Slashdot Mirror

There is another page of pictures that you won't see clicking on the links, she has page 15 going directly to 17 by accident. This page shows the swimming pool.

I know! Godzilla and Barbara Streisand can retire at the same time after one last movie! Godzilla vs Mecha-Streisand!

"After all... tomorrow is another day" Scarlett O'Hara

I read the synopsis, 'cos I didn't know what a 'Trapper Keeper' was, and that left me none the wiser.

(So for everyone else who wasn't traumatised by one in their youth it's what happens when you cross a ring-binder with a box-file and give it a horrible sounding name: The Trapper Keeper )

Second, I'd like everybodies suggestions for other cool devices from anime you'd like to see created in real life.

Here's a couple I'd like.
An e-frame from Exosquad.
Obligatory Veritech Fighter.
A new keyboard setup, with hand enhancement like in Ghost in the Shell.
Kaneda's bike.
Make people fear you even if you're old with the Roujin Z setup.
A pokeball, so I can finally do something about that annoying dog next door.
Appleseed had the right idea.
You know you want capsules like in DBZ.
Um....I guess I want a Chii Persocon too.....
I'm done.

Actually, I'm thinking it IS a ripoff:

Leon Mandrake
Mandrake the Magician

Of course, the old Linux Mandrake logo is obviously a ripoff of Mandrake the Magician...

It seems quite clear that Mandrake Linux intended to rip off Mandrake the Magician's look and name.

As it happens, there was also a stage magician named Leon Mandrake who may or may not have been the basis for the cartoon character. (Some sources say yes, others say they came up with the name independantly. However, he and one of the original Mandrake cartoonists were friends.)

There's a page about him here.

So if nothing else, it means that the association between the word "mandrake" and stage magic goes beyond just the comic strip.

Yes, that's what he meant. You, I, and Sir Clarke are all talking about the same "Dark Dune Spot" phenomena.

Maybe he meant these?

Evidentally this John fellow was really a lunatic or a moron.

The Bible is undeniably self-contridictory. If it were not, it would be unnecessary to create elaborate arguments to explain and justify the blatant contridictions which are apparant to anyone who hasn't had their bullshit sensors permently fried through a lifetime of indoctrination.

It's impossible for an intellectually honest person to reconcile the entire Bible with the post-Enlightenment interpretation of the philosopy attributed to Jesus; which is why Thomas Jefferson felt it necessary to compile his own bible. Jefferson spent the better part of his adult life in the process of, to use his own description, seperating the diamonds from the dunghill in order to produce what he felt was an accurate rendition of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Sadly, many modern Christians (particuarly those on the far right) denounce Jefferson's work as heretical and blasphemous. It has been my experience that the religion practiced by most people calling themselves "Christian" has precious little in common with the philosophy so masterfully related by Jefferson.

It occurs to me that the label "Christian" bears a lot in common to the label "Hacker", in that both are used by groups with diametrically opposed values to describe themselves. Script-kiddie "hackers" have almost exactly the same relation to classical MIT-style "hackers" as Jeffersonian "Christians" have to far-right bible-beater "Christians". Just as the real hackers have had their name sullied by the script kiddies of the world, the true followers of Jesus's philosophy have had their name sullied by misguided idiots. In a perfect world, it wouldn't be necessary to have to label oneself as a "white-hat hacker" or a "Jeffersonian Christian" in order to distinguish oneself from the the undesirables; but this is not a perfect world. By labelling oneself as a "christian" without providing any additional qualification, you allow an outsider to unconciously lump you together with the lunatic fringe.

I don't rememeber so much fuss from any Members of Parliament about *real* experiments, such as when General Motors were using live pigs in car crash tests.

And I don't hear much support for Animal Rights prisoners from our elected representatives.

No, it's "I know, I'll get fucking worked up over video games, that'll get me in the papers"

fuck them

Those of us at Damn Small Linux forum have been fiddling with putting DSL on the hard drive, just like it was running from the CD. It's great, really. I got tired of hearing my CDROM drive spin, so I got into putting DSL on the drive, to speed it up, and quiet the CDROM. We have been advised that although it is possible to boot from a USB device, those things have limited read-write ability, and should not be treated like a hard drive, rather like a big floppy. I do like to keep my restore tarball and it's control file on the USB drive, it's only used once to load your own web browsers, files, wallpapers, etc. and then once to backup anything you want added to the tarball. You can take the drive out of the USB port after the restore, if you don't intend to backup when you shutdown. Here is my howto on putting the DSL live cd on the HDD.
All that is required is a small 60 mb partition for /knoppix and filetool.sh, and a 30 mb partition for the tarball and the control file, filetool.lst. I often put this on a slave hdd.
---
Not too portable, but gives you some practice working with this kind of distro.

(BTW,you decide which among the White Album,
Black Album, Darkside of the Moon, Wizard of Oz are the
"used up overplayed has beens", if any; I ain't goin' there.)

Why must you make the assumption that "Free Software" means "Free Source Code"?

There is plenty of great, free software whose source code is understandibly the private property of the author. A great example is this game

This guy made a really great game and made it available for free. Sure, source code would be nice, but isn't it enough to just be happy with the fact that there are some good authors out there already who do this?

I have made some changes and this version seems to not blink on the Celeron. I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if it works for you.

or at least they used to be. After BMW dumped them, Ford decided to pick up Landrover to go with their Jaguar line. Top 10 Reasons My Land Rover Discovery Sucks

Last I heard Gates uses bash (Warning: Link is to an Angelfire site, but still mildly amusing)

It's fast and stable, and the scite editor included is way better than gnotepad for editing html pages for my web site. Right now, I am using the glinks web browser, which has to be seen to be believed. It is much better than dillo, but of course no match for Moz 7.

Big problem in moving my CD and stick around to various machines. Modem has to be reconfigured with #wvdialconf wvdial.conf, and of course you might not be able to get X to run.
One can start with "knoppix 2" to start in text mode and work up from there.

I installed on the HDD as I wanted more speed, and got a little tired of having the cdrom drive spin, although it's not really that bad, I just wanted more...

This setup runs almost as fast as my P4 2.8 1GB XP box, but not quite. It's not slow by any means.

One idea is to back up to a second memory stick (remove the original) then if your stick pulls a "mars lander" item on the flash memory, you still have your stuff.

I have my menu file(yes, I changed it) on the 'net at:
fluxbox_menu so you can see what this litttle distro has. I have not added anything but Moz 7 to it, yet. As you can see this setup is stable enough to make this post, using Slashdot's online "comment box", with the corrections, and additions one must make. There is no "paste" in glinks, that I could find, so I couldn't just write this in scite, and paste it here.

A few years later my dad got us a copy of Kids and the C=64 but the games in that didn't seem as fun as the ones we were making, which were more graphical.

Learning by making games is the way to go. Kids can learn some algebra concepts by learning the simple graphics libraries and learning to do simple animations.

A few years ago a 12 year old sent me an email and asked if I would help him make a video game. He had seen one of my others games on the web and wanted to learn. I thought it was cool that he dared to ask, so I took him up on it. We decided to code in Java since it is freely available and you can put your work up on a website for others to see. The result is at http://www.angelfire.com/games4/anirak/. I did most of the programming and he did the design of the game and the graphics. We went over the code using instant messenger he understood it and would modify it to try out different things. It was a lot of fun for him.

After that I started writing a pacman type tutorial on the same site, but only recently have I made any progress on it. Unfortunately the stuff I have done recently is pretty complex. It is probably easier to stick to shot-em-ups that don't involve complex boards or AI when using the game as a learning tool for children.

If you want to use any of the code on those sites for educational purposes feel free to do so.

A few years later my dad got us a copy of Kids and the C=64 but the games in that didn't seem as fun as the ones we were making, which were more graphical.

Learning by making games is the way to go. Kids can learn some algebra concepts by learning the simple graphics libraries and learning to do simple animations.

A few years ago a 12 year old sent me an email and asked if I would help him make a video game. He had seen one of my others games on the web and wanted to learn. I thought it was cool that he dared to ask, so I took him up on it. We decided to code in Java since it is freely available and you can put your work up on a website for others to see. The result is at http://www.angelfire.com/games4/anirak/. I did most of the programming and he did the design of the game and the graphics. We went over the code using instant messenger he understood it and would modify it to try out different things. It was a lot of fun for him.

After that I started writing a pacman type tutorial on the same site, but only recently have I made any progress on it. Unfortunately the stuff I have done recently is pretty complex. It is probably easier to stick to shot-em-ups that don't involve complex boards or AI when using the game as a learning tool for children.

If you want to use any of the code on those sites for educational purposes feel free to do so.

Of course a screenshot isn't possible, since no computer is used.

I have also written a little WinAmp pluggin to demo the effect, since you can't download my old monitor. It is here. Go into the Preferences panel, select Plug-ins, then Visualization. Select the vis_text.dll pluggin and then in the drop-down box at the bottom select Strange.

I hope to god you mean T-X and NOT The T-1000.

Those who are interested in nuclear rocketry may want to check out NASA's Project Prometheus.

There's also an excellent write-up of present day and past efforts HERE.

Metal Gear? Strap ourselves onto the rockets and let it's rail gun shoot us into space!!
The Snake Hole: a Metal Gear Solid encyclopedia + Mirror

It's him!

You might also want to check this out.

In answer to your other question, this system isn't likely to rip itself apart anytime soon.

The trick is to make the window manager do what you want it to. You need a layout that you can fully customize: Here's my favorite .fvwm2rc, and if you get it to run on your system, it's very plain, but has some powerful features. Just hover your cursor over a window, and you get focus. Right click on the title-bar of the top window, and you get the pager and the windows underneath. Saves time, and if you are using FVWM to update your web pages like I do, saves effort, and makes your work go easier. You want lots of features and power, but not a lot of glitz like you have with KDE. It takes memory and cpu power to run KDE, but my fvwm2rc is designed to run with SuSE 6.3, for older computers. I have this one running on a box with 32 MB of 30-pin ram, with a 25 mhz bus, and it works ok. On an old box like that, you need all the help you can get. You can run MWM, but you get almost no fun features. I'm trying to come up with some nice features, so you won't really miss Gnome or KDE (Which won't run well on very old boxes anyway.)

I've been working with fvwm for a while, and enjoy fixing up .fvwm2rc's for my machines. Here is a page of mine with several for you to try, and here is a link to the one that I am using now, with SuSE Linux, to make this post. As you can see, I love working with FVWM.

... no disturbing medium ...
What like this?

Bush caught in Crawford,Texas more details to follow.

Bush has been caught!

I had really only known Bob Newhart as my parents' type of comedian (they watched the sitcoms he was in, as I recall). I'm 25, so I missed a lot of his earlier work.

Until, on one of my 600-mile round-trip pilgrimages to my parents' place, I caught an episode of Comedy College on public radio, featuring some of his past work . I was amazed by what I heard - dark, textured, subtle, and not at all the sitcom man I'd originally taken him for.

I'm a fan of deadpan, so naturally he was instantly appealing to me.
(I also like Norm MacDonald for that reason [fyi: not my page, but good info], but few seem to agree with me on that one... I'm one of the few that actually liked Dirty Work. :) )

You mean like Philips Digital Compact Cassette?

Well, Denmark is the oldest monerchy in the world, other than that you're probably right.

Actually, the Japanese monarchy dates back to 660 BC, making it by far the oldest in the world. Denmark's is more than thousand years younger, the starting date is not established precisely.
Check this page for more information on the different current and former monarchies of the world.

I cant remember where I first saw the stuff linked below, some of the ZX stuff wasnt quite closed source enough.
Prepare your soldering iron:)

How to build your own ZX80/ZX81
Another zx81 clone using an FPGA
Yet another ZX81

I was about to say "Shame no one's done it for a Spectrum", but a quick Google search reveals that someone has. I am not worthy.

Is this a worthy haggis?

Imagine if you could control video games with just your hand movements, without having to hold a controller? The video game industry would never be the same again.

I thought this was going to be some kind of Cube case mod, but no, it's just a guy with a weird sense of humor.

Okay, okay, I admit it. It's funny.

But somebody should still wrap it good.

"Microsoft has broken some laws, too, yes."

Why is that OK with you? Why is somebody who breaks laws a better person then somebody who did not break laws? You judge ellison harshly even though he has never been charged with a crime and you want to give Bill gates a pass even though he has been convicted.

"But I haven't heard anything about outright stealing technology;"

In that case you have your head buried in the sand. Sendo, Priceline , and Stac are just a few of the victims of theft of Intellectual property by MS. I am not talking about copying applications here I am talking about out and out stealing of technology and breaking contracts. Here is a quote from one of the articles I linked to.
During one of those meetings, Priceline said Microsoft CEO Bill Gates told Priceline founder Jay Walker that he wasn't going to let patent infringement claims stand in his way.

According to a Priceline press release announcing the suit, "Mr. Gates went on to say that many other companies were suing Microsoft for patent infringement and that priceline.com could, in effect, get in line."

Further down the article.
This is not the first time a company has claimed that Microsoft stole its technology after meeting to discuss a business relationship.

In December 1998, Goldtouch Technologies sued the software giant, saying Microsoft illegally copied its design for an ergonomic mouse after the two companies had discussed the product.

Other companies who've sued Microsoft for patent infringement include Eolas Technologies, which claimed earlier this year that the Redmond, Wash., giant infringed upon a plug-in patent. And in 1994, a jury ordered Microsoft to settle with Stac Electronics Inc. for violating a data-compression patent.

MS has a history of sleazy behavior like this.

"Give me more information, and then I can make a proper judgment."

I have provided you with a few links, google can provide much more.

"But I'm not really arguing that they didn't do those things"

Why not? If they did lie, cheat and steal is it OK with you? Is that moral? If I could prove to you that MS lied cheated and stole would you agree with me that they are immoral? My guess is that you don't think there is anything wrong with lying, cheating and stealing as long it's done in the name of making money.

"I asked those questions in order to contrast against Philip Morris's own violations of mores and laws, in order to show that there's complexity in the issues."

It's not that complex. Both Phillip Morris and MS are immoral companies doing immoral things. You can argue about the degree of immorality but that's a hollow argument. that's like saying one mass murderer is less immoral then another one because he killed less people.

"But are they being immoral? What are they being immoral about? Destroying other people's things? I guess in itself that's immoral."

Yes they are being immoral. Yes destroying other people's property is immoral and illegal.

"But are you trying to say there's absolutely no justification for such things? There's never a time when destroying somebody else's things is NOT immoral?"

I never said and I'd appreciate it if you did not put words into my mouth. There may very well be circumstances when it's OK to destroy other people's property. You keep trying to muddy up the issue by throwing up these stupid straw man arguments but I am not going to bite.

"Why is it so hard for you to believe that morality and ethics are a complicated issue? Countless people have struggled with these issues for thousands of years because it's so complicated, yet you seem to think it's black and white.'

It's not hard for me to believe th

Ahem>/A>...

If this is not the inventor of the plane, I do not know what this is.

And what will they charge Saddam with?

Well, the whole "being in bed with the devil" thing would be a good excuse for the prosecution.

10. Hacker the deluxe edition (until recently oop)
9. Wizwar
8. Nuclear War (which someone made into a silly computer game of a similar name.)
7. Settlers of Catan/Seafarers of Catan (you can find this at nearly every game store)
6. Eurorails/Empire Builder
5. Family Business
4. Risk and/or the NEW risk (of course)
3. Chess
2. Checkers
1. A set of these

Anybody remember Fighter's History?
I've never played either Crazy Taxi or Simpson's Road Rage, but Fighter's History was practically a palette shift of Street Fighter 2. Capcom took DataEast to court, and lost. The judge felt that while there were definitaly similarities, Fighter's History was a different game of the same genre.

Uncanny Simularities"

Quick Summation Half way down

I'm surprised, I remember the entire thing so vividly, but I just can't find more resources about it on the web....

Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.

... for the US jam industry. They can jam anything with that stuff.

So, because you're a pessimistic, paranoid, isolationist, luddite, so should everyone be?

So, suggesting that real life is more interesting than simulations is pessimistic, paranoid, isolationist, and luddite? Sounds paranoid to me. And you don't want to go out into the world to experience it, but rather stay at home jacked in? Definitely isolationist.

Humankinds appetite for communication and connectedness will continue to grow

Yes, becauce current technological and socieconomic trends are taking away opportunites for communication and connectedness. Spend two hours each way communting to work, nine hours in a cube, get home too exhausted for any interaction more demanding than swallowing your ration of anitdepressants and passive TV watching...and wonder why you have this itching unfulfilled desire for that "ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". And the commericals dangle shiny techno-toys in front of you, and you think "ah! that must be what's missing from my life."

Never say never

Of course one can say never. "The halting problem will never be solved." Likewise, "Simulated reality can never match the real thing - because the best computer is the Universe."

Her name is not "Mom," it's Lois, and she's hot.

I actually have a proposal for a "reasonable sentence" for spammers.

Seriously though, I second and third and fourth the oft-repeated idea that the only way to go after these pricks is to follow the money. Sca^H^Hpammers are small-time pseudo-crooks; they're not doing anything illegal, but if you ban what they're doing now, you'd find them working as disreputable used-car salesmen or the likes thereof.

Spam has a goal; that goal is getting money out of the recipient's pockets. There is always someone at the receiving end; whether it's cheapherbalviagraknockoffsonline.com, abdulhamidandhis419otherbrothers.nigerianemail.com , or instantpenisenlargementjustclickhere.com. They're either "real" shops or scams, operating behind fake addresses and trojaned web servers.

Going after them is no different from, in the frist case, pursuing "businesses" who violate various retail-related laws (truth in advertising, etc.) and in the second, common fraud. Everything is trackable; a spammer can hide behind forged mail headers and fake web/dns servers running on grandma Jones' worm-infected Windows 95 PC on a DSL line, but in the end effect, whoever wants to actually _receive_ your cold hard cash has to be reachable.

Go after them there, and go back to my first paragraph. Spam will always be profitable, in any form (email, IM, snail mail, accosting people on the street, etc.) as long as it makes economic sense for someone to sell something via spam.

Tsk. They use Roberts' Birds or Southern Africa, instead of the more appropriate Olsen's Standard Book of British Birds (the Expurgated Version)

The $25.00 redhat is yours to do with what you want. It's real, and the only differences are what the two OS's are capable of, software that will run on them, etc. XP runs the expensive Office 2003, but that's not free in the site license, is it? XP does not have a lot built in like Redhat, Mandrake, LindowsOS, etc. have, so the student has to get his own powerpoint, excel, word, etc. to make XP useful. Lindows is not cheap, especially when you add the Office 2003 clone, but my point is to question the "site license" for XP as applying to anything but machines staying on campus, whereas the redhat and suse deals apply to machines that can leave the campus. I'm running SuSE now, but only 2.2, and it's no XP, no comparison. Hard to set up, and get the services trimmed down to what you need, only. I tend to run it on very old machines, one in particular with only 32mb 30-pin ram, and I can run Opera 6.03 with wvdial just fine, but compared to Windows 98 on the same box is almost as good, but complicated to set up. Had to make a custom .fvwm2rc with what I wanted. Almost like we are comparing apples and oranges here, SuSE vs XP.

What, you mean a jizz-mopper?