What we've done is imported "Yars' Revenge" from the Atari 2600 did some elevation emulation, ported the code, and re-compiled to make it work on the Intellivision. We may be selling that cartridge commercially as there is a great need for 8-bit cartridges.
Pardon me, but I think one of two things have happened here.
1) The esteemed moderation pool (of which I have occasionally found my self a member) missed a clearly +1, Funny post (great need for 8-bit Intellivision carts?) and modded it as Insightful/Interesting. I scored one like that, once, before the more clueful moderators clicked my link.
2) I have just shown myself to be woefully ignorant, despite having a TRS-80 (with LNW Expansion Interface, heavy as lead) of my own stashed away in the closet.
Both choices, at the moment, appear equally likely.
It's been two weeks, and the story is about to be archived, so I wanted to give an update to anyone interested.
The solution to the problem appears to be simple: get the Slashdot community involved! I haven't received a single call from the gruff-voiced robot -- not one in two weeks. I can only conclude that the story here (as well as the posting on usenet referenced in another thread) caused the company to rethink their strategy.
Did we Slashdot their 800 number? 'Scuse me while I shed a bitter tear.
I've only received two unsolicited calls since then. One was an actual person -- she was selling something, so I emphatically pointed out that she was making an unsolicited call to a cell phone. She replied, "You should blame your phone company for selling us the number, honey," and hung up before I could see if she was just blowing smoke.
The other was a female-voiced robot who asked me rather politely to call a local number. I've written down the number, and I'll call it *after* the Do-Not-Call list issue is resolved. I don't want to take any chance of starting a "business relationship" with any telemarketer before the list goes into effect -- even though I didn't sign up any of my numbers for the list. I don't trust US telemarketers to keep the list to themselves -- I think they'll sell them on the sly to offshore scumbags.
I'm almost sad to see that the parent is currently modded 0, Flamebait. Someone has to play Devil's Advocate, even if it's to argue a patently ridiculous point.
At the risk of feeding a troll, I'll point out a couple of things:
AFAIK they have allways delivered a decent service at decent price to their customers. Compared to normal bussiness practise they are just very ethical in their behavior. As a long time customer I must say that they are nice to deal with compared to many of those unethical companies that you find on the internet that just want to scam you.
An excellent analogy! Verisign is not as unethical as the companies that sell snake oil and redirect your phone call to Vanuatu. That's like saying I should be happy to just be beaten up in a robbery, 'cause I could have been killed outright. Thanks, I feel much better.
My only dealing with NSI (in the pre-Verisign buyout days) was when they wouldn't transfer my domain to me from the original owner because of an obscure missing piece of paper (full story here). I got around the problem by transferring the domain to Domain Direct (affiliate link) and then to the much cheaper Gandi (no kickback), and I've never looked back.
dot.ws, for one: try this. I think many other countries' 2-letter codes do the same, especially if the country has sold their national online identity for cold, hard cash.
In case you are not a doubleplusgood duckspeaker, here is a helpful translation of Verisign's letter to ICANN.
Dear Paul: Translation: Dear meddlesome twit:
This will respond to the ICANN Advisory concerning VeriSign's Deployment of DNS Wildcard Service dated 19 September 2003. We're about to tell you where you can stick your "advisory".
In the footsteps of several other registries that have done the same, we recently deployed a wildcard in the.com and.net zones. Verisign has no problem being just as sleazy and underhanded as any of our competitors.
This was done after many months of testing and analysis and in compliance with all applicable technical standards. Marketing sees dollar signs, and legal says we can get away with it.
All indications are that users, important members of the internet community we all serve, are benefiting from the improved web navigation offered by Site Finder. None of the lusers who installed "The Internet" on their computers has a clue that we've even done anything.
These results are consistent with the findings from the extensive research we performed. They are, however, clicking the pretty buttons, just like we hoped they would.
We are, of course, very interested in any objective technical information ICANN may have received concerning the service and would welcome the opportunity to work with you to review such data. To that end, we have reached out to schedule meetings... of leading experts in the field. Let's have a meeting. Then another. Then another. Then, we'll codify the new de facto "standard".
As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data. We're going to get our way, because we can, and there's nothing you can do about it. Weenie.
After completing an assessment of any operational impact of our wildcard implementation, we will take any appropriate steps necessary. And if we don't get our way, we'll pay off anyone we need to.
I look forward to continuing to work with you on this issue. Kiss our ass.
Best Regards, See you in Hell,
Russell Lewis Executive Vice President, General Manager VeriSign Naming and Directory Services
In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen. The sad part of this is that in today's world somrthing similar could happen.
I'm seeing a lot of messages to this effect, and they're getting modded +1, Funny. But it should be pointed out that the joke falls a bit flat, because the KGB did not encrypt the text on the artwork. The artist encrypted the text for the purpose of posing a challenge to its viewers.
According to the victory announcement, the original text is from "classified KGB instructions and correspondence." Now, if the Russians wanted to make a case, they could try to figure out who stole their classified "correspondence"... good thing that never happens to us. Oops.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, huge encrypted artwork cracks YOU!
(How could the first posters have missed this chance?)
Mononoke's Disappointing Box Office
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What sort of challenges did you face when you wrote the script for the dub of Princess Mononoke? I think your question is a bit too open-ended. I was wanting to ask a more specific question:
Mr. Gaiman, after the time, effort, and research you put into the dub of Princess Mononoke, were you disappointed by the film's performance at the US box office? Do you feel that the film was mishandled by Miramax, or were US audiences not quite ready to have their expectations of animation stretched that far?
I agree with your primary assertion -- the statistics you quote look like they were pulled out of thin air, at best.
OTOH, the >100% number isn't outside possibility:
In other words we will have 53% more Windows installation on banking machines then total number of banking machines on the planet.
If the number of banking machines itself doubles by 2006, then it will be no problem to install Windows on 1.53 times as many machines as are in place now. That's not to say they accounted for that in the stats you mentioned, of course!
Basically it results in inbreeding and intolerance, and the society degrades to the point at which women become basically property, and an outside injection of (non-inbred) women causes civil disruption, as all of the men fight for the source of new genetic material to give to their sons.
Wow... that describes way too many cultures both ancient and modern, even back to Biblical days.
But he said better personalization is one way to improve searching. For example, if MSN knows that the computer user searching for "pizza" lives in a specific ZIP code, it can deliver results of pizza places in that ZIP code.
That's exactly why I *won't* want to use this new search engine. If I want to find pizza places in my zip code, I'll do it myself, thank you.
Crap, if I wanted internet that logged into me, I'd already have it.
The original trilogy rocked. The new trilogy sucked, at least the first two thirds. Great story, crappy writing. "Crappy", in this sense, may or may not mean "better than average but not up to Star Wars standards".
I'm looking forward to the day, maybe 20 or 30 years from now, when some studio finally buys the rights off of Lucas' estate, and remakes parts I-III with a real screenwriter. That may happen about the time they release parts IV-VI in their original format, without the stupid additions that changed *them* from good movies to special effects showcases with incidental characters and plot.
Just because Lucas wanted to evoke the sense of wonder of the pulp sci-fi thrillers of the '50s, doesn't mean he should also employ their lame dialog and plot contrivances. [Insert Darth Maul and/or Jar Jar rant here]
I know the article says the machines "have no peripherals". But that's 100% bogus.
What, they're going to swap out the hard drive each time they want to add a new flavor of soda pop to the menu? Remember, they're pushing ease of upgrades -- that means that there's going to be some user-friendly way to update the ATM with the latest doodads.
That's why I say it'll have a USB port, or a floppy, or perhaps a CD-ROM behind the maintenance door. The alternative is to allow the ATM to be programmed remotely via the comm line... and tell me how that is any different from being "connected to the internet" when the PC on the other end is part of the corporate intranet.
Yes, it will be possible to make these systems hack-proof (or at least hack-resistant). But hack-proofing decreases user-friendliness, and some bank somewhere will choose the wrong priority when designing their Windows-based ATM system.
From the Wired article: But one of Anderson's colleagues, Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at security monitoring and consulting company Counterpane Internet Security, dismissed this [money-dispensing virus] scenario. He pointed out that the machines would not operate online and therefore would not become vulnerable to a malicious Internet attack or to some virus passed around in an e-mail attachment. Because the machines have no peripherals like floppy disks, it would be difficult for a cracker to install code or steal information.
Of course, everyone knows that ATMs have no communications links of any kind. It's just a box full of money with a power plug, right?
Duh! The ATM communicates with the bank, with the ATM user, *and* with the maintenance staff.
* The bank connection is some sort of comm line. Put encryption on it and maybe it's safe. But what happens when it turns out they've used some Win-standard encryption.dll that gets hacked?
* The customer sticks a card in and punches buttons. This is reasonably safe now, when you have little more than a numeric keypad with "Cancel" and "Enter" buttons. But the more Windoze crap they add -- they're talking about "lottery tickets and soft drinks" -- the more robust the UI will have to be. Are you sure you checked that buffer overflow?
* Finally, the maintenance staff has "root-like" physical access to the system. Sure, you have to get past some heavy-duty locks to get to the control panel inside the machine. Big deal, lots of crooks know how to pick locks... how many, though, know OS/2? But what happens when trojan-friendly Windows is the OS? Pick the lock, load the software (because there *will* be a floppy, CD-ROM, or USB port for upgrades), and dispense free, untracable cash whenever someone inserts an ATM card with magic cardno "1111-2222-3333-4444".
Perhaps using OS/2 was a way of de facto "security by obscurity". Installing Windows is more like "security by crossing-your-fingers".
Straight from the horse-sized rodent's mouth
on
Rodents of Unusual Size
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you don't like registration, just search news.google.com with appropriate keywords, and Voila! Horse-sized Rodents!
Thanks for your concern... but give the moderators a chance! 8 minutes is only a notable gap when you've FP'd the article (which I almost but not quite did this time).
Go further down the rabbit hole. Ask yourself if China is this bad AND has nuclear weapons why was Iraq invaded while China's a preferred trading status country?
I just happen to have a TRS-80 Level II Basic program in front of me:
10 Data "China", "yes", "yes", "Iraq", "yes", "no" 20 Read Country$, Bad$, Nuke$ 30 If Bad$ = "yes" then Print "We must deal with "; Country$ 40 If Bad$ = "yes" and Nuke$ = "no" then Print "Invade Evil "; Country$; "!!!" 50 If Bad$ = "yes" and Nuke$ = "yes" then Print "We will constructively engage "; Country$; " with trade." 60 GOTO 20
I'm sort of Buddhist, although I'm not so sure about Confucius. I ought to fit in, more or less.
Hmmm... I think you'd better check the first few paragraphs of the link I found for my original posting. Or, just pin a note to your back saying "Persecute Me".
You made a good point, though: Remember the "one child" policy? Well, all those little princes are growning up.
Yeah, and they don't have many princesses to marry. The one-child policy led to a very suspicious decrease in the number of baby girls, so we now have a lot of young men with no way to get a wife. I think it looks something like this:
1. Excess male population 2. ??? 3. Conquest!
where ??? = [War | Prosperity], and Prosperity isn't looking like the most likely choice.
To be honest, I hope it just trashes boot sectors before writing random crap all over the hard drive. That might actually get the message through. All these soft viruses just make people think of it as an inconvenience. When something bad happens, people might just start sitting up and taking notice.
You're thinking software, not biology.
A virus like Ebola is bad news for its host. It spreads pretty easily and quickly causes violent, bloody death. But it kills its host so quickly that the host doesn't have time to infect anyone outside his immediate contacts, and the severe nature brings all Man's medical defenses to track the contagion to its source and eradicate it.
The common cold is a virus, too. It causes relatively minor discomfort to its host, only killing a small number of previously weakened hosts. This gives the cold time to spread widely before it is detected, and by that time the infection can no longer be contained -- or even traced back to its original host.
Early viruses were more Ebola-like, wiping out boot sectors, killing the host. But when was the last time you heard of a new infection by the Michelangelo virus?
Evolution, of a sort, has led to new viruses being more like the common cold -- annoying, but not deadly, and therefore common as a sneeze.
I tried it in M$ Word, and here's what Clippy told me:
. . . explosion on the heals of a recent Security Bulletin... Clippy: Order of Words (consider revising)
Applying typical Slashdot editorial standards, I tried this:
. . . explosion on heals the of a recent Security Bulletin... Clippy: Order of Words (consider revising)
Crap, let's try again.
. . . explosion on heals of the a recent Security Bulletin... Clippy: Remove "the" or "a"
I think we got it:
Seft sent in a solid article running on the BBC discussing the next potential worm explosion on heals of the recent Security Bulletin from Microsoft. The article is a somewhat general topic piece on worms in general. Clippy: turns into a bicycle and rides into the distance
Slashdot Mirror
What we've done is imported "Yars' Revenge" from the Atari 2600 did some elevation emulation, ported the code, and re-compiled to make it work on the Intellivision. We may be selling that cartridge commercially as there is a great need for 8-bit cartridges.
Pardon me, but I think one of two things have happened here.
1) The esteemed moderation pool (of which I have occasionally found my self a member) missed a clearly +1, Funny post (great need for 8-bit Intellivision carts?) and modded it as Insightful/Interesting. I scored one like that, once, before the more clueful moderators clicked my link.
2) I have just shown myself to be woefully ignorant, despite having a TRS-80 (with LNW Expansion Interface, heavy as lead) of my own stashed away in the closet.
Both choices, at the moment, appear equally likely.
That was an interesting post... you just overquoted the parent. In binary. Actually, that *is* an interesting twist!
This binary converter may be useful for those not "in" on the joke.
It's been two weeks, and the story is about to be archived, so I wanted to give an update to anyone interested.
The solution to the problem appears to be simple: get the Slashdot community involved! I haven't received a single call from the gruff-voiced robot -- not one in two weeks. I can only conclude that the story here (as well as the posting on usenet referenced in another thread) caused the company to rethink their strategy.
Did we Slashdot their 800 number? 'Scuse me while I shed a bitter tear.
I've only received two unsolicited calls since then. One was an actual person -- she was selling something, so I emphatically pointed out that she was making an unsolicited call to a cell phone. She replied, "You should blame your phone company for selling us the number, honey," and hung up before I could see if she was just blowing smoke.
The other was a female-voiced robot who asked me rather politely to call a local number. I've written down the number, and I'll call it *after* the Do-Not-Call list issue is resolved. I don't want to take any chance of starting a "business relationship" with any telemarketer before the list goes into effect -- even though I didn't sign up any of my numbers for the list. I don't trust US telemarketers to keep the list to themselves -- I think they'll sell them on the sly to offshore scumbags.
Again, thanks to all for your help!
I'm almost sad to see that the parent is currently modded 0, Flamebait. Someone has to play Devil's Advocate, even if it's to argue a patently ridiculous point.
At the risk of feeding a troll, I'll point out a couple of things:
AFAIK they have allways delivered a decent service at decent price to their customers. Compared to normal bussiness practise they are just very ethical in their behavior. As a long time customer I must say that they are nice to deal with compared to many of those unethical companies that you find on the internet that just want to scam you.
An excellent analogy! Verisign is not as unethical as the companies that sell snake oil and redirect your phone call to Vanuatu. That's like saying I should be happy to just be beaten up in a robbery, 'cause I could have been killed outright. Thanks, I feel much better.
My only dealing with NSI (in the pre-Verisign buyout days) was when they wouldn't transfer my domain to me from the original owner because of an obscure missing piece of paper (full story here). I got around the problem by transferring the domain to Domain Direct (affiliate link) and then to the much cheaper Gandi (no kickback), and I've never looked back.
Fasilmile? Is this some new form of communication that I've never been told about?
It's a typo. He meant to say that he sent it "by Fax, slimily".
Which ones?
.ws, for one: try this. I think many other countries' 2-letter codes do the same, especially if the country has sold their national online identity for cold, hard cash.
dot
In case you are not a doubleplusgood duckspeaker, here is a helpful translation of Verisign's letter to ICANN.
.com and .net zones.
Dear Paul:
Translation: Dear meddlesome twit:
This will respond to the ICANN Advisory concerning VeriSign's Deployment of DNS Wildcard Service dated 19 September 2003.
We're about to tell you where you can stick your "advisory".
In the footsteps of several other registries that have done the same, we recently deployed a wildcard in the
Verisign has no problem being just as sleazy and underhanded as any of our competitors.
This was done after many months of testing and analysis and in compliance with all applicable technical standards.
Marketing sees dollar signs, and legal says we can get away with it.
All indications are that users, important members of the internet community we all serve, are benefiting from the improved web navigation offered by Site Finder.
None of the lusers who installed "The Internet" on their computers has a clue that we've even done anything.
These results are consistent with the findings from the extensive research we performed.
They are, however, clicking the pretty buttons, just like we hoped they would.
We are, of course, very interested in any objective technical information ICANN may have received concerning the service and would welcome the opportunity to work with you to review such data. To that end, we have reached out to schedule meetings... of leading experts in the field.
Let's have a meeting. Then another. Then another. Then, we'll codify the new de facto "standard".
As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data.
We're going to get our way, because we can, and there's nothing you can do about it. Weenie.
After completing an assessment of any operational impact of our wildcard implementation, we will take any appropriate steps necessary.
And if we don't get our way, we'll pay off anyone we need to.
I look forward to continuing to work with you on this issue.
Kiss our ass.
Best Regards,
See you in Hell,
Russell Lewis
Executive Vice President, General Manager
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services
In other news, the KGB has filed a lawsuit against the Kryptos Group under the DMCA, claiming that their IP has now been stolen.
The sad part of this is that in today's world somrthing similar could happen.
I'm seeing a lot of messages to this effect, and they're getting modded +1, Funny. But it should be pointed out that the joke falls a bit flat, because the KGB did not encrypt the text on the artwork. The artist encrypted the text for the purpose of posing a challenge to its viewers.
According to the victory announcement, the original text is from "classified KGB instructions and correspondence." Now, if the Russians wanted to make a case, they could try to figure out who stole their classified "correspondence"... good thing that never happens to us. Oops.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, huge encrypted artwork cracks YOU!
(How could the first posters have missed this chance?)
What sort of challenges did you face when you wrote the script for the dub of Princess Mononoke?
I think your question is a bit too open-ended. I was wanting to ask a more specific question:
Mr. Gaiman, after the time, effort, and research you put into the dub of Princess Mononoke , were you disappointed by the film's performance at the US box office? Do you feel that the film was mishandled by Miramax, or were US audiences not quite ready to have their expectations of animation stretched that far?
I agree with your primary assertion -- the statistics you quote look like they were pulled out of thin air, at best.
OTOH, the >100% number isn't outside possibility:
In other words we will have 53% more Windows installation on banking machines then total number of banking machines on the planet.
If the number of banking machines itself doubles by 2006, then it will be no problem to install Windows on 1.53 times as many machines as are in place now. That's not to say they accounted for that in the stats you mentioned, of course!
Lies, damned lies, and statistics, right?
Basically it results in inbreeding and intolerance, and the society degrades to the point at which women become basically property, and an outside injection of (non-inbred) women causes civil disruption, as all of the men fight for the source of new genetic material to give to their sons.
Wow... that describes way too many cultures both ancient and modern, even back to Biblical days.
Depressing!
You can already get it.
Yeah, that guy scares me. In the TV ads, he gets suggestions for some type of music (samba?), and remarks, "My wife doesn't even know I like samba!"
Replace "My wife" with "John Ashcroft" and "samba" with "big boobs", and you can see the problem...
"to google" is a much nicer verb than "to MSN".
Actually, both are very accurate!
"I Googled some results for you" implies that you found some results from a large number (a googol) of sites.
"I MiSiN'd but I couldn't find anything" correctly implies that you had no luck at all, as all the good sites were "missin'" from the index.
Never underestimate the M$ marketroids!
But he said better personalization is one way to improve searching. For example, if MSN knows that the computer user searching for "pizza" lives in a specific ZIP code, it can deliver results of pizza places in that ZIP code.
That's exactly why I *won't* want to use this new search engine. If I want to find pizza places in my zip code, I'll do it myself, thank you.
Crap, if I wanted internet that logged into me, I'd already have it.
The original trilogy rocked. The new trilogy sucked, at least the first two thirds. Great story, crappy writing. "Crappy", in this sense, may or may not mean "better than average but not up to Star Wars standards".
I'm looking forward to the day, maybe 20 or 30 years from now, when some studio finally buys the rights off of Lucas' estate, and remakes parts I-III with a real screenwriter. That may happen about the time they release parts IV-VI in their original format, without the stupid additions that changed *them* from good movies to special effects showcases with incidental characters and plot.
Just because Lucas wanted to evoke the sense of wonder of the pulp sci-fi thrillers of the '50s, doesn't mean he should also employ their lame dialog and plot contrivances. [Insert Darth Maul and/or Jar Jar rant here]
um, did you _read_ the article?
I know the article says the machines "have no peripherals". But that's 100% bogus.
What, they're going to swap out the hard drive each time they want to add a new flavor of soda pop to the menu? Remember, they're pushing ease of upgrades -- that means that there's going to be some user-friendly way to update the ATM with the latest doodads.
That's why I say it'll have a USB port, or a floppy, or perhaps a CD-ROM behind the maintenance door. The alternative is to allow the ATM to be programmed remotely via the comm line... and tell me how that is any different from being "connected to the internet" when the PC on the other end is part of the corporate intranet.
Yes, it will be possible to make these systems hack-proof (or at least hack-resistant). But hack-proofing decreases user-friendliness, and some bank somewhere will choose the wrong priority when designing their Windows-based ATM system.
From the Wired article:
.dll that gets hacked?
But one of Anderson's colleagues, Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at security monitoring and consulting company Counterpane Internet Security, dismissed this [money-dispensing virus] scenario. He pointed out that the machines would not operate online and therefore would not become vulnerable to a malicious Internet attack or to some virus passed around in an e-mail attachment. Because the machines have no peripherals like floppy disks, it would be difficult for a cracker to install code or steal information.
Of course, everyone knows that ATMs have no communications links of any kind. It's just a box full of money with a power plug, right?
Duh! The ATM communicates with the bank, with the ATM user, *and* with the maintenance staff.
* The bank connection is some sort of comm line. Put encryption on it and maybe it's safe. But what happens when it turns out they've used some Win-standard encryption
* The customer sticks a card in and punches buttons. This is reasonably safe now, when you have little more than a numeric keypad with "Cancel" and "Enter" buttons. But the more Windoze crap they add -- they're talking about "lottery tickets and soft drinks" -- the more robust the UI will have to be. Are you sure you checked that buffer overflow?
* Finally, the maintenance staff has "root-like" physical access to the system. Sure, you have to get past some heavy-duty locks to get to the control panel inside the machine. Big deal, lots of crooks know how to pick locks... how many, though, know OS/2? But what happens when trojan-friendly Windows is the OS? Pick the lock, load the software (because there *will* be a floppy, CD-ROM, or USB port for upgrades), and dispense free, untracable cash whenever someone inserts an ATM card with magic cardno "1111-2222-3333-4444".
Perhaps using OS/2 was a way of de facto "security by obscurity". Installing Windows is more like "security by crossing-your-fingers".
If you don't like registration, just search news.google.com with appropriate keywords, and Voila! Horse-sized Rodents!
So, I'm not old enough to remember...what happened when you wrote bad code like this on the TRS-80?
We elected Reagan. Except that time, the countries included such dangerous regimes as Nicaragua and other Latin American countries.
(I wish someone besides the AC had noticed the obvious flaw in the program! ?OD ERROR IN 20 Remember, y'all, it had to be short enough to be funny.)
How has the parent post not been modded up yet?
Thanks for your concern... but give the moderators a chance! 8 minutes is only a notable gap when you've FP'd the article (which I almost but not quite did this time).
Go further down the rabbit hole. Ask yourself if China is this bad AND has nuclear weapons why was Iraq invaded while China's a preferred trading status country?
I just happen to have a TRS-80 Level II Basic program in front of me:
10 Data "China", "yes", "yes", "Iraq", "yes", "no"
20 Read Country$, Bad$, Nuke$
30 If Bad$ = "yes" then Print "We must deal with "; Country$
40 If Bad$ = "yes" and Nuke$ = "no" then Print "Invade Evil "; Country$; "!!!"
50 If Bad$ = "yes" and Nuke$ = "yes" then Print "We will constructively engage "; Country$; " with trade."
60 GOTO 20
I'm sort of Buddhist, although I'm not so sure about Confucius. I ought to fit in, more or less.
Hmmm... I think you'd better check the first few paragraphs of the link I found for my original posting. Or, just pin a note to your back saying "Persecute Me".
You made a good point, though:
Remember the "one child" policy? Well, all those little princes are growning up.
Yeah, and they don't have many princesses to marry. The one-child policy led to a very suspicious decrease in the number of baby girls, so we now have a lot of young men with no way to get a wife. I think it looks something like this:
1. Excess male population
2. ???
3. Conquest!
where ??? = [War | Prosperity], and Prosperity isn't looking like the most likely choice.
To be honest, I hope it just trashes boot sectors before writing random crap all over the hard drive. That might actually get the message through. All these soft viruses just make people think of it as an inconvenience. When something bad happens, people might just start sitting up and taking notice.
You're thinking software, not biology.
A virus like Ebola is bad news for its host. It spreads pretty easily and quickly causes violent, bloody death. But it kills its host so quickly that the host doesn't have time to infect anyone outside his immediate contacts, and the severe nature brings all Man's medical defenses to track the contagion to its source and eradicate it.
The common cold is a virus, too. It causes relatively minor discomfort to its host, only killing a small number of previously weakened hosts. This gives the cold time to spread widely before it is detected, and by that time the infection can no longer be contained -- or even traced back to its original host.
Early viruses were more Ebola-like, wiping out boot sectors, killing the host. But when was the last time you heard of a new infection by the Michelangelo virus?
Evolution, of a sort, has led to new viruses being more like the common cold -- annoying, but not deadly, and therefore common as a sneeze.
I tried it in M$ Word, and here's what Clippy told me:
. . . explosion on the heals of a recent Security Bulletin...
Clippy: Order of Words (consider revising)
Applying typical Slashdot editorial standards, I tried this:
. . . explosion on heals the of a recent Security Bulletin...
Clippy: Order of Words (consider revising)
Crap, let's try again.
. . . explosion on heals of the a recent Security Bulletin...
Clippy: Remove "the" or "a"
I think we got it:
Seft sent in a solid article running on the BBC discussing the next potential worm explosion on heals of the recent Security Bulletin from Microsoft. The article is a somewhat general topic piece on worms in general.
Clippy: turns into a bicycle and rides into the distance
Alright! Let's post!