From time to time I mention the Japanese and the unique differences they have compared to us (most aren't obese for instance). From time to time I also mention finding articles related to anime such a life-size Gundam or the Argo.

This time, I have come across something so disturbing (in a good way) that it truly boggles the mind. I'm sure you are all familiar with anime and the characters therein. If not by name, you can at least recognize when you see an anime-drawn character. In particular, the women of anime are drawn as having HUGE round eyes (except if they're evil in which case the almond shape persists), thin, lithe bodies and possibly lots of bouncy hair.

In that regard, I give you a real anime woman! No, not the first picture, the second. And third. And fourth. And so on. The main page for her is http://blog.crooz.jp/xx1xx/

So who is she? Believe it or not, she works at the Wakatsuki Chinatsu concession in the teen paradise of Shibuya 109. At least according to this article from whence I came across her blog.

Seriously, does she or does she not look EXACTLY like the women of anime (including the adult variety)?

I don't read kanji but if you hover of the various links, you can at least get an idea of where you're going. Start below the Hair Nail link to see the articles and the associated pictures.

As a rule, I don't watch commercials. As soon as I see one, I change the channel. However, there are a few that I do watch and with the sequel to Tron coming out, I've noticed a few promoting the movie.

Let me say straight away that if the commercials are representative of the movie, the remake is a failure. With the exception of blue and red lighting around the edge of things, everything I've seen leads me to believe this is going to be one big shitfest of explosions interspersed with some touchy-feely scenes (though one apparently doesn't get to touch Olivia Wilde).

And speaking of Olivia, the few words I've heard her speak are delivered in as bland a style as is possible. There doesn't seem to be any emotion behind her words.

While the first movie was ground breaking, this one seems to another in a long line of movies which takes a perfectly good story and tramples the lineage into dust. I'm looking at you Transformers. >:

Based solely on the commercials, I fail to see one redeeming reason to watch it unless it comes out on television.

Depending on your definition of "real". For those of you who watched the original broadcast series, StarBlazers was probably the first anime you saw. You watched as they fired the Wave Motion Gun for the first time and saw it obliterate a floating island. You held your breath as the relentless assault of the Gamalons threatened to destroy them. Your eyes, like mine, were probably as big as saucers as they found out they had to go into the Gamalon homeworld and take them out before they could acquire the device from Trelana.*

Now, for a mere $277, you can own The Argo. Well, a 1:625 scale model at least. One thing it has going for it is that it's metal, not plastic. Judging by the picture, it seems to be very true to the series.

I still have a soft spot for the final confrontation of The Argo inside planet Gamalon. When I decide to watch the show, I do so at night, lights off, volume up. The effect of The Argo's main guns firing every which way, the exploding bombs and rockets trying to find their mark, the sound of everything, is something that I thoroughly enjoy.

This ungrammatical ghost (either "win shakes" or "wins shake" would have been correct) was a clear duplicate of another story, so I knew it was doomed when I saw it.

Tea Party Win Shake Up Net Neutrality
Date: 11/04/2010
Original link: http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/04/1544211
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the tea-shake dept.

GovTechGuy found a story discussing the Republican and Tea Party congressional wins and what that means for Net Neutrality. Apparently most of the dems who signed the net neutrality pledge last week are now looking for work.

Installed a new PC for one of the higher ups and was going through the process of configuring the newest version of Firefox (3.6.11). I wasn't able to do a copy and paste into the new, empty, profile directory of the users profile so I had to create one from scratch. After that, I figured it was easier to just go to the four web sites and rebookmark them rather than trying to do a copy and paste.

However, in my travels, I found that the option to not submit crash reports would not stay unchecked. I would uncheck it, click OK then come back in and it was rechecked.

I don't want to submit crash reports from this user's PC. They wouldn't know what to do with them anyway.

So I went to look for the 3.6.10 version. Found the ftp link but get this server message:

ISA Server: extended error message :

200 Switching to Binary mode.
200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
550 Permission denied.
ï½

If one follows Mozilla's own directions on how to get an older version, you can't (at least I can't). Add in the fact that a simple checkbox won't stay unchecked and that when you delete some of the extraneous entries in the bookmark directory you are still left with lines, one begins to wonder if Taco and Company are giving advice to the Mozilla folks.

No, I'm not submitting a bug report. I'm not creating ANOTHER account somewhere just to let them know. This is my bug report. Anyone with connections or who has an account can submit it for me.

And more P.S. Taco

Your journal system still sucks. Having to turn on javascript is asinine. Get off yours and drop this nonsense!

Everyone reading this should be aware of what the Nigerian 419 Scam is all about. You've probably received one or two of them (I've only ever received one). As more and more people wise up (or the older ones die off, depending on your point of view), these scams, while still raking in millions, are becoming less and less effective.

So, in good Evolutionary style, those who want to make you part with your money have come up with their newest ploy. I give you, the Enron letter.

P.S. You still haven't fixed the glitch in your Journal system, Taco. One still has to enable javascript to write a title. I deal with incompetency, stupidity and laziness from my co-workers on a daily basis. I shouldn't have to deal with it on a web site which is supposedly run by folks in the know.

My guess is that this Monday-morning submission turned out to be a duplicate of something that came in over the weekend. But I haven't had a chance to check.

BSA Inflate Their Piracy Losses
Date: 09/20/2010
Original link: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/09/20/1525220
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the thats-just-marketing dept.

superapecommando noted that Glyn Moody reckons
"The IDC numbers turn out to be reasonable enough, the conclusions drawn from them are not. Reducing software piracy will not magically conjure up those hundreds of billions of dollars of economic growth that the BSA invokes, or create huge numbers of new jobs: it will simply move the money around â" in fact, it will send more of it outside local economies to the US, and reduce the local employment. And it certainly won't do anything to ameliorate the quotidian problems of poorly-written software..."

Ok, so it's not really named after me, but I was looking for a decent pizza place in lower Manhattan (if you know of any, let me know) and happened to see the following name at 55 Broad Street:

Wombat Financial Software

Funny how those things come about, isn't it?

And what is it with this javascript requirement to write in the journal. Come on Taco, quit being like your proverbial namesake (shitty).

I just received mail notification that a fellow user has bought me a gift subscription to slashdot. I'm already friends/fans with the person but his email address isn't visible so I can't thank the person off-/. (wimp, change your privacy settings and deal with the spam! :P )
 
Not sure what I did to deserve it, but I thank you!
 

First, let me say that /. is becoming more and more annoying as it tries to be on the cutting edge of shit for its web design. I had to turn on javascript to write this as not having it turned on wouldn't let me type anything.

With that little bit out of the way, nearly everyone I told the following piece about me seems shocked, especially when it is revealed that I am employed in the IT field. What is so shocking that people's mouths fall to ground in surprise? What is so unbelievable that they have to call their friends to spread the news?

I don't own a cell phone. Just as some on here will say they don't have cable, I don't own a cell phone. My job doesn't require it, nor do I want or need one. I don't want people to be able to contact me at a moment's notice. I most certainly don't people to be able to track me down.

And I'm not the only one. As the following article relates, many people, of both high and low stature, don't have cell phones. And it's not because they're luddites. They don't have one because they don't need one. Which is something I have said all along. The number of people who truly need a cell phone is insignificant compared to those who own one (or more) phones. Besides, as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of La Verne says in the article, "He says he has never overheard a cell conversation that wasn't banal."

So when you find out someone doesn't own a cell phone, don't think they're living in a backwards mentality. Think of them as being on the cutting edge of being a power broker.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38646066/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/

I'm not talking about some reproduction made in the basement of an agoraphobic teenager. No, I'm talking life-size, possibly functional, Gundams. You know, the kind that go bang and boom as they destroy things.

For your viewing pleasure: Gundam!

I was expecting this one to resurface -- it disappeared right about the time Slashdot posted a big political story -- but it hasn't come back yet. I'm guessing it's a dupe of a story over the weekend, but I haven't had time to go searching.

Your Rights Online: UK Government Refuses To Ditch IE6
Date: 08/02/2010
Orig link: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/08/02/169202
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the good-plan-guys dept.

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes
"The UK government has said it will not upgrade its departments computers from Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 because it would not be 'cost-effective'. A recent online petition posted to Number10.gov.uk received 6,223 signatures that called for the 'Prime Minister to encourage government departments to upgrade away from Internet Explorer 6' due to its alleged vulnerability to attack, and because it requires web developers to specially craft sites to support the browser. This raises the question, what is the cost of an upgrade compared to a massive security breach?"

This one was funny -- it was in red on the front page at the same time as the article that eventually posted for real, Talk On Chinese Cyber Army Pulled From Black Hat. Oops!

Black Hat Talk On China Cyber Army Pulled
Date: 07/15/2010
Orig link: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/07/15/1529241
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the nobody-ever-talks-about-the-purple-hats dept.

itwbennett writes
"A talk that would have given conference attendees a unique profile of China's secretive government-sponsored hacking efforts has been pulled from the Black Hat schedule. Wayne Huang, one of the presenters of the talk and CTO with Taiwanese security vendor Armorize, said that he decided to pull the talk after vetting it with several organizations that had contributed intelligence and getting pressure from several places, both in Taiwan and in China. Huang wouldn't say who complained or why, but he said that by pulling the talk Armorize will be able to maintain its good relations with the Asian security community. 'We ran the materials by some key people and they were not happy with it,' he said."

I simply can't believe how awful Windows is, and (unfortunately) how gullible I am. [my laptop] came loaded with Vista Business, and a "fallback" DVD for XP Professional. I tried running Vista on it. I really tried, I really wanted it to work, and I said exactly that in my blog here. But it didn't. Every time I tried it, things started out looking promising, and after a month or two it would go belly-up. Three or four times I reloaded Vista from scratch and tried again, hoping that the latest Microsoft Updates would fix it. Eventually I gave up, reloaded one last time with XP Professional, and ran that with no problem for two years.

A month or so ago, through my own carelessness, I wiped the disk on this laptop. I had to reload everything from scratch, so (like a fool) I thought well, Vista SP2 is out, everyone says that it is "all fixed up now and works great, and reliably", so I'll try that again. I loaded Vista from scratch, added all the updates to SP2 and beyond, and I've been running it that way since. Until today. ... Windows is unreliable garbage, it always has been, it always will be, and if you use it you should be willing to accept that risk. I am no longer willing to accept that risk, even part-time as a secondary operating system on this laptop. Windows is gone, it has puked all over its disk for the last time here, and I will not reload it. I am in the process of transferring the data to one of the Linux partitions - yes, Linux is quite happy to read the partition that Windows says is hopelessly corrupted.

Please, PLEASE, unless you want to hear a very long string of words that I learned during my military service, do NOT tell me that the "solution" to this problem is to give Microsoft even more money and "upgrade" to Windows 7. ... if Vista is not stable, or reliable, then Microsoft should withdraw it and either offer a free "upgrade" to Windows 7 or offer a refund of the purchase cost. ... I absolutely don't believe the Windows 7 is any better, any more stable or any more reliable than Vista. They come from Microsoft, they are utter garbage...

This is a sign of things to come for Windows. Windows 7 was predictably just as bad as Vista was. People no longer are falling for Microsoft's promises of "this version fixes everything."