Slashdot Mirror

B-52s are bombers, not fighters. While a B-52 probably could, given a crack crew, and apparently in this case did, shoot down a MIG fighter, that's not what they were built for, and I guarantee you the B-52 in question wasn't flying over North Vietnam for the purpose of engaging enemy fighters.

No, Linebacker II was an aerial bombing campaign targeting civilian targets - Vietnamese cities. It was Nixon way of trying to end the war on his terms, not those of Congress. And he killed a thousand plus people, most of them almost certainly civilians, to do it. Moore is simply "translating" the plaque into more historically revealing terms.

To quote one sympathetic account of the Linebacker II bombing campaign:

In light of the 20,000 tons of bombs that were dropped on the citizens of Hanoi and Haiphong, there were relatively few casualties. Only 1,318 people were killed in Hanoi and 306 in Haiphong, a truly remarkable number.

So no, the plaque does not proudly proclaim that the bomber killed thousands of Vietnamese civilians. It proudly proclaims that the bomber took part in an operation in which 1624 (over a thousand, but not "thousands and thousands") Vietnamese, mostly (not exclusively) civilians, were killed. So while Moore is exaggerating, he's actually reading the plaque with far more attention to allusion than you, or especially Hardy Law, with your (plural) complete lack of historical knowledge or intellectual discernment, seem capable of doing. By proclaiming that the plane was part of Linebacker II, the plaque is indeed bragging about an operation designed to kill a large number of Vietnamese civilians.

For an example of the sort of history he no doubt had in mind, see this account of the combat history of the B-52.

I could google more up, but I found these:
http://www.snpp.com/other/articles/flash.html
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/78/story_7843_1.htm l
http://www.lorenjavier.com/toychest/asian/simpsons .html
http://members.aol.com/Jovifan2/Apu.html

Grow up, dude. Not all nudity implies "stroke yourself while watching this." Nudity can be used as an essential plot device, to help character development, or to invoke specific feelings (shame, modesty, sexuality, empowerment, etc.) [emphasis added]

"Yeah, Ms. Tweed, we uh, need you to get naked for the, er, plot, and to, uh, empower the feelings of modesty in our audience."

Give me strength: I don't disagree with you that artistic considerations can make nudity an essential element in a film, but every tit-flash isn't evidence of well-developed, mature cinematic sensibilities. If that were the case Showgirls would be considered Citzen Kane, and Girls Gone Wild would be a powerful work of documentary filmmaking.

So, let's take a quick look at how nudity is used in Ghost In The Shell. A quick trip over to Google's image search yields the following examples of important cinematography. Certainly no untoward objectification of women there. Just art for art's sake, for us grown-up types to enjoy over some sherry. The big tits are important to the artistic vision!

Some of us adults understand this, some do not. You seem to belong in the latter group. Feel free go back to your Smurfs and Rugrats, and leave the interesting movies to the grown-ups. The ones who can grasp the concept that "cartoons" aren't just for Saturday morning kids.

For me, the answer all boils down to the gravity at the destination. If you're talking about moving to Mars or the Moon, forget it: going somwhere where gravity is a third or a tenth of Earth's is pretty much a one-way trip since it would be very difficult to return to Earth's gravity after a few years away. For subsequent generations it would be even worse, since they'd be born and raised in low gravity. Going back to Earth would be a death sentence.

If you never intend to return to Earth this isn't an issue, but to me it seems to be a concept killer. I really don't understand why people gloss over this when they talk about colonizing the soloar system.

Now oribtal space colonies... that's different. I would love to move to such a place if I could get 1 g artificial gravity. At this point of my life I'd be willing to take the risk and try to survive there if I had the choice: to me it seems to be the future of space colonization, and I'd like to be a pioneer there. Alas, that's a choice I don't have.

Freud claimed that people normally develop oedipal feelings, but people can normally resolve them themselves.

Nitpick: "People" is unnecessarily vague. Men (can) have oedipal feelings... women (can) have electra complexes.

Here's a brief overview

You just reminded me of this message, stenciled on the block that mounts the space shuttles to their 747 transports: "PLACE ORBITER HERE... BLACK SIDE DOWN"

I have no problem with sending email to AOL from our non-megacorp servers. Of course, we've never sent stuff to AOL that was classified as "bulk email", and we have taken a few moments to incorporate Sender Policy Framework records into our DNS, in keeping with AOL's stated policy on SPF and "whitelisting", so your mileage may vary.

You mean the C64GS ?
like so.

I've heard this too.. this site (burn, AOL, burn!) has more info..

Hydrogen peroxide is quite unstable and decomposes under the right conditions (silver catalyst). It's a fuel all by itself, although you can improve its performance by injecting other fuels, when it acts partly as a fuel and partly as an oxidiser.

Try 720x480 (of 535 lines total).

Of all the different combos of resolution in the world (see table in above link), none of them have 486 lines.

Even more info.

The law says it is, regardless of how vociferously you object. Legally speaking it is theft, or to be more specific, theft of services, and is a felony in many states, usually depending on the dollar value of the services that have been stolen. New Jersey law. Pennsylvania law. Kentucky law. And so forth.

Transcript

You can also stream it with RealPlayer from here.

Of course, "flammable" is a word (as a quick check in a dictionary would tell you). What "The Elements of Style" says is that "flammable", though a word, is a poor (though clearer) synonym for "inflammable".

The Sea Shadow stealth ship used to be parked inside a huge aquatic "hangar" back behind the NeXT headquarters at the same time Rolling Stone magazine conducted an interview of Steve Jobs there back in 1994.

PS: The NSA loved NeXT's computers.

OR

2) Route your email through your ISP's mail server

One of my customers had this problem. We went through the steps on aol's postmaster.info site. They can now send email to AOL.

Another customer of mine had this problem, we ended up having to forward their mail through their ISP's mail server.

I don't see the problem.

>Also, Plato is very clear that Atlantis was a real place.
>He hears about it from an Egyptian priest who says Atlantis existed 9000 years prior.

Um, right, because Egyptian priests are known to be a fount of reliable information. And actually, the priest alledgedly told Solon, who told Plato. Repeating information told to you by another is hearsay, and is not allowed in courts for very good reasons.

Anything passed down for generations (be it 900 or 9000 years) is likely to have severe flaws in it, particularly with early man. Oral tradition is widely known to distort the truth, and writing isn't much better. Look at the multiple versions of the bible. Compare Chaucer with modern prose. Now think of how pictographs' meaning could be distorted.

People believe what they want to believe. I just got yet another one of the "Bill Gates will send you $250 for forwarding this to your friends" e-mails that had been forwarded to hundreds of people within the body of text I got. There are several smart people who should know better involved in the chain, but because it's more fun to believe it's real that fake, it survives.

Given all that, do you really think there's a mystic land named Atlantas, or do you think it was an alegory for something? Particularly given that it's introduced in texts discussing utopian societies?

>I have faith that Plato knew what he was talking about

Would you allow someone to testify against you in court about something they heard from someone else, who heard it from someone else, who obtained the information from written/oral documents that still someone else prepared and passed on?

Who'd have thunk it?

That's never been patented, has it? Not while people had sense, that is. It's so surprising that people find new keyboards.

And finally, as far as Scroll Lock is concerned, bookmark this in your list of pointless sites that should never have been created.

Well... it still has more of a purpose then the scroll lock key. http://users.aol.com/elmothecow/scrollock/scroloff .htm is a good example of scroll lock's main function.

and the resolutions the same as I use on a 14' monitor

But more than enough for television.

A standard NTSC TV frame is about 525 scan lines, of which about 480 are visible (the rest are off-screen and don't contain image data.)

The highest progressive-scan HDTV signal is 720 lines. The highest interlaced HDTV signal is 1080 lines.

Sure, my computers do much better than this (between 1600x1200 and 2048x1536, depending on which computer/monitor I'm using), but computers and televisions have very different requirements. For a computer screen, you have to render very fine details, and you're sitting only a few feet away. For televisions, you never have that kind of detail, and you're usually sitting across the room from the screen.

PS: You may find this link of interest.

A weed is just a flower growing
where it isn't supposed to be.
And a flower is just a weed with sense,
To grow in a flower bed you see!

(Thank you, Andy Kazukenus)

nihirnighthawk@aol.com

Just follow these easy steps:

1. Obtain one cock
2. Suck it, nihirnighthawk@aol.com

K5 isn't a lesson on dictators. It was circling the bowl long before Rusty pulled the plug on user registrations.

K5 is just another experiment that proves the tragedy of the commons.

I remember when K5 got popular, many people held it up as some sort of standard that slashdot should emulate. That made me laugh.

Say what you want about slashdot's closed story queue or moderation system, but they have stood the test of time. They have survived populatiry and the trolls and crapflooders that have come with it. K5 on the other hand suffers from:

• Idiots polluting the story queue with garbage and then voting that garbage up
• A fundamentally broken moderation system where you can post and moderate in the same discussion and where there are no checks and balances

That "sense of owndership" that gulliable K5 subscribers have is shared with all of the other idiots who make up the site and piss on the commons. The paper linked to in this article effectively reaches the same conclusions.

This just in: Communists change history! We also interview a man in Dayton, Ohio who is actually surprised! News at 11.

The MicroSoft Caller-ID/SPF merger proposals say that SPF records will be honored, so you can publish them without fear of losing support.

So, go ahead and publish SPF records.

MicroSoft supporting SPF records is a really smart move. Last week, I posted results of a survey of 1.3 million email domain names to the IETF MARID mailing list. Now that I'm back from the MARID meeting, I just finished a survey of Caller-ID records. There appears to be about a factor of 500-1000 more domains that have published SPF exclusively than Caller-ID exclusively and only a tiny fraction of the 1.3 million domains have published Caller-ID records. In short, MicroSoft isn't changing to support SPF records because they are better (I think they are), but because it is an acknowledgement that MicroSoft's Caller-ID hasn't caught on.

Meng Weng Wong (the SPF author) and MicroSoft are still discussing how exactly this merger will work on. I personally don't see any reason to support XML right away. MicroSoft has not come out with a single concrete extention that can't be done with SPF already.

I also think that there are alternatives to the complex Caller-ID algorithm and that doesn't require every Ezmlm and other mailing lists to upgrade their software. From the research that I've done (and yes, this is something I have really researched), there appears to be far more mailing lists broken by MS's Caller-ID system than email forwarders broken by SPF.

(I'm the author of libspf-alt and the maintainer of the trusted-forwarder global whitelist. So, now you know why I have researched this stuff so much.)

...before space travel is monopolized, like every other bloody field out there? It's not a question of "if". It's a question of "when". Monopoly (or quasi-monopoly, e.g. the Coke/Pepsi diopoly) seems to be the new way of doing business.

This won't mean dick because the sites can be easily shown to be biased, but:
americanprogress.org
Some AOLer's book review
A Rush-sucks website not exactly a venue for non-biased discussion... But, hey, you did ask.

Then there are the famous ones like the little oxycontin thing and his draft deferment for a non-existant football injury. (It's actually a Pilonidal cyst, basically a croncially reacurring pimple on his ass. It can apparently be quite uncomfortable when infected.)

And that the "abuse" (If it was done on American's it would be called torture.) was the result of a few people acting out fraturnity style partying when reports from the army itself indicate the abuse was widespread, systemic, and resulted from orders. (Trying to think of the name of one of the reports...) Well, I'll post a link to that one if I can remember it.

I wonder if I can remember some more. All I know is that if I turn on Rush, I end up spending my time yelling at the radio...

<a href="http://members.aol.com/IDICPage/Catspaw.html ">ST:TOS Catspaw Episode</a>

4) 120,000 terrorists in the US? C'mon! Has ANYONE on /. ever met a "terrorist"?

A Case of Conscience ?

I also thought this sounded waaay cool, so I quick-searched for Tachi Labs that is doing the research. Good links on that page to further info, images, videos. And such a cool reference 'section' (bottom of that page):

"M. Shiro, Ghost in the Shell, Kodansya, 1991" (link added by me)

With earlier /. reports on the Nausicaa jet, the Akira bike, and now this Cloaking thing (ok, so it's not really matching Kusanagi & crew's wicked cloaking tech in GITS, but still...) ...I don't know what to make of it, but I think it's pretty cool that they get inspiration for their R&D from somewhat 'unlikely' places - and really follow through on those quirky ideas.

Gotta respect that kind of curiosity and dedication.

The Incredibles, Schminpedibles.

That movie looks like it will suck. Now, if they did a movie about The Impossibles...

Am I feeling old?

There are two sets of universes, each containing a version of our photon, one set in which the photon passes through the left slit and one set in which it passes through the right. (Actually there are an even greater number of universes in which the experiment is never carried out in the first place, but we are ignoring those.) The photons are particles that carry a property called "quantum phase" which oscillates as they travel. Two universes which are identical except for the photon arriving at a certain point on the film with opposite phases, cancel each other out. Neither one is "real". Maybe it is more correct to say that the multiverse cannot contain two such contradictory universes in the first place, rather than to imagine them existing, and then meeting and going "poof".

Perhaps we shouldn't try to contact them, not yet at least.

Physics and mathematics may not be universal but be closely related to our general perception of reality, which largely depends on the kind of life we have here on Earth, how our brains evolved to better grasp the environment we live in. We have certain set of physical concepts, also at the scientific level, which are more or less intuitive for our brains. The Others have theirs.

Any way of thinking limits the solutions we can find. We can take some different viewpoints and change our thinking, but there could be limits with that. We can only change our thinking if we can think of the other ways of thinking, which might not always be possible. The Others may have the same problem.

Therefore, finding a solution for some universal problems might need much bigger change in thinking than even what the Others could be capable of making. To solve the problems, they would need to find completely new forms of life, each with their new potential. Some of the forms of life could be "planted" and evolved freely -- the Others acting as "creator-gods" -- but that would be limited by the kinds of life they are capable of inventing, which is again limited by their brain. A better choise could be to let the Nature do its job of inventing the way, and then hunting for solutions.

For example, according to modern physics, the universe has a problem: it's dying. After some 10^100 years, it'll be just some thin energy particles here and there. Let's assume that the Others have noticed the problem too and haven't found a solution.

If we now made contacts with the aliens, the free development of our own ways of thinking would quickly stop and we would be assimilated in Their culture and science. We would have no special position any longer and would no longer be that promising to the Others. We would be just cosmic rabble.

Probably abducting some portion of people would be useful, to create interesting cultural hybrids that would combine the ways of thinking from the both worlds, but the main stream culture should be kept in isolation as long as possible.

WRT the religion question, the Others might believe that they were created to solve the same question, or alternatively living in an artificial universe, created to solve the same question...or that they are the First. If they (or we that matter) have any reason, however, they would notice that the question is unanswerable and therefore suspension of belief is the only rational choise.

Or maybe they are Pantheists. That would probably be much in line with Carl Sagan's ideas of Extraterrestials.

Don't blame the script kiddies for this. They are just kids, after all ..... kids are by nature explorers and experimentalists, and this is pretty much hard-coded into the human firmware.

It's like placing a coin on a railway track to see what happens to the Queen's face when a train runs over it, and ending up derailing the train ..... an unfortunate consequence, not one that could reasonably have been foreseen by the "perpetrators" {all manner of crap already gets blown around railway lines, what difference does anyone suppose a coin will make?} but one that should have been taken into account by the implementors of the system. If the train makers can't be sure that a coin on the tracks won't derail their trains, then the trains are no good. What if a bird eats a berry, then shits the seed out and it lands on the track and that derails a train? Do you blame the bird? Blame the owner of the hedge the berry was growing on? Or do you blame the person who designed a train so badly that an object on the track would throw it off altogether?


This is an excellent opportunity to sow seeds of change. Open people's minds to the possibility that there might be an alternative to Windows. Ask questions. Did they know there were vulnerabilities? Well, did they not look at the source code? [the what?] The source code -- you know, the human-readable form of the code that can be examined and modified. What scrutiny did you subject the source code to? [but that's a secret!] What -- you bought a locked box that you knew you weren't going to be allowed to look inside, and you didn't get even the tiniest little bit suspicious that somebody might be trying to hide something from you?

Every piece of food you buy is clearly labelled with a list of the ingredients. {this was actually used in an anti-drug propaganda advertisement in the mid-1990s, till some bright spark suggested that surely legal drugs would be properly labelled and the problems caused by not knowing what was in pills and powders were merely a side-effect of prohibition}. The analogy between Microsoft and Tom Lehrer's Old Dope Peddler is a strong one. Give out free samples {educational licence discount}, get people hooked {file format lock-in}, watch the little puppets dance to your tune.

For my part, I have pledged never again to work with Windows, ever. At all. The only repair I will ever again do to a Windows box is to install Linux on it -- barring that, I will simply unplug the power cable, leave it unplugged and consider that an improvement. The time has already come when I would sooner forego a computer altogether than touch Windows.

Are you sure you want to mix your moddies and daddies? (Another ref)

Okay. Here's a couple:
AOL.com - go ahead and laugh, but their site is classy and the layout is table-free.
Sprint.com - ditto. They use tables, for tabular data, like their stock quote info, but that's what tables are *for*.

Commercial sites, especially big ones, are deep and take a lot of work to redesign and recode. Most of those probably aren't being torn down and rebuilt with CSS because there isn't an enormous return in doing it yet. This doesn't mean it cannot be done, nor does it mean that if you're starting a new site, or re-doing an existing one, that CSS can't do the job.

In fact, I'll bet it can. See the Zen Garden for a hundred or so examples of what can be done with only CSS.

My first thought from the headline was that it was some new translator that combined the Encheferizer with the Pirate Translator.

Arrrr! Bork! Bork! Bork!

Garg

Don't be so sure. Write once. Compile anywhere. wxWidgets.

(Oh, and it works, too. AOL Communicator uses it.)

For a while, AOL decided that we were spammers, althought that has just as mysteriously subsided.

http://postmaster.aol.com/tools/whitelist_guides.h tml.

While the AOL users may have a reputation for being clueless, the postmasters at AOL.com do some cool things. As I recall, AOL was the first major ISP to start rejecting SMTP connections from hosts that did not have PTR records (reverse DNS).

What did it run? Forth, of course!

(Sorry, just had to show there was a better alternative to BASIC back in the early '80s. I still do Forth regularly in OpenFirmware)

• does run Linux
  
  
• proofs that Mirosoft is making bad software
  
  
• shows how stealing intellectual property simply cannot be wrong ("Actually, it is not stealing") because every fucking idiot does it
  
  
• assumes that any law preventing child molesters from distributing their filthy shit is an attack on Free Speech
  
  
• promotes homosexual, interracial or interspecial cohibitation
  

a more useful purpose.

Here is a link about honeybee genetics.

The IMAP server supports SSL, which will encrypt your session to prevent casual eavesdropping. Most current email programs have a checkbox or menu option in the account setup that enables SSL. However, you need to change the server name to imap.cs.com (port 993 -- the standard).

However, AOL has a somewhat unreliable SMTP proxy that sometimes intercepts port 25 connections and sends your message. Take a look at <http://members.aol.com/adamkb/aol/mailfaq/3rd-par ty.html#3rd-party-acct>.

AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app, will be available via IMAP starting Thursday.

Just for the record, it's already available and I've been using it for a couple of weeks now. There's an unofficial Web site describing it at AdamKB's site.

There are a few quirks I've noticed... AOL auto-deletes older mail that you've read unless you move it into the Saved Mail folder (max. 20 MB, I believe). Unfortunately, users of AOL's Mac client or the Web mail interface don't have a Saved Mail folder... that's created by the AOL 9 for Windows software only. AOL's IMAP implementation doesn't allow creating folders, so I have to find a Windows machine with AOL 9 installed to create this.

Also, there are some people who have had problems sending through AOL's authenticated SMTP server using Apple's Mail.app client, but that's probably an Apple bug, not AOL.

This is definitely a great move... I've been using Claris Emailer for years because it was the only authorized third-party AOL mail client, so now I have alternatives. And I've had my AOL address since 1990, so I'm reluctant to give it up.

...AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app...

AOL Mail has been available online via HTTP for quite some time.