creation of a rival professional league—the American Basketball Association (ABA)—in 1967, which shifted the NBA’s balance of power. By 1976, when the NBA absorbed four ABA teams, professional salaries averaged $110,000—more than twice what baseball and football players made.Moreover, the NBA Players’ Association won a collective-bargaining agreement, severance pay, first-class airfare, disability, medical insurance, and pensions. Despite the improvement in players’ salaries and overall play, however, the NBA limped along in television ratings and profitability throughout the 1970s. For the first time since the advent of the 24-second clock, the NBA enhanced the drama by adopting the three-point shot (from 23 feet, 9 inches [7.23 meters]).

The American professional game continues to provide the model for global competition. A U.S. “Dream Team” took advantage of revised FIBA eligibility rules that permitted professional athletes’ participation in the Olympics, to trounce all their opponents at the 1992 Barcelona Games by unprecedented margins. The Dream Team’s success propelled the game into the most geographically diffused and commercially lucrative phase of any sport in history. Even in places without a strong basketball tradition, like Britain, attendance for England’s National Basketball League has soared from an early 1970s’ average of 7,500 to 330,000 in 1985. The game’s popularity since the 1970s continues untrammeled in Latin America, and now China claims more players than the entire population of Europe. Efforts are currently under way to establish a Professional league in Asia, with likely locations for teams in Tokyo, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Basketball has enjoyed even greater success on the European continent where NBA stars are celebrated in Italian, Spanish, and French newspapers and glossy magazines. Since 1987, basketball has been Italy’s second most popular sport. More than half the members of the national Spanish junior team are currently playing college ball in the United States.Moreover, of the 21 foreign players on NBA rosters in 1995, 14 had attended U.S. universities.

The renaissance of big-time college basketball came in the 1979 NCAA title game when two of the three dominant players of the 1980s—Earvin “Magic” Johnson (1959–) and Larry Bird (1956–)—were pitted against each other for the first time. The 6 foot, 9 inch “Magic”destroyed the stereotypical notions of how size dictated positions and, along with Bird, elevated creative passing and teamwork. Magic’s dexterity and court vision brought the brilliance of the black aesthetic to new heights. The Magic-Bird rivalry catapulted the month-long NCAA tournament atop the pinnacle of international sport just beneath the Olympics and World Cup competitions. Gross receipts for the NCAA tournament have increased from eight million dollars in 1979 to over 184 million dollars in 1995. The rivalry also sparked unprecedented interest in both the game and the basketball player as a marketable celebrity. Buoyed by the advertising agency’s success in marketing athletic shoes and sportswear (e.g., Nike, Reebok, and Converse) with superstar endorsers, basketball stars, especially Michael Jordan (1963–), have become some of the world’s highest paid athletes and most recognizable personalities.

The game’s hold on the American imagination is reflected in the emergence of a cadre of successful basketball films.Unlike baseball, football, and boxing,basketball was largely ignored by filmmakers until the late 1970s, but recently has become part of a pervasive sports, media, and entertainment enterprise. Since the 1970s filmmakers have moved away from silly, frivolous scripts to ones that dramatize the contradictory nature of basketball in contemporary society.The commercial success of White Men Can’t Jump (1991) and the artistic recognition conferred upon the documentary Hoop Dreams (1995) illuminate the importance of urban playgrounds as breeding grounds of big-time talent, the centrality of the black aesthetic, and the game’s promise of social mobility for millions of young people throughout the world.

What is Spyware?

Spyware represents a new type of malware that poses a signifi cant threat to business and home users. Unlike those who create other forms of malware, such as viruses, spyware authors are not motivated by curiosity or a desire to establish a reputation. Instead, they are attracted to the possibility of making large amounts of money quickly and easily.

In general, spyware describes a category of software designed to capture and record confi dential information without a user’s knowledge or consent. Key loggers, as discussed in chapter three, are a typical example of spyware. Some Trojans can also be classifi ed as spyware.

Applications for spyware range from monitoring the actions of a spouse to industrial espionage. Although early spyware programs were quite primitive, modern applications have a number of sophisticated features that make them diffi cult to detect and remove. Like viruses, the most advanced programs are able to disable or delete security software, and some even pose as spyware removal tools. Spyware can be grouped into a number of categories, including the following:

• Data miners: Programs that collect information about a user, supposedly with his knowledge and/or consent. Spyware developers sometimes justify the use of such software by referring to the use of clickthrough agreements.

• Monitoring tools: Software intended to report on a user’s activities, including the use of Trojans and key loggers.

• Trackers: Programs that monitor Internet activity, recording information such as the sites visited by a user. Trackers do not necessarily record personally identifi able information.

• Annoyware: A type of adware that attempts to force advertising on users by opening multiple browser windows, pop-ups, and so on.

• Browser hijackers. Sometimes called home-page hijackers, these programs hijack the user’s home page and can also make other changes, such as changing the default search engine or altering system settings.

• Dialers. A type of program that alters the settings used to make dial-up connections to the Internet, usually with the aim of calling premium rate numbers at the expense of the user. The numbers called are often linked with services that provide pornography, causing some people to become too embarrassed to make a complaint.

About Trojans

A Trojan will usually appear as a game, utility, or some other innocuous file in order to gain access to a computer system. When the user launches the program, it first installs the Trojan before continuing to work in the way the user expects. In this way, the user becomes responsible for infecting his own machine.

Like viruses, Trojans are able to alter files, delete data, and display messages. However, Trojans tend to be designed for two main purposes: gathering information and taking control of an infected system. Once active, a Trojan will scan the user’s hard disk for sensitive information, such as passwords, credit card details, and anything else of value. Once this information has been gathered, the Trojan will wait for an opportunity to phone home. Usually, the Trojan waits until the user is online and then sends the information it has collected in an e-mail. By waiting until there is some Internet activity, the Trojan often escapes the user’s notice.

Some Trojans install a key logger to monitor all activity on the infected computer. A key logger records every key pressed by the user and stores the data in a file on the computer’s hard disk. By monitoring a computer over a period of time, the key logger is able to collect a wide variety of information, including all passwords and user names typed by the user, the contents of any outgoing e-mail messages, the contents of word-processing  documents, and any information entered into any forms displayed on Web pages. Even a single online transaction may provide enough information to defraud the computer’s owner. For instance, if a user makes a purchase from an online store, such as Amazon.com, the key logger will have an opportunity to record his account details and credit card information.

From time to time, the key logger will need to send the information it has collected to its owner. It is at this time that the user may notice an unusual surge in Internet traffi c caused when the key logger sends its data by e-mail. Some of the most sophisticated key loggers try to reduce the risk of detection by minimizing the amount of data transmitted by e-mail. This is achieved by compressing the data file after deleting any data that has been sent before. It is also possible for a key logger to transmit the data file at regular intervals or when it reaches a certain size. This prevents the program from attempting to send large files that may cause increased Internet traffic for hours at a time. Some programs are even capable of splitting a large data fi le into several parts so that it can be sent a little at a time.

Some Trojans are used to establish control over the computers they infect. Sometimes, only partial control is needed and users may be unaware that a Trojan is sending out e-mail or taking part in a denial of service attack. However, some Trojans allow a third party to take complete control over the infected computer, just as if they were sitting in front of it. The Trojan acts as a remote-control application, allowing its owner access to all of the computer’s resources including programs, data files, printers, disk drives, webcams, and network services, such as Internet access. Once control has been taken over the machine, users are virtually powerless to interfere except by switching the power off. The best-known example of this kind of Trojan is Back Orifice, which was produced by a hacking group known as the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Codec

Short for “coder/decoder,” a codec is essentially an algorithm for encoding (and compressing) a stream of data for transmission, and then decoding and decompressing it at the receiving end. Usually the data involved represents audio or video content. Typically the data is being downloaded from a Web site to be played on a personal computer or portable player. A codec is described as “lossy” if some of the original information is lost in the compression process. It then becomes a question of whether the loss in quality is perceived by the user as significant. A codec that preserves all the information needed to re-create the original file is “lossless.” For most purposes, the much greater size of the lossless version of a file is not worth the (often imperceptible) increase in quality or fidelity. A codec is usually used in connection with a “container format” that specifies how the encoded data is to be stored in a file. Often a container can hold more than one data stream and even more than one kind of media (such as video and audio). When one refers to a Windows WAV file, for example, one is actually referring to a container. Most of the popular codecs and file formats are proprietary, which creates something of a dilemma for users who prefer open-source solutions. However, while most Linux distributions do not include support for formats such as MP3 out of the box, distributions such as Ubuntu are now making it easier for users to choose nonsupported proprietary codecs if desired. The preceding table lists some codecs likely to be encountered by program developers and consumers.

Dynamics

Dynamica is a term coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) in 1689 during his Italian journey, referring to his doctrine of forces. In that year, he composed an extensive work called Dynamica, which remained unpublished at the time. His major publication on the subject is “Specimen Dynamicum,” which appeared in the Acta eruditorum for 1695, in which he tried to reconcile a variety of metaphysical and mechanical traditions relevant to the notion of force on the basis of a grid of the following four notions: (1) active primitive force is a purely metaphysical entity expressing the activity of substances and is also called entelechy; (2) active derivative force is somehow the phenomenal manifestation of an aggregate of metaphysical substances and is measured by living force, or vis viva; (3) passive primitive force is purely metaphysical and expresses the imperfection of substances; (4) is passive derivative force, which is also called inertia, is its phenomenal manifestation. The connection between metaphysical and phenomenal levels was and still is especially problematic in this account. Leibniz further introduced the distinction between vis viva, which pertains to actual motion and is proportional to the square of velocity, and vis mortua, or dead force, which pertains to the very beginning of motion and is proportional to infinitesimal velocity. Examples of the latter are Christiaan Huygens’s (1629–1695) centrifugal, and Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) centripetal, forces.

Leibniz developed his views in several works and tried to establish many laws of nature, such as the law of conservation of force, or vis viva, on the metaphysical foundations provided in his system. Although Leibniz’s metaphysical preoccupations are extreme even by seventeenth-century standards, at the time notions like motion and force had much larger philosophical dimensions than the modern reader may suspect. Ca. 1700 the notion of dynamics had a distinctive Leibnizian flavor that Newton found particularly irritating and distasteful. In a manuscript, he complained that “Galileo began to consider the effect of Gravity upon Projectiles. Mr Newton in his Principia Philosophiae improved that consideration into a large science. Mr Leibniz christened the child by a new name as if it had been his own, calling it Dynamica…. But his mark must be set upon all new inventions. And if one may judge by the multitude of new names and characters invented by him, he would go for a great inventor.” Although Leibniz’s dynamics was primarily a science of living forces, in the quotation above Newton portrayed it as dealing with his own force, a notion more similar to Leibniz’s dead force. Almost exactly a century after Leibniz had coined the term, Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), in his classic Mécanique analytique (1788), defined dynamics as the science of accelerative forces and of the motions they produce. In his historical outline, he portrayed Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) as the founder of dynamics, a science later perfected by Huygens. Lagrange went on to argue with involuntary irony that mechanics and, therefore, dynamics were then revolutionized by Newton. Thus, by that time it had become customary to call dynamics a doctrine of forces based, unlike Leibniz’s, on accelerations, such as Newton’s. Newton himself had given the greatest possible emphasis to his doctrine of forces by stating in his Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis (1687) that the whole burden of philosophy consists in investigating the forces from the phenomena of motion and then from the forces to demonstrate the phenomena. The term dynamics is also used by some historians in the sense of science of motion, rather than strictly of forces, and is contrasted to statics, or the science of equilibrium of bodies. Ernst Mach (1838–1916), for example, devoted the first two parts of his influential Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung (1883; ninth edition, 1933) to the development of the principles of statics and of dynamics, which in his view had been founded by Galileo and by which he meant a science of motion. These preliminary reflections leave the scholar of the Scientific Revolution with the problem of whether it is legitimate or helpful to talk of a history of dynamics in the seventeenth century, including such actors as Galileo and Huygens, and extending back to the medieval scientia de motu (science of motion) and scientia de ponderibus (science of weight) and even to the Quaestiones mechanicae attributed to Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) or to one of his immediate disciples. The answer to this question depends on several factors, such as whether dynamics is taken to mean a science of accelerative forces, a science of motion, or a science of the causes of motion. Further, it depends on the aims and purposes of one’s historical research. Historians, however, ought to be aware of the categories of their actors, even if for a variety of reasons they decide not to follow them, and make a conscious and deliberate decision, as opposed to taking for granted that dynamics always existed and that its history can, therefore, be written unproblematically.

IBM PC

By 1981, a small but vigorous personal computer (PC) industry was offering complete desktop computer systems. Apple’s Apple II offered color graphics and expandability through an “open architecture”—slots into which cards designed by third-party vendors could be plugged. While the Apple II had its own DOS (disk operating system) as did Radio Shack’s TRS-80, most microcomputers sold in the business market used CP/M, an operating system developed by Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research. Meanwhile, IBM, the world’s largest computer company (see ib m), had quietly created a special team headed by Phillip (“Don”) Estridge and tasked with designing a personal computer. Unlike the case with the company’s mainframe development, the team was given considerable freedom in choosing architecture and components—but they were told they would have to have a machine ready for the market in one year. Because of the short time frame, the team chose thirdparty components already well established in the market, including the monitor, floppy disk drive, and a printer.

Unlike Apple and most other companies, IBM created two separate video display systems, one monochrome (MDA) for sharp text for business applications and the threecolor CGA system for the game and education markets. The IBM team also adopted standards from the emerging microcomputer industry instead of trying to use existing mainframe standards. For example, they used the ASCII code to represent characters, not the EBCDIC code used on IBM mainframes. They also chose the Intel 8086 and 8088 microprocessors, which had an instruction set similar to that of the Intel 8080 used in many CP/M systems (see microprocessor). This would make it easy for software developers to create IBM PC versions of their software quickly so that the new machine would have a repertoire of business software. One might have expected that IBM would also adopt a version of CP/M as the PC’s operating system, taking advantage of the closest thing to an existing industry standard. However, CP/M was relatively expensive, and negotiations with Digital Research stumbled, leaving an opening for a much smaller company, Microsoft, to sell a DOS based on software it had licensed from Seattle Computer Products. While IBM did offer CP/M and another operating system based on the UC San Diego Pascal development system,
Microsoft DOS, which became known as PC-DOS (and later MS-DOS), was cheapest and effectively became the default offering.

When IBM officially announced its PC in April 1981, Apple took out full-page ads “welcoming” the new competitor to what it considered to already be a mature industry. But by the end of 1983, a million IBM PCs had been sold, dwarfing Apple and other brands. From then on, while Apple would go on to announce its distinctive Macintosh in 1984, the IBM machine would set the industry standard. To most people, “PC” would mean “IBM PC.”

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Distributed Computing

This concept involves the creation of a software system that runs programs and stores data across a number of different computers, an idea pervasive today. A simple form is the central computer (such as in a bank or credit card company) with which thousands of terminals communicate to submit transactions. While this system is in some sense distributed, it is not really decentralized. Most of the work is done by the central computer, which is not dependent on the terminals for its own functioning. However, responsibilities can be more evenly apportioned between computers.

Today the World Wide Web is in a sense the world’s largest distributed computing system. Millions of documents stored on hundreds of thousands of servers can be accessed by millions of users’ Web browsers running on a variety of personal computers. While there are rules for specifying addresses and creating and routing data packets (see Internet and tcp/ip), no one agency or computer complex controls access to information or communication (such as e-mail).

What is Encryption?

The use of encryption to disguise the meanings of messages goes back thousands of years (the Romans, for example, used substitution ciphers, where each letter in a message was replaced with a different letter). Mechanical cipher machines first came into general use in the 1930s. During World War II the German Enigma cipher machine used multiple rotors and a configurable plugboard to create a continuously varying cipher that was thought to be unbreakable. However, Allied codebreakers built electromechanical and electronic devices that succeeded in exploiting flaws in the German machine (while incidentally advancing computing technology). During the cold war Western and Soviet cryptographers vied to create increasingly complex cryptosystems while deploying more powerful computers to decrypt their opponent’s messages.

In the business world, the growing amount of valuable and sensitive data being stored and transmitted on computers by the 1960s led to a need for high-quality commercial encryption systems. In 1976, the U.S. National Bureau of Standards approved the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which originally used a 56-bit key to turn each 64-bit chunk of message into a 64-bit encrypted ciphertext. DES relies upon the use of a complicated mathematical function to create complex permutations within blocks and characters of text. DES has been implemented on special-purpose chips that can encrypt millions of bytes of message per second.

The Ring 2002

The Ring is a 2002 American psychological horror film directed by Gore Verbinski, and starring Naomi Watts and Martin Henderson. It is a remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ring.

Both films are based on Koji Suzuki's novel Ring and focus on a mysterious cursed videotape that contains a seemingly random series of disturbing images. After watching the tape, the viewer receives a phone call in which a girl's voice announces that the viewer will die in seven days. The film was a critical and commercial success.

Plot

16-year old Katie Embry (Amber Tamblyn) and 17-year old Becca Kotler (Rachael Bella) discuss a supposedly cursed videotape while alone at home at the former's house. According to legend, those who watch the tape will die in seven days. Katie reveals that seven days ago, she went to a cabin at Shelter Mountain Inn with her friends, where she viewed the video tape. The girls laugh it off, but after a series of strange occurrences in the next few minutes, involving a television in the house turning itself on, Katie dies mysteriously and horrifically while Becca watches, leading to Becca's institutionalization in a mental hospital.

Katie's cousin, Aidan (David Dorfman), is visibly affected by the death. After Katie's funeral, Ruth Embry (Lindsay Frost) asks her sister Rachel (Naomi Watts), Aidan's mother and a journalist, to investigate Katie's death, which leads her to the cabin where Katie watched the tape. Rachel finds and watches the tape; the phone rings, and she hears a child's voice say "seven days", upsetting Rachel. The next day, Rachel calls Noah (Martin Henderson), her ex-boyfriend, who is also Aidan's father, to show him the video and asks for his assistance based upon his media-related skills. He asks her to make a copy for further investigation, which she does, but later takes it home herself. To Rachel's horror, she discovers Aidan watching the copy a few days later.

After viewing the tape, Rachel begins experiencing nightmares, nose bleeds, and surreal situations (for instance, when she pauses a section of the tape in which a fly runs across the screen, she is able to pluck the fly from the monitor). Increasingly anxious about getting to the origin of the tape, Rachel investigates images of a woman seen in the tape. Using a video lab, she discovers images in the tape's overscan area, which through further research she discovers to be a lighthouse located on Moesko Island. It also turns out that the tape's overscan does not include time code, which hints that the tape was not made using electronic equipment. The woman turns out to be Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran), who lived on the island in Washington, many years prior with her husband Richard (Brian Cox). Rachel discovers that, after bringing home an adopted daughter, tragedy befell the Morgan ranch – the horses raised on the ranch went mad and killed themselves, which in turn supposedly had caused Anna (who loved her horses) to become depressed and commit suicide. Rachel goes to the Morgan house and finds Richard, who refuses to talk about the video or his daughter and sends Rachel away. A local doctor tells Rachel that Anna could not carry a baby to term and adopted a child named Samara (Daveigh Chase). Dr. Grasnik (Jane Alexander) recounts that Anna soon complained about gruesome visions that only happened when Samara was around, so both were sent to a mental institution. While Rachel is investigating on Moesko Island, Noah is investigating the institution, where he finds Anna's file and discovers that there was a video of Samara, but the video is missing. Back at the ranch, Rachel sneaks back to the Morgan house where she discovers the missing video, watches it, and is confronted by Richard who says that the girl was evil. He then electrocutes himself in the bathtub, sending Rachel running out of the room screaming.

Noah arrives and, with Rachel, goes to the barn to discover an attic where Samara was kept by her father. Behind the wallpaper they discover an image of a tree seen on the tape, which grows near the Shelter Mountain Inn. At the inn, they discover a well underneath the floor, in which Rachel finds Samara's body, experiencing a vision of how her mother pushed her into it. Rachel notifies the authorities, and gives Samara a proper burial.

Rachel informs Aidan that they will no longer be troubled by Samara. However, Aidan is horrified, telling his mother she had freed her body, and that Samara "never sleeps". and that she was not supposed to help Samara. In his apartment, Noah's TV turns on, revealing an image in which a decaying Samara crawls from the well and out of the TV into the room. Horrified, Noah trips backward and tries to crawl away from Samara. Samara faces him, exposes her true face and stares directly at him, killing him with fear, which Rachel discovers after racing to his apartment and seeing his face distorted like Katie's was. Upon returning to her apartment, Rachel destroys and burns the original tape. Wondering why she had not died like the others, she remembers that she made a copy of the tape. She soon notices the copy of the tape underneath the couch. Rachel realizes the only way to escape and save Aidan is to have him copy the tape and show it to someone else, continuing the cycle. Rachel helps Aidan copy the tape, who asks her what is going to happen to the person they give the tape to. She does not respond as a shot of the well is shown in the tape. Then the screen goes to black static and ends with a few pictures from the tape.
The credits roll as scary, sinister music sounds.

Cast

Naomi Watts as Rachel Keller

Martin Henderson as Noah Clay

David Dorfman as Aidan Keller

Brian Cox as Richard Morgan

Jane Alexander as Dr. Grasnik

Amber Tamblyn as Katie Embry

Lindsay Frost as Ruth Embry

Rachael Bella as Rebecca 'Becca' Kotler

Daveigh Chase as Samara Morgan

Shannon Cochran as Anna Morgan

Richard Lineback as Innkeeper

Pauley Perrette as Beth

Sara Rue as Babysitter

Sasha Barrese as Teen Girl

Adam Brody as Teen Boy

Awards

Jumper 2008

Jumper is a 2008 American science fiction film, loosely based on the 1992 science fiction novel of the same name by Steven Gould. The film is directed by Doug Liman and stars Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Max Thieriot, AnnaSophia Robb, and Diane Lane. The film follows a young man capable of teleporting as he is chased by a secret society intent on killing him.

The script went through a rewrite prior to filming and the roles for the main characters were changed during production. Jumper was filmed in 20 cities in 14 countries between 2006 and 2007. The film was released on February 14, 2008 and a soundtrack was released on February 19. The film held the first position in its opening weekend with $27.3 million, but despite this success, reviews from critics were generally negative.

Plot

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, teenager David Rice (Max Thieriot) gives his crush, Millie, a snow globe containing the Eiffel Tower, knowing her dreams of traveling someday. A bully, Mark, throws the globe onto the ice near a river. While trying to retrieve it, David falls through the ice and is pulled away by the current. He suddenly finds himself in the local library with drenched clothes. He discovers he can "Jump", or teleport, disappearing from one place and instantly appearing in another. Unhappy with his life, he runs away and is believed dead by his alcoholic father.

Eight years later, an adult David has settled into a life of adventure. He spends his days jumping around various continents, doing various sports and living lavishly using money stolen from banks via his jumping abilities. We also see him observing a natural disaster on the TV news, but not even consider using his powers to save the people. After a day of hedonistic jumping, including seducing and sleeping with a woman in London, he is ambushed in his home by Roland Cox. Cox tries to trap him with a system of high-voltage cables, which prevent him from being able to jump. David escapes and returns home to Ann Arbor, seeking Millie. He is attacked by Mark and purposely teleports him into a bank vault. He leaves him there and returns to Millie, inviting her to travel with him (by conventional means) to Rome. Roland – who we see heads an organisation dedicated to killing these "abominations" because "only God should have the power to be everywhere" – later discovers Mark in police custody and so learns David's identity.

David and Millie arrive in Rome, he attempting to keep his true nature as a thief and his powers a secret from her. After talking, they share a kiss and have sex. David and Millie visit the Colosseum, only to find it closed. David uses his abilities to unlock a door from the inside, telling a skeptical Millie the door was already unlocked. While opening another door, he discovers another Jumper, Griffin. He warns David that "Paladins" are coming – an extremist group who has been tracking down and killing Jumpers from "the beginning." Several Paladins show up and attack them. Griffin kills one and teleports, taking the body with him. David tries to leave with Millie, but is detained by Italian police and questioned about the death. While waiting for a magistrate to arrive, David's mother Mary, who had left David when he was five, appears and throws him the keys to his handcuffs. She tells him he has very little time to leave. David tries to follow her, but she says if he wants the girl to live he must leave now. David tells Millie the police let him go and they leave together. Millie, now very suspicious, demands the truth. David declines and puts her on a plane home.

David jumps to Griffin's lair, asking where to find Roland. Griffin explains that Paladins are religious fanatics who believe Jumpers are an affront to God and have been hunting them for centuries. He also says that Paladins will kill Jumpers by targeting their loved ones. He has been trying to kill Roland for years, as the Paladins killed his parents when he was a child and have tried to kill him several times. David teleports to his father, finds him bleeding and teleports him to a hospital. He returns to Griffin and convinces him to go with him to the airport to greet Millie. Upon arriving, they realize her flight landed an hour earlier. Griffin returns to his lair to get weapons while David searches for Millie. He breaks into her apartment, angering Millie, who tells him to leave. Through the living room window David sees Roland arriving and shows her what he can do, and save her, by teleporting her back to Griffin's lair. The Paladins follow using a machine that keeps the "jump scar" (wormhole) open and fight with David and Griffin. Roland is chased back through the portal, but snatches Millie back to her apartment with a cable.

Griffin decides to take a bomb to Millie's apartment and kill everyone. David refuses, wanting to save Millie. They fight through several locations, and David traps Griffin with power lines in a war zone. Griffin warns that if he faces the Paladins alone he will be outnumbered. He goes anyway and is quickly trapped by Roland's electric cables. David cannot escape as he is physically tied to the apartment by the cables. Using his teleporting powers David separates the apartment from the rest of the building and teleports that section away, along with Roland, Millie and himself, back to the lake he fell through the ice into as a child. Once free of the cables (while still underwater) David teleports to the library with Millie, as well as an unwelcome Roland. David then grabs Roland and takes him to a cave in the Grand Canyon, abandoning him there, and telling him that he could have been killed instead.

David visits his mother and is stunned when a girl, his half-sister, Sophie, answers the door. Mary tells David she has known he was a Jumper since he was five, when Jumpers make their first Jump. She is a Paladin, and had to either kill David or leave. She again allows him to leave, allowing him a "head start". He meets with Millie outside and they jump to an unknown location.

Cast

Hayden Christensen (Max Thieriot, teenage) as David Rice, the film's protagonist. He's a young man who discovers the ability to teleport or "jump". David turns rebellious when he is caught in the middle of the century war between the Paladins and Jumpers.

Rachel Bilson (Annasophia Robb, teenage) as Millie Harris, David's childhood friend and crush who later becomes his girlfriend.

Samuel L. Jackson as Roland Cox, the leader of the Paladins whose goal is to kill Jumpers. Roland serves as the film's main antagonist.

Jamie Bell as Griffin, a renegade jumper who tracks down and eliminates Paladins.

Kristen Stewart as Sophie.

Diane Lane as Mary Rice, David's mother who separated from her son when he was five years old.

Teddy Dunn (Jesse James, teenage) as Mark Kobold, David's childhood bully.

Michael Rooker as William Rice, David's father.

S.W.A.T

S.W.A.T. is a 2003 action-crime film directed by Clark Johnson, and is based on the 1975 television series of the same name. It stars Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell, LL Cool J and Michelle Rodriguez. It was produced by Neal H. Moritz and released in the United States on August 8, 2003.

Plot

The film begins with a hostage situation in Los Angeles; this was loosely based on the 1997 North Hollywood shootout. Officer Jim Street (Colin Farrell), a former Navy SEAL and hot-shot cop from the Los Angeles Police Department and his SWAT team are sent to stop a gang of robbers who have taken over a bank. His high-tempered partner and close friend Brian Gamble (Jeremy Renner) disobeys an order, and wounds a hostage. Gamble and Street are demoted by Captain Fuller (Larry Poindexter), the commander of LAPD's Metropolitan Division, who is portrayed as a "fussy martinet". Gamble quits following arguments with Fuller and Street, the latter of whom is taken off the SWAT team and sent to work in the "gun cage", where he looks after gear and weapons.

Six months after the incident, The Chief of Police calls on Sergeant Daniel "Hondo" Harrelson (Samuel L. Jackson) to help re-organize the SWAT division. Hondo is transferred in, and soon puts together a diverse team, including himself, Street, Chris Sánchez (Michelle Rodriguez), Deacon Kaye (LL Cool J), T.J. McCabe (Josh Charles), and Michael Boxer (Brian Van Holt). The team trains together and develops bonds of friendship, and their first mission to subdue an unstable gunman is a success.

Meanwhile, a drug lord by the name of Alexander Montel (Olivier Martinez) has killed his father and uncle for control of the family's crime empire. Uniformed L.A.P.D. personnel stop Montel for a broken taillight, detain him, and learn through Interpol he is an international fugitive. But as Montel is transferred to prison, his associates, dressed as LAPD officers, assault the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department bus transporting Montel in an attempt to free him. Hondo's SWAT team foils the assault. As Montel is being brought into the police station in front of a group of reporters, he yells to the TV cameras, "I will give 100 million dollars to whoever gets me out of here!"

The L.A.P.D. makes plans to transfer Montel into federal custody. They plan to fly him away, but a mysterious attacker (it is presumed to be Gamble) shoots down the helicopter. The police next send out a large convoy, which gang members attack. It proves to be a decoy, and Hondo's team has spirited Montel away in two S.U.V.s. However, T.J. has been plotting with Gamble, and the two succeed in taking Montel from the other officers, critically wounding Boxer in the process. Hondo and the rest give chase, and there is a final fierce battle, Gamble's group against the SWAT officers. Hondo's team is victorious. T.J. kills himself rather than be captured, and there is a vicious hand to hand fight between Street and Gamble, with Street emerging the eventual victor when he kicks Gamble under the wheels of a passing train. The SWAT team delivers Montel to a federal prison to await trial. On the way home to L.A., a report of a holdup in progress comes over the police radio, and despite the team being two officers down and off shift for the past twelve hours, Hondo, Street, Kaye, and Sanchez decide to help anyway. The film's last line is Hondo shouting, "Mount up!".

Cast

Samuel L. Jackson as Sergeant Second Grade Daniel "Hondo" Harrelson, He is brought back by the Chief of Police to head a new SWAT Element. He is a retired Recon Marine. He uses both an M4A1 and MP5A2. He personally upgraded the trigger of the M4A1 that he uses. His call sign is 70 David.

Colin Farrell as Police Officer Third Grade Jim Street. He is originally assigned to SWAT, but after an incident with his partner he is removed from the team and placed in the "gun cage." After Hondo sees his abilities and knowledge of special tactics firsthand, he is recruited for the new SWAT team. He is a former Navy SEAL and explosives expert. Street uses an M4A1 and a Kimber Custom TLE II pistol on SWAT missions.

Michelle Rodriguez as Police Officer Third Grade Christina "Chris" Sanchez, was a frequent applicant to SWAT, who was rejected each time due to the captain's sexism. Hondo persuades him to allow her to be on his team. She carries an MP5 on SWAT calls. Her callsign is 73-David. She has a daughter named Eliza.

LL Cool J as Police Officer Third Grade Deacon "Deke" Kaye, is a Patrol officer and father of two children whom Hondo also recruits. In the SWAT team, he is armed with a Benelli M3 Super 90 shotgun and later Hondo's MP5, and serves as the rear-guard of the team.

Josh Charles as Police Officer Third Grade T.J. McCabe, is a member of SWAT who initially has problems with Street.

Jeremy Renner as former Police Officer Third Grade Brian Gamble, Street's former partner. He quit the L.A.P.D. after being demoted.

Brian Van Holt as Police Officer Third Grade Michael Boxer is a SWAT officer who has worked with Hondo before. His sister was involved with Street and broke up with him after he was transferred to the gun cage. He is armed with a M4A1.

Olivier Martinez as Alexander "Alex" Montel, is a French criminal. His family controls a huge drug empire which values into the billions.

Ken Davitian as Martin Gascoigne, is a Italian L.A.-based drug trafficker who is Montel's uncle. Gascoigne operates from the Figaro Cafè, in Downtown LA.

Reg E. Cathey as Lieutenant Second Grade Greg Velasquez, is field commander of D Platoon (SWAT) and one of Hondo's old friends. His call sign is 10-David.

Larry Poindexter as Captain Thomas Fuller, is Commander of Metropolitan Division (Home of the LAPD SWAT) D Platoon; most SWAT officers hate him. His call sign is R-commander.

Page Kennedy as Travis

Domenick Lombardozzi as GQ

James DuMont as Gus