I liked the sets. I saw balls. WOW, hardly ever see a mainstream movie with that much male nudity in it at once.

I liked the way it portrayed Greek sexuality overall. Level headed portrayal of the role of religion in Greek life as well.

Good battle scenes overall. Loved the elephants, they were quite impressive.

Some of it just ....drug....and drug on...and the exact nature of the 'mother conflict thing' was not as clear as it could have been. I didn't like all the forwards and backwards time jumping. I think it would have been better if it had been a straight forward in time narrative.

Interesting concept.

Enter in your AIM screen-name (and anyone else's you want) and see how many people link to you, within three degrees.

There's no way to increase your own score by adding people. This score is specifically calculated by counting people who have *your* name, in *their* buddy list, and some sort of formula which weights their link to you, based on their own scores.

My score today is: 45989

For reference, here are a few other people I checked. Some are folks I know, and some are just random names I typed in:

Rattle: 3176
Gordon Walton: 40466
Kim Zetter: 4851
Llearyn: 36773
GMBreeland: 38804
Randal: 5435
Strick: 13136
Virgil: 17273
Grunch: 1608
Aestetix: 17502
Bryan: 13765
God: 77395
Bob: 157924

Funny that "Bob" is more popular than "God." ;)

Elonka :)

3127 here.....and I rarely turn it on.

The Three Degrees of AIMfight.com

"In order to lock out both copied games as well as homebrew software, including the GNU/Linux operating system, Microsoft built a chain of trust on the Xbox reaching from the hardware to the execution of game code, in order to avoid the infiltration of code that has not been authorized by Microsoft. The link between hardware and software in this chain of trust is the hidden "MCPX" boot ROM. The principles, the implementations and the security vulnerabilities of this 512 bytes ROM will be discussed in this article. "

'How to fit 3 bugs in 512 bytes of security code' - Xbox

I have reason to believe that at least one person already has this exploit, and it isn't just Mike Lynn. :)

Anyway, I have about as much faith in this guy's opinion as I do that this chick's boobs are real.

Redmond, Thanks for Nothing...

The password administration used to configure filters was on the back of the laptops. The students took advantage of it. NOW:

"The information we have received indicates that out of the ~300 boys in grades 9 - 12, 80-100 were involved with the "unauthorized access" and 1 out of every 20 boys in grades 9 to 11 was charged with a felony. This reflects a terrible system failure. The administration needs to admit their responsibility in the breakdown of security and discipline during the rollout of this experimental laptop program."

Young students face felony charges for computer trespass

The next installment of Jennifer's story about representing Mike is up.

This post has one key piece of information that explains definitively why Jennifer kicks so much ass. She is a Jersey Girl!

I also find it somewhat intriguing that both her cat and dog look very serious.

Update: The last installment is up now as well. Wired has picked up the story from Jennifer's blog and is running it.

Jennifer Granick | The Shout | Reverse Engineering Lawyer Code

Kudos to MemeStreams user Dagmar for putting together a post with breaks the technical aspects of Lynn's disclosure down in a way that non-technical people can understand. Be sure to click through and read his entire post.

Someone who takes the time to tie a few existing exploits together and utilize a technique similar to what Lynn discovered to make a worm that infects equipment, spends a small amount of time trying to infect other equipment, and then viciously puts the equipment out of commission in the aforementioned fashion, could in a very real sense turn off large chunks of the Internet.

No, I was not joking about the last sentence. If you work in an IT (Information Technology shop) take a moment to look around your office at all the very important equipment you have that just happens to have the Cisco logo on it. (I say "just happens to have the Cisco logo" because the root problem here has nothing to do with Cisco in particular, they're just the first company who have had this weakness uncovered--and as I said earlier, they were already in better shape than most.) Now imagine what would happen if that all that equipment just shut off, and you couldn't get it back up and running any time in the next twelve hours or so. You might think, "well, I will just go to their website and get the updates" but no, no... the Internet connection ran through one of the pieces of equipment that is now down so you can't do that. ...and even if it's not, there's a good chance that the people who your company connects to in order to reach the Internet has equipment that's has been effected, so you still can't get to the website with the updates you need. So you pick up the phone and call the manufacturer, and get to wait on hold for a very long time indeed, because many thousands of other people are just as stuck as you are. FedEx can get things out fast, but they're not nearly instantaneous, and hundreds of thousands of packages all marked "Red Tag, Highest Priority" at once are going to give them fits. Unless you know someone with magic powers of teleportation, you're looking at a very long wait for a package to be delivered by a truck that can fix your problem, and you're going to have to deal with all the upper-management types freaking out in the meantime. (Mind you, if you're lucky, your inter-office email system will also have been shut down by this, so they can only get to you through your cell phone and pager, which limits the number of panicked managers who can get to you at once.)

One message that Dagmar tries to get across in this, that should be spread and embraced, is that equipment (and software) mono-cultures are inherently dangerous. A post on the blog Art Of Noh... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Non-Technical Explanation of Mike Lynn's Disclosure

"Faced with declining literacy and the ever-growing distractions of the electronic media, faced with the fact that - Harry Potter fans aside - so few kids curl up with a book and read for pleasure anymore, what do we teachers do? We saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader."

How schools are destroying the joy of reading

I love this site, and check it out at least weekly. It is great for homeschoolers. The posters they have are great. I mainly look at this site for my son, but always find that I constantly learn new things here.

E-Naturalist Site - nice site with great information and a great design

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

This whole "we should teach different ideas" is retarded. There are ideas that life spawns from rotten meat. There are ideas that the US forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor because of an oil embargo. There are ideas that the earth is hollow.

The point is there are ideas for everything, and we don't teach them all. We have some criteria that concepts have to meet to be taught. In science classes, that criteria is the scientific method.

I quote the Intelligent Design article on Wikipedia:

Critics call ID religious dogma repackaged in an effort to return creationism into public school science classrooms and note that ID features notably as part of the campaign known as Teach the Controversy. The National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education assert that ID is not science, but creationism. While the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection has observable and repeatable facts to support it such as the process of mutations, gene flow, genetic drift, adaptation and speciation through natural selection, the "Intelligent Designer" in ID is neither observable nor repeatable. This violates the scientific requirement of falsifiability. ID violates Occam's Razor by postulating an entity or entities to explain something that may have a simpler and scientifically supportable explanation not involving unobservable help.

ID is *not* science. It should not be taught in a *science* class. Doing so undermines the entire point of science. Bush's complete misunderstanding of this is beyond excuse.

-------------------
I am glad that my child is homeschooled. We teach EVOLUTION and only evolution with no qualms about it. I don't understand why these ignorant fools can't appreciate the unbelievable wonder and beauty of evolution.

They stumble on the word THEORY. They somehow think that because we use the word THEORY in describing evolution, that it must be untested science without evidence.

The problem is that these fools don't even begin to understand the most basic science - the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Why would I want someone that lacks that fundamental understanding teaching science anyway?

Creationist have their right to see the world the way they do, as much as Nancy Reagan had the right to plan state affairs based on astrology. That's fine. I just want them to leave me and mine alone. They scare me- the creationists more than the astrologers!

CNN.com - Bush: Schools should teach 'intelligent design' - Aug 2, 2005