When you get down to it, the problem most people seem to have with Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s for girls. Even worse — it’s “mommy porn”, porn for mommies, for older women to read and get excited about, and that dangerous nonsense really needs to be stopped right now. Everyone knows that the only women who are allowed to actually have sexuality are slender, high-breasted twenty-one year old virgins — rather like, it has to be said, the heroine of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Laurie Penny, “In defence of Fifty Shades of Grey”, New Statesman, 2012-07-08
July 12, 2012
QotD: The real reasons for criticizing Fifty Shades of Grey
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What happens when updates don’t
Stopped for lunch, let Windows Update reboot my laptop. It's been saying "Preparing to configure Windows. Do not turn off" for last 40 mins
— Nicholas Russon (@nrusson) July 12, 2012
Anyone else have extremely long reboot after the latest Microsoft patch?
— Nicholas Russon (@nrusson) July 12, 2012
Over an hour, still no change. I have to assume that the computer has locked up at exactly the worst moment for it to do so: if I power it down, I’m risking it not being able to reboot.
My desktop (the one I’m using to update this blog post) had the same Microsoft patch applied, but took only a few minutes to reboot successfully. Can’t draw any absolute conclusions from this: although both machines are running Windows 7, they’re not the same version. The laptop is on Windows 7 Home Premium, and the desktop is running Windows 7 Professional.
Suggestions are welcome in the comments…
Update: Thanks to some suggestions from a much more technical person than me, I eventually persuaded the laptop to reject the Windows Update changes and revert back to the previous state. Now, of course, Windows Update is all up in my face about needing to apply some urgent patches… I’ll apply them one at a time (which will be a pain as each of them likely requires a reboot) until I find the one that was causing the freeze-up. It’s also possible that applying them one at a time may prevent the lock-up from happening.
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Säkerhetsbloggen does some preliminary analysis of Yahoo’s 453,000 leaked passwords
As we’ve noticed before, there are lots of really, really bad passwords in use:
Recently, Ars Technica reported about a leak by “D33ds Company” of more than 450.000 plain-text accounts from a Yahoo service, which is suspected to be Yahoo Voice.
Since all the accounts are in plain-text, anyone with an account present in the leak which also has the same password on other sites (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc), should assume that someone has accessed their account.
[. . .]
Total entries = 442773 Total unique entries = 342478 Top 10 passwords 123456 = 1666 (0.38%) password = 780 (0.18%) welcome = 436 (0.1%) ninja = 333 (0.08%) abc123 = 250 (0.06%) 123456789 = 222 (0.05%) 12345678 = 208 (0.05%) sunshine = 205 (0.05%) princess = 202 (0.05%) qwerty = 172 (0.04%)
Other bits of password-related idiocy are here.
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JourneyQuest S2E1: An Epic?
If you’re coming in at the middle, you can start from season 1, episode 1.
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Firefly 10th anniversary TV special to air in November
James Hibberd has the details:
To celebrate the cult-favorite sci-fi drama’s 10th anniversary, Science Channel is shooting a new one-hour special chronicling the Firefly cast reunion at Comic-Con this week.
The special — titled Browncoats Unite — will include footage from Friday’s reunion panel, featuring several members of the original team including star Nathan Fillion and creator Joss Whedon. Plus, the cast is shooting an in-depth behind-the-scenes roundtable interview that will dive deeper into burning fan questions about the beloved series. Both the panel and the roundtable will be moderated by Entertainment Weekly‘s own Jeff Jensen.
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The newest literary subgenre: the stream of unconsciousness
James Courter in the Wall Street Journal:
Is it true that college students today are unprepared and unmotivated? That generalization does injustice to the numerous bright exceptions I saw in my 25 years of teaching composition to university freshmen. But in other cases the characterization is all too accurate.
One big problem is that so few students are readers. As an unfortunate result, they have erroneous, and sometimes hilarious, notions of how the written language represents what they hear. What emerged in their papers and emails was a sort of literary subgenre that I’ve come to think of as stream of unconsciousness.
Some of their most creative thinking was devoted to fashioning excuses for tardiness, skipping class entirely, and failure to complete assignments. One guy admitted that he had trouble getting into “the proper frame of mime” for an 8 a.m. class.
Then there were the two young men who missed class for having gotten on the wrong side of the law. They both emailed me, one to say that he had been charged with a “mister meaner,” the other with a “misdeminor.”
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