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"People from my country (UK) invented the computer."

Nope. The first computer as a programmable, general-purpose calculation machine was build in 1941 by Konrad Zuse.
Of course, there were numerous electronic or electromechanic calculation machines back then, but none of them was truely programmable.

Right now the New Age label describes an interest in relaxed lifestyles, spiritual exploration, holistic health, advanced technologies, multiculturalism, environmental consciousness, global peace, and an unearthing of the ancient mysteries. What it will be in the future, who knows?

However, if the source code does exist, and does give sufficient information to allow the decoding of the data-correction information, it means that, for anyone with a hacked GPS receiver, they can still get an accurate signal even if the US government turns the scrambling back on.

Anyway, Digital Convergence tried suing people who ran websites hosting drivers and software for the CueCat claiming IP violations, which led to a great deal of ill will toward them. On top of it all, their site was cracked, and customer information was leaked.

About.Com covers both here: http://it.about.com/compute/it/library/weekly/aa09 2300a.htm

I certainly a fan of the drink, but I'll the first to admit that it is most certainly physically addictive.

Harcore alcoholics get physical withdrawl symptons when the get off their regular patterns, including the DTs (delerium tremens - shakes), agitation, profuse sweating, hallucinations and seizures. See this or a local Google.com near you.

Perhaps you were thinking of marijuana, which has not been proven to be physically addictive (although, like anything, it can can psycological addiction, aka "I like doing it, and am not quiting").

If you're still not convinced, try swallowing the fact that one man (well arguably one man) evolved the language single-handedly (inventing hundreds of words still in use).

No, a bunch of self-appointed cultural superiors trying to look trendy on message boards don't make a legitimate quorum of language shifting legislators, but language never evolved that way. It evolves by people shoehorning new meanings into old words and hammering together new words for old meanings.

"Gibberish or Yiddish? You decide."
-the Pedro Picasso

--

What does the zygote have that the two gametes did not have a moment before?

Human life. A soul. The right to live. Take your pick.... It is not legal to murder someone...

Metabolism does not a human being make; neither does the oft-cited beating heart. A body stops being a human being under the law when it's brain-dead. A zygote has no brain, nor even any neurons. It can't think, feel, or even sense other than by reacting to chemicals at the cellular level. When you try to claim the label of "human being" for something so insignificant, you demean humanity.

Simply because a large proportion of zygotes die before birth has no bearing on my contention that life begins before such birth, indeed at conception.

What do you consider a human being? Just when, exactly, does a person become a person? I suggest that any answer besides "conception" bears serious problems.

This is a cop-out. People tell other people how to deal with such important issues all the time and many such things are legislated.

The "pro-life" movement is all about demanding public adherence to one particular ideal of piousness. If that's what you want, you can always go someplace where it's the law of the land; I suggest Afghanistan, or if you don't have the stomach for such required conformity you might try Iran.
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard

Actually, this is totally wrong. Price out some of the lower end Digidesign or MOTU cards/racks, then tell me how far that amount would have gotten you 25 years ago (adjusted for inflation, of course). The big difference is that your home recorded music can end up on CD sounding good rather than a self released cassette. Remember those?

Since, the "near death" of Apple a couple years ago, most major third party hardware and software is available for both Windows and Mac OS, with the same functionality. And yes, you do need third party hardware, even on the Mac. To name a few of the major players: Steinberg, Emagic, Opcode, Sonic Foundry, etc.

A short history on music production and distribution:
blah, blah, blah

This amusingly myopic regurgitation of dated rock critic wisdom is so terrible that I'll bring up only the worst points of it and then point you to some good resources so you can get a better handle on things.

The major problem with your "history" is that it neglects to mention black people until Public Enemy and NWA. Don't forget that the black community has played a major role in the invention of every American music, from jazz to rap to techno. Furthermore, they've had their own distribution channels in the past, and still do today.

While perhaps making for convenient comparisons to Britney, et al. , your explanation of the differences between AM/FM and 33/45 are grossly exagerated and, in some cases, incorrect. A lot of this has to do with the fact that you forgot black people, whose music is often more appropriately presented in a singles format.

Perhaps you best check out these places:
All Music
The Mechanic's Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes and CDs
Home Recording at About.com

Here is a cool history of that, along with some other stuff:

http://www.inventors.about.com/science/inventors/l ibrary/weekly/aa080499.htm
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Another trademark was stripped from Bayer in that treaty - Heroin.

See about.com's aspirin page.

-Isaac

You might browse lists of photo sharing sites, such as this one at AmateurPhoto.About.Com. I looked at two, and see that PhotoLoft.Com allows browser or email upload, and there's a "Store" for creating gifts which involve your photos.

I then looked for a similar page on Yahoo!: Yahoo! ... Photography and found that ImageStation.Com allows several upload methods and has a "Store" which can apparently make prints (based on the price list in the upper left corner). Plenty of unexplored sites there, although many are professionally oriented. And "Yahoo! Photos" requires IE so is useless.

Note that now that you have the name of several services which meet your needs, you could now search for pages which list all those sites and you might find indexes which list more. Yup, a MetaCrawler search of "Imagestation PhotoLoft" (omit the quotation marks) found several photo service index pages.

Stallman also highlights the term "copy protection". "The word 'protection' ... tries to disguise obstructionism and rampant power as an attempt to keep a program or book or song safe from harm. It is a propaganda word."

Exactly. Just like the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Germany.

Using words to create associations is a powerful and seductive form of lying, because it is often too subtle to be noticed by the listener. The word "protection" can activate a person's needs for security, which is a very primitive and base need, which operates prior to any rational thought.

This is most worrying (to me), as it moves IT debate away from rational arguments about function and specification, and into the realms of pre-rational belief, tribalism, herd mentality, fear, etc.

These subtle tricks can be exposed by asking; exactly WHO is being protected from WHAT? Under WHICH conditions?

To which a VALID answer might be: The existing large music distribution companies are protecting their current level of control of the existing distribution media.

ie. it has nothing to do with protecting the existing buyer of music media from any sort of 'danger' -- "Oh boy, I'm in danger of paying less for music... I'm really scared"

No. The internet is a new digital distribution medium. The knowledge producers, like scientists and artists, can ensure the survivability of information by storing it digitally and maintaining copies. Let us not forget that we have a problem with the deterioration of paper records:

"Within the last year, an increasing amount of publicity has been given to the fact that we are facing the loss of an enormous part of our historical, cultural, and scientific record because of the self-destruction of the acidic papers on which books and other publications have been printed since the mid-lath century.

Digital media can be used to great benefit exacltly because it can be copied.

But some power groups wish to "disable" this very feature intrinsic to it's nature.

Content 'protection'? More like knowledge destruction.

This chapter will self erase in 60 minutes...

I've never heard of that either. I always thought of consoles to be platforms (ps2, sega, nintendo, etc), not the type of game (side scroller as in mario, crash bandicoot, sonic, etc), but doing a quick google search comes up with this page at about.com which seems to list 'platform' games as the original poster describes. I guess I learn something everyday I read /.

The US House already has such a rule. An explanation of this rule can be found here. However the Senate has subjected itself to far fewer rules than the House. Therefore Senator Hatch is within the rules to suggest a stupid thing like this. If you want this changed, now is your chance. Matters of agenda rules are adopted individualy by each house of Congress. The rules for the upcoming Senate session have not been approved yet and won't be until sometime next month. Write to your Senator(s) now and express your concerns.

Make the salary of a congressman equal to the average salary of the American worker, and then we'll get the right kind of people in there.

It is interesting to note what the salaries of the US representatives are.

Rank-and-file Members of Congress (U.S. Senators and Representatives) are paid a base salary of $136,673 annually. They are also allowed to make an additional maximum 15 percent of their salary ($20,500) from outside sources, like speaking, legal practice and consulting. In addition, they are allowed unlimited income from book royalties.

Listeners from around the Twin Cities simply visited our homepage at 2000flushes.com, uploaded their programming in MP3 form, and listened as it was automatically broadcast over 94.1 FM just minutes later. It was a blast!

We got more than just music. We got original programming, from mock political ads making George Bush out to be a whiny coke fiend, to people shouting out their own rants, to people making up their own station IDs.

If the NAB says there's no room for microstations on the dial, then we think they must mean they want to turn over airtime on THEIR stations for the public to use. It's the only other way to address the fact that the airwaves BELONG to the public, and yet the public has absolutely NO access to them.

(We believe automated public access would be great for Low Power Radio stations, too, but if the NAB doesn't... well, they had their chance!:)

For more info: Check out the article about us at pirateradio.about.com, the press release we sent out below, or our own website at 2000flushes.com (before corporate america tries to steal it back!).

-- Dan ZAP!
2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM
& Apocatopia Magazine (coming soon!)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Minneapolis, MN--November 20, 2000

The World's First Public Access Pirate Radio Station
Now Broadcasting Live on 94.1 FM

Mark the date on your calendar.

On November 6th, at 12:35 a.m., 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM burst onto the airwaveswith a totally new 24-hour-a-day format where the listeners are the broadcasters.

Using an Internet application of their own design, 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio now enables any citizen to access the airwaves. Potential broadcasters simply visit the station website at www.2000flushes.com, upload any audio in MP3 format, tune to 94.1 FM, and listen as it is automatically broadcast to the entire Twin Cities just minutes later. This makes 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM the first totally automated public access radio resource in the world.

The 2000 Flushes website has received thousands of hits as listeners scramble to upload their own spoken word and music programming before the station is shut down. Global Household Brands, manufacturer of 2000 Flushes Toilet Bowl Cleaner, has initiated action to obtain the 2000flushes.com domain, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has already discovered the 2000 Flushes signal and is closing in fast.

2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM is a rallying cry against paradoxical FCC policy which claims to recognize the broadcast spectrum as a public resource while blocking public access to this medium and selling FM station licenses for millions of dollars to corporations which already own dozens of stations in other markets. The argument traditionally advanced for this system of corporate media dominance is that if everyone operated their own radio or television station, there would be so much interference that nobody would be heard.

The 2000 Flushes concept demonstrates a new working model where listeners can SHARE time on existing stations. Realizing the potential for globalizing this new way of accessing the airwaves, 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio 94.1 FM has spun off the application division into another, separate entity, Memeradio (www.memeradio.com), which will be working to develop and spread this technology to other stations, and to lobby the FCC and the United States Congress for broadcast change.

"This could crack the world open," said one Memeradio staffer. "You ain't heard nothin' yet."

Contact 2000 Flushes Pirate Radio and Memeradio at: flushradio@yahoo.com

Thanks to everyone who uploaded, and we'll be back on the air soon!

Take, for example, the inventor of the Java Programming Language, Patrick Naughton

It's also interesting how most people associated with Java are pedophiles, too!

A recent e-mail forward to me read:

"Please sign this petition so we don't lose an irreplaceable resource....NPR On NPR's Morning Edition last week, Nina Tottenberg said that if the Supreme Court supports Congress, it is in effect the end of the National Public Radio (NPR), NEA & the Public Broadcasting System(PBS). PBS, NPR and the arts are facing major cutbacks in funding. In spite of the efforts of each station to reduce spending costs and stream line their services, some government officials believe that the funding currently going to these programs is too large a portion of funding for something which is seen as not worthwhile."

My response? NPR is not an irreplacable resource.

Twenty one years ago, National Public Radio petitioned the FCC to stop accepting applications for the low-power Educational License class. WMUC in College Park was one of the last stations to get a ten watt FM radio license under this plan, but this was a year before the UMBC campus (my school) even established a radio station.

Because of these rules that NPR brought about, UMBC cannot get a license under 1000 watts, and due to the large amount of high-power corporate radio saturation in this area, no higher-powered licenses are available.

National Public Radio has only their own interests in mind, not the interests of smaller communities and people who still want localized, non-corporate free radio.

Forget about NPR. Support your local communities and your universities by advocating for LPFM.

For more information, see the following sites:
Pirate/Free Radio on About.Com
Prometheus Radio Project
Media Democracy Now

And my own letters to the Senators, here and here.

PS: In the interests of full disclosure, this is a revised version of something I posted earlier to my my own web page.

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• GMD ifarchive of new and old interactive games
• Frotz, infocom game player for all machines (including Windows and Linux)
• Nitfol, an even better infocom game player
• About.com guide to IF
• unofficial Infocom page with some freebie Zork downloads
• Most of the Infocom games (Amiga games site, but the data files work on all platforms with Frotz)

The RCA 77DX ribbon mic is a little more common than the old 44's. Even though the ones on the desks of Larry King and David Letterman are replicas, you can still find them used by recording engineers to pull off the mid-side recording technique.

Well when you use wording like "accident" or "monkey mutants", your opinion of evolution clearly shows through. I could also decide that the incredible odds against our showing up are miracle enough, and that I wouldn't want to squander such a rare opportunity by leading the next Nazi revolution or destroying the environment.

You seem to have the naive view that morality can only exist when based upon religion. Moreover, your particular religion.

Lest you object to the idea of athiestic morality, here's a site that should give you plenty to chew on.


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Mr. Granade's description of the term "warez" and similar terms come across as more impartial and informative than the current Jargon File entry.

Kudos to Mr. Granade for the work.

Mr. Granade's description of the term "warez" and similar terms come across as more impartial and informative than the current Jargon File entry.

Kudos to Mr. Granade for the work.

Also do a search on /. for nanotube.

The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind;
The water has no mind to retain their image.

Steve Mann just posted mega Twiddler2 pictures taken from his head-cam.

The link between sleeplessness and memory loss has always been intuitively known for eons. We've also known for quite some time that sleeplessness takes a toll on the workforce. According to some reports, 51% of Americans report that sleeplessness interferes with their productivity. People are going to bed late and failing to get up early, and not surprisingly, (according to that same source) a third of the population wishes they could nap on the job (and surprisingly, 16% of employers "endorse naps on the job" -- I wish I had that sort of employer).

Unfortunately, the outlook isn't good for people who fail to get their eight or so hours of sleep per night. Sleeplessness increases stress and raises bloodpressure (which can increase heart attacks), can precipitate ulcers, and can even promote alzhe ime rs. Sadly, very techies and engineers who are designing the technology that will preserve more information in the next few years than has been recorded in the history of humanity won't "be around" to see it happen, as debilitating diseases rob them of the ability to perceive the world they have constructed. What begins with immediate memory loss will ultimately be cemented in their old age.

The solution is clear. OSHA already has standards in place to prev ent RSI injuries in the workplace. Federal laws already exist governing how often and for how long truck drivers must sleep before returning to the road. New guidelines must be set for how much IT workers can be forced to work without sleep. In the footsteps of pioneers of the 10-hour work day of the nineteenth century, we must today pioneer the 8-hour sleep day. The safety of our IT infrastructure and ultimately of our fellow workers demands it.

The moon is going somewhere. It's getting further away from the earth by nearly 4 cm per year.

Was sent to Hawaii for a six month stint. Perfect weather all the time, the most laid back culture I've ever seen. The place to be if you are a outdoors person or an ocean lover. But the cost of living is even higher than Silicon Valley, the overflow of tourists can get irritating, and after a couple of months rock fever starts to set in.

After that, I was sent to the Silicon Hills of Austin, Texas. Lots of great, cheap food. Lots of great cheap anything, with the lowest cost of living of any place I've ever lived, and no state income tax to boot. A live music lovers paradise. But...it's still Texas. Outside of Austin, even within it, all the old Southern ways still hold true. Probably a bit disconcerning to people who weren't raised in that environment.

Got bored with Austin and finally packed my things to take a contract job in Silicon Valley. Lived in Mountain View, took the CalTrain to my job in San Mateo. Reverse commute, so traffic wasn't a problem. Loved being ecologically friendly, to the point where I could even take my bike on the trains and busses! Stanford, Fresh Choice, Frye's Electronics, Tony Romas, all within easy reach. Twas really like paradise to me, and in the six months I was there, I didn't have enough time to think of anything I didn't like about it.

But alas, I was destined to go to Japan. Lived in a Tokyo "apartment" about the size of a college dorm room, took trains where you could barely squeeze yourself on board, let alone a bike. The air is smoggy, the language and customs are strange, the double-standard between Japanese and foreigners will confound you til your dying days, and $5 for a cup of coffee (no refills) is the norm. But the people are friendly, and there's literally something for everybody. Japan is truely whatever you make of it, as long as you have the adventurous spirit to brave out the initial adjustment period. And it's here where I've dug my roots for the long haul.

I think I was going to make a point with all this, and it probably was something like this: Silicon Valley is a great place for a geek, but you really have to look at the whole picture of who you are and what you want out of live before you decide on the place where you will finally attach yourself.

You can also read many of the reviews at interactfiction.about.com.

Instead, we're so imbued with certain stereotypes that we even let The Phantom Menace's "midiclorians" - the "tiny organism that inhabit every cell in your body and channel the Force" - slip by with little complaint.

Erm...

"Midiclorians" are probably supposed to be somewhat similar to "mitochondria," part of our cells that "are semiautonomous in that they can divide and grow to make more of themselves. They also have their own DNA and ribosomes."

So, a movie that isn't TRYING to portray realistic physics by any stretch of the imagination is probably closer to the truth than many that ARE trying.

[Flame omitted]

1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all)
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm

2. Open source knowledge management systems
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion /

3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome .htm
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/

5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/

6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html

7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite .co m/edusims.html
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml

8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/enviro nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm

9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

10. Make corporations more accountable to human needs
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+penal ty&hl=en
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/

11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)

12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l

When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml

My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities.
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity .ht ml
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/

Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/

There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html ;

Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.

It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.

Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.

State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) County State Electoral Commissions oversee (in some places) Municipal Electoral Commissions. Voting technology can be specified at any level & are most often left to the local areas.

Results are generally tabulated & reported via telephone calls by designated offficials to specified telephone numbers using pre-agreed-upon passwords to identify themselves with call-backs to confirm authenticity. This also varies widely with computer-based systems becoming more common but the call/password/call-back is cheap, established & reliable.

The Press & Campaigns are notified via two methods - either they'll have a person on site at the Election Commission Office or they'll also use the call-in method using passwords.

Furthermore as most should know by now (it's a standard news story that gets dusted off & rerun every year) a vote for US President doesn't actually mean a vote-for-the-president. Instead there's an Electoral College making sure your Vader2000 write-ins don't go anywhere. Finally not all places use Simple Majority for local elections, for example Cambridge, Mass. uses Proportional Representation for it's local candidates.

Kasparov hasn't been the official FIDE world chess federation champion since 1993, when he broke with FIDE to play against the legitimate challenger Nigel Short.

Karpov regained the FIDE title in a 1993 match and lost it by not playing in the 1999 FIDE world championship. This matter is currently under legal dispute.

Kasparov did not play his legitimate challenger, Alexei Shirov, and attempted to set up a "championship" match with another leading player, Viswanathan Anand of India before hand-picking Kramnik as his challenger here.

However Kramnik is number 3 on the FIDE rating list and so was a worthy challenger, just not the man who deserved the match, Shirov.

One comment complained about not seeing any reviews of Blue Submarine #6. Since I've seen all four episodes, I figured I'd oblige.

Well, as everyone has said, the best thing about this anime is the soundtrack. If you have a 5.1 stereo system, you ought to be quite pleased. If you're lucky, you won't have any neighbors to bother and can crank the volume too.

The story is also fairly good. The first episode is almost all action and very little plot, but the arc picks up in the second and is in full swing through the third and fourth episodes.

The CG, while pretty impressive in its own right, doesn't always mesh well with the hand drawn stuff, especially when they cut from a CG scene to a hand-drawn version of the same scene.

One thing I especially liked about it is that they don't hand you the story on a platter. A lot of what you see isn't necessarily explicitly explained or is left for later. I thought it was nice to see a story that let me draw my own inferences about ancillary details.

I recommend that you see it from DVD, though. (Or, if you don't like the $20/episode cost, do as I did--watch a friend's copy.) To my knowledge, cable only transmits Dolby pro-logic, so people with 5.1 setups will miss a little of the soundscape. Also, according to the end of this about.com story, Toonami will be digitally editing out Hayami's cigarettes.

Governor Bush recognizes that our new economy is driven by the hard work and creativity of men and women in the private sector -- and not by Government bureaucrats.

The high tech industry is in great need of highly skilled workers. Too many Americans are unable to fill these jobs because they lack the necessary skills.

Are you sure?

We can credit W3C for being forward-looking, but I expect that CSSMP will go the way of WAP.

Perhaps not. I believe the point of this newly crafted subset of CSS2 is to provide a stable reference for useful functions that ought to be in mobile devices (meaning ultra-portable devices with limited display capabilities, and not meaning laptops which might have better display capabilities than many quite old desktop computer layouts with small VGA monitors which are still in use throughout the world).

This area is of keen interest to me, and after the long agony with simple HTML 3.2/4.0[1]+ and with CSS1 through the still not-quite-totally-there CSS2, any way to avoid any more standards wrangling will come as a great relief to those of us who have to actually do this stuff for a living. I'd imagine that XSLT 1.0+ engines will do much of the actual work, and it really helps to be able to more or less reuse all that existing work with a near-exact subset of CSS2.

Anyways, I'm back (in a few minutes, after a little more procrastination) to figuring out how to most efficiently split up parts of (simple for now) XML documents for later Java/Python XML/XSLT processing, while allowing simpler, more immediate PHP 4.0+ XML processing. Argh ....

Shamless for About.com's UrbanLegends site: http://urb anl egends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/blho ax.htm

They have complete writeups on both versions of it... US Version, Canadian Version. If you bother to take a look, notice how thses two e-mails are almost EXACTLY the same, save for the differneces in Canadian/American government references. At least these jokers aren't discriminating over political boundaries... I'm just surprised that the Canadian version doesn't have a French translation to go along with it...

Shamless for About.com's UrbanLegends site: http://urb anl egends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/blho ax.htm

They have complete writeups on both versions of it... US Version, Canadian Version. If you bother to take a look, notice how thses two e-mails are almost EXACTLY the same, save for the differneces in Canadian/American government references. At least these jokers aren't discriminating over political boundaries... I'm just surprised that the Canadian version doesn't have a French translation to go along with it...

Shamless for About.com's UrbanLegends site: http://urb anl egends.about.com/science/urbanlegends/library/blho ax.htm

They have complete writeups on both versions of it... US Version, Canadian Version. If you bother to take a look, notice how thses two e-mails are almost EXACTLY the same, save for the differneces in Canadian/American government references. At least these jokers aren't discriminating over political boundaries... I'm just surprised that the Canadian version doesn't have a French translation to go along with it...

restriction of individual rights and liberties, ...

You mean like the CDA and COPA ???

use by police of excessive force in dispersing peaceful demonstrators, ...

Recall Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, earlier this year ???

allows detention without charge for up to two years, renewable indefinitely, of anyone considered a potential threat to national security.

We do it here in the States too, if they're foreign nationals. . .

At least 27 prisoners of conscience were detained, ...

We seem to have bunches of those here, too.... I remember a story about a divorce custody case gone bad, the mother hid the child. . .and did several years in jail (basic details here )

My point ?? The US does the same stuff. . .

The golden era of VRML was when Netscape was the number one Web browser and Netscape's own VRML browser Live3D (nee WebFX, became Cosmo Player) was included in the Netscape bundle most people downloaded.

But within 6 months it had become clear that Netscape itself had gotten so big (and Cosmo Player and the others had gotten so big) that bundling the two together gave an unacceptably large download. And so, VRML browsers were unbundled.

Add in some serious Netscape bugs that grievously affected VRML browsers but didn't affect HTML page viewing much (and therefore were low priority on Netscape's fix list) and some absurd hopefulness that Ma and Pa Kettle wouldn't mind installing a plugin that (briefly) was regarded as being as easy to install as a DOS game, and the mindshare was lost.

And because VRML worlds weren't exactly ubiquitous themselves (building 3D is hard -- building effective 3D is real hard), a substantial number of people upgraded their Netscape installation (or replaced it with a MSIE installation) without ever knowing that they used to have built in VRML browsing capability and didn't any more.

This was the occasion for the first of what have become regular biennial events: The Death of VRML (film at 11).

X3D (sorta aka VRML 2001) is intended to break the ubiquity barrier. Trouble is, XML, on which it's based, is gaining mindshare at a pace that can optimistically be called glacial. Hell, how many web sites even have style sheets, for chrissakes?

VRML has got a couple of niches now. One of them, the "3D community" niche is a pretty big one -- three quarters of a million people have visited Cybertown long enough to sign up as members and a good percentage of them participate in the full 3D experience (informal observation). But in comparison to the 2D web, that's chicken feed.

An application that I think is really going to take off in another niche is Geo VRML where 3D geodata can be used to immeasurably improve the "you are there" experience of maps. Again, a niche, although it's one I'm personally excited about.

And there have been some other really brilliant applications of 3D on the Web that together make up a third niche. You can find a number of them on my site and on about.com -- Sandy's links are better maintained than mine. Let's call that niche "hardcore 3Dheads", among whom I number myself.

But in order for 3D to break out of those niches, it's got to be on every desktop. Huge plugins or controls to download and add to an already bloated Web browser won't do it.

Nor will a new and improved standard or pseudostandard for 3D on the Web. VRML 97 has got plenty of headroom. Not one 3D world in 20 uses the simple but (if I do say so myself) fairly effective color, lighting, and animation tricks in this dolphin, for example.

But until there's a way to get 3D into everybody's Web browser, or using some other means onto everybody's desktop, I'm not optimistic about the future of 3D on the web.

Actually, it's completely logical, considering that English, Japanese, and German are, in that order, the three most common languages found on Web pages and among Net users. French, Chinese (Mandarin), and Spanish are in positions four through six, though their specific order depends on which of these numbers you use.

I don't particularly want to cast myself in the role of a Netscape defender, but it's rather knee-jerk conspiracy-theorist to imply this is evil money-grubbing corporate pandering when there is a simple, logical explanation that fits the facts equally well. Namely, that Netscape is devoting its resources to serving the largest markets (as defined by user base) first. Let's save the gratuitous Netscape-bashing for their truly dumb and craven decisions.

(On the coriolis effect)

"The same effect has been accused of responsibility for the direction water circulates when you flush a toilet. This is surely nonsense. In this case, the water rotates in the direction which the pipe points which carries the water from the tank to the bowl."

(taken from urbanlegends.about.com)

OC, this is all due to the physical disability I have and all the pills are perscribed medications. Without them I'm incapable of moving at all.

---

obBitch: man, I submit this each year, and of course /. doesn't post it, and this year they do. Michael is cool. obBitch2: the first year I don't enter, and damn, it gets /., so all of you check out the last couple of years comps as well: btw, ftp.gmd.de is going to be hammered, so check some mirrors at http://ifarchive.org/ http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXcomp etition95.html replace the 95 with appropriate year. usenet: rec.arts.int-fiction rec.games.int-fiction For those using linux, about 90% of the games should work for you, if not more. Check out http://interactfiction.about.com/library/weekly/aa 091100h.htm?terms=linux here for help. www.textfire.com is good and ifiction.tsx.org is a hoot http://members.dencity.com/petro/reflect.html http://members.dencity.com/petro/ludite.html of my games are the nicest darnded reviews me every got..... and play my games, for weird stuff: look for Rybread Celcius or bad reviews, one in the same... btw, Graham Nelson is a genius for reverse engineering the infocom data structure... I know I can't spell ...oh yeah, and my own feeble IF page www.pushove.com/if here

That is incorrect. The Integrated Circuit was most definitely patented. And I quote:

"Robert Noyce took the helm of the new enterprise and it was his invention of the integrated circuit that same year (along with Jack Kilby of TI who shared the patents) that would make Fairchild's fortune"

Taken from this article.

Here are a few other references:

http://inv entors.about.com/science/inventors/library/weekly/ aa080498.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyb er/tech/ctb218.htm

Poor SOBs. Their patents ran out in 81. But it looks like they got to have a good run of it with the screwed up Japanese patent system!

• http://inv entors.about.com/science/inventors/library/weekly/ aa123097.htm
• http://www.antimonopoly.com/ori ginal_boardgame.html

This page at about.com lists all sorts of comparisons between Linux, 2000 and NT.

http://www.pharmacology.about.com/health/pharmacol ogy/library/weekly/aa000522a.htm has some stuff about this here, it looks like it may be true,

There's a comprehensive list of strange flying machines (including the SoloTrek XVF) at...
http://aviation.about.com/hob bies/aviation/msub20.htm

If you're looking for your flying cars, check out the first couple of links.

--
Jonathan Hunt