Another urban legend re: Google earth and maps has been circulating recently. Several people have told me that the satellite imagery is intentionally old, because after 9/11 the US gov't passed a law saying no satellite photos newer than 2 years could be provided to the general public.
This is of course hogwash. Google will actually tell you how current their data is (can't remember how to look this up at the moment), and besides, there are MANY instances of pretty new buildings and construction (well under a year old) that show up very clearly.
I've even shown examples of this to people who know full well what date a building/overpass/etc went up, and they still insist on parroting this legend. Urban legends die hard.
Back in the day, I was prone to scanning various cable ISP subnets looking for open Windows shares. The funniest thing I ever saw was this guy's wallpaper:
Imagine 2 stick figures engaged in doggy style, with one guy labelled "bad people" and the other "you". The caption was "You're fucked! You shouldn't be sharing your C drive with the whole world. Get a clue."
I never kept the bmp, but I still have a printout taped up on my wall as a reminder.
For instance, the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) has never been under copyright. Never, because back then, you had to put a copyright notice on your film or it was automatically in the public domain. NOTLD became a wild success, and sadly the original creators never saw much money from it.
No copyright law, extension or otherwise, has since fixed this problem. George Romero talks about this on pretty much every DVD commentary he's done.
It's maddening that something like NOTLD never made its creators any money, and yet Disney still rakes in billions from movies it made 70 years ago.
The more sunlight HOURS, but at any given moment, the sun is lower in the sky up here (posted from their destination of Calgary, Alberta).
Believe me, the sun is still quite noticably south of the zenith at noon here, even on the summer solstice.
Basically, they could drive longer up here in a given day, but with less power all along. It comes down to how much actual sunlight energy these cars need to run.
There's at least one vendor out there who sells software that contains essentially this functionality. It tracks what websites you visit, and how long you surf on them, by seeing whether or not IE is in the foreground, whether the mouse/keyboard are in use when it it in the foreground, etc. I imagine it would be pretty easy to monitor damn near any application this way.
The argument in its favour, so I was given, was that the proxy server couldn't tell with enough precision how LONG people were spending looking at a given website. Management actually wanted to-the-minute counts of what employees were looking at.
I suggested to my co-workers that we might as well throw away any facade of privacy, and install video cameras behind each employee's shoulder. This way we could not only know what they did on their computer during office hours (and every single minute of it!), but also whether or not they were wasting valuable minutes doing non-work related things like reading a magazine.
As I see it, if you need to resort to these tools in the first place, you have far deeper problems with your management style. It's not *that* hard to know who's being productive and doing their work, if you have any clue what your employees are supposed to be doing.
Anyway, as an Albertan I welcome rulings like this - I only wish they would be country-wide. Paranoid employees are far less productive in the end. But hey, if I don't have anything to hide, I shouldn't mind, right?
I'm sick and very tired of many posters here on/. acting as if the use of any MS product or platform is somehow a cardinal sin and an open invitation to get \cr@cked\.
It sure seems to be, however.
I remember a simple time when malware spread one way: through executable files on floppy disks. Wanna be protected? Don't run them without a virus scan on the disk first.
Then, viruses started spreading through email. No problem, just don't open the executable attachment and you're safe. What's this? Suddenly they can auto-execute just by previewing the message? Strike 1, Microsoft.
Ok, so that's fixed. I'll also run a virus scanner on all incoming mail for fun. Oh? I got a worm that infected me on an open port that I didn't know about, wouldn't want open if I did know about it, and couldn't close even if I tried? Strike 2, Microsoft.
Ok, we've solved that. A lot of patching, and a software firewall (and maybe h/w in front for good measure) stops that. I should be pretty safe. Now people are hosting viruses on webpages. No problem, I'll just not open executables within my browser. What? A simple click on a URL can infect me now? Strike 3, Microsoft.
You know why people bash Microsoft? They release an OS that needlessly leaves itself open to infection. Instead of closing the infection route, they (3 years later) tack on a firewall. They release an email client that will automatically run executable content. They release a browser that will do the same.
Fact is, it's possible to run a pretty secure Windows box, you're right. If you don't use Microsoft's email and browser software, if you patch (and reboot) your machine every week, if you run a software and/or hardware firewall in front and if you run antivirus/antispyware software 24x7. Oh, and shut down a few needless services (if you can).
Or, run pretty much any other modern OS/software suite without any of the above precautions. Of course, don't run untrusted executables in ANY OS, that one is a far more difficult nut to crack:)
Odds are, she installed a couple/half dozen programs. Some of the adware out there will set itself up almost like a mini distribution server, and install everything else under the sun.
ie: install program A. A installs B, C, and D. Each of those install 4 other programs. Repeat ad nauseum.
The rest of what you said, however, is spot on. I've stopped giving free technical support to friends and family who think they know better than me. If you ask for help, then ignore that help, you're on your own. Fortunately, my folks trust me pretty well and have been enjoying tabbed browsing for a few years now.
I met Chris when he still lived in Winnipeg nearly 15 years ago. Still good friends with one of his former roommates, and there's some pretty interesting stories to tell. Let's just say, he was into tinfoil hats almost before tinfoil was invented. I do remember him taking a lot of psychadelics at one point, which could explain where he's gone in life.
Way back during the early days of the web, Chris "pioneered" the idea of an online soap opera. Needless to say, it worked about as well as the idea sounds. Managed to get a TON of publicity about it, even though it seemed like no one outside of the media knew or cared.
Always interesting to see people you knew way back when making the news, especially when you come from a Canadian backwater (quick Slashdot pool: who's heard of Winnipeg?:)
Error parsing "panacea"
on
Anatomy of a Hack
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Non-MS machines not being perfect, and the parent comment that Windows should never be on the perimeter defense, are two entirely different things.
Network security in general, like another poster already commented, is about risk management. You'll NEVER be 100% secure - this doesn't mean that OS with the worst security track record in history is good enough. The idea is to get yourself to a comfortable level of paranoia vs functionality.
After watching Code Red, Blaster, Slammer, Sasser, etc, etc, etc run rampant through the Internet, I'm sorry, but I have to agree. Putting Windows anywhere NEAR your perimeter is like russian roulette. Sure, you can find someone who hasn't experienced problems with them. They're still in the 1%, however.
And don't anyone give me the marketshare bullshit excuse, please. The server market is still nowhere close to being dominated by Windows, yet it still sees the vast majority (99.99999%) of worm traffic.
SQL injections? Yeah, they work on any OS. Helps the cracker a whole lot if your SQL server runs with root privs - which for all I know is still the default and required state of a MSSQL box. If not... hooray, Microsoft caught up to 10 years ago.
A whole slew of services: RPC, SMB/CIFS (file sharing), UPNP...
Ports: 135, 137, 138, 139, 145, 500, 1025...
Windows 2000/XP has a TON of default listening services, most of which have been exploited over the years by various worms. Only way to turn most of these "off" (other than to render your system unusable) is to run a software firewall, Microsoft's or 3rd party. They're turned on and listening for "convenience", I imagine. I will admit that in a corporate environment it's handy as hell to be able to admin just about anything on a box without doing a thing. Why the hell these were left on for home users is beyond me.
Ah, Blaster, Sasser, et al, you will always have special places in my heart.
Unpatched Win95 will last about 20 minutes, from what I can see with Snort, IF you have file shares bound to TCP/IP. There's still a lot of Opaserv traffic on cable/DSL ISPs.
(For those that don't remember/didn't know, Opaserv was a fun worm that can crack any unpatched Win95/98 box with file sharing turned on, and bound to TCP/IP. How does it get in? Easy. Until patched towards the end of 1998, Windows 9x shares only authenticated the first character of the password. Opaserv just tried the first 40 or so possibilities. Took Microsoft over 3 years to patch this one:)
try putting a fresh RH9 (off ISOs) on your DMZ, and let's see how long it lasts.
2.5 years and counting, here. Default workstation installs of RH8 and later don't leave any ports open. Same goes for every other Linux distro I've tried in the past couple of years.
My personal favourite. Saw it for the first time maybe 2 years ago, now half the kids on IRC use it exclusively - and a goodly portion of Slashdot.
Of course, declining spelling/grammer skills are occuring everywhere these days, but I'll touch on a few things I've noticed specifically in the technical field.
1. Online chat. The need to keep up with a conversation online leads to very poor typing skills. Especially in an environment such as IRC, which is often 90% argument. People madly rush to get their point in before 15 others do, and make horrendous typing mistakes. Heh. Of course, others correct them on it, which makes them all the angrier. Eventually, I've found this devolves into "I'M NOT WRITING AN ESSAY LEAVE MY TIPING SKILZ OUT OF THS!!!!!1". Give it enough time, and poor typing is a point of pride to many people.
2. Geek culture. We've always had a bit of counter-culture in us. We hated the ties at IBM. We hate showering daily:) And we HATE authority, old-fashioned anything, and general proper behaviour (whatever that is).
3. An incredible influx of young people online. No one is as poor with language skills as a teenager. And no one is as defensive when you try to correct them. Combine these two and you have the recipe for #1 above, in spades. For most young people these days, IRC/MSN/? is their first experience with large amounts of typing (or writing, for that matter) that occurs without a spelling and grammer checker. When chatting, it's painfully obvious how the technology has propped them up. Most younger folk have also not worked in (for example) an office environment, where language skills actually matter.
We do it all the time, here. How many games are released for Mac and/or Linux? How many websites *still* only work properly in IE?
Hell, at least there are technical issues with those. How many times have you seen an application Windows-only, when it's a simple recompile and a few tweaks to make it run under Linux? I've seen a lot of formerly closed source apps that fit this category quite nicely.
Never mind, apparently the yanks also have some mountains called the "Three Sisters". Just took 5 minutes for the picture to resolve. Maybe I need a better gfx card?:)
Speaking of which, for those of us into climbing/hiking, for most of the Canadian Rockies (Three Sisters in Canmore is included as a default sightseeing point, yay!) the resolution and elevation are sufficient to get a general idea of what you're heading into. I've pored over topo maps and the like, but you never get the sense of what you're getting into.
I've used the tilt/rotate and careful zooming on some of the areas I've been this summer so far, and it's positively creepy. Having satellite textures mapped onto elevation data is the next best thing.
I've already poked around a few backcountry places that maps don't as show much fun, but the Keyhole data is veeeery promising. There's one block a bit north of Lake Louise that is VERY highly detailed for backcountry, looks like fun!
9,000 Star Wars stories on Slashdot and everyone uses the (admittedly idiotic) midichlorian line to claim continuity errors.
In the original trilogy, there were many references to "the Force is strong with this one", and "the Force runs in my family". It was always clear that some people were more inclined to have it than others.
My take on the whole issue, after seeing episode I, was that the degree of Force a person could wield was REFLECTED in the midichlorian count, not the other way around. Not until everyone on Slashdot started hollering about this did it even occur to me that the midichlorians were some sort of genetic inheritance that CAUSED the Force to be exhibited.
So, some people are more in touch with the Force than others. This is reflected by their midichlorian test. As they develop in Force abilities, other Jedi can just pick this up, but maybe when they're very young a blood test is needed. The Jedi recruits children who seem more likely to be strong in the Force, and trains them. Much like athletic skill is partially inherited, there's still some natural ability in all of us and training can give anyone at least some of it. There's no magic blood test to see "will be good at basketball", but we can look for indications that with the right training, someone is more likely to be.
I never once saw any indication that it was some exclusive, genetically-inherited power. I truly don't understand where people came up with this.
This is quite possibly the best Star Wars comment on Slashdot, ever.
One thing a lot of people here don't realize, is the immense age range on this site. We all assume everyone else is within a few years of age from us, and this comes up time and again: "my first computer was a 486" "I used punch cards, newb!" etc.
Us 80s kids (those that actually grew up in the 80s, not those born in them) are a very odd breed. We bridged the cultural gap between Leave it to Beaver and American Idol. Between transistor radios and mp3 players. Between pocket calculators and the latest G5s. Between Bugs Bunny and Pokemon.
Think about it: before Star Wars, mass merchandising almost didn't exist. Within 5 years of Star Wars, the movie industry changed entirely. Box office revenues became such a small portion of income as to be almost meaningless for many films. Saturday morning cartoons became an entirely different breed one the merchandise tie-ins became the important factor. We went from computers being these huge things you might have seen on television (back when there were 5 channels if you were lucky), to having one in your pocket that can SHOW television, all 300 channels of it.
When I was very young, the world was as my parents saw it. Pop culture came through the radio (been around for decades), television (a few channels, hasn't changed much other than the introduction of colour a while back - and most people only owned one), movies (theatres only, so you're only ever going to see a movie once or twice in your life) or newspapers. During my childhood nearly all of what we have today developed - the Internet, VCRs/DVDs, Cassettes/CDs, the 300 channel universe...
The world changed profoundly during the 80s. Those of you who were already adults just adapted, and in many cases, stayed away from the changes. Those of you too young to remember, well, you think the world has always been this way. There's a fairly small subset of society that's shared both experiences: the time from about 1945-1977, and today. Not just shared it, LIVED it. I cannot for the life of me explain to my parents just why a home computer is so cool. They'll simply never get it. And most kids these days just expect it. The magic is lost on them.
Insert Star Wars into my rant, and maybe you'll understand just why it's considered such a huge part of my generation's lives. What Star Wars did to the movie/toy industry is what we saw EVERY DAY while growing up.
Slashdot Mirror
*waves*
Another urban legend re: Google earth and maps has been circulating recently. Several people have told me that the satellite imagery is intentionally old, because after 9/11 the US gov't passed a law saying no satellite photos newer than 2 years could be provided to the general public.
This is of course hogwash. Google will actually tell you how current their data is (can't remember how to look this up at the moment), and besides, there are MANY instances of pretty new buildings and construction (well under a year old) that show up very clearly.
I've even shown examples of this to people who know full well what date a building/overpass/etc went up, and they still insist on parroting this legend. Urban legends die hard.
Heh.
Back in the day, I was prone to scanning various cable ISP subnets looking for open Windows shares. The funniest thing I ever saw was this guy's wallpaper:
Imagine 2 stick figures engaged in doggy style, with one guy labelled "bad people" and the other "you". The caption was "You're fucked! You shouldn't be sharing your C drive with the whole world. Get a clue."
I never kept the bmp, but I still have a printout taped up on my wall as a reminder.
Bono didn't cover everything, not by a long shot.
For instance, the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) has never been under copyright. Never, because back then, you had to put a copyright notice on your film or it was automatically in the public domain. NOTLD became a wild success, and sadly the original creators never saw much money from it.
No copyright law, extension or otherwise, has since fixed this problem. George Romero talks about this on pretty much every DVD commentary he's done.
It's maddening that something like NOTLD never made its creators any money, and yet Disney still rakes in billions from movies it made 70 years ago.
Palpatine: Kill him.
Anakin: No.
Palpatine: Kill him.
Anakin: Ok.
Don't worry, the Apache Foundation already made the introductions.
They're still waiting on meeting this mysterious Mr. Code Red, and his second cousin, Ms. Nimda.
Dr. Slammer could not be reached for comment.
See: John Wayne Bobbit.
Nuff sed.
Nope.
The more sunlight HOURS, but at any given moment, the sun is lower in the sky up here (posted from their destination of Calgary, Alberta).
Believe me, the sun is still quite noticably south of the zenith at noon here, even on the summer solstice.
Basically, they could drive longer up here in a given day, but with less power all along. It comes down to how much actual sunlight energy these cars need to run.
Sounds insane, doesn't it?
There's at least one vendor out there who sells software that contains essentially this functionality. It tracks what websites you visit, and how long you surf on them, by seeing whether or not IE is in the foreground, whether the mouse/keyboard are in use when it it in the foreground, etc. I imagine it would be pretty easy to monitor damn near any application this way.
The argument in its favour, so I was given, was that the proxy server couldn't tell with enough precision how LONG people were spending looking at a given website. Management actually wanted to-the-minute counts of what employees were looking at.
I suggested to my co-workers that we might as well throw away any facade of privacy, and install video cameras behind each employee's shoulder. This way we could not only know what they did on their computer during office hours (and every single minute of it!), but also whether or not they were wasting valuable minutes doing non-work related things like reading a magazine.
As I see it, if you need to resort to these tools in the first place, you have far deeper problems with your management style. It's not *that* hard to know who's being productive and doing their work, if you have any clue what your employees are supposed to be doing.
Anyway, as an Albertan I welcome rulings like this - I only wish they would be country-wide. Paranoid employees are far less productive in the end. But hey, if I don't have anything to hide, I shouldn't mind, right?
I'm sick and very tired of many posters here on /. acting as if the use of any MS product or platform is somehow a cardinal sin and an open invitation to get \cr@cked\.
:)
It sure seems to be, however.
I remember a simple time when malware spread one way: through executable files on floppy disks. Wanna be protected? Don't run them without a virus scan on the disk first.
Then, viruses started spreading through email. No problem, just don't open the executable attachment and you're safe. What's this? Suddenly they can auto-execute just by previewing the message? Strike 1, Microsoft.
Ok, so that's fixed. I'll also run a virus scanner on all incoming mail for fun. Oh? I got a worm that infected me on an open port that I didn't know about, wouldn't want open if I did know about it, and couldn't close even if I tried? Strike 2, Microsoft.
Ok, we've solved that. A lot of patching, and a software firewall (and maybe h/w in front for good measure) stops that. I should be pretty safe. Now people are hosting viruses on webpages. No problem, I'll just not open executables within my browser. What? A simple click on a URL can infect me now? Strike 3, Microsoft.
You know why people bash Microsoft? They release an OS that needlessly leaves itself open to infection. Instead of closing the infection route, they (3 years later) tack on a firewall. They release an email client that will automatically run executable content. They release a browser that will do the same.
Fact is, it's possible to run a pretty secure Windows box, you're right. If you don't use Microsoft's email and browser software, if you patch (and reboot) your machine every week, if you run a software and/or hardware firewall in front and if you run antivirus/antispyware software 24x7. Oh, and shut down a few needless services (if you can).
Or, run pretty much any other modern OS/software suite without any of the above precautions. Of course, don't run untrusted executables in ANY OS, that one is a far more difficult nut to crack
Odds are, she installed a couple/half dozen programs. Some of the adware out there will set itself up almost like a mini distribution server, and install everything else under the sun.
ie: install program A. A installs B, C, and D. Each of those install 4 other programs. Repeat ad nauseum.
The rest of what you said, however, is spot on. I've stopped giving free technical support to friends and family who think they know better than me. If you ask for help, then ignore that help, you're on your own. Fortunately, my folks trust me pretty well and have been enjoying tabbed browsing for a few years now.
Crackpot doesn't even begin to describe him.
:)
I met Chris when he still lived in Winnipeg nearly 15 years ago. Still good friends with one of his former roommates, and there's some pretty interesting stories to tell. Let's just say, he was into tinfoil hats almost before tinfoil was invented. I do remember him taking a lot of psychadelics at one point, which could explain where he's gone in life.
Way back during the early days of the web, Chris "pioneered" the idea of an online soap opera. Needless to say, it worked about as well as the idea sounds. Managed to get a TON of publicity about it, even though it seemed like no one outside of the media knew or cared.
Always interesting to see people you knew way back when making the news, especially when you come from a Canadian backwater (quick Slashdot pool: who's heard of Winnipeg?
Non-MS machines not being perfect, and the parent comment that Windows should never be on the perimeter defense, are two entirely different things.
Network security in general, like another poster already commented, is about risk management. You'll NEVER be 100% secure - this doesn't mean that OS with the worst security track record in history is good enough. The idea is to get yourself to a comfortable level of paranoia vs functionality.
After watching Code Red, Blaster, Slammer, Sasser, etc, etc, etc run rampant through the Internet, I'm sorry, but I have to agree. Putting Windows anywhere NEAR your perimeter is like russian roulette. Sure, you can find someone who hasn't experienced problems with them. They're still in the 1%, however.
And don't anyone give me the marketshare bullshit excuse, please. The server market is still nowhere close to being dominated by Windows, yet it still sees the vast majority (99.99999%) of worm traffic.
SQL injections? Yeah, they work on any OS. Helps the cracker a whole lot if your SQL server runs with root privs - which for all I know is still the default and required state of a MSSQL box. If not... hooray, Microsoft caught up to 10 years ago.
Tetsuo!!!!!
Kaneda!!!!!
(Repeat ad infinitum)
A whole slew of services: RPC, SMB/CIFS (file sharing), UPNP...
Ports: 135, 137, 138, 139, 145, 500, 1025...
Windows 2000/XP has a TON of default listening services, most of which have been exploited over the years by various worms. Only way to turn most of these "off" (other than to render your system unusable) is to run a software firewall, Microsoft's or 3rd party. They're turned on and listening for "convenience", I imagine. I will admit that in a corporate environment it's handy as hell to be able to admin just about anything on a box without doing a thing. Why the hell these were left on for home users is beyond me.
Ah, Blaster, Sasser, et al, you will always have special places in my heart.
Unpatched Win95 will last about 20 minutes, from what I can see with Snort, IF you have file shares bound to TCP/IP. There's still a lot of Opaserv traffic on cable/DSL ISPs.
:)
(For those that don't remember/didn't know, Opaserv was a fun worm that can crack any unpatched Win95/98 box with file sharing turned on, and bound to TCP/IP. How does it get in? Easy. Until patched towards the end of 1998, Windows 9x shares only authenticated the first character of the password. Opaserv just tried the first 40 or so possibilities. Took Microsoft over 3 years to patch this one
try putting a fresh RH9 (off ISOs) on your DMZ, and let's see how long it lasts.
2.5 years and counting, here. Default workstation installs of RH8 and later don't leave any ports open. Same goes for every other Linux distro I've tried in the past couple of years.
Nice troll, though.
My personal favourite. Saw it for the first time maybe 2 years ago, now half the kids on IRC use it exclusively - and a goodly portion of Slashdot.
:) And we HATE authority, old-fashioned anything, and general proper behaviour (whatever that is).
Of course, declining spelling/grammer skills are occuring everywhere these days, but I'll touch on a few things I've noticed specifically in the technical field.
1. Online chat. The need to keep up with a conversation online leads to very poor typing skills. Especially in an environment such as IRC, which is often 90% argument. People madly rush to get their point in before 15 others do, and make horrendous typing mistakes. Heh. Of course, others correct them on it, which makes them all the angrier. Eventually, I've found this devolves into "I'M NOT WRITING AN ESSAY LEAVE MY TIPING SKILZ OUT OF THS!!!!!1". Give it enough time, and poor typing is a point of pride to many people.
2. Geek culture. We've always had a bit of counter-culture in us. We hated the ties at IBM. We hate showering daily
3. An incredible influx of young people online. No one is as poor with language skills as a teenager. And no one is as defensive when you try to correct them. Combine these two and you have the recipe for #1 above, in spades. For most young people these days, IRC/MSN/? is their first experience with large amounts of typing (or writing, for that matter) that occurs without a spelling and grammer checker. When chatting, it's painfully obvious how the technology has propped them up. Most younger folk have also not worked in (for example) an office environment, where language skills actually matter.
We do it all the time, here. How many games are released for Mac and/or Linux? How many websites *still* only work properly in IE?
Hell, at least there are technical issues with those. How many times have you seen an application Windows-only, when it's a simple recompile and a few tweaks to make it run under Linux? I've seen a lot of formerly closed source apps that fit this category quite nicely.
Crap.
:)
Never mind, apparently the yanks also have some mountains called the "Three Sisters". Just took 5 minutes for the picture to resolve. Maybe I need a better gfx card?
Speaking of which, for those of us into climbing/hiking, for most of the Canadian Rockies (Three Sisters in Canmore is included as a default sightseeing point, yay!) the resolution and elevation are sufficient to get a general idea of what you're heading into. I've pored over topo maps and the like, but you never get the sense of what you're getting into.
I've used the tilt/rotate and careful zooming on some of the areas I've been this summer so far, and it's positively creepy. Having satellite textures mapped onto elevation data is the next best thing.
I've already poked around a few backcountry places that maps don't as show much fun, but the Keyhole data is veeeery promising. There's one block a bit north of Lake Louise that is VERY highly detailed for backcountry, looks like fun!
Word of warning, for those that are old enough to remember when programs used to ask by default where you wanted to install them:
:)
GoogleEarth installs in c:\program files. No option is given, unless you choose "custom" install.
Not a show-stopper, but I really wish developers hadn't moved to that model. I have multiple partitions for a reason!
9,000 Star Wars stories on Slashdot and everyone uses the (admittedly idiotic) midichlorian line to claim continuity errors.
In the original trilogy, there were many references to "the Force is strong with this one", and "the Force runs in my family". It was always clear that some people were more inclined to have it than others.
My take on the whole issue, after seeing episode I, was that the degree of Force a person could wield was REFLECTED in the midichlorian count, not the other way around. Not until everyone on Slashdot started hollering about this did it even occur to me that the midichlorians were some sort of genetic inheritance that CAUSED the Force to be exhibited.
So, some people are more in touch with the Force than others. This is reflected by their midichlorian test. As they develop in Force abilities, other Jedi can just pick this up, but maybe when they're very young a blood test is needed. The Jedi recruits children who seem more likely to be strong in the Force, and trains them. Much like athletic skill is partially inherited, there's still some natural ability in all of us and training can give anyone at least some of it. There's no magic blood test to see "will be good at basketball", but we can look for indications that with the right training, someone is more likely to be.
I never once saw any indication that it was some exclusive, genetically-inherited power. I truly don't understand where people came up with this.
Yeah, but unfortunately Wal-Mart won't give you a refund on bullets if you try to return them :)
This is quite possibly the best Star Wars comment on Slashdot, ever.
One thing a lot of people here don't realize, is the immense age range on this site. We all assume everyone else is within a few years of age from us, and this comes up time and again: "my first computer was a 486" "I used punch cards, newb!" etc.
Us 80s kids (those that actually grew up in the 80s, not those born in them) are a very odd breed. We bridged the cultural gap between Leave it to Beaver and American Idol. Between transistor radios and mp3 players. Between pocket calculators and the latest G5s. Between Bugs Bunny and Pokemon.
Think about it: before Star Wars, mass merchandising almost didn't exist. Within 5 years of Star Wars, the movie industry changed entirely. Box office revenues became such a small portion of income as to be almost meaningless for many films. Saturday morning cartoons became an entirely different breed one the merchandise tie-ins became the important factor. We went from computers being these huge things you might have seen on television (back when there were 5 channels if you were lucky), to having one in your pocket that can SHOW television, all 300 channels of it.
When I was very young, the world was as my parents saw it. Pop culture came through the radio (been around for decades), television (a few channels, hasn't changed much other than the introduction of colour a while back - and most people only owned one), movies (theatres only, so you're only ever going to see a movie once or twice in your life) or newspapers. During my childhood nearly all of what we have today developed - the Internet, VCRs/DVDs, Cassettes/CDs, the 300 channel universe...
The world changed profoundly during the 80s. Those of you who were already adults just adapted, and in many cases, stayed away from the changes. Those of you too young to remember, well, you think the world has always been this way. There's a fairly small subset of society that's shared both experiences: the time from about 1945-1977, and today. Not just shared it, LIVED it. I cannot for the life of me explain to my parents just why a home computer is so cool. They'll simply never get it. And most kids these days just expect it. The magic is lost on them.
Insert Star Wars into my rant, and maybe you'll understand just why it's considered such a huge part of my generation's lives. What Star Wars did to the movie/toy industry is what we saw EVERY DAY while growing up.