Basically, as I understand it, very shortly after being arrested, the government told him that he could either: 1. Go to trial right now, which would not give him and his lawyer(s) time to prepare their defense
or
2. Waive his right, and go to trial at the government's convenience (currently something like four years, without a hint of a trial)
By a million-to-one coincidence, the government was fully prepared to go to court against Mitnick from the minute they arrested him. Pretty funny, eh?
Although what he did was illegal, and he ought to be punished for it, the government really has screwed him royally. My feelings: TRY KEVIN.
And the prohibition on using computers and telecom equipment is outrageous. You can't do _crap_ without using something nowadays. I really can't puzzle out why the government seems to crack down so hard on hackers, as opposed to, say, murderers.
Anyone up for pooling their money for buying an island and forming the country of Linuxania? (or Wrestlemania, I like that....)
If someone is willing to employ me, but won't take my word for it, why the hell would they trust me to work there? I refuse to work in an environment predicated on distrust. I have much the same problem with the 'final indignity' practiced at Costco & CompUSA. It's a slur on my honor.
I agree. The problem of virii, rampant flaming, etc. can be addressed, though not necessarily solved, in several ways.
1. Legislation The US government which, let's face it, has more power over the net than other governments, can heavily legislate the net and people's conduct on the net, and enforce those laws with a heavy hand.
I don't think any of us want this; that it might happen is one of the downsides of having a government that was deliberately designed to be slow and stupid.
2. Social responsibility People should be pressured into accepting responsibility for their actions on the net. This doesn't mean they shouldn't be anonymous (see my other post on that subject). Rather, people need to think their actions through and act calmly and politely as much as possible, even if they experience no direct repercussions. Responsibility is not a matter of stimuli, response. It's roughly a moral issue. But there's no way to make people act in a moral fashion (no moral way), so...
3. Fault-tolerance While everyone who can ought to still act responsibly, let's also encourage the establishment of fault-tolerant systems which can absorb malicious/juvinile behavior like the liquid terminator can absob bullets.
Part of this means technical fixes, like not creating juicy hooks for virii, and definately not keeping them once this vunerability is made clear. I can't believe that Microsoft takes pride in any of it's work; their stuff is real garbage on all levels.
But another part of this is a social fix./. has implemented one type of social fix, in the creation of the moderator/score system. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of this, as it tends to lead to other people deciding what will be read by default. This ghettoizes many worthwhile posts because of moderators disliking the author, the content or not wanting to second-guess each other and bring a low score back up.
I'm sure there are other social fixes out there, if we'll only experiment.
Let's do all of the latter two we can, to avoid the former, okay?
Once again I just can't see why it is that so many people insist on everyone on the net being named. Untracable psuedonyms and pure anonymity get an incredibly bad rap here, even though it's nothing compared to the degree of identification that large corporations and various governments would prefer.
Yes, the net does have two apparently conflicting abilities. It both fosters extremely close relationships, by bringing together people who would likely never meet, with similar interests, or even who just like to talk to each other. At the same time, Katz is right in that just like the soldier who sits in a bunker thousands of miles away from the action, people can also be disassociated from each other, with the abstract, faceless ASCII world of the net insulating everyone.
Surely the exaggerated mode of speech, with concepts strongly worded to let the intonations of the voice and expressions of the face that are so essential to speech is a contributing factor here. If sarcasm (for instance) can't be distinguished in plain text from regular speech, an emoticon is not going to help that much. Written communication _can_ convey this information; after all people have written to each other for millenia. Yet, as more people now utilize it for conversational purposes with strangers, as opposed to the well thought-out letter of old to an acquantance, the number of people who fail to get their point across accurately has grown dramatically. I don't know if the overall percentage of these failures has increased though. I'll leave that for other people to debate.
Getting back to my point, yes the net has these abilities, because of fosters communication. It doesn't care to whom, from whom, or how clear.
Yet why should a person's thoughts and words be dismissed instantly only because there's no way to find out who, irl, wrote them? One of the great advantages of the net is that it's not real life. I can be a dog. More importantly, I can be a dog with something to say, and you can be a dog who wants to hear it. A name is just a matter of convenience, so as not to have to address everyone as hey-you@over-there.net. If people wish their speech to be attributed all the way back to them, that's their choice, but it doesn't necessarily mean that their words are better. Lots of people post (maybe not here, but in general) from aol or webtv or some such, which are all quite tracable. And they, because they are comfortable with their ISP, or don't know how or why they might change it, tend to get derided. Again, this is all too frequently based on a glance at a name or address, glossing over their message entirely.
Me, I don't want real-time video or sound. I feel that written communication, aside from being a more efficient use of bandwith for me, lets me choose my words in a way that speech generally does not. Yet I bet anyone five dollars that the minute a/v become the standard media for communication on the net, no one will bother reading text messages. Again, because of surface attributes, rather than the content. I will grant that communication may be richer by using such technologies (see above) but it's the discrimination based on relatively unimportant issues that galls me.
Yes, the most enthusiastic flamers and hackers (that word's meaning has multiple definitions; deal) will hide behind aliases and anonymity. So will whistle-blowers, people who fear retribution, people wishing to say things that would for one reason or another prove dangerous if posted with a name, to one's safety or reputation.
And I don't even want to get into the specter of big brother corporations and governments monitoring everyone. How many people here dislike anonymous posts, but support anonymity from Microsoft? You can't have one without the other, I'm afraid. (except possibly in Australia and New Zealand)
I am not, however, defending the author of this or any other malicious (by intent or deed) virii. Nor those who would slander or libel others. But while I don't intend to do the lantern thing, as long as there is one good reason for anonymity, it's something we really need to preserve.
I apologize if I've rambled here. One major gripe I have with/. is the small comment blank. It bugs me to only be able to read a few lines without scrolling, so I usually don't.
People have been predicting that Apple would go out of business any day now since they were founded. I'm not saying that it's difficult to attack either one, but why can't you attack the more entity that poses a more immediate problem? again, if microsoft dropped a ton of bricks on you and apple a single brick, why do you make the single brick a higher priority?
really people. even if you don't like apple &| macs, can't y'all find a better target that's more suitable (pragmatically) for these negative feelings? hell, why not bitch at microsoft - they're worse and not suffering, like apple has been of late. after all it's not apple's plan to kill linux/OSS now is it?
(sheesh - if gates, allen and ballmer dropped a ton of bricks on y'all and jobs dropped a pebble you'd blame apple)
Dumbed Down Journalism
on
IBM and Mp3
·
· Score: 1
oh, well, that's easy. the disk is 1.44MB in capacity.
That's enough to hold 1000 compressed 1 bit 1x1 pixel images, or 6 hours of music (provided that it's midi, or maybe a simple mod) or even 300 hefty e-books. All of which contain the letter e, repeated an ungodly number of times and nothing else. Otherwise they'd call them l-books or something, wouldn't they?
It's really amazing technology, and it's pretty cheap too! I can get you a prerelease version for $50 + s/h if you want.
It took me nearly three minutes to figure out what the hell you were talking about.
No, no, back in high school, I was a staff member on the underground newspaper, The Low Life. In order to make a token gesture at anonymity (we knew that the faculty knew who we were and they knew that we knew....) everyone used handles. The editor gave me that one. I don't know why.
At about the same time I became active on bbses and the net, and just kept using that as my handle.
Especially given that I'm a temp, and while I can take all the days off I want, I never know when I _will_ have work. Ergo, I work whenever I can, and in fact, was lucky to get to work on Easter weekend for more money.
However, here in the US at least, National Call In Sick Day is May 19th. We were just talking about it a day or two ago.
Is it at all possible that Microsoft set the whole thing up? Well, this does come hot on the heels of the GUID contraversy, which they're taking a good bit of flack for. Could the GUID be more important to them than people had thought? (which would be why they'd be willing to try to save it)
And with all the press (even some in major media outlets), why didn't the alleged author (who's would be pretty smart to develop this virus) alter the GUID? (Caveat: If neither MS nor the accused guy in NJ did it, then the actual author is smart enough;)
So Microsoft would have had to set someone up (who is a likely candidate for a fall anyhow; if I were Microsoft I'd look for someone who's written other macro virii, similarly trackable through the GUID database, pirates software, always quiet and kept to himself...) which would not be terribly difficult. After all, they're the only ones who have the GUID database and if they felt it necessary they could easily fudge it to point to whomever they liked, prior to it (or a subset of it) being entered into evidence.
And although I have not been directly effected by Melissa (I use a Mac, and pine on Linux, via telnet, for mail) it seems to me that it's just a very virulent DOS attack. The file it propagates is kind of funny, really. So why all the hype, unless MS (which is already known to feed reporters in the trades information, and could presumably expand their operation a bit) were to have been hyping it? And they sure reported early on the arrest of that suspect. Although this is all conjecture, it does make you think.
When a architect will develop and build a house for you that doesn't have any locks on the door. Will you blame some one for burglary?
Hell yes.
Although I don't find the Melissa virus to be all that awful (it's just DOS, and pretty funny too), and I have some sucspicions about the whole affair, it is completely irrelevant whether or not there's a 'lock on the door.'
If someone steals something, even if it was unprotected, then he's still a thief. Of course, I still think that Microsoft ought to have been found guilty of negligence for such awfully insecure products years ago by someone. They are partially to blame, but that doesn't absolve people breaking into your computer just because it's easier.
Nah, the version i read has Johnny and Molly living with the Lo-Teks, (Molly got the Yakuza assassin to cut a hole in the Lo-Teks' floor which he promptly dropped through) and Johnny working with Jones (the ex-navy dolphin) to decode all the other information still in his head.
Sometime between Johnny Memnonic and Neuromancer, Johnny gets killed, which is why Molly hooks up with Case.
I plan on taking the 19th off, and possibly the 18th if i think that the lines will be a problem. And I'll be seeing it with Altus, who said he's also taking off to see it (and driving back up to MA to boot!)
Fortunately all i need is linux - i've got the 400MHz G3 (waiting on my extra 128mb dimm).
boy i just can't wait til i have macos, macosxserver and linux all on my box. (which is blindingly fast btw - for instance the mp3 encode time to play time ratio is 0.5 : 1)
You could indeed be the world's greatest hacker. That power lies inside yourself Sailor Altus! Heh heh.
Anyway, what if the solution to the halting problem had a call to DestroyWorld and your comment read something like this: bsd call kept for bakwards compatabillitey (where you weren't watching your spelling and typed 's' instead of 'a')
Well, that's just begging for some BSD coder to muck with that. Always knew that a fateful combination of your bad spelling and Berkeley would be the end of us.;)
Yeah, dictionaries, thesaurii and other large reference works are all known to do this sort of thing. Although it's fscking hard to find the magic word!
I'd say just add in a couple of completely fake cds. They'd be lost in all the data but easily trackable.
I am curious though, as to whether or not CDDB should be allowed to do this. Isn't a list like that the sort of thing that would fall under the ruling that prevents phone books and many other databases from being copyrightable?
i'd like to get four imacs. a set of three (red, blue and green) which would be named Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup and another blue one which would be caulked and put in the bathroom.
"Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes..." -The Comic Book Guy, Simpsons Episode 4F12
That out of the way, I rather liked Futurama, although there was so much setup involved that I wonder if it'll have a running plot, or instead be as episodic as The Simpsons.
Some good throwaway gags, interesting use of cgi.... Ehh, I'll give it some time to develop; Simpsons blew until they realized that Homer was the heart of the show, not Bart.
Yeah, for someone raised on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, a stage light falling from out of the sky is nothing.
Would've been cool if it turned out to be one really big coincidence and Truman dies at sea. On a related note, does anyone else think that the Mission: Impossible movie would have been better if Tom Cruise had actually been a traitor (it would have only required a small amount of the film to be changed, and the girl could be the heroine in the end).
What's the difference between Fusion and Cold Fusion? Is it what it sounds like (Cold Fusion generates less heat)?
Ah, well, normal fusion (as takes place in stars) requires extreme temperatures and pressures to work. H-Bombs, which are fusion weapons, used to use an A-Bomb (fission) as a trigger. Nowadays I think they use some sort of really neat plastic explosive, but it's still not really useful for power generation or anything.
Cold fusion is much less demanding. The much-hyped cold fusion thing a while back was said to take place in a glass jar. Unfortunately for me and my nearly working DeLorean, it looks as though this was a hoax - at any rate no one seems to have reproduced Fleischmann and Pons' results.
The real trick is to get any sort of controllable and safe fusion process to output more (lots more, really) energy than it consumes. Then it'll be practical. Oh, don't go assuming that it's entirely safe, as it may indeed output a good deal of radiation, with solid waste in the form of the actual reactor. OTOH, we finally get some more helium (a non-renewable resource, IIRC).
Well, on the nature of the city in The Truman Show, wasn't it revealed pretty early on in the film that it was all a set? I only saw it once, I'm afraid so I could be wrong. (although I live a couple hours away from Seaside, Florida, where it was filmed - it really looks exactly like it does in the movie, minus the island aspect.)
Now what really got me was The Fifth Element. In all of the ads for that, they kept hyping the mysterious 'Fifth Element' even though it was revealed right away. That and the nightmare dystopic future in which everyone wears brightly colored french clothing turned me off to it. Hopefully The Matrix won't be as bad, though I fear it will be.
I live in Brighton, within spitting distance (really! i've tested this out!) from Newton. I would kill to have Media One and a cable modem. instead we get Cablevision, which is so craptastic that in order to get ~100 channels, they need TWO coaxial cables entering the box. so we end up with channels 2-55A and 2-55B
i hate cablevision - one of the worst things about living in boston or brookline. that and the parking.
well... i also had an apple iigs. and i was also bitter. the iivx that i got a couple months before the centri appeared didn't help.
but my last machine was handbuilt. i got a board, power supply, generic ATX case (which the mb fit, thanks), drives and memories and cards from half a dozen different places. without a bundled copy of macos. but having recently sold it off, i am now going to get a new g3 minitower.
i don't have any problems really, at the moment with apple, and i must say that it's nice to see steve kicking ass and taking names. macos x should certainly increase the mac cool factor, and i cant wait to get it.
id suggest waiting for the new os to come along, running it on the g4s and reapprasing your opinion. if you still don't go for the mac, thats cool too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Mitnick waived his right to a speedy trial.
Basically, as I understand it, very shortly after being arrested, the government told him that he could either:
1. Go to trial right now, which would not give him and his lawyer(s) time to prepare their defense
or
2. Waive his right, and go to trial at the government's convenience (currently something like four years, without a hint of a trial)
By a million-to-one coincidence, the government was fully prepared to go to court against Mitnick from the minute they arrested him. Pretty funny, eh?
Although what he did was illegal, and he ought to be punished for it, the government really has screwed him royally. My feelings: TRY KEVIN.
And the prohibition on using computers and telecom equipment is outrageous. You can't do _crap_ without using something nowadays. I really can't puzzle out why the government seems to crack down so hard on hackers, as opposed to, say, murderers.
Anyone up for pooling their money for buying an island and forming the country of Linuxania? (or Wrestlemania, I like that....)
Seriously, I can't stand the idea.
If someone is willing to employ me, but won't take my word for it, why the hell would they trust me to work there? I refuse to work in an environment predicated on distrust. I have much the same problem with the 'final indignity' practiced at Costco & CompUSA. It's a slur on my honor.
I agree. The problem of virii, rampant flaming, etc. can be addressed, though not necessarily solved, in several ways.
/. has implemented one type of social fix, in the creation of the moderator/score system. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of this, as it tends to lead to other people deciding what will be read by default. This ghettoizes many worthwhile posts because of moderators disliking the author, the content or not wanting to second-guess each other and bring a low score back up.
1. Legislation
The US government which, let's face it, has more power over the net than other governments, can heavily legislate the net and people's conduct on the net, and enforce those laws with a heavy hand.
I don't think any of us want this; that it might happen is one of the downsides of having a government that was deliberately designed to be slow and stupid.
2. Social responsibility
People should be pressured into accepting responsibility for their actions on the net. This doesn't mean they shouldn't be anonymous (see my other post on that subject). Rather, people need to think their actions through and act calmly and politely as much as possible, even if they experience no direct repercussions. Responsibility is not a matter of stimuli, response. It's roughly a moral issue. But there's no way to make people act in a moral fashion (no moral way), so...
3. Fault-tolerance
While everyone who can ought to still act responsibly, let's also encourage the establishment of fault-tolerant systems which can absorb malicious/juvinile behavior like the liquid terminator can absob bullets.
Part of this means technical fixes, like not creating juicy hooks for virii, and definately not keeping them once this vunerability is made clear. I can't believe that Microsoft takes pride in any of it's work; their stuff is real garbage on all levels.
But another part of this is a social fix.
I'm sure there are other social fixes out there, if we'll only experiment.
Let's do all of the latter two we can, to avoid the former, okay?
Once again I just can't see why it is that so many people insist on everyone on the net being named. Untracable psuedonyms and pure anonymity get an incredibly bad rap here, even though it's nothing compared to the degree of identification that large corporations and various governments would prefer.
/. is the small comment blank. It bugs me to only be able to read a few lines without scrolling, so I usually don't.
Yes, the net does have two apparently conflicting abilities. It both fosters extremely close relationships, by bringing together people who would likely never meet, with similar interests, or even who just like to talk to each other. At the same time, Katz is right in that just like the soldier who sits in a bunker thousands of miles away from the action, people can also be disassociated from each other, with the abstract, faceless ASCII world of the net insulating everyone.
Surely the exaggerated mode of speech, with concepts strongly worded to let the intonations of the voice and expressions of the face that are so essential to speech is a contributing factor here. If sarcasm (for instance) can't be distinguished in plain text from regular speech, an emoticon is not going to help that much. Written communication _can_ convey this information; after all people have written to each other for millenia. Yet, as more people now utilize it for conversational purposes with strangers, as opposed to the well thought-out letter of old to an acquantance, the number of people who fail to get their point across accurately has grown dramatically. I don't know if the overall percentage of these failures has increased though. I'll leave that for other people to debate.
Getting back to my point, yes the net has these abilities, because of fosters communication. It doesn't care to whom, from whom, or how clear.
Yet why should a person's thoughts and words be dismissed instantly only because there's no way to find out who, irl, wrote them? One of the great advantages of the net is that it's not real life. I can be a dog. More importantly, I can be a dog with something to say, and you can be a dog who wants to hear it. A name is just a matter of convenience, so as not to have to address everyone as hey-you@over-there.net. If people wish their speech to be attributed all the way back to them, that's their choice, but it doesn't necessarily mean that their words are better. Lots of people post (maybe not here, but in general) from aol or webtv or some such, which are all quite tracable. And they, because they are comfortable with their ISP, or don't know how or why they might change it, tend to get derided. Again, this is all too frequently based on a glance at a name or address, glossing over their message entirely.
Me, I don't want real-time video or sound. I feel that written communication, aside from being a more efficient use of bandwith for me, lets me choose my words in a way that speech generally does not. Yet I bet anyone five dollars that the minute a/v become the standard media for communication on the net, no one will bother reading text messages. Again, because of surface attributes, rather than the content. I will grant that communication may be richer by using such technologies (see above) but it's the discrimination based on relatively unimportant issues that galls me.
Yes, the most enthusiastic flamers and hackers (that word's meaning has multiple definitions; deal) will hide behind aliases and anonymity. So will whistle-blowers, people who fear retribution, people wishing to say things that would for one reason or another prove dangerous if posted with a name, to one's safety or reputation.
And I don't even want to get into the specter of big brother corporations and governments monitoring everyone. How many people here dislike anonymous posts, but support anonymity from Microsoft? You can't have one without the other, I'm afraid. (except possibly in Australia and New Zealand)
I am not, however, defending the author of this or any other malicious (by intent or deed) virii. Nor those who would slander or libel others. But while I don't intend to do the lantern thing, as long as there is one good reason for anonymity, it's something we really need to preserve.
I apologize if I've rambled here. One major gripe I have with
-cpt kangarooski
People have been predicting that Apple would go out of business any day now since they were founded. I'm not saying that it's difficult to attack either one, but why can't you attack the more entity that poses a more immediate problem? again, if microsoft dropped a ton of bricks on you and apple a single brick, why do you make the single brick a higher priority?
really people. even if you don't like apple &| macs, can't y'all find a better target that's more suitable (pragmatically) for these negative feelings? hell, why not bitch at microsoft - they're worse and not suffering, like apple has been of late. after all it's not apple's plan to kill linux/OSS now is it?
(sheesh - if gates, allen and ballmer dropped a ton of bricks on y'all and jobs dropped a pebble you'd blame apple)
oh, well, that's easy. the disk is 1.44MB in capacity.
That's enough to hold 1000 compressed 1 bit 1x1 pixel images, or 6 hours of music (provided that it's midi, or maybe a simple mod) or even 300 hefty e-books. All of which contain the letter e, repeated an ungodly number of times and nothing else. Otherwise they'd call them l-books or something, wouldn't they?
It's really amazing technology, and it's pretty cheap too! I can get you a prerelease version for $50 + s/h if you want.
It took me nearly three minutes to figure out what the hell you were talking about.
;)
No, no, back in high school, I was a staff member on the underground newspaper, The Low Life. In order to make a token gesture at anonymity (we knew that the faculty knew who we were and they knew that we knew....) everyone used handles. The editor gave me that one. I don't know why.
At about the same time I became active on bbses and the net, and just kept using that as my handle.
Thanks for laughing
Especially given that I'm a temp, and while I can take all the days off I want, I never know when I _will_ have work. Ergo, I work whenever I can, and in fact, was lucky to get to work on Easter weekend for more money.
However, here in the US at least, National Call In Sick Day is May 19th. We were just talking about it a day or two ago.
to "Weird Al"'s I Think I'm a Clone Now?
Is it at all possible that Microsoft set the whole thing up? Well, this does come hot on the heels of the GUID contraversy, which they're taking a good bit of flack for. Could the GUID be more important to them than people had thought? (which would be why they'd be willing to try to save it)
And with all the press (even some in major media outlets), why didn't the alleged author (who's would be pretty smart to develop this virus) alter the GUID? (Caveat: If neither MS nor the accused guy in NJ did it, then the actual author is smart enough ;)
So Microsoft would have had to set someone up (who is a likely candidate for a fall anyhow; if I were Microsoft I'd look for someone who's written other macro virii, similarly trackable through the GUID database, pirates software, always quiet and kept to himself...) which would not be terribly difficult. After all, they're the only ones who have the GUID database and if they felt it necessary they could easily fudge it to point to whomever they liked, prior to it (or a subset of it) being entered into evidence.
And although I have not been directly effected by Melissa (I use a Mac, and pine on Linux, via telnet, for mail) it seems to me that it's just a very virulent DOS attack. The file it propagates is kind of funny, really. So why all the hype, unless MS (which is already known to feed reporters in the trades information, and could presumably expand their operation a bit) were to have been hyping it? And they sure reported early on the arrest of that suspect. Although this is all conjecture, it does make you think.
Hell yes.
Although I don't find the Melissa virus to be all that awful (it's just DOS, and pretty funny too), and I have some sucspicions about the whole affair, it is completely irrelevant whether or not there's a 'lock on the door.'
If someone steals something, even if it was unprotected, then he's still a thief. Of course, I still think that Microsoft ought to have been found guilty of negligence for such awfully insecure products years ago by someone. They are partially to blame, but that doesn't absolve people breaking into your computer just because it's easier.
Nah, the version i read has Johnny and Molly living with the Lo-Teks, (Molly got the Yakuza assassin to cut a hole in the Lo-Teks' floor which he promptly dropped through) and Johnny working with Jones (the ex-navy dolphin) to decode all the other information still in his head.
Sometime between Johnny Memnonic and Neuromancer, Johnny gets killed, which is why Molly hooks up with Case.
I plan on taking the 19th off, and possibly the 18th if i think that the lines will be a problem. And I'll be seeing it with Altus, who said he's also taking off to see it (and driving back up to MA to boot!)
Fortunately all i need is linux - i've got the 400MHz G3 (waiting on my extra 128mb dimm).
boy i just can't wait til i have macos, macosxserver and linux all on my box. (which is blindingly fast btw - for instance the mp3 encode time to play time ratio is 0.5 : 1)
Woo Hoo!
Anyway, what if the solution to the halting problem had a call to DestroyWorld and your comment read something like this:
bsd call kept for bakwards compatabillitey (where you weren't watching your spelling and typed 's' instead of 'a')
Well, that's just begging for some BSD coder to muck with that. Always knew that a fateful combination of your bad spelling and Berkeley would be the end of us. ;)
Yeah, dictionaries, thesaurii and other large reference works are all known to do this sort of thing. Although it's fscking hard to find the magic word!
I'd say just add in a couple of completely fake cds. They'd be lost in all the data but easily trackable.
I am curious though, as to whether or not CDDB should be allowed to do this. Isn't a list like that the sort of thing that would fall under the ruling that prevents phone books and many other databases from being copyrightable?
my g3 b&w is nene. that much i've got.
-The Comic Book Guy, Simpsons Episode 4F12
That out of the way, I rather liked Futurama, although there was so much setup involved that I wonder if it'll have a running plot, or instead be as episodic as The Simpsons.
Some good throwaway gags, interesting use of cgi.... Ehh, I'll give it some time to develop; Simpsons blew until they realized that Homer was the heart of the show, not Bart.
Would've been cool if it turned out to be one really big coincidence and Truman dies at sea. On a related note, does anyone else think that the Mission: Impossible movie would have been better if Tom Cruise had actually been a traitor (it would have only required a small amount of the film to be changed, and the girl could be the heroine in the end).
Ah, well, normal fusion (as takes place in stars) requires extreme temperatures and pressures to work. H-Bombs, which are fusion weapons, used to use an A-Bomb (fission) as a trigger. Nowadays I think they use some sort of really neat plastic explosive, but it's still not really useful for power generation or anything.
Cold fusion is much less demanding. The much-hyped cold fusion thing a while back was said to take place in a glass jar. Unfortunately for me and my nearly working DeLorean, it looks as though this was a hoax - at any rate no one seems to have reproduced Fleischmann and Pons' results.
The real trick is to get any sort of controllable and safe fusion process to output more (lots more, really) energy than it consumes. Then it'll be practical. Oh, don't go assuming that it's entirely safe, as it may indeed output a good deal of radiation, with solid waste in the form of the actual reactor. OTOH, we finally get some more helium (a non-renewable resource, IIRC).
Yes, that's the one. It also had Chewchilla, the Wookie Monster and the destruction of planet Basketball. I laughed my ass off when I saw that.
Now what really got me was The Fifth Element. In all of the ads for that, they kept hyping the mysterious 'Fifth Element' even though it was revealed right away. That and the nightmare dystopic future in which everyone wears brightly colored french clothing turned me off to it. Hopefully The Matrix won't be as bad, though I fear it will be.
I live in Brighton, within spitting distance (really! i've tested this out!) from Newton. I would kill to have Media One and a cable modem. instead we get Cablevision, which is so craptastic that in order to get ~100 channels, they need TWO coaxial cables entering the box. so we end up with channels 2-55A and 2-55B
i hate cablevision - one of the worst things about living in boston or brookline. that and the parking.
well... i also had an apple iigs. and i was also bitter. the iivx that i got a couple months before the centri appeared didn't help.
but my last machine was handbuilt. i got a board, power supply, generic ATX case (which the mb fit, thanks), drives and memories and cards from half a dozen different places. without a bundled copy of macos. but having recently sold it off, i am now going to get a new g3 minitower.
i don't have any problems really, at the moment with apple, and i must say that it's nice to see steve kicking ass and taking names. macos x should certainly increase the mac cool factor, and i cant wait to get it.
id suggest waiting for the new os to come along, running it on the g4s and reapprasing your opinion. if you still don't go for the mac, thats cool too.