And then the updater gets hacked
on
Due Diligence?
·
· Score: 2
This could be a nightmare in itself. What happens if the update server gets hacked... then all of a sudden you have systems either auto-trojaning themselves - or shutting down everywhere.
Not really a good idea... an equivilient to *gasp* "windows update" for terminal would be nice (RH8 has one, if you pay for or try RHN), where it automatically gives you a list of updates available and allows you to pick them in a dselect-style (debian) format, or something similar.
Unsubscribing does not work. However, it would be nice if email client could recognize this supposed opt-out statement and categorize the letter as junk mail.
That's so simple it's almost brilliant. There are a few bugs with it, but it's actually not a bad idea.
The main bug: You'd have to either have logic for lists you do want, or only use that particular email account for personal emails
But seriously, checking an email for the word "unsubscribe" (and a few other key ones) as a hyperlink would probably work very well for that variety of spam. Since 99% of people won't send you "unsubscribe" hyperlinked, it solves the problem of knocking out the wrong emails.
Has anybody actually tried this? Sometimes there's brilliance in random musing.
Also interesting, it looks like one of the things they are nailing them for is the fraudulent 'remove me from your mailing list' that actually brings more spam
I fell for this a few times, basically by hitting that link you notify el-spammer that your email is valid, giving him/her/it the opportunity to add you to a list of "verified" people to bombard to spam. This is REALLY one of the slimiest of the slimy tactics.
I don't suppose this court decision would force spammers to think about changing the "remove me" link to "Yeah, spam my ass like there's no tomorrow", since that's what it really does
So you've got a smoking video card, a super fast processor, and some other fancy peripherals. You've stocked your machine up... except you haven't taken the time to upgrade your RAM about the 256MB of PC2100 DDR...
ooops, mistake!
RAM does definately make a difference. It used to be that after a certain amount of RAM, the speed difference was negligable, but since then OS's and apps have been chewing up more and more memory.
Once your monster-fragging memory-chewing game starts getting near memory limits, you are going to see performance loss, even on a high-end processor. You'll start hearing that annoying clickety-clickety-clack sound, which often indicates your hard-drive is whirring away storing up swap space.
Even if you've got a nice new 7200RPM (or higher in SCSI) hard drive, it's not going to get near the transfer speed as your RAM, as you're limited by the mechanical medium. Suddenly, your game will start stuttering, and some bigass monster or perhaps a dude with a show gun is going to tag advantage of this to remove your head.
I have 2 machines, an Athlon XP and an old Duron. The Athlon is by far superior, faster processor, faster bus, faster RAM, etc, etc. The Duron, however, has half a gig of RAM (and probably more soon, PC133 is cheap and abundant). While the Athlon takes the lead easily at first, it can decrease noticably in performance as I start running into heavy swap usage.
Windows XP is a big fat whale of an OS, and it sucks a lot of my RAM to begin with. Throwing a big game on top of that (and whatever helper apps multitask in the background) can put it in the red zone fairly quickly. In contrast, with 512MB of RAM, the OS tends to put its bloated self into memory, and still leave enough space for my gaming needs.
The moral of this is, that - as always - a PC is only as fast as its slowest component. In many cases, you can bottleneck at the RAM, or - when you run low on memory - a the hard disk in swap.
It's like having a car with a huge engine, and only 6" tires or a really narrow gasline. You have to have balance... and a superfast processor really isn't going to cut a big difference nowadays until everything else catches up.
Windows users should rejoice then, for this is one "virus" that Microsoft systems are never likely to catch. After all, who would want the cost of such systems to suddenly spiral down and... hey, wait a minute!!
The amount of radioactivity is so miniscule that you don't have to worry about it as much.
What does "as much" mean, having a radioactive power source sitting on my lap makes me fear for my ability to produce offspring. People worry about cellphones causing sterility, and they just run on Li/NiMh batteries and transmit out a focussed antenna...
Somehow not having to worry "as much" still leaves me worried enough. Nerds have enough problems getting to the point of propogating without having irradiated nether regions. I'll let them test this for awhile first.
Yeah, but the article didn't include their address... (should have said address and names). I assume putting in the kids info in the original article was attempting to humanize her, but it's still a bad idea in both situations.
It just opened up the easy route for a bunch of hostile idiots to 2 young boys (not that most people couldn't check google, but most think to bother)...
A lot of it is about dosage. It seems that a lot of the allergy shots that they give kids are mostly like vaccines, dead or miniscules samples of a substance that they are allergic to, to build an immunity.
Cats and dogs, etc I got over. But one summer during burning season I inhaled a bunch of sagebrush smoke (myself being allergic to sage/sagebrush) and had hives and shakes for 3 months. I take that same stuff in the shots, but it's a whole lot less dosage and spread over more time. Inhaling an allergen in smoke form into one's lungs, not good...
Posting the names of the kids? You're an ass. They've done nothing other than being born to idiotic parentage, and now do you know how many times they'll get beaten up and have their lunch money stolen?
Little Johnny: My dad said your mom is a filthy spammer Craig: Is not!!!! Johnny: Is too, give me your lunch money or I'll beatchya!
Did those virii come distributed with the product? Now you're going to tell me there are ABSOLUTELY NO possible security holes in open source software, ever right? Go on...
Ignoring the fact that installing certain operating system components are often worse on your computer than a virus (by installing this service pack, we may enter your computer)...
Nothing is 100% secure, and nobody ever said linux is (or not anyone intelligent, anyways). However, tallies of response time when a breach is found, and often the time in finding such a breach, are the factors at hand. You'll certainly not see MS yelling out "hey, we were hacked, check your software people," but instead something more like a quiet, um... something wrong... here patch... you fix.
And yes, lots of MS tools come with bugs in them that leave your computer so open that you might as well just invite half the web for a party. Once MS gets the patch out, if you're a decently intelligent admin/user, you can fix things up to plug the hole, or meanwhile just disable affected components,etc.
MS isn't all the problem, idiots who don't patch up are also a problem (demonstrated by the continual code red attempts shown in my webserver logs), but at least when something goes wrong we hear about it, and can expect a solution shortly after discovery.
Obviously quite a few of you went to see Spider Man
Of course we did. It was a good movie, and most of us actually don't have a problem paying to see something good. For potential stinkers, I (and a lot of people I know) will download them first - and then perhaps later buy the DVD or see it in theatre.
What did we do? We paid for a product that was good. At the time we didn't know that Mr Lee was getting screwed, so at the time there wasn't strong reason to boycott.
It's one thing to advocate boycotting where you know something wrong is being done. Prior to now, I doubt even Mr Lee would have endorsed that (and may not, still).
If you want to think yourself superior just because you *didn't* see spider man, suit yourself. What I saw was a movie well worth paying for, had all those who contributed gotten a fair share.
As for the CD, pay-per-view, etc. Never bothered with those. I would have bought the DVD, because up until now it was worth my money, but now I'll hold off, at least until Stan gets his cut of the profits (which shall continue long past the theatre movie, due to DVD's etc).
Sometimes this works backwards, but I used to have some really bad allergies to animals: cat fur, feathers, etc.
After toughing it out in clean fresh air, coupled with visits to the chickens in the barn, etc, most of my animal allergies went away. I was still allergic to cats, but got rid of that after we got three of the shedding creatures.
In reverse cases, sometimes the allergies chip away at the immune system, causing gradually increasing sickness. But in most cases I've heard of, low exposure over time builds tolerence.
*Note: That's low exposure, stuffing a kid with allergies in a house of 50 cats is probably not recommended in the short run...
I still had ready access to "harmful material" via the magazines that various other students stole from their parents' drawers, schoolground talk, and (admittedly to a lesser extent than today) TV.
Is it really arguable that children are exposing themselves to such material any more via library internet than through any other incidental medium?
Yes, the internet is a ready source of explicit material. However, having the computers in a semi-public is a deterrent to most youngsters of average intelligence. If not, then chances are it won't be long before somebody spots them and wonders why they are browsing "Persian Kitty's Adult Homepage" (a friend did once end up on this site legitimately, while checking pk.com instead of pkware.com for pkzip, but that's another story).
The cry of "what about the children" has been used too often, so it's getting to be a case of the "boy who cried wolf", or in this case, porn. Blocking the educational value of sites on sexuality,etc - perhaps for those who have truly legitimate medical questions - and others indeed be counterproductive for the library as a resource for knowledge.
No, they pay for bulk licenses most times. But those comes with a lot of strings attached at times, which is what often causes problems in the long run. I didn't say they pay full price (I don't actually know the actual price), I just know it still costs when dealing with bulk upgrades, even at a lesser price.
I work as a tech for schools and educational institutions. For many of these, they are still using windows 95. There are some 98 machines, but licenses are limited so the 95's tend to be prominent anywhere outside of a lab.
Trying to deal with an OS which is no longer supported by the vendor, or many software/hardware manufacturers, is just plain ugly. While I never liked 95, the cost of licensing 100+ machines just tends to be a bit prohibitive, when hardware, etc is also very expensive.
And it's not just licensing the OS, but accepting all the terms of the license agreements. We don't want to sell our souls to MS (or any other big corp) to save a few bucks. Thus, we are looking at alternatives, and open source becomes increasingly tempting solution, even though we know many will not be happy with such a changover into unfamiliar areas.
The point is, you're right. There is quite sparse "long-term" customer value, unless there are a lot of "long-term" payments being made. This isn't to say that everything should be free, or dirt cheap, but it shouldn't be as painful as it tends to be when done in bulk.
You also have to consider system requirements, and how much they have hiked for OS to OS. XP needs RAM, 2K isn't so bad but it can be a RAM pig too. Unfortunately linux desktops also tend to wallow in the mud unless fed something over 64MB as well (Gnome on RH8 runs, very slow in loading apps though), but at least you don't have to buy an OS and hardware too.
Wireless has a good transfer rate, so it would offer good resolution for wireless devices or decent transfer for wireless networks. A lot of laptops with a decent wireless ports can transfer up to 4Mbps (my old laptop did quite fast transfers before it met the electrical-surge goblins).
While it might not be good for providing long-distance network access (due to line of sight), a wide range wireless hub could do quite well for a room of computers, etc (which would kick butt for a LAN party or perhaps a school lab, if you had a hub somewhere high and aerial receivers). We have to avoid use-it-for-everything scenario though...
One of the first ideas under development is for credit card payment systems. The idea is to equip credit cards with infrared links for use at gas pumps and supermarkets, for instance.
Just because something is new and works doesn't mean it has to take over everything. It's like the story about networked laundry machines. I the keychain with a RFID chip for gas was good enough, and probably cheaper to produce.
Ever notice that most comments starting with "Excellent" or "Brilliant", etc tend to be trolls? I almost overlooked this one because of it.
I still see a problem with the described methods though. That being, I don't think that the second-best search page selling product X would want a link running to the next-up competitor selling same product X.
The same is definately true for the second-best... do you really want users checking out where everybody else is looking for better deals?
If you knew that your prices beat the competition it would be a no-brainer, but otherwise it would be in some ways virtual suicide.
Single player game suggestions
on
Gaming Goodness
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Just a suggestion and a plug... try older games that are still cool. There are lots of good single player games, you just don't see them because they go under in the hype for the sweeeeet multiplayer games that come out.
I'm still plugging a bit at "Nocturne." The control is a bit roundabout, but the graphics are very good (considering the game isn't a new-off-the-shelf) and storyline is cool.
Otherwise, how about an RPG, or a racing game? If you're just talking about FPS games, then you're looking at the wrong genre as most people like to be able to extend their gaming value with multiplayer (long after the single missions grow boring).
Those who want to play alone should go console, one of the main aspects that made PC's into gaming systems was the superior multiplayer abilities.
I would find it interesting to know how many people actually plan such organized events on a public website?
While the site might be good as a front for gaining support for a protest, most sites wouldn't advocate a "let's go out with a bunch of wooden clubs and beat somebody" type protest.
Furthermore, if such a protest were being organized, it would probably be better done with a non-violent splash page which got support, and an internal method of communication (encrypted transmission, email?) etc.
I've seen an increasing amount of protests online, but not any that actually listed a voilent solition.
Those who insist that they are right will often go to unreasonable and unrealistic depth in order to defend their belief. The "Moon landing didn't happen" group seems to be somewhat fanatical... how many fanatics do you have that actually listened to common sense?:-)
They mean LCD's though, not CRT monitors. They'd be of similar power drain to a laptor on a similar battery I would think, probably less, as the LED alone doesn't have moving parts as does the rest of the PC.
a) Lynx/Links... hmmm: If your boss sees you checking out ASCII nudes he/she will probably just shrug and think you're more crazy than perverse.
b) Gnome's *"Multiple desktops" through which to carry on both your work and another to browse slashdot or the "other" activities mentioned quite often
*WinXP has this too with TweakUI, but the taskbar doesn't change so and all it really does is reposition windows, making it a lame and semi-useless knock-off. Too bad as I find this one of the most useful features of the linux GUI.
Slashdot Mirror
This could be a nightmare in itself. What happens if the update server gets hacked... then all of a sudden you have systems either auto-trojaning themselves - or shutting down everywhere.
Not really a good idea... an equivilient to *gasp* "windows update" for terminal would be nice (RH8 has one, if you pay for or try RHN), where it automatically gives you a list of updates available and allows you to pick them in a dselect-style (debian) format, or something similar.
Unsubscribing does not work. However, it would be nice if email client could recognize this supposed opt-out statement and categorize the letter as junk mail.
That's so simple it's almost brilliant. There are a few bugs with it, but it's actually not a bad idea.
The main bug: You'd have to either have logic for lists you do want, or only use that particular email account for personal emails
But seriously, checking an email for the word "unsubscribe" (and a few other key ones) as a hyperlink would probably work very well for that variety of spam. Since 99% of people won't send you "unsubscribe" hyperlinked, it solves the problem of knocking out the wrong emails.
Has anybody actually tried this? Sometimes there's brilliance in random musing.
Also interesting, it looks like one of the things they are nailing them for is the fraudulent 'remove me from your mailing list' that actually brings more spam
I fell for this a few times, basically by hitting that link you notify el-spammer that your email is valid, giving him/her/it the opportunity to add you to a list of "verified" people to bombard to spam. This is REALLY one of the slimiest of the slimy tactics.
I don't suppose this court decision would force spammers to think about changing the "remove me" link to "Yeah, spam my ass like there's no tomorrow", since that's what it really does
So you've got a smoking video card, a super fast processor, and some other fancy peripherals. You've stocked your machine up... except you haven't taken the time to upgrade your RAM about the 256MB of PC2100 DDR...
ooops, mistake!
RAM does definately make a difference. It used to be that after a certain amount of RAM, the speed difference was negligable, but since then OS's and apps have been chewing up more and more memory.
Once your monster-fragging memory-chewing game starts getting near memory limits, you are going to see performance loss, even on a high-end processor. You'll start hearing that annoying clickety-clickety-clack sound, which often indicates your hard-drive is whirring away storing up swap space.
Even if you've got a nice new 7200RPM (or higher in SCSI) hard drive, it's not going to get near the transfer speed as your RAM, as you're limited by the mechanical medium. Suddenly, your game will start stuttering, and some bigass monster or perhaps a dude with a show gun is going to tag advantage of this to remove your head.
I have 2 machines, an Athlon XP and an old Duron. The Athlon is by far superior, faster processor, faster bus, faster RAM, etc, etc. The Duron, however, has half a gig of RAM (and probably more soon, PC133 is cheap and abundant). While the Athlon takes the lead easily at first, it can decrease noticably in performance as I start running into heavy swap usage.
Windows XP is a big fat whale of an OS, and it sucks a lot of my RAM to begin with. Throwing a big game on top of that (and whatever helper apps multitask in the background) can put it in the red zone fairly quickly. In contrast, with 512MB of RAM, the OS tends to put its bloated self into memory, and still leave enough space for my gaming needs.
The moral of this is, that - as always - a PC is only as fast as its slowest component. In many cases, you can bottleneck at the RAM, or - when you run low on memory - a the hard disk in swap.
It's like having a car with a huge engine, and only 6" tires or a really narrow gasline. You have to have balance... and a superfast processor really isn't going to cut a big difference nowadays until everything else catches up.
+1 informative... apparently moderators DO have a good sense of humour sometimes *lol*
I take it you're an AT&T user? Enjoy slashdot while you can then, you might not be back for awhile :-)
Windows users should rejoice then, for this is one "virus" that Microsoft systems are never likely to catch. After all, who would want the cost of such systems to suddenly spiral down and... hey, wait a minute!!
The amount of radioactivity is so miniscule that you don't have to worry about it as much.
What does "as much" mean, having a radioactive power source sitting on my lap makes me fear for my ability to produce offspring. People worry about cellphones causing sterility, and they just run on Li/NiMh batteries and transmit out a focussed antenna...
Somehow not having to worry "as much" still leaves me worried enough. Nerds have enough problems getting to the point of propogating without having irradiated nether regions. I'll let them test this for awhile first.
Look, it glows! - phorm
Yeah, but the article didn't include their address... (should have said address and names). I assume putting in the kids info in the original article was attempting to humanize her, but it's still a bad idea in both situations.
It just opened up the easy route for a bunch of hostile idiots to 2 young boys (not that most people couldn't check google, but most think to bother)...
A lot of it is about dosage. It seems that a lot of the allergy shots that they give kids are mostly like vaccines, dead or miniscules samples of a substance that they are allergic to, to build an immunity.
Cats and dogs, etc I got over. But one summer during burning season I inhaled a bunch of sagebrush smoke (myself being allergic to sage/sagebrush) and had hives and shakes for 3 months. I take that same stuff in the shots, but it's a whole lot less dosage and spread over more time. Inhaling an allergen in smoke form into one's lungs, not good...
Posting the names of the kids? You're an ass. They've done nothing other than being born to idiotic parentage, and now do you know how many times they'll get beaten up and have their lunch money stolen?
Little Johnny: My dad said your mom is a filthy spammer
Craig: Is not!!!!
Johnny: Is too, give me your lunch money or I'll beatchya!
Did those virii come distributed with the product? Now you're going to tell me there are ABSOLUTELY NO possible security holes in open source software, ever right? Go on...
Ignoring the fact that installing certain operating system components are often worse on your computer than a virus (by installing this service pack, we may enter your computer)...
Nothing is 100% secure, and nobody ever said linux is (or not anyone intelligent, anyways). However, tallies of response time when a breach is found, and often the time in finding such a breach, are the factors at hand. You'll certainly not see MS yelling out "hey, we were hacked, check your software people," but instead something more like a quiet, um... something wrong... here patch... you fix.
And yes, lots of MS tools come with bugs in them that leave your computer so open that you might as well just invite half the web for a party. Once MS gets the patch out, if you're a decently intelligent admin/user, you can fix things up to plug the hole, or meanwhile just disable affected components,etc.
MS isn't all the problem, idiots who don't patch up are also a problem (demonstrated by the continual code red attempts shown in my webserver logs), but at least when something goes wrong we hear about it, and can expect a solution shortly after discovery.
Obviously quite a few of you went to see Spider Man
Of course we did. It was a good movie, and most of us actually don't have a problem paying to see something good. For potential stinkers, I (and a lot of people I know) will download them first - and then perhaps later buy the DVD or see it in theatre.
What did we do? We paid for a product that was good. At the time we didn't know that Mr Lee was getting screwed, so at the time there wasn't strong reason to boycott.
It's one thing to advocate boycotting where you know something wrong is being done. Prior to now, I doubt even Mr Lee would have endorsed that (and may not, still).
If you want to think yourself superior just because you *didn't* see spider man, suit yourself. What I saw was a movie well worth paying for, had all those who contributed gotten a fair share.
As for the CD, pay-per-view, etc. Never bothered with those. I would have bought the DVD, because up until now it was worth my money, but now I'll hold off, at least until Stan gets his cut of the profits (which shall continue long past the theatre movie, due to DVD's etc).
Sometimes this works backwards, but I used to have some really bad allergies to animals: cat fur, feathers, etc.
After toughing it out in clean fresh air, coupled with visits to the chickens in the barn, etc, most of my animal allergies went away. I was still allergic to cats, but got rid of that after we got three of the shedding creatures.
In reverse cases, sometimes the allergies chip away at the immune system, causing gradually increasing sickness. But in most cases I've heard of, low exposure over time builds tolerence.
*Note: That's low exposure, stuffing a kid with allergies in a house of 50 cats is probably not recommended in the short run...
I still had ready access to "harmful material" via the magazines that various other students stole from their parents' drawers, schoolground talk, and (admittedly to a lesser extent than today) TV.
Is it really arguable that children are exposing themselves to such material any more via library internet than through any other incidental medium?
Yes, the internet is a ready source of explicit material. However, having the computers in a semi-public is a deterrent to most youngsters of average intelligence. If not, then chances are it won't be long before somebody spots them and wonders why they are browsing "Persian Kitty's Adult Homepage" (a friend did once end up on this site legitimately, while checking pk.com instead of pkware.com for pkzip, but that's another story).
The cry of "what about the children" has been used too often, so it's getting to be a case of the "boy who cried wolf", or in this case, porn. Blocking the educational value of sites on sexuality,etc - perhaps for those who have truly legitimate medical questions - and others indeed be counterproductive for the library as a resource for knowledge.
No, they pay for bulk licenses most times. But those comes with a lot of strings attached at times, which is what often causes problems in the long run. I didn't say they pay full price (I don't actually know the actual price), I just know it still costs when dealing with bulk upgrades, even at a lesser price.
I work as a tech for schools and educational institutions. For many of these, they are still using windows 95. There are some 98 machines, but licenses are limited so the 95's tend to be prominent anywhere outside of a lab.
Trying to deal with an OS which is no longer supported by the vendor, or many software/hardware manufacturers, is just plain ugly. While I never liked 95, the cost of licensing 100+ machines just tends to be a bit prohibitive, when hardware, etc is also very expensive.
And it's not just licensing the OS, but accepting all the terms of the license agreements. We don't want to sell our souls to MS (or any other big corp) to save a few bucks. Thus, we are looking at alternatives, and open source becomes increasingly tempting solution, even though we know many will not be happy with such a changover into unfamiliar areas.
The point is, you're right. There is quite sparse "long-term" customer value, unless there are a lot of "long-term" payments being made. This isn't to say that everything should be free, or dirt cheap, but it shouldn't be as painful as it tends to be when done in bulk.
You also have to consider system requirements, and how much they have hiked for OS to OS. XP needs RAM, 2K isn't so bad but it can be a RAM pig too. Unfortunately linux desktops also tend to wallow in the mud unless fed something over 64MB as well (Gnome on RH8 runs, very slow in loading apps though), but at least you don't have to buy an OS and hardware too.
Maybe somebody actually read my post
Wireless has a good transfer rate, so it would offer good resolution for wireless devices or decent transfer for wireless networks. A lot of laptops with a decent wireless ports can transfer up to 4Mbps (my old laptop did quite fast transfers before it met the electrical-surge goblins).
While it might not be good for providing long-distance network access (due to line of sight), a wide range wireless hub could do quite well for a room of computers, etc (which would kick butt for a LAN party or perhaps a school lab, if you had a hub somewhere high and aerial receivers). We have to avoid use-it-for-everything scenario though...
One of the first ideas under development is for credit card payment systems. The idea is to equip credit cards with infrared links for use at gas pumps and supermarkets, for instance.
Just because something is new and works doesn't mean it has to take over everything. It's like the story about networked laundry machines. I the keychain with a RFID chip for gas was good enough, and probably cheaper to produce.
Ever notice that most comments starting with "Excellent" or "Brilliant", etc tend to be trolls? I almost overlooked this one because of it.
I still see a problem with the described methods though. That being, I don't think that the second-best search page selling product X would want a link running to the next-up competitor selling same product X.
The same is definately true for the second-best... do you really want users checking out where everybody else is looking for better deals?
If you knew that your prices beat the competition it would be a no-brainer, but otherwise it would be in some ways virtual suicide.
Just a suggestion and a plug... try older games that are still cool. There are lots of good single player games, you just don't see them because they go under in the hype for the sweeeeet multiplayer games that come out.
I'm still plugging a bit at "Nocturne." The control is a bit roundabout, but the graphics are very good (considering the game isn't a new-off-the-shelf) and storyline is cool.
Otherwise, how about an RPG, or a racing game? If you're just talking about FPS games, then you're looking at the wrong genre as most people like to be able to extend their gaming value with multiplayer (long after the single missions grow boring).
Those who want to play alone should go console, one of the main aspects that made PC's into gaming systems was the superior multiplayer abilities.
I would find it interesting to know how many people actually plan such organized events on a public website?
While the site might be good as a front for gaining support for a protest, most sites wouldn't advocate a "let's go out with a bunch of wooden clubs and beat somebody" type protest.
Furthermore, if such a protest were being organized, it would probably be better done with a non-violent splash page which got support, and an internal method of communication (encrypted transmission, email?) etc.
I've seen an increasing amount of protests online, but not any that actually listed a voilent solition.
Those who insist that they are right will often go to unreasonable and unrealistic depth in order to defend their belief. The "Moon landing didn't happen" group seems to be somewhat fanatical... how many fanatics do you have that actually listened to common sense? :-)
an all-expense-paid one-way trip:
We don't want them to come back, so we can use something cheap to launch 'em up anyways.
*Note: Original post did contain sadistic humour
They mean LCD's though, not CRT monitors. They'd be of similar power drain to a laptor on a similar battery I would think, probably less, as the LED alone doesn't have moving parts as does the rest of the PC.
Hmmm... well in linux you've got:
a) Lynx/Links... hmmm: If your boss sees you checking out ASCII nudes he/she will probably just shrug and think you're more crazy than perverse.
b) Gnome's *"Multiple desktops" through which to carry on both your work and another to browse slashdot or the "other" activities mentioned quite often
*WinXP has this too with TweakUI, but the taskbar doesn't change so and all it really does is reposition windows, making it a lame and semi-useless knock-off. Too bad as I find this one of the most useful features of the linux GUI.