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Chilean scientists have determined that a 12-meter mass
of flesh discovered recently on a Pacific beach is actually CmdrTaco.

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There is no direct Internet in North Korea except for one, tiny cybercafe that costs around a years salary for three minutes and is open to foreigners only.. A person I know who travels regularly to North Korea tells me that effectively there is no Internet in North Korea. The colleges have an 'intranet' of sorts, but it is not connected to the outside world. There are no sites in the world that use North Korea's Internet domain.. Read The Official Propaganda In The DPRK: Ideas And Methods and The Repressive System And The Political Control In North Korea

Both types of firewall are needed - and with new ways for malicious apps to piggyback onto legitimate ones like Firehole, an up-to-date personal firewall that can handle DLL injection (I believe the latest ZoneAlarm does as does version 2 of Outpost - currently in beta) should be thought of as a necessary companion to the corporate firewall. An application firewall like System Safety Monitor should also be considered - properly configured this can stop any spyware in its tracks.

Finally, restricting Active Content (ActiveX, Javascript and Java) to only a few "trusted" sites will do a great deal to prevent users from being affected by drive-by downloads, home page hijacking and various other forms of malware. A good reference on these can be found at Eric Howes' Privacy and Security Site.

In Soviet Russia, locks pick you!

It may not have made the article because: A.) It was primarily sold in Japan, and B.) It was more of a premature "digital convergance" box than a pure game machine per se. A co-production with Bandai, the Pippin used a PowerPC 603 processor and a slimmed-down version of Apple OS.

Information on this system is surprisingly hard to come by for a machine released in the mid-1990s, but here's an ancient page listing the specshttp://karx.narod.ru/tmegames/pippin.html.

And another link from a retrogaming site: http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Apple_Bandai_pippin/a pple_bandai_pippin.html.

Release dates do play a big part in who buys what system, but Nintendo doesn't sound like it's accounting for why or how their consumers make decisions to pick a console! Honestly if they had released the GameCube closer to the unveiling of the Playstation 2, how many more sales would they have generated? How many additional impulsive buys would that have accounted for? How many people would still buy the Playstation 2 for GTA?

The biggest question on the minds of my friends back in '95 was, "Do I buy a Sega Saturn now, wait for Sony's first console system, or preorder an N64?"

My buddies started to fall in to three distinct camps. First there were the impatient gamers that wanted to satisfy a fix right now! Naturally they snatched up the Saturn and voiced no regrets. The next bunch were the tech savvy spec hunting gamers that assumed the market would follow whichever system had the best hardware (please don't remind me of the 3DO). Even after the Playstation was released, and it was becoming obvious that Nintendo was going to take a lot longer to ship, there were still countless people that I knew that stuck with the philosophy that if Nintendo was taking it's time to do things right it was probably worth it to wait for their system(even if it meant waiting another year)! Last, but not least, there's the slow-to-let-go, trend-following fan-boys-and-girls that were too leary to fork over hundreds of dollars to a company that was just getting it's feet wet in the game biz. As would be expected the last bunch became product loyalists, either standing devoutely behind Nintendo and their SNES's or advocating the virtues of buying the already-here Sega Saturn system. To be fair, there were those that just wanted to wait to see which developers would sign up with which systems. And others who just wanted to make sure that the system they bought had GOOD games worth playing, developers be damned! That's probably another camp or two entirely, but who's counting?

So you have players operating on indulgence/instant-gratification, product superiority, product loyalty, the number of developers backing the console (which probably has it's roots in the adage, "a 1000 monkeys all banging away at a 1000 keyboards for a 1000 years, and eventually you have to get something good"), and what seems most important, IMHO, GOOD titles worth playing.

It just rather irked me that Iwata sounded so desperately clueless in this interview! Yes, getting it out the door sooner would be great, as long as you don't compromise any of the other things needed to sustain your system! Duh! If they're trying to finger why their sales are low they should look towards their software and hardware. For having spent as long as they did to release, they only surpass the PS2 by a foot on the yard stick.

Essentially, the embryonic stem cells have failed to produce very promising results because of rejection or tumor formation (in many cases). Adult stem cells, which are pluripotential (not totipotential), have no rejection problems because they are autologously donated. Searching Google on "bone marrow stem cells" produces a variety of results, like this plea for funding from a Russian biologist: Why cloning? or this from Science Daily or Bone Marrow Stem Cells can become almost anything.

However, around six months ago I read a horiffic account of her six years in the North Korean prison system by a woman named Soon Ok-Lee and I was so appaled and so angry that something like this could go on on this planet that I suddenly became very interested in North Korea. I have a lot I'd like to share, so please forgive me if this post is quite 'information dense'.

First, I'd encourage all of you to read Ms. Lee's account. There is a condensed version of it at this URL (caution, not for children.. it may even give you adults nightmares..)

US Senate Testimony of Ms. Soon Ok Lee North Korean prison camp survivor

There are many other defector testimonies available too. They make fascinating if chilling reading, as does anything having to do with North Korea. All I can say is that North Korea is an enigma of sorts. An entire country operated like a cult. It is a cult in which to question the insane narcissistic ruler Kim Jong-Il is often to die. You dont believe me? Read her story!

Which brings me to the reason why I am posting. Kim Jong-Il's hold on North Korea, I think, is fragile. It depends on a very tight "blockade on information' coming in to the country. Can Slashdot readers think of any way to get news of the outside into North Korea ? Because if we could.. we could rid the world of a madman comparable to PolPot or Hitler or Stalin..

For some background on NK's techniques of control, read the following:

The Official Propaganda In The DPRK: Ideas And Methods

The Repressive System And The Political Control In North Korea

Here are some other resources: Two other defectors stories..

http://monthly.chosun.com/html/200201/200201280001 _1.html

http://monthly.chosun.com/html/200006/200006130003 _1.html

NK Human Rights website

North Korea's strategy

Anyway, please check them out, and please do something for human rights in North Korea today. They are human beings like ourselves and they are suffering.

I daresay that any of us outspoken geeks who found ourself suddenly transplanted into North Korea would soon find ourself in the position Ms. Lee. found herself in. Except that she lived and we would die for that ill-considered remark. She was one of the only people to ever be released from an NK death camp. She risked (and is risking) her life to tell her story.. Maybe we can help in some way.. Breaking the blockade of information coming into North Korea would help destabilize Kim Jong-Il. With all the technology available to the West, there has to be away.. And it would be nonviolent, since eventually HIS OWN PEOPLE would kill him..

He is one of the most evil people who have ever lived. Dont fall for the lies.. He is fooling so many people... he will never 'open up' he is afraid the world would find out about his crimes and NK's 'killing fields'. It is all an act. A lie.

One idea I had was to float toilet paper into North Korea on leaky balloons.. Most North Koreans have never seen toilet paper. Lets show them that the rest of the world is not trying to kill them. We want to help free them.

I know it's not the latest, but I found the WinME source code on the net a few months ago.

• Biryukov and Shamir cryptanalysis of A5/1 GSM privacy algorithm
• Discussion on cracking A5/1
• Cryptome's copy of the A5 algorithm (PS format)

geocities had nasty popups before so I created another site here and instantly realized geosities had fixed. Well, let it live just in case MS would dare to sue /. again.
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