The name "Al Qaida" was invented by the CIA not Bin Laden
Sure, but the CIA gave it such wide currency that it caught on. Now it's been adopted by the terrorists themselves. I suppose it was a bit like what happened with words like 'geek' or 'otaku'.
Amusing. Al-Qa'ida didn't exist, but now thanks to the CIA doing its PR every last eejit with a pipe-bomb claims to be affiliated to it.
(Amazingly enough, Blair used the "if terrorism changes the way we live then they've won" speech in a justification of curtailing civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism!)
That was funny, but the most entertaining piece of hypocrisy on this issue is this:
On the 90-day internment law: Blair says that the police want to be able to imprison people without charge for three months for investigation and interrogation. He says that on this matter the police know best and we should listen to them and give them what they need to make us safe.
On the late opening law for pubs: police representatives say that it will be a disaster and lead to even greater alcohol-fuelled public disorder and random violence. Blair completely ignores them and goes right ahead with changing the law so that (starting today) we British people are free to drink all night if we see fit to do so.
I'm not sure quite how these two Mr Blairs manage to live together in the same skull. Libertarian and fascist in one. Or maybe he's hoping that we'll all be to pissed in the pub to get pissed at him...
how the hell is a pensioner objecting to a war a terrorist?
Bushian reasoning:
1) This is the War On Terrorism.
2) You are either for us or against us.
3) If you are against us in the War On Terrorism, then that makes you
4) A Terrorist.
Blairian reasoning:
1) I'm doing the Right Thing, because I'm a pretty straight kind of guy, ok?
2) And I think Jack has the right to make his speech without impolite interruptions.
3) And we really shouldn't get sidetracked by theoretical arguments about civil liberties, because terrorism is really a very serious threat.
4) And I should point out that I had absolutely nothing to do with the incident itself.
5) And I don't think that a blame culture is very productive at all, just ask Peter or David, so it really isn't helpful to go talking about whether anyone should resign.
5) It's in the past now, so we should all move on and deal with the new problems that are ahead of us, going forward into a better and fairer Britain in the 21st century.
Used as the basis for Animal Farm by George Orwell
I'm not certain that's quite what happened. The Animalist Revolution was corrupted not by power per se but by Napoleon. Had the Revolution remained under Snowball's leadership it would probably have been rather more successful; however, Napoleon and Squealer (who were already complete stinkers) took every opportunity that came their way.
It wasn't so much that power corrupted, as that power attracted the corrupt and gave them even greater scope within which to practise their corruption...
Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
As mentioned before, it is only the female that drinks blood, and it is used for making babies (mosquito babies I assume, not human), not for everyday sustanance.
Great. So the mosquito bites me, gives me malaria, and uses the blood to make MORE MOSQUITOS. Now, if you'd explain to me why this is a good thing?
That disease kills some 1.5 million people a year. One million, five hundred thousand people a year, every year. That's death on a Holocaust scale, and not just for a few years but year on year with no end in sight.
Now, maybe there will be unpredictable ecological knock-on effects; food webs are like that. But I'll tell you what, to prevent one point five million deaths a year, if someone offered me the chance to press God's red button marked 'Instantly Exterminate All Mosquitos' I'd do it without the slightest hesitation.
There are species that depend on the these "pests" for survival?
There are indeed. For instance, the mosquito is a crucial part of the lifecycle of the plasmodium. If mosquitos are eradicated, then the plasmodium goes with it.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, plasmodium sits just above HIV on the list of Species That Have Just Got To Go, but YMMV.
You have to wonder just how autonomous this probe is, if the news that it successfully landed (and has subsequently taken off again) comes as a surprise to Mission Control.
It's a robot. A space robot. A Japanese space robot. You know what those things are like.
It's probably going to head off to another planet to fight giant fearsome monsters now.
These are the least important. Get whatever monitor you can afford. Get the cheapest keyboard that your willing to have on your desk.
Otherwise good advice, but this is awful. Do NOT skimp on the monitor. Right now you're not playing Halflife 2, you're reading/. That's something that will work exactly the same with any CPU, video card, hard disk, whatever. Hell, I could dig up my old P90 from 1995, set up a lightweight distro, and Slashdot would work just as well as it does on the latest-n-greatest. The component of your computer that you are using 100% of the time, whether gaming or surfing or working, no matter what the task may be, is the monitor.
Get a decent monitor. Your eyes will thank you for it.
The keyboard - again, a component that's ALWAYS in play. Cheap keyboards are horrible. Have you seen how much geeks are willing to pay for antique IBM keyboards from back when they made them well? If you spend a lot of time using your keyboard, and if you post to/. you probably do, then getting hold of a decent quality one will make a world of difference.
To my mind, these fundamentalists are more guilty of idolatry. The idolaters of old made themselves graven images of their gods, and worshipped them. In time they came to completely forget their gods and worship the images; this was abhorrent to the Hebrews, whose prohibition on such things had led them to relate to their god more directly.
What is the modern equivalent of these idolaters? Why, the biblical inerrantists. They have made themselves a graven image of God, not made of wood or of gold or marble but of words. They have defined their god so narrowly and restricted him within the ancient text, and cannot conceive of anything beyond the holy scripture. Thus these idolaters try to shout down anyone who dares examine the world itself for clues to the nature of the creation, and confine themselves to Genesis.
It's a tragedy, because assuming for the sake of argument that there is a God, then they're missing some of his best tricks. Evolution is a brilliant hack - a system that you can set up and just let run, and all the work is done for you. It must give God some of the same kind of kick we hackers get when we replace a thousand lines of brutal code with a single concise iterative function... And as for nucleosynthesis, the means by which the heavy elements that constitute much of the Earth were made, if God came up with that then he has a sense of style that I really like. Seeding the universe with metals from supernovae - amazing.
But no. The idolaters remain with their hollow Bronze Age god of words, words that they worship night and day, memorise and repeat to themselves, shout out at street corners... Idolatry, indeed.
Actually, Nintendo make awesome games. Unfortunately, hardly anyone else makes games for Nintendo consoles at all.
However, back in the NES and SNES era, when Nintendo were the biggest thing in the industry, they were incredibly evil. Evil in a way that would have Bill Gates hiding in the largest church he could find. Spectacularly and monumentally evil. Google 'nintendo lawsuit' and see a history of litigation that would shock the Nazgul themselves. Or read this - they weren't nice at all.
Take off the tin foil hat. The amount of work it would take to write such an exploit would be huge and would only get a tiny fraction of the market. There's no profit in it, there's no notoriety for it.
Would a worm do all that, or a clueless script kiddie? Probably not. As you say, there are too few dual-boot systems around. Bear in mind however that the Linux partition is still at risk from a malicious kiddie letting rip with fdisk.
But would a hacker do it? Yes, I think so. Especially if he'd just been directly challenged to do so by someone who thinks the wall between Windows and Linux in a dual-boot system is so impenetrable...
I have a dual boot system: 1. Windows for games and the occasional Windows-only software. Nothing sensitive there. Rootkit me all you want. 2. Linux for the serious stuff.
So... an attacker who's pwnz3d your Windows installation can't then access the MBR, futz with your bootloader and pass the options of his choice to your Linux kernel at next boot time? He can't install rfstool on the sly and mount your Linux partitions and plunder your personal information you keep there?
I mean, we could keep our troups in Iraq for almost another month for that kind of money! What are they thinking, wasting it on a stupid big telescope.
Remember, kids: if you buy telescopes, then the terrorists win!
Ever been in a crowded lift and Nokia Default Ringtone goes off? A dozen people simultaneously go for their phones.
That's why you want a distinctive ringtone. If I hear a mobile ringing I know immediately whether or not it's mine. If it isn't, I can completely ignore it.
(Well, unless someone else in the immediate vicinity is geeky enough to have located and downloaded the exact same anime.mid I'm using at the moment... anyone else around here have We Gotta Power set as their ringtone? Thought not.)
Red signifies evidence of First4Internet accesses; Green signifies accesses to Sony's enhanced CD site (included with the rootkit, but also elsewhere). Most links are yellow, though: Over 3/4ths of networks found resolving Sony during the sampling period also resolved First4Internet.
He's displaying DNS servers that have processed queries for sites at Sony and F4I relevant to the rootkit, on the assumption that these represent rootkits phoning home, or uninstall attempts. However, after a scandal of this magnitude, every geek blog on the net is pointing at F4I and Sony sites, highly rated/. posts are dissecting the uninstaller, and even the mainstream media are taking notice. Chances are that between us, we outraged geeks have hit every page on Sony and F4I remotely connected with the rootkit thousands of times; there's probably not a nameserver left on the net that hasn't seen a query for updates.xcp-aurora.com by now.
As the author himself admits,
Ultimately, as I have said from the start -- I simply do not have enough information to determine/imply/"guesstimate" how many hosts have been compromised.
In other words, it's a pretty map, but who knows if it actually represents anything? To my mind, it does represent something - it shows how widespread the story is. The blips on that map mostly represent geeks following links from/., not rootkits phoning home.
Good thing Texas hasn't been teaching "intelligent math" (the theory that big numbers are too BIG to ever come from little numbers) else they'd never figure out how much sony's penalities will be.
Don't be silly. We don't object to the teaching of microaddition - that's perfectly obvious. We only have a problem with the teaching of macroaddition - the theory of ones to quintillions. Nobody has ever even seen more than a few million of anything. It takes just as much faith to believe in Graham's Number as it does to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, so we expect either equal time to be given to Intelligent Math, or that the teaching of atheistic macroaddition be removed from the curriculum.
Aslan is tied down and sacrificed for someone else's sins. In The Last Battle, Tash the anti-Aslan is introduced. So yes, I would say that Aslan is definitely Christ.
The concept of blood sacrifice as atonement for transgressions is far, far older than Christianity - as I understand Christian theology, the whole point of the Passion was that the death of the Son of God was so colossal as to atone for all sins, ending the necessity for further blood sacrifices as appeasement. As for Tash - again, the dualism between incarnations of good and evil predates Christ.
Certainly the Chronicles can be read as a Christian story. As I understand it, that was also what Lewis intended. But the Christian motifs Lewis used were mostly ones that also existed in older beliefs. Thus it is, as I mentioned above, equally reasonable to identify Aslan with the sun god.
After all, if Narnia is such a Christian place, just what are Bacchus and the Maenads doing there? Euan, euan, euoi-oi-oi!
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but the CIA gave it such wide currency that it caught on. Now it's been adopted by the terrorists themselves. I suppose it was a bit like what happened with words like 'geek' or 'otaku'.
Amusing. Al-Qa'ida didn't exist, but now thanks to the CIA doing its PR every last eejit with a pipe-bomb claims to be affiliated to it.
That was funny, but the most entertaining piece of hypocrisy on this issue is this:
On the 90-day internment law: Blair says that the police want to be able to imprison people without charge for three months for investigation and interrogation. He says that on this matter the police know best and we should listen to them and give them what they need to make us safe.
On the late opening law for pubs: police representatives say that it will be a disaster and lead to even greater alcohol-fuelled public disorder and random violence. Blair completely ignores them and goes right ahead with changing the law so that (starting today) we British people are free to drink all night if we see fit to do so.
I'm not sure quite how these two Mr Blairs manage to live together in the same skull. Libertarian and fascist in one. Or maybe he's hoping that we'll all be to pissed in the pub to get pissed at him...
Bushian reasoning:
1) This is the War On Terrorism.
2) You are either for us or against us.
3) If you are against us in the War On Terrorism, then that makes you
4) A Terrorist.
Blairian reasoning:
1) I'm doing the Right Thing, because I'm a pretty straight kind of guy, ok?
2) And I think Jack has the right to make his speech without impolite interruptions.
3) And we really shouldn't get sidetracked by theoretical arguments about civil liberties, because terrorism is really a very serious threat.
4) And I should point out that I had absolutely nothing to do with the incident itself.
5) And I don't think that a blame culture is very productive at all, just ask Peter or David, so it really isn't helpful to go talking about whether anyone should resign.
5) It's in the past now, so we should all move on and deal with the new problems that are ahead of us, going forward into a better and fairer Britain in the 21st century.
I'm not certain that's quite what happened. The Animalist Revolution was corrupted not by power per se but by Napoleon. Had the Revolution remained under Snowball's leadership it would probably have been rather more successful; however, Napoleon and Squealer (who were already complete stinkers) took every opportunity that came their way.
It wasn't so much that power corrupted, as that power attracted the corrupt and gave them even greater scope within which to practise their corruption...
cf: DMCA, Patriot Act, Prevention of Terrorism Act (UK), Enabling Act (Weimar Germany)...
Great. So the mosquito bites me, gives me malaria, and uses the blood to make MORE MOSQUITOS. Now, if you'd explain to me why this is a good thing?
That disease kills some 1.5 million people a year. One million, five hundred thousand people a year, every year. That's death on a Holocaust scale, and not just for a few years but year on year with no end in sight.
Now, maybe there will be unpredictable ecological knock-on effects; food webs are like that. But I'll tell you what, to prevent one point five million deaths a year, if someone offered me the chance to press God's red button marked 'Instantly Exterminate All Mosquitos' I'd do it without the slightest hesitation.
There are indeed. For instance, the mosquito is a crucial part of the lifecycle of the plasmodium. If mosquitos are eradicated, then the plasmodium goes with it.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, plasmodium sits just above HIV on the list of Species That Have Just Got To Go, but YMMV.
What, gradually sinking, in complete denial about it, and the rich are grabbing all the lifeboats?
It's a robot. A space robot. A Japanese space robot. You know what those things are like.
It's probably going to head off to another planet to fight giant fearsome monsters now.
Kurosawa, Kurosawa... uh...
Ah, I remember! That teacher from Azumanga Daioh, right?
Otherwise good advice, but this is awful. Do NOT skimp on the monitor. Right now you're not playing Halflife 2, you're reading /. That's something that will work exactly the same with any CPU, video card, hard disk, whatever. Hell, I could dig up my old P90 from 1995, set up a lightweight distro, and Slashdot would work just as well as it does on the latest-n-greatest. The component of your computer that you are using 100% of the time, whether gaming or surfing or working, no matter what the task may be, is the monitor.
Get a decent monitor. Your eyes will thank you for it.
The keyboard - again, a component that's ALWAYS in play. Cheap keyboards are horrible. Have you seen how much geeks are willing to pay for antique IBM keyboards from back when they made them well? If you spend a lot of time using your keyboard, and if you post to /. you probably do, then getting hold of a decent quality one will make a world of difference.
To my mind, these fundamentalists are more guilty of idolatry. The idolaters of old made themselves graven images of their gods, and worshipped them. In time they came to completely forget their gods and worship the images; this was abhorrent to the Hebrews, whose prohibition on such things had led them to relate to their god more directly.
What is the modern equivalent of these idolaters? Why, the biblical inerrantists. They have made themselves a graven image of God, not made of wood or of gold or marble but of words. They have defined their god so narrowly and restricted him within the ancient text, and cannot conceive of anything beyond the holy scripture. Thus these idolaters try to shout down anyone who dares examine the world itself for clues to the nature of the creation, and confine themselves to Genesis.
It's a tragedy, because assuming for the sake of argument that there is a God, then they're missing some of his best tricks. Evolution is a brilliant hack - a system that you can set up and just let run, and all the work is done for you. It must give God some of the same kind of kick we hackers get when we replace a thousand lines of brutal code with a single concise iterative function... And as for nucleosynthesis, the means by which the heavy elements that constitute much of the Earth were made, if God came up with that then he has a sense of style that I really like. Seeding the universe with metals from supernovae - amazing.
But no. The idolaters remain with their hollow Bronze Age god of words, words that they worship night and day, memorise and repeat to themselves, shout out at street corners... Idolatry, indeed.
Actually, Nintendo make awesome games. Unfortunately, hardly anyone else makes games for Nintendo consoles at all.
However, back in the NES and SNES era, when Nintendo were the biggest thing in the industry, they were incredibly evil. Evil in a way that would have Bill Gates hiding in the largest church he could find. Spectacularly and monumentally evil. Google 'nintendo lawsuit' and see a history of litigation that would shock the Nazgul themselves. Or read this - they weren't nice at all.
I always get depressed as the nights draw in towards the end of Hextober; how about you?
Since it's Firefox, surely it would have to be FreeDOS?
Would a worm do all that, or a clueless script kiddie? Probably not. As you say, there are too few dual-boot systems around. Bear in mind however that the Linux partition is still at risk from a malicious kiddie letting rip with fdisk.
But would a hacker do it? Yes, I think so. Especially if he'd just been directly challenged to do so by someone who thinks the wall between Windows and Linux in a dual-boot system is so impenetrable...
So... an attacker who's pwnz3d your Windows installation can't then access the MBR, futz with your bootloader and pass the options of his choice to your Linux kernel at next boot time? He can't install rfstool on the sly and mount your Linux partitions and plunder your personal information you keep there?
This kind of thinking is extremely $sys$profitable irresponsible.
Please, don't even think that. If Bush dies, Cheney becomes president.
Did you miss the memo? America turned to the Dark Side long ago, when they cancelled Apollo to pay for Vietnam.
Remember, kids: if you buy telescopes, then the terrorists win!
That's why you want a distinctive ringtone. If I hear a mobile ringing I know immediately whether or not it's mine. If it isn't, I can completely ignore it.
(Well, unless someone else in the immediate vicinity is geeky enough to have located and downloaded the exact same anime .mid I'm using at the moment... anyone else around here have We Gotta Power set as their ringtone? Thought not.)
From doxpara:
Red signifies evidence of First4Internet accesses; Green signifies accesses to Sony's enhanced CD site (included with the rootkit, but also elsewhere). Most links are yellow, though: Over 3/4ths of networks found resolving Sony during the sampling period also resolved First4Internet.
He's displaying DNS servers that have processed queries for sites at Sony and F4I relevant to the rootkit, on the assumption that these represent rootkits phoning home, or uninstall attempts. However, after a scandal of this magnitude, every geek blog on the net is pointing at F4I and Sony sites, highly rated /. posts are dissecting the uninstaller, and even the mainstream media are taking notice. Chances are that between us, we outraged geeks have hit every page on Sony and F4I remotely connected with the rootkit thousands of times; there's probably not a nameserver left on the net that hasn't seen a query for updates.xcp-aurora.com by now.
As the author himself admits,
Ultimately, as I have said from the start -- I simply do not have enough information to determine/imply/"guesstimate" how many hosts have been compromised.
In other words, it's a pretty map, but who knows if it actually represents anything? To my mind, it does represent something - it shows how widespread the story is. The blips on that map mostly represent geeks following links from /., not rootkits phoning home.
Don't be silly. We don't object to the teaching of microaddition - that's perfectly obvious. We only have a problem with the teaching of macroaddition - the theory of ones to quintillions. Nobody has ever even seen more than a few million of anything. It takes just as much faith to believe in Graham's Number as it does to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, so we expect either equal time to be given to Intelligent Math, or that the teaching of atheistic macroaddition be removed from the curriculum.
The concept of blood sacrifice as atonement for transgressions is far, far older than Christianity - as I understand Christian theology, the whole point of the Passion was that the death of the Son of God was so colossal as to atone for all sins, ending the necessity for further blood sacrifices as appeasement. As for Tash - again, the dualism between incarnations of good and evil predates Christ.
Certainly the Chronicles can be read as a Christian story. As I understand it, that was also what Lewis intended. But the Christian motifs Lewis used were mostly ones that also existed in older beliefs. Thus it is, as I mentioned above, equally reasonable to identify Aslan with the sun god.
After all, if Narnia is such a Christian place, just what are Bacchus and the Maenads doing there? Euan, euan, euoi-oi-oi!