For my money, I'd go with an Avant keyboard. It's even more high-end in terms of price, but it's worth every dime. Gimmicks like blank keytops (who looks at the keytops while typing anyway?) are a novelty, sure, but Avant keyboards are fully remappable: you can create your own keyboard layout. The keytops have characters printed on them, but if you like, you can rearrange them so that they match (or don't match, if you prefer) your layout. And yes, like all reasonably high-end keyboards, they are sturdy, hold up well, and have good tactile feedback. But for me the key selling point is the ability to rearrange the layout however you want. Tired of overextending your pinky to hit shift and ctrl all the time? Put those keys on home positions like I've done, and in a week your pinkies won't ache any more.
*Shrug*. If the blank keytops are worth money to you, go for it, but don't expect them to have a measurable impact on your typing speed or comfort.
> My hunch is that a encryption program carried in a virus would be rather > simplistic.
Yeah, but in later operations, the blackhats will realize that the encryption program doesn't have to be carried in the virus; all the virus needs is enough networking code to retrieve the real payload from elsewhere. The real payload can then proceed to do RSA encryption with a 1024-bit key and follow that up by continuously writing over the originals with alternating layers of random bits and fixed patterns while port-scanning for vulnerable IIS and MS SQL servers to use to pass itself along, and also emailing itself to everyone in the user's address book, putting copies of itself (called something like newlogo.jpg.exe) on every open CIFS fileshare on the LAN, and sending full-color brochures to any printers it finds featuring a URL of a compromised webserver that hosts another copy of itself -- oh, and looking for a modem that it can use to place calls and play a pre-recorded voice message...
> Good god. You use a computer a lot, and that makes a lot of people stupid > BUT you?
Susceptibility to phishing has virtually NOTHING to do with how much you do or do not use a computer. It is a function of your general level of naivete. Giving out your bank password in response to an email request is fundamentally no different from giving out your credit card number to a sleazy telemarketer who says he's from the local police charity. In both cases, somebody contacts you and claims to represent a certain organization, and you just believe he is whoever he represents himself as, without wondering whether someone could be faking those credentials. No amount of computer-technical knowledge will prevent you from making that mistake, and no amount of *ignorance* of technical computer and network details will *prevent* you from seeing through the ruse.
Granted, technical knowledge helps you to see the *details* of the ruse, e.g., to expose it; an end user is unlikely to be able to analyze email headers and do whois lookups and whatnot to track down the sender's real identity, for instance. But that won't stop a sensibly sceptical end user from saying to himself, "Hey, how do I know this message is really from Citibank and that what it says is true? Maybe I'll call the bank and check..." A network admin won't have to call the bank, obviously, because he can analyze the headers and stuff, but he'll only do that under the same circumstances that an end user would call the bank, i.e., if he doesn't immediately believe that the message must certainly be reliable just because he received it.
> Question: Did you believe in Santa Claus growing up?
No. My parents taught me discernment, not lies.
What the honeynets are doing is good, and it's worth doing, and they should keep on doing it, but it is nevertheless true that a large amount of gullibility is required to fall for a phishing scheme of any kind. Basically you have to be the kind of person who just assumes any random person you've never met before is probably telling you the truth whenever he's talking, unless you have a specific reason to believe otherwise. That's fundamentally dumb, because if you live in a world populated by human beings, at least 50% of what people tell you is wrong. If you don't put at least some thought into evaluating the probably veracity of each and every thing that you hear or read, you're stupid.
Actually, what he was saying might not be dangerous, depending on the implementation he was using. All the recursion there is tail recursion, so if his implementation special-cases tail recursion, this will only consume constant system resources.
> No one would be stupid enough to try and make an email > client be an applications platform
Shhh, you'll give them ideas. In 1994 we commonly said thinks like, "nobody would be stupid enough to make a mailreader automatically execute instructions or code attached to a message", and then the Outlook team did exactly that, and Microsoft *boasted* about it and touted it as an important feature.
> Do I trust them to objectively evaluate whether any given website is > dangerous (from an IT security perspective) or benign?
Oh, and it's also worth noting that while I trust *myself* to do a better job of evaluating this than AOLTW, I would *NOT* trust most end users to do a better job of evaluating this than AOLTW -- i.e., I would rather trust AOLTW's judgement on this than leave it up to the end users in most cases.
Of course, if you have the option of not trusting *any* sites to run in IE, then you can take the decision of which sites to trust out of the hands of the user without giving it to AOLTW -- i.e., you can set things up so that Firefox or some other browser is used exclusively and IE is not used. I consider myself fortunate to be able to do that (and, indeed, that's how the PCs on our network are currently set up), but not all IT departments have that option, so that leaves them, until now, in the untenable position of leaving it up to the end user to decide which sites it's safe to view in IE. Netscape 8 gives them a somewhat better option than that, IMO.
> Well... and why exactly should I trust AOL Time Warner?
Depends what you're trusting them to do. The question you want to ask is not "Do I trust them to always to the right thing in every circumstance?" but rather "Do I trust them to objectively evaluate whether any given website is dangerous (from an IT security perspective) or benign?" Maybe you do and maybe you don't (I'm not convinced I do), but it's a simpler question than the overbroad "Do I trust them?" and, on the whole, more likely to be answered in the affirmative.
> Diamond windows wouldn't break as easily but they would not be good > for your heating bill as diamond is a good thermal conductor.
So's glass. (Not as much maybe, but nevertheless.) That's why good windows have more than one pane (three is common) with air or argon or something in between. (If they start out with argon or a vacuum, it ends up as just air after a while anyway; sealing the edges reliably isn't possible at an acceptable price point.) Air is a fairly poor heat conductor, especially if the cavity it's filling is too small/thin for convection currents to form. In fact, most of the best insulators work on this principle; fiberglass insulation and styrofoam are mostly small pockets of air.
> I'm a web designer, and I truly believe that a good designer knows better > than a user how things should look 95% of the time...
Yeah, maybe, but the *other* 97.384% of web designers *don't*. For starters, most of them are stuck in a brain-dammaged 1985-esque mindset wherein they pretend they're still working with an ink-on-paper medium. I've given up entirely on the idea of allowing websites to choose their own colors, and I've half a mind to take away their ability to choose their own layouts too, because most webmasters can't design a layout that works at different resolutions and with different text sizes if their lives depend on it.
The dog will not get lost. Dogs do not get lost. Ever. In all of recorded history, there is not a single uncontested documented instance of a dog getting lost. There are many urban legends about "lost" dogs, but almost all of these, if not just plain made up, are gross overstatements or misunderstandings. Most of them are just the dog's owner/companion freaking out and going into a panic because *they* don't know where the dog is.
Sometimes a dog will stray away from where the dog's owner/companion thinks the dog should be, and that person may not be entirely certain where the dog is, but the dog, although it may be loose and possibly astray, is *not* lost; the dog knows *precisely* where he is, and *exactly* how to get back home; when he's ready, assuming you've made the environment such that home is a place where he wants to go, he'll show up there.
You say it's blind, but you forgot to mention that this particular blind dog is also deaf, cripled, and lame and has had a lobotomy.
The real danger for stray dogs isn't that they won't be able to find their way back home; the danger for stray dogs is that some adverse circumstance will occur and injure the dog while he is out; this is especially likely in an urban setting. The dog is much safer in a rural environment than an urban one.
She should keep the dog indoors or on a leash or rope for a few days at the new place, so that he'll accept it as home and not attempt to get back to the former home. This seldom takes more than a week. Once the dog knows the new place is home, he will not get lost. Even if you shut the dog in the trunk and drive for half an hour, when you let him out, he will be able to find his way back. (Don't actually do this, though; it's cruel, and the dog may not trust you afterward; trunks are no fun whatsoever to ride in.)
> Must I now install an english to pig-latin service for both ends?;)
No, here's what you do: Set up Dvorak->Qwerty transliterative fonts on all your workstations at both ends, and set the keyboard layouts to Dvorak. Your users will still type as if the layout were QWERTY, and due to the transliterative fonts the letters will appear correct. For instance, the user will type the key that they think is "S", but on a Dvorak layout that key is really "O", so the character they typed is "O". However, the transliterative font displays "O" as "S", so the user will see "S" on the screen. But anyone who intercepts the traffic will see "O". As long as whoever intercepts the traffic doesn't know about frequency analysis, you should be good to go;-)
> You can never completely remove all security holes. But you can reduce them.
This is true. However...
> I'm not saying Mozilla does a bad job at all, but to automatically say that > KDE is just as bad, but doesn't have the userbase to expose it, isn't logical
It's not illogical in the sense of being unlikely to be true. If what you meant is that it doesn't necessarily follow, then you're right; it doesn't. The OP is making an unstated assumption. It is, however, an assumption that may likely be correct.
My analysis is that any program written in a language that exposes raw pointers and/or fixed-size storage buffers will necessarily be plagued continually with security flaws unless *unusually* extensive care is taken to avoid that. All major browsers in use today are written in such languages, incidentally, and so is most server software, and most applications. Also most OS kernels and schedulers and such, but it's probably *necessary* for those things to be written in such languages; whereas, applications (increasingly, with hardware advances) could reasonably be written in VHLLs, which provide important protections against this class of subtle vulnerability. That isn't to say anything written in a VHLL will necessarily be totally secure, but the difficulty of making it secure may be rather substantially lower. I'm hoping that a lot of software development will move in that direction over the next twenty years.
> They need apologists to start really apologizing
Umm, "apologist" and "apologize" come from the same root word, but apologizing is very different from what apologists do. See "apologetics" for further clarification. Almost the opposite of apologizing.
> It's harder to think of practical reasons for Klingons carrying melee > weapons, but it's also harder to think of why there *should* be practical > reasons.
Indeed, Bat'leh use seems to be very much culturally driven.
> Klingons are screwed up in a lot of ways when it comes to fighting and war.
If you think their war and fighting customs are screwed up, you should study their courtship rituals (wait, those are almost the same customs as for war and fighting...) or their coming-of-age rituals or their politics or, heaven help you, their music.
> My guess is things have just progressed to the point in Star Wars where > nobody bothers wearing armor anymore because nobody bothers still using > archaic weapons like shotguns that require defending against.
Except that if it ever got to the point where people forgot about the body armor, assassins would start using scope rifles again. (A fascinating sci-fi book was written on this premise, called _The High Crusade_, which involves some dudes from twelfth-century England hijacking the scout ship of a would-be invading alien empire and, between midieval warfare methods, stolen technology, and the devious use of psychology, eventually taking over their whole galactic empire. It's worth reading, IMO, particularly if you find the concept of weapon obsolescence interestingly complex.)
The thing about Jedi using the force to deflect bullets (or, indeed, using Jedi short-term prescience to just dodge the bullets) makes more sense.
> The U.S. could destroy the middle east from orbit,
"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." Destruction from orbit is kinda blunt, though; do we really want to nuke half a continent? Wouldn't it be almost as effective and a lot safer to just napalm-blanket the half dozen largest cities in Iraq and plough salt into the fields?
> Sometimes you don't want to kill every one. It's bad PR.
Indeed. All those pesky civilians, and the demands of international politics...
> And who would pump your oil when you're done?
Droids, obviously. But Europe would never let us hear the end of it if we wiped out a civilian population. I mean, how *rude*!
> Jedi can parry gunfire with their lightsabres (neat trick, that - > how do you practice?)
With a small spherical droid and a blindfold. If you miss your block, you say "Ow!" in an annoyed and petulant tone like a spoiled child. At least, that's what Luke did.
> The odd thing about Jedi using light sabers is that they don't bother > with blasters at all.
No, the odd thing is that they bother with light sabers. With the kind of prescience needed to pilot a pod racer and the kind of telekenesis that would be required to levitate an X-wing out of a bog, a Jedi master *ought* to be able to just walk through the middle of a blaster fight unscathed, pushing and pulling on the shooters' aim as necessary to avoid being hit. And, as Luke (a complete novice at the time) demonstrates with the little training droid ball, they ought to be able to do all that blindfolded. What do they need light sabers for?
(The answer is, of course, simple: they need light sabers for *image*. Light sabers are cool, impressive, intimidating,...)
> The best part of this is that the article is JUST interesting enough to > make you click "Next" then "Stop" and swear you aren't going to do it > again. Then you do.
Huh? As soon as I realized it was going to do that each time, not just once, I promptly hit "slower", noticed that the speed number in the URI increased, and added about three zeros on the end of it.
But I agree that the person who decided to do the article this way should be forcibly "promoted" (with no pay increase, a cubicle closer to his boss, and new responsibilities) to Senior Divisional Head of the Middle Management Structural Synergy Reorganizational Team or something, to ensure he never designs another web page.
There are a couple of other pieces of ST tech that I have a pretty hard time believing could actually be built, too. For instance, and the universal translator is absolutely impossible.
Oh, and then there's the idea that pretty much every star system in the Milky Way has at least one planet (and often two or three) with a human-breathable atmosphere, a human-tolerable amount of gravity, *and* two-armed two-legged humanoids with about the same intelligence and size as humans, two eyes, one nose below them, one mouth below that, ears on the sides,... I know it makes casting easier, but geez, come on.
Slashdot Mirror
For my money, I'd go with an Avant keyboard. It's even more high-end in terms of price, but it's worth every dime. Gimmicks like blank keytops (who looks at the keytops while typing anyway?) are a novelty, sure, but Avant keyboards are fully remappable: you can create your own keyboard layout. The keytops have characters printed on them, but if you like, you can rearrange them so that they match (or don't match, if you prefer) your layout. And yes, like all reasonably high-end keyboards, they are sturdy, hold up well, and have good tactile feedback. But for me the key selling point is the ability to rearrange the layout however you want. Tired of overextending your pinky to hit shift and ctrl all the time? Put those keys on home positions like I've done, and in a week your pinkies won't ache any more.
*Shrug*. If the blank keytops are worth money to you, go for it, but don't expect them to have a measurable impact on your typing speed or comfort.
> My hunch is that a encryption program carried in a virus would be rather
> simplistic.
Yeah, but in later operations, the blackhats will realize that the encryption program doesn't have to be carried in the virus; all the virus needs is enough networking code to retrieve the real payload from elsewhere. The real payload can then proceed to do RSA encryption with a 1024-bit key and follow that up by continuously writing over the originals with alternating layers of random bits and fixed patterns while port-scanning for vulnerable IIS and MS SQL servers to use to pass itself along, and also emailing itself to everyone in the user's address book, putting copies of itself (called something like newlogo.jpg.exe) on every open CIFS fileshare on the LAN, and sending full-color brochures to any printers it finds featuring a URL of a compromised webserver that hosts another copy of itself -- oh, and looking for a modem that it can use to place calls and play a pre-recorded voice message...
> Good god. You use a computer a lot, and that makes a lot of people stupid
> BUT you?
Susceptibility to phishing has virtually NOTHING to do with how much you do or do not use a computer. It is a function of your general level of naivete. Giving out your bank password in response to an email request is fundamentally no different from giving out your credit card number to a sleazy telemarketer who says he's from the local police charity. In both cases, somebody contacts you and claims to represent a certain organization, and you just believe he is whoever he represents himself as, without wondering whether someone could be faking those credentials. No amount of computer-technical knowledge will prevent you from making that mistake, and no amount of *ignorance* of technical computer and network details will *prevent* you from seeing through the ruse.
Granted, technical knowledge helps you to see the *details* of the ruse, e.g., to expose it; an end user is unlikely to be able to analyze email headers and do whois lookups and whatnot to track down the sender's real identity, for instance. But that won't stop a sensibly sceptical end user from saying to himself, "Hey, how do I know this message is really from Citibank and that what it says is true? Maybe I'll call the bank and check..." A network admin won't have to call the bank, obviously, because he can analyze the headers and stuff, but he'll only do that under the same circumstances that an end user would call the bank, i.e., if he doesn't immediately believe that the message must certainly be reliable just because he received it.
> Question: Did you believe in Santa Claus growing up?
No. My parents taught me discernment, not lies.
What the honeynets are doing is good, and it's worth doing, and they should keep on doing it, but it is nevertheless true that a large amount of gullibility is required to fall for a phishing scheme of any kind. Basically you have to be the kind of person who just assumes any random person you've never met before is probably telling you the truth whenever he's talking, unless you have a specific reason to believe otherwise. That's fundamentally dumb, because if you live in a world populated by human beings, at least 50% of what people tell you is wrong. If you don't put at least some thought into evaluating the probably veracity of each and every thing that you hear or read, you're stupid.
Actually, what he was saying might not be dangerous, depending on the implementation he was using. All the recursion there is tail recursion, so if his implementation special-cases tail recursion, this will only consume constant system resources.
>> ... Bill Gates came into power.)))
...
> You're a LISP programmer aren't you?
No, that would be (past-tense (come bill-gates (into power)))
Or, in Emacs lisp,
(grammar-english-past-tense
(grammar-english-verb-come
(person-bill-gates
(into sociopolitical-power))))
an Ewok Thanksgiving Special!
> No one would be stupid enough to try and make an email
> client be an applications platform
Shhh, you'll give them ideas. In 1994 we commonly said thinks like, "nobody
would be stupid enough to make a mailreader automatically execute instructions
or code attached to a message", and then the Outlook team did exactly that,
and Microsoft *boasted* about it and touted it as an important feature.
> And how careful and meticulous can they be, really, if their advertising
> says "let's you?"
I don't know. Let's you and me have a discussion about grammar and punctuation.
> Do I trust them to objectively evaluate whether any given website is
> dangerous (from an IT security perspective) or benign?
Oh, and it's also worth noting that while I trust *myself* to do a better job of evaluating this than AOLTW, I would *NOT* trust most end users to do a better job of evaluating this than AOLTW -- i.e., I would rather trust AOLTW's judgement on this than leave it up to the end users in most cases.
Of course, if you have the option of not trusting *any* sites to run in IE, then you can take the decision of which sites to trust out of the hands of the user without giving it to AOLTW -- i.e., you can set things up so that Firefox or some other browser is used exclusively and IE is not used. I consider myself fortunate to be able to do that (and, indeed, that's how the PCs on our network are currently set up), but not all IT departments have that option, so that leaves them, until now, in the untenable position of leaving it up to the end user to decide which sites it's safe to view in IE. Netscape 8 gives them a somewhat better option than that, IMO.
> Well... and why exactly should I trust AOL Time Warner?
Depends what you're trusting them to do. The question you want to ask is not "Do I trust them to always to the right thing in every circumstance?" but rather "Do I trust them to objectively evaluate whether any given website is dangerous (from an IT security perspective) or benign?" Maybe you do and maybe you don't (I'm not convinced I do), but it's a simpler question than the overbroad "Do I trust them?" and, on the whole, more likely to be answered in the affirmative.
> Diamond windows wouldn't break as easily but they would not be good
> for your heating bill as diamond is a good thermal conductor.
So's glass. (Not as much maybe, but nevertheless.) That's why good windows have more than one pane (three is common) with air or argon or something in between. (If they start out with argon or a vacuum, it ends up as just air after a while anyway; sealing the edges reliably isn't possible at an acceptable price point.) Air is a fairly poor heat conductor, especially if the cavity it's filling is too small/thin for convection currents to form. In fact, most of the best insulators work on this principle; fiberglass insulation and styrofoam are mostly small pockets of air.
> I'm a web designer, and I truly believe that a good designer knows better
> than a user how things should look 95% of the time...
Yeah, maybe, but the *other* 97.384% of web designers *don't*. For starters, most of them are stuck in a brain-dammaged 1985-esque mindset wherein they pretend they're still working with an ink-on-paper medium. I've given up entirely on the idea of allowing websites to choose their own colors, and I've half a mind to take away their ability to choose their own layouts too, because most webmasters can't design a layout that works at different resolutions and with different text sizes if their lives depend on it.
The dog will not get lost. Dogs do not get lost. Ever. In all of recorded history, there is not a single uncontested documented instance of a dog getting lost. There are many urban legends about "lost" dogs, but almost all of these, if not just plain made up, are gross overstatements or misunderstandings. Most of them are just the dog's owner/companion freaking out and going into a panic because *they* don't know where the dog is.
Sometimes a dog will stray away from where the dog's owner/companion thinks the dog should be, and that person may not be entirely certain where the dog is, but the dog, although it may be loose and possibly astray, is *not* lost; the dog knows *precisely* where he is, and *exactly* how to get back home; when he's ready, assuming you've made the environment such that home is a place where he wants to go, he'll show up there.
You say it's blind, but you forgot to mention that this particular blind dog is also deaf, cripled, and lame and has had a lobotomy.
The real danger for stray dogs isn't that they won't be able to find their way back home; the danger for stray dogs is that some adverse circumstance will occur and injure the dog while he is out; this is especially likely in an urban setting. The dog is much safer in a rural environment than an urban one.
She should keep the dog indoors or on a leash or rope for a few days at the new place, so that he'll accept it as home and not attempt to get back to the former home. This seldom takes more than a week. Once the dog knows the new place is home, he will not get lost. Even if you shut the dog in the trunk and drive for half an hour, when you let him out, he will be able to find his way back. (Don't actually do this, though; it's cruel, and the dog may not trust you afterward; trunks are no fun whatsoever to ride in.)
> Must I now install an english to pig-latin service for both ends? ;)
;-)
No, here's what you do: Set up Dvorak->Qwerty transliterative fonts on all your workstations at both ends, and set the keyboard layouts to Dvorak. Your users will still type as if the layout were QWERTY, and due to the transliterative fonts the letters will appear correct. For instance, the user will type the key that they think is "S", but on a Dvorak layout that key is really "O", so the character they typed is "O". However, the transliterative font displays "O" as "S", so the user will see "S" on the screen. But anyone who intercepts the traffic will see "O". As long as whoever intercepts the traffic doesn't know about frequency analysis, you should be good to go
> You can never completely remove all security holes. But you can reduce them.
This is true. However...
> I'm not saying Mozilla does a bad job at all, but to automatically say that
> KDE is just as bad, but doesn't have the userbase to expose it, isn't logical
It's not illogical in the sense of being unlikely to be true. If what you meant is that it doesn't necessarily follow, then you're right; it doesn't. The OP is making an unstated assumption. It is, however, an assumption that may likely be correct.
My analysis is that any program written in a language that exposes raw pointers and/or fixed-size storage buffers will necessarily be plagued continually with security flaws unless *unusually* extensive care is taken to avoid that. All major browsers in use today are written in such languages, incidentally, and so is most server software, and most applications. Also most OS kernels and schedulers and such, but it's probably *necessary* for those things to be written in such languages; whereas, applications (increasingly, with hardware advances) could reasonably be written in VHLLs, which provide important protections against this class of subtle vulnerability. That isn't to say anything written in a VHLL will necessarily be totally secure, but the difficulty of making it secure may be rather substantially lower. I'm hoping that a lot of software development will move in that direction over the next twenty years.
> They need apologists to start really apologizing
Umm, "apologist" and "apologize" come from the same root word, but apologizing is very different from what apologists do. See "apologetics" for further clarification. Almost the opposite of apologizing.
> In Soviet Russia, X Ys YOU!
> In Korea, only old people X!
> In Kansas, X is illegal!
On slashdot, there's a meme about X!
> I know that, from all things, non-tech people should not open their
> power supplies (PS).
Also CRTs. Do not attempt to open up and service a CRT yourself unless you know why it's dangerous and how long they can hold their charge.
> It's harder to think of practical reasons for Klingons carrying melee
> weapons, but it's also harder to think of why there *should* be practical
> reasons.
Indeed, Bat'leh use seems to be very much culturally driven.
> Klingons are screwed up in a lot of ways when it comes to fighting and war.
If you think their war and fighting customs are screwed up, you should study their courtship rituals (wait, those are almost the same customs as for war and fighting...) or their coming-of-age rituals or their politics or, heaven help you, their music.
> My guess is things have just progressed to the point in Star Wars where
> nobody bothers wearing armor anymore because nobody bothers still using
> archaic weapons like shotguns that require defending against.
Except that if it ever got to the point where people forgot about the body armor, assassins would start using scope rifles again. (A fascinating sci-fi book was written on this premise, called _The High Crusade_, which involves some dudes from twelfth-century England hijacking the scout ship of a would-be invading alien empire and, between midieval warfare methods, stolen technology, and the devious use of psychology, eventually taking over their whole galactic empire. It's worth reading, IMO, particularly if you find the concept of weapon obsolescence interestingly complex.)
The thing about Jedi using the force to deflect bullets (or, indeed, using Jedi short-term prescience to just dodge the bullets) makes more sense.
> The U.S. could destroy the middle east from orbit,
"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." Destruction from orbit is kinda blunt, though; do we really want to nuke half a continent? Wouldn't it be almost as effective and a lot safer to just napalm-blanket the half dozen largest cities in Iraq and plough salt into the fields?
> Sometimes you don't want to kill every one. It's bad PR.
Indeed. All those pesky civilians, and the demands of international politics...
> And who would pump your oil when you're done?
Droids, obviously. But Europe would never let us hear the end of it if we wiped out a civilian population. I mean, how *rude*!
> Jedi can parry gunfire with their lightsabres (neat trick, that -
> how do you practice?)
With a small spherical droid and a blindfold. If you miss your block, you say "Ow!" in an annoyed and petulant tone like a spoiled child. At least, that's what Luke did.
> The odd thing about Jedi using light sabers is that they don't bother
...)
> with blasters at all.
No, the odd thing is that they bother with light sabers. With the kind of prescience needed to pilot a pod racer and the kind of telekenesis that would be required to levitate an X-wing out of a bog, a Jedi master *ought* to be able to just walk through the middle of a blaster fight unscathed, pushing and pulling on the shooters' aim as necessary to avoid being hit. And, as Luke (a complete novice at the time) demonstrates with the little training droid ball, they ought to be able to do all that blindfolded. What do they need light sabers for?
(The answer is, of course, simple: they need light sabers for *image*. Light sabers are cool, impressive, intimidating,
> The best part of this is that the article is JUST interesting enough to
> make you click "Next" then "Stop" and swear you aren't going to do it
> again. Then you do.
Huh? As soon as I realized it was going to do that each time, not just once, I promptly hit "slower", noticed that the speed number in the URI increased, and added about three zeros on the end of it.
But I agree that the person who decided to do the article this way should be forcibly "promoted" (with no pay increase, a cubicle closer to his boss, and new responsibilities) to Senior Divisional Head of the Middle Management Structural Synergy Reorganizational Team or something, to ensure he never designs another web page.
There are a couple of other pieces of ST tech that I have a pretty hard time believing could actually be built, too. For instance, and the universal translator is absolutely impossible.
... I know it makes casting easier, but geez, come on.
Oh, and then there's the idea that pretty much every star system in the Milky Way has at least one planet (and often two or three) with a human-breathable atmosphere, a human-tolerable amount of gravity, *and* two-armed two-legged humanoids with about the same intelligence and size as humans, two eyes, one nose below them, one mouth below that, ears on the sides,