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(Jon sez:)

Your Writer: Jon Kilgannon This is a problem in the real world. It's called shoulder surfing, in which a miscreant will watch over someone's shoulder while he or she types in a PIN, phone number, password, or other information which one would prefer was kept secret. This is the sort of things real hackers do (as opposed to what you see in the movies, where they guess a few passwords and then yell "I'm in!" to the leader of the infiltration team).

Delphic, for those who were wondering, means obscurely prophetic and refers to the ancient Oracle at Delphi, where the Greeks would go to hear the prophecies of the gods. Manny is telling Ben to stop being so annoyingly vague about his plans.

(Mark sez:)

Your Artist: Mark Sachs Wow, are you people in for a treat! Today I not only fixed the the archive page display problems in Mozilla Firefox but also went back and added all of the missing "Mark sez" and "Jon sez" columns, which Jon had been saving through his usual foresight, to the archives. Yes, you heard right -- you can now leaf through right back to the beginning of MoS and read all our blathering right from the start. Reading my old columns really opened my eyes as to how many times I re-use the same shticks:

  • Cracking a lame joke and then going "ZING! Thank you!"
  • Mumbling something about how sleepy I am instead of writing anything coherent.
  • Recommending Vernor Vinge's novels.
  • Doing that "New character enter! Oh! Who is this!!" Firesign Theater riff.
  • Making an incredibly oblique reference to how hot one of the female characters is.

Gawd, I must be annoying to be around all the time. But anyway, if you can still stomach the idea, please enjoy. Going back to the archive page issue, we're now looking good under both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. However, I'm given to understand there's other web browsers out there, such as Safari and Opera. If there are any visual glitches when using these browsers, let us know. Might as well make a clean sweep of things here.

Finally: Don't be shocked by billboards on the Moon. All fundamental aspects of being human will travel with us to the planets and stars, and that includes looking out at Buzz Aldrin's "magnificent desolation" and deciding to put an ad in front of it. I don't know what "flin" is but it's probably something that I never get to do.