re: watched wargames last night with my kid

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Holy shite a 20 something Michael Madsen is in the first scene.

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Yeah, him and John Spencer (LA Law, West Wing) as the guys in the bunker.

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Wasn't he also in Star Wars flying an X Wing fighter at the end of the movie when they attack the Death Star?

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Do you mean Porkins? No. That was William Hootkins.

Hootkins probably best known for Porkins (Star Wars) and Major Eaton from Raiders.



Another big fat guy, though.

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gumbo2176

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I bet you're a thrill a minute at a cocktail party.

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I bet you're a thrill a minute at a cocktail party.

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What's the matter, using some logic made the movie less fascinating to you now that it has been described for what it is-----a teen flick where a high school geek saves the world from nuclear destruction by making the computer play tic-tac-toe.

Oh, and in my post I did say it was a pretty good flick, just pretty far fetched. Guess you missed that part-------------or was it selective editing?

Watched it this weekend also. The RC flying dinosaur was ahead of its time.

Still a great movie

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Still a great movie

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so hard to ever recreate that era..the heady 'pre internet' days of geeks with boutique computers and endless energy and creativity to crack into other systems.

i have my own hacking story which was pretty great...we had a computer lab in high school in 1983-84 that was 'networked' (the computers in the lab anyway) and i spent the whole semester fricking with other classmates..in particular this one guy who was a straight A+ student and thought he was God's gift to computers.

He lacked..'imagination'. We kept hacking into his computer and changing his programs around..never malicious..we didn't delete anything we just fricked with his stuff; messing it up in humorous ways like changing his ascii rocketship into a squirting penis

another time we setup a program that ran as soon as he logged on and it would log him off..and delete itself he would call the teacher over and they would go through his account and could find NOTHING.

he tried so many things to protect his account and "RA'd" to the teacher all year long and the teacher, who was pretty smart himself, adopted some of his ideas to 'protect' the computer accounts.

went so far as to change his password almost weekly.

but i had an ace in the hole...i had access to the admin software during the first week of school while the lab was still being setup; and when everyone was next door taking a test; i deliberately 'flunked' it and turned it in 10 minutes into class so i could 'go next door to the lab'.

the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one.

anyway, i went into the lab and started printing it out..THE ENTIRE CODE. about 10 minutes in i hear banging on the wall and i freaked out..i went next door and the computer teacher said "WhAT ARE YOU DOING IN THERE?" and i said "i'm just printing out some programs to get a head start on the coding for the year". he said "Ok, just hurry it up"



my accomplice was in the class still taking the test and i remember catching his eye briefly and he was about to pee himself.

modern problems, modern solutions.


anyway, the punchline is i stuffed the 10,000 line software code printout into my backpack, took it home and STUDIED IT until i found the key...15 lines of code that could be typed in and it would spit out the admin password.

so NOBODY could explain who was the 'ghost' in the machine. we certainly played it close to the vest and Mr. SmARTY PAntS KNew it was us so he had the teacher go into our accounts every day and look for the code that let us in.

but it was in my noggin'.

all i needed was about 5 minutes (if that) to key it in, see the password, then delete it and jot the password down later.

poof no evidence, nothing the teacher could pin on us. ever.


*****


so the whole year he kept reformatting, changing, erasing, moving us to different computers, etc...NOBODY could figure out how the system kept getting hacked...because it was all in my head.

so on the last day of school, i took that page out of my notebook that had every single password the teacher used for the entire year (it was a long arse list!) and i slipped it under the door to his office.

good ol Mr. Peske. I should see if he's still alive and fill him in on how we did it. to this day he's probably still wondering.

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and Midnight Madness (Michael J. Fox's film debut, which also featured Paul Reubens in a prototype of what would become the PeeWee Herman character)

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One of my earliest memories of watching a movie on HBO, loved it. "Eeeee-gypt? Eeeee-aster? Easter egg, Easter bunny!" "FAGGA BEEFE??"

Our high school physics class got to go tour the Bossier Strategic Air Command in 1976. While we were there the Alaska base sent us a message.welcoming us. They printed it out with an ink jet printer. I brought it home and took it off to college..