I work in a PC store and there's loads of stuff that can make a thief a quick buck in a few seconds. Ink cartidges are the biggest target
I know that "self service" shops clean up on impulse purchases, but while I'm browsing the rack for a cyan Lasejet 2600 cartridge I'm unlikely to think "What the hell, I'll get some Epson and Lexmark ink while I'm at it!". Its one case where I know exactly what I want and would quite like some service.
So why not keep ink cartridges, batteries, memory cards and other high-value-but-non-sexy accessories behind a counter (you can still make sure customers walk past the iPods to get there) and employ someone... Oh, wait, I just answered my own question.:-)
(Although, funnily, although that is exactly what happens at one of my favorite shops for buying consumables and components, they still manage to be cheaper than big shops with no service...)
When (particularly large) stores whine about the cost of shoplifting I hope that they remember to offset those costs against the massive benefits they reap from self-service and low staffing levels.
PS - to any monochrome moralists listening, thinking about the incentives and opportunities for crime is something that can and should be done as well as throwing the book at criminals and instead of taking actions that piss off the law-abiding majority.
According to this article [cnn.com], Microsoft's ClearType does seem to be a new thing and not a copy of the anti-aliasing used on the Apple II.
Acorn RISC-OS was certainly using anti-aliasing to improve the legibility of small fonts on computer monitors by 1990, and also offered sub-pixel anti-aliasing - although the latter feature was usually disabled because it used too much CPU/RAM for the entry-level models c.f. the improvements (and probably didn't achieve much on a CRT anyway). Not sure if their (not too successful) portable did anything different - although I think they did have some patents on improving greyscale LCD displays.
The OS ran on ARM-based "Archimedes" (and later RISC-PC) systems that had about half of the UK schools market in the late-80s/early 90s. The DTP and vector drawing applications were particularly impressive.
Xara Xtreme (www.xara.com) is a decendent of a RISC_OS based graphics app, which was one of the first to anti-alias everything (text and graphics) in real time.
C.f. Windows which, ISTR, from Win95-Win2000, only used anti-aliasing to hide "jaggies" in large fonts and turned it off for small fonts.
I had a few flights a month ago in Europe (Denmark and Poland), and at these airports the ID was required at boarding as well.
Bear in mind that airports in Europe (especially UK) are used predominantly for international travel c.f. the large proportion of domestic travel in the USA. Plus, we had terrorists before you, nyah! Checking passports has always been important, and the airports have often been built with this in mind - E.g. at Heathrow, the main security check only gets you as far as the shopping mall - after that, each international gate has its own secondary checkpoint and "closed" waiting area. The boarding pass switcheroo would be much harder to pull off there.
...and when I visit the US I find the banknotes hard to distinguish.
However, is there not a theory that hard-to-distinguish banknotes deter fraud (because you have to look carefully at them you are more likely to spot an iffy one)?
One of the frequent objections to patent reform seems to come from the drug companies which (if you reconfigure your brain to enable "feeling sorry for poor impoverished multinational companies mode") is sort-of understandable, given the amount of work needed to establish what might be an easy-to-replicate chemical as a drug. Its also a field where disclosure of information is likely to advance science.
Couldn't some of the protection currently offered by patents be made part of FDA and similar approval processes instead? I.e. make the investment needed to get a drug FDA approved: get an N-year monopoly on its sale?
The risk that customers who run Linux or OSX but need occasional access to Windows might be able to buy a copy to use in a VM for less than the price of a separate windows PC.
If I can buy an OEM copy of Ultimate along with a new hard drive, install it under Boot Camp on my Mac and then legally install it in an OSX-hosted VM as well then I might consider it. If not - well, Windows 2000 runs all the must-have Windows software I need...
Clarification: (a) installing Linux as a secondary OS on a windows machine (or a Mac for that matter) without disturbing the existing OS is inevitably more complicated than installing windows on a bare machine. Installing something like Ubuntu on a bare machine is (at worst) little different to installing windows.
(b) PCs sold as windows machines may include hardware that isn't supported by Linux. This makes for an unhappy installation experience. Natuarally a large project such as the Birmingham one, they would have selected supported hardware (I had to disengage cynicism mode to type that)
(c) Some hassles when installing Linux are to do with licensing/patent issues that the FOSS community can do little about (e.g. MP3 playback, DVD playback). This is a particular drawback of the GNU-purist distros such as Debian and Ubuntu.
(d) Slashdotters are probably keen to get their 3D accelerated graphics and multi-monitor setups going, and this is one area where Linux really does suck bigtime. Probably not a big deal in a library or office setting though. The 3D bit may be down to proprietary driver issues but the multi-monitor issue does seem like a Linux weakness (it IS possible with manual xorg.conf-editing hell).
TFA and the submission seems to concentrate on the liberty/deregulation aspect and glosses over the simpler one: too many signs distract drivers and/or train them to ignore signs.
Near where I live there's a nice digital sign which shows your speed and says "thank you" or "slow down". Yet to find out whether it has a "whoops!" message for when you plough into a pedestrian because you were watching the sign instead of the road.
ISTR some schemes in the UK that were trying to reduce signage - but these were clearly based on the clutter/distraction principle.
Compared to this, all you have to do now is to take any passport and insert a cracked chip with cloned data inside.
Congratulations - Bad Hat now has a passport on which the electronic photo (and other biometrics) and printed photo don't match. Even if B.H. looks a bit like you, the immigration officer ought to notice that the photos are different and Mr Hat will go straight to Guantanamo (if the official is too overworked/underpaid/thick to notice that then no technology in the world is going to help). Provided that the info on the chip is digitally signed (not encrypted) with a private key sitting in a steel vault somewhere, Bad Hat can't change it - hopefully, he can't even clone it properly.
He'd be far better off using your original passport which (if you recall) he had to physically steal because the 3DES encription had done its (only) intended job of stopping him remotely sniffing the RFID data. Bad hat gets through immigration while you are being strip-searched after presenting the Mickey Mouse passport that he substituted for yours.
Basicly, the machines owned by the various governments would encrypt the data with a key belonging to that government (e.g. the UK has a machine) and then the machines at the airports (if the airports are fancy enough to be able to read the machine readable part of the passport) use a matching public key.
Why bother? As I understand it, most - if not all - of the information is also printed on the passport. (Heck, I'm pretty sure that even my non-biometric passport has my fingerprints and DNA all over it!) so if you have the passport you have the info. Plus, some people might like the idea that they can buy a reader and find out what data the guv'ment have really stored on their own passport!
OTOH if the passports don't use a PKI system similar to the one you've described to digitally sign the electronic information - and thus make it very difficult for a third party to create new or doctored passports - then something is rotten. However, nothing in TFA contradicts the idea that the data is digitally signed. The system they're claiming to have "cracked" sounds like a perfectly adequate way of stopping anybody casually snooping the RFID tag without having physical posession of the passport. Yes, you could get lucky and find out those items of information some other way, but you'd still need to identify and jostle the person you'd researched to scan their chip.
What we really need is some super-advanced alien race to make contact and hand us a totally infallible identification symbol. It might also help cut down on the problem if it made any potential identity thief drop dead on the spot.
The instant telepathic communication feature would annoy the hell out of the cellphone companies, but might make cinemas a bit quieter (shame about all that writhing polychromatic light from people's wrists reflecting off the screen).
Trouble is, we'd probably be dragged into some silly cosmic "war on terror" as a result.
I don't know why a simple thing as desgining a security algorithm can be so hard.
True - provided you're trying to get Alice to talk to Bob! Those two know a thing or two about cryptography by know and can deal with keeping keys secret, using strong passwords etc.
It all gets rather harder if you're dealing with a huge messy system composed of hoardes of busy people who neither understand nor wish to understand the system. And that's just the immigration officers, never mind joe public!
The system that they cracked seems entirely fit for the (obviously intended) purpose of preventing casual sniffing of the RFID information. It makes the perfectly pragmatic assumption that, if the bad hats get physical posession of the passport you're screwed anyway.
They could have used a "secret" key (or something more sophisticated) because every immigration desk in every participating country then needs a secret key to "unlock" the info - and as soon as one of those (inevitably) leaks every passport in a dozen countries would have to be updated or replaced.
The problem is that all any technological change like this can achieve is to make counterfieters work that little bit harder (the article didn't say if the info had been digitally signed - which would really help there and would be totally unrelated to anti-RFID-snooping measures).
Having first learned 8080 assembly, I ended up fairly despising the 6502 for its dearth of, well, everything -- registers, speed, 16-bit operations, stack space...
OTOH, a mere mortal could quickly memorise the entire 6502 instruction set. Also, the real "registers" on the 6502 were the bottom 256 bytes of RAM, which had optimised access (with 1 byte addresses) and were the basis of most indirect addressing modes.
Actually - the 6502 vs Z80/8080 wars were an awful lot like the later RISC vs CISC argument: the Z80/8080s had programmer friendly instruction sets with looping, multiplication etc; the 6502 had a tiny instruction set and dit twice as much work per clock cycle. ISTR that the 6502 smoked the Z80 in anything that didn't involve floating point.
PS: The ARM was originally designed by 6502 uberhackers at Acorn for use in the successor to the BBC Micro. You can see why 6502 lovers would go for a RISC design...
...which has yet to reach prototype stage so I fail to see the significance.
Try "range of several metres" versus "sat right on top of the pad". If they've done computer simulations then making a prototype should be childs play c.f. getting the world's electronic gadget manufacturers to agree on a standard.
PS: Don't you just love the BBC - the person they approach for comment is the co-founder of a company making what would be (once the idea came to fruition) a competing product. He's actually quite reasonable, considering. In other news from the BBC - "Should Christmas be abolished? we ask the manager of Toys'R'Us and a turkey!"
Well, the acting was often terrible. Let's get that out of the way. That wasn't it.
I think the other problem was that B5 was largely presented in the "classical tradgedy" style, with lots of melodrama, exposition, soliloquies and "comic relief" (or, on occasions "comic" relief!). There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this (especially when half your plot lines are "inspired" by Macbeth, Lord of the Rings and Lensmen) - its the same style as Star Trek - but it was already falling out of favour c.f. the pseudo-naturalistic fly-on-the-wall style of other TV and hasn't aged gracefully.
OK, there was some duff acting as well. I have a theory that some good actors give great auditions and then turn into a two-by-four as soon as they walk onto a spaceship set. This seems to be the only explanation of some of the acting in otherwise great TV SF (SciFi channel's Dune, anyone?) and would explain the Bujold/Janeway incident in ST Voyager.
Thanks to this new generosity, I think I will stay with Windows 2000 instead of buying a Mac.
Win2k runs quite nicely Parallels on a Mac... No activation crap or VM restrictions to worry about. The only thing is I'd kinda got used to anti-aliased fonts.
Which is a bit of a problem - although the creature comfort ads were very popular and won awards, they were a failure for a simple reason.
Everyone thought the electricity ads were for British Gas!
Well, back in those days when you got gas from the gas board and electricity from the electricity board (Ok, they'd been de-nationalised but it was a while before there was any real choice) - I never did see the point for ads for gas and electricity. Were you expected to think "Oh, nice parrot - I think I'll turn up the heater" or "Hey, that panther likes to be warm - I'll rip out my gas boiler and put in storage heaters [1]"?
[1] Note for Americans and other aliens: storage heaters are a wonderful energy efficient device that use cut-price overnight electricity to heat up a pile of bricks overnight so that your house is like an oven first thing in the morning and freezing cold by the time you get home from work (or, for a sterotypical/. reader, get out of bed). They save electricity because, sooner or later, you rip them out and put in a gas boiler.
I'm pretty sure the original short predated the gas adverts - although its probably the gas adverts that enabled most people to see them. I'm sure advertising work does a lot to support outfits like Aardman.
Maybe the web will kill off all the crass adverts that everybody ignores (so that people can ignore them on the web instead) and just leave the nicely made subtle and ironic ones (+5 wishful thinking).
I completely agree - hyping up a bug that causes the application to exit (oh the humanity! how can that happen?) in Browser A as a "security vulnerability" as if its somehow comparable with a "redirect my secure connection to a phishing site" flaw in Browser B is blatent double standards...
Oh, wait, you mean the other way around? No, don't get that, sorry.
The report goes on to say that: 'it is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government...
PS: in TFA that sentence had a "but" on the beginning of it and was referring to the fact that the UK music industry has, so far, graciously refrained from enforcing the law on personal copying.
Technically, in the UK, even copying the CD that you have just bought onto a cassette tape to play in the car was illegal - but your friendly local music megastore always had a rack of blank tapes by the checkout.
If there is any further derision of state-funded broadcasting on Slashdot, and talk of "not paying for stuff we don't use" then the British Broadcasting Corp. will send the bailffs over to confiscate the pink Monty Python foot "funny" icon (plus any reference to Spam not concerning canned meat), along with all sigs containing quotes from Hitchiker's Guide, Red Dwarf or The Office. Plus any stories linking to BBC news - but then, that's biassed state-run propaganda, whereas everybody knows that you can trust Fox.
Meanwhile, in the supermarket: "Yes, I know that my grocery bill is $100 but, by my calculation, $5 of that goes to fund commercial TV via advertising campaigns, and I only watch bittorrents of Doctor Who, so here's $95".
I personally don't want a crippled OS to accommodate third party security vendors.
It sounds like MS is planning to sell its own security stuff separately. If there is a mechanism for aftermarket installation of MS security products/patches then there is already a mechanism that could potentially be cracked*. Legitimate security software vendors could not legally use such a crack (thanks to DMCA and its EU equivalents) but that is hardly going to bother virus writers, is it?
* This is not an "Alice wants to talk to Bob without Eve hearing" scenario (which the cryptographers have pretty well sewn up) - like DRM, this is "Alice wants to stop Bob talking in his sleep to his girlfriend Eve" situation (which can only be solved by castrating Bob).
I need to download an app, double click and click next next next and its done. To uninstall I'd doubleclick something and its gone.
Well, assuming that you have a valid reason for not letting the distro builders package your application for you, it sounds like you need something like AutoPackage.
Re:Strange way to prosecute in the US
on
The Future of ReiserFS
·
· Score: 2, Informative
But from the way you describe the UK criminal justice system the police can just arrest anyone they want and not have to declare why until the person has already been convicted.
Er, no - here in the UK we think its a good idea if the evidence is presented to the public at a thing called a trial with a judge and a jury and a prosecution and a defense and due process and stuff. Its a bit like what you have in the US, but with more fancy dress.
We just think its a good idea if all the potential jurors haven't already seen the TV miniseries with the girl they quite fancied from "Lost" as the victim and that British guy who always plays the baddie in superhero films as the accused.
And, yes, arrests are reported, the charges are reported, and police do call for evidence - there are just rules to stop the media (mis)reporting the unchallenged case for the prosecution before the trial.
Of course, the guv'ment wants to bend the rules for spies, terrorists etc. but the UK is hardly alone in that, and they haven't entirely had it their own way.
We can always toss in a cute kid with a robotic daggit. Hey, they can even stop the fleet at a space casino!
Actually, "Boxy" was in the pilot miniseries and features prominently in the "deleted scenes" on the series 1 DVDs. Not so cute - looked like he was going to be the first to find out about Sharon's little secret. No robot daggit, though.
They also cut what I thought was a really funny scene - Baltar telling number 6 that he "needed a little time". Maybe they were deliberately "darkening" the show.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that "self service" shops clean up on impulse purchases, but while I'm browsing the rack for a cyan Lasejet 2600 cartridge I'm unlikely to think "What the hell, I'll get some Epson and Lexmark ink while I'm at it!". Its one case where I know exactly what I want and would quite like some service.
So why not keep ink cartridges, batteries, memory cards and other high-value-but-non-sexy accessories behind a counter (you can still make sure customers walk past the iPods to get there) and employ someone... Oh, wait, I just answered my own question. :-)
(Although, funnily, although that is exactly what happens at one of my favorite shops for buying consumables and components, they still manage to be cheaper than big shops with no service...)
When (particularly large) stores whine about the cost of shoplifting I hope that they remember to offset those costs against the massive benefits they reap from self-service and low staffing levels.
PS - to any monochrome moralists listening, thinking about the incentives and opportunities for crime is something that can and should be done as well as throwing the book at criminals and instead of taking actions that piss off the law-abiding majority.
Acorn RISC-OS was certainly using anti-aliasing to improve the legibility of small fonts on computer monitors by 1990, and also offered sub-pixel anti-aliasing - although the latter feature was usually disabled because it used too much CPU/RAM for the entry-level models c.f. the improvements (and probably didn't achieve much on a CRT anyway). Not sure if their (not too successful) portable did anything different - although I think they did have some patents on improving greyscale LCD displays.
The OS ran on ARM-based "Archimedes" (and later RISC-PC) systems that had about half of the UK schools market in the late-80s/early 90s. The DTP and vector drawing applications were particularly impressive.
Xara Xtreme (www.xara.com) is a decendent of a RISC_OS based graphics app, which was one of the first to anti-alias everything (text and graphics) in real time.
C.f. Windows which, ISTR, from Win95-Win2000, only used anti-aliasing to hide "jaggies" in large fonts and turned it off for small fonts.
Bear in mind that airports in Europe (especially UK) are used predominantly for international travel c.f. the large proportion of domestic travel in the USA. Plus, we had terrorists before you, nyah! Checking passports has always been important, and the airports have often been built with this in mind - E.g. at Heathrow, the main security check only gets you as far as the shopping mall - after that, each international gate has its own secondary checkpoint and "closed" waiting area. The boarding pass switcheroo would be much harder to pull off there.
...and when I visit the US I find the banknotes hard to distinguish. However, is there not a theory that hard-to-distinguish banknotes deter fraud (because you have to look carefully at them you are more likely to spot an iffy one)?
One of the frequent objections to patent reform seems to come from the drug companies which (if you reconfigure your brain to enable "feeling sorry for poor impoverished multinational companies mode") is sort-of understandable, given the amount of work needed to establish what might be an easy-to-replicate chemical as a drug. Its also a field where disclosure of information is likely to advance science.
Couldn't some of the protection currently offered by patents be made part of FDA and similar approval processes instead? I.e. make the investment needed to get a drug FDA approved: get an N-year monopoly on its sale?
The risk that customers who run Linux or OSX but need occasional access to Windows might be able to buy a copy to use in a VM for less than the price of a separate windows PC.
If I can buy an OEM copy of Ultimate along with a new hard drive, install it under Boot Camp on my Mac and then legally install it in an OSX-hosted VM as well then I might consider it. If not - well, Windows 2000 runs all the must-have Windows software I need...
Clarification: (a) installing Linux as a secondary OS on a windows machine (or a Mac for that matter) without disturbing the existing OS is inevitably more complicated than installing windows on a bare machine. Installing something like Ubuntu on a bare machine is (at worst) little different to installing windows.
(b) PCs sold as windows machines may include hardware that isn't supported by Linux. This makes for an unhappy installation experience. Natuarally a large project such as the Birmingham one, they would have selected supported hardware (I had to disengage cynicism mode to type that)
(c) Some hassles when installing Linux are to do with licensing/patent issues that the FOSS community can do little about (e.g. MP3 playback, DVD playback). This is a particular drawback of the GNU-purist distros such as Debian and Ubuntu.
(d) Slashdotters are probably keen to get their 3D accelerated graphics and multi-monitor setups going, and this is one area where Linux really does suck bigtime. Probably not a big deal in a library or office setting though. The 3D bit may be down to proprietary driver issues but the multi-monitor issue does seem like a Linux weakness (it IS possible with manual xorg.conf-editing hell).
Near where I live there's a nice digital sign which shows your speed and says "thank you" or "slow down". Yet to find out whether it has a "whoops!" message for when you plough into a pedestrian because you were watching the sign instead of the road.
ISTR some schemes in the UK that were trying to reduce signage - but these were clearly based on the clutter/distraction principle.
Congratulations - Bad Hat now has a passport on which the electronic photo (and other biometrics) and printed photo don't match. Even if B.H. looks a bit like you, the immigration officer ought to notice that the photos are different and Mr Hat will go straight to Guantanamo (if the official is too overworked/underpaid/thick to notice that then no technology in the world is going to help). Provided that the info on the chip is digitally signed (not encrypted) with a private key sitting in a steel vault somewhere, Bad Hat can't change it - hopefully, he can't even clone it properly.
He'd be far better off using your original passport which (if you recall) he had to physically steal because the 3DES encription had done its (only) intended job of stopping him remotely sniffing the RFID data. Bad hat gets through immigration while you are being strip-searched after presenting the Mickey Mouse passport that he substituted for yours.
Why bother? As I understand it, most - if not all - of the information is also printed on the passport. (Heck, I'm pretty sure that even my non-biometric passport has my fingerprints and DNA all over it!) so if you have the passport you have the info. Plus, some people might like the idea that they can buy a reader and find out what data the guv'ment have really stored on their own passport!
OTOH if the passports don't use a PKI system similar to the one you've described to digitally sign the electronic information - and thus make it very difficult for a third party to create new or doctored passports - then something is rotten. However, nothing in TFA contradicts the idea that the data is digitally signed. The system they're claiming to have "cracked" sounds like a perfectly adequate way of stopping anybody casually snooping the RFID tag without having physical posession of the passport. Yes, you could get lucky and find out those items of information some other way, but you'd still need to identify and jostle the person you'd researched to scan their chip.
What we really need is some super-advanced alien race to make contact and hand us a totally infallible identification symbol. It might also help cut down on the problem if it made any potential identity thief drop dead on the spot.
The instant telepathic communication feature would annoy the hell out of the cellphone companies, but might make cinemas a bit quieter (shame about all that writhing polychromatic light from people's wrists reflecting off the screen).
Trouble is, we'd probably be dragged into some silly cosmic "war on terror" as a result.
True - provided you're trying to get Alice to talk to Bob! Those two know a thing or two about cryptography by know and can deal with keeping keys secret, using strong passwords etc.
It all gets rather harder if you're dealing with a huge messy system composed of hoardes of busy people who neither understand nor wish to understand the system. And that's just the immigration officers, never mind joe public!
The system that they cracked seems entirely fit for the (obviously intended) purpose of preventing casual sniffing of the RFID information. It makes the perfectly pragmatic assumption that, if the bad hats get physical posession of the passport you're screwed anyway.
They could have used a "secret" key (or something more sophisticated) because every immigration desk in every participating country then needs a secret key to "unlock" the info - and as soon as one of those (inevitably) leaks every passport in a dozen countries would have to be updated or replaced.
The problem is that all any technological change like this can achieve is to make counterfieters work that little bit harder (the article didn't say if the info had been digitally signed - which would really help there and would be totally unrelated to anti-RFID-snooping measures).
OTOH, a mere mortal could quickly memorise the entire 6502 instruction set. Also, the real "registers" on the 6502 were the bottom 256 bytes of RAM, which had optimised access (with 1 byte addresses) and were the basis of most indirect addressing modes.
Actually - the 6502 vs Z80/8080 wars were an awful lot like the later RISC vs CISC argument: the Z80/8080s had programmer friendly instruction sets with looping, multiplication etc; the 6502 had a tiny instruction set and dit twice as much work per clock cycle. ISTR that the 6502 smoked the Z80 in anything that didn't involve floating point.
PS: The ARM was originally designed by 6502 uberhackers at Acorn for use in the successor to the BBC Micro. You can see why 6502 lovers would go for a RISC design...
Try "range of several metres" versus "sat right on top of the pad". If they've done computer simulations then making a prototype should be childs play c.f. getting the world's electronic gadget manufacturers to agree on a standard.
PS: Don't you just love the BBC - the person they approach for comment is the co-founder of a company making what would be (once the idea came to fruition) a competing product. He's actually quite reasonable, considering. In other news from the BBC - "Should Christmas be abolished? we ask the manager of Toys'R'Us and a turkey!"
I think the other problem was that B5 was largely presented in the "classical tradgedy" style, with lots of melodrama, exposition, soliloquies and "comic relief" (or, on occasions "comic" relief!). There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this (especially when half your plot lines are "inspired" by Macbeth, Lord of the Rings and Lensmen) - its the same style as Star Trek - but it was already falling out of favour c.f. the pseudo-naturalistic fly-on-the-wall style of other TV and hasn't aged gracefully.
OK, there was some duff acting as well. I have a theory that some good actors give great auditions and then turn into a two-by-four as soon as they walk onto a spaceship set. This seems to be the only explanation of some of the acting in otherwise great TV SF (SciFi channel's Dune, anyone?) and would explain the Bujold/Janeway incident in ST Voyager.
Win2k runs quite nicely Parallels on a Mac... No activation crap or VM restrictions to worry about. The only thing is I'd kinda got used to anti-aliased fonts.
Well, back in those days when you got gas from the gas board and electricity from the electricity board (Ok, they'd been de-nationalised but it was a while before there was any real choice) - I never did see the point for ads for gas and electricity. Were you expected to think "Oh, nice parrot - I think I'll turn up the heater" or "Hey, that panther likes to be warm - I'll rip out my gas boiler and put in storage heaters [1]"?
[1] Note for Americans and other aliens: storage heaters are a wonderful energy efficient device that use cut-price overnight electricity to heat up a pile of bricks overnight so that your house is like an oven first thing in the morning and freezing cold by the time you get home from work (or, for a sterotypical /. reader, get out of bed). They save electricity because, sooner or later, you rip them out and put in a gas boiler.
I'm pretty sure the original short predated the gas adverts - although its probably the gas adverts that enabled most people to see them. I'm sure advertising work does a lot to support outfits like Aardman.
Maybe the web will kill off all the crass adverts that everybody ignores (so that people can ignore them on the web instead) and just leave the nicely made subtle and ironic ones (+5 wishful thinking).
I completely agree - hyping up a bug that causes the application to exit (oh the humanity! how can that happen?) in Browser A as a "security vulnerability" as if its somehow comparable with a "redirect my secure connection to a phishing site" flaw in Browser B is blatent double standards...
Oh, wait, you mean the other way around? No, don't get that, sorry.
PS: in TFA that sentence had a "but" on the beginning of it and was referring to the fact that the UK music industry has, so far, graciously refrained from enforcing the law on personal copying.
Technically, in the UK, even copying the CD that you have just bought onto a cassette tape to play in the car was illegal - but your friendly local music megastore always had a rack of blank tapes by the checkout.
If there is any further derision of state-funded broadcasting on Slashdot, and talk of "not paying for stuff we don't use" then the British Broadcasting Corp. will send the bailffs over to confiscate the pink Monty Python foot "funny" icon (plus any reference to Spam not concerning canned meat), along with all sigs containing quotes from Hitchiker's Guide, Red Dwarf or The Office. Plus any stories linking to BBC news - but then, that's biassed state-run propaganda, whereas everybody knows that you can trust Fox.
Meanwhile, in the supermarket: "Yes, I know that my grocery bill is $100 but, by my calculation, $5 of that goes to fund commercial TV via advertising campaigns, and I only watch bittorrents of Doctor Who, so here's $95".
It sounds like MS is planning to sell its own security stuff separately. If there is a mechanism for aftermarket installation of MS security products/patches then there is already a mechanism that could potentially be cracked*. Legitimate security software vendors could not legally use such a crack (thanks to DMCA and its EU equivalents) but that is hardly going to bother virus writers, is it?
* This is not an "Alice wants to talk to Bob without Eve hearing" scenario (which the cryptographers have pretty well sewn up) - like DRM, this is "Alice wants to stop Bob talking in his sleep to his girlfriend Eve" situation (which can only be solved by castrating Bob).
Well, assuming that you have a valid reason for not letting the distro builders package your application for you, it sounds like you need something like AutoPackage.
Er, no - here in the UK we think its a good idea if the evidence is presented to the public at a thing called a trial with a judge and a jury and a prosecution and a defense and due process and stuff. Its a bit like what you have in the US, but with more fancy dress.
We just think its a good idea if all the potential jurors haven't already seen the TV miniseries with the girl they quite fancied from "Lost" as the victim and that British guy who always plays the baddie in superhero films as the accused.
And, yes, arrests are reported, the charges are reported, and police do call for evidence - there are just rules to stop the media (mis)reporting the unchallenged case for the prosecution before the trial.
Of course, the guv'ment wants to bend the rules for spies, terrorists etc. but the UK is hardly alone in that, and they haven't entirely had it their own way.
Actually, "Boxy" was in the pilot miniseries and features prominently in the "deleted scenes" on the series 1 DVDs. Not so cute - looked like he was going to be the first to find out about Sharon's little secret. No robot daggit, though.
They also cut what I thought was a really funny scene - Baltar telling number 6 that he "needed a little time". Maybe they were deliberately "darkening" the show.