Some of these have also been noted by other respondants, but let me see if I can summarize:
Motorola Power PC: With the next generation of faster G4 processors comming out and Apple's continuing commitment to the architecture, I wouldn't write this one off yet.
IBM Power PC: I haven't exactly figured out what diferentiates IBM's and Motorola's PPC chips, but it seems like IBM's are targeted more towards embeded applications where they'll probably remain a big player for some time.
IBM Power: It seems with the IBM - Motorola split on the PPC, IBM returned to the power architecture for their big boxes. The latest offering is the Power III, which gives the Alpha and Itanium a serious run for their money. Keep in mind that this processor is at the heart of the world's fastest computer, so I think it's providing some stiff compition for Intel. (Disclaimer: I may have some bias given that ASCI White is just a few blocks away from me right now.)
MIPS: I think I heard that SGI is migrating all their MIPS machines to Itanium, so this one's probably dead.
PA-RISC - HP worked jointly with Intel on Itanium with the intention of it replacing PA-RISC, so I think it safe to declare this one out of the running.
AMD's x86-64 architecture - I honestly don't know much about this architecture, but from my understanding it's a derivitive of the Intel x86 architecture with extentions for 64 bit memory addressing. Whether or not you want to consider it an Intel design is up to you, but Intel certainly isn't going to endorse them and I think they'll provide some stiff competition for Itanium (particularly if they run existing x86-32 code flawlessly).
As for some of your other comments:
With the new higher speed UltraSparc III processors that Sun is putting in their new Blade machines, Sun has once again reached a reasonable price/performance point, so I wouldn't discount them too much yet. I completely don't understand your comment about the ESA not being able to afford it. Furthermore, Sun is very anti-Intel: I've heard the only place in Sun that they're allowed to have Intel boxes is is the Solaris x86 development group, so Sun will likely be the last major workstation/server vendor to make the switch to hop on the Intel bandwagon.
Motorola most certainly still makes processors. Besides the afore mentioned PPC, the 68k architecture is still around since it's great for embedded applications and handheld computers, such as the Palm (which last I heard used the Dragonball processor - a variation of the 68040, I think).
In summary, I think your conclusion that the Intel based design is the only serious contender out there is a bit overstated.
You know, I was thinking about that as I was typing it and it didn't quite seem right. I just saw the figures briefly yesterday, so I'm just going from my ever falable memory. I know Fred's looking at getting their research released so they can post it on their webpage. In any case, the point was that LCDs represent a significant cost savings after only a couple years of average (5 days/wk, 8 hr/day) use.
While your point is well taken, another major advantage of LCD displays (other than the space savings as noted by another poster) is the power and cooling savings. Fred Cohen had his students in the CCD do a power and heat analysis of all their equiptment in the wake of the CA power crisis. They found that a 17" LCD monitor only drew 1/10 the power and generated 1/4 the heat of a 17" CRT monitor meaning that the higher cost for the LCD monitor would pay for itself after just a couple years of use.
I'll one up you there (nothing personal) - It was describing me perfectly up to reform school - hair & all. In fact, the other kids in High School called me Screech to tease me. Fortunately I found my revenge in sucess and not suicide: instead of reform school I went to college and these days I'm pulling an impressive salary doing computer security work for the government while working on my Ph.D.
Oh - and the hair grew out into a chic magnet in college (then I cut it off about a month after my wedding).
if I were to work for a public school, I'd have to go through all sorts of 'teaching certification' bullshit. Which would effectively limit me to teaching at a private school...
I'm no expert in the area, but if I'm not mistaken any decent private school will have at least that many certification requirements for two reasons:
they have to be able to prove to the state board of education or whoever that the degrees they issue fulfill the requirements for that level of degree in the state and
parents who pay booko-bucks to send their kids to a private school want some tangible proof that the teachers there are the best qualified educational professions their money can buy.
AFAIK, certification isn't really that bad: if teaching really interests you, then there should be no question that it's worth it.
i've found that guards are no match for the evil power of 'looking like you belong there'.
They are where I work. We don't have rent-a-guards, we have bonified State Police. We actually have multiple levels of security officers, ranging from the unarmed gate guards (I think the theory is to minimize the number of weapons, the same way that Bobbies in England don't carry firearms) to our protective security officers that tote GLOCs and M-16s - most of those are former military. And the arms aren't just for show either: every now and then (always after hours) they do both live-fire and blank-fire exercises.
Our guards are required to touch the badge of every person coming in. I guess a while back they had a red team test the effectiveness of this system: the team was able to get in by flashing a credit card that the guard just blindly touched. Heads rolled big time over that. Now days they look at the pictures on the badges carefully: I really piss them off when I ride my bike in with my helmet and Oakleys: they actually take a minute (usually squinting) to see that my facial features match.
I will admit that once inside, people normally get pretty lax: particularly about the badges being worn face out on the upper half of the body. But I saw a guy once who had lost his badge in the cafeteria and security kept him under armed escort like he was a prisoner as he went back to get it. Furthermore, a lot of the laxness comes from seeing the same people every day. If you go into an unfamiliar area usually someone will ask you, "Can I help you?" It's a lot more polite than a formal challenge, but the undertone is there.
One way to look at it is that a lot of our security measures were adopted from the military. If you want to impliment good physical security, looking at how the military does it is a good place to start. I'm not saying they're perfect: there's always the proverbial corporal who gets busted down to private for falling asleep at his post. I think they've actually gotten better in recent years though as our armed forces has become almost purely volunteers typically of a fairly high calibur. My dad did some special ops during his tour back during the cold war and he loves to tell the story of how they were doing war games, so he snuck into the "enemy" camp right past the guards and under the Colonel's tent, then woke the Colonel up and said, "Excuse me sir, you're now a prisoner of war." You better believe some heads rolled over that one the next morning.
Which actually brings me to another recommendation: red team. Use people who know how to do social engineering to do a site evaluation of your resistance. Depending on where you work, the size of your company, budget, etc, this could be done by an outside contractor, internal team acting as outsiders (which may in turn pose as insiders, but they aren't allowed to pose as their real persona), or even just get a bunch of your friends to do it (but management has to agree to it regardless: you wouldn't want to get your friends in trouble - this is really only a good idea if you work at a small, hip company anyway).
Sometimes I think users go out of their way to be stupid. One of my friends who heads up IT for a medium-sized, nation-wide company sent out a warning to everyone to watch out for this new trojan horse because one machine in the company had already been infected. One of the employees got curious about this trojan horse, so he did a web search for it, clicked the first link that popped up and the site was kind enough to automatically download & install the trojan on his machine. I think that one tops the free drink holder story if only because I know it's true.
"Out of Office" auto responses are not allowed to propagate outside of the business if allowed at all. They are specifically flagged at creation and blocked at the company?s outbound servers.
Yes, yes,yes!
Whenever I post to Bugtraq I get back a ton of autoresponses, usually something to the effect of, "I'm on vacation, so if you need help with one of the servers call Ralph at 1234567." I responded to all of these once in bulk noting that:
I know you're systems primary administrator isn't around
I know the name and number of someone else that probably isn't a full time sysadmin, but has all the power of one (easily manipulated)
I have a great story to tell that person: "I talked to Bill before he took off and he said if I kept having this access problem when he was gone I should call you."
They were sending these autoreplies to anyone who posted to Bugtraq, which certainly contains some of the seediest people in Computer Security
Be glad I, at least, am one of the good guys.
The ones that responded to my message were generally pleased to hear from me: many noted that all the other responses they got from their autoresponses were downright rude if not just plain obscene (hence they were happy to give my advice more creedance). A couple also noted that they hated using autorepliers, but their management required it: one said he'd use my letter as evidence as to why the policy should be changed.
So I have to agree 100% with maggard's recommendation here. Actually, they're all good, although some may need slight modifications depending on your environment. For example, we're not concerned about powered network drops (for our unclassified net at least) to unused offices in my building because I work in a secured government facility protected by guards, gates & guns. YMMV.
Think again. Both my mother and her mother (my grandmother) have had to have surgery on both of their wrists due to CTS. Seeing my mother in that much pain when I was a kid caused me to pay more attention to ergonomics than most teens do/would. Despite that I started developing wrist pain to the point that I got medical attention from my employeer. I was fortunate enought to work somewhere that they are actually concerned about safety and have had enough experience with knowledge workers over the past half century that they know how to handle a situation like mine. They made some minor tweaks to my workstation and advised me how to take frequent breaks and do proper wrist exercises. All that made quite a difference and it keeps the pain at bay, but I still pay close attention to my body because I don't want to go under the knife like my mother and grandma.
Anyway, the lesson here is that I don't think it's coincidence that three generations of my family have been affected by CTS.
When I'm on hot or not (which I am very little: it's a major time sink) I rate some people as a 1 either because they're just hidious (which is rare and I assume not the case with you) or because their picture didn't load. Now, that's the real geek in me. I try to rate people based on all available information, and typically just a jpeg doesn't tell you that much about someone, but if it's hosted on a server that can't stay up or handle that much traffic or I don't know what else, then that to me is a very unattractive feature about the person. Besides, they're essentially asking me to rate their appearance blindfolded - what else am I suppose to do? Rate them a 5 I suppose, but what if they're really ugly? I don't know. And I suppose they're some satisfaction in inflicting some statistical anomaly as I find it really amusing when I do this to someone that others rate at like a 9.9.
So is rating them based on the server that serves up their jpegs any more shallow than hot or not in general? For the uninitiated, that's a retorical question. And incidently, I don't think shallow == bad, but that's a lengthy commentary that I won't even bother to get into (and I suppose that's even more shallow of me). The only other thing I'll say on that subject is that people around here need to lighten up. Enjoy life some more - it's Friday night - have some fun.
Good answer - I had to check the username to see if it was one of my college roommates (big Mac guys) and got a good chuckel. That was quite an informed answer for a user by the name of AIX admin. ..
I don't think so - By the time I was done reading the question, I totally forgot who the company was - the tone was very different from the "This is the greatest thing since sliced bread, everyone should have one in their grage, and the people who are bringing it to you are Blah, Inc." type of spam that we've seen here on/. before.
I think this is totally relevant to/. - what we have here is a small, open source reliant company made up of a bunch of geeks that want to know how to get better press. My intuition tells me that there are lots of other geeks around here on/. that are facing the same problem. What's more, this is one of those types of problems that other readers can provide real insight and experience to - I think it's much better than the usual Ask/. fare that can usually be categorized into either:
I need a lawyer - what do I do? or
I know I could figure this out if I just RTFM, but I'm too lazy to do that, can you tell me?
I see that RobLimo's already posted something useful - I think given/.'s background pre-Andover that Hemos would probably have something insightful to say, and, like I said, I'm sure there are other geeks around here that have had to face this situation before.
It's a shame that programming still has this bullshit mystique of "art" to it. "Art" is just a lame excuse for laziness: instead of approaching the problems methodically and scientifically, it's just ever-so-much easier to take a half-assed hack-and-patch approach.
I think the real problem is the change in the meaning of the word art in the past ~100 years. What most people think of these days when they hear the word "Art" is what is traditionally thought of as "Fine Arts". The traditional meaning of the word Art was more akin to "Technique". The phrase "State of the art" is refering to the most advanced techniques available. This is also why many universities still call their science departments "The college of arts and letters".
It used to be that professions that required a lot of talent and/or practice in order to master a technique, such as painting or dancing were considered the "fine arts". Then, in the latter part of the 19th century or early part of the 20th century some revolutionary fine artists decided to discard these old-school techniques. In the process they succeeded in changing the traditional notion of art from something that was more technique to something that was more creative.
Unfortunately, the traditional use of the word art wasn't obilterated in the process, so many early computer scientists (particularly Knuth) started to talk about "The Art of Computer Programming." What they meant wasn't that it's a creative process, but rather that it's a technique that must requires talent and must be practiced. Knuth preaches a lot of things about computer programming: programs should be simple and comprehendable, they should implement algorithms that are mathematically proven. It might not be anything as formal as methodologies like ISO-9000, but there's no implication of creativity like, "Let's see if we can fit 30 function points on one line because that would be so cool!"
Anyway, I think the only reasonable solution at this point is to abandon the antique word "art" and start talking about software development as a "technique" or other similar term.
I bet VeriSign will point out the awful mess (think of the risk!) of trying to redistribute control of.com to anyone else.
Would that be the risk that they freely give away microsoft.com to any yahoo who claims to be a Microsoft employee and forks over a few hundred dollars?
But my guess is that it's not the math that's causing the load on your database server. Try moving the, er, adult website to a different machine than the database server.
Being here in California where we're more reliant on wind power than tidal power (and we've all seen how reliable that is recently), I'm more worried about the proliferation of wind farms around here. I mean, what happens when we've farmed all the wind? Most of the weather patterns for the entire United States start in the Pacific and travel via the wind eastward over the country. If we use all the wind here in California for power, suddenly all those clouds and the jetstream and stuff will stop here, the rest of the country will get sucked into a terible drought and pilots won't be able to make up for the late departure from SFO to JFK!
Think about it, the US will be devistated, the dot-com stocks will crash taking the economy with it, the country will go into uncontrolled recession, the free world will fall and the commies will take over. At least if the moon were to fall, NASA could send it into some uninhabited part of the Pacific Ocean, just like they did with MIR.
I think one of the main questions here is what does it mean to be human? Does homo sapien == human? This is obviously a philosophical question and art tends to do a good job addressing philosophical questions. The best work of art I've seen that addresses this is Ghost in the Shell followed closely by Blade Runner (esp The Director's Cut), which also happen to be my favourite two films of all time. While they're more centered around androids & AI, I think the same issues would apply to extraterestrials. Check them out.
Might this be just a tad bit embellished for the reporter's sake?
Did anyone else notice that the one guy was glad to get the $250 from the reporter so he could go out drinking?
Yes, I definately think they're embelishing - at least in terms of how much money they're making with these scams. Others have commented that the logs were faked - I think the idea of suddenly getting $250 to go out drinking wouldn't occur to a reporter that hasn't lived down & out for a while - sounds a lot more like some of my friends back in college.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of these have also been noted by other respondants, but let me see if I can summarize:
As for some of your other comments:
In summary, I think your conclusion that the Intel based design is the only serious contender out there is a bit overstated.
-"Zow"
You know, I was thinking about that as I was typing it and it didn't quite seem right. I just saw the figures briefly yesterday, so I'm just going from my ever falable memory. I know Fred's looking at getting their research released so they can post it on their webpage. In any case, the point was that LCDs represent a significant cost savings after only a couple years of average (5 days/wk, 8 hr/day) use.
-"Zow"
While your point is well taken, another major advantage of LCD displays (other than the space savings as noted by another poster) is the power and cooling savings. Fred Cohen had his students in the CCD do a power and heat analysis of all their equiptment in the wake of the CA power crisis. They found that a 17" LCD monitor only drew 1/10 the power and generated 1/4 the heat of a 17" CRT monitor meaning that the higher cost for the LCD monitor would pay for itself after just a couple years of use.
-"Zow"
Well, I never thought of putting my thoughts on /. as punishment for them, but now that you mention it. . .
Sorry, couldn't resist.
-"Zow"
I'll one up you there (nothing personal) - It was describing me perfectly up to reform school - hair & all. In fact, the other kids in High School called me Screech to tease me. Fortunately I found my revenge in sucess and not suicide: instead of reform school I went to college and these days I'm pulling an impressive salary doing computer security work for the government while working on my Ph.D.
Oh - and the hair grew out into a chic magnet in college (then I cut it off about a month after my wedding).
-"Zow"
I'm no expert in the area, but if I'm not mistaken any decent private school will have at least that many certification requirements for two reasons:
AFAIK, certification isn't really that bad: if teaching really interests you, then there should be no question that it's worth it.
My $.02,
-"Zow"
They are where I work. We don't have rent-a-guards, we have bonified State Police. We actually have multiple levels of security officers, ranging from the unarmed gate guards (I think the theory is to minimize the number of weapons, the same way that Bobbies in England don't carry firearms) to our protective security officers that tote GLOCs and M-16s - most of those are former military. And the arms aren't just for show either: every now and then (always after hours) they do both live-fire and blank-fire exercises.
Our guards are required to touch the badge of every person coming in. I guess a while back they had a red team test the effectiveness of this system: the team was able to get in by flashing a credit card that the guard just blindly touched. Heads rolled big time over that. Now days they look at the pictures on the badges carefully: I really piss them off when I ride my bike in with my helmet and Oakleys: they actually take a minute (usually squinting) to see that my facial features match.
I will admit that once inside, people normally get pretty lax: particularly about the badges being worn face out on the upper half of the body. But I saw a guy once who had lost his badge in the cafeteria and security kept him under armed escort like he was a prisoner as he went back to get it. Furthermore, a lot of the laxness comes from seeing the same people every day. If you go into an unfamiliar area usually someone will ask you, "Can I help you?" It's a lot more polite than a formal challenge, but the undertone is there.
One way to look at it is that a lot of our security measures were adopted from the military. If you want to impliment good physical security, looking at how the military does it is a good place to start. I'm not saying they're perfect: there's always the proverbial corporal who gets busted down to private for falling asleep at his post. I think they've actually gotten better in recent years though as our armed forces has become almost purely volunteers typically of a fairly high calibur. My dad did some special ops during his tour back during the cold war and he loves to tell the story of how they were doing war games, so he snuck into the "enemy" camp right past the guards and under the Colonel's tent, then woke the Colonel up and said, "Excuse me sir, you're now a prisoner of war." You better believe some heads rolled over that one the next morning.
Which actually brings me to another recommendation: red team. Use people who know how to do social engineering to do a site evaluation of your resistance. Depending on where you work, the size of your company, budget, etc, this could be done by an outside contractor, internal team acting as outsiders (which may in turn pose as insiders, but they aren't allowed to pose as their real persona), or even just get a bunch of your friends to do it (but management has to agree to it regardless: you wouldn't want to get your friends in trouble - this is really only a good idea if you work at a small, hip company anyway).
-"Zow"
Sometimes I think users go out of their way to be stupid. One of my friends who heads up IT for a medium-sized, nation-wide company sent out a warning to everyone to watch out for this new trojan horse because one machine in the company had already been infected. One of the employees got curious about this trojan horse, so he did a web search for it, clicked the first link that popped up and the site was kind enough to automatically download & install the trojan on his machine. I think that one tops the free drink holder story if only because I know it's true.
-"Zow"
Yes, yes,yes!
Whenever I post to Bugtraq I get back a ton of autoresponses, usually something to the effect of, "I'm on vacation, so if you need help with one of the servers call Ralph at 1234567." I responded to all of these once in bulk noting that:
The ones that responded to my message were generally pleased to hear from me: many noted that all the other responses they got from their autoresponses were downright rude if not just plain obscene (hence they were happy to give my advice more creedance). A couple also noted that they hated using autorepliers, but their management required it: one said he'd use my letter as evidence as to why the policy should be changed.
So I have to agree 100% with maggard's recommendation here. Actually, they're all good, although some may need slight modifications depending on your environment. For example, we're not concerned about powered network drops (for our unclassified net at least) to unused offices in my building because I work in a secured government facility protected by guards, gates & guns. YMMV.
-"Zow"
Think again. Both my mother and her mother (my grandmother) have had to have surgery on both of their wrists due to CTS. Seeing my mother in that much pain when I was a kid caused me to pay more attention to ergonomics than most teens do/would. Despite that I started developing wrist pain to the point that I got medical attention from my employeer. I was fortunate enought to work somewhere that they are actually concerned about safety and have had enough experience with knowledge workers over the past half century that they know how to handle a situation like mine. They made some minor tweaks to my workstation and advised me how to take frequent breaks and do proper wrist exercises. All that made quite a difference and it keeps the pain at bay, but I still pay close attention to my body because I don't want to go under the knife like my mother and grandma.
Anyway, the lesson here is that I don't think it's coincidence that three generations of my family have been affected by CTS.
-"Zow"
When I'm on hot or not (which I am very little: it's a major time sink) I rate some people as a 1 either because they're just hidious (which is rare and I assume not the case with you) or because their picture didn't load. Now, that's the real geek in me. I try to rate people based on all available information, and typically just a jpeg doesn't tell you that much about someone, but if it's hosted on a server that can't stay up or handle that much traffic or I don't know what else, then that to me is a very unattractive feature about the person. Besides, they're essentially asking me to rate their appearance blindfolded - what else am I suppose to do? Rate them a 5 I suppose, but what if they're really ugly? I don't know. And I suppose they're some satisfaction in inflicting some statistical anomaly as I find it really amusing when I do this to someone that others rate at like a 9.9 .
So is rating them based on the server that serves up their jpegs any more shallow than hot or not in general? For the uninitiated, that's a retorical question. And incidently, I don't think shallow == bad, but that's a lengthy commentary that I won't even bother to get into (and I suppose that's even more shallow of me). The only other thing I'll say on that subject is that people around here need to lighten up. Enjoy life some more - it's Friday night - have some fun.
Peace,
-"Zow"
Good answer - I had to check the username to see if it was one of my college roommates (big Mac guys) and got a good chuckel. That was quite an informed answer for a user by the name of AIX admin. . .
-"Zow"
I don't think so - By the time I was done reading the question, I totally forgot who the company was - the tone was very different from the "This is the greatest thing since sliced bread, everyone should have one in their grage, and the people who are bringing it to you are Blah, Inc." type of spam that we've seen here on /. before.
I think this is totally relevant to /. - what we have here is a small, open source reliant company made up of a bunch of geeks that want to know how to get better press. My intuition tells me that there are lots of other geeks around here on /. that are facing the same problem. What's more, this is one of those types of problems that other readers can provide real insight and experience to - I think it's much better than the usual Ask /. fare that can usually be categorized into either:
- I need a lawyer - what do I do? or
- I know I could figure this out if I just RTFM, but I'm too lazy to do that, can you tell me?
I see that RobLimo's already posted something useful - I think given-"Zow"
I think the real problem is the change in the meaning of the word art in the past ~100 years. What most people think of these days when they hear the word "Art" is what is traditionally thought of as "Fine Arts". The traditional meaning of the word Art was more akin to "Technique". The phrase "State of the art" is refering to the most advanced techniques available. This is also why many universities still call their science departments "The college of arts and letters".
It used to be that professions that required a lot of talent and/or practice in order to master a technique, such as painting or dancing were considered the "fine arts". Then, in the latter part of the 19th century or early part of the 20th century some revolutionary fine artists decided to discard these old-school techniques. In the process they succeeded in changing the traditional notion of art from something that was more technique to something that was more creative.
Unfortunately, the traditional use of the word art wasn't obilterated in the process, so many early computer scientists (particularly Knuth) started to talk about "The Art of Computer Programming." What they meant wasn't that it's a creative process, but rather that it's a technique that must requires talent and must be practiced. Knuth preaches a lot of things about computer programming: programs should be simple and comprehendable, they should implement algorithms that are mathematically proven. It might not be anything as formal as methodologies like ISO-9000, but there's no implication of creativity like, "Let's see if we can fit 30 function points on one line because that would be so cool!"
Anyway, I think the only reasonable solution at this point is to abandon the antique word "art" and start talking about software development as a "technique" or other similar term.
My $.02,
-"Zow"
Would that be the risk that they freely give away microsoft.com to any yahoo who claims to be a Microsoft employee and forks over a few hundred dollars?
-"Zow"
Binary.
But my guess is that it's not the math that's causing the load on your database server. Try moving the, er, adult website to a different machine than the database server.
Get Linux. It has everything you need in it and it was created by programmers who worked on it many long grueling hours for free.
Sorry, it was actually 3rd post. You would normally go home with a consolation prize but. . .
Not on April Fools Day.
-"Zow"
Being here in California where we're more reliant on wind power than tidal power (and we've all seen how reliable that is recently), I'm more worried about the proliferation of wind farms around here. I mean, what happens when we've farmed all the wind? Most of the weather patterns for the entire United States start in the Pacific and travel via the wind eastward over the country. If we use all the wind here in California for power, suddenly all those clouds and the jetstream and stuff will stop here, the rest of the country will get sucked into a terible drought and pilots won't be able to make up for the late departure from SFO to JFK!
Think about it, the US will be devistated, the dot-com stocks will crash taking the economy with it, the country will go into uncontrolled recession, the free world will fall and the commies will take over. At least if the moon were to fall, NASA could send it into some uninhabited part of the Pacific Ocean, just like they did with MIR.
I think this RFC is actually a parody of SOAP, as chronicaled in Bruce Schneier's June 2000 Crypto-Gram.
-"Zow"
Well, it's a tie between any one of the hundreds of webpages I've seen that were Last Modified: 12:00am January 1, 1970
-"Zow"
As long as you do it in COBOL or VB.
-"Zow"
I think one of the main questions here is what does it mean to be human? Does homo sapien == human? This is obviously a philosophical question and art tends to do a good job addressing philosophical questions. The best work of art I've seen that addresses this is Ghost in the Shell followed closely by Blade Runner (esp The Director's Cut), which also happen to be my favourite two films of all time. While they're more centered around androids & AI, I think the same issues would apply to extraterestrials. Check them out.
-"Zow"
Your question is predicated on the assumption that aliens are not already here and (pick any combo):
That should about cover the main sceneros. Oh wait, I almost forgot: writing entries for the Hitchhiker's Guide. . .
-"Zow"
Did anyone else notice that the one guy was glad to get the $250 from the reporter so he could go out drinking?
Yes, I definately think they're embelishing - at least in terms of how much money they're making with these scams. Others have commented that the logs were faked - I think the idea of suddenly getting $250 to go out drinking wouldn't occur to a reporter that hasn't lived down & out for a while - sounds a lot more like some of my friends back in college.
-"Zow"
Or the Linux kernel source!
Sorry. Mod me down for flamebait, but I couldn't help it.
-"Zow"