My bank account limits me to uppercase letters and numbers, and has a maximum length as well. Since that rules out everything I've ever used as a password (except for one I use on retarded services that email it back to you in plain text), and I don't want it written down anywhere, I'm constantly forgetting it. I got tired of doing a reset every time I wanted to check my account balance, so I just signed up for mailed balance updates and keep track myself - not hard when you only use it for online transactions (ie. Steam games) and major purchases (everything else I just pay cash).
I almost hope someone does hack the account, so the bank ends up losing money giving me back the ~$300 or so in the account. Maybe then they'll learn to follow security guidelines.
Torchlight. It was made by many of the people who made Diablo 2, but it's significantly less "scary". Good fun, if a bit repetitive towards the end. And cheap, too - It was only $20 at release, and is probably down to $10-15 by now. And it even has a "netbook" mode to run on low-end hardware, in case you haven't upgraded lately.
Sort of. All the numbered games are individual - VI has no characters in common with I, IV or IX. They have made a few sequels - X-2 is a sequel to X, FFIV: The After Years is a sequel to IV, VII has both a prequel and sequel game (Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus, respectively), etc. And, if you want to get technical, VII, X and X-2 are technically in the same universe, but that's a rather obscure fact, and there's no shared characters between VII and X.
Normally, there are certain constants in the series. There is almost always a character named Cid, but they share nothing besides the name. The gameplay is relatively similar in most of them - I and XII are closer in gameplay than, say, Quake and Quake III. There are certain common elements (airships), certain musical themes carried throughout the series (da da-da da, da da daa da-daaa), and character archetypes are usually the same (ie. there's Chick with a Staff, Big Scary Guy Who Is Often Black, Creepy Goth Guy, etc.). And shout-outs are common, especially in remakes (see: Gilgamesh). However, none of the main games is dependent on any of the others - it's like how George Lucas has shout-outs to THX1138 in most of his films. The fans like it, the developers like it, everyone else doesn't even notice it.
Normally, it would just be seen as sort of a label for the creators - you would see "FFVIII" and think "Oh, it's from the guys who made FFI through VII, and I (liked those/didn't like those) and will make my purchase decision based on that". In fact, most of the series was made by a few people - Nobuo Uematsu composed the entire soundtrack for the first nine games, and worked on several others; Yoshitaka Amano designed the characters for the first six; Hironobu Sakaguchi designed the gameplay for the first eleven. So, for a while, it was sort of like a band's name - you would know "Final Fantasy = these people", and know that meant it was probably a good game.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. Most, if not all, of the people who made the classic Final Fantasies (IV-IX, by my count) have left. Amano only designs the title logo now; Uematsu left but is sometimes brought back in as a contractor; Sakaguchi left and made his own game company. Most players agree that the past few games have been markedly different, although whether they're still good or not is up for debate.
Compounding the problem is that Square is sort of franchise-whoring the series. Spin-offs are far more common - Final Fantasy VII alone has a prequel game (Crisis Core, generally liked), a sequel game (Dirge of Cerberus, generally disliked), a prequel anime OVA (Before Crisis), a sequel full-length movie (Advent Children), and has had guest appearances in far, far too many games (I know of many, many people who only played Kingdom Hearts to see Sephiroth and Cloud one more time). You could legitimately call that single "game" a series in it's own right.
And then there's Dissidia. Think "Square Enix's version of Super Smash Bros.". A game that, judged on its own merits, sucks. If you were completely ignorant of who the characters were, you would hate the game. It's a gameplay mess, the story is convoluted and pointless, and it's repetitive and boring. However, it was well-received because it had the main hero and villain of every major Final Fantasy game. And yeah, it's cool to see Kefka and Sephiroth duke it out. That would be like seeing Darth Vader and Darth Maul fight - instant nerd awesomeness. But it taught Square that they could sell a game purely on the Final Fantasy name. (I'm aware of the earlier Mystic Quest/Legends games, but those had the distinction of actually being worth playing on their own merits).
So, to answer your question, no, Square Enix doesn't actually have a lead on Activision re: franchise whoring. But they're catching up fast.
I never said *which* descriptions were false. I could have lied about the $, or about the &. I could even have lied about lying to you - maybe that *is* my real password.
If the passwords are encrypted, they'll have to go through the effort of cracking them to notice the postfix is there.
Using SHA-1 and the above examples, $kurg^is42_fb becomes de357c5ba1b2e8d6a773319d6c2d1068a3960bb9, while $kurg^is42_sd becomes a15d3716b55df845ef3f421a0343dd08050956c7. That's one of the features of a strong cryptographic hash - a slight change in the input produces a major, complete change in the output.
I have three different passwords I use for everything. The weakest (8 characters, 2 non-alphanumeric and one uppercase, but I sometimes have to strip the & and @ on things that don't allow it) is used on things where I really don't give a shit if someone hacks it. Want to upload stuff to Imageshack in my name? Who cares? Want to hack my Dropbox? I only use it as free file hosting - everything on it is supposed to be publically-viewed, and I have local copies of all the data. Want my Gawker account? Knock yourself out - I don't even try posting anything there, everyone's too retarded. Hell, some sites email it back to me in plain text.
The next password (9 characters, 2 non-alpha, one uppercase, non-dictionary word (unless someone added Esperanto to their password dictionary)) is used for things I actually care about. Steam. Slashdot. User-level logins. Email. Stuff I would be able to recover, but which would seriously inconvenience me. If I hear that one of the systems I use it on has been compromised, or even "maybe" compromised, I change them all. I do have this one written down in a few places, but always under lock and key.
The highest (20 characters, 3 non-alphanumeric, 4 numbers and 6 uppercase, with nothing at all that would appear in any dictionary) is used on things I need actual security on. Root accounts. Bank accounts (or at least I would, if my bank wasn't retarded). And the only place I have this recorded is in one location, which contains only the instructions I used to generate it, which requires knowledge of hexadecimal, early science-fiction, and the arrangement of my keyboard. I consider this one uncrackable - I would be confident setting it as the launch code to a nuclear missile. If I remember, last I checked it would take several years to crack the password - anyone who cracks it will probably have spent more on electricity for their computer than they'd get out of my bank account.
PS: I know about password management programs. Don't trust them, and I have to use public terminals too often to have passwords I can't remember. I've considered using the postfix system (ie. $kurg^is42 would become $kurg^is42_fb on facebook, $kurg^is42_sd on/., etc), but haven't gotten around to actually doing it yet. Probably should.
PPS: That's not my actual password. And several of my descriptions were deliberately false, just to maintain security.
My bank is nearly as bad - only uppercase letters and numbers. I used my normal password as a basis for crafting my bank password, but I can never remember if I replaced all Os with 0s, or just the first one, or just the second, or what I did with the underscore, etc. So I still can't remember it. I got tired of doing a password reset every time I wanted to check my balance, and just signed up for mailed account updates. Fuck trees.
What's really sad is that I'm in networking classes right now (not in the Cisco ones yet, that's in a few semesters). And the only mention of IPv6 has been when I asked about it, or asked "how would ___ be done under IPv6?". They aren't even preparing new networking people to work with IPv6. I'm probably going to have to teach myself everything.
And I also doubt most of the recent Sony hacks have been vengeance. The first one, yeah, probably, and justifiably so. Everything after that was just petty crooks - they smelled blood in the water, and swarmed.
Woops, brain must've segfaulted and mixed it up with the Dreamcast.
After a bit of research (ie. reading the citations on Wikipedia), it seems that the OS is actually custom-made. However, I don't completely believe that - I suspect pretty large chunks of code, especially on the first XBox, were copied from Windows. 360 I can believe (it's not even x86 - it's PowerPC), but not the original.
The XBox had a full Windows CE OS running. You know what that means.
Both the PS3 and Wii use specialized high-speed RAM. The Wii uses some sort of 1T-SRAM, and the PS3 uses a modernized version of RDRAM. Both make up for relatively low capacity with high-speed access. The XBox used commodity DDR DRAM, at clocks about normal for PCs of the time (thus slow by gaming PC standards.
The first Xbox... internals were pretty much just generic PC hardware.
Not even that. For a gaming rig, the Xbox internals were CRAPPY. The processor was basically a Celeron 733, only 64MB of RAM, and what was essentially a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (the lowest-end of nVidia's DirectX 8 cards).
Lemons are apparently the new cake. Great. I know the jokes were funny in the game, but referencing it constantly whenever someone so much as mentions lemons, moon rock, crushers, or potatoes just kills the joke. I would much prefer that we make our own jokes.
Or at least do something inventive with it. I'm sure there's some funny Monty Python/Portal combination jokes just waiting to be made.
While I was thinking the same thing, I was thinking it was because he actually sent it (but didn't want to outright lie about it). However, the explanation of "he took the pic, but didn't send it" seems faintly plausible. Weirder things have happened. Occam would throw a fit, but I like that explanation.
In principle, that seems plausible. Life could have migrated there, not evolved. That may be the case for the worms, but the bacteria they feed on seem different. Feeding off radiation in a high-pressure, anaerobic environment? That seems too big a difference to easily explain via evolution from aboveground organisms. I wouldn't rule that out as a possibility, but it still seems dubious.
Precisely. I like open-source stuff, not because it's inherently better or more ethical than closed-source, but because the open-source process tends to produce better end product. I have no problem with running closed-source programs when they're superior to the open-source options. I go with what works.
Actually, the state of war is officially recognized. The Korean War has not yet officially ended - while a cease-fire and an armistice were signed, a peace treaty has not, and neither side has withdrawn their declaration of war. And, as the numerous infiltration tunnels violated Article 1, Paragraphs 7-9 of the Korean Armistice Agreement, and the Yeonpyeong shelling violated Article 2, Paragraph 12, you could argue that even the armistice has been abrogated, and that a full state of war legally exists.
I would assume that the burden of proof needed to declare war over a cyber-attack is no different than that needed for a physical attack. The Pentagon was basically just saying "cyberattacks aren't exempted from war - we will retaliate as we would for any other attack".
Now, if China were to launch a large-scale cyberattack, we'd know it was them, because they would simultaneously launch all kinds of other military attacks. If it's big enough to cause major problems, it's big enough to leave a trail, and eventually the culprit country will be hunted down. We know this. China knows this. Thus, any major cyberattack would be in combination with other attacks.
Hypothetical war scenario: First warning is a massive cyberattack. Goal is denial-of-service of the entire North American comms system. Whether by clever hacking or sheer numbers, the systems go down, and stay down. No Internet, no phone, nothing faster than Fedex. Second notice is a full ICBM launch. 300 missiles, their full inventory, each with nuclear warheads. Priority targets are the American missile fields. They're hit before they can receive orders to fire, or even confirm that there's an attack going on. Time elapsed: 20 minutes. US ICBMs are effectively gone. The only remaining nuclear option (the bombers were mothballed long ago) is submarine-launched missiles. Enough for some nasty payback, but not enough to turn the tide.
This could be either the prelude to an invasion, or simply a preventative measure - getting us out of the way so they can "finish" the Korean War, maybe. Perhaps even just a defensive distraction, should China feel that the American army is uncomfortably close to their border.
OK, so I'm not Tom Clancy here, but that's the most plausible scenario I can imagine for a military cyberattack. Political or espionage, sure, there's plenty of those, but when was the last time we declared war over a spy?
Maybe, maybe not. I'm definitely careful, and common sense is always the best first line of defense, but malware still gets through sometimes. Last virus to hurt me would've done the same no matter how careful I'd been. A normally-safe and trustworthy site got hacked (smbc-comics.com, for the record), put a malicious Java applet into the page. I happened to visit in the few hours before the site manager was alerted and fixed the problem. Virus broke through whatever security Firefox and Java (both fully updated at the time) had, and basically hosed my system with scareware and adware. Spent a whole weekend fixing it.
And there are, actually, some rare bits of malware that don't require human interaction at all. Worms quite often exploit software thoroughly enough to infect unattended servers. Although quite uncommon nowadays, since exploiting users is far easier than exploiting software, it's still completely possible.
Well, the general consensus is "it's better than the last several movies (ie. Nemesis, Insurrection, Generations), but not quite as good as the best movies (II, IV and First Contact).". So, while the reboot is generally seen as an improvement, there's still many ex-fans who are remaining ex-fans.
Judging from that, a DC reboot would work if people are feeling that the current stories aren't as good as they should be. Not being a comics fan myself, I can't say if that's the case.
Alienware? Seriously? Not only are those things bulky and ugly as hell, they're also terrible, terrible laptops. The high-powered ones have a battery life measured in seconds of full use. The low-powered ones are weak and incredibly overpriced.
There are plenty of good laptop manufacturers. I prefer Asus - a $1100 laptop has lasted me two years. I had one hard disk failure - I was able to back up all my data, send it in under warranty, and get it fixed, no questions asked. It looks pretty good, doesn't weigh too much, and balances a respectable amount of power (Core 2 Duo and GeForce 9600 - not top-of-the-line, but it still works fine even on newer games) with an OK battery life (~100 minutes, on a poorly-cared-for two-year-old battery).
Alienware is junk. On their high-end rigs, they charge a huge amount for what ends up being mediocre machines. On the low end, they do the same, but with less glowing LEDs everywhere. There's a reason most gamers view anyone using an Alienware as a poser - anyone with actual experience, even FPS-obsessed teenagers, can find or build better computers at a fraction of the cost.
Gaming. Most games use some sort of single-file archive for all the textures, meshes, animations, and sounds. With modern games, those are usually 4-10GB. And the access patterns are only rarely sequential. Hence why some gamers invest extra on 10krpm hard drives or (now) SSDs - loading times in some games can be ridiculous otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
My bank account limits me to uppercase letters and numbers, and has a maximum length as well. Since that rules out everything I've ever used as a password (except for one I use on retarded services that email it back to you in plain text), and I don't want it written down anywhere, I'm constantly forgetting it. I got tired of doing a reset every time I wanted to check my account balance, so I just signed up for mailed balance updates and keep track myself - not hard when you only use it for online transactions (ie. Steam games) and major purchases (everything else I just pay cash).
I almost hope someone does hack the account, so the bank ends up losing money giving me back the ~$300 or so in the account. Maybe then they'll learn to follow security guidelines.
It's generally not scary.
Man, what patch version of RL are you playing?
Torchlight. It was made by many of the people who made Diablo 2, but it's significantly less "scary". Good fun, if a bit repetitive towards the end. And cheap, too - It was only $20 at release, and is probably down to $10-15 by now. And it even has a "netbook" mode to run on low-end hardware, in case you haven't upgraded lately.
Sort of. All the numbered games are individual - VI has no characters in common with I, IV or IX. They have made a few sequels - X-2 is a sequel to X, FFIV: The After Years is a sequel to IV, VII has both a prequel and sequel game (Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus, respectively), etc. And, if you want to get technical, VII, X and X-2 are technically in the same universe, but that's a rather obscure fact, and there's no shared characters between VII and X.
Normally, there are certain constants in the series. There is almost always a character named Cid, but they share nothing besides the name. The gameplay is relatively similar in most of them - I and XII are closer in gameplay than, say, Quake and Quake III. There are certain common elements (airships), certain musical themes carried throughout the series (da da-da da, da da daa da-daaa), and character archetypes are usually the same (ie. there's Chick with a Staff, Big Scary Guy Who Is Often Black, Creepy Goth Guy, etc.). And shout-outs are common, especially in remakes (see: Gilgamesh). However, none of the main games is dependent on any of the others - it's like how George Lucas has shout-outs to THX1138 in most of his films. The fans like it, the developers like it, everyone else doesn't even notice it.
Normally, it would just be seen as sort of a label for the creators - you would see "FFVIII" and think "Oh, it's from the guys who made FFI through VII, and I (liked those/didn't like those) and will make my purchase decision based on that". In fact, most of the series was made by a few people - Nobuo Uematsu composed the entire soundtrack for the first nine games, and worked on several others; Yoshitaka Amano designed the characters for the first six; Hironobu Sakaguchi designed the gameplay for the first eleven. So, for a while, it was sort of like a band's name - you would know "Final Fantasy = these people", and know that meant it was probably a good game.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. Most, if not all, of the people who made the classic Final Fantasies (IV-IX, by my count) have left. Amano only designs the title logo now; Uematsu left but is sometimes brought back in as a contractor; Sakaguchi left and made his own game company. Most players agree that the past few games have been markedly different, although whether they're still good or not is up for debate.
Compounding the problem is that Square is sort of franchise-whoring the series. Spin-offs are far more common - Final Fantasy VII alone has a prequel game (Crisis Core, generally liked), a sequel game (Dirge of Cerberus, generally disliked), a prequel anime OVA (Before Crisis), a sequel full-length movie (Advent Children), and has had guest appearances in far, far too many games (I know of many, many people who only played Kingdom Hearts to see Sephiroth and Cloud one more time). You could legitimately call that single "game" a series in it's own right.
And then there's Dissidia. Think "Square Enix's version of Super Smash Bros.". A game that, judged on its own merits, sucks. If you were completely ignorant of who the characters were, you would hate the game. It's a gameplay mess, the story is convoluted and pointless, and it's repetitive and boring. However, it was well-received because it had the main hero and villain of every major Final Fantasy game. And yeah, it's cool to see Kefka and Sephiroth duke it out. That would be like seeing Darth Vader and Darth Maul fight - instant nerd awesomeness. But it taught Square that they could sell a game purely on the Final Fantasy name. (I'm aware of the earlier Mystic Quest/Legends games, but those had the distinction of actually being worth playing on their own merits).
So, to answer your question, no, Square Enix doesn't actually have a lead on Activision re: franchise whoring. But they're catching up fast.
I never said *which* descriptions were false. I could have lied about the $, or about the &. I could even have lied about lying to you - maybe that *is* my real password.
If the passwords are encrypted, they'll have to go through the effort of cracking them to notice the postfix is there.
Using SHA-1 and the above examples, $kurg^is42_fb becomes de357c5ba1b2e8d6a773319d6c2d1068a3960bb9, while $kurg^is42_sd becomes a15d3716b55df845ef3f421a0343dd08050956c7. That's one of the features of a strong cryptographic hash - a slight change in the input produces a major, complete change in the output.
I have three different passwords I use for everything. The weakest (8 characters, 2 non-alphanumeric and one uppercase, but I sometimes have to strip the & and @ on things that don't allow it) is used on things where I really don't give a shit if someone hacks it. Want to upload stuff to Imageshack in my name? Who cares? Want to hack my Dropbox? I only use it as free file hosting - everything on it is supposed to be publically-viewed, and I have local copies of all the data. Want my Gawker account? Knock yourself out - I don't even try posting anything there, everyone's too retarded. Hell, some sites email it back to me in plain text.
/., etc), but haven't gotten around to actually doing it yet. Probably should.
The next password (9 characters, 2 non-alpha, one uppercase, non-dictionary word (unless someone added Esperanto to their password dictionary)) is used for things I actually care about. Steam. Slashdot. User-level logins. Email. Stuff I would be able to recover, but which would seriously inconvenience me. If I hear that one of the systems I use it on has been compromised, or even "maybe" compromised, I change them all. I do have this one written down in a few places, but always under lock and key.
The highest (20 characters, 3 non-alphanumeric, 4 numbers and 6 uppercase, with nothing at all that would appear in any dictionary) is used on things I need actual security on. Root accounts. Bank accounts (or at least I would, if my bank wasn't retarded). And the only place I have this recorded is in one location, which contains only the instructions I used to generate it, which requires knowledge of hexadecimal, early science-fiction, and the arrangement of my keyboard. I consider this one uncrackable - I would be confident setting it as the launch code to a nuclear missile. If I remember, last I checked it would take several years to crack the password - anyone who cracks it will probably have spent more on electricity for their computer than they'd get out of my bank account.
PS: I know about password management programs. Don't trust them, and I have to use public terminals too often to have passwords I can't remember. I've considered using the postfix system (ie. $kurg^is42 would become $kurg^is42_fb on facebook, $kurg^is42_sd on
PPS: That's not my actual password. And several of my descriptions were deliberately false, just to maintain security.
My bank is nearly as bad - only uppercase letters and numbers. I used my normal password as a basis for crafting my bank password, but I can never remember if I replaced all Os with 0s, or just the first one, or just the second, or what I did with the underscore, etc. So I still can't remember it. I got tired of doing a password reset every time I wanted to check my balance, and just signed up for mailed account updates. Fuck trees.
What's really sad is that I'm in networking classes right now (not in the Cisco ones yet, that's in a few semesters). And the only mention of IPv6 has been when I asked about it, or asked "how would ___ be done under IPv6?". They aren't even preparing new networking people to work with IPv6. I'm probably going to have to teach myself everything.
They're doing it for "teh lulz", most likely.
And I also doubt most of the recent Sony hacks have been vengeance. The first one, yeah, probably, and justifiably so. Everything after that was just petty crooks - they smelled blood in the water, and swarmed.
Woops, brain must've segfaulted and mixed it up with the Dreamcast.
After a bit of research (ie. reading the citations on Wikipedia), it seems that the OS is actually custom-made. However, I don't completely believe that - I suspect pretty large chunks of code, especially on the first XBox, were copied from Windows. 360 I can believe (it's not even x86 - it's PowerPC), but not the original.
The first Xbox ... internals were pretty much just generic PC hardware.
Not even that. For a gaming rig, the Xbox internals were CRAPPY. The processor was basically a Celeron 733, only 64MB of RAM, and what was essentially a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (the lowest-end of nVidia's DirectX 8 cards).
Actually, I was imagining some sort of Spanish Inquisition bit. I imagine Wheatley is extremely bad at torture.
You could probably do something with Holy Grail / the Animal King. How did it become King, anyways?
Lemons are apparently the new cake. Great. I know the jokes were funny in the game, but referencing it constantly whenever someone so much as mentions lemons, moon rock, crushers, or potatoes just kills the joke. I would much prefer that we make our own jokes.
Or at least do something inventive with it. I'm sure there's some funny Monty Python/Portal combination jokes just waiting to be made.
While I was thinking the same thing, I was thinking it was because he actually sent it (but didn't want to outright lie about it). However, the explanation of "he took the pic, but didn't send it" seems faintly plausible. Weirder things have happened. Occam would throw a fit, but I like that explanation.
In principle, that seems plausible. Life could have migrated there, not evolved. That may be the case for the worms, but the bacteria they feed on seem different. Feeding off radiation in a high-pressure, anaerobic environment? That seems too big a difference to easily explain via evolution from aboveground organisms. I wouldn't rule that out as a possibility, but it still seems dubious.
Well, it's an even-numbered release. Those are usually the good ones, right?
Precisely. I like open-source stuff, not because it's inherently better or more ethical than closed-source, but because the open-source process tends to produce better end product. I have no problem with running closed-source programs when they're superior to the open-source options. I go with what works.
Actually, the state of war is officially recognized. The Korean War has not yet officially ended - while a cease-fire and an armistice were signed, a peace treaty has not, and neither side has withdrawn their declaration of war. And, as the numerous infiltration tunnels violated Article 1, Paragraphs 7-9 of the Korean Armistice Agreement, and the Yeonpyeong shelling violated Article 2, Paragraph 12, you could argue that even the armistice has been abrogated, and that a full state of war legally exists.
I would assume that the burden of proof needed to declare war over a cyber-attack is no different than that needed for a physical attack. The Pentagon was basically just saying "cyberattacks aren't exempted from war - we will retaliate as we would for any other attack".
Now, if China were to launch a large-scale cyberattack, we'd know it was them, because they would simultaneously launch all kinds of other military attacks. If it's big enough to cause major problems, it's big enough to leave a trail, and eventually the culprit country will be hunted down. We know this. China knows this. Thus, any major cyberattack would be in combination with other attacks.
Hypothetical war scenario: First warning is a massive cyberattack. Goal is denial-of-service of the entire North American comms system. Whether by clever hacking or sheer numbers, the systems go down, and stay down. No Internet, no phone, nothing faster than Fedex. Second notice is a full ICBM launch. 300 missiles, their full inventory, each with nuclear warheads. Priority targets are the American missile fields. They're hit before they can receive orders to fire, or even confirm that there's an attack going on. Time elapsed: 20 minutes. US ICBMs are effectively gone. The only remaining nuclear option (the bombers were mothballed long ago) is submarine-launched missiles. Enough for some nasty payback, but not enough to turn the tide.
This could be either the prelude to an invasion, or simply a preventative measure - getting us out of the way so they can "finish" the Korean War, maybe. Perhaps even just a defensive distraction, should China feel that the American army is uncomfortably close to their border.
OK, so I'm not Tom Clancy here, but that's the most plausible scenario I can imagine for a military cyberattack. Political or espionage, sure, there's plenty of those, but when was the last time we declared war over a spy?
Maybe, maybe not. I'm definitely careful, and common sense is always the best first line of defense, but malware still gets through sometimes. Last virus to hurt me would've done the same no matter how careful I'd been. A normally-safe and trustworthy site got hacked (smbc-comics.com, for the record), put a malicious Java applet into the page. I happened to visit in the few hours before the site manager was alerted and fixed the problem. Virus broke through whatever security Firefox and Java (both fully updated at the time) had, and basically hosed my system with scareware and adware. Spent a whole weekend fixing it.
And there are, actually, some rare bits of malware that don't require human interaction at all. Worms quite often exploit software thoroughly enough to infect unattended servers. Although quite uncommon nowadays, since exploiting users is far easier than exploiting software, it's still completely possible.
Well, the general consensus is "it's better than the last several movies (ie. Nemesis, Insurrection, Generations), but not quite as good as the best movies (II, IV and First Contact).". So, while the reboot is generally seen as an improvement, there's still many ex-fans who are remaining ex-fans.
Judging from that, a DC reboot would work if people are feeling that the current stories aren't as good as they should be. Not being a comics fan myself, I can't say if that's the case.
Alienware? Seriously? Not only are those things bulky and ugly as hell, they're also terrible, terrible laptops. The high-powered ones have a battery life measured in seconds of full use. The low-powered ones are weak and incredibly overpriced.
There are plenty of good laptop manufacturers. I prefer Asus - a $1100 laptop has lasted me two years. I had one hard disk failure - I was able to back up all my data, send it in under warranty, and get it fixed, no questions asked. It looks pretty good, doesn't weigh too much, and balances a respectable amount of power (Core 2 Duo and GeForce 9600 - not top-of-the-line, but it still works fine even on newer games) with an OK battery life (~100 minutes, on a poorly-cared-for two-year-old battery).
Alienware is junk. On their high-end rigs, they charge a huge amount for what ends up being mediocre machines. On the low end, they do the same, but with less glowing LEDs everywhere. There's a reason most gamers view anyone using an Alienware as a poser - anyone with actual experience, even FPS-obsessed teenagers, can find or build better computers at a fraction of the cost.
Gaming. Most games use some sort of single-file archive for all the textures, meshes, animations, and sounds. With modern games, those are usually 4-10GB. And the access patterns are only rarely sequential. Hence why some gamers invest extra on 10krpm hard drives or (now) SSDs - loading times in some games can be ridiculous otherwise.