Slashdot Mirror

Actually, mine was even shorter as "NewsForge shares a new Web site, OSvids.com, that shows video clips of various Linux distributions in action." on my Web site. I couldn't think of anything else to add. Basically, it is K.I.S.S.

Doubting Maxwell: There is one already! From my Web site (AQFL):

Hmmph, I didn't know we had End User License Agreement (EULA) to live! Tempnexus's Broadband Reports Security forum thread mentioned a funny spoof for every human who was born. According to this EULA, we seems to come with spywares (God spies on us), and can be infected with bad stuff like virus and trojans. Ending EULA means terminating life. Here's a copy of the EULA:

PLEASE READ this end-user license agreement ("EULA") carefully. By being born, you agree to be bound by the terms of this EULA. If you do not agree, do not exit womb and, if applicable, return to the place of conception for a full refund.

1. GENERAL. This EULA is a legal agreement between you (either an individual or an entity) and the scientific or religious establishment of your choice ("God"). This EULA governs your Life, which includes all seconds from the time you are born until you are legally pronounced dead (. This EULA also governs the container supplied with your Life ("Body") and any support services ("miracles") relating to Life except as may be included in another agreement between you and God. An amendment or addendum to this EULA may be presented to you by your retail suppliers ("Parents").

2. THE PARENT PROGRAM. All complaints and technical support requests should be addressed to your Parents, who may or may not, depending on the subscription level you have elected, offer you additional warranties. Parents are third-party components, and not subject to warranties under this EULA. God is not liable for the quality, competence, character, number, gender, species, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or presence/absence of your Parents, or for the quality of the relationship between them, if any, and does not supply technical support for Parental units. Any Parent may be terminated or exchanged at any time without notice and without recourse.

3 CONSCIOUSNESS. To reduce piracy, God requires certain components to be activated. The license rights granted under this EULA are limited to the first five times you gain Consciousness ("Wake up") after you are Born unless you supply the information necessary to activate your Life. You may also need to reactivate your Life if you modify your Body or alter your Consciousness. God will not collect any personally identifiable information from your DNA during the activation process without your consent.

4. DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT. Content providers are using digital rights management technology to protect the integrity of their content so that their intellectual property, including copyright, in such content is not misappropriated. If your Brain's security has been compromised, content providers may request that God revoke your right to copy, display, and/or play protected content. Revocation does not alter your Brain's ability to access unprotected content, if any exists.

5. OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES. Your Life may not be shared or used concurrently among different Bodies.

6. YOU ALSO AGREE:

a. Not to remove or obscure any copyright, trademark or patent notices ("Birthmarks") that appear on the Body as delivered to you;

b. To indemnify, hold harmless, and defend God from and against any claims or lawsuits, including attorneys' fees, that arise or result from the use or distribution of the Life;

c. That God reserves all rights not expressly granted.

3. RESERVATION OF RIGHTS AND OWNERSHIP. God reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in this EULA. The Life is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws and treaties. God or Its suppliers own the title, copyright, and other intellectual property rights in the Life and in any derivative works produced by you during the course of your Life. The Life is licensed, not sold.

4. MEMORIES. You may make a single back-up copy of the Life. You may use one (1) back-up copy solely

I am 30 years old and single (never had a date or relationship before). I am finding lack of free time during both full-time work days (and some overtimes) and non-work days. I barely play games these days even on weekend. If I do, then I get maybe 1-2 hours a week. I used to play a lot before. I even made a poll on my Web site about free time as a full-time worker as a single adult.

GamePro has an article about the ads from a few days ago. No registration here. I posted this on my my site.

aminorex: Yep, I have seen videos of those animals using clever tools! See here for examples.

I found an interesting story from The New York Times (no registration needed when I just checked) last year about time obsession that caused the train wreck. It was an interesting read.

According to an old story I posted, Yahooligans! used to have episodes online. It appears Yahoo! took them and many other cartoon series down. :(

According to an old story I posted, Yahooligans! used to have episodes online. It appears Yahoo! took them and many other cartoon series down. :(

Did you know there is a 3% fee for Americans' phones? Read below:

NewsNet5.com reports that there is a call to repeal a telephone/phone (including cellular/cell phones) tax most Americans probably don't even know they are paying. Anybody who has ever tried to decipher a phone bill knows how tough it can be. One of the charges is a 3 percent fee on every phone bill in America. The origin of the tax predates the invention of the phone by nearly a century.

Every time a person use their his/her phone, he/she supports the war effort -- the Spanish-American War. The 1898 war involved Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. The fee began as a luxury tax on phones at the turn of the 19th Century. And we're all still paying for it today. Phone bills don't specify that the tax originates from the Spanish-American War. It is labeled as the federal excise tax, which amounts to 3 percent of every monthly bill...

Seen on Shacknews. Posted on my site recently.

BBC UK mentions the little interests in science.

From my Web site: "BBC News reports teenagers value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them." This was according to The Science Learning Centre's research in London that asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.

Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people". Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".

The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year. The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004. The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%...

Seen on Shacknews."

This ABC News video (Flash for a streaming video required) shows the behind the scenes of Google's headquarter. Of course the host is jealous by all this [grin].

Seen on Digg and posted on my AQFL Web site.

BBC News reports teenagers value the role of science in society, but feel scientists are "brainy people not like them." This was according to The Science Learning Centre's research in London that asked 11,000 pupils for their views on science and scientists.

Around 70% of the 11-15 year olds questioned said they did not picture scientists as "normal young and attractive men and women". The research examined why numbers of science exam entries are declining. They found around 80% of pupils thought scientists did "very important work" and 70% thought they worked "creatively and imaginatively". Only 40% said they agreed that scientists did "boring and repetitive work". Over three quarters of the respondents thought scientists were "really brainy people". Among those who said they would not like to be scientists, reasons included: "Because you would constantly be depressed and tired and not have time for family", and "because they all wear big glasses and white coats and I am female".

The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year. The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004. The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%...

Seen on Shacknews. I believe United States is also like this. Posted on AQFL.

View FoxTrot cartoon and figure out its Easter Egg. I suck at math, but at least I knew it was binary and had to decode it. You can view AQFL for the analysis and answer. :)

Imagine this in every key notes with Steve Ballmer. From AQFL. :)

According to this F-Secure's Web log, it tells what is going wrong with the Windows Metafiles (WMF) vulnerability. It turns out this is not really a bug, it's just a bad design from another era. When Windows Metafiles were designed in late 1980s, a feature was included that allowed the image files to contain actual code. This code would be executed via a callback in special situations. This was not a bug; this was something which was needed at the time. The feature now in the limelight is known as the Escape() function and especially the SetAbortProc subfunction, and has been around since Windows 3.0, shipped in 1990...

Seen on Digg. This Broadband Reports' security forum thread mentioned this as well.

Copied and pasted from my AQFL Web site.

From last year's stories, Foxnews and CHannelCicinatti.com (video clips included, but don't know if they still work). Taken from AQFL.

I was wondering why my site got hammered. :) So, it was CowboyNeal's fault forgetting the link. Heh.

Most of my submitted stories are also on AQFL. ;)

A co-worker sent me these unmaintainable code essays back in August 2005. Taken from AQFL.

... when Bill Gates was talking about games, DirectX, and DOOM. See the video clips of it on AQFL. Notice he has a trenchcoat too. This presentation was way before the movie and tragic event.

From AQFL: Broadband Reports and Boing Boing say WiFi doesn't "stand for" wireless fidelity. It's a pun on "Hi-Fi" and "wireless fidelity" doesn't mean anything.

This past event was better. Even the zombies look cooler (grosser)! Copied and pasted from AQFL:

The Daily Texan (with gross photographs) reports on Thursday outside the Frank Erwin Center, a horde of zombies attacked the "American Idol" auditions. No one was hurt.

The zombies, 15 fake-bloodied actors in all, lurched out from under the IH-35 overpass and shuffled toward the Erwin Center, where they encountered the pop-star hopefuls.

Most of the 100 or so young people gathered outside had just been rejected by the "American Idol" review board, and they were talking, singing and waiting for rides home when the zombies arrived. "Braaaaaaains!" the zombies said. Nick Muntean, a UT radio-television-film graduate student who organized and participated in the zombie horde, added, "Television rots your braaaaaaains!" The pop-star wannabes were largely unimpressed.

Seen on Blue's News. I wonder if there are video clips of this!

About ten days ago, I mentioned a New York Times story on my Web site about hurricane names:

The New York Times report that each Katrina is handling the problem in her own way. Others with last year's 281st most popular baby name for a girl are coping with their fateful association with the devastating storm by trying everything from defending their name against those who might make fun of it to questioning the hurricane naming system... ... Katrina, which means pure, reached its pinnacle of popularity as a name in 1980, when it was the 90th most common female baby name. Following only the whims of the fashion climate, 50 years ago the name was 489th in popularity, according to the Social Security Administration. It climbed to its peak 25 years later. But it slipped to No. 127 in 1990 and continued to fall... ... "How about doing away with names?" asked Katrina Heron, author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World" (HarperCollins 2005), and a former editor at The New York Times Magazine. "Every time this horrible natural disaster strikes some group of people gets sideswiped." Ms. Heron has an alternative idea. "I think we should name hurricanes after vegetables we hate."

A spokesman from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, which issues names of hurricanes based on an alphabetical list that rotates annually and repeats every six years, did not respond to messages, but Stu Ostro, a senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, said the world body was unlikely to change the system, which started in 1953. Experts had found that just giving storms numbers or locations was confusing. "The goal is to give valuable information clearly that can help save lives," Mr. Ostro said. "Maybe that's some solace the people named Camille or Katrina or Charley or Ivan can take."

The World Meteorological Organization does have a policy of retiring the names of particularly vicious storms, like Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, which pounded Florida last year, so this is likely to be the last Hurricane Katrina...

I posted this story back in April on my Web site (AQFL):

"Modern technology depletes human cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs, according to a psychiatric study conducted at King's College, London. And the curse of 'messaging' is to blame.

E-mail users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users, in a clinical trial of over a thousand participants. Doziness, lethargy and an inability to focus are classic characteristics of a spliffhead, but e-mail users exhibited these particular symptoms to a "startling" degree, according to Dr. Glenn Wilson. The deterioration in mental capacity was the direct result of the trialists' addiction to technology, researchers discovered. E-mail addicts were bombarded by context switches and developed an inability to distinguish between trivial and significant messages. Incredibly, 20 per cent of trialists jeopardized their immediate social relations by rushing off to "check their messages" in the middle of a conversation.

Wilson's research is no flash in the pan. Computer technology in its modern, "interconnected" form is dumbing down the population more rapidly than television."

... you can read it here.

Did anyone find it amusing to see Luke and Leia as bbabies. They're not even premature! How many months was Padme pregnant? It can't be nine months!

If you want to know more about this birthday song history, then read Dmusic's article.

I posted this on AQFL long time ago. :)

I mentioned this old story on my AQFL site It is from 5/2/2005. It was an interesting read.

Awesome link! Also, the Futurama one was good too.

I posted these two links and credited you on my AQFL site. :)

... read this New York Times article (no registration): Anywhere else in the world, a train running 90 seconds late would perhaps be considered on time. But in Japan, 90 seconds would foil commuters who depend on trains' connecting to one another with balletic precision, often with only a couple of minutes to spare... .. Across the country, the accident has already caused much soul-searching over Japan's attention - some would say obsession - with punctuality and efficiency. To many, the driver's single-minded focus on making up the 90 seconds seemed to reveal the weak points of a society where the trains really do run on time, but where people have lost sight of the bigger picture.

"Japanese believe that if they board a train, they'll arrive on time. There is no flexibility in our society; people are not flexible, either. If you go abroad, you find that trains don't necessarily arrive on time," Mr. Sawada said. "This disaster was produced by Japanese civilization and Japanese people." said Yasuyuki Sawada, a 49-year-old railway worker.

The Japanese search for rail perfection is relentless, from the humble commuter train to the country's most famous tracks. In 2004, on the 40th anniversary of the bullet train, there was much hand-wringing over the fact that a year earlier the trains on that line had registered on average a delay - of six seconds...

I mentioned this on my AQFL site.

Can you also please click on this link? ;)

Yours Truly Unfriendly,
Close Fiend

See AQFL. There are three parts to Hypercube^2.

I posted about it on my AQFL site (might not connect due to domain changes right now).

See here for amusing screen shots. Be warned some of them contain nudity.

Example from my above comment:
IF U DONT KNOW N3TSP3AK.!!!1!!1!!!1!!111! WTF LOL LAT TEH ENGLISH-2-12-Y3AR-OLD-AOLER TRANSLA2R!!111! DO IT FOR U!1!!1!!1 OMG WTF SOURCA!11!!1!! WTF )

... let The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator do it for you.

Source. ;)

According to my old AQFL story and Dark Horizons, there was a WMV trailer on Screen Rant but the Web site seems to be down. You can look at Google's cached Web page. And here is the original Web site that hosted it (still works for now).

See here. /. rejected my submission. :P I posted about it from my site.

I mentioned this on my Web site after midnight.

I assume this leaked version (QT required) is similiar to Amazon's SWF copy (not loading the trailer for me).

I posted a story on AQFL about it:

"Former U.S. President candidates' Web sites can be just another place to shop for sex toys, download movies and get a law degree online in a few months...

When politicians and Internet domain names meet, strange things happen, particularly after the campaigns are over. Click on Elizabeth Dole's old site, and you go straight to an auction of Pokemon video games on eBay. A Libertarian currently owns the original 1996 Clinton and Dole campaign Web sites, and uses them to support 2004 Libertarian presidential candidate Michael Badnarik, while also hawking Clinton and Dole's latest books.

When asked for an explanation, a top domain-name registrar pointed out that Web site addresses are always rented and never owned, and that former owners can't dictate who picks up their discarded sites."

LiveScience report that a new analysis of the December earthquake that caused disastrous tsunami waves to strike Asia and Africa. The report finds it was three times more powerful than earlier measurements suggested. This would make it the second largest earthquake ever instrumentally recorded...

From AQFL.

I posted this a few days ago on my AQFL Web site:

Death_Knight's thread (screen shots [nice ion canon] and comments) mentions a FilePlanet (account required -- free or subscription) video file link (87 MB) with Gnomevasion in World of Warcraft. Here is the video file description: "What happens when you take 300 players, throw in teamwork, voice communication, a server crash, and one of the greatest guilds of all time? You get Gnomevasion! In this video members of Sturmgrenadier form up on an alternate server in WoW when their home of Bleeding Hollow goes down. Hilarity ensues when each and every member wreaks chaos on an unsuspecting server with pink-haired pig-tailed gnomes! Download this video and witness the true power of a Gnomevasion."

Non-FilePlanet sites: #1, #2, and #3 (BitTorrent files).

Funny music video! It is two minutes and 20 seconds. Check it out!

here.

Anheuser-Busch, the largest advertiser with 10 of the 30-second ad slots on Fox's Feb. 6 broadcast, produced a humorous spot that purports to show what really caused Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" in last year's Super Bowl halftime on CBS.

From my AQFL site.

• Hmm... Maybe that's cause that's the tile that the submitter of this story worked on? It's a guy named "Ant" and he's got his own
• blog where his handle is ant and a contributor to that particular quilt on tiles.ice.org is named antaydos.

TobyIRC: According to my AQFL story, it was posted from here. :)

Click here. Taken from my site. ;)

This CNN story says video games calm kids before surgery, more effectively than tranquilizers or parental presence. Doctors found that allowing children a few minutes to play the games reduced their anxiety until the anesthesia took effect. Dr. Anu Patel conducted the study after noticing a friend's 7-year-old son was so absorbed with his Game Boy at a restaurant that he ignored the adults and the food at his table.

Seen on Blue's News and copied from my Web site.

...that doesn't care what this guy's system specs are or what resolution he watched it at?

Didn't we just have a nice article about game reviews? Where is the "meat" of this story?

Wouldn't it be much better to read something like this, instead:

Ant writes "Blue's News mentions a Far Cry Tech Demo/ATI & Crytek Tech Demo the showcases the capabilities of the amazing Crytek engine used to power the award-winning game, Far Cry. The tech demo is presented as a movie, called "The Project". The story is reminiscent of the 1930's adventure-serial "Cliffhangar" movie, but set in the present. I recommend everyone check it out.

There is also a video file format available for those who don't have a powerful system and/or video card."

Then again... this is Slashdot. *grin*

CNET News.com and ZDNet.

"The Air Force is consolidating its 38 software contracts and nine support contracts with Microsoft into two all-encompassing, agencywide agreements, according to a statement seen by CNET News.com.

The contract, done in conjunction with Dell, will call for the installation and configuration of software as well as ongoing maintenance and upgrades. The deal, which includes 525,000 licenses of Microsoft's Windows and Office, is valued at $500 million over six years, according to Microsoft."

Posted this on my AQFL Web site and even submitted to /. (rejected) on 11/19/2004.

See the photographs, link, and comments on AQFL.

Did anyone feel like playing City of Heroes from this movie?

I posted my brief review and comments on my AQFL Web Site.

And guys, see it on DLP format if you can!

bl1st3r: Wired mentioned MirrotDot in the beginning of October 2004. See my site AQFL's story for the details.

I was actually surprised that MirroDot had a local copy of a file! 2 MB/sec was impressive.