Alternate.org

So, The Chooch tells me that He-Man and Transformers figures have been re-released. I was a huge He-Man fan (ahem) when I was like 4 years old. And surprisingly enough, I hardly recognize any of those figures, except for TrapJaw, because he had a rad name and interchangeable claw-things. And Transformers are over-rated, I think.

So, well, Radiohead uses Apple stuff… Didn’t we already know this?


Oh well, Anyway, it’s a cool article.

If you dig nostalgia at all, then you should enjoy this picture (and article) a great deal. Bear in mind that no matter how great the story is, it will never be as cool as the old Nintendo game.

Chunk looks *ahem* super, doesn’t he?

“The draft protocol would put national security and confidential business information at risk,”

If any of you questioned whether Bush was tightly in tow of the business community, his reasoning for rejecting the proposal to enforce the germ warfare treaty should erase all doubt.

Have you heard about this Sklyarov / Adobe / EFF thing? As it turns out, basically, Adobe’s encrypted PDF and eBook software is crap, and easily cracked. So at DefCon, Dmitry Sklyarov gave a little speech on how easy it was to crack it, and expressed distress that Adobe charges customers thousands of dollars to use it. He didn’t release his cracking software, he just explained it and pointed out the holes in Adobe’s security. Now, any self-respecting software company would hire this guy in a second, and make him Vice President of Keeping it Real, but no, Adobe decides to send the Feds after him and have him sent to prison. Cool. So the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) met with Adobe this week and the software giant has backed down on their charges, with Dmitry’s release in the hands of the Federal Govt. One of the EFF’s main points was that Adobe abused the DMCA and used it to arrest someone in a situation that it has no real control over. I think it’s pretty sad when companies suppress people like this instead of giving them the credit they deserve. I mean, the point is that the higher-ups at Adobe don’t know a god-damn thing about software or how it works, and so when a VP says ‘There’s this guy, and he cracked our software, and now he’s telling people that our copy-protection scheme sucks,’ and their knee-jerk response is to get them thrown in prison, because they don’t understand 2 things: 1) The hacker actually did something good for Adobe, because if they listened to him and fixed their software, Adobe’s customers would learn of it and be even more eager to buy it and 2) Bad software is something that needs to be FIXED, not ignored.

From the ‘Things don’t ever change, do they?’ department… I sort of unoffically took this week off, as my projects all seemed to be in a waiting period or didn’t need to be started for a few days. So what did I do with me semi-time off, the first I’ve had since, ahem, October of last year? Well, I found myself re-enamored with the whole ’emulation’ syndrome.. you know, using an app called an emulator to play games that you have no business playing on a 32bit processor and a 32mb video card… Games like.. Super Mario Bros 1, 2, and 3… Super Dodge Ball, Castlevania, Baseball Stars, Casino Kid, Super Mario World, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, Blades of Steel, California Games… the list goes on and on. And what I noticed? I instinctively thought of calling up scott and asking him where the ‘magic fairy who gives you a better boomerang’ was in Link to the Past.. I found myself still adept at Captain Skyhawk, but atrocious at Starfox, which was to be expected. Things never really do change, but I can still kick all your asses at Quake 3 Arena, no matter how many times my cousins beat me 20-0 at Baseball Stars.