I've just heard that the Core, one of the worst films attacks against human intelligence ever is set to return sometime next year.

I can just see the tagline now... The Core II - We'll get at least 3% of the science right.

The Core is right up there with Armegeddon, in fact it's probably beyond Armegeddon on how dumb it is. I'll just briefly outline why the Core was so stupid:

1) The Earth's magnetic field is collapsing because the core of the Earth stopped rotating.

The amount of energy worked up in the Earth's core is huge. Here's an interesting fact; if the Earth's core actually did stop rotating the energy released would be enough to melt metals on the surface of the Earth, enough energy to evaporate all the world's oceans 10 times over.

2) Because the field is collapsing the microwaves from the Sun are getting through.

The Sun doesn't emit much in the way of microwaves. Secondly the magnetic field doesn't stop microwaves anyway. Thirdly microwaves aren't even that dangerous.

3) The bridge scene.... Bad engineering at its worst, a bunch of microwaves break through the magnetic field and come up to a suspension bridge - breaking it in two. The towers bend inwards.

If you break a suspension bridge in two, ie break the cables, the force would pull the towers outwards, not inwards because the inward force has just disappeared because the cables have broken.

4) They use a ship that is made out of indestructible metals to reach the core of the Earth.

Bad engineering and bad science. If the metals are indestructible how can you cut them to make a ship out of them? I mean come on.

5) They use a nuke to start the core of the Earth up again. In the film they mention the core is a ball of iron the size of Mars.

Well the core is about the size of Mars and it is mostly iron. So what the hell is a nuke going to do to it? Nothing!

Right so that is why the Core was a terrible film. You might argue it's only a film it doesn't need to be realistic, that's perfectly correct. But this film is the typical disaster film, ie it tries to make itself realistic. It has therefore stepped over to the side of reality where it can be judged by reality.

The lack of any understanding of science is inexcusable, it wouldn't take a lot to get at least some of the science right, well actually with this film the whole plot would need to be scrapped.

At it's best this film is a comedy. At it's worst this film damages the already under-developed understanding of science among the population.

We do not need a sequal. I mean what the hell are they gonna do next? Start the core of the Sun up with another nuke? What's a nuke going to do to a nuclear reactor over a million times the size of the Earth? Bugger all!

This is why we need the Shuttle back in action ASAP, from CBC:

Ed Campion, a NASA spokesman at the Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C., told the Associated Press Saturday that he was hopeful the problem on the space-based telescope could be fixed from the ground.

NASA experts suspect a faulty transistor or perhaps a cosmic event has wiped out part of the camera's memory. The transistor can probably be replaced by a back-up unit, while the camera's memory can be reloaded.

"Both possibilities are things that can be resolved here on the ground," Campion said.

Hopefully it can be fixed from the ground, but if not then the satellite will be up there for months, if not a year before a Shuttle crew could get to it and swap out any faulty components. That sort of downtime is insane considering the state Hubble is in anyway.

Now we're getting somewhere. When the Beta 2 branch was forked we were only getting bug fixes, now we're back to get features on the new fork. A few things I've noticed after using the new build for a couple of hours:

Aero Glass has been tweaked and looks much better.
Font weight and size has been changed some what.
Performance is right up there with Windows XP SP2.
New icons.
New mouse pointer.
New login screen.
New post-boot screen.
List view returns.
Flip-3D is now anti-alaised and fades in and out much nicer.
Window control buttons no longer flash up black for a second.
Menus are now much more consistant.
3px issue on Start Menu divide is now resolved.
New games added to the Games Explorer.
Alt text in IE7 now has the new tooltip style.
Networking performance is right up there with Windows XP.

It's nice to get off a bug-fix fork and onto an improvement fork. Now we're seeing the polish applied and it's looking good.