You just proved my point. The Flat Tax plan substitutes a five-figure personal deduction and lower flat rate for all those separate deductions. Company perks (company cars, etc) are taxed as income. In effect, the Flat Tax makes a well-padded guess on living expenses, calls that the personal deduction, and taxes anything above that at 17%. You don't have to get Big Brother's approval to spend your money the way you want!
Corporate capital investments are fully deductable first-year rather than depreciated and any unused deductions are carried forward. That ends the disincentive to invest in productivity-enhancing capital equipment, and I guarantee the companies that build that equipment (say, PC vendors) will appreciate it, even though they'll be paying more in taxes because they're doing more business.
I'm convinced that most startups don't need venture captial. What they do need is a core crew of engineers and (later on) a skeleton crew of support staff (ie, people who will find paying customers) who are willing and able to take equity instead of cash until paying customers are found. When and if those paying customers are found, profits not reinvested in the company are paid out as dividends to the shareholders. Add angel investment into the mix as appropriate. Don't even consider going public (not worth the overhead and distraction, especially now that the IPO bubble has gone kaboom), but if the stockholders (mostly engineers, if you've managed to do this right) want to sell out to a Big Company that offers the appropriate pile of lucre, that works too. (A local crew did this, selling out to Cisco for $millions. Neat trick.)
Benefits:
1) Paying out cash to employees is inefficient, since the marginal tax rate in America is roughly 50% (28% Federal income + 12.4% SocSec + 2.9% Mediscare + the state income tax that pays for the roads/schools/fire/police that people actually use). This is known as "soaking the rich", aka slavery, aka how the Democratic Party has adapted from the pre-Civil-War era to the Information Age. Equity doesn't get taxed until it's sold, and the long term capital gains tax is 20%. Which is why the 1993 Federal income tax hike didn't kill the economy, people just switched to financing with stock instead of cash, which had the unfortunate side effect of making it easy to fund things like pets.com.
2) Very little corporate overhead, very simple. Minimizes contacts with lawyers, accountants, and other such creatures that add friction to the economy.
Problems:
1) The U.S. Federal Tax Code is rigged to royally screw companies that pay out dividends. Corporate profits are taxed once as income, and the stockholders are taxed again on what's left of that income when they receive their dividends at the stockholders Federal income tax rate. So $1,000 in gross profits becomes $650 in net profits becomes ~$450. Possible workaround: profit-sharing checks for the employees, but that doesn't help angel investors if you have them. Killing the double taxation of dividends would make more sense but it would never get through the Senate.
2) Surviving on little to no income while the company gets off the ground. Even without dependents, just paying for housing is a bitch, and geeks tend to congregate in territories with the looniest real estate valuations. (In the Midwest, that means my home city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, with housing valuations second only to Chicago.) The reason valuations are so high is that the Federal Mortgage Interest Deduction encourages real estate inflation, and the average voter is too stupid to realize that giving up their precious deductions (aka social engineering) and switching to the Flat Income Tax plan would leave them at least as well off. Local zoning regs that make high-density development impossible do the rest (thus why we have yuppie lofts in renovated decrepit downtown buildings renting for $big bucks rather than highrises).
3) Stock is much riskier than cash for workers. Nice upside when it works, though.
4) This doesn't work for companies with heavy capital expenses. Fortunately, many/most geek companies don't fall into this category.
Fair warning: IANA(lawyer | accountant), just a geek who follows finance and politics enough to be dangerous.
I'm even more frightened when I consider that future space exploration may be limited to Individuals and Private Corporations, whose main concern is their own pocketbooks, and not the benefit of humanity.
I wasn't referring to any benchmarks, I was intending a sarcastic slam at Intel for rigging their P4 with a ridiculously long performence-killing 20 stage pipeline just so they could crank the clockspeed above what the AMD Athlon (with its much more rational 11 stage pipeline) can do. I guess I should have nixed the Quake3 comment that threw everyone. Intel has a minor marketing headache on their hands if anyone bothers to ask why the ridiculously expensive sub-GHz Itanium is a faster chip than the 2GHz P4.
AMD should bring up this point in their marketing, actually.
I'm betting on the AMD Hammer series (2H2002) over the second-generation Itaniums (McKinley?) regardless.
But golly, the Itanium isn't even GHz-class while the Pentium 4 is 2GHz. Why would anyone buy such an obviously slow machine? Even a pokey 1.4GHz Athlon is faster than the Itanium, right? Quake 3 framerates must really suck!
(Amusing how Intel went with a short pipeline at the expense of clockspeed when selling to a more technologically literate market...)
With Sun Blade 100 workstations available for $1K, it'd be nice to drop an ATI Radeon PCI card in and use that instead of the onboard ATI Rage chip. Is this doable?
Actually, what would be really cool is to get one of the ATX UltraSPARC IIe motherboards (roughly equivalent to what the Blade 100 ships with), mount it in a good midtower case (PC Power & Cooling, 400W Silencer p/s), get four 512meg PC133 ECC DIMMs from Crucial, one or two IBM 60gig 60GXP series IDE drives or Ultrastar 10K RPM SCSI drives (which SCSI controller?), a DVD-ROM drive (Pioneer 16X slot-load?), that Radeon PCI card, slap it all together, and you'd have a pretty nice workstation or low-end server. Much better than the config Sun sells.
But that's only because we need SPARC Solaris compatibility at work. Otherwise, a dual Athlon running Linux would beat the snot out of it.
IMnsHO, 128megs RAM isn't enough these days. 256megs is a good minimum, and I put 512megs in new machines I build. 256meg RIMMs cost over double what 256meg PC2100 DIMMs cost, and I'd want a pair in either case. Your argument to compare the cost of two 256meg RIMMs to a single 512meg DIMM is absurd.
Then again, I do C++ and Java development. YMMV.
BTW, you'll be able to do dual-channel DDR SDRAM with the nForce chipset, which will whomp Rambus solutions but good (4.2Gb/sec *and* low latency *and* dirt cheap).
$77 per for PC800 256meg RIMMs, which is a good deal more than 256meg PC2100 DDR DIMMs ($31). 64meg RIMMs are not terribly useful these days, so they're being dumped. And like I said, Rambus memory has poor latency.
Let's see, do I buy a 2GHz uniprocessor P4 with its performence-killing 20 stage pipeline, miniscule 8K L1 cache, and high-latency/overpriced RDRAM, or do I buy a dual processor AthlonMP, 128K L1 cache, DDR SDRAM, and 64-bit PCI slots (Tyan Tiger MP) for LESS MONEY?
These days, Intel CPUs are for people who don't know any better (or are forced to buy Dell).
Ditto what the other folks replying said about power supplies. I have a 1.4GHz Athlon OC'd to 1.5GHz (11x136MHz) on my desk at work (custom built because Dell only sells obsolete P3s and brain-damaged P4s), and the 400W Silencer power supply from PC Power & Cooling has no trouble at all, the +3.3V rail stays between 3.30 and 3.34 (average 3.33) volts, the +5V rail stays between 4.95 and 5.05 (average 4.99) volts, and the +12V rail stays between 11.86 and 12.04 (average 11.93) volts. Expensive beasts, but worth it, and they have the juice to handle the dual Tyan motherboards that are just starting to trickle onto the market (the $250 workstation boards). If you can't afford a PCP&C supply, at least get an Antec.
Where can I get a computer for free? Please, sign me up!
It's called used hardware. Now that the new stuff is so cheap, it shouldn't be too much trouble to hunt down an old 486 or even a Pentium for next to nothing. Kinda like how the poor drive used cars instead of new ones. (Hell, I drive a used car, if only because I'd rather piss away my money on computer toys:-)) It also says something about America when people who are "poor" have cars, but I digress.
Not that there isn't merit to having a few publically accessable Internet-connected PCs in libraries and such, it's just not that big a deal. If the politicians really wanted to help, they'd quit making it so damn difficult to build new (fiber optic) cable plants to compete against the existing antiquated communications infrastructure, assuming there's much to compete with in the first place. No more legal monopolies in exchange for taxes--er, "franchise fees", 'kay?
The "it's inevitable" argument is the one used by socialists when they're trying to disarm opponents. Odd to see it being used here, both because of the context and because it's been so thoroughly discredited.
Even if the control freaks can overcome the technical obsticals, the only way they can get sustainable legal support (anyone wanna bet on the DMCA being around in full force in 5 years?) is by convincing the voting public that they want the restrictions, and while that's relatively easy for the pollution-control devices the TR author cites, it's a lot harder to come up with a compelling argument for 'net controls. The odds against figuring out both the technical and legal sides are in freedom's favor.
Re:The true question is...
on
Quake 4 Announced
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, after III comes IV, not IIII.
You wanna argue with the nailgun, you go right ahead...
I do something similar, except I pop up an IE window pointing to a page on a site I host explaining code red and how to fix it. I always get that CGI error, but my server logs report a hit from the infected host on my explanation page. So that error is perfectly normal - it's working.
%2A is *, which will send to all machines on a workgroup in a workgroup configuration, and I would presume all machines on a domain as well. This should be fairly easy to automate... but it's late, so I'll let someone else play with this.
A user on grc.security (news.grc.com) suggested using the Windows "net send" command to send a pop-up message to the infected user. net.exe won't talk across the Internet, but you ought to be able to run the net.exe program on the rooted IIS box, something like:
http://ipaddress/c/inetpub/scripts/root.exe?/c+n et +send+%25COMPUTERNAME%25+You+have+been+infected+by +the+Code+Red+II+Worm+which+attempted+to+attack+my +server
%25COMPUTERNAME%25 translates to %COMPUTERNAME%, which returns the Windows hostname. I know that works from one of my failed attempts that gave me a reply, but with the above string, I get back a page with "Error in CGI Application" as
the title:
CGI Error
The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set
of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:
and it doesn't give me any return. Can anyone verify and/or debug this? It *might* be working.
The %USERDOMAIN% variable might be useful too, so you could send to the whole Windows domain, "Machine LUSER on DOOFUSDOMAIN is infected with Code Red II" or some such. %USERDOMAIN% is the machine name on systems on a workgroup.
I made a rookie mistake in my story submission
on
Code Red Back For More
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It just occurred to me to look up the definition of Class A/B/C addresses, and yup, I used the terms wrong in my story submission (argh!). What I meant to say was that when the worm generates addresses to scan, it appeared to always keep the first octet and a little over half the time (137 of 224 scans in my case) it keeps the second octet as well. That's no longer precisely true: I've since logged one scan from 152.72.x.x (grep XXXX access_log | grep -v 24.). And the high number of scans from within the first two octets may have more to do with that being a block of cable modem addresses rich in vulnerable IIS machines than anything else.
And now we know these poor bastards have been rootkitted. There has to be a way to use this to warn them?
Perhaps the fact that this guy got modded to 3 with such baseless "logic" is an indication that there are some xenophobic moderators around? Guys, mod this misguided moron down!
My point, had you bothered to think about it, was that the reasons given for why the worm couldn't have originated in China were obviously wrong, and had the reporter been competent enough to do a modest amount of research he'd have seen that.
Sometimes the obvious answer, namely that the worm really was written by a lone cracker in China, really is the right one, no matter how un-politically-correct it is. However, we don't really know, as I indicated with "(Chinese?)". I'm just curious why the reporter's mainland Chinese sources felt it necessary to dispense obvious misinformation. It's probably just a reflex action from a lifetime in one of the more brutal Communist dictatorships.
This newswire article quotes various people in China claiming that obviously the worm didn't come from there because Chinese servers aren't getting infected, and besides, the worm is just too complicated for an individual to create. The reporter bought it. Had he bothered to do some research, he'd have known that the worm is coded to only infect English (US) language servers, and in all likelyhood it was coded by a (Chinese?) teenager with too much time on his hands.
(Well, okay, it does run on the non-English servers, but it doesn't deface them...)
They should have done a remake of the original book, which todays movie budgets and technology would allow. And they should have picked someone other than Tim Burton to make it. In the novel the apes lived in a futuristic society with advanced technology. That I'd pay $8 to watch. Instead, I've ordered the novel, and after I've read that I'll rent the original flick.
Mark Wahlberg is no Charlton Heston. Ugh.
This is my favorite review of the movie. "Meanwhile, even though we are supposed to be rooting for the humans, Wahlberg throws out one-liners about how awful and relatively inferior we are. 'The smarter we get, the more violent our world becomes,' he says with all of the intensity you'd expect from a mechanic telling you to pick up your car on Tuesday. Indeed, when Wahlberg needs to issue a Henry V style loin-girding speech a la Mel Gibson in Braveheart, he instead sounds like he's yelling at a driver who's about to take his parking spot."
Oh yeah, silly me... So that's why DVD's cost about 50% more in the UK than they do in the States.
Or because of VAT taxes, import duties, the high cost of doing business in general...
According to my expat coworkers, EVERYTHING is more expensive in the UK. They'll typically buy computer gear here before returning home, just a few small items that'll make it through customs.
Not that I'm excusing the asinine DVD regional encoding scheme, but hey, it was designed by Hollywood liberal control freaks:-).
Slashdot Mirror
You just proved my point. The Flat Tax plan substitutes a five-figure personal deduction and lower flat rate for all those separate deductions. Company perks (company cars, etc) are taxed as income. In effect, the Flat Tax makes a well-padded guess on living expenses, calls that the personal deduction, and taxes anything above that at 17%. You don't have to get Big Brother's approval to spend your money the way you want!
Corporate capital investments are fully deductable first-year rather than depreciated and any unused deductions are carried forward. That ends the disincentive to invest in productivity-enhancing capital equipment, and I guarantee the companies that build that equipment (say, PC vendors) will appreciate it, even though they'll be paying more in taxes because they're doing more business.
I'm convinced that most startups don't need venture captial. What they do need is a core crew of engineers and (later on) a skeleton crew of support staff (ie, people who will find paying customers) who are willing and able to take equity instead of cash until paying customers are found. When and if those paying customers are found, profits not reinvested in the company are paid out as dividends to the shareholders. Add angel investment into the mix as appropriate. Don't even consider going public (not worth the overhead and distraction, especially now that the IPO bubble has gone kaboom), but if the stockholders (mostly engineers, if you've managed to do this right) want to sell out to a Big Company that offers the appropriate pile of lucre, that works too. (A local crew did this, selling out to Cisco for $millions. Neat trick.)
Benefits:
1) Paying out cash to employees is inefficient, since the marginal tax rate in America is roughly 50% (28% Federal income + 12.4% SocSec + 2.9% Mediscare + the state income tax that pays for the roads/schools/fire/police that people actually use). This is known as "soaking the rich", aka slavery, aka how the Democratic Party has adapted from the pre-Civil-War era to the Information Age. Equity doesn't get taxed until it's sold, and the long term capital gains tax is 20%. Which is why the 1993 Federal income tax hike didn't kill the economy, people just switched to financing with stock instead of cash, which had the unfortunate side effect of making it easy to fund things like pets.com.
2) Very little corporate overhead, very simple. Minimizes contacts with lawyers, accountants, and other such creatures that add friction to the economy.
Problems:
1) The U.S. Federal Tax Code is rigged to royally screw companies that pay out dividends. Corporate profits are taxed once as income, and the stockholders are taxed again on what's left of that income when they receive their dividends at the stockholders Federal income tax rate. So $1,000 in gross profits becomes $650 in net profits becomes ~$450. Possible workaround: profit-sharing checks for the employees, but that doesn't help angel investors if you have them. Killing the double taxation of dividends would make more sense but it would never get through the Senate.
2) Surviving on little to no income while the company gets off the ground. Even without dependents, just paying for housing is a bitch, and geeks tend to congregate in territories with the looniest real estate valuations. (In the Midwest, that means my home city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, with housing valuations second only to Chicago.) The reason valuations are so high is that the Federal Mortgage Interest Deduction encourages real estate inflation, and the average voter is too stupid to realize that giving up their precious deductions (aka social engineering) and switching to the Flat Income Tax plan would leave them at least as well off. Local zoning regs that make high-density development impossible do the rest (thus why we have yuppie lofts in renovated decrepit downtown buildings renting for $big bucks rather than highrises).
3) Stock is much riskier than cash for workers. Nice upside when it works, though.
4) This doesn't work for companies with heavy capital expenses. Fortunately, many/most geek companies don't fall into this category.
Fair warning: IANA(lawyer | accountant), just a geek who follows finance and politics enough to be dangerous.
Amen. The Register put it very well.
I'm even more frightened when I consider that future space exploration may be limited to Individuals and Private Corporations, whose main concern is their own pocketbooks, and not the benefit of humanity.
You mean like John Carmack?
I wasn't referring to any benchmarks, I was intending a sarcastic slam at Intel for rigging their P4 with a ridiculously long performence-killing 20 stage pipeline just so they could crank the clockspeed above what the AMD Athlon (with its much more rational 11 stage pipeline) can do. I guess I should have nixed the Quake3 comment that threw everyone. Intel has a minor marketing headache on their hands if anyone bothers to ask why the ridiculously expensive sub-GHz Itanium is a faster chip than the 2GHz P4.
AMD should bring up this point in their marketing, actually.
I'm betting on the AMD Hammer series (2H2002) over the second-generation Itaniums (McKinley?) regardless.
Oops, my <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags showed up in preview mode but didn't survive submit. Maybe Code mode will protect them.
I run a 1.4GHz Athlon OC'd to 1.5GHz, btw.
But golly, the Itanium isn't even GHz-class while the Pentium 4 is 2GHz. Why would anyone buy such an obviously slow machine? Even a pokey 1.4GHz Athlon is faster than the Itanium, right? Quake 3 framerates must really suck!
(Amusing how Intel went with a short pipeline at the expense of clockspeed when selling to a more technologically literate market...)
With Sun Blade 100 workstations available for $1K, it'd be nice to drop an ATI Radeon PCI card in and use that instead of the onboard ATI Rage chip. Is this doable?
Actually, what would be really cool is to get one of the ATX UltraSPARC IIe motherboards (roughly equivalent to what the Blade 100 ships with), mount it in a good midtower case (PC Power & Cooling, 400W Silencer p/s), get four 512meg PC133 ECC DIMMs from Crucial, one or two IBM 60gig 60GXP series IDE drives or Ultrastar 10K RPM SCSI drives (which SCSI controller?), a DVD-ROM drive (Pioneer 16X slot-load?), that Radeon PCI card, slap it all together, and you'd have a pretty nice workstation or low-end server. Much better than the config Sun sells.
But that's only because we need SPARC Solaris compatibility at work. Otherwise, a dual Athlon running Linux would beat the snot out of it.
IMnsHO, 128megs RAM isn't enough these days. 256megs is a good minimum, and I put 512megs in new machines I build. 256meg RIMMs cost over double what 256meg PC2100 DIMMs cost, and I'd want a pair in either case. Your argument to compare the cost of two 256meg RIMMs to a single 512meg DIMM is absurd.
Then again, I do C++ and Java development. YMMV.
BTW, you'll be able to do dual-channel DDR SDRAM with the nForce chipset, which will whomp Rambus solutions but good (4.2Gb/sec *and* low latency *and* dirt cheap).
$77 per for PC800 256meg RIMMs, which is a good deal more than 256meg PC2100 DDR DIMMs ($31). 64meg RIMMs are not terribly useful these days, so they're being dumped. And like I said, Rambus memory has poor latency.
Let's see, do I buy a 2GHz uniprocessor P4 with its performence-killing 20 stage pipeline, miniscule 8K L1 cache, and high-latency/overpriced RDRAM, or do I buy a dual processor AthlonMP, 128K L1 cache, DDR SDRAM, and 64-bit PCI slots (Tyan Tiger MP) for LESS MONEY?
These days, Intel CPUs are for people who don't know any better (or are forced to buy Dell).
Ditto what the other folks replying said about power supplies. I have a 1.4GHz Athlon OC'd to 1.5GHz (11x136MHz) on my desk at work (custom built because Dell only sells obsolete P3s and brain-damaged P4s), and the 400W Silencer power supply from PC Power & Cooling has no trouble at all, the +3.3V rail stays between 3.30 and 3.34 (average 3.33) volts, the +5V rail stays between 4.95 and 5.05 (average 4.99) volts, and the +12V rail stays between 11.86 and 12.04 (average 11.93) volts. Expensive beasts, but worth it, and they have the juice to handle the dual Tyan motherboards that are just starting to trickle onto the market (the $250 workstation boards). If you can't afford a PCP&C supply, at least get an Antec.
Use good DIMMs too, Crucial, Corsair, etc.
Where can I get a computer for free? Please, sign me up!
:-)) It also says something about America when people who are "poor" have cars, but I digress.
It's called used hardware. Now that the new stuff is so cheap, it shouldn't be too much trouble to hunt down an old 486 or even a Pentium for next to nothing. Kinda like how the poor drive used cars instead of new ones. (Hell, I drive a used car, if only because I'd rather piss away my money on computer toys
Not that there isn't merit to having a few publically accessable Internet-connected PCs in libraries and such, it's just not that big a deal. If the politicians really wanted to help, they'd quit making it so damn difficult to build new (fiber optic) cable plants to compete against the existing antiquated communications infrastructure, assuming there's much to compete with in the first place. No more legal monopolies in exchange for taxes--er, "franchise fees", 'kay?
I want Simoleons, dammit!
We do have a friend or two in high places.
The "it's inevitable" argument is the one used by socialists when they're trying to disarm opponents. Odd to see it being used here, both because of the context and because it's been so thoroughly discredited.
Even if the control freaks can overcome the technical obsticals, the only way they can get sustainable legal support (anyone wanna bet on the DMCA being around in full force in 5 years?) is by convincing the voting public that they want the restrictions, and while that's relatively easy for the pollution-control devices the TR author cites, it's a lot harder to come up with a compelling argument for 'net controls. The odds against figuring out both the technical and legal sides are in freedom's favor.
Actually, after III comes IV, not IIII.
You wanna argue with the nailgun, you go right ahead...
I do something similar, except I pop up an IE window pointing to a page on a site I host explaining code red and how to fix it. I always get that CGI error, but my server logs report a hit from the infected host on my explanation page. So that error is perfectly normal - it's working.
/scripts/root.exe?/c+net+send+%2A+Machine+%25COMPU TERNAME%25+has+been+infected+by+the+Code+Red+II+wo rm+and+attacked+my+server HTTP/1.0
Great! One significant change has been suggested:
telnet x.x.x.x 80
GET
%2A is *, which will send to all machines on a workgroup in a workgroup configuration, and I would presume all machines on a domain as well. This should be fairly easy to automate... but it's late, so I'll let someone else play with this.
A user on grc.security (news.grc.com) suggested using the Windows "net send" command to send a pop-up message to the infected user. net.exe won't talk across the Internet, but you ought to be able to run the net.exe program on the rooted IIS box, something like:
n et +send+%25COMPUTERNAME%25+You+have+been+infected+by +the+Code+Red+II+Worm+which+attempted+to+attack+my +server
http://ipaddress/c/inetpub/scripts/root.exe?/c+
%25COMPUTERNAME%25 translates to %COMPUTERNAME%, which returns the Windows hostname. I know that works from one of my failed attempts that gave me a reply, but with the above string, I get back a page with "Error in CGI Application" as
the title:
CGI Error
The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set
of HTTP headers. The headers it did return are:
and it doesn't give me any return. Can anyone verify and/or debug this? It *might* be working.
The %USERDOMAIN% variable might be useful too, so you could send to the whole Windows domain, "Machine LUSER on DOOFUSDOMAIN is infected with Code Red II" or some such. %USERDOMAIN% is the machine name on systems on a workgroup.
It just occurred to me to look up the definition of Class A/B/C addresses, and yup, I used the terms wrong in my story submission (argh!). What I meant to say was that when the worm generates addresses to scan, it appeared to always keep the first octet and a little over half the time (137 of 224 scans in my case) it keeps the second octet as well. That's no longer precisely true: I've since logged one scan from 152.72.x.x (grep XXXX access_log | grep -v 24.). And the high number of scans from within the first two octets may have more to do with that being a block of cable modem addresses rich in vulnerable IIS machines than anything else.
And now we know these poor bastards have been rootkitted. There has to be a way to use this to warn them?
Perhaps the fact that this guy got modded to 3 with such baseless "logic" is an indication that there are some xenophobic moderators around? Guys, mod this misguided moron down!
My point, had you bothered to think about it, was that the reasons given for why the worm couldn't have originated in China were obviously wrong, and had the reporter been competent enough to do a modest amount of research he'd have seen that.
Sometimes the obvious answer, namely that the worm really was written by a lone cracker in China, really is the right one, no matter how un-politically-correct it is. However, we don't really know, as I indicated with "(Chinese?)". I'm just curious why the reporter's mainland Chinese sources felt it necessary to dispense obvious misinformation. It's probably just a reflex action from a lifetime in one of the more brutal Communist dictatorships.
This newswire article quotes various people in China claiming that obviously the worm didn't come from there because Chinese servers aren't getting infected, and besides, the worm is just too complicated for an individual to create. The reporter bought it. Had he bothered to do some research, he'd have known that the worm is coded to only infect English (US) language servers, and in all likelyhood it was coded by a (Chinese?) teenager with too much time on his hands.
(Well, okay, it does run on the non-English servers, but it doesn't deface them...)
They should have done a remake of the original book, which todays movie budgets and technology would allow. And they should have picked someone other than Tim Burton to make it. In the novel the apes lived in a futuristic society with advanced technology. That I'd pay $8 to watch. Instead, I've ordered the novel, and after I've read that I'll rent the original flick.
Mark Wahlberg is no Charlton Heston. Ugh.
This is my favorite review of the movie. "Meanwhile, even though we are supposed to be rooting for the humans, Wahlberg throws out one-liners about how awful and relatively inferior we are. 'The smarter we get, the more violent our world becomes,' he says with all of the intensity you'd expect from a mechanic telling you to pick up your car on Tuesday. Indeed, when Wahlberg needs to issue a Henry V style loin-girding speech a la Mel Gibson in Braveheart, he instead sounds like he's yelling at a driver who's about to take his parking spot."
Oh yeah, silly me... So that's why DVD's cost about 50% more in the UK than they do in the States.
:-).
Or because of VAT taxes, import duties, the high cost of doing business in general...
According to my expat coworkers, EVERYTHING is more expensive in the UK. They'll typically buy computer gear here before returning home, just a few small items that'll make it through customs.
Not that I'm excusing the asinine DVD regional encoding scheme, but hey, it was designed by Hollywood liberal control freaks
I mean, really, FDR promised us that Social Security #'s would never mutate into national ID cards...
That's what we get for giving Big Brother a new toy.
And to top it off, SocSec is a pyramid scheme.
...perhaps China will no longer be a totalitarian dictatorship by the time 2008 rolls around?
:-).
It's not likely, but y'never know. Meanwhile, I do wish the Chinese people the best of luck in their hunt for foreign proxy servers