And for those that might bleat "without advertising, many sites would fail" I say Good. Let those sites fail.
Actually, you don't really have to care.
You're in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation with everyone else visiting those sites. You may choose to block, or not to block.
If you block, and everyone else blocks, you don't get bothered by ads, and the site soon fails. Bad.
If you don't block, and everyone else blocks, you get bothered by ads, and the site STILL fails. Awful.
If you don't block, and nobody else blocks, you get bothered by ads, and the site survives. Good.
If you block, and nobody else blocks, you don't get bothered by ads, and the site survives. Great!
Now, since Everyone Else will make their own choices, and you cannot significantly influence them in that choice, you might as well please yourself. You may therefore block ads with a clear conscience.
Too much religion (that is, retelling of the Bible) for my liking.
Are the Chronicles of Narnia religious? Undoubtedly.
Are they Christian? Well, only if you want to read them that way.
Reading the stories as a kid at Catholic primary school, the Christian interpretation was extremely obvious. But that's a matter of context. Aslan is undoubtedly God, but is he necessarily Christ? A strong argument could be made that he is Apollo, the Sun-God, the Summer; he rises from the East, and brings warmth and light with him, driving away the Witch's winter. Once he turns up, the place is suddenly full of characters and creatures from Graeco-Roman paganism, including Bacchus himself with his full retinue.
The traditional Christian world is one in which God created Man in his own image, and exalts him, giving him dominion over the world and all the other animals in it. Could Narnia be any more different? Here God is a Lion, and Man was not even a part of the original Creation; when we first arrive in Narnia, humans are so rare that the Witch is amazed to meet one, and wonders if Edmund might be some overgrown Dwarf who has shaved off his beard.
To me, the saga feels like the author is trying desperately to Christianise his story, but that he knows deep down that it is pagan, pure and ancient...
The real trick would be to read it in old entish...
Interesting. If I remember correctly, the first words of the book were There was Eru. Now, Fangorn tells us that in Old Entish any name is actually in itself the story of what it names. He himself, as perhaps the oldest living thing in Middle-earth (AFAIK only Bombadil, the Maiar and maybe Cirdan are of the same kind of age) has a truly spectacular name that would take days to read in full.
Now, given Entish naming conventions, what would the name of Eru Iluvatar be like? It seems to me that the Entish name of Eru would in fact be a complete history of Creation, including the entire Silmarillion, because the whole thing is part of Iluvatar's story. It would, then, certainly take several weeks just to read the first page - but you'd be finished after word number three.
You haven't read the Silmarilion until you've read it in the original Elvish.
Nobody alive in the world has ever read the Silmarillion in the original Elvish. JRRT read it in the Red Book of Westmarch, where it was included as Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish; this would have been written in Westron, the common language of the countries of northwestern Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. He translated the Red Book into the English with which we are familiar, and later published Bilbo's diary There and Back Again and Frodo's The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King as fiction because nobody would take all this elf stuff seriously otherwise. The Translations from the Elvish seemed to have posed more difficulty in translation to English and in editing, though Christopher has done a pretty decent job in cleaning up the conflicting versions to give us the Silmarillion we know today.
Doesn't this fall into the category of "don't live there?"
Well, yes, probably. That said, I wonder if this might actually attract a certain type of warped tourist to the town? The City of Eternal Darkness, lit only by giant mirrors that reflect an eerie faded sunlight onto its dismal roofs... Chances are something Lovecraftian lives there.
Myself, I'd be heading up the hill to stick a giant cut-out of a bat onto one of the mirrors:-)
* pulls out phone, flips through recent ringtones *
Hmm.
We Gotta Power
You Get To Burning
Theme from Knightmare Cruel Angel's Thesis
Tank!
We Were Angels
Sampo
The interesting thing is, grossly uncool though all these ringtones are, they're actually more effective at Getting Noticed. They're ringtones that nobody else has, and possibly that nobody else has ever heard. Sometimes it pays to be weird:-)
(oh, and they were all free from fansites over GPRS. None of this three-quid-a-week to Jamster or whatever the latest rip-off might be...)
I see they found that universal frame of reference they were looking for.
Doesn't really apply to rotation.
If you're sealed inside a spaceship moving at constant velocity and cannot refer to the outside in any experiment, you have no way to determine what its velocity might be. There's no physical difference between 'stationary' and '0.999c', until you interact with something outside. Even then, you can still declare that you're stationary and that it is moving and the physics works out the same.
If, however, you're sealed inside a spaceship rotating with constant angular velocity, that's quite another matter. You'll know about the rotation, either by reference to gyroscopes if it's spinning very slowly, or by the fact that you seem to be stuck to the wall if it's spinning very quickly...
Don't forget that they can regenerate body parts, so the only way to kill them is to cut their head off. There can be only one...
Beheading doesn't work. They just regenerate the whole body.
I've got two research projects going on concerning this issue, which will become a major problem in the not too distant future if geek pop culture has taught us anything at all. One involves the experimental use of fire and / or acid to prevent regeneration after the supermouse has been beaten down; the second option is more extreme, involving the simultaneous destruction of all the mouse's cells leaving nothing behind from which it can regenerate. This is the secret Project Kamehameha.
Of course, to be fair, it would probably irk them to know that I drink, smoke pot occasionally, don't care if homosexuals marry each other, and identify myself as Christian.
As far as I know, the only one of those which you'll find forbidden in the Bible is homosexuality. Jesus himself drank quite heavily - certainly enough to draw the disapproval of the Pharisees - and I don't think there's a single word in the Bible either way about tobacco or cannabis.
And... if you have to log in to run it, doesn't any resident keylogger already have the single most important password?
Well, ps lists all the processes running on the computer, and in theory should reveal any keylogger lurking in memory.
However, regarding the login password itself: in order to install the keylogger, the attacker has presumably already compromised your own machine. Thus he doesn't need your login password for that box - he already has full access there, otherwise he couldn't have installed the keylogger. What he wants are the passwords that get into your online services. Your bank. Your email account. Amazon. eBay. Your card numbers and secret identifiers for all your online activity. For those, he needs to quietly install a keylogger, install a rootkit to cover it up (which would compromise ps, and so make the keylogger invisible) and then sit back and wait for you to unwittingly hand over all those juicy details.
A quick ps auwx will show me if there are evil deeds afoot.
Unless the attacker has replaced ps with a version that will not show the keylogger. And, of course, you always run 'ps' first of all when you log in and before you type in any important passwords, don't you?
... 6000 incompatible platforms. How are customers meant to establish a standard that way?
Fortunately, Microsoft Keylogger 2006 will be included with Vista, and will report all your passwords to Redmond in a convenient and user-friendly way, establishing a de-facto industry standard in modern keylogging solutions.
And what does the BBC do? They give us more padding than pudding and spend most of the article lauding the joys of ubiqquitous sensors ("better coffee") and the growth of RFID tags ("Wal-Mart made the chinese use them") than addressing or even framing the issues raised. And then whan they run out of filler factoids they make more pie-in-the-sky promises like the ones above.
Yet ANOTHER example of the frightening right-wing bias of the BBC. Really, they're completely sold out to corporate interests these days. Probably it's because if they misbehave, Murdoch will make his papers agitate for the abolition of the licence fee...
Does this seem eerily similar to Stephenson's primer from The Diamond Age?
Not really. The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer was a hell of a lot more than a laptop computer. That thing was basically an electronic parent and teacher with an awesome AI. The objective here is similar to that of the Mandarin conspirators - revolutionise society for the better by giving huge numbers of poor children an opportunity - but the devices in question aren't especially like the Primer. Certainly no more like it than any other random laptop in the world.
Pretty much *everybody* installed win32s, because freecell came with it...always winnable my ass.
Freecell, played with a real deck, will obviously not always be winnable; it's easy to construct an impossible deal. However, MS Freecell only allowed the choice of, what, 32768 games or so? Of those, only one was unwinnable: game 11982. If you failed to win any other game, it was purely your own incompetence:)
seems as though our network people think that using a Live Linux CD can import a virus to bring a Windows network down. Yes, that's exactly what I was told!
Well, they can. In theory. It would be insane to actually do it that way, mind...
I was also told that using Linux posed a problem in that they 'didn't have tracking tools for Linux so couldn't tell what web sites were visited or what was downloaded or uploaded.' That did sound more reasonable.
That actually sounds less reasonable. Surely they should be logging your internet activity at the network gateway? Isn't that a hell of a lot easier than maintaining spyware on every individual machine?
the info on his page seems to indicate he didn't go by resolutions for just any F4I addresses but for addresses the rootkit used, particularly he mentions updates.xcp-aurora.com
The rootkit doesn't phone home to there. From doxpara: Originally, it appeared that the rootkit itself issued queries against First4Internet. It does not.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you don't really have to care.
You're in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation with everyone else visiting those sites. You may choose to block, or not to block.
If you block, and everyone else blocks, you don't get bothered by ads, and the site soon fails. Bad.
If you don't block, and everyone else blocks, you get bothered by ads, and the site STILL fails. Awful.
If you don't block, and nobody else blocks, you get bothered by ads, and the site survives. Good.
If you block, and nobody else blocks, you don't get bothered by ads, and the site survives. Great!
Now, since Everyone Else will make their own choices, and you cannot significantly influence them in that choice, you might as well please yourself. You may therefore block ads with a clear conscience.
Betrayed the Revolution a bit, haven't we, comrades?
Are the Chronicles of Narnia religious? Undoubtedly.
Are they Christian? Well, only if you want to read them that way.
Reading the stories as a kid at Catholic primary school, the Christian interpretation was extremely obvious. But that's a matter of context. Aslan is undoubtedly God, but is he necessarily Christ? A strong argument could be made that he is Apollo, the Sun-God, the Summer; he rises from the East, and brings warmth and light with him, driving away the Witch's winter. Once he turns up, the place is suddenly full of characters and creatures from Graeco-Roman paganism, including Bacchus himself with his full retinue.
The traditional Christian world is one in which God created Man in his own image, and exalts him, giving him dominion over the world and all the other animals in it. Could Narnia be any more different? Here God is a Lion, and Man was not even a part of the original Creation; when we first arrive in Narnia, humans are so rare that the Witch is amazed to meet one, and wonders if Edmund might be some overgrown Dwarf who has shaved off his beard.
To me, the saga feels like the author is trying desperately to Christianise his story, but that he knows deep down that it is pagan, pure and ancient...
Interesting. If I remember correctly, the first words of the book were There was Eru. Now, Fangorn tells us that in Old Entish any name is actually in itself the story of what it names. He himself, as perhaps the oldest living thing in Middle-earth (AFAIK only Bombadil, the Maiar and maybe Cirdan are of the same kind of age) has a truly spectacular name that would take days to read in full.
Now, given Entish naming conventions, what would the name of Eru Iluvatar be like? It seems to me that the Entish name of Eru would in fact be a complete history of Creation, including the entire Silmarillion, because the whole thing is part of Iluvatar's story. It would, then, certainly take several weeks just to read the first page - but you'd be finished after word number three.
Nobody alive in the world has ever read the Silmarillion in the original Elvish. JRRT read it in the Red Book of Westmarch, where it was included as Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish; this would have been written in Westron, the common language of the countries of northwestern Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age. He translated the Red Book into the English with which we are familiar, and later published Bilbo's diary There and Back Again and Frodo's The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King as fiction because nobody would take all this elf stuff seriously otherwise. The Translations from the Elvish seemed to have posed more difficulty in translation to English and in editing, though Christopher has done a pretty decent job in cleaning up the conflicting versions to give us the Silmarillion we know today.
Well, one can only speculate. But I'm sure that this will do wonders for the town's image.
Well, yes, probably. That said, I wonder if this might actually attract a certain type of warped tourist to the town? The City of Eternal Darkness, lit only by giant mirrors that reflect an eerie faded sunlight onto its dismal roofs... Chances are something Lovecraftian lives there.
Myself, I'd be heading up the hill to stick a giant cut-out of a bat onto one of the mirrors :-)
I never heard that the Irish were particularly litigious...
* pulls out phone, flips through recent ringtones *
Hmm.
We Gotta Power
You Get To Burning
Theme from Knightmare
Cruel Angel's Thesis
Tank!
We Were Angels
Sampo
The interesting thing is, grossly uncool though all these ringtones are, they're actually more effective at Getting Noticed. They're ringtones that nobody else has, and possibly that nobody else has ever heard. Sometimes it pays to be weird :-)
(oh, and they were all free from fansites over GPRS. None of this three-quid-a-week to Jamster or whatever the latest rip-off might be...)
Doesn't really apply to rotation.
If you're sealed inside a spaceship moving at constant velocity and cannot refer to the outside in any experiment, you have no way to determine what its velocity might be. There's no physical difference between 'stationary' and '0.999c', until you interact with something outside. Even then, you can still declare that you're stationary and that it is moving and the physics works out the same.
If, however, you're sealed inside a spaceship rotating with constant angular velocity, that's quite another matter. You'll know about the rotation, either by reference to gyroscopes if it's spinning very slowly, or by the fact that you seem to be stuck to the wall if it's spinning very quickly...
Beheading doesn't work. They just regenerate the whole body.
I've got two research projects going on concerning this issue, which will become a major problem in the not too distant future if geek pop culture has taught us anything at all. One involves the experimental use of fire and / or acid to prevent regeneration after the supermouse has been beaten down; the second option is more extreme, involving the simultaneous destruction of all the mouse's cells leaving nothing behind from which it can regenerate. This is the secret Project Kamehameha.
As far as I know, the only one of those which you'll find forbidden in the Bible is homosexuality. Jesus himself drank quite heavily - certainly enough to draw the disapproval of the Pharisees - and I don't think there's a single word in the Bible either way about tobacco or cannabis.
$sys$ How about alt.binaries.*?
You're quite right, USENET is entirely useless and wholly devoid of any material of interest.
In other news today, the Atlantic ocean is rather wet, the Great Attractor is rather far away, and the Pope is rather religious.
I thought the creationist mob were blockheaded... then I went to sci.physics and met the relativity deniers. Wow.
Well, ps lists all the processes running on the computer, and in theory should reveal any keylogger lurking in memory.
However, regarding the login password itself: in order to install the keylogger, the attacker has presumably already compromised your own machine. Thus he doesn't need your login password for that box - he already has full access there, otherwise he couldn't have installed the keylogger. What he wants are the passwords that get into your online services. Your bank. Your email account. Amazon. eBay. Your card numbers and secret identifiers for all your online activity. For those, he needs to quietly install a keylogger, install a rootkit to cover it up (which would compromise ps, and so make the keylogger invisible) and then sit back and wait for you to unwittingly hand over all those juicy details.
Unless the attacker has replaced ps with a version that will not show the keylogger. And, of course, you always run 'ps' first of all when you log in and before you type in any important passwords, don't you?
Fortunately, Microsoft Keylogger 2006 will be included with Vista, and will report all your passwords to Redmond in a convenient and user-friendly way, establishing a de-facto industry standard in modern keylogging solutions.
In Kansas, it's not mediaeval torture, it's Intelligent Interrogation.
Yet ANOTHER example of the frightening right-wing bias of the BBC. Really, they're completely sold out to corporate interests these days. Probably it's because if they misbehave, Murdoch will make his papers agitate for the abolition of the licence fee...
Not really. The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer was a hell of a lot more than a laptop computer. That thing was basically an electronic parent and teacher with an awesome AI. The objective here is similar to that of the Mandarin conspirators - revolutionise society for the better by giving huge numbers of poor children an opportunity - but the devices in question aren't especially like the Primer. Certainly no more like it than any other random laptop in the world.
Freecell, played with a real deck, will obviously not always be winnable; it's easy to construct an impossible deal. However, MS Freecell only allowed the choice of, what, 32768 games or so? Of those, only one was unwinnable: game 11982. If you failed to win any other game, it was purely your own incompetence :)
Well, they can. In theory. It would be insane to actually do it that way, mind...
I was also told that using Linux posed a problem in that they 'didn't have tracking tools for Linux so couldn't tell what web sites were visited or what was downloaded or uploaded.' That did sound more reasonable.
That actually sounds less reasonable. Surely they should be logging your internet activity at the network gateway? Isn't that a hell of a lot easier than maintaining spyware on every individual machine?
So we're looking at hits to http://updates.xcp-aurora.com/ are we?
The rootkit doesn't phone home to there. From doxpara: Originally, it appeared that the rootkit itself issued queries against First4Internet. It does not.
So we're looking at hits to http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html, are we? Well, let's see what Google knows. That site is linked to by only one page: http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html - part of the Sony information site about this system, the site which has been referred to by every story, blog, and Slashdot post on this subject throughout the whole saga.
What we're seeing here isn't evidence of how widespread the rootkit is. It's how widespread the story is.
Pah. I'll believe it when Netcraft confirms it.