I find it amusing that there are people accusing environmental groups of fearmongering on the nuclear industry, while others put absolutely no effort into even getting basic information on wind. Energy shouldn't be political.
Modern windmills don't eat birds. They turn too slowly (as they're often the size of 747s.) I suggest a quick Google search would enlighten you significantly. As for the real-estate... Have you ever seen the footprint of a windmill? It's insignificant. They can be placed across farmland, or at sea (there's currently a proposal to build a wind-farm in Nantucket Sound, to power that entire area.)
I suggest that ISPs simply insert bandwidth limiters to prevent customers from overusing their connections, rather than charging them extra, or going to war with them.
Of course, the Civic Hybrid's mileage is nothing special. 51MPG on the highway is pretty damn good for a car of that size, but it's nothing special when compared to smaller vehicles. I have a more traditionally powered Civic CX that gets about 48MPG on the highway (or at least, it did when I first bought it a decade ago:). The Insight gets 68MPG, I believe (which is really impressive).
The obvious tradeoff here is size for fuel-efficiency, but that's really something to consider carefully if you're specifically looking for an "eco-friendly" car. In other words, depending on your preferences, it might not make sense to buy a heavy but fuel-efficient vehicle when you could get better mileage in a relatively in-efficient compact car.
"Let the market decide" has put the US a generation behind the rest of the world for mobile services.
I don't much like the current situation in the US, and I wish I could use a roaming GSM here and abroad. However, I think that Europe's actions will come back to bite them. For one thing, a lack of international standards can be made up for by the market. What's the difference between GSM and the US's TDMA-based networks? Frequencies and protocols. All things that can be modified on the phone side. As chips become more and more advanced and capable of communicating on a variety of networks, single unified standards may become as much of a barrier as as file formats are to a program like Photoshop.
Furthermore, Europe's headlong plunge into the morass that is GSM-based 3G will leave them out billions of dollars and stuck with yesterday's technology. The future of ubiquitous data communications is not hyper-expensive TDMA networks, but something more like 802.11. I imagine that thanks to the US's stubborness and failure to adopt standards, we will have an advantage in this area. It may take us a few years to fully develop the technology, but don't count the US out right now. One need only look at Japan's abandoned analog HDTV system to see what government standardization can buy.
It's worth pointing out that the movie was produced by Cruise, and Spielberg only directed as a hired gun. That could explain some of the "selling out" you saw. Of course, I never really though of Spielberg as the most anti-corporate director in the world, anyway.
But it might be easier for terrorists to take out something (physically) like the root DNS servers, or a major point like MAE East/West -- it may not cause the apocalypse, but that will still screw things up majorly for the world... the Internet does have lots of single points of failure, believe it or not.
I say bring it on. Nothing would convince the powers that be to fix the current, vulnerable system than a good attack on the DNS servers. If it's going to happen, it might as well happen now rather than later.
Though I sincerely doubt that Al Queda will be able to do much damage with their 1987 Data General laptop and 300-baud Acousticoupler modem, I wish them luck anyway.
(Er, and if you think this message was anything other than a harmless gripe, you might just work for a Federal agency.)
Product placement
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As for the advertising... how much has the Coke logo changed in the last 50 years? Brand recognition is powerful, long lasting stuff.
Actually, I think the unchanged nature of the logos can be chalked up to simple product placement. Firms like The Gap, Pepsi and Reebok paid a ton of money to get their logos into this movie, and they want to build brand-recognition in the here-and-now.
There's an interesting article over on Slate about the ads in Minority Report. Though product placement is nothing new, this film represents the first time corporations have actually hired outside advertising agencies to realize the full-length commercials that were played throughout the movie.
Everything recent is copyright even if you didn't intend it to be. You can't give it up. You can say that people are allowed to copy it, but you still own the copyright.
The Public Domain is alive and well. All you have to do to make a work public is clearly mark it as being in the Public Domain. A quick search on Google will find you plenty of confirmation of this.
But you're right that I should have been more clear. What I was referring to was not just public domain works, but also those copyrighted works where permission to redistribute had been granted by the copyright holder.
The 1st amendment implications are the scariest. If this law really does permit real DOS attacks where copyrighted files are concerned (and the language seems to be very permissive), then it permits corporations to interfere with the distribution of non-copyrighted files. That might include things like political speech.
I hope people can see the problem with allowing an unaccountable corporation to shoot first and ask questions later.
If their equipment is put up for auction, all those competitors out there will have an equal chance to bid up the prices. So it doesn't make sense to say that equipment will go for nearly nothing, allowing huge prices cuts.
Some of the competitors already have working networks. It makes no sense to buy a nationwide network or the equipment to operate it if you've already got one of your own. This really sucks for companies that have actually shouldered the cost of building and maintaining these networks, because now some competitor is going to come along and slaughter them.
The carriers will have to drop their prices below the break-even point, and there will be further layoffs and maybe even bankruptcies. And as the industry contracts, competition disappears and the consumer eventually pays for any short term benefits he/she may may have enjoyed.
A kiosk that allows customers to "build their own" CD compilations by selecting from a huge list of individual tracks -- paying $0.50 per track or $5 per CD...
It's a win/win situation for everyone - except the freight companies and those who press the CDs we currently buy.
It's not a win/win situation for the record companies. Go have a heart-to-heart with somebody who benefits from the current situation-- anywhere from an enthusiastic studio exec to a recording engineer or financially successful artist. Ask them how they feel about the "CD model", and what they think of your idea.
That conversation will pretty much blow away your hopes for voluntary change. The problem is simple: CDs are too sweet a deal. By packaging 9-12 tracks of varying quality onto a single album, the labels can often pull in a reasonably high take even if the album only has one or two hit singles. This reduces promotional costs, and increases profit ratios. Even if CD prices dropped to the ultra-low $5 you suggest, the labels would still be far better off forcing you to buy packaged CDs vs. mixing and matching.
This is not a fortuitous coincidence. This situation is responsible for an enormous share of the labels' revenue. They will fight like demons to keep it in place. They may lose that fight, but they won't do it quietly.
Besides, it uses a reserved portion of the disk so it's not like you're losing space for your recordings.
As far as I know, that space wasn't reserved when I bought my Tivo. When my box was automatically upgraded (to 2.0, I think), a chunk of previously usable recording time was plucked away and reserved for those ads. If you'd upgraded the space in your Tivo prior to that upgrade, you lost even more space. Please let me know if I'm wrong here.
If the labels can force p2p networks into a more complex model, it culls the less technically able users
That really depends how complex the user experience becomes. Napster was far more technically complex than the traditional "download from a website" model, but it still attracted millions of regular users. That's because all of that complexity was hidden behind a cute little easy-to-install UI. Kazaa is even more complex than Napster, but the user experience is almost exactly the same (excepting the spyware, of course.)
Many of the countermeasures suggested above would be fairly easy to integrate in a transparent way, and I imagine they will be. In the long term, I think this is a losing game for the record companies. The cost of maintaining the "war" on p2p systems is going to be far, far higher (by many orders of magnitude) than the cost of building a smarter p2p network (and for many p2p coders, it isn't even about cost.) Also, the more successful the labels are, the tougher and more resistant the p2p networks will become.
In the short term, on the other hand, it might make sense. If the labels make a strong effort to pull people into cheap, legal music download services now, this sort of disruption will serve them well. But I'm not particularly confident that the labels have their act together on this. (And even if they do, the battle will still go on over video downloads.)
Ford got away with it because tires are generally considered to be an add-on, not part of the vehicle (and the company still got into a lot of trouble, and lost business. The name "Ford" lost a lot of safety cred thanks to this problem.) Let them put defective steel/aluminum members into a car, and see if the focus is on "Smithson Steelco, Inc.", or on Ford itself.
Even better, let them run a standard set of tests on the vehicles (including crash tests) and still not pick up on a glaring flaw, and see who gets blamed.
Anyway, the fact is that somebody needs to be pressured in order to stop things like this from happening in the future. If you let Microsoft off the hook on this, they have no incentive to take responsibility for work done by their outside contractors. Do you think that shifting the blame onto the virtually unknown contractor that made this mistake is going to make future mass-released Microsoft products more secure?
So, to sum up, Microsoft really SHOULD be blamed. A world where Microsoft gets blamed is probably a better one for all involved (even Microsoft).
The headline and story blurb seem to suggest that installing the Korean version of Visual Studio.Net will infect your computer with a virus, and that simply isn't the case. Yes, it still shows sloppy QA, but it can't really cause any actual damage, and that should be mentioned in the story.
Hate to double-post, but, the blurb currently includes the following text:
News.com just updated their story to point out that it probably won't infect the people who installed Visual Studio.Net, but it's still a rather nasty faux pas for a company that's supposed to be cleaning up its act.
Looks like News.com is really to blame here. Since they're sort of a "third party" supplier, should we really hold Slashdot accountable for that website's mistake?
Just like Michael went after McAfee for claiming that the JPEG virus is a huge concern, he's claiming that the virus Microsoft included is a huge concern. It isn't.
Whether the virus actually poses a serious threat is incidental. What this incident demonstrates is that Microsoft has a poor process for examining work done by their contractors. This wasn't even a complex, difficult-to-diagnose code glitch: it was an entire additional file, which is to other kinds of fatal flaws as a mammoth is to a field mouse. What kind of security process runs a virus scan on only the files you expect to be there?
If you have serious money riding on Microsoft products, it should scare the hell out of you. It's like buying a new wall safe, learning that criminals have infiltrated the organization and added backdoors to the locks, but thanks to a completely accidental redesign, they can't use them. Phew. Would you be inspired to purchase that companies products? And of course, that analogy doesn't begin to cover it, because hunting down those criminals is nothing compared to the sort of work required to guarantee secure, trustworthy software.
This would be bad enough, but it comes on the heels of Microsoft's enormous marketing initiative for "Trustworthy Computing", which was intended to make customers feel that Microsoft is now committed to security in their products. If I were a major customer of Microsoft's, this incident would more than reverse any warm feelings I had toward the company's security policies since "Trustworthy Computing".
Not to mention that the hole the Nimba virus would be attacking becomes patched during the installation of Visual Studio.Net by the installation of Internet Explorer 6.
So if your doctor's office was accidentally spreading Hepatitis B to their patients, but-- fortunately-- was giving them Hepatitis B vaccinations at the same time, you'd feel comfortable doing business with that doctor in the future? What if next time it was something nastier?
Microsoft is breathing a sigh of relief right now because they caught a lucky break. Period. The only evidence of competence here is the installation of a Nimda-patched version of IE, and that's only because Nimda is a pretty old-fashioned bug by industry standards.
But a third party company screwed this baby up in transition, not M$. Using this as a "M$-is-so-evil/incompetent" story is pretty inappropriate.
If GM includes defective 3rd-party gas tanks and brake-pads in their vehicles, will you absolve them from blame? The sad thing was that this wasn't even a very subtle flaw. Microsoft could easily have found it with a slightly more robust virus checking process.
"Trustworthy computing" means that your 3rd party suppliers are going to have to go through the wringer, too. Otherwise the phrase has no meaning, and there's nothing at all wrong with making this point.
Anyway, the Slashdot writeup is, as usual, way overblown in its anti-Microsoft slant. If they're going to write tirades about McAfee scaremongering [slashdot.org], then they probably shouldn't do it themselves.
Well, god forbid we should put too much pressure on the company that produces the vast majority of PC OSes. Particularly a company that has recently been bragging about it's new high-security policy.
Are you actually suggesting that there's too much criticism of Microsoft's security practices in the world? A Slashdot 10 times as rabid couldn't begin to bring consumer concern to the levels it should be at.
They all got it wrong. Now they have to backtrack. Lowcost flatrate, unlimited broadband will become a thing of the past. I'd put my house on it.
I imagine the first result is going to be a lot of irate parents, pissed off to get a $100 cable modem bill because of their kid. Given the choice of locking the computer away or going back to dialup, most parents will pick the latter. Nobody likes or understands per-kbyte payment schemes, because they're completely non-obvious. Cable companies venture into this arena at their own peril.
Anyway, a lot of the underlying bandwidth of an ISP is rented at a flat rate. Sharing that bandwidth by applying per-kbyte charges or statistically-intuited caps is a very tricky operation. Do it wrong, you wind up with very pissed off customers.
Whether this is a result of the 9/11 attack and its subsequent Arab bashing or because powerful entities with ties to liberal political movements (Ted Turner) have bought out all the major news outlets is up in the air
I like binary choices. My news sucks, so either a) it's because of 9/11, or b) it's because of the liberals.
Actually, I rather thought that Ted Turner was off the stage at this point, having been told to take a hike by the folks at AOL/TW. I was also surprised to hear his news outfits referred to in the same breath as the word "liberal". If I'm not mistaken, the majority of the government these days is run by conservatives-- and they're getting the nicest treatment you could ask for from the press.
there's only a certain amount of stuff we can sequester.
Prove it.
Let me put it another way. Carbon sequestration is damn easy to do, with other, faster growing plants. Trees take years to regrow, and overlogging can severely damage an entire ecosystem and have all sorts of other messy effects.
Not that I have anything against responsible logging. It's just that a vast amount of logging is not responsible (particularly outside this country), and has grave environmental consequences.
Reducing complex environmental questions to a game of C02 accounting seems rather silly. If that's what the authors of this book have done, then that's a shame.
Yes, but that's assuming that most of the wood/paper generated from the trees doesn't biodegrade or burn. This is the case with some of the wood being cut down-- it winds up in furniture, buildings or landfills. On the other hand, there's only a certain amount of stuff we can sequester.
Clearcutting trees can have some very negative effects in terms of soil erosion, which can significantly multiply the impact of a single acre's logging. Trees are also responsible for pulling enormous amounts of water out of the soil and into the air, and so on.
I imagine that the original films will regain their popularity someday, at least in some circles. Then Lucas (or his estate) will make even more money by re-releasing them all on DVD in the unmodified (but refurbished) version.
But until that day, I wonder how much work it'd take to edit out all of the new crap on the modified DVDs when they come out? Perhaps you'll be able to download a mostly-original refurbished Star Wars someday soon.
Tips 1. Hit 0 on the first menu.. there is almost never a Cancel service option in the voice menu and 0 usually sends you to a human right away.
Dialing 0 used to work everywhere. Nowadays, of course, companies are wise to it, and more often than not you'll get an "invalid option" response. Plus, once you dial 0, they know you've got a touch tone phone-- so there's no way you're getting out of voice jail.
The best thing is just to hold the line and pretend that you just don't understand the whole button-pressing thing. And as tempting as it is, never fall for that "Press 1 to continue in English" line. Do you really think they're gonna force you to continue in Spanish?
Slashdot Mirror
Modern windmills don't eat birds. They turn too slowly (as they're often the size of 747s.) I suggest a quick Google search would enlighten you significantly. As for the real-estate... Have you ever seen the footprint of a windmill? It's insignificant. They can be placed across farmland, or at sea (there's currently a proposal to build a wind-farm in Nantucket Sound, to power that entire area.)
I suggest that ISPs simply insert bandwidth limiters to prevent customers from overusing their connections, rather than charging them extra, or going to war with them.
The obvious tradeoff here is size for fuel-efficiency, but that's really something to consider carefully if you're specifically looking for an "eco-friendly" car. In other words, depending on your preferences, it might not make sense to buy a heavy but fuel-efficient vehicle when you could get better mileage in a relatively in-efficient compact car.
I don't much like the current situation in the US, and I wish I could use a roaming GSM here and abroad. However, I think that Europe's actions will come back to bite them. For one thing, a lack of international standards can be made up for by the market. What's the difference between GSM and the US's TDMA-based networks? Frequencies and protocols. All things that can be modified on the phone side. As chips become more and more advanced and capable of communicating on a variety of networks, single unified standards may become as much of a barrier as as file formats are to a program like Photoshop.
Furthermore, Europe's headlong plunge into the morass that is GSM-based 3G will leave them out billions of dollars and stuck with yesterday's technology. The future of ubiquitous data communications is not hyper-expensive TDMA networks, but something more like 802.11. I imagine that thanks to the US's stubborness and failure to adopt standards, we will have an advantage in this area. It may take us a few years to fully develop the technology, but don't count the US out right now. One need only look at Japan's abandoned analog HDTV system to see what government standardization can buy.
It's worth pointing out that the movie was produced by Cruise, and Spielberg only directed as a hired gun. That could explain some of the "selling out" you saw. Of course, I never really though of Spielberg as the most anti-corporate director in the world, anyway.
I don't know. How many corporate logos remain unchanged from 1950? A very small number, I'd say.
I say bring it on. Nothing would convince the powers that be to fix the current, vulnerable system than a good attack on the DNS servers. If it's going to happen, it might as well happen now rather than later.
Though I sincerely doubt that Al Queda will be able to do much damage with their 1987 Data General laptop and 300-baud Acousticoupler modem, I wish them luck anyway.
(Er, and if you think this message was anything other than a harmless gripe, you might just work for a Federal agency.)
Actually, I think the unchanged nature of the logos can be chalked up to simple product placement. Firms like The Gap, Pepsi and Reebok paid a ton of money to get their logos into this movie, and they want to build brand-recognition in the here-and-now.
There's an interesting article over on Slate about the ads in Minority Report. Though product placement is nothing new, this film represents the first time corporations have actually hired outside advertising agencies to realize the full-length commercials that were played throughout the movie.
The Public Domain is alive and well. All you have to do to make a work public is clearly mark it as being in the Public Domain. A quick search on Google will find you plenty of confirmation of this.
But you're right that I should have been more clear. What I was referring to was not just public domain works, but also those copyrighted works where permission to redistribute had been granted by the copyright holder.
I hope people can see the problem with allowing an unaccountable corporation to shoot first and ask questions later.
Some of the competitors already have working networks. It makes no sense to buy a nationwide network or the equipment to operate it if you've already got one of your own. This really sucks for companies that have actually shouldered the cost of building and maintaining these networks, because now some competitor is going to come along and slaughter them.
The carriers will have to drop their prices below the break-even point, and there will be further layoffs and maybe even bankruptcies. And as the industry contracts, competition disappears and the consumer eventually pays for any short term benefits he/she may may have enjoyed.
It's a win/win situation for everyone - except the freight companies and those who press the CDs we currently buy.
It's not a win/win situation for the record companies. Go have a heart-to-heart with somebody who benefits from the current situation-- anywhere from an enthusiastic studio exec to a recording engineer or financially successful artist. Ask them how they feel about the "CD model", and what they think of your idea.
That conversation will pretty much blow away your hopes for voluntary change. The problem is simple: CDs are too sweet a deal. By packaging 9-12 tracks of varying quality onto a single album, the labels can often pull in a reasonably high take even if the album only has one or two hit singles. This reduces promotional costs, and increases profit ratios. Even if CD prices dropped to the ultra-low $5 you suggest, the labels would still be far better off forcing you to buy packaged CDs vs. mixing and matching.
This is not a fortuitous coincidence. This situation is responsible for an enormous share of the labels' revenue. They will fight like demons to keep it in place. They may lose that fight, but they won't do it quietly.
As far as I know, that space wasn't reserved when I bought my Tivo. When my box was automatically upgraded (to 2.0, I think), a chunk of previously usable recording time was plucked away and reserved for those ads. If you'd upgraded the space in your Tivo prior to that upgrade, you lost even more space. Please let me know if I'm wrong here.
That really depends how complex the user experience becomes. Napster was far more technically complex than the traditional "download from a website" model, but it still attracted millions of regular users. That's because all of that complexity was hidden behind a cute little easy-to-install UI. Kazaa is even more complex than Napster, but the user experience is almost exactly the same (excepting the spyware, of course.)
Many of the countermeasures suggested above would be fairly easy to integrate in a transparent way, and I imagine they will be. In the long term, I think this is a losing game for the record companies. The cost of maintaining the "war" on p2p systems is going to be far, far higher (by many orders of magnitude) than the cost of building a smarter p2p network (and for many p2p coders, it isn't even about cost.) Also, the more successful the labels are, the tougher and more resistant the p2p networks will become.
In the short term, on the other hand, it might make sense. If the labels make a strong effort to pull people into cheap, legal music download services now, this sort of disruption will serve them well. But I'm not particularly confident that the labels have their act together on this. (And even if they do, the battle will still go on over video downloads.)
Even better, let them run a standard set of tests on the vehicles (including crash tests) and still not pick up on a glaring flaw, and see who gets blamed.
Anyway, the fact is that somebody needs to be pressured in order to stop things like this from happening in the future. If you let Microsoft off the hook on this, they have no incentive to take responsibility for work done by their outside contractors. Do you think that shifting the blame onto the virtually unknown contractor that made this mistake is going to make future mass-released Microsoft products more secure?
So, to sum up, Microsoft really SHOULD be blamed. A world where Microsoft gets blamed is probably a better one for all involved (even Microsoft).
Hate to double-post, but, the blurb currently includes the following text:
Looks like News.com is really to blame here. Since they're sort of a "third party" supplier, should we really hold Slashdot accountable for that website's mistake?Whether the virus actually poses a serious threat is incidental. What this incident demonstrates is that Microsoft has a poor process for examining work done by their contractors. This wasn't even a complex, difficult-to-diagnose code glitch: it was an entire additional file, which is to other kinds of fatal flaws as a mammoth is to a field mouse. What kind of security process runs a virus scan on only the files you expect to be there?
If you have serious money riding on Microsoft products, it should scare the hell out of you. It's like buying a new wall safe, learning that criminals have infiltrated the organization and added backdoors to the locks, but thanks to a completely accidental redesign, they can't use them. Phew. Would you be inspired to purchase that companies products? And of course, that analogy doesn't begin to cover it, because hunting down those criminals is nothing compared to the sort of work required to guarantee secure, trustworthy software.
This would be bad enough, but it comes on the heels of Microsoft's enormous marketing initiative for "Trustworthy Computing", which was intended to make customers feel that Microsoft is now committed to security in their products. If I were a major customer of Microsoft's, this incident would more than reverse any warm feelings I had toward the company's security policies since "Trustworthy Computing".
Not to mention that the hole the Nimba virus would be attacking becomes patched during the installation of Visual Studio .Net by the installation of Internet Explorer 6.
So if your doctor's office was accidentally spreading Hepatitis B to their patients, but-- fortunately-- was giving them Hepatitis B vaccinations at the same time, you'd feel comfortable doing business with that doctor in the future? What if next time it was something nastier?
Microsoft is breathing a sigh of relief right now because they caught a lucky break. Period. The only evidence of competence here is the installation of a Nimda-patched version of IE, and that's only because Nimda is a pretty old-fashioned bug by industry standards.
If GM includes defective 3rd-party gas tanks and brake-pads in their vehicles, will you absolve them from blame? The sad thing was that this wasn't even a very subtle flaw. Microsoft could easily have found it with a slightly more robust virus checking process.
"Trustworthy computing" means that your 3rd party suppliers are going to have to go through the wringer, too. Otherwise the phrase has no meaning, and there's nothing at all wrong with making this point.
Well, god forbid we should put too much pressure on the company that produces the vast majority of PC OSes. Particularly a company that has recently been bragging about it's new high-security policy.
Are you actually suggesting that there's too much criticism of Microsoft's security practices in the world? A Slashdot 10 times as rabid couldn't begin to bring consumer concern to the levels it should be at.
I imagine the first result is going to be a lot of irate parents, pissed off to get a $100 cable modem bill because of their kid. Given the choice of locking the computer away or going back to dialup, most parents will pick the latter. Nobody likes or understands per-kbyte payment schemes, because they're completely non-obvious. Cable companies venture into this arena at their own peril.
Anyway, a lot of the underlying bandwidth of an ISP is rented at a flat rate. Sharing that bandwidth by applying per-kbyte charges or statistically-intuited caps is a very tricky operation. Do it wrong, you wind up with very pissed off customers.
I like binary choices. My news sucks, so either a) it's because of 9/11, or b) it's because of the liberals.
Actually, I rather thought that Ted Turner was off the stage at this point, having been told to take a hike by the folks at AOL/TW. I was also surprised to hear his news outfits referred to in the same breath as the word "liberal". If I'm not mistaken, the majority of the government these days is run by conservatives-- and they're getting the nicest treatment you could ask for from the press.
Prove it.
Let me put it another way. Carbon sequestration is damn easy to do, with other, faster growing plants. Trees take years to regrow, and overlogging can severely damage an entire ecosystem and have all sorts of other messy effects.
Not that I have anything against responsible logging. It's just that a vast amount of logging is not responsible (particularly outside this country), and has grave environmental consequences.
Reducing complex environmental questions to a game of C02 accounting seems rather silly. If that's what the authors of this book have done, then that's a shame.
Clearcutting trees can have some very negative effects in terms of soil erosion, which can significantly multiply the impact of a single acre's logging. Trees are also responsible for pulling enormous amounts of water out of the soil and into the air, and so on.
I imagine that the original films will regain their popularity someday, at least in some circles. Then Lucas (or his estate) will make even more money by re-releasing them all on DVD in the unmodified (but refurbished) version. But until that day, I wonder how much work it'd take to edit out all of the new crap on the modified DVDs when they come out? Perhaps you'll be able to download a mostly-original refurbished Star Wars someday soon.
Dialing 0 used to work everywhere. Nowadays, of course, companies are wise to it, and more often than not you'll get an "invalid option" response. Plus, once you dial 0, they know you've got a touch tone phone-- so there's no way you're getting out of voice jail.
The best thing is just to hold the line and pretend that you just don't understand the whole button-pressing thing. And as tempting as it is, never fall for that "Press 1 to continue in English" line. Do you really think they're gonna force you to continue in Spanish?