*** SPOILER ALERT ***

It seems every review I read sings the praises of the new Star Wars movie, and while I definitely enjoyed it, I have some major gripes. Here are the main ones:

First of all, I hated the acting; it caused me pain. I also thought many of the scenes were quite cheesy — especially a lot of the Emperor ones.

Worst of all for me, however, was Anakin’s character. The guy playing him is a fcktard to rule all fcktards. He, along with the script, completely ruined the transition of Anakin to Vader. Consider the fact that Anakin was best buddies and mostly a good guy like 10 minutes before he starts dicing through children that he’s known and cared for for most of their lives. And all this happened as a result of a conversation with the Emperor — not a blast of energy, not a drug, not a hypnosis session — nothing. Just an order to go and kill the Jedi (to include his best friend and a bunch of kids). I just can’t buy it.

I didn’t see the struggle that should have come with this transition, and the struggle that they tried to show was shallow and poorly-placed in my view. Him thinking, “Jedi…bad…” doesn’t equate to the struggle of having to kill the people closest to him — especially since like a day before he was about to strike down the emperor after finding out he was the Sith lord. It just doesn’t add up.

I don’t think the story is the problem though; the story is probably one of the coolest ever; it’s the execution that got me. It could have been done far better if the script was different, but I’m willing to grant that the book may be far superior due to time constraints in the movie. I mean look at Natalie Portman…she is a badass actress in everything she’s been in. In this movie she was quite lackluster — even bad. The romance scenes were downright B-movie stuff. Seriously, her saying “Hold me, Anakin. Hold me like you did on Naboo.” was one of the worst lines I’ve ever heard. I didn’t even like Sam Jackson’s parts; they were dull and lifeless — again, all due to the script , not the actors.

Oh well, it was still an awesome movie, and I’ll definitely be seeing it again. Perhaps I’ll enjoy it more the next few times I see it.

“Is Windows cheaper to patch than open source software? Of course this Microsoft-commissioned report thinks so …”

I’d like to be able to tell you more about this article, but that’s where I stopped reading.

This would be nice:

HKLM\Software\AllowBufferOverflows=no (REG_SZ)

Well, it seems that I now have a true 6Mb connection to the Internet — proof that I am in favor with the Gods. In case you’re wondering, that yields roughly 730KB/sec downloads.

Uh…yeah.

This is too much — Bruce Schneier posted a story about an Ohio sting operation that had a female intern with the U.S. Marshals using a fake I.D. during the bust. Problem is, it wasn’t a fake I.D. — it was someone else’s.

Here’s a snip from Bruce’s post on the matter:

“In an Ohio sting operation at a strip bar, a 22-year-old student intern with the United States Marshals Service was given a fake identity so she could work undercover at the club. But instead of giving her a fabricated identity, the police gave her the identity of another woman living in another Ohio city. And they didn’t tell the other woman. Oddly enough, this is legal. According to Ohio’s identity theft law, the police are allowed to do it. Identity theft cannot be prosecuted if: “The person or entity using the personal identifying information is a law enforcement agency, authorized fraud personnel, or a representative of or attorney for a law enforcement agency or authorized fraud personnel and is using the personal identifying information in a bona fide investigation, an information security evaluation, a pretext calling evaluation, or a similar matter.”

Bruce Schneier talked recently in his blog about the fact that many security and safety measures that mean well have unforseen, often dangerous results.

The example given involves the installation of traffic cameras in England that take a picture of vehicles that go over 80mph. Well, what’s happening is that the drivers, knowing what the limit is, are setting their cruise controls to 79mph on that particular stretch of road.

“In response to automated speedtraps, drivers are adopting the obvious tactic of driving just below the trigger speed for the cameras, presumably on cruise control. So instead of cars on the road traveling at a spectrum of speeds with reasonable gaps between them, we are seeing “pelotons” of cars traveling closely bunched together at the same high speed, presenting unfamiliar hazards to each other and to law-abiding slower road-users.”

This Wired piece supports a thought that I’ve had for sometime about the failing of memory with age.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is some degree of failure as we age, but I think the reason people in their 30’s and 40’s who have busy lives have bad memories may be more a function of how much crap they have on their plate than their memory simply not being as good as it was 10 years ago.

My thing is that as a child there’s not much to remember, and as such the little things process easily and quickly. As an adult — especially in a field like IT or the medical profession — there are countless things to keep in your head at all times. It’s downright crowded up there.

So, my feeling is that things are given priorities somehow; things that are deemed trivial get very little resources so that the “important” things can remain intact. So when the stressed out IT person freaks out at not being able to remember the name of a cereal they used to eat, the first thing that comes to mind is, “I would have been able to remember that easily 5 years ago…”

Well, my thing is that it’s quite likely that the life of said person was likely quite a bit less complex back then. Perhaps this is the reason for poor memory through the 30s and 40s?

There’s a new Firefox extension out there called Greasemonkey, and it’s worth taking a long, hard look at.

Essentially, what it does is rewrite certain websites you visit based on downloadable scripts. Here’s a perfect example via a clip out of a recent Wired article:

“There’s a script targeting Amazon pages that lets you know if a book you are looking at on Amazon is available at your local library,” Pilgrim said. “Think about that. That’s amazing, and it happens automatically. You configure it once for your library, and Greasemonkey goes and gets the data.”

The word of the day is polyglot.

/. is running a story on the upcoming OpenBSD Hackathon, and I thought it important to point out what the term “Hack” means — not only in this case, but in any case where the term is properly used.

Here’s a piece of the article text — to give you a hint:

“Past OpenBSD hackathons have seen the introduction of SMP support, support for the amd64 architecture, and many other significant advances. What big advance will come out of the 2005 hackathon is yet to be seen.”

This is significant. Note the words the introduction of; this means that something was created there — as in, building new things. It’s important that this not be confused with digital trespassing, vandalism, or any other sort of hooliganism.

Hacking is using creativity to build new things that solve problems. It’s not (in my view) negative in any way. In fact I think “hacking” is quite positive. It means exploring and being creative about how one looks at the world and solves problems. We need more hackers.

Crackers, on the other hand, range from unpopular, script-kiddie posers to elite and highly professional criminals. The key here isn’t the skill level of the individual — it’s the motives.

Eric Raymond said it best when he said, “Hackers build things; crackers break them.” This is the definition that I like best, and I’m happy to see it used this way for a change.