Not only does Greedo shoot first, a cheesy British voice-over pretending to be Han says "Sorry old chap" as he walks away.
Leah is not Jabba's slave in Return of the Jedi, but his image consultant and she wears a smart business suit.
No stormtroopers die, they all just yell "Flesh wound! I'm off to see the ship's medic!"
The interrogation droid pulls back its needle and instead of drugging Leah, it shoots out Skittles(TM) for everyone to enjoy!
After the initial escape from the Death Star, Jesus comes by and raises Obi-Wan from the dead. They both go off for a drink and talk about how much of a dick Mel Gibson is.
3CP0's voice is replaced with a very manly southern american voice and occasionally ends his sentences with words like "Partner" or "Dude." A cowboy hat is digitally inserted now and again. Occasionally, he's chewing on a piece of straw.
R2D2 wears pants.
The previous unknown character "JoJo" is restored and only yells "WoooOOOoooOOo" whenever some kind of sexual inneundo is made between Han and Leah.
Leah no longer kisses Luke. Instead she kisses 3P0 who then says "Damn straight."
All blow-up space vehicles shoot out a guy with a parachute.
All characters killed by Vader's 'force choke' get up and say "Deary, I think I must have choked on something. Off to see the ship's medic, Lord Vader."
Lightsabers no longer kill, they merely hurt a lot. There are three scenes where Luke has to insert DuraCell(TM) batteries to recharge his.
The emperor is now refered to as President or Mr. President.
>How is this any better for attention span than a TV?
Because you have to sit down and read for x amount of time to get any meaningful information. As opposed to watching a four minute block of video and sound that changes camera angles every 4-8 seconds then 5 minutes of commercials, etc.
When the internet becomes another television channel is when you can compare the two, but right now its still text-based and thus requires some patience and reading comprehension.
Arguably, the internet is shifting us back towards a literate society as compared to an "entertain me" visual society that television tends to produce. Its hard to see the forest for the trees, but considering this is my third-year as a Tivo owner and fourth year broadband subscriber its easy to see how nasty TV is and how much of a saving grace the internet can be.
Neil Postman wrote a great book on the downsides of television-based politics called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Its worth checking out for those interested in media criticism.
I've done this with vonage and also called a dial-up through it and connected at 14k or so. The connection didn't last long but it was interesting to see that the VoIP protocols didn't consider modem tones 'noise.'
Re:Boy I sure will sleep better tonight...
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Nope, remember we're talking about viruses here. They all join into a very tiny virus-fighting robot with their 12 year old intern Jimmy.
Every year or so I buy a game that consists of 90% 3D fluff. I just spent an hour at Dave and Busters and really enjoyed the "old" 2D interfaces because they nether helped nor hindered good games. By good game I mean something designed with regards to gameplay and not another over-done FPS maze game or cookie-cutter strategy game.
The game industry looks like the equivalant of the comic book industry in the eary 90s, lots of eye-candy, gimmick covers, etc and little substance. Seems its a technological arms race to build games that run on the newest hardware and that gameplay is the last thing on the 'to do' list.
>Yes, of course Ballmer would like us to believe that a Windows to Windows transition of more than ten thousand computers would just go smooth as silk.
Conversations are always difficult, most windows admins could write books regarding moving from one version of windows to another let alone a whole different operating system and suite of apps. Considering this article is has almost no facts or information other than Ballmer gloating its impossible to tell if something catastrophic has happened or its just another day working in IT.
>Yes, the ignorant masses are being duped by the marketing dollars of large corporations.
I would not use the word duped. People want to buy image, they want to buy meaningless brands, either through peer-pressure (coercion) or as an attempt to look more fit (in the darwinian sense) to the opposite sex and to intimidating to the same sex.
There are also some of us who buy on commodity - we don't care about image or branding we want our bang for our buck. We read reviews, shop around, etc.
The real problem is where do you draw the advertising line? Many european countries limit advertising to children and have much stricter truth in advertising laws than the US. The US seems to be a playground of outright lies, branding, broken promises, vaporware, etc for this reason. Worse, investors buy this BS just as well as consumers, afterall they're consumers too and believe in the power of the brand. This makes for unhealthy market conditions and probably was one of the main factors in the burst tech bubble.
If anything, the US has to take a good look at its advertising practices and put serious limits on corporate speech and enforce these laws.
Lastly, I can't agree with the grandparent that technology will be our undoing, if anything its been shown to be extremely liberating when produced en masse and cheaply (or libre). There's no need to use technology to "enslave the masses," just keep them poor and make the rich even richer and you'll have conditions ripe for theocracies, monarchies, police states, etc.
> The BSA can not enter your property without concent PERIOD.
They have real warrants and real sheriffs with them (or whoever gives out the warrants in your state). On top of it, if you fight them the loser pays. This is the only loser pays system in America I believe and exists only to punish law firms that say, "The legal fees are nothing to us, bring it on." If the law firm loses by some technicality they have pay the BSA's legal fees in cold hard cash.
Exactly. The DMCA can be repealed and challenged. The dead in Iraq will forever remain that way. If Bush appoints a Supreme Court judge he/she will stay there for quite some time pushing a radical right-wing agenda. If Bush gets four more years, well... I'd rather not think about it.
Not to mention the zip program can just download md5 sums and check for known popular viruses without all the overhead of actually scanning, repairing, etc that AV software has to do.
And we can give it a catchy slogan, "Don't click unless its a zip!"
Let look at a lot of these exploits, they generally are.scr,.vbs,.bat, etc files. By blocking these attachments by default you're going to avoid most attempts at compromising your machine.
Sure, this is old hat to slashdotters, but I think it would behoove all email client writers to do this by default as MS does now. Now, that leaves us with macro word/excel viruses, other exploits, and the zip files themselves. The first two can be taken care of by a competent virus scanner or system patching and the latter forces the user to open the zip archive thus revealing the true extension (most compression utilities do this) and copies the file(s) to some location thus giving the virus scanner more of a chance to check the thing for viruses.
Its far from a perfect solution, but it will make people sensitive to file extensions and file types. It will also save disk space and bandwidth by compressing attachments (or even the message itself). Added functionality can be added like signed zip archives, AV hooks into zip programs, etc. Heck, the zip format already provides a cross-platform encryption scheme. Sure its not 3DES/RSA or anything, but it sure beats nothing (especially for those worried about sniffing).
This is essentially the setup many of the companies I work with have. You get your pdf, doc, xls, etc but anything executable is either deleted or quarantined. I don't see why email clients written for residential customers can't do the same.
Data loss isn't even an issue, the worst case scenario is asking the guy who sent you that.exe to zip it because your mailer doesn't support executable extensions. If you get a bounce back or a message saying "I didnt send you an.exe" then you can safely assume the file is no good and just delete it or set your mailer to auto-delete.
This can be done in three steps:
1. Implement auto-zipping. Geeks and security sensitive people will probably enable this by default. Or it should be default with newer version of mailers.
2. Once a significant amount of traffic is in the zip format set your mailer to reject all executables. It also could auto-remail the person sending you executables. (this may be exploited by spammers looking for live email addresses).
3. Watch zip vendors work closer with AV vendors to provide better protection from viruses in zip archives.
I use alltheweb when not using google. Between those two I generally find what I want.
Alltheweb is a bit more international than google (I believe its hosted in Europe somewhere) and is owned by Overture who sells google lots of search info.
>But hard-drives are different as the data on them may not be replaceable if the unit fails
So? Its still hardware, legally as equal to a video card. Its up to the user/admin to backup the data. Yes, it is a pain but HDs shouldn't have some special status amongst hardware, if anything we need better consumer reports and reliability data before buying.
>The majority of consumers just want vast amounts of cheap food and aren't too bothered how or where it comes from.
That's not my experience at all. Yes the anti-GM at all costs people are small and vocal but the "please label what I'm about to eat crowd" are pretty mainstream.
Lots of ex-RedHat users are shifting to Mandrake instead of playing with the Fedora Core. Mandrake is a lot like RedHat, especially if you're used to downloading compiled RPMs and such. Not to mention Mandrake is usually recommended to new people because of its installer and overall GUI-ness.
Windows nt-based does exactly this when you set the permissions to user. No going outside your profile directory, no installations of anything that isn't completely local, etc. You can tighten it by editing group policy too.
The problem is that users have to be taught abut safe computing, and restricting admin/root access is just one step in the process.
The only real "exploit" here is the activeX installer. Most email clients render plain-text URLs clickable anyway.
There's a reason why this stuff is written with activex controls - they look official like they're from the operating system. Disable activex and watch the spyware go away. It seems most people know not to download an.exe but think activeX, expecially when its "signed," means that its safe.
Greg Palast documents this very well too. Online you can find his Jim Crow in Cyberspace article. For the grueling details you can get his Best Democracy Money can Buy book.
With Bush's numbers so low, why not? Mod this down, but if there is some way to cook the numbers I don't see it above ANY political party in any country to at least try. Considering Diebold et al are mostly GOP supporters even to the point of the CEO of Diebold promising to deliver Ohio to Bush it seems plausible that something "semi-illegal" might be tried.
Look at Harris's "felon" list from the 2000 election in Florida. It lists thousands of people who are not felons or felons who have gotten their voting rights back in other states. Harris can just say "whoops it looks like the database people dropped the ball" even though she hired them arguably knowing what the results will be. Now we're looking at an even worse case scenario, officials playing dumb on why these electro-gizmos keep "breaking" and voting for one particular candidate over and over and then passing the buck to the vendor.
In a mixed-OS organization there will be Exchange servers and decision makers that demand Outlook, especially its scheduling/meeting/groupware. OO doesn't come with a mail client, let alone a MAPI aware Exchange compatible one.
What of the recent announcement that office 'just works' under WINE? I tried the newest version of wine and office certainly doesn't work, but if the report from wineconf is true then the 60 dollar codeweaver software might go the way of the dodo and give IBM a headstart into doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
Jimbo Jones: You let me down, man. Now I don't believe in nothing no more. I'm going to law school.
Homer: Noooo!
Not only does Greedo shoot first, a cheesy British voice-over pretending to be Han says "Sorry old chap" as he walks away.
Leah is not Jabba's slave in Return of the Jedi, but his image consultant and she wears a smart business suit.
No stormtroopers die, they all just yell "Flesh wound! I'm off to see the ship's medic!"
The interrogation droid pulls back its needle and instead of drugging Leah, it shoots out Skittles(TM) for everyone to enjoy!
After the initial escape from the Death Star, Jesus comes by and raises Obi-Wan from the dead. They both go off for a drink and talk about how much of a dick Mel Gibson is.
3CP0's voice is replaced with a very manly southern american voice and occasionally ends his sentences with words like "Partner" or "Dude." A cowboy hat is digitally inserted now and again. Occasionally, he's chewing on a piece of straw.
R2D2 wears pants.
The previous unknown character "JoJo" is restored and only yells "WoooOOOoooOOo" whenever some kind of sexual inneundo is made between Han and Leah.
Leah no longer kisses Luke. Instead she kisses 3P0 who then says "Damn straight."
All blow-up space vehicles shoot out a guy with a parachute.
All characters killed by Vader's 'force choke' get up and say "Deary, I think I must have choked on something. Off to see the ship's medic, Lord Vader."
Lightsabers no longer kill, they merely hurt a lot. There are three scenes where Luke has to insert DuraCell(TM) batteries to recharge his.
The emperor is now refered to as President or Mr. President.
>How is this any better for attention span than a TV?
Because you have to sit down and read for x amount of time to get any meaningful information. As opposed to watching a four minute block of video and sound that changes camera angles every 4-8 seconds then 5 minutes of commercials, etc.
When the internet becomes another television channel is when you can compare the two, but right now its still text-based and thus requires some patience and reading comprehension.
Arguably, the internet is shifting us back towards a literate society as compared to an "entertain me" visual society that television tends to produce. Its hard to see the forest for the trees, but considering this is my third-year as a Tivo owner and fourth year broadband subscriber its easy to see how nasty TV is and how much of a saving grace the internet can be.
Neil Postman wrote a great book on the downsides of television-based politics called Amusing Ourselves to Death. Its worth checking out for those interested in media criticism.
I've done this with vonage and also called a dial-up through it and connected at 14k or so. The connection didn't last long but it was interesting to see that the VoIP protocols didn't consider modem tones 'noise.'
Nope, remember we're talking about viruses here. They all join into a very tiny virus-fighting robot with their 12 year old intern Jimmy.
"See Jimmy, this is what we call the CPU."
"Jeepers, its so big!"
"Nope, remember we're tiny."
"Jeepers I forgot!"
Every year or so I buy a game that consists of 90% 3D fluff. I just spent an hour at Dave and Busters and really enjoyed the "old" 2D interfaces because they nether helped nor hindered good games. By good game I mean something designed with regards to gameplay and not another over-done FPS maze game or cookie-cutter strategy game.
The game industry looks like the equivalant of the comic book industry in the eary 90s, lots of eye-candy, gimmick covers, etc and little substance. Seems its a technological arms race to build games that run on the newest hardware and that gameplay is the last thing on the 'to do' list.
>Yes, of course Ballmer would like us to believe that a Windows to Windows transition of more than ten thousand computers would just go smooth as silk.
They had some issues at first too and now are reaping the rewards.
Conversations are always difficult, most windows admins could write books regarding moving from one version of windows to another let alone a whole different operating system and suite of apps. Considering this article is has almost no facts or information other than Ballmer gloating its impossible to tell if something catastrophic has happened or its just another day working in IT.
>Yes, the ignorant masses are being duped by the marketing dollars of large corporations.
I would not use the word duped. People want to buy image, they want to buy meaningless brands, either through peer-pressure (coercion) or as an attempt to look more fit (in the darwinian sense) to the opposite sex and to intimidating to the same sex.
There are also some of us who buy on commodity - we don't care about image or branding we want our bang for our buck. We read reviews, shop around, etc.
The real problem is where do you draw the advertising line? Many european countries limit advertising to children and have much stricter truth in advertising laws than the US. The US seems to be a playground of outright lies, branding, broken promises, vaporware, etc for this reason. Worse, investors buy this BS just as well as consumers, afterall they're consumers too and believe in the power of the brand. This makes for unhealthy market conditions and probably was one of the main factors in the burst tech bubble.
If anything, the US has to take a good look at its advertising practices and put serious limits on corporate speech and enforce these laws.
Lastly, I can't agree with the grandparent that technology will be our undoing, if anything its been shown to be extremely liberating when produced en masse and cheaply (or libre). There's no need to use technology to "enslave the masses," just keep them poor and make the rich even richer and you'll have conditions ripe for theocracies, monarchies, police states, etc.
> The BSA can not enter your property without concent PERIOD.
They have real warrants and real sheriffs with them (or whoever gives out the warrants in your state). On top of it, if you fight them the loser pays. This is the only loser pays system in America I believe and exists only to punish law firms that say, "The legal fees are nothing to us, bring it on." If the law firm loses by some technicality they have pay the BSA's legal fees in cold hard cash.
>So DMCA proponent or not Kerry '04!
Exactly. The DMCA can be repealed and challenged. The dead in Iraq will forever remain that way. If Bush appoints a Supreme Court judge he/she will stay there for quite some time pushing a radical right-wing agenda. If Bush gets four more years, well... I'd rather not think about it.
That will happen if you skip step 1.
Not to mention the zip program can just download md5 sums and check for known popular viruses without all the overhead of actually scanning, repairing, etc that AV software has to do.
And we can give it a catchy slogan, "Don't click unless its a zip!"
Let look at a lot of these exploits, they generally are .scr, .vbs, .bat, etc files. By blocking these attachments by default you're going to avoid most attempts at compromising your machine.
.exe to zip it because your mailer doesn't support executable extensions. If you get a bounce back or a message saying "I didnt send you an .exe" then you can safely assume the file is no good and just delete it or set your mailer to auto-delete.
Sure, this is old hat to slashdotters, but I think it would behoove all email client writers to do this by default as MS does now. Now, that leaves us with macro word/excel viruses, other exploits, and the zip files themselves. The first two can be taken care of by a competent virus scanner or system patching and the latter forces the user to open the zip archive thus revealing the true extension (most compression utilities do this) and copies the file(s) to some location thus giving the virus scanner more of a chance to check the thing for viruses.
Its far from a perfect solution, but it will make people sensitive to file extensions and file types. It will also save disk space and bandwidth by compressing attachments (or even the message itself). Added functionality can be added like signed zip archives, AV hooks into zip programs, etc. Heck, the zip format already provides a cross-platform encryption scheme. Sure its not 3DES/RSA or anything, but it sure beats nothing (especially for those worried about sniffing).
This is essentially the setup many of the companies I work with have. You get your pdf, doc, xls, etc but anything executable is either deleted or quarantined. I don't see why email clients written for residential customers can't do the same.
Data loss isn't even an issue, the worst case scenario is asking the guy who sent you that
This can be done in three steps:
1. Implement auto-zipping. Geeks and security sensitive people will probably enable this by default. Or it should be default with newer version of mailers.
2. Once a significant amount of traffic is in the zip format set your mailer to reject all executables. It also could auto-remail the person sending you executables. (this may be exploited by spammers looking for live email addresses).
3. Watch zip vendors work closer with AV vendors to provide better protection from viruses in zip archives.
>There are also other similar programs out there for MSN, Lycos, etc.
I use hotmail popper to get hotmail POP access, something that you can't even buy.
It recently went from freeware to pay-ware. You might be able to find an older version somewhere.
I use alltheweb when not using google. Between those two I generally find what I want.
Alltheweb is a bit more international than google (I believe its hosted in Europe somewhere) and is owned by Overture who sells google lots of search info.
About us page here.
They also seem to have a knack for lowering the importance of weblogs, which seems to be a big issue with some people nowadays.
It would be nice if it didn't look like a little black dildo on my bed when its flipped-over. Seriously.
>But hard-drives are different as the data on them may not be replaceable if the unit fails
So? Its still hardware, legally as equal to a video card. Its up to the user/admin to backup the data. Yes, it is a pain but HDs shouldn't have some special status amongst hardware, if anything we need better consumer reports and reliability data before buying.
>The majority of consumers just want vast amounts of cheap food and aren't too bothered how or where it comes from.
That's not my experience at all. Yes the anti-GM at all costs people are small and vocal but the "please label what I'm about to eat crowd" are pretty mainstream.
>Mandrake 991
Lots of ex-RedHat users are shifting to Mandrake instead of playing with the Fedora Core. Mandrake is a lot like RedHat, especially if you're used to downloading compiled RPMs and such. Not to mention Mandrake is usually recommended to new people because of its installer and overall GUI-ness.
Windows nt-based does exactly this when you set the permissions to user. No going outside your profile directory, no installations of anything that isn't completely local, etc. You can tighten it by editing group policy too.
The problem is that users have to be taught abut safe computing, and restricting admin/root access is just one step in the process.
The only real "exploit" here is the activeX installer. Most email clients render plain-text URLs clickable anyway.
.exe but think activeX, expecially when its "signed," means that its safe.
There's a reason why this stuff is written with activex controls - they look official like they're from the operating system. Disable activex and watch the spyware go away. It seems most people know not to download an
Greg Palast documents this very well too. Online you can find his Jim Crow in Cyberspace article. For the grueling details you can get his Best Democracy Money can Buy book.
With Bush's numbers so low, why not? Mod this down, but if there is some way to cook the numbers I don't see it above ANY political party in any country to at least try. Considering Diebold et al are mostly GOP supporters even to the point of the CEO of Diebold promising to deliver Ohio to Bush it seems plausible that something "semi-illegal" might be tried.
Look at Harris's "felon" list from the 2000 election in Florida. It lists thousands of people who are not felons or felons who have gotten their voting rights back in other states. Harris can just say "whoops it looks like the database people dropped the ball" even though she hired them arguably knowing what the results will be. Now we're looking at an even worse case scenario, officials playing dumb on why these electro-gizmos keep "breaking" and voting for one particular candidate over and over and then passing the buck to the vendor.
In a mixed-OS organization there will be Exchange servers and decision makers that demand Outlook, especially its scheduling/meeting/groupware. OO doesn't come with a mail client, let alone a MAPI aware Exchange compatible one.
Pointy haired boss, a reference to Dilbert. Its an acronym that really isn't catching on.
What of the recent announcement that office 'just works' under WINE? I tried the newest version of wine and office certainly doesn't work, but if the report from wineconf is true then the 60 dollar codeweaver software might go the way of the dodo and give IBM a headstart into doing this.