That's just crap. Move if it's so bad where you live.
You sound just like people who justify joining gangs and committing crimes instead of finding honest work because there are just no other opportunities for them--the system is corrupt/racist/biased against them, so the only thing they can do is steal from honest people who have actually made something of themselves. There are always other options, but you were just too lazy or complacent to take them. You chose a scummy job, you have to live with that fact. Asking for sympathy because you didn't have enough self respect to better yourself and find a job that didn't involve making yourself part of the one of the most universally loathed classes on Earth is almost as contemptible as taking the job in the first place.
Any abuse a telemarketer gets is deserved in spades.
No, I honestly don't have the foggiest notion what a compressor does. That's why I suggested using it. I just wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about.
I suppose, theoretically speaking, that someone who had some clue as to what he was doing could try connecting the phone's audio to the sidechain jack on the compressor. Then, he might think about setting the attack to the minimum, and the release to the maximum. He might also set the compression ratio somewhere in the neighborhood of 15:1 or higher, and the threshold fairly low.
If you did that, it would reduce the level of the audio from the computer, which is run through the main input on the compressor, whenever the level on the sidechain is higher than the threshold--or so I'm told. If that were the case, you could probably use that setup to take calls without ever having to touch your mixer, since you would need to have silence on the line for more than the maximum release time (three seconds on the 3630) before the music would come back up again.
This is probably better to do in hardware than in software. Here's what I'd try:
Get a phone that has a jack for a headset. These are usually a 3/32" connector that carries both microphone and audio. Connect to this an adaptor that splits it into two 1/8" connectors, one for headphones and one for mic. You probably have some headphones with a boom mic attached that has separate lines for audio and microphone. Just run the mic line into the mic port on the splitter, or use a lapel mic. Take the audio from the telephone, and feed it into a hardware mixer--just pick up any cheap mixer from Radio Shack. Then you can mix your computer's audio into the headphones as well. That way, you're not dependent on the computer working properly to be able to do your job, you can control audio source volumes quickly and independently from each other, and you could even add something like a DVD player or stereo to your mixer and be able to listen to that as well.
If you wanted to get really fancy, you could throw an audio compressor with sidechaining, such as the Alesis 3630, into the pipeline. Route the telephone's output so it goes through the compressor's sidechain channel, and run the computer's audio through the main input on the compressor. Then, whenever audio comes in through the phone line, the sound of the computer will automatically lower.
I think so. If you and a few other like minded people each own 1% of the shares, that can quickly add up to some pretty substantial sway over the direction the company takes.
Yes, I know Worf was raised by humans, and no, it still doesn't make sense in context.
Worf was pretending that he was the captain of the Enterprise to convince the captain of the Klingon ship, who had been in stasis for 70 years, that the war was over (and presumably that the Klingons had won). So it would have made sense to refer to the date in Klingon terms, which would have been the year of Kahless or something. A Klingon who had been at war with the Federation his entire life would presumably have no idea, much less care, what century humans considered it to be.
Worf: "Has the Tong dropped it's shields?" Tactical Officer: "No, sir." Worf: "Very well. Fire all phasers." K'Temoc: "Wait! Lower the shields. I yield command of the Tong to you, Captain Worf. Long live the Klingon Empire!" Worf: "A wise decision, Captain. Commander K'ehleyr will board your vessel and take command. The Klingon cruiser Prang will soon arrive and escort you home. And Captain?" K'Temoc: "Yes?" Worf: "Welcome to the 24th century."
Which actually doesn't make that much sense if you think about it, since why would two Klingons use a human calendar when speaking to each other? The elegant solution to this problem, of course, is not to think about it too much.
Thank you for this completely information free post. The world is a much better place now that we know that HiThere thinks the Libertarian Party sucks.
Facts? Specific examples? Don't be silly, we don't need any of that nonsense.
THAT'S your objection to libertarianism?! That someone might head a vast conspiracy to destroy your life?
You may want to invest in some tinfoil, my friend.
Besides, there are still social services available in a libertarian society. They're just provided by charity rather than government. And as organizations such as The Salvation Army and Goodwill show, it is quite possible to run such charities as non-governmental private organizations.
As a result I don't go to bars anymore. That hurts the economy, along with my love life, and that's bad. Maybe for you, but that's not really everybody else's problem. Besides (and without conceding your implicit argument that your economic contributions are so vital that they trump other people's freedom of choice), are you taking all that money you would have spent in bars and putting it under a mattress? No, you're spending it elsewhere, meaning you're still contributing to the economy. So what you're basically saying is that your patronage of these bars is so important to their financial well being that they should be forced to ban smoking, because you know what's in their economic best interest better than they do.
However, I will point out that if gun ownership was an effective protection against gun violence, gun-toting inner-city gangs would not be shooting and killing each other, along with the occasional bystander caught in the crossfire. And I will point out that if prescription drug use were an effective protection against sickness, crack-smoking inner city gangs wouldn't be killing themselves through drug overdoses, along with the occasional innocent bystander who gets mugged by some junkie desperate for his next fix. There's a big difference between legitimate use by responsible citizens, and abuse by criminals.
But I guess in your mind, anyone who does something you don't approve of is a criminal.
Because that's what the politicians want. It's what keeps them in power. We have a two party system in this country, and they have set themselves up to be diametrically opposed to each other on basically every major issue. There's no room for middle ground or alternatives, because that would open up the political system to third parties or independents, which would take away power from the established ruling parties.
As a result, you must either be for abortion rights, gun control, socialized medicine, gay rights, environmental protection, and non-interventionism, or be against all these things. Either way, you are out of necessity for more government regulation to promote your agenda, because if you don't pass a law on a given issue your opponents will. It's essentially a zero sum legislative proliferation game. If you would rather vote for a party that supports what you truly believe you are told you are throwing your vote away. So most people pick the issue that is most important to them, and ally themselves with the party they that agrees with them on that issue.
But the truth is it's not any better anywhere else, if you ask me. In some ways, the best political situation one can realistically expect is deadlock. Consensus can be a dangerous thing, because more often than not it represents an agreement that the population needs some new additional regulation or control for its own good (see, e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act or the Homeland Security Act, both of which enjoyed an broad bipartisan support).
The question is no longer whether new regulations are necessary, but rather which of two opposing viewpoints you hold as to what that regulation should be.
A lot of verbiage has been expended on the nature of intellectual property, and whether the system is in need of "fixing". But what exactly is the problem with the current system?
The funny thing about laws is that no matter how carefully they are designed and written, they must still be enforced somehow. And by and large, it simply isn't practical to enforce every violation of intellectual property laws as they currently stand. The vast majority of lawsuits against IP infringers involve your run of the mill flagrant copyright violations: Party A creates something, Party B publishes it without attribution and profits from that action, Party A sues. In these cases, it is up to the courts to decide what the damages are for such infringement, and they generally do a pretty good job. There is even a whole body of law permitting some such uses under the doctrine of fair use. So the system is not weighted completely in favor of copyright holders.
Then there are the very few, but high profile cases that involve file sharing and such. Most of the parties involved in these cases are infringers on a grand scale--people who run sites explicitly dedicated to trading pirated music or software, for example. Certainly, one could point to a few cases where a grandmother or a four year old were sued, but these cases make up a very small portion of infringement cases as a whole, and a practically negligible percentage of the total infringement that actually goes on. But the people who run the sites know what they are getting into, and they make the choice to facilitate massive copyright infringement. Whether they feel morally justified in doing so, they are aware of the risks going into it, and should be willing to face the consequences should it come to that. Besides, there will always be others willing to take their place.
Perhaps organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have been given somewhat too much power to enforce their IP rights. But as a practical matter, they simply cannot do anything to significantly reduce the amount of infringement that actually occurs. Nor can they chase down everyone who has ever downloaded an MP3 and sue for damages, real or theoretical. The fact of the matter is that, even if it is flawed in principle, our current system actually works fairly well on a practical level. There really isn't any need to scrap the current system and start over. Refine it, perhaps, but that's why we live in a free society where we can make and change laws as needed.
Intellectual property rights are beneficial to society as a whole in that they encourage people to create who might not otherwise do so. Many industries that revolve around the creation of intellectual property simply wouldn't exist but for the broad rights granted to IP creators. To those who say that copyright shouldn't last more than 7 years or some other short time, I would counter that, as long as a creation is profitable, why shouldn't the creator be entitled to enjoy that profit? Many films and works of literature that were created decades ago are still popular today, and still generate significant revenue. Should someone else be entitled to that revenue simply because he decided to package it up and sell it at a cheaper price immediately after the copyright expired?
In fact, it seems to me that a term of copyright equal to the life of the creator and then some is not unreasonable. It benefits the individual artist as much as anyone. If not for the significant length of a copyright today, writers wouldn't be entitled to royalties on their work after the copyright expired. In fact, if you wrote a novel or a script, for example, it would be in the best interest of large corporations to simply wait the brief period for the copyright to expire, at which point they could simply use the work in any way they see fit rather than having to negotiate a fair arrangement with the content creator.
Nothing depresses me more than adults who have completely failed to grow the fsck up. I hate to say it but you're going to have to get used to it. It only seems to be getting more common. -- "Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional." Rarely have I seen a sig that is so ironically appropriate to the topic at hand.
I have a hard time placing all of the blame for this on Lori Drew. Yes, she is a despicable person, but it's not at all clear to me that this was really her fault. If it were, couldn't we say that anytime someone kills himself, we can place the blame for the death on the people who were mean to him? Where do we draw the line, exactly?
Lori Drew may have provoked Megan to kill herself. She may have known at the time that was a possibility. Even so, I think it's at best arguable that this is a crime--it touches on very precarious areas of free speech that courts are loathe to tread on.
I don't really want to blame Megan's mother for this death, but it seems to me that if one person were in a position to step in and do something about this, it would have been her. It sounds cruel to say, but Megan's mother failed her completely, and that was probably the single biggest factor leading to Megan's decision to take her own life when she did.
I feel incredibly sorry for Tina Meier. Not just because she lost a daughter--this is tragedy enough--but also because I am certain that she knows exactly what she could have done as a mother to save her daughter, but for whatever reason was not able to do.
And also, because I am sure she realizes that blaming Lori Drew for her daughter's death will not help assuage her own guilt and pain.
There's no question that what this woman did was wrong and morally repugnant. But was it a crime?
It's hard to see what she actually did that was illegal. This could have just as easily happened had the boyfriend been real. Lying to someone about your identity isn't a crime (generally speaking).
On the other hand, if she had a reasonable expectation that the girl would commit suicide because of her actions, she could possibly be charged with reckless homicide or a similar crime for what she did. The obvious defense is that she had no way of knowing what the girl would do. I am guessing from the fact that such charges weren't filed that there was no history of suicide attempts, and that the woman likely didn't know (or can reasonably claim she didn't know) about the girl's clinical depression. Without those critical elements, there's no hope of securing a conviction, so it'd be pointless to file charges.
Personally, I suspect she just was trying to get back at the girl out of sheer nastiness, and didn't think too hard about what her actions might lead to. I wonder if she even feels badly about it. I certainly hope so.
That all being said, I think these charges are pretty tenuous at best. I can understand wanting to see justice done, but essentially making up crimes until you find something that will stick is not the way the American justice system is supposed to work, and it is an abuse of power on the part of the prosecutor. Sometimes you simply have to accept the fact that some wrongs will go unpunished because we are simply not equipped to deal with them at the time, and that is the trade-off for living in a free society.
As I understand it, the notion is that because of some possible scientific advances looming on the horizon that may or may not affect anything, it's time to scrap our entire health care system and move to socialized medicine. Whether or not you believe that universal health care is a good thing, that's a pretty big leap in logic.
How do we actually know that's what's on the EPROMs? They could be mislabeled, or the data on the chips could be unreadable. EPROMs do have a tendency to degrade over time, especially if they're not well taken care of.
Besides, even if they do contain some version of the game, and even if it's readable, there's no guarantee that it's actually a playable game. It could be an unplayable version, or even a test or demo of some sort.
Sorry to rain on the parade. If this turns out to be the real McCoy, I'll be as excited as anyone. But I'd put up even money that this ends up being a disappointment. I hope I'm wrong, though.
You're going to have to reboot the system to reset that, as has been mentioned. However, there's an easy way to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Once your system is up and running, log in (as root) and type "rm -rf/"
Doing this will prevent any sort of malicious command from being run in the future.
I have no recollection of POTS telephone service ever being unavailable. You might want to check with the department of redundancy department on this one. POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service;-)
For what it's worth, I do recall mine going out on occasion. Which especially sucked at the time because we had no cell phone reception at the house, making it very hard to check on the status of repairs (or, for that matter, to even let anybody know the line was down!)
It's funny you should say that, because in the world of visual effects the After Effects interface is considered to be one of the most painful and difficult to use for its intended purpose. While some people do use layer based compositing, most prefer a node based compositing system such as Shake. Personally, I had been using After Effects for the better part of a decade, and within two weeks of picking up Shake I never went back (granted, they are designed to do slightly different things, but 99% of what I do could be done in either package).
I'd love to see a node based interface for Photoshop, actually. Even though it's not designed for it, many tasks involving a single image are much easier to perform in Shake than in Photoshop. I do agree that After Effects is probably a better interface for Photoshop than Photoshop, but for what it's actually supposed to do, it can be very difficult to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just crap. Move if it's so bad where you live.
You sound just like people who justify joining gangs and committing crimes instead of finding honest work because there are just no other opportunities for them--the system is corrupt/racist/biased against them, so the only thing they can do is steal from honest people who have actually made something of themselves. There are always other options, but you were just too lazy or complacent to take them. You chose a scummy job, you have to live with that fact. Asking for sympathy because you didn't have enough self respect to better yourself and find a job that didn't involve making yourself part of the one of the most universally loathed classes on Earth is almost as contemptible as taking the job in the first place.
Any abuse a telemarketer gets is deserved in spades.
Isn't this request pretty much just, "I want to solve a trivially-easy problem in the most complex way possible?"
Welcome to Slashdot.
No, I honestly don't have the foggiest notion what a compressor does. That's why I suggested using it. I just wanted to sound like I knew what I was talking about.
I suppose, theoretically speaking, that someone who had some clue as to what he was doing could try connecting the phone's audio to the sidechain jack on the compressor. Then, he might think about setting the attack to the minimum, and the release to the maximum. He might also set the compression ratio somewhere in the neighborhood of 15:1 or higher, and the threshold fairly low.
If you did that, it would reduce the level of the audio from the computer, which is run through the main input on the compressor, whenever the level on the sidechain is higher than the threshold--or so I'm told. If that were the case, you could probably use that setup to take calls without ever having to touch your mixer, since you would need to have silence on the line for more than the maximum release time (three seconds on the 3630) before the music would come back up again.
Boy, if only that would work, DJs might use the same technique to duck audio levels when talking into the mic. Too bad I have no idea what I'm talking about.
This is probably better to do in hardware than in software. Here's what I'd try:
Get a phone that has a jack for a headset. These are usually a 3/32" connector that carries both microphone and audio. Connect to this an adaptor that splits it into two 1/8" connectors, one for headphones and one for mic. You probably have some headphones with a boom mic attached that has separate lines for audio and microphone. Just run the mic line into the mic port on the splitter, or use a lapel mic. Take the audio from the telephone, and feed it into a hardware mixer--just pick up any cheap mixer from Radio Shack. Then you can mix your computer's audio into the headphones as well. That way, you're not dependent on the computer working properly to be able to do your job, you can control audio source volumes quickly and independently from each other, and you could even add something like a DVD player or stereo to your mixer and be able to listen to that as well.
If you wanted to get really fancy, you could throw an audio compressor with sidechaining, such as the Alesis 3630, into the pipeline. Route the telephone's output so it goes through the compressor's sidechain channel, and run the computer's audio through the main input on the compressor. Then, whenever audio comes in through the phone line, the sound of the computer will automatically lower.
I think so. If you and a few other like minded people each own 1% of the shares, that can quickly add up to some pretty substantial sway over the direction the company takes.
$1200 is (quite literally) pocket change...
That's a helluva pocket you've got there. Even in Sacajawea dollars, that's a lot of change.
Maybe if you're a rare coin collector or something.
Yes, I know Worf was raised by humans, and no, it still doesn't make sense in context.
Worf was pretending that he was the captain of the Enterprise to convince the captain of the Klingon ship, who had been in stasis for 70 years, that the war was over (and presumably that the Klingons had won). So it would have made sense to refer to the date in Klingon terms, which would have been the year of Kahless or something. A Klingon who had been at war with the Federation his entire life would presumably have no idea, much less care, what century humans considered it to be.
Just sayin'.
They did occasionally refer to the present as the Xth century, though.
Which actually doesn't make that much sense if you think about it, since why would two Klingons use a human calendar when speaking to each other? The elegant solution to this problem, of course, is not to think about it too much.
Well, you don't exactly get to be in the legislature if you're destitute these days, do you?
Thank you for this completely information free post. The world is a much better place now that we know that HiThere thinks the Libertarian Party sucks.
Facts? Specific examples? Don't be silly, we don't need any of that nonsense.
THAT'S your objection to libertarianism?! That someone might head a vast conspiracy to destroy your life?
You may want to invest in some tinfoil, my friend.
Besides, there are still social services available in a libertarian society. They're just provided by charity rather than government. And as organizations such as The Salvation Army and Goodwill show, it is quite possible to run such charities as non-governmental private organizations.
No sympathy, no drama, just cold, hard killing, witty commentary, and a can full of badassery. Doesn't look like they'll be sticking to that.
I think you have Max Payne confused with Duke Nukem.
But I guess in your mind, anyone who does something you don't approve of is a criminal.
Because that's what the politicians want. It's what keeps them in power. We have a two party system in this country, and they have set themselves up to be diametrically opposed to each other on basically every major issue. There's no room for middle ground or alternatives, because that would open up the political system to third parties or independents, which would take away power from the established ruling parties.
As a result, you must either be for abortion rights, gun control, socialized medicine, gay rights, environmental protection, and non-interventionism, or be against all these things. Either way, you are out of necessity for more government regulation to promote your agenda, because if you don't pass a law on a given issue your opponents will. It's essentially a zero sum legislative proliferation game. If you would rather vote for a party that supports what you truly believe you are told you are throwing your vote away. So most people pick the issue that is most important to them, and ally themselves with the party they that agrees with them on that issue.
But the truth is it's not any better anywhere else, if you ask me. In some ways, the best political situation one can realistically expect is deadlock. Consensus can be a dangerous thing, because more often than not it represents an agreement that the population needs some new additional regulation or control for its own good (see, e.g., the USA PATRIOT Act or the Homeland Security Act, both of which enjoyed an broad bipartisan support).
The question is no longer whether new regulations are necessary, but rather which of two opposing viewpoints you hold as to what that regulation should be.
A lot of verbiage has been expended on the nature of intellectual property, and whether the system is in need of "fixing". But what exactly is the problem with the current system?
The funny thing about laws is that no matter how carefully they are designed and written, they must still be enforced somehow. And by and large, it simply isn't practical to enforce every violation of intellectual property laws as they currently stand. The vast majority of lawsuits against IP infringers involve your run of the mill flagrant copyright violations: Party A creates something, Party B publishes it without attribution and profits from that action, Party A sues. In these cases, it is up to the courts to decide what the damages are for such infringement, and they generally do a pretty good job. There is even a whole body of law permitting some such uses under the doctrine of fair use. So the system is not weighted completely in favor of copyright holders.
Then there are the very few, but high profile cases that involve file sharing and such. Most of the parties involved in these cases are infringers on a grand scale--people who run sites explicitly dedicated to trading pirated music or software, for example. Certainly, one could point to a few cases where a grandmother or a four year old were sued, but these cases make up a very small portion of infringement cases as a whole, and a practically negligible percentage of the total infringement that actually goes on. But the people who run the sites know what they are getting into, and they make the choice to facilitate massive copyright infringement. Whether they feel morally justified in doing so, they are aware of the risks going into it, and should be willing to face the consequences should it come to that. Besides, there will always be others willing to take their place.
Perhaps organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA have been given somewhat too much power to enforce their IP rights. But as a practical matter, they simply cannot do anything to significantly reduce the amount of infringement that actually occurs. Nor can they chase down everyone who has ever downloaded an MP3 and sue for damages, real or theoretical. The fact of the matter is that, even if it is flawed in principle, our current system actually works fairly well on a practical level. There really isn't any need to scrap the current system and start over. Refine it, perhaps, but that's why we live in a free society where we can make and change laws as needed.
Intellectual property rights are beneficial to society as a whole in that they encourage people to create who might not otherwise do so. Many industries that revolve around the creation of intellectual property simply wouldn't exist but for the broad rights granted to IP creators. To those who say that copyright shouldn't last more than 7 years or some other short time, I would counter that, as long as a creation is profitable, why shouldn't the creator be entitled to enjoy that profit? Many films and works of literature that were created decades ago are still popular today, and still generate significant revenue. Should someone else be entitled to that revenue simply because he decided to package it up and sell it at a cheaper price immediately after the copyright expired?
In fact, it seems to me that a term of copyright equal to the life of the creator and then some is not unreasonable. It benefits the individual artist as much as anyone. If not for the significant length of a copyright today, writers wouldn't be entitled to royalties on their work after the copyright expired. In fact, if you wrote a novel or a script, for example, it would be in the best interest of large corporations to simply wait the brief period for the copyright to expire, at which point they could simply use the work in any way they see fit rather than having to negotiate a fair arrangement with the content creator.
Or, as they say, "Boys are from Qo'noS, girls are from Romulus."
--
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional." Rarely have I seen a sig that is so ironically appropriate to the topic at hand.
Actually, it appears that the last thing she did before killing herself was get into an argument with her mother about this very subject.
I have a hard time placing all of the blame for this on Lori Drew. Yes, she is a despicable person, but it's not at all clear to me that this was really her fault. If it were, couldn't we say that anytime someone kills himself, we can place the blame for the death on the people who were mean to him? Where do we draw the line, exactly?
Lori Drew may have provoked Megan to kill herself. She may have known at the time that was a possibility. Even so, I think it's at best arguable that this is a crime--it touches on very precarious areas of free speech that courts are loathe to tread on.
I don't really want to blame Megan's mother for this death, but it seems to me that if one person were in a position to step in and do something about this, it would have been her. It sounds cruel to say, but Megan's mother failed her completely, and that was probably the single biggest factor leading to Megan's decision to take her own life when she did.
I feel incredibly sorry for Tina Meier. Not just because she lost a daughter--this is tragedy enough--but also because I am certain that she knows exactly what she could have done as a mother to save her daughter, but for whatever reason was not able to do.
And also, because I am sure she realizes that blaming Lori Drew for her daughter's death will not help assuage her own guilt and pain.
There's no question that what this woman did was wrong and morally repugnant. But was it a crime?
It's hard to see what she actually did that was illegal. This could have just as easily happened had the boyfriend been real. Lying to someone about your identity isn't a crime (generally speaking).
On the other hand, if she had a reasonable expectation that the girl would commit suicide because of her actions, she could possibly be charged with reckless homicide or a similar crime for what she did. The obvious defense is that she had no way of knowing what the girl would do. I am guessing from the fact that such charges weren't filed that there was no history of suicide attempts, and that the woman likely didn't know (or can reasonably claim she didn't know) about the girl's clinical depression. Without those critical elements, there's no hope of securing a conviction, so it'd be pointless to file charges.
Personally, I suspect she just was trying to get back at the girl out of sheer nastiness, and didn't think too hard about what her actions might lead to. I wonder if she even feels badly about it. I certainly hope so.
That all being said, I think these charges are pretty tenuous at best. I can understand wanting to see justice done, but essentially making up crimes until you find something that will stick is not the way the American justice system is supposed to work, and it is an abuse of power on the part of the prosecutor. Sometimes you simply have to accept the fact that some wrongs will go unpunished because we are simply not equipped to deal with them at the time, and that is the trade-off for living in a free society.
Still sort of monstrous, though.
...but this is ridiculous.
As I understand it, the notion is that because of some possible scientific advances looming on the horizon that may or may not affect anything, it's time to scrap our entire health care system and move to socialized medicine. Whether or not you believe that universal health care is a good thing, that's a pretty big leap in logic.
How do we actually know that's what's on the EPROMs? They could be mislabeled, or the data on the chips could be unreadable. EPROMs do have a tendency to degrade over time, especially if they're not well taken care of.
Besides, even if they do contain some version of the game, and even if it's readable, there's no guarantee that it's actually a playable game. It could be an unplayable version, or even a test or demo of some sort.
Sorry to rain on the parade. If this turns out to be the real McCoy, I'll be as excited as anyone. But I'd put up even money that this ends up being a disappointment. I hope I'm wrong, though.
You're going to have to reboot the system to reset that, as has been mentioned. However, there's an easy way to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Once your system is up and running, log in (as root) and type "rm -rf /"
Doing this will prevent any sort of malicious command from being run in the future.
For what it's worth, I do recall mine going out on occasion. Which especially sucked at the time because we had no cell phone reception at the house, making it very hard to check on the status of repairs (or, for that matter, to even let anybody know the line was down!)
It's funny you should say that, because in the world of visual effects the After Effects interface is considered to be one of the most painful and difficult to use for its intended purpose. While some people do use layer based compositing, most prefer a node based compositing system such as Shake. Personally, I had been using After Effects for the better part of a decade, and within two weeks of picking up Shake I never went back (granted, they are designed to do slightly different things, but 99% of what I do could be done in either package).
I'd love to see a node based interface for Photoshop, actually. Even though it's not designed for it, many tasks involving a single image are much easier to perform in Shake than in Photoshop. I do agree that After Effects is probably a better interface for Photoshop than Photoshop, but for what it's actually supposed to do, it can be very difficult to deal with.