I'm not completely convinced that the 3D on Linux is lacklustre. My own machine is a passable duron 800 , bits n pieces and a geforce 2mx. To be honest, the linux mesa drivers rock hard. I've gotten much better performance out of Q3 on linux then on Windows. Other milage may vary. There *WAS* problems with the sound driver, so the point may not be moot.
Anyway.. In other news, as soon as the GLScene components for Delphi are finally finished on Kylix , windows dies. I'll unleash my half-arsedness on the linux world in completion.
Have fear... bad code worries are truly founded! Who needs BSP for 3D when Fast computers run my nutty little maze demo's on brute force alone.(erm).
3d Monster Maze on the ZX81... predates DOOM (an Wolfenstein - why isn't that on there too?) by several years
I may have the name wrong, but the FIRST monster(s) in the maze game I'm aware of was something like "hunt the whumpus"... Terrrifying Text menu action.
..or even just different coloured guys with different and intresting cultural backgrounds. Any appeal to genetic breeding for races was scientifically scotched donkeys years ago. There has been so much interbreeding between the various 'races' over the past 10k years that it's kinda meaningless outside some obvious phenotypical differences.
That's not to deny various out of africa versus other theorys on anthropological evolution, but it's not something that makes much difference. evolutionary selection in homo sapien sapiens has been pretty much limited to pigment adaptions and a few things.
If I remember right.. You used to be able to DCC someone a file that overwrote there main mIRC.INI file and fill it with nutty little bad-ass scripts. and the user wouldn't know he's run it.
Of course ppl wouldn't do that anymore wouldn't they.
Of course somewhere down the track, a.NET worm is way too feasible... And if some folx around here have there way it'd be OS agnostic. Lucky us. WIN-VIRUS for LINUX!
Re:Modern companies can move around and avoid unio
on
Dial U for Union
·
· Score: 1
Of course what that means is that they need to be hounded down so that whereever they go, they are deprived of the ability to deny their workers the absolute right of association.
You know really govts should pass international treatys on this. If this company is so figgen cocky to screw hardworking staff in denver over staff meeting up and discussing conditions, london and ANY other country should say "Piss off, we don't wan't you here". The right of free association is too precious to allow it to be trampled on by out of control multinationals.
Actually, that 40$ saves you from being a scab. The reallity is , is in West Australia where it's optional, moral people who do join the student union are forced to subsidise scabs ^H^H^H non unionists who use the facilities but won't pay. It's my take on it that freeloaders are worse than.. well worse than something anyway.
Get used to it, the alternative is to be an immoral prick.
And by the way, the term is faggot and it applies only to firesticks you homophobic asshole.
Hehe.
I can just see the slogan: Who operating system do Microsoft turn to to run it's world famous Hotmail Service? FreeBSD! . That's what!
Now if that ain't an endorsement, I don't know what is.:)
Re:Oh yah, another humanoid alien race
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
I'd say the carbon/water thing is probably quite likely high in the scheme of hypothetical life in the universe. Bipedalism is anyones guess. Earth seemed to generate sweet bugga all bipedalism.... except for the dominant species, so maybe any little green men we might hypothetically meet will be bipedal on account of the fact they actually got anyware... or non existant
Of course they could be slathering bug-monsters too.
And Startreck truly rocked the whole way through.
if this had been an official policy, it would have been nicely executed
I'd say , more likely, that the programmer who put this backdoor in, as been "nicely executed".
I've read that MS can be a little heavy on security with staff.
How is this guys post a Troll. It's a pretty fair comment actually
However I might add, that using Apache soap-mod, or any RPC... or network anything for that matter.. is dangerous once you've introduced a packet sniffer and some methodology for actually decoding it. Soap of course is hideously readable, not surprising in that XML is designed to be , self documenting
Truth is you can't trust anything.. Except yer sweet old self.
Btw. Soap is a pretty cool technology, It'd be even cooler if MS didn't stuff it to the hilt with variant junk. Weak typing has reeeealy gotta go.
It's definately true that at this stage IE does do a better job at rendering pages, and has a few nifty-o tricks up it's sleave taboot.
But It does seem apparent though that if you built your page utilising NN quirks, IE may end up goofing the page too. So what makes one more standard than the other
Take for instance XML. Now I have no Idea anymore if NN will even look at XML. I'd hazard a guess to say that it does not. But I'll be bold and say IE does not either. Really. If I create a xml definition thinger file, guaranteed that as harebrained as I make it , IE will nod it's head and say 'I'll let it pass'. And many of the retarded definitions I've come up with originally did not work at all in a propper validator. It's my take on it therefore that IE does not do 'real' XML.
What's the bet then, that if Netscape/Mozilla does do "real" XML and W3C standards down to the bone, that it'll look great.... . . . And break in a Internet exploder browser.
Now soap is another matter. Kudos to microsoft on that one. Bigger kudos to IBM for puttin' it on Apache. As yet neither are compliant. But it's a damn good idea. (Even if it is just XML-RPC with nutty definition files and variants)
Excuse me waffling. It's getting late:)
Of course , one can opt for Cold fusion & Oracle, and be completely OS agnostic. Truth be told, Apache runs abit goofy on NT/2000 from my own experience. The memory model is more unixified in Apache.
But to be perfectly honest, IIS is a pain in the arse to write for. Getting the little bugger to let go of that malfunctioning ISAPI module can be a pain in the neck... Especially in a live server where you can't just turn it off, and it can be an absolute horror to fix a busted install without fk knows how many reboots.
But that's a minor gripe. I tend to be a C based CGI code kinda guy rather than a CF/ASP/PHP kinda guy anyway.
It's an opinion. That's all.
Unless I have been living under a rock for a while and "New York Times" is actually slang for a means of stealing telecom services, I think that his analysis is pretty hard to fault here. 2600 magazine has a long history ("Fun at Costco") of giving people instructions on how to knowingly break the law, and it's pointless to pretend otherwise.
Bollocks. In my daily work as administering my work network, I'm having to review security on various elements of our network. The reality is *ANY* network admin worth his or her salt NEEDS sites like 2600 to figure out how hackers work and what the techniques are and what to look out for.
Relying on ms security updates is careless, and sure don't help when the problem is with the ACME DSL gizmo or whatever. Do you reeeeeealy believe defence against malicious crackers comes from anyware else than from the barrel of a smoking gun? 2600 is actually doing the non-hacker community a favor, although in private they'd hate me for saying it. And what on earth is malicious about DeCSS anyway? Are people really going to pirate a multi gigabyte AVI file over the net?
IANAL, but generally, well at least in Australia it is, But I'd assume the same applys in the US, that courts generally have to stick within there terms of reference. Particularly in appeals, where the deal is not so much what is the decision to make, but was that decision the right one.
In this context, the case's terms of reference are the 2600 guys getting boloxed for linking to a 2600 source.
However, where that streches out, is if the chain of reasoning that led to the decision can be shown to be faulty, and that reasoning was made in the wider context, then it stands to reason for the purposes of review of said argument the frame of reference must logically include the frame the decision was made in.
Personally I'd just stamp my feet and get grumpy, but that rarely wins court cases!
How is that flamebait? Admiting that I'm OS agnostic?. I raise a serious issue here. I'll repeat.
In Australia privacy laws protect customers from having data given to 3rd party companies. I wanted to know if they have similar laws in the state
Oh and btw;- Haxor Moderation abusers suck. Read the friggin guidelines or dont mod at all.
Do you USA folks have a privacy act? Not a flame, it's a question. My understanding, is that in Australia (where I'm from) the company you bought the machine from would possible be exposing itself to breaches of the privacy act.
I gotta admit, while I'm fairly OS agnostic, this DOES tick me off. Who gives MS the right to know whether I'm intending to put in windows or Solaris or Linux or whatever..... None of there fking business
I work in a workplace with a hybrid selection of pc's and the like. Solaris for DB's, Linux for firewallrouters & various inetd type tasks an Win+ange box, various NT workstations, theres even an old novell box dickin' around somewhere.
F*k MS if there going to profile me however. We occasionally do defence contracts and I'd be stuffed if a foreign company is gonna get it's dirty mits on info on our LAN
I'd assume American companies feel the same way. Perhaps they ain't gonna do it here tho. Whats the privacy law situ in the states?
The Axis camera & Milestone surveilance software works real well. The Axis cam just plugs into an ethernet. You could then just run UTP back to wherever, or if on a boat, figure out some sort of scheme with Cisco's aironet (802.something).
The Axis can control various PTZ camera heads, including the somewhat nifty Canon VC-3 type pan tilters. Pelco 'for great justice' even.
Axis stuff rocks, there moving over to linux OS on alot of stuff they do now, and open their source for a lot of their stuff.
Milestone however is a little evil in terms of being verry un-free softwarewise. Shame. It's actually otherwise real good software.
This assumes you got bucks and all tho.
I guess it depends on the copper
In 92 I got busted while walking down the road from my flats in a pretty messed up area of Perth Australia. Yeah, I did have a couple of cones (bowls in US speak I think) of verry low grade leaf in my pocket. The cops kinda searched us without real reason, but probably noticed I was just plain shiteing myself, shaking and stuttering at the prospect of getting busted
In the end before they found it I just gave up, grabbed it out my sock and gave it to them
They took me to the cop station and one of the first thing they asked was "Why are you so frightened". I said I was terrified of going to jail.
To my surprise the guy told me to calm down and said that I'd just get a three hundred buck fine, and a record. I signed the paper work , confessed (I kinda WAS caught red handed) and they let me go.
It went to court three months later. I got a three hundred dollar fine which I served by two days community service which I actually quite enjoyed. The judge was hideously rude, but probably figured that a good yelling at would sort me out better quicksmart. The cops conceeded that I was helpfull and actually comended me on my politeness in court (even though they stuffed up the evidence.. I found out later that had I not confessed I probably would of beat the charge as they had the wrong exibit in court).
Anyway I havent smoked pot ever since, but that stupid fecking record is still there for another 3 years
Ok. First, X10 is fairly nifty, but you have a few issues to deal with. X10 basically works by encoding little data pulses over the zero crossing of the AC sine wave. There are a few problems here. First, is that a lot of houses are wired with multiple phases wherein the actual phase angle of the power is different (usually in increments of 120degrees). This munts the signals somewhat. Power conditioner wreak havok on those little pulses as well, as will certain forms of lighting ballast equipment. X-10 does have a phase-coupler that should help somewhat , but at that point you enter electrician-world.X-10 isn't really my strongpoint, but I do know that well thought out systems can be pretty fun. Clipsal stuff probably is a better option too. Oh, and watch out for your 50hz vs 60hz issues.
However, one of the nifty things you can do, if you are electrically minded, is get one of those Basic-stamp PIC thingers and build a nice clean RS-232 interface to X-10 and use some standard serial IO cmds on your *ix or windoze boxen to programatically control your stuff
Also for the harware hacker, IR stuff is pretty easy to manage too. There are plenty of net schematics/sourcecode combo's for IR learner/sender stuff. Controls VCR,TV's,DVD's,STEREO's,PROJECTORS,VIDCONF CODECS and even some light dimmers.
If you are cashed up however, the only way to go is to put in a Panja Netlinx system. This little sucker is a Coldfire processor based computer thinger that has 6xRS232 ports, perhaps around 10 IR sender ports, 6 Relay outs, 100mbit netport, AXlink, and basically interfaces to just about anythink. All programmed in some nutty little C type language. Panja just also sponsered some sortsa opensource thing. Hoping it worked for em. Panja basically rock and as yeah, specialising in there stuff keeps me well employed for a living. Nifty that. Chuck in a coupla touchscreens, and invite geek lasses over for the ultimate "Gosh I'm kitted up" schmooze.
There is also crestron, which do a simmilar thing. I prefer Panja, but that's probably more familiarity more than anything
I'd think the easiest way of doing it (Crippling it) would be to burn the HAL of the thing onto a little epoxy covered (think no hardware haxoring) rom and bury the winsock stack in there with exclusive access to the network port. Limit incomming connections to say 8 (for multiplayer games).. or worse, let it initiate and massacre Lan-gaming oportunities, and bingo.. No-fekin-chance of a server box hack... Until someone figures out how to Haxor around it of course:)
Mind you, the whole post-mod Cyberpunk thing lends it's self verry well to advertising. But it's got a nifty little irony to it.
One could not imagine a Neo-Tokyo distopia *Without* the incessant "MEGACORP-3000 WE OWN YOU" neon's everywhere , It's part of the whole future-capitalist gloom of it all. But stick in a "Microsoft Windows 2000 We owblahblah...." (for instance) and sudenly the advertised product is now symbolically associated with the verry reason why said Neo-Tokyo or whatever would be crap to live in.
It's a subtle irony, but I'd bet any well read SCI-FI geek would see it.
Slashdot Mirror
ROFL! Mod this sucker up!
I'm not completely convinced that the 3D on Linux is lacklustre. My own machine is a passable duron 800 , bits n pieces and a geforce 2mx. To be honest, the linux mesa drivers rock hard. I've gotten much better performance out of Q3 on linux then on Windows. Other milage may vary. There *WAS* problems with the sound driver, so the point may not be moot.
Anyway.. In other news, as soon as the GLScene components for Delphi are finally finished on Kylix , windows dies. I'll unleash my half-arsedness on the linux world in completion.
Have fear... bad code worries are truly founded! Who needs BSP for 3D when Fast computers run my nutty little maze demo's on brute force alone.(erm).
3d Monster Maze on the ZX81... predates DOOM (an Wolfenstein - why isn't that on there too?) by several years
I may have the name wrong, but the FIRST monster(s) in the maze game I'm aware of was something like "hunt the whumpus"... Terrrifying Text menu action.
..or even just different coloured guys with different and intresting cultural backgrounds. Any appeal to genetic breeding for races was scientifically scotched donkeys years ago. There has been so much interbreeding between the various 'races' over the past 10k years that it's kinda meaningless outside some obvious phenotypical differences.
That's not to deny various out of africa versus other theorys on anthropological evolution, but it's not something that makes much difference. evolutionary selection in homo sapien sapiens has been pretty much limited to pigment adaptions and a few things.
If I remember right.. You used to be able to DCC someone a file that overwrote there main mIRC.INI file and fill it with nutty little bad-ass scripts. and the user wouldn't know he's run it.
Of course ppl wouldn't do that anymore wouldn't they.
Of course somewhere down the track, a .NET worm is way too feasible... And if some folx around here have there way it'd be OS agnostic. Lucky us. WIN-VIRUS for LINUX!
Of course what that means is that they need to be hounded down so that whereever they go, they are deprived of the ability to deny their workers the absolute right of association.
You know really govts should pass international treatys on this. If this company is so figgen cocky to screw hardworking staff in denver over staff meeting up and discussing conditions, london and ANY other country should say "Piss off, we don't wan't you here". The right of free association is too precious to allow it to be trampled on by out of control multinationals.
Actually, that 40$ saves you from being a scab. The reallity is , is in West Australia where it's optional, moral people who do join the student union are forced to subsidise scabs ^H^H^H non unionists who use the facilities but won't pay. It's my take on it that freeloaders are worse than .. well worse than something anyway.
Get used to it, the alternative is to be an immoral prick.
And by the way, the term is faggot and it applies only to firesticks you homophobic asshole.
Hehe. : :)
I can just see the slogan
Who operating system do Microsoft turn to to run it's world famous Hotmail Service? FreeBSD! . That's what!
Now if that ain't an endorsement, I don't know what is.
I'd say the carbon/water thing is probably quite likely high in the scheme of hypothetical life in the universe. Bipedalism is anyones guess. Earth seemed to generate sweet bugga all bipedalism.... except for the dominant species, so maybe any little green men we might hypothetically meet will be bipedal on account of the fact they actually got anyware... or non existant
Of course they could be slathering bug-monsters too.
And Startreck truly rocked the whole way through.
Rtmark came up with the idea originally I think. Basically if a corporation is a person therefor it is deathsentancable. That was the basic Idea
if this had been an official policy, it would have been nicely executed
I'd say , more likely, that the programmer who put this backdoor in, as been "nicely executed".
I've read that MS can be a little heavy on security with staff.
How is this guys post a Troll. It's a pretty fair comment actually ... or network anything for that matter .. is dangerous once you've introduced a packet sniffer and some methodology for actually decoding it. Soap of course is hideously readable, not surprising in that XML is designed to be , self documenting
However I might add, that using Apache soap-mod, or any RPC
Truth is you can't trust anything.. Except yer sweet old self.
Btw. Soap is a pretty cool technology, It'd be even cooler if MS didn't stuff it to the hilt with variant junk. Weak typing has reeeealy gotta go.
It's definately true that at this stage IE does do a better job at rendering pages, and has a few nifty-o tricks up it's sleave taboot. :)
But It does seem apparent though that if you built your page utilising NN quirks, IE may end up goofing the page too. So what makes one more standard than the other
Take for instance XML. Now I have no Idea anymore if NN will even look at XML. I'd hazard a guess to say that it does not. But I'll be bold and say IE does not either. Really. If I create a xml definition thinger file, guaranteed that as harebrained as I make it , IE will nod it's head and say 'I'll let it pass'. And many of the retarded definitions I've come up with originally did not work at all in a propper validator. It's my take on it therefore that IE does not do 'real' XML.
What's the bet then, that if Netscape/Mozilla does do "real" XML and W3C standards down to the bone, that it'll look great.... . . . And break in a Internet exploder browser.
Now soap is another matter. Kudos to microsoft on that one. Bigger kudos to IBM for puttin' it on Apache. As yet neither are compliant. But it's a damn good idea. (Even if it is just XML-RPC with nutty definition files and variants)
Excuse me waffling. It's getting late
Of course , one can opt for Cold fusion & Oracle, and be completely OS agnostic. Truth be told, Apache runs abit goofy on NT/2000 from my own experience. The memory model is more unixified in Apache.
But to be perfectly honest, IIS is a pain in the arse to write for. Getting the little bugger to let go of that malfunctioning ISAPI module can be a pain in the neck... Especially in a live server where you can't just turn it off, and it can be an absolute horror to fix a busted install without fk knows how many reboots.
But that's a minor gripe. I tend to be a C based CGI code kinda guy rather than a CF/ASP/PHP kinda guy anyway.
It's an opinion. That's all.
Relying on ms security updates is careless, and sure don't help when the problem is with the ACME DSL gizmo or whatever.
Do you reeeeeealy believe defence against malicious crackers comes from anyware else than from the barrel of a smoking gun? 2600 is actually doing the non-hacker community a favor, although in private they'd hate me for saying it. And what on earth is malicious about DeCSS anyway? Are people really going to pirate a multi gigabyte AVI file over the net?
IANAL, but generally, well at least in Australia it is, But I'd assume the same applys in the US, that courts generally have to stick within there terms of reference. Particularly in appeals, where the deal is not so much what is the decision to make, but was that decision the right one.
In this context, the case's terms of reference are the 2600 guys getting boloxed for linking to a 2600 source.
However, where that streches out, is if the chain of reasoning that led to the decision can be shown to be faulty, and that reasoning was made in the wider context, then it stands to reason for the purposes of review of said argument the frame of reference must logically include the frame the decision was made in.
Personally I'd just stamp my feet and get grumpy, but that rarely wins court cases!
How is that flamebait? Admiting that I'm OS agnostic?. I raise a serious issue here. I'll repeat.
In Australia privacy laws protect customers from having data given to 3rd party companies. I wanted to know if they have similar laws in the state
Oh and btw;- Haxor Moderation abusers suck. Read the friggin guidelines or dont mod at all.
Do you USA folks have a privacy act? Not a flame, it's a question. My understanding, is that in Australia (where I'm from) the company you bought the machine from would possible be exposing itself to breaches of the privacy act.
I gotta admit, while I'm fairly OS agnostic, this DOES tick me off. Who gives MS the right to know whether I'm intending to put in windows or Solaris or Linux or whatever..... None of there fking business
I work in a workplace with a hybrid selection of pc's and the like. Solaris for DB's, Linux for firewallrouters & various inetd type tasks an Win+ange box, various NT workstations, theres even an old novell box dickin' around somewhere.
F*k MS if there going to profile me however. We occasionally do defence contracts and I'd be stuffed if a foreign company is gonna get it's dirty mits on info on our LAN
I'd assume American companies feel the same way. Perhaps they ain't gonna do it here tho. Whats the privacy law situ in the states?
The Axis camera & Milestone surveilance software works real well. The Axis cam just plugs into an ethernet. You could then just run UTP back to wherever, or if on a boat, figure out some sort of scheme with Cisco's aironet (802.something). The Axis can control various PTZ camera heads, including the somewhat nifty Canon VC-3 type pan tilters. Pelco 'for great justice' even.
Axis stuff rocks, there moving over to linux OS on alot of stuff they do now, and open their source for a lot of their stuff.
Milestone however is a little evil in terms of being verry un-free softwarewise. Shame. It's actually otherwise real good software.
This assumes you got bucks and all tho.
I guess it depends on the copper
In 92 I got busted while walking down the road from my flats in a pretty messed up area of Perth Australia. Yeah, I did have a couple of cones (bowls in US speak I think) of verry low grade leaf in my pocket. The cops kinda searched us without real reason, but probably noticed I was just plain shiteing myself, shaking and stuttering at the prospect of getting busted
In the end before they found it I just gave up, grabbed it out my sock and gave it to them
They took me to the cop station and one of the first thing they asked was "Why are you so frightened". I said I was terrified of going to jail.
To my surprise the guy told me to calm down and said that I'd just get a three hundred buck fine, and a record. I signed the paper work , confessed (I kinda WAS caught red handed) and they let me go.
It went to court three months later. I got a three hundred dollar fine which I served by two days community service which I actually quite enjoyed. The judge was hideously rude, but probably figured that a good yelling at would sort me out better quicksmart. The cops conceeded that I was helpfull and actually comended me on my politeness in court (even though they stuffed up the evidence.. I found out later that had I not confessed I probably would of beat the charge as they had the wrong exibit in court).
Anyway I havent smoked pot ever since, but that stupid fecking record is still there for another 3 years
Ok. First, X10 is fairly nifty, but you have a few issues to deal with. X10 basically works by encoding little data pulses over the zero crossing of the AC sine wave. There are a few problems here. First, is that a lot of houses are wired with multiple phases wherein the actual phase angle of the power is different (usually in increments of 120degrees). This munts the signals somewhat. Power conditioner wreak havok on those little pulses as well, as will certain forms of lighting ballast equipment. X-10 does have a phase-coupler that should help somewhat , but at that point you enter electrician-world.X-10 isn't really my strongpoint, but I do know that well thought out systems can be pretty fun. Clipsal stuff probably is a better option too. Oh, and watch out for your 50hz vs 60hz issues.
However, one of the nifty things you can do, if you are electrically minded, is get one of those Basic-stamp PIC thingers and build a nice clean RS-232 interface to X-10 and use some standard serial IO cmds on your *ix or windoze boxen to programatically control your stuff
Also for the harware hacker, IR stuff is pretty easy to manage too. There are plenty of net schematics/sourcecode combo's for IR learner/sender stuff. Controls VCR,TV's,DVD's,STEREO's,PROJECTORS,VIDCONF CODECS and even some light dimmers.
If you are cashed up however, the only way to go is to put in a Panja Netlinx system. This little sucker is a Coldfire processor based computer thinger that has 6xRS232 ports, perhaps around 10 IR sender ports, 6 Relay outs, 100mbit netport, AXlink, and basically interfaces to just about anythink. All programmed in some nutty little C type language. Panja just also sponsered some sortsa opensource thing. Hoping it worked for em. Panja basically rock and as yeah, specialising in there stuff keeps me well employed for a living. Nifty that. Chuck in a coupla touchscreens, and invite geek lasses over for the ultimate "Gosh I'm kitted up" schmooze.
There is also crestron, which do a simmilar thing. I prefer Panja, but that's probably more familiarity more than anything
Anyway;- Hyperlinks
Big page of nifty home automation links.
Panja
Crestron
Your own pc(sorry)
I'd think the easiest way of doing it (Crippling it) would be to burn the HAL of the thing onto a little epoxy covered (think no hardware haxoring) rom and bury the winsock stack in there with exclusive access to the network port. Limit incomming connections to say 8 (for multiplayer games).. or worse, let it initiate and massacre Lan-gaming oportunities, and bingo.. No-fekin-chance of a server box hack... Until someone figures out how to Haxor around it of course :)
.......unless there using an Alcatel boxen apparently. :)
Mind you, the whole post-mod Cyberpunk thing lends it's self verry well to advertising. But it's got a nifty little irony to it.
One could not imagine a Neo-Tokyo distopia *Without* the incessant "MEGACORP-3000 WE OWN YOU" neon's everywhere , It's part of the whole future-capitalist gloom of it all. But stick in a "Microsoft Windows 2000 We owblahblah...." (for instance) and sudenly the advertised product is now symbolically associated with the verry reason why said Neo-Tokyo or whatever would be crap to live in.
It's a subtle irony, but I'd bet any well read SCI-FI geek would see it.