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Probably the best way to get things really quiet is to treat the noise problem as a separate isse from the cooling issue.

Noise as an issues is like best handled by isolating the machine partially in a cool cabinet with sound baffles. There are folks who go overboard into the noise reduction. some recommendation I have seen include reducing the speed of your machine so that the computer can run without CPU fans. I have also seen power supplies that do not have and do not need fans because the design.

Needless to say, you need to have a handle on your priorities.

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For a wonderful Dream-Maker

Ode
by Arthur O'Shaugnessey

We are the Music makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams
Wandering by lone seabreakers, and sitting by desolate streams
World losers, and world forsakers, on whom the pale moon gleams
Yet we are the Movers and Shakers of the world, forever, it seems.

We are the carefree dancers, we are the players on the the stage
And we are the poets and the writers, we are the muses of the age.
And we are the painters and sculptors, of those futures not yet seen.
and we are the Movers and the Shakers, of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful endless dittes, we build up the worlds great cities
And out of a fabulous story, we fashioned a empire's glory
One man with a dream, at pleasure, will go forth, and conquer a crown.
And three, with a new songs measure, can trample an empire down.

We are the Music makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams
Wandering by lone seabreakers, and sitting by desolate streams
World losers, and world forsakers, on whom the pale moon gleams
For we are the Movers and Shakers of the world, forever, it seems.

Sleep well, Dream Maker.

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Sounds like a good place for all those talented dot com refugees out there.

VCs should make sure to look out for those who lost them money the first time around. Especially those whop were into smoke and mirrors.

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Just noting in passing,

That the version tracking can take palce inside the document, or outside the document. Version tracking can be engineered outside the document if you have many types of data and documents. Then you will need a database to control the varios parameters of the documents such as file names, number of copies, who has access, etc. This can be a problem, but it is not outrageous, depending on the capabilities of the technology at hand. I would think ity is certainly within the capabilities of perl and the table technology of your choice.

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The Fall of the Federation.

Agreed

Though it would amuse me no end that we would see see it from some far future, and part of the gist is that none would know why precisely why the federation fell. Have the Klingons become more and more like the chinese, so that they become the cultural center of a high level civilization (say, in their 5th empire, we currently seeing the 1st)) and we watch the klingon scientists at work when they find a starship encased in ice in/on the surface of a long period comet (people in stasis, etc whatever)

or whatever. The point being agreed on is to take it well outside of the normal range of events and known history so that you can start from scratch somehow. take it truly intergalatic (months to the next galaxy)

something!

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One hack type of solution that I recall from the world of dos and windows what a generic NON-MS database with fileds that had the document name in it as a character field. a widget on the screen could call up the MS doc by file name, and launch word or whatever.

In the original, the file was a medical record sort of thing, so it was a doc with a name made up of pateint ssn number, doc ID, and a time/date string. The file names got stored in the db, and the db could launch w to open them via a command.

The only thing I could think of is maybe a widget or macro in word to save the current date/time as part of the file name, along with the user ID, so that as soon as word opened the file, it would be saved with the new file name with the updated data in the name.

Wait, as part of the command line, you can set it up to copy the file to a new name with the propwer date and time info in the name, then feed the string so you have a proper record of it in the database, and then open it in your word processor. This maintains an audit trail, since everytime a doc is opened, a copy is made and saved. You could also include a delete option for just for folks just looking around.

So this is not to hard to do via the database of your choice. Although you better have a lot of drive space for the clueless. A really messy solution, but if you have space to waste, semi-workable. This would work for in house, not webifried.

You would have to add a layer in there some place for converting to web format, depending on the word processor you use.

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The best idea I ever heard for a new ST series was for it to take place after The Fall of the Federation. This would be especially rewarding for the fans, since then you would know what was lost, but not many of the characters would.

This has been done with Andromeda, also based on an Idea by Roddenberry. It is an okay show, but it is missing some of the irony that a viewers knowledge of the previous civilization would give.

If Paramount did that, it would be too obviously stealing a good idea.

Personally, I like the idea of the Star Trek would turned on its head, with a 1000 years plus of history gone down the tubes. So that the early Federation would be like the history of Early Rome Before the Ceasars.

but it is too good an idea to waste, perhaps ...

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In the begginnig the web was mostly a refuge of college kids and research scientists, etc. There were also walled communities, like Compuserve, and AOL, etc.

Then the commercial types got into the act, and for a while, it was all hell.

It looks like the Internet might wind up not being commercially viable as Madison Ave might want it to be. We may be seein gthe death throes of Madison Ave on the Net. What would that leave us with?

Mostly college kids and research scientists. With a number of walled communities, like before.

sheer speculation , of course, but ...

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They have moved it off the front page.

It is now at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/technews-2001 0510.html

There is also another article with decent info here

They also have updated info on the specs on the front page.

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A year and a half after the second largest non-event in history

It was one of those situations where, if you do your job right, nothing goes wrong.

of course, if you are a BOFH, then you make sure things are always going wrong, so you can be a hero when convenient, or when you want to be entertained.

;-)

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I haven't used either Navigator or Mozilla for quite some time. What does Navigator have that Mozilla doesn't for someone like me who doesn't need another mail client or web design software?

All that added integration with Internet Shopping, courtesy of AOL, etc.

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You can't win: the client won't appreciate knowing that they made the wrong choice and the hosting company won't enjoy having their flaws pointed out to a customer. You'll catch shit from both sides and could well get sued out of the deal.

Heh - I know of one company that has two computer shops - one side that has running the business on some multidimensional DBMS since the dawn of time, and the other newer MS shop. The MS shop has several dozen people, and the old shop has a small handful.

The MS shop is terribly mad at the old small shop, because the MS shop is producing substantially less than the old new shop. - Of course the old shop is run with just a handful of gurus, where the MS shop has lots of (fill in the blank)

Bottom line - sometimes it pays to know what you are doing. And when You don't it costs you money.

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Put up on your website a number of white papers that include security analysis of several "typical" obviously fictional companies, but which have some resemblence to the clients involved. The fictional companies could be in another country (all names, etc have been changed to protect the guilty). Include with this news stories from reral agencies and companies that hand security failures. Especially if some of these had systems similar to the clinet in question.

finally - [START JOKE] post the company name to a hacker newsgroup as vulnerable. do this some months after giving them the warning. Then send a reporter around to them after about a month, "I am doing a story on hackers, and I am interviewing typical companies about their internet security" [END JOKE]

I do not, and I will never condone the abuse of a personal or corporate computer system for fun and or profit, etc.

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Looking at the screen shots reminds me of Escher. All those wild angles. don't pan too fast it might make you sick! I think I would likely want to configure it so that the aspect ratio was a little wider. Maybe this would be suitable for the 3 panel Panasonic monitor that folks where going nuts over last year.

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I belive that the SlashCode site itself is running 2.0

Slash hosting is in the process of setting up a new server with the 2.0 - so we'll need a utility to import from a slash 1.0 setup, not just in the same machine, but migration over a network.

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Will the new slash fix the apparent 50 karma cap? The 50 karma cap, as far as I know, is a line in a config file. It was that in 1.09

I haven't had time to find where it set in the new system yet.

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You see, there's this thing called a thesaurus. You can find different words that mean the same thing ... you make the connection.

Unfotunately, some people reading a thesarus do not know the words that are similar in meaning are not the same in meaning. Often something that is they primary meaning in one word is a secondary meaning someplace else.

For Example, you have a crusty old gentleman. One of the meanings of Crusty is Flakey, as in the crust of a pie.

You might not want to substitute the word flakey for crusty in this context. It wouldn't quite fit right.

Reading a paper written with this method gets really funny really fast.

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The easiest tests to give as a teacher are multiple guess.

In a situation involving papers, as this one did, the easiest solution is to have the students sign up (put on a list) the topics that they are writing about, so that there are obviously no duplicates.

The best test is an open book type of test, although it is the hardest to correct, because you had to ask questions that really determine the studendts understanding.

In one math class I know of, the teacher had the final exam set up with a series of fiercely complex questions. But if you really understood what was going on, you got the correct answers, which were all very simple integers and fractions, etc.

You had to know enough to be able to cut through the BS.

This applies to computing very nicely. Did you fix it? Does it crash? etc.

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Well, some people are going to start marketing special suits to protect themselves. I do not, however, recommend this example made from aluminum foil. (check out the poor dog!)

There is this very legit product from ShieldWorks. Check out their catalog

And there is the world famous Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie

It of course depends on what is the most important body part to protect as far as you are concerned. These mostly focus on protecting the brain. (Not that is is being overused by some folks)

Other people may want to investigate protection for other body parts.

There is a business plan in here someplace folks.

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It now seems like a secret business plan method to have a patent on some process or product that gets used around the world, wherein you deliberately do not enforce it for many many years. When the market has developed sufficiently, you surprise everyone by enforcing the claims, and get huge buckets of money compared to the petty cash I would get if I had to enforce it all along, and if I had to actually develop the product and promote uses for the product in the first place.

I am going to patent that as a proprietary business method.

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Sorry Jon, the US is a sane country, China isn't.

I have to use an analogy That I heard in a different context, that makes sense here.

If you have a democratically run (by the inmates) insane asylum, it would still be crazy. If you had a communistically [is that a word?] run (by the inmates) insane asylum, it would still be crazy.

In fact, it doesn't matter what form of government or political philosophy you use in an insane asylum run by the inmates, it would still be crazy. Most political philosophies make decent sense if you have bunch decent sane people to make it work, and to nullify the abuses. But when you cannot not tell the difference betewn the nuts and the flakes and the crackpots, and sanity, you have a problem.

Now you have a situation where you have to cope with the abuses imposed by the wackos so you can live in a decent world.

It is startling to think that the problems of figuring out who is a wacko (and who is not) and how to deal with them is a possible component of the problems we deal with in many arenas. The politically correct answer is that everyone is crazy, or everyone is sane. neither of which is true, although I wonder about this sometimes

Obviously commercial interests exist to take advantadge of the situation. There is no commercial profit obviously there in the long run, regardless of the idealism you may have to try to sort it all out. It is not politically correct to pursue this.

It is this quandry that brings us to trying to hide stuff

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My take on this is as follows:

We have our own future in our hands.

We will not loose to MS because of anything that MS does.

If we loose, it is because we become our own worst enemies.

Foaming at the mouth is ineffective marketing technology. Microsoft is a master of marketing, using their strength in marketing to sell what is considered by some to be inferior products. They market to the masses, people who follow opinion leaders, because those folks do not have the time, ambition, or wherewithal to do the legwork themselves.

This is most likely the correct target to go after.

If you go to page three of the article, there is this bit which sums is up nicely:

There's a lot Microsoft can do, because right now, more people will listen to them than they will to the average Linux über-hacker. If you believe otherwise, then you may need to check your ego at the door.

Because when presented with a calm, reasonable-sounding statement from a large corporation versus sarcastic rants and flames from a bunch of apparent malcontents who do nothing all day but argue why Microsoft is an evil entity instead of stipulating exactly why their product is better, I will guarantee you that the average listener is going to give far more weight to the calm, reasonable-sounding statements every single time.

I am not proposing that everyone associated with Linux get haircuts, take manners lessons, and start wearing Tux-logoed polo shirts. But I am advocating that we don't rest on our superior technological laurels and think that's all we need to fend off Microsoft's very carefully planned attacks. Nor can we get so pleased with ourselves with how inventive we can get with hammering Microsoft with lofty insults. Because all of this is leading up to one inescapable conclusion: no one outside of our community is going to keep listening to this much longer.

And Microsoft knows this. Every time we fly off the collective handle when they do something threatening and they can just sit back and say "see how unreasonable those people are? See how derisive the keepers of this Linux technology can be?" We have our own future in our hands.

We will not loose to MS because of anything that MS does.

If we loose, it is because we become our own worst enemies..

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I wonder how they are going to enforce this. at the retail level.

The rental model is one thing, where you directly rent the software from MS.

But if I go into a sotore and buy something, is it going to time out on me in three years? it going to give me an error screen 3 years after activation? I can imagine all kinds of horror stories on this. Handled with hard ball tactics, this could for less rational folks into violence etc.

I for one, am glad I am getting up to speed on the *nix systems

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This would bet THE ideal thing to port slashdot to. Store the comments on freenet, and leave the metadata like mod points and such at a centrally controlled site. No more being forced to pull a comment due to lawyers babbling, and no more problems with old content that people still want going away, etc. etc.

Since it is under the GPL, and the source is available, have a crack at it. Note that Slashdot is based on apache, Mysql, mod_perl among other things. So this would tie in well with the original idea of SQL on Freenet in the first place.

but you would also have to deal with the original Cmdr Taco Spaghetti code as well.

;-)

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Well, This reminds me of the case of France vs Yahoo last year.

This is where the Value of the Internet is wiped out because everyone gets offended by what is going on in the next country, then the next province, the next city, town, or county.

A case where people prefer to be safe in their ignorance.

on the other hand, jerking the other guys chain with a high voltage cattle prod doesn't help either. You know, there are guys who will act as insulting as possible just because the other person gets upset about something, instead of acting with compassion.

Sort of cutting off the nose to spite the face. Cutting themselves off might do more harm than good.

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Appartently Transmeta is a device of choice for the forth-coming tablet PC spec from Microsoft.

I have mixed feeling on this one.

But I do not know how viable it will be as a laptop replacement.

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1) the Register had this on Friday 04/05/2001 at 16:03 GMT - which works out to be 9am in LA, I think.

I am sure folks submitted it before the weekend.

So what gives, is it news or not? Especially since MS rejected the plan. As the story said:

Microsoft was said to be uninterested in such a deal, which isn't entirely surprising - acquiring Napster would bring Microsoft a valuable brand name, but one that wouldn't exactly endear it to the music industry. Far better to use Napster to promote its technology. If it works, and Napster's reputation is restored, Microsoft can buy the company then. If Napster dies the death - either because its fans reject the subscription service or the recording industry kills it - Microsoft can shrug its shoulders and say it was only a technology provider.

This is news? Look at the surprise on my face.

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Maybe I'm naive, but I'd call that a minimum standard of intellectual honesty and fairness, not "exceptional."

Looking at the typical behavior around here, especially from the college crowd, odds are that this would qualify you for the top 5 percent of the population. Never mind those who are less "well educated".

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In your detailed paper, you note:

37. For instance, under the first sale doctrine, an owner of a piece of software can transfer her program to whomever and for whatever she desires. The use of a license prevents this doctrine from applying, which allows computer programming firms to price-discriminate between customer characteristics. If Microsoft wants to give Windows software to public schools at a cost blow the production cost and the transaction consummates a sale, the first sale doctrine would apply, and the school could resell the programs at a higher price to a corporation, retaining the difference. This would cause Microsoft to charge all customers one price, either by lowering its price, forcing it to run at a loss, or raising its price, thus making the program unavailable to schools and other meagerly funded organizations. This result is economically inefficient and would most assuredly be politically unpopular.

I am interested on the implications of the fact of Microsofts monopoly in as it applies to licensing. While it can be argued that the two issues are separate, and one is not relevant to the other, many people look at the practices of Microsoft in this regard and view it with horror and contempt. Are there instances where such licensing practices impose a non-legitimate enforcment of "rights", and in fact constitute improper maintenance of a monopoly? Or do people have these separate issues confused, when they should be treated separately?

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See that foot? It's funny, laugh. I really, really, hope that I'm not missing out on some serious meta- meta- meta- levels of sarcasm here.

That's what I get for posting about five minutes before the morning caffiene kicks in.

[shrug]

Foot in mouth tastes good on monday morning. Now all I got to do is learn to whistle.

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Each container was labeled to indicate the destination of its contents. Special delivery letters were delivered within one hour; regular letters within three.

Thinking about this, I realized that this compares favorably with email, in that between meetings, and so on, the response times are similar. This puts a new light on the commerce of the early 20th century. However:

"the pneumatic service began to pale next to the new technology of the motor-wagon, which could deliver mail two to three times faster than a horse-drawn cart with equal or greater volume and more than 10 times the volume of a pneumatic tube, while only slightly slower."

Now that has gone to hell in a handbasket since then.

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I mean, a faked memo, is it really 'news for nerds'

Well, the question is if unverified memo is news, or should we presume unverified memos as fake until proven otherwise? Of course, presuming all unverified memos as true is lunacy as well.

I find that a lot of this is highly dependant on a person's choice of enemies, etc. Too often, if the unverified blurb is about someone that a person loves to hate, then it must be true. Of Course. and vice versa.

It takes exceptional qualities to step outside the box in this regard, and suspend judgement on someone you hate; and to get all the facts, despite the FUD. The memo itself seems to be semi reasonable from the viewpoint of AOL, and I would not hold anything against them if it was true. MS should expect some people to be working against them.

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This was reported in The Register on Saturday morning. The article there is good, and has all of the juicy bits of the story.

Which is nice if Beta News gets Slashed. (all your hits are belong to us!)

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Still a problem an enemy K10 tanker is a high value target it's worthwhile your UAV taking down by any means possible a civilian DC10 you don't want to even go near. They are more or less the same type of aircraft and you can't trust the enemy to send out an "I am your enemy" transponder signal.

In combat situations, your friends send out an "I am your friend" signal in response to the correct query. Enemies presumably do not have your protocols. In a combat zone, guess which ones you shoot?

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There was this story in the The Register citing A post on The Tech Report suggests that Microsoft just might be preparing to retro-fit XP's product activation to Win2k. According to the author, installation of the Internet Explorer 6 preview on a Win2k machine resulted in the addition of a new, suspicious-sounding registry key:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing

(The original Tech Report article is here, and has some more interesting tech data.)

Bottom line, they are going to try to get you any way they can.

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78 online servers. 118 players.

Well it is a bit of a niche market.

But every thing considered, not bad at all.

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If you remove the pilot, the dynamic performance of the aircraft is limited only by the airframe.

Which points to the possibility that alleged performance of things like UFOs (if you believe in them) are explained by having an AI at the controls. Heck, you could have smaller sized robots (big enough to get enviromental samples and get about, but small enough to save weight)

Probably the next big cultural change is where AI is a fact of Life.

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Or.. what if someone hack's them... compare the amount of hacking done to .gov sites compared to the amount of breakins in .gov buildings :)

Well you just need to make sure your wireless protocols are secure. Or else you could get haxored and become a target of your own equipment. It is much harder to haxor a human pilot.

This gets into the whole sticky situation of the ethics that you program into an AI. I can see lots of problems if you program in something like the "Survival of the fittest". Humans are sometimes not very fit. Suddenly some version of Asimovs Laws of Robotics, and other versions of Ethical systems become very relevant.

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I think that the Unmanned tanks are going to require a substantial advance in AI. The best research along the line of computer controlled vehicles is probably covered in this Slash article about the Man vs Machine Challenge Web Site, where the research challeng is to have an trully independent AI controlled Formula One Race Car win a Formula One Race. That is something that is going to be difficult on any day. But the research of learning to handle such a turbulent environment would be usefull for things like tanks that are linked to terrain.

The combat problem of aircraft is actually a simpler problem in some regards, because generally everything can be better mapped to a certain degree. Long range sensors give an added edge as well.

The combat problem with a tank involves far more as far as obstacles goes, plus the problem of identifying friend or foe in dealing with combatents. With aircraft this is dealt with by certain automated communications protocols. This is far harder to do on the ground. How do you identity civilians, etc?

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Aside from the troll aspects of the p[ost, I know of a number of people in different parts of the country who had a decent life, then all the yuppies (or whatever you call them these days) moved in and messed it up. Often all the locals are screwed over and forced to move out before the yuppies market crashes.

I have seen it in a number of areas of the country. Heck even in SF, where you can have studio apartment for thousands per month. Shear insanity. talk about herd mentality (we are all individuals!)

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Funny you should compare genetic manipulation to coding.

I can imagine the bug reports. But how do you learn to code into something like that?

"the system was allright, but the Data processing subsystem had a tendency to crash after sex." "It's as designed - mark as will not fix"

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The children were born following a technique called ooplasmic transfer. This involves taking some of the contents of the donor cell and injecting it into the egg cell of a woman with infertility problems.

So I guess this means that gene splicing, etc was NOT involved. And what they did was to add mitochonria from one person into the cells of another.

Sort of similar to replacing whole chromosomes, though that could be the next step.

Sort of like hacking code by replacing whole sections of code. This should be safe, as far as the children goes.

But the can of worms it opens...

I do not mind it by itself, it is just that I do not know of any agency that I would feel comfortable in trusting with this sort of thing.

That, ultimately, is the problem. Who do you trust?

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this bit in the article is interesting:

Maryland legislators recognized quickly why exempting Open Source software from the mandated warranties made sense, Webbink says. "How do you impose a warranty on some hacker who's in Romania, written a piece of the code, and given it away for free?"

So that is one angle.

I am more concerned about the "self-help" section which seems to allow software companies to shut down software if the user doesn't pay the license fee by a deadline. But Ianal, etc.

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With increasing levels of complexity you get increasing levels of functionality. You also get more things that break. You have to make sure that the underpinningsa are set correctly. When they are not, then watch out.

[Insert snide comment here] Take a look at that pinnacle of Object Oriented Programming, Microsoft Office

That cheap shot aside, The ramp up to a level of truly competent understanding is much longer than anticipated. The problem is that often OOP can give the appearance of competancy to those not in the know, but you still have the same problems that you had before, that can be much more difficult to find, if you are not expert

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There is this bit from the article that no-one has commented on yet:

It will be interesting to see how the RIAA reacts [if this laws passes], either by claiming that Denmark violates international law, or by trying to get .dk banned altogether, or both. Perhaps they will lobby to change the law in such a fashion that access to file sharing and MP3 sites / networks must be forbidden for foreigners.

Maybe the RIAA will advocate the US declare war on Denmark for threatening the dominance of american culture. Or try to ban the internet because it is such a threat to their way of life (greed)

In general, I like the fact that more and more major artisits are starting to side with the Napster side of the argument, seeing how the major labels are abusing the artists they say they are protecting.

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Apparently the car is done in cooperation with Rinspeed - [English page here] They have a frames menu, but the Advantige R is there under the concept cars, with far more detail (with specs!) than in the original story.

The Concept car page is here (broken out of the frame).

Photos too. very much worth checking out.

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LOL

If you look at where the money is, you can see that many monied interests wanted to improve things for themselves, often with no regard for others [I am positively shocked by this idea! Aren't You? Say it isn't so!]

Take a look at this summary of Psychology and Industrial Efficiency by Hugo Münsterberg (1913). As Münsterberg himself put it: 'We ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in the interest of business.' This is not unusual for that period.

In a modern context we have the example of the microserfs and Microdroids, as seen here

Even during the DotCom Craze we have examples of the tremdous loyalty seen at one time at Amazon.com, as documented on slash here (Original site here) Another example are the Romans who prosecuted anyone who who not do pagan sacrifice for the cult of the Emperor (the state). This was bad news for the Christians for a while.

Bottom line, the cult of the current belief systems, as expressed by the dominant powers, hates anyone who would or could be a threat to them. This applies to Romans, business men, the Spanish Inquisition, politicians, and for that matter whatever clique of individuals that has control in an area.

Of course taking this too far, what we do is discredit ideals like friendship and loyalty. Who deserves your loyalty and friendship, ever? Who indeed?

To only see the mechanism in the thing you love to hate most is small minded indeed.

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Unfortunately, we have to stop this discussion now. We've been Godwinned!

LOL! I had completely forgotten about that. That's a riot.

Question is, of course, is if the basics of propoganda, as detailed above, are in fact relevant when talking about Microsoft.

Or do we automatically turn a blind eye to the abuse if it bears some resemblance to those tried and true historical examples?

The trap here is that if we turn a blind eye, then we permit the abuse we abhore happen again. But of course, we can over-react.

The best reaction is to determine the truth, and recognize that some people could use those techniques one way or another, especially if their intent is to destroy.

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As seen here, and here and many other places, the basic techniques is to overcome your enemy by constantly redefining the terms used to describe them.

For example, the original purposes of the mental health industry were to help government and big business control populations and to control markets. The classic historical example of this is Nazi Germany.

After the war, many companies wanted to make use of the techniques to improve their markets, politicians wanted to advance their causes etc, all taking a page or two for the Nazi play book. But they did not want the stench of the association.

Now we all know that these are honorable men, and that these end goals of control and manipulation have been set aside by the vast majority of governments and organizations around the world.

But here and there we see a hint of the old technique. You redefine the word. You include just enough of the truth, and twist it with a lie, that it requires a sophisticated understanding to spot what is wrong.

to quote Hitler (full chapter here): given variously as (depending on translation:" ... all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan." (or alternatively) "... an effective propaganda has to limit itself to just a few points and must keep repeating them in the form of catch phrases for as long as it takes to have ascertained that even the very last person understands under these words what one wants him to understand." The full chapter makes fascinating reading, especially when comparing it to MS Marketing FUD and tactics.

Ultimately a lie *will* backfire, however, because people see through it and hate you for it. It may take a while, a long time.

Therefore the best PR campiagn is not based in lies, but is uses real truths.

But the MS marketroids resort to twisting and distorting the facts

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It would have been wonderful for this to have shown up in a slash poll, with extra commentary here.

but this would have been forethought in action.

Is this just a little much to hope for?

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