Not to mention comic books were most popular in the 1940s and 1950s. The average successful comic book today has barely a fraction of the circulation a successful comic book did in 1940.
Whenever someone brings up the "Ah! Kids can hear swearing! Aiiieeee!!!!" meme, I bring out this story from my own childhood.
When I was in middle school, I spent a week working at a cub scout day camp. I think I was around 12 or 13 at the time. The adults warned us that we had to watch our language around the cubs (who were probably around 8 or 9), because they didn't want the kids picking up any bad words from us. They needn't have bothered. The kids were far more foul-mouthed around us than we were amongst ourselves, and actually managed to shock us. This was in the late 1980s.
Kids don't need TV, movies, video games or the Internet to learn bad words. They learn them from their friends at school, or they learn them from parents, or from neighbor kids.
There was a B.C. comic strip a few years ago that I thought illustrated this point well: Two kids (well, ants) walk into the room, one crying, "Mom, he said the Z-word!" The parents send the kid to his room, then have this brief conversation: "Where'd the little %@#&! learn the Z-word?" "Beats the #@*$ out of me."
I suspect they hate Flash not even for what it does, but for what's done with it.
I mean, there are four main objections I've heard to Flash:
1. It's proprietary. 2. It's an extra software requirement. 3. It's annoying. 4. It's inaccessible.
#1, as you suggest, is limited to the subset that is opposed philosophically to proprietary software.
#2 applies to people who can't install it. Maybe they're running Linux on PowerPC, maybe their sysadmin refuses to install it. (Consider an office environment running thin clients connecting to a terminal server. To conserve bandwidth and server resources, the sysadmin might want to limit things like sound, animation, and unnecessary plugins.)
#3 and #4 are mostly a matter of what the website developer has chosen to do with the tool. Compare punch-the-monkey ads to the menus on macromedia.com, for instance, or to a Flash-based media site that's only targeting the people who like that type of site.
If a developer wants to, he can create an accessible, non-annoying site using Flash. A little extra effort can provide HTML-only fallbacks for people in catgory 2. The major problems -- unless you insist on only Free (with a captial F) software -- can all be eliminated by the people creating the site.
The Hawaiian islands gets hit almost as badly as Australia. Sometimes it's accidental introduction -- there's a frog species overrunning some areas and causing serious noise pollution with their croaking -- and sometimes it's deliberate but misguided. People introduced the mongoose to control the rat population. Not only did they not take care of the rats (they forgot to take into account different nesting habits and day/night cycle), but they proceeded to infest the islands themselves.
Like Australia, Hawaii is geographically isolated. Species thrive without competition, but when a more competitive species arrives, it has an easy time taking over.
On the other hand, Australia has been isolated for a lot longer than Hawaii has existed, so while Hawaii is populated by successive waves of immigrating species going back thousands of years, Australia's got millions of years' worth of native species that haven't had to deal much with foreigners until a few hundred years ago.
Interesting to note that they've released Camino 1.0 as a universal binary.
I believe this makes it only the third released browser to run natively on Intel Macs. Safari was naturally the first, followed by Shiira a few weeks ago.
The Opera 9 previews have been universal, so we can expect native support when that's released (anyone know when?), and Firefox should be there with the next bugfix/stability release, 1.5.0.2, due (IIRC) in mid-to-late March. Strangely, OmniWeb is still PowerPC only, even though the rest of OmniGroup's lineup has universal binaries already.
The idea at the time was for red to indicate known phishing sites, yellow to indicate suspected phishing sites, and green to indicate a site that was both secure and trusted (though they hadn't worked out the criteria for a trusted site at the time). Normal SSL sites would show the lock, business name, and CA, but would have an ordinary white background.
Presumably a phishing site with SSL would either be red with the lock or just red (since the lock and business name show up in the same place as the shield and "Phishing site!"). This is conjecture, though, because I'm not willing to point my copy of IE at a known phishing site just to see what it does!
Many people think that an SSL certificate somehow guarantees a trustful vendor.
This is the result of years of advertising by cert authorities, Verisign in particular.
Admittedly, Verisign used to make a much greater effort to verify their clients than GeoTrust or Thawte. (This may or may not have changed.) I remember having to provide Verisign with business IDs, wait a month for them to verify things, go back and forth with address corrections, etc.
These days you can have an SSL cert up and running in less than an hour. If you give GeoTrust a valid phone number and you can answer it, you're pretty much set.
No, but a lot of people still have the silly idea that phishing is only as sophisticated as it was 2 years ago, back when it was plaintext, full of misspellings, and sent you to an IP or a GeoCities page.
Back then, it was hard to imagine people getting fooled by the crude "Send me yore passwerd" level of "attacks" -- and yet people fell victim to it just the same. These days, they're polished enough that you basically have to assume any email that claims to be from your bank is forged, then examine it and try to prove otherwise.
But clicking HTML links is compltely irrelevant to this particular case. The problem was they used a similar domain name and got an SSL cert in the name of the target institution.
This phish could've been pulled off just as easily in plaintext.
The Internet Storm Center did a write-up on this case inclusing a hypothetical tale of Joe Sixpack trying to verify the phish, doing (almost) everything right -- typing in the address instead of clicking on the link, checking for an SSL certificate, checking who the cert is registered to, etc, and still getting caught.
The fatal flaw in the hypothetical course of action is trusting the non-standard domain name...but you can hardly blame Joe Sixpack for that one when so many financial institutions actually use one-off domains or partner sites. I was working on some phishing rules last year and counted something like 5 domains that Citibank used alone.
Agreed, it's hardly secret. I knew this 10 years ago and assumed it was general knowledge. I even worked this into the FAQ for a mailing list I started 6 years ago.
Of course, like all "general knowlegde," there's always the risk that it's actually "general assumption." It's interesting to see it confirmed.
At church, during a quiet time, a hip-worn cell vibrating against a Wooden Pew makes a lot of noise... During one of my MBA classes, one guys phone was always vibrating, and it was distracting. Especially during exams.
Reminds me of some of my college classmates.
One had a pager that was louder on vibrate than on sound. The case was loose and couldn't be tightened.
Then there was the friend whose office desk started vibrating mysteriously, because the phone sitting on the desk was still on vibrate.
When it comes down to it, sound is vibration. The difference is just that one mode vibrates a speaker, designed to get the air going, and another vibrates the case. Put that case on any sort of sounding board, and you get noise.
The terms "graphic novel" and "comic book" refer to both format and genre. If someone talks about a "comic book movie," chances are they mean X-Men or Superman and not Ghost World, Road to Perdition, or A History of Violence. This leads to ambiguity in just what the terms actually mean.
I can't bring myself to call anything made up of 22 pages stapled together a "graphic novel," no matter how serious, but a 150-page hardcover or trade paperback? Maybe. I'm more inclined if it's all one long story, especially if it's original. I guess I'm thinking of an individual comic book as a short story, and something like Sandman: The Kindly Ones (which took 13 issues to tell serialized) as novel-length.
That said, I've recently started looking at comics from the 1940s, and there were tons of these 100-page anthologies on newsprint. Those were unambiguously comic books. Same with the 200-300-page hardcover Archive editions DC puts out. Or the 500-page Marvel Essentials or DC's Showcase Presents lines.
Even for people who actually distinguish between "comic books" and "graphic novels," the line is fuzzy.
Back in 2004, Microsoft announced that Longhorn would automatically detect a computer's graphics capability and show one of three GUIs: Aero, Aero Glass (the really high-end interface) or a classic Win2K-style interface.
This new article doesn't actually say the PCs won't be able to run Vista, but that they won't be able to take advantage of Aero Glass. It doesn't mention the three tiers of interface, but it does say this:
"When [a] user sees a system running Vista on a PC with integrated graphics, and then sees Vista on a PC with a powerful graphics [board] in it, there will be no discussion -- they will go for the better looking system if they can possibly afford it," Peddie said in a statement.
Sounds like one in two machines will be stuck with classic. Or maybe even some of those will get the mid-level GUI. But it doesn't say they won't be able to run the OS.
OK, here's a terrible thought: A video game tie-in to The Passion of the Christ. And since it would be insensitive for the player to play Jesus, the player takes on the roles of Pilate, Roman guards, etc. It'll be violent enough for the usual FPS crowd, but since it's in service of religion, it must be okay, right?
Where does "knowledgeable about" end, and "vested interest" begin?
At the point where you remove/downplay inconvenient truths and play up flattering opinions. And if you get as far as adding fiction, you're way past the line.
It's a conflict of interest issue. You can't be sure whether someone will set aside their interest to make a decision objectively, so you put policies in place to remove the temptation. You see it all the time in local governments where someone has to resign from a committee or abstain from a vote because they own property in an area that's under consideration for being re-zoned, or something similar.
The question is what Wikipedia should do about this. Is it better to remove the temptation, or is it better to keep an eye on the articles and use other pressures to limit/repair the damage?
I thought you were supposed to be the people from the land of the free and whatnot, really suspicious of government intrusion into people's lives, et cetera.
We're more concerned with interference than intrusion. Of course, most people are more concerned with interference in their *own* lives than interference in someone else's.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention comic books were most popular in the 1940s and 1950s. The average successful comic book today has barely a fraction of the circulation a successful comic book did in 1940.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Taunting your opponents as a means to defeating them... Why do I have the urge to tell someone, "How appropriate. You fight like a cow."
Whenever someone brings up the "Ah! Kids can hear swearing! Aiiieeee!!!!" meme, I bring out this story from my own childhood.
When I was in middle school, I spent a week working at a cub scout day camp. I think I was around 12 or 13 at the time. The adults warned us that we had to watch our language around the cubs (who were probably around 8 or 9), because they didn't want the kids picking up any bad words from us. They needn't have bothered. The kids were far more foul-mouthed around us than we were amongst ourselves, and actually managed to shock us. This was in the late 1980s.
Kids don't need TV, movies, video games or the Internet to learn bad words. They learn them from their friends at school, or they learn them from parents, or from neighbor kids.
There was a B.C. comic strip a few years ago that I thought illustrated this point well: Two kids (well, ants) walk into the room, one crying, "Mom, he said the Z-word!" The parents send the kid to his room, then have this brief conversation: "Where'd the little %@#&! learn the Z-word?" "Beats the #@*$ out of me."
Or is it only the ridiculous Dvorak articles that get posted on Slashdot?
Apple will adopt Windows? I didn't realize Windows had been orphaned. Is it in foster care? What happened to its parents?
I suspect they hate Flash not even for what it does, but for what's done with it.
I mean, there are four main objections I've heard to Flash:
1. It's proprietary.
2. It's an extra software requirement.
3. It's annoying.
4. It's inaccessible.
#1, as you suggest, is limited to the subset that is opposed philosophically to proprietary software.
#2 applies to people who can't install it. Maybe they're running Linux on PowerPC, maybe their sysadmin refuses to install it. (Consider an office environment running thin clients connecting to a terminal server. To conserve bandwidth and server resources, the sysadmin might want to limit things like sound, animation, and unnecessary plugins.)
#3 and #4 are mostly a matter of what the website developer has chosen to do with the tool. Compare punch-the-monkey ads to the menus on macromedia.com, for instance, or to a Flash-based media site that's only targeting the people who like that type of site.
If a developer wants to, he can create an accessible, non-annoying site using Flash. A little extra effort can provide HTML-only fallbacks for people in catgory 2. The major problems -- unless you insist on only Free (with a captial F) software -- can all be eliminated by the people creating the site.
The Hawaiian islands gets hit almost as badly as Australia. Sometimes it's accidental introduction -- there's a frog species overrunning some areas and causing serious noise pollution with their croaking -- and sometimes it's deliberate but misguided. People introduced the mongoose to control the rat population. Not only did they not take care of the rats (they forgot to take into account different nesting habits and day/night cycle), but they proceeded to infest the islands themselves.
Like Australia, Hawaii is geographically isolated. Species thrive without competition, but when a more competitive species arrives, it has an easy time taking over.
On the other hand, Australia has been isolated for a lot longer than Hawaii has existed, so while Hawaii is populated by successive waves of immigrating species going back thousands of years, Australia's got millions of years' worth of native species that haven't had to deal much with foreigners until a few hundred years ago.
At least, it has been according to the unofficial 1.5 changelog. The list of Mac-specific bugs fixed includes:
Interesting to note that they've released Camino 1.0 as a universal binary.
I believe this makes it only the third released browser to run natively on Intel Macs. Safari was naturally the first, followed by Shiira a few weeks ago.
The Opera 9 previews have been universal, so we can expect native support when that's released (anyone know when?), and Firefox should be there with the next bugfix/stability release, 1.5.0.2, due (IIRC) in mid-to-late March. Strangely, OmniWeb is still PowerPC only, even though the rest of OmniGroup's lineup has universal binaries already.
Let's try this again: Camino 1.0 Release Notes
The link in the story appears broken. Here's the actual ,a href="http://www.caminobrowser.org/releases/1.0.ph p">Camino 1.0 release notes
Here's the way it was described in the big anti-phishing browser summit with Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and KDE:7 .aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/11/21/49550
The idea at the time was for red to indicate known phishing sites, yellow to indicate suspected phishing sites, and green to indicate a site that was both secure and trusted (though they hadn't worked out the criteria for a trusted site at the time). Normal SSL sites would show the lock, business name, and CA, but would have an ordinary white background.
Presumably a phishing site with SSL would either be red with the lock or just red (since the lock and business name show up in the same place as the shield and "Phishing site!"). This is conjecture, though, because I'm not willing to point my copy of IE at a known phishing site just to see what it does!
Many people think that an SSL certificate somehow guarantees a trustful vendor.
This is the result of years of advertising by cert authorities, Verisign in particular.
Admittedly, Verisign used to make a much greater effort to verify their clients than GeoTrust or Thawte. (This may or may not have changed.) I remember having to provide Verisign with business IDs, wait a month for them to verify things, go back and forth with address corrections, etc.
These days you can have an SSL cert up and running in less than an hour. If you give GeoTrust a valid phone number and you can answer it, you're pretty much set.
No, but a lot of people still have the silly idea that phishing is only as sophisticated as it was 2 years ago, back when it was plaintext, full of misspellings, and sent you to an IP or a GeoCities page.
Back then, it was hard to imagine people getting fooled by the crude "Send me yore passwerd" level of "attacks" -- and yet people fell victim to it just the same. These days, they're polished enough that you basically have to assume any email that claims to be from your bank is forged, then examine it and try to prove otherwise.
But clicking HTML links is compltely irrelevant to this particular case. The problem was they used a similar domain name and got an SSL cert in the name of the target institution.
This phish could've been pulled off just as easily in plaintext.
The Internet Storm Center did a write-up on this case inclusing a hypothetical tale of Joe Sixpack trying to verify the phish, doing (almost) everything right -- typing in the address instead of clicking on the link, checking for an SSL certificate, checking who the cert is registered to, etc, and still getting caught.
The fatal flaw in the hypothetical course of action is trusting the non-standard domain name...but you can hardly blame Joe Sixpack for that one when so many financial institutions actually use one-off domains or partner sites. I was working on some phishing rules last year and counted something like 5 domains that Citibank used alone.
Agreed, it's hardly secret. I knew this 10 years ago and assumed it was general knowledge. I even worked this into the FAQ for a mailing list I started 6 years ago.
Of course, like all "general knowlegde," there's always the risk that it's actually "general assumption." It's interesting to see it confirmed.
At church, during a quiet time, a hip-worn cell vibrating against a Wooden Pew makes a lot of noise...
During one of my MBA classes, one guys phone was always vibrating, and it was distracting. Especially during exams.
Reminds me of some of my college classmates.
One had a pager that was louder on vibrate than on sound. The case was loose and couldn't be tightened.
Then there was the friend whose office desk started vibrating mysteriously, because the phone sitting on the desk was still on vibrate.
When it comes down to it, sound is vibration. The difference is just that one mode vibrates a speaker, designed to get the air going, and another vibrates the case. Put that case on any sort of sounding board, and you get noise.
The terms "graphic novel" and "comic book" refer to both format and genre. If someone talks about a "comic book movie," chances are they mean X-Men or Superman and not Ghost World, Road to Perdition, or A History of Violence. This leads to ambiguity in just what the terms actually mean.
I can't bring myself to call anything made up of 22 pages stapled together a "graphic novel," no matter how serious, but a 150-page hardcover or trade paperback? Maybe. I'm more inclined if it's all one long story, especially if it's original. I guess I'm thinking of an individual comic book as a short story, and something like Sandman: The Kindly Ones (which took 13 issues to tell serialized) as novel-length.
That said, I've recently started looking at comics from the 1940s, and there were tons of these 100-page anthologies on newsprint. Those were unambiguously comic books. Same with the 200-300-page hardcover Archive editions DC puts out. Or the 500-page Marvel Essentials or DC's Showcase Presents lines.
Even for people who actually distinguish between "comic books" and "graphic novels," the line is fuzzy.
...tried to replace the term "text adventure." Of course, in that case I think they wanted to hide the word "Text."
Back in 2004, Microsoft announced that Longhorn would automatically detect a computer's graphics capability and show one of three GUIs: Aero, Aero Glass (the really high-end interface) or a classic Win2K-style interface.
This new article doesn't actually say the PCs won't be able to run Vista, but that they won't be able to take advantage of Aero Glass. It doesn't mention the three tiers of interface, but it does say this:
Sounds like one in two machines will be stuck with classic. Or maybe even some of those will get the mid-level GUI. But it doesn't say they won't be able to run the OS.
OK, here's a terrible thought: A video game tie-in to The Passion of the Christ. And since it would be insensitive for the player to play Jesus, the player takes on the roles of Pilate, Roman guards, etc. It'll be violent enough for the usual FPS crowd, but since it's in service of religion, it must be okay, right?
Where does "knowledgeable about" end, and "vested interest" begin?
At the point where you remove/downplay inconvenient truths and play up flattering opinions. And if you get as far as adding fiction, you're way past the line.
It's a conflict of interest issue. You can't be sure whether someone will set aside their interest to make a decision objectively, so you put policies in place to remove the temptation. You see it all the time in local governments where someone has to resign from a committee or abstain from a vote because they own property in an area that's under consideration for being re-zoned, or something similar.
The question is what Wikipedia should do about this. Is it better to remove the temptation, or is it better to keep an eye on the articles and use other pressures to limit/repair the damage?
I thought you were supposed to be the people from the land of the free and whatnot, really suspicious of government intrusion into people's lives, et cetera.
We're more concerned with interference than intrusion. Of course, most people are more concerned with interference in their *own* lives than interference in someone else's.