He specifically noted that it was the only thing he's ever driven that accelerates even when you stomp on the brakes.
It's like the punchline from the old joke: "Yeah, I've had brakes like that too."
I've seen brake shoes that came out of an ordinary car that came off a high speed race track after an hour of the hardest driving a street car will ever see. (A friend of mine is a high-speed driving instructor.) Honest to god, they were bent like bananas. There's a circular depression deep in the middle where the brake piston was mashing them into the brake discs, and both ends are bent out over half an inch away from the discs. He got off the track early because the brakes felt kind of mushy.
Even with only about 4 square inches of pad in contact with glowing orange discs, he brought the car to a stop. If this guy in his brand new car couldn't stand on the brakes and bring it to a halt, he was joyriding. Even if they were "mushy", driving without the brakes for about five minutes at those speeds would have cooled them down enough to stop fast.
Back in 1981, my wife had an old rust-bomb '71 Cadillac Coupe de Ville that had a runaway cruise control module. (She called it "possessed".) Sometimes, it would just decide it wasn't going fast enough, so it accelerated all by itself.
Now, picture combining that failure with a failure in the brake pedal sensor switch. You've got a cruise control trying to bring you up to speed, and no feedback telling it to disconnect. Of course, in that old behemoth there was a mechanical "on/off" switch for the cruise control allowing the driver to simply shut it off. It was still very, very surprising though to feel the acceleration, look down and see 80 MPH and rising.
These were all discrete circuits, long before the era of computers. Now in this Renault, if there is an "on/off" switch, it's no more effective than pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del on a hung PC. It's very easy to see how a couple of simultaneous failures could allow this to happen. What's harder to see is how an engineer could allow such a crappy, unsafe, non-redundant design to ever make it to prototype stage, let alone a production vehicle. If I lived in France, I'd seriously have to think very hard before purchasing another Renault ever again. (Here, in the States, it's easy to promise never to buy one, but it may be harder to follow through on this promise if you're French and it's your "national" brand.)
That was my point. What if he didn't actually did lose control of his vehicle? What if he was just out for a joyride in his new sweet chariot and figured out a clever way to get the cops to make a hole for him instead of jailing his speeding ass?
I've had a stuck throttle before. It was -20 degrees in Minnesota in a parking lot at night, and the thing was literally frozen open. It was indeed scary -- it took several seconds of panic before I figured out to shut off the vehicle. Once I had it stopped, I was able to pry the throttle closed, and idled the engine for a few minutes to thaw it out. If this really was a case of runaway throttle, I feel bad for him. But if he just claimed it to scam some free ride time from the cops (dirtying Renault's name in the process) then he should get time off from the Graybar Hotel just to watch the impound lot crush his wheels into sheet metal.
Yeah, you're missing something. The unreported parts of this conversation:
You: Hello, police? Oh my god, my cruise control is stuck at full throttle! Help!
Police: Stay calm, sir. Can you shift to neutral?
You: No, and I can't shut it off! Help!
Police: We'll send officers to clear the road, sir. Remain calm, keep on the freeway.
You: Thanks, I'll call back if I need more help. [click]
You: YEEEEEEEHAAAAAWWWWW!!!!!!!! I'm goin' 120 MPH and the cops are clearing the road for me! How sweet is that?!?!?!
You mean like the "FBI WARNING" at the front of every video tape and DVD I've rented in the last decade? Or the "No broadcast, rebroadcast or retransmission is allowed without the express written consent of Major League Baseball" line uttered at the start of every baseball game? I'm not sure those are all that useful.
The biggest problem I have with those messages are the people that would heed their warnings are those that would have done the right thing anyway.
Here's a better idea. How about a "Surgeon General's Warning" style rectangle right on the face of the bills that says something like this:
TREASURY SECRETARY'S WARNING: COPYING MONEY
IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE THAT CARRIES A PENALTY OF
20 YEARS IN FEDERAL POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS PRISON!
I think that would be far more effective at getting their message out than implementing funky image-detecting software.
Virus writers aren't the only threat. They're just the visible threat.
How do you think the really bad organized criminal types get into banking computers or credit systems? They use the same exploits virus writers use, only they have a vested interest in keeping those exploits secret. The longer the vulnerability remains secret, the longer the bad guys can continue to use them.
Virus writers point out those exploits in a dramatic way that results in patches being released quickly.
Are you familiar with how a medical vaccine works? The patient is exposed to a non-lethal form of infection, and their immune system learns how to respond. Then, once the patient has recoverd, if he encounters the lethal form of the infection his immune system uses that previously gained knowledge to fight it off before it spreads. The analogy is similar: if web site operators are hit with "non-lethal" viruses, they evenutally may plug the holes that the truly malicious robbers had been using.
As much as nobody likes to admit it, the virus writers are "helping" security in this roundabout way. It's the dark, annoying, but sometimes necessary side of full disclosure.
That said, if the freakin' Sasser worm writer ever sets foot in front of my truck, I'm putting it in 4WD and hitting the gas.
Well, it won't stop open source users unless they download and install the GIMP Currency Blocker Plugin. I heard someone posted a diff that would disable it, too.:-)
All joking aside, they're not looking to "stop" all copying with this measure at this time. They're looking at it statistically: if 50% of the population is too stupid to change their default screensaver, that same 50% won't be aware that there's an alternative to commercial photo editing software. That means they are probably hoping for a 50% reduction in 'casual' counterfeiting.
It's also been theorized that recognition of the so-called "Eurion" constellation will be built into a new generation of scanners. So, if you own one of these scanners, you won't have the opportunity to download the raw image anyway -- you'll be stopped by the firmware in the scanner. Xerox was also testing printer technology that would refuse to emit a printout that contained the Eurion constellation.
It actually makes a lot of sense from the governments' point of view. If you're Joe Sixpack and decide to "print your own lunch money" and get busted for it, you get to spend up to 20 years in a Federal prison for counterfeiting. That's the exact same sentence they'd hand out to a Mafioso who may have set up an intaglio printing press and was printing hundreds of thousands per week.
If someone is so stupid as to try printing counterfeit money, then maybe a simple, stupid technological speed-bump is all it will take to keep him out of prison. And from their point of view, that's worth it.
That's interesting, but what does that do for exception handling? It seems to me that it could interfere with exceptions thrown deep in the code that are expected to be caught at a level much farther up?
I'm not a Java guy, so maybe I'm not catching all the nuances of the try/finally construct. It just looks like it could cause unwanted behavior.
We have a different problem. Our software is widely distributed around our corporation, through sometimes slow networks. We can't remotely debug, but we're expected to have an answer for every software failing. Logging is the best way we've found to be able to determine root causes.
Crash dumps only go so far. They're good for picking apart a program that crashed, but many errors are logic errors: being asked to add X+l (lower case L) and having the coder write X+1 (digit one) won't crash a program, but it won't always produce correct results, either. And it's very difficult to find when the lower case 'L' usually contains the value one anyway, except in these critical error situations. Logging lets us examine snapshots of the internal state at critical points in the execution. It also gives us flow, which answers questions such as: what did the user type, when did they type it, and "how many fricking times did they hit the damned enter key??? Idiots!"
And yeah, we've got a lot of people who can't read dumps. We have a few who apparently never learned the difference between hex and decimal. It's becoming obvious to me that schools are not emphasising the machine level of programming any more, but focusing only on the highest level of languages. There are degreed java coders coming out now who barely understand what byte code is, let alone the fact that a virtual machine still has to interpret that data before a CPU can execute it.
Of course, that's just my crotchety old-guy opinion. I could be wrong.
He needs the length of the buffer to pass the size to the.write() method. By calling strlen() he avoids the problem created by defining the literal in once place and the length of the literal in another.
Now, why he didn't simply use the << operator on the literal string allowing the functionality of strlen() to be encapsulated by the routine that actually cares about the string's length is beyond me...:-) Oh, I bet that's exactly what you were trying to say but you didn't encode the < character with the < string in your HTML.
There. You may now feel validated by a second opinion. (And I completely agree with your opinion regarding the confusing nature of the "double negative" coding style as well.)
And BBSs didn't really catch on until after the rise of the PC. MECC predated PCs by about 8-10 years. There were a few Apple II based BBSs that existed a little earlier, and even a few BBSs built on other, older gear, but they were pretty inconsequential as far as I was concerned.
All us MECCies were really spoiled. After having spent so much time with so many people on the big cyber at MECC, BBSs absolutely sucked. A lot. They were tiny, overcrowded, noisy places that I never cared much about, and we couldn't ever get more than a few people together at one time to chat or game. It was like going from a coach-seat party bus to the back seat of a Ford Escort.
[ Warning: never ask an old guy about the past, he's likely to answer you. ]
My mistake, we met 24 years ago, not 25. It was on the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium's (MECC) mainframe. It was a CDC Cyber 72 that was operated on behalf of all the schools in Minnesota. We had 110 baud modems with acoustic couplers and teletypes. Many (all?) of the community colleges, public high schools and even some of the elementary schools had a terminal or two tucked away in a math or science room somewhere. MECC also had an email application, and the "list" command would list all of the email accounts. (Just picture typing "list" and getting a list of all valid email addresses today!)
MECC was huge in Minnesota schools in the 1970s. Today, they're probably best remembered for having produced educational games such as Oregon Trail and Odell Lake. But back then, having computer access in public schools was a novel concept, and most of those of us who became computer nerds have all done quite well for ourselves. There are even a few MECCies here on Slashdot.
One day, I found an email from someone named "SWEETHEART" (we didn't have lower case back then:-) who found my username funny. We began exchanging emails, we moved our conversations to some of the "talk" programs (these programs were the great-grandparents of IRC, only with nicer interfaces) and exchanged phone numbers. Eventually, we met, started going out, and now we've been married 20 years with a 16-year-old hacker son to show for it.
It was a different time; definitely a more innocent era. The only people with access to the computers were students -- we didn't worry about predators or pedophiles.
I know what you're saying, but fortunately I broke myself of that misconception 25 years ago. I met my wife on line 25 years ago, and I'm constantly reminded of just how "real" online people are.
As a matter of fact, sharing a private joke with my mom was part of the way I reacted to my father's unexpected death. Making jokes is a part of who I am, and one came out that afternoon. We both chuckled for a moment, a welcome bit of relief as we began to come back to the land of the living.
Losing a loved one hurts more than anything, and people don't necessarily react rationally to pain. Perhaps I really am sick. Or just maybe your expectations of what other people should be on the inside is skewed.
I'm not going to make a joke in this topic, since I find none of it to be particularily funny. Just realize that not everyone is going to react the way you might want them to.
The movie was able to easily show this with a top-view camera, so I was wondering how they were going to pull that off in the theatre. We had the best main floor seats I've ever had in my life when we saw this show (they were worth the $$$, trust me,) but obviously you won't see the swastika formation from below. They had a brilliant low-tech solution. While we were distracted with the antics of the dancers, they positioned large mirrors over the stage. You were already laughing at the guys with the bolt-on-mannequins goose stepping around the stage, and then the mirrors tilted to get your attention. You looked up and realized they were dancing in swastikas, and it just got funnier and funnier!
The entire show was laugh-till-your-eyes-watered from start to finish. I literally ached from laughter afterwards... the pigeons, oh god the pigeons were great!
The original movie was hilarious (a bit dated by the time I saw it, since I was only 7 when it came out) but the stage performance completely blew me away. Words can't describe how they were able to get us laughing from start to finish, and kept it going full throttle the entire time.
If you ever get the chance to see the travelling company's live performance, beg, borrow or steal tickets to it; and drag as many friends as you can
I think Robin Hood: Men In Tights was the shark-jump. All three of the earlier movies you mentioned were brilliant.
imdb doesn't show the upcoming Spaceballs II in Mr. Brooks' production bio, but it does show an announcement that "The Producers (2005)" is currently in production, and he's bringing in the cast from the Broadway production to do it. That was by far the funniest play I have ever seen in my life -- I hope he can pull it off again.
You should probably qualify your statement a bit. Our work desktops have 1.5GHz P4s with 1GB RAM, and they are doggedly slow at performing the large project compilations we need to do frequently. (Yes, I know we should restructure our app, but that's a different discussion we need to have with our vendor.) My boss just handed me a spare dual 2.4GHz Xeon 4GB server and said "try it on here" so we'll see. But I can honestly say that I don't have as much computer as I need at the moment. And when a $4000 computer makes the difference between your programmers waiting at their desks for compiles vs. wandering off for coffee, then it's a good investment in productivity.
I can also tell you there's a large difference between my home box (Athlon 2400 w/512MB 133Mhz RAM) and my son's home box (Athlon 3000+ w/1GB 400 MHz RAM). They have identical graphics cards, and are both run at the same resolution. Neither is overclocked. Games come up about four times faster on his computer, and his frame rates are appreciably higher (no blocky graphic artifacts on his.)
I thought my 2400 was the cat's pyjamas when I built it, and it's served me well these last few years. But it's showing its age, especially when subjected to a side by side comparison with this year's model.
(I may have to get an Athlon 64 just to pwn my kid here:-)
These aren't being marketed as PDAs. They are being marketed to national parks, monuments, historic sites, etc. Think of them as virtual tour guides. All the info on their web site says about software is that it will interact with your customers, and that you can download their track (GPS tracking) and their interaction. It sounds like a completely closed package at this point. Their readily available documentation doesn't even tell you what OS it's running on.
That said, they have a recess on the back for the owner to place a logo. They'll make them to whatever color your organization requires (a certain university may want them in maroon and gold, for example, to give virtual tours to incoming freshmen.)
The screen is supposed to be visible in full sunlight. The other thing to keep in mind regarding screen resolution is that the focus isn't supposed to be on the gadget, it's supposed to be on the historic site (or whatever.) Hi-res graphics probably aren't as high a priority as usability, durability, battery life, weight, power consumption, price, etc.
Anyway, it's a special-purpose device, and is certainly not being marketed as a "PDA Designed for the Great Outdoors" despite the Slashdot assertion to the contrary.
The important question is: are these political rant sites doing it on purpose to gain standing on Google News?
Many moons ago people realized that big traffic could be had by gaming Google. They built link farms and exchanged links with other link farms in order to get their page at the top of Google's search ranking. You can bet that if you type "free porn" into Google that you're going to get pages that have seriously manipulated to get there. Hell, there's "how-to-rig-google-for-dummies" books on the shelves over at Barney Snowball.
I think it would be naive of us in the extreme to think political commentary sites would ignore the power of Google.
Aww, hell. I've been wearing a pager on my belt for 17 years. Five years ago I added a Leatherman and so quit carrying a Swiss Army Knife in my pocket. Three years ago, I started keeping a cell phone with me at all times, and recently moved that to my belt. Add the wallet, keys, odd loose change, a Palm Tungsten and an antique pocket watch, and I probably have over a kilo of extra junk supported by my belt.
Good thing I got married before I got all that crap, because it sure wouldn't attract anyone today.
So anyway, now it makes sense why kids walk around with their pants about their knees -- it's gotta be all the electronic crap dragging their pants down.
Re:Own a computer, own a car
on
Security Alert
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· Score: 3, Funny
And people do, because they know if they don't they'll end up stranded in Bumbleshoot, Minnesota at 3 AM.
But there are no consequences for owning a computer that's been hacked and is being used by someone else for their own nefarious purposes.
Perhaps that's a good reason keyboards should come with built-in tazers.
Re:RTFM Issue
on
Security Alert
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Even if the review had been glowing and great, you're right. Nobody I know who would need to read a book like this EVER would have bought it.
That's why I think it's somewhat our responsibility to help our friends and families (to whatever extent possible) to keep them out of computer trouble. I carry a copy of Spybot S&D and AVG Antivirus with me when I visit family members, just because I know they don't have what it takes to keep themselves safe. Some can't even be bothered to run Spybot without prompting (however, whenever a house has nieces or nephews aged 10-12 I find they are the ones to catch on really quickly, and I also find their families' computers are much less likely to have spyware.)
Yeah, I might spend half an hour away from people while I clean things up for them, but it's always, always appreciated. And I know there are at least a dozen computers out there that *aren't* acting as zombies.
Is that "$67 million Palmyra Atoll dollars" as in "Hey, you got an extra $2 million Palmyra Atoll dollars on you? I wanna hit McDonalds on the way home and I'm a bit short till Friday."
Slashdot Mirror
It's like the punchline from the old joke: "Yeah, I've had brakes like that too."
I've seen brake shoes that came out of an ordinary car that came off a high speed race track after an hour of the hardest driving a street car will ever see. (A friend of mine is a high-speed driving instructor.) Honest to god, they were bent like bananas. There's a circular depression deep in the middle where the brake piston was mashing them into the brake discs, and both ends are bent out over half an inch away from the discs. He got off the track early because the brakes felt kind of mushy.
Even with only about 4 square inches of pad in contact with glowing orange discs, he brought the car to a stop. If this guy in his brand new car couldn't stand on the brakes and bring it to a halt, he was joyriding. Even if they were "mushy", driving without the brakes for about five minutes at those speeds would have cooled them down enough to stop fast.
Now, picture combining that failure with a failure in the brake pedal sensor switch. You've got a cruise control trying to bring you up to speed, and no feedback telling it to disconnect. Of course, in that old behemoth there was a mechanical "on/off" switch for the cruise control allowing the driver to simply shut it off. It was still very, very surprising though to feel the acceleration, look down and see 80 MPH and rising.
These were all discrete circuits, long before the era of computers. Now in this Renault, if there is an "on/off" switch, it's no more effective than pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del on a hung PC. It's very easy to see how a couple of simultaneous failures could allow this to happen. What's harder to see is how an engineer could allow such a crappy, unsafe, non-redundant design to ever make it to prototype stage, let alone a production vehicle. If I lived in France, I'd seriously have to think very hard before purchasing another Renault ever again. (Here, in the States, it's easy to promise never to buy one, but it may be harder to follow through on this promise if you're French and it's your "national" brand.)
I've had a stuck throttle before. It was -20 degrees in Minnesota in a parking lot at night, and the thing was literally frozen open. It was indeed scary -- it took several seconds of panic before I figured out to shut off the vehicle. Once I had it stopped, I was able to pry the throttle closed, and idled the engine for a few minutes to thaw it out. If this really was a case of runaway throttle, I feel bad for him. But if he just claimed it to scam some free ride time from the cops (dirtying Renault's name in the process) then he should get time off from the Graybar Hotel just to watch the impound lot crush his wheels into sheet metal.
You: Hello, police? Oh my god, my cruise control is stuck at full throttle! Help!
Police: Stay calm, sir. Can you shift to neutral?
You: No, and I can't shut it off! Help!
Police: We'll send officers to clear the road, sir. Remain calm, keep on the freeway.
You: Thanks, I'll call back if I need more help. [click]
You: YEEEEEEEHAAAAAWWWWW!!!!!!!! I'm goin' 120 MPH and the cops are clearing the road for me! How sweet is that?!?!?!
The biggest problem I have with those messages are the people that would heed their warnings are those that would have done the right thing anyway.
Here's a better idea. How about a "Surgeon General's Warning" style rectangle right on the face of the bills that says something like this:
TREASURY SECRETARY'S WARNING: COPYING MONEY
IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE THAT CARRIES A PENALTY OF
20 YEARS IN FEDERAL POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS PRISON!
I think that would be far more effective at getting their message out than implementing funky image-detecting software.
How do you think the really bad organized criminal types get into banking computers or credit systems? They use the same exploits virus writers use, only they have a vested interest in keeping those exploits secret. The longer the vulnerability remains secret, the longer the bad guys can continue to use them.
Virus writers point out those exploits in a dramatic way that results in patches being released quickly.
Are you familiar with how a medical vaccine works? The patient is exposed to a non-lethal form of infection, and their immune system learns how to respond. Then, once the patient has recoverd, if he encounters the lethal form of the infection his immune system uses that previously gained knowledge to fight it off before it spreads. The analogy is similar: if web site operators are hit with "non-lethal" viruses, they evenutally may plug the holes that the truly malicious robbers had been using.
As much as nobody likes to admit it, the virus writers are "helping" security in this roundabout way. It's the dark, annoying, but sometimes necessary side of full disclosure.
That said, if the freakin' Sasser worm writer ever sets foot in front of my truck, I'm putting it in 4WD and hitting the gas.
All joking aside, they're not looking to "stop" all copying with this measure at this time. They're looking at it statistically: if 50% of the population is too stupid to change their default screensaver, that same 50% won't be aware that there's an alternative to commercial photo editing software. That means they are probably hoping for a 50% reduction in 'casual' counterfeiting.
It's also been theorized that recognition of the so-called "Eurion" constellation will be built into a new generation of scanners. So, if you own one of these scanners, you won't have the opportunity to download the raw image anyway -- you'll be stopped by the firmware in the scanner. Xerox was also testing printer technology that would refuse to emit a printout that contained the Eurion constellation.
It actually makes a lot of sense from the governments' point of view. If you're Joe Sixpack and decide to "print your own lunch money" and get busted for it, you get to spend up to 20 years in a Federal prison for counterfeiting. That's the exact same sentence they'd hand out to a Mafioso who may have set up an intaglio printing press and was printing hundreds of thousands per week.
If someone is so stupid as to try printing counterfeit money, then maybe a simple, stupid technological speed-bump is all it will take to keep him out of prison. And from their point of view, that's worth it.
I'm not a Java guy, so maybe I'm not catching all the nuances of the try/finally construct. It just looks like it could cause unwanted behavior.
Crash dumps only go so far. They're good for picking apart a program that crashed, but many errors are logic errors: being asked to add X+l (lower case L) and having the coder write X+1 (digit one) won't crash a program, but it won't always produce correct results, either. And it's very difficult to find when the lower case 'L' usually contains the value one anyway, except in these critical error situations. Logging lets us examine snapshots of the internal state at critical points in the execution. It also gives us flow, which answers questions such as: what did the user type, when did they type it, and "how many fricking times did they hit the damned enter key??? Idiots!"
And yeah, we've got a lot of people who can't read dumps. We have a few who apparently never learned the difference between hex and decimal. It's becoming obvious to me that schools are not emphasising the machine level of programming any more, but focusing only on the highest level of languages. There are degreed java coders coming out now who barely understand what byte code is, let alone the fact that a virtual machine still has to interpret that data before a CPU can execute it.
Of course, that's just my crotchety old-guy opinion. I could be wrong.
Now, why he didn't simply use the << operator on the literal string allowing the functionality of strlen() to be encapsulated by the routine that actually cares about the string's length is beyond me... :-) Oh, I bet that's exactly what you were trying to say but you didn't encode the < character with the < string in your HTML.
There. You may now feel validated by a second opinion. (And I completely agree with your opinion regarding the confusing nature of the "double negative" coding style as well.)
All us MECCies were really spoiled. After having spent so much time with so many people on the big cyber at MECC, BBSs absolutely sucked. A lot. They were tiny, overcrowded, noisy places that I never cared much about, and we couldn't ever get more than a few people together at one time to chat or game. It was like going from a coach-seat party bus to the back seat of a Ford Escort.
My mistake, we met 24 years ago, not 25. It was on the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium's (MECC) mainframe. It was a CDC Cyber 72 that was operated on behalf of all the schools in Minnesota. We had 110 baud modems with acoustic couplers and teletypes. Many (all?) of the community colleges, public high schools and even some of the elementary schools had a terminal or two tucked away in a math or science room somewhere. MECC also had an email application, and the "list" command would list all of the email accounts. (Just picture typing "list" and getting a list of all valid email addresses today!)
MECC was huge in Minnesota schools in the 1970s. Today, they're probably best remembered for having produced educational games such as Oregon Trail and Odell Lake. But back then, having computer access in public schools was a novel concept, and most of those of us who became computer nerds have all done quite well for ourselves. There are even a few MECCies here on Slashdot.
One day, I found an email from someone named "SWEETHEART" (we didn't have lower case back then :-) who found my username funny. We began exchanging emails, we moved our conversations to some of the "talk" programs (these programs were the great-grandparents of IRC, only with nicer interfaces) and exchanged phone numbers. Eventually, we met, started going out, and now we've been married 20 years with a 16-year-old hacker son to show for it.
It was a different time; definitely a more innocent era. The only people with access to the computers were students -- we didn't worry about predators or pedophiles.
That's very true. And no, I wasn't browsing at -1 reading some of those insensitive clods' posts. (Man, some of those are really awful.)
I know what you're saying, but fortunately I broke myself of that misconception 25 years ago. I met my wife on line 25 years ago, and I'm constantly reminded of just how "real" online people are.
Constantly.
Losing a loved one hurts more than anything, and people don't necessarily react rationally to pain. Perhaps I really am sick. Or just maybe your expectations of what other people should be on the inside is skewed.
I'm not going to make a joke in this topic, since I find none of it to be particularily funny. Just realize that not everyone is going to react the way you might want them to.
The entire show was laugh-till-your-eyes-watered from start to finish. I literally ached from laughter afterwards ... the pigeons, oh god the pigeons were great!
The original movie was hilarious (a bit dated by the time I saw it, since I was only 7 when it came out) but the stage performance completely blew me away. Words can't describe how they were able to get us laughing from start to finish, and kept it going full throttle the entire time.
If you ever get the chance to see the travelling company's live performance, beg, borrow or steal tickets to it; and drag as many friends as you can
imdb doesn't show the upcoming Spaceballs II in Mr. Brooks' production bio, but it does show an announcement that "The Producers (2005)" is currently in production, and he's bringing in the cast from the Broadway production to do it. That was by far the funniest play I have ever seen in my life -- I hope he can pull it off again.
Could be the Greatest Movie Ever!
I can also tell you there's a large difference between my home box (Athlon 2400 w/512MB 133Mhz RAM) and my son's home box (Athlon 3000+ w/1GB 400 MHz RAM). They have identical graphics cards, and are both run at the same resolution. Neither is overclocked. Games come up about four times faster on his computer, and his frame rates are appreciably higher (no blocky graphic artifacts on his.)
I thought my 2400 was the cat's pyjamas when I built it, and it's served me well these last few years. But it's showing its age, especially when subjected to a side by side comparison with this year's model.
(I may have to get an Athlon 64 just to pwn my kid here :-)
That said, they have a recess on the back for the owner to place a logo. They'll make them to whatever color your organization requires (a certain university may want them in maroon and gold, for example, to give virtual tours to incoming freshmen.)
The screen is supposed to be visible in full sunlight. The other thing to keep in mind regarding screen resolution is that the focus isn't supposed to be on the gadget, it's supposed to be on the historic site (or whatever.) Hi-res graphics probably aren't as high a priority as usability, durability, battery life, weight, power consumption, price, etc.
Anyway, it's a special-purpose device, and is certainly not being marketed as a "PDA Designed for the Great Outdoors" despite the Slashdot assertion to the contrary.
Many moons ago people realized that big traffic could be had by gaming Google. They built link farms and exchanged links with other link farms in order to get their page at the top of Google's search ranking. You can bet that if you type "free porn" into Google that you're going to get pages that have seriously manipulated to get there. Hell, there's "how-to-rig-google-for-dummies" books on the shelves over at Barney Snowball.
I think it would be naive of us in the extreme to think political commentary sites would ignore the power of Google.
Good thing I got married before I got all that crap, because it sure wouldn't attract anyone today.
So anyway, now it makes sense why kids walk around with their pants about their knees -- it's gotta be all the electronic crap dragging their pants down.
But there are no consequences for owning a computer that's been hacked and is being used by someone else for their own nefarious purposes.
Perhaps that's a good reason keyboards should come with built-in tazers.
That's why I think it's somewhat our responsibility to help our friends and families (to whatever extent possible) to keep them out of computer trouble. I carry a copy of Spybot S&D and AVG Antivirus with me when I visit family members, just because I know they don't have what it takes to keep themselves safe. Some can't even be bothered to run Spybot without prompting (however, whenever a house has nieces or nephews aged 10-12 I find they are the ones to catch on really quickly, and I also find their families' computers are much less likely to have spyware.)
Yeah, I might spend half an hour away from people while I clean things up for them, but it's always, always appreciated. And I know there are at least a dozen computers out there that *aren't* acting as zombies.
Is that "$67 million Palmyra Atoll dollars" as in "Hey, you got an extra $2 million Palmyra Atoll dollars on you? I wanna hit McDonalds on the way home and I'm a bit short till Friday."