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Pirate more music that has no reason being disseminated in the first place? IMHO any music worth listening too is already free.

How do you know Outlook 2016 was supported when GP called? Just because it's there now doesn't mean it was there before now. The last Wayback Machine snapshot of that page from a month after Office 2016 was released doesn't even list it as a client so it may have been recently added. And since when is calling someone out for being a dick "abusive" -- especially when that person is, in fact, being a dick?

Use Dirac notation as extended for big data by Robson in "The New Physician as Unwitting Quantum Mechanic: Is Adapting Dirac’s Inference System Best Practice for Personalized Medicine, Genomics, and Proteomics".

This "notation" actually emphasizes certain primitive operations that can define the "machine language". Syntactic sugars should be used for parsimony, as well as and pragmas for efficient semantic heuristics are appropriate layers atop the primitives.

...like, say, Ted Chiang's "Understand".

This site (not sure why it's not active anymore) Was designed by the site admins to teach people the information they would need to know to be successful on the site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

All the info there is all they ever asked about and covered in the interview questions. Back when I took it 5 years ago or so all the information was correct. What exactly is wrong about the information there?

All they asked was about torrents/trackers/seeding/ratio. Questions about how to properly rip a CD to lossless with secure mode, error correction, cue sheet and log file for verification of correct ripping procedure. Then some questions about different audio formats like lossy vs lossless and bitrates. Also what is a transcode and ways to help identify whether a lossless copy was ever a transcode etc. Pretty basic stuff, I don't see how it could have been wrong.

All the questions were clearly there to make sure someone know how to properly rip cds, how to manage their ratio and share properly, and how to not screw up re-encoding the audio formats. All pretty important stuff to keep a smoothly running community of consistent and high quality music.

These are the people who spend over $9,000 for an audio cable because it makes "warmer sound", or better yet, audiophile SATA cables.

I don't do stupid shit like that, but I did spend several hundred dollars building my own SET tube amplifier. The difference is audible, dramatically so. So is the difference between an MP3 and any digital recording that doesn't use a lossy compression algorithm, assuming of course, that the mix wasn't done by the current crop of "more compression is always better" asshats.

In other words, while that tool who paid $9K for an ethernet cable (no shit, it's really a thing) probably can't actually hear any difference, lots of audiophiles do, and the paucity of quality source material in the online world sucks so much that ripped CD's on pirate sites are the predictable result.

These are the people who spend over $9,000 for an audio cable because it makes "warmer sound", or better yet, audiophile SATA cables.

Timely example:

Matzillah Project Introduces World's First Kosher Web Browser

Good job, guys: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://kuro5hin.org

Just tried the Wayback Machine, it won't allow due to robots

This was the site where someone debunked the "Windows just copied its TCP/IP stack from the BSDs" and now that source is gone thanks to a robots.txt wiping out the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/*/... .

The bit of video I saw showed Dr Spencer arguing against genetic randomness. Maybe he believes the only other possibility is Intelligent Design? I don't know. I haven't looked into it. [GiordyS]

Ironically, GiordyS says this in response to my pointing out that Dr. Spencer has been making his "intelligent design" views public for years... and in that bit of video Dr. Spencer was repeating classic "intelligent design" arguments. "Maybe?" You still "don't know"? Seriously?

But I know nothing about competing genetic randomness theories, so my lack of surprise has nothing to do with the actual science, in case you misunderstood. (I haven't looked into it.) [GiordyS]

They're not "competing genetic randomness theories. That's the entire point. "Intelligent Design" is a supernatural "explanation" which violates methodological naturalism and therefore would destroy science if it were confused with a scientific hypothesis. If the scientific process included a "supernatural" option, it would be used on a daily basis because people (including scientists) are lazy. As I've said before, I believe that science absolutely requires naturalism for two reasons. First, supernatural explanations are compatible with any and all eventualities, therefore they are not falsifiable and do not provide unique predictions.

Second, if science allowed supernatural explanations as a legitimate recourse, they would be used far too often because we can't distinguish poorly understood natural phenomena from genuinely supernatural phenomena:

• Laplace never would've studied the stability of the solar system, so NASA wouldn't know to put the SOHO and WMAP satellites in their respective Lagrange points.
• The question of why atoms are stable despite the predictions of classical electrodynamics would've been answered in the same way Newton explained the solar system's stability, so quantum mechanics (along with much of modern technology) wouldn't have been discovered.
• The precession of Mercury's orbit would've been dismissed as "Allah pushing the planet around," so we never would have discovered Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, without which GPS devices can't function accurately.
• The missing 2/3 of solar neutrinos would've been explained as "Ra's chariot soaking up the neutrinos on their way to earth," so neutrino oscillation would never have been proposed and proven, which would cause our cosmological models (if 'science' of this kind could even lead to such models) to be inaccurate because we wouldn't know that neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass.
• Cosmic rays with energies above the GZK limit are currently unexplained. Should we bother looking for a naturalistic explanation, or just say they're "Jesus particles"?
• Should we continue to try to quantize gravity, or announce that the obvious impossibility of such a feat is proof that the universe contains a message from its Intelligent Designer?

If you think that any of these examples are silly, exactly how are they differen

The bit of video I saw showed Dr Spencer arguing against genetic randomness. Maybe he believes the only other possibility is Intelligent Design? I don't know. I haven't looked into it. [GiordyS]

Ironically, GiordyS says this in response to my pointing out that Dr. Spencer has been making his "intelligent design" views public for years... and in that bit of video Dr. Spencer was repeating classic "intelligent design" arguments. "Maybe?" You still "don't know"? Seriously?

But I know nothing about competing genetic randomness theories, so my lack of surprise has nothing to do with the actual science, in case you misunderstood. (I haven't looked into it.) [GiordyS]

They're not "competing genetic randomness theories. That's the entire point. "Intelligent Design" is a supernatural "explanation" which violates methodological naturalism and therefore would destroy science if it were confused with a scientific hypothesis. If the scientific process included a "supernatural" option, it would be used on a daily basis because people (including scientists) are lazy. As I've said before, I believe that science absolutely requires naturalism for two reasons. First, supernatural explanations are compatible with any and all eventualities, therefore they are not falsifiable and do not provide unique predictions.

Second, if science allowed supernatural explanations as a legitimate recourse, they would be used far too often because we can't distinguish poorly understood natural phenomena from genuinely supernatural phenomena:

• Laplace never would've studied the stability of the solar system, so NASA wouldn't know to put the SOHO and WMAP satellites in their respective Lagrange points.
• The question of why atoms are stable despite the predictions of classical electrodynamics would've been answered in the same way Newton explained the solar system's stability, so quantum mechanics (along with much of modern technology) wouldn't have been discovered.
• The precession of Mercury's orbit would've been dismissed as "Allah pushing the planet around," so we never would have discovered Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, without which GPS devices can't function accurately.
• The missing 2/3 of solar neutrinos would've been explained as "Ra's chariot soaking up the neutrinos on their way to earth," so neutrino oscillation would never have been proposed and proven, which would cause our cosmological models (if 'science' of this kind could even lead to such models) to be inaccurate because we wouldn't know that neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass.
• Cosmic rays with energies above the GZK limit are currently unexplained. Should we bother looking for a naturalistic explanation, or just say they're "Jesus particles"?
• Should we continue to try to quantize gravity, or announce that the obvious impossibility of such a feat is proof that the universe contains a message from its Intelligent Designer?

If you think that any of these examples are silly, exactly how are they differen

More to the point, you also said (after listening to Dr. Roy Spencer endorse the "theory of creation" over evolution) "I wouldn't be surprised if there is contradictory evidence that is simply ignored or dismissed because it challenges orthodox views. Scientists are human beings after all."

You were responding to a video where Senator Whitehouse asked Roy Spencer "And do you still believe that the Theory of Creation actually has a much better scientific basis than the Theory of Evolution, to be specific?"

Dr. Spencer replied: "I think, I think I could be put into a debate with someone on the other side and I think I could give more science supporting that life is created than they could support, with evidence, that life evolved through natural random processes, so yes."

Dr. Spencer has been making his "intelligent design" views public for years before GiordyS cited him for his climate contrarian views.

And once GiordyS finds out about Dr. Spencer's creationist views, he says "I wouldn't be surprised if there is contradictory evidence that is simply ignored or dismissed because it challenges orthodox views. Scientists are human beings after all."

As I've explained, intelligent design is certainly not scientific. But to return to my original point with this analogy, should I ignore all that evidence just because GiordyS's source Dr. Spencer is a creationist?

More to the point, you also said (after listening to Dr. Roy Spencer endorse the "theory of creation" over evolution) "I wouldn't be surprised if there is contradictory evidence that is simply ignored or dismissed because it challenges orthodox views. Scientists are human beings after all."

You were responding to a video where Senator Whitehouse asked Roy Spencer "And do you still believe that the Theory of Creation actually has a much better scientific basis than the Theory of Evolution, to be specific?"

Dr. Spencer replied: "I think, I think I could be put into a debate with someone on the other side and I think I could give more science supporting that life is created than they could support, with evidence, that life evolved through natural random processes, so yes."

Dr. Spencer has been making his "intelligent design" views public for years before GiordyS cited him for his climate contrarian views.

And once GiordyS finds out about Dr. Spencer's creationist views, he says "I wouldn't be surprised if there is contradictory evidence that is simply ignored or dismissed because it challenges orthodox views. Scientists are human beings after all."

As I've explained, intelligent design is certainly not scientific. But to return to my original point with this analogy, should I ignore all that evidence just because GiordyS's source Dr. Spencer is a creationist?

Here is a rough investigation I did...

First, you need to read the court document from TFA -- https://www.ftc.gov/system/fil... -- and you would find out that the issue occurred in or around 2012.

quotes from the document

Amazon has received many complaints from adults who were surprised to find themselves charged for in-app purchases made by children

In March 2012, Amazon introduced a password prompt feature for in-app charges of $20 or more. (...) This initial step did not include charges below $20 or charges that, in combination, exceeded $20.

In August 2012, the FTC notified Amazon that it was investigating its in-app billing practices. ...

In October 2012, Amazon released software entitled Kindle FreeTime, which allowed parents to control tablet usage by children in a variety of ways. ...

In May 2013, Amazon added a password requirement for all first-time in-app purchases on Kindle Fire tablets. ...

In June 2013, Amazon changed the configuration of the AppStore so that the words “In-App Purchasing” would appear on an app’s description page:

To date, Kindle devices of the “First Generation,” for which software updates are no longer available, enable customers to make in-app purchases of $1 or less without authorization via entry of a password.

That said, when was the link you posted was up for the search? Would any parents need to search BEFORE they give a Kindle to their kids? If they need to, what make them think they need to? Not everyone has the same level of thought to predict what will happen in the future, so they need to find a way to prevent the situation.

Anyway, I checked online with a website which archive a lot of web page. The first date it recorded the page you mentioned is on July 11, 2014 -- http://web.archive.org/web/201... -- which is quite late compared to the time the issue had firstly occurred. See what I am going?

In conclusion, no one should be SJW and said it is every parents' fault. I am sure there are some who are at fault, but I believe majority are suffered because Amazon didn't try to properly solve the issue. Or Amazon was incompetent in solving the issue. Who knows?

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury is more of a poetic look at the topic of youth, ageing and death. I vaguely remember a short story which touched on the specific topic of what eternal youth was possible by drinking a potion made out of something cheap and ubiquitous, like a dandelion. How would a person decide when to stop taking this elixir? I don't remember the name of that story but it might have been in the book Dandelion Wine.

You're probably thinking of the Kelly Hoose case (here's another story link)where the government used a company-watermarked image of Melissa Bertsch. The British government pulled the same trick using the same exact model two years prior to that. Some state laws that define the requirements for child pornography let the police and prosecutors treat something as child pornography even if only the metadata indicates it's probably child pornography (file name, title, a sticky note on a DVD case that says "kids having sex," whatever.) The overall standards for what is or is not pornography are grossly subjective already; parents have been arrested in the past because of taking innocent pictures of their kids in a bathtub combined with mandatory reporting laws for photo developers that make the developers liable if they fail to report.

The system is set up to make it as easy as possible to accuse someone of possession of child pornography and make it extremely difficult to win in court. The conviction rate for child pornography cases that aren't plead guilty to, dropped by prosecution or dismissed by a judge before going to trial is 100% and that's not an exaggeration. Once you're charged, you either find a bulletproof defense like Kelly Hoose, you plead guilty to avoid prison, or you go to a trial and watch as a jury throws you away because it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to protecting the children.

Kiddie porn charges have become an easy way for the government to strip someone of their rights, shut them up, and get rid of them for a long time. You don't have to be guilty, you just have to seem that way.

George W. Bush started following the law George H. W. Bush signed when he was president: PL101-611, the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990.

That act required NASA to procure commercial launch services.

I say "started" because shortly after my subsequent congressional testimony on the importance of commercial incentives, I was working at Cape Canaveral on commercializing the MX missile as a launch vehicle when everyone in our firm received "VIP" seats to watch NASA launch a satellite. NASA continued to all-but-ignore the law. When I contacted Senator Gore's chief of staff of the Senate Science Committee to request Congressional oversight of the law, he informed me that our grassroots coalition simply did not possess the "power" required to see the law enforced. That is quite seriously no exaggeration of what he said. Since I had been working at SAIC on technologies that, let's just say, had a good deal of "power" I decided to drop out of politics lest I start thinking about exactly how much "power" I had. Ron Paul's 2007 campaign was the next time participated in politics.

There is a good deal more to this history, but since Google has decided they can't be bothered to make their search engine work in the unique case of Usenet archives, it is going to take some doing for people to find it. For those who can figure out how to make it work I suggest looking at the sci.space and sci.space.policy archives starting around the time that the L5 Society merged with the National Space Society.

George W. Bush started following the law George H. W. Bush signed when he was president: PL101-611, the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990.

That act required NASA to procure commercial launch services.

I say "started" because shortly after my subsequent congressional testimony on the importance of commercial incentives, I was working at Cape Canaveral on commercializing the MX missile as a launch vehicle when everyone in our firm received "VIP" seats to watch NASA launch a satellite. NASA continued to all-but-ignore the law. When I contacted Senator Gore's chief of staff of the Senate Science Committee to request Congressional oversight of the law, he informed me that our grassroots coalition simply did not possess the "power" required to see the law enforced. That is quite seriously no exaggeration of what he said. Since I had been working at SAIC on technologies that, let's just say, had a good deal of "power" I decided to drop out of politics lest I start thinking about exactly how much "power" I had. Ron Paul's 2007 campaign was the next time participated in politics.

There is a good deal more to this history, but since Google has decided they can't be bothered to make their search engine work in the unique case of Usenet archives, it is going to take some doing for people to find it. For those who can figure out how to make it work I suggest looking at the sci.space and sci.space.policy archives starting around the time that the L5 Society merged with the National Space Society.

One thing that taxi drivers don't want getting out is that for the most part:
1. Assaults by taxi drivers are fairly common as well.

I only feel it fair to point out that assaults on taxi drivers are also fairly common as well...as evidenced by things like the local taxi companies here feeling the need to fit silent alarms to the cabs which warn the company, other taxi drivers and Police that a driver is in trouble and their current GPS location in an attempt to stop the number of assaults on the drivers (It worked, up to a point, however there are still 'no go' areas where they refuse to pick up from/deliver to)

2. Taxi drivers are often vetted about as well as Uber drivers - many of the companies use the same background check service Uber does.

Here's another thing, as our local taxi companies are run by crooks, a lot of their drivers are crooks and have criminal convictions. This is not atypical.

Now, I can't make universal statements because there's thousands of taxi companies, but I think Uber is getting a bad rap from sheer size and being a good target for news articles.

Too true, it's amusing that the media appears to be quite willing to paint Uber's operations and operatives as being somewhat 'shady', as if this was somehow any different than 'normal' cab firms..

the irony of all this isn't lost on a lot of us.

Some of us are getting the popcorn in for the day that Uber starts operations here and runs into our local equivalent of the The Piranha Brothers who run all the taxis (despite the apparent multiple liveries..)

The algorithmically generated prior art is probably not prior art at all. To be prior art, the description has to be published at a specific date. I don't see any dates on this prior art (here for example http://allpriorart.com/1459996...). Further, even if it had a date, it's unclear if this was ever "published". A single URL sitting on the internet is probably insufficient to meet the publication requirement if the link isn't accessible from some indexing or search system. Even the 10,000 prior art inventions posted to archive.org (here https://archive.org/download/A...) could arguably not be considered accessible if there is no real way to find anything within them.

This has a long way to go before it could be considered practical. That said, it's an interesting idea.

4 It is a cover story for military aviation R&D.

Bingo. USAF even admitted as much, back before they took this off their website.

People really do see lights in the sky that seem to move in ways our aircraft can't. They're just projections. And please ignore the Chinese demonstrations of such tech. It's clearly not a militarized version of this.

Whatever you do, don't look up "blue beam", it's clearly 100% infeasible. There's no plan to stage an alien invasion.... even though a presidential candidate in TFA is currently setting up the pitch. Plans may have changed, but the PSYOPS tech remains the same.

Imagine getting blown back into the stone age... In a few short generations all the tech we have will be gone it will become like today's rumored legends of wizardry. Then those powerful few who secreted away tech and retained control of the skies can safely re-emerge, even more powerful than before. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So, to become Gods, elites just need to reduce the relative tech level of the populace...

Oh, come on, that's just a silly theory. There's no global effort to manufacture consent for population reduction on the grounds of climate / pollution fear-mongering. It's not like there's an Agenda 21 nor Agenda 2030 to dictate global policy that aligns with such (you haven't read them, have you? Of course not, you're a member of the slave class). Keep in mind that whites are less than 10% of the population of earth, and their birth rates are in decline. That means it's brown people who are the "population problem"... Nah, couldn't be. It goes against all liberal sensibilities to think that way. Of course bigger government can only lead to "social" benefits, never harm. Corruption is a fairy tale. Panama has no papers, and Emperors wear no clothes (in the Bohemian Grove).

Beware of all claims of the existence of extraterrestrials. It could just be our secret space program. I wonder what they're hiding behind that projection covering the moon?

That's not actually a ringing endorsement.

Why not? Because the current generation is going to the dogs? How many times have we heard that? The baby boomer generation, who are now the old farts, were constantly belittle for their stupidity and selfishness when they were young. You can easily see it from 1950s films. I also suggest checking here. It's number 29, entitled "Only Johnny Knows". Notice how what is said could just as easily apply to millenials, baby boomers, generation x, and so on. This nonsense is really get tiring...

Basically what I’m trying to say is read the fine print and check your entitlement. You chose to pay money for a product that was dependent on someone else’s charity to keep working.

The not-so-fine print at the time of purchase actually said "Free lifetime service subscription." That sure sounds like an a liability the parties would have had on their radar when valuing the acquisition. In fact, after the acquisition was complete, Nest reiterated the commitment: "For existing customers, the service will continue to be available and we will continue to offer customer support."

Reasonable people thus might well view the ongoing service as something more along the lines of a contractual obligation rather than an "entitlement" or "charity."

Basically what I’m trying to say is read the fine print and check your entitlement. You chose to pay money for a product that was dependent on someone else’s charity to keep working.

The not-so-fine print at the time of purchase actually said "Free lifetime service subscription." That sure sounds like an a liability the parties would have had on their radar when valuing the acquisition. In fact, after the acquisition was complete, Nest reiterated the commitment: "For existing customers, the service will continue to be available and we will continue to offer customer support."

Reasonable people thus might well view the ongoing service as something more along the lines of a contractual obligation rather than an "entitlement" or "charity."

No new nuclear generating plants have been licensed and constructed for thirty years

Just an FYI, This statement is dubious.

There are two new reactors being built at Summer Nuclear Station in South Carolina, (NRC Approved in 2012). There are also two new reactors being built at Vogtle Nuclear Station in Georgia (also NRC approved in 2012).

While technically true, no new plants have been licensed (a plant being a location where 1 or more reactors reside), it makes it sound like there has been no nuclear expansion in the US at all. In reality the construction of new reactors at existing plants is still an expansion of nuclear power.

And, President Obama's executive branch offered Loan guarantees for Vogtle. This happened under the 111th congress. Even the NRC Chairman at the time, Gregory Jaczko, was appointed during the 111th.

So yes, Nuclear power did receive a substantial bump under the 111th, as compared to the 15 previous congresses.

https://archive.org/details/co...

Wow, 100 Atari games?!? For only $15?!? The easiest way possible?

And here I was thinking that the 500+ free Atari games playable for free in your browser on archive.org was the easiest possible way.

I feel you are also paying for the online multiplayer, scoreboards, convenience of them all being downloaded at once, along with support for newer controllers.

... soldiers have been coaxed into marching onto a battlefield and dying in their thousands so Tyrant A can enjoy riches instead of Tyrant B.

USMC Major General Smedley Butler said "War Is A Racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Download here: https://archive.org/details/Wa...

There were a few easter eggs on the original Palm Pilot. One showed the Development Team Credits with a photo, another was dancing palm trees in the Giraffe app.

I used to have a web site listing a lot more, but it's been lost many ISP's ago...

edit: Found it!
https://web.archive.org/web/19...

oh, well, that's different then. The archive only has 600 or so arcade games. And Admittedly searching for "atari" only gives about 40 results.

And they have the DOS versions of of Hard drivin and Hard Drivin II.

oh, well, that's different then. The archive only has 600 or so arcade games. And Admittedly searching for "atari" only gives about 40 results.

And they have the DOS versions of of Hard drivin and Hard Drivin II.

oh, well, that's different then. The archive only has 600 or so arcade games. And Admittedly searching for "atari" only gives about 40 results.

And they have the DOS versions of of Hard drivin and Hard Drivin II.

Wow, 100 Atari games?!? For only $15?!? The easiest way possible?

And here I was thinking that the 500+ free Atari games playable for free in your browser on archive.org was the easiest possible way.

The voters in the first article may be interested to learn the discrimination has an Anglo-Saxon cultural basis, but I doubt they would find solace in that in any case.

Some people want to find discrimination or outrage everywhere. I read the article you linked and I honestly find not a thing to be outraged about. Do you?

Once again, the subject is not ballot-box stuffing or similar attempts at mass fraud. Voter fraud is when someone impersonates another person at the poll or tricks authorities when registering to vote; That is salient to the subject of voter IDs and immigrants.

Here is a link [wikipedia.org] about written tests in US voting history. Also, more recently poll taxes. [wikipedia.org] As with Tamany Hall, this is grade school history.

Yes, history that happened well over 50 years ago. History that also, despite your protestations, did involve people voting as other people. You might as well be saying how you think we're about to start interning Japanese again. Times have changed, people have changed, situations have changed, the population has changed, and the country as a whole has changed. Jim Crow isn't coming back. Drawing a false analogy between verifying voter identity (that again, the vast majority of people already have, and are available without cost from almost all states) and, e.g., literacy tests, is ludicrous.

That judicialwatch link is an opinion piece from nine years ago that doesn't even give a rough idea of scale beyond weasel words like "many". It has one broken link to a newspaper, and several other links that are activist groups (just as judicialwatch is, itself, a conservative activist group). IOW, they don't feel confident enough to link directly to research and they conveniently left statistics out. You took accepted their opinion as true on their authority. The other articles you think you saw were probably about accusations that didn't pan out -- see the studies I referenced via washingtonpost. [washingtonpost.com]

Liberals write against voter ID, conservatives write for voter ID. No surprise there.

Add-on to turn broken links into Archive links is very handy. Here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20070616203147/http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-votefraud_10tex.ART.State.Edition1.4454f8d.html

Here's an NC article about the complexities of voter rolls, IDs, and immigrants:
http://www.journalnow.com/news/elections/state/dmv-search-of-records-turns-up-ineligible-n-c-voters/article_f4ecc2ae-5981-11e4-9f35-0017a43b2370.html

That's interesting about Mexico, though it would be ironic to hold them up as a good example when their people are fleeing. As for "pot-kettle", false equivalence canards got old in the 90s. They don't hold water in most places. Not only have I looked at your sources more closely than you have looked at mine, I have backed-up my concerns; you haven't.

Interesting that you hadn't heard about Mexico's voter ID laws (wait till you hear what they do with illegal immigrants)--it's been a pro-voter ID POV talking point for, I don't know, a decade? Here's an article that goes in more depth (http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2015/aug/26/sid-miller/sid-miller-says-voters-mexico-must-have-tamper-pro/ -- hat tip, it does mention some US statistics you'll enjoy). As with everything else in the Internet echo chamber. Liberals write against showing an ID to vote (but yes to showing an ID

That reminded me of a similar hack I read about a couple of years ago (and holy shit was it hard to find this again). It's about going around the 5 attempt limit per power cycle that exists in Opal compliant ATA password implementations.

HP-Labs have solved the problem with macro malware 15 years ago.

They create a new temporary user to run it. A powerbox gave the user access and control over files needed.

Why didn't Microsoft follow this path:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Oh come on. Sourceforge has never been good. Slow as hell service (CVS et al) and cluttered UI in project pages were the main complaints in the 2000s. They've made the service fast now though. The UI has had a facelift once or twice during the time but the clutter remains. Projects' bug trackers are littered bugs that have doubly-escaped HTML entities, from some conversion in 2007 or so.

Here, have this snapshot of SF UI circa 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20031008091422/http://sourceforge.net/projects/gaim/

'Tolerable' is what I'd currently rate them as. There are way better project hosting services around. I'd think there were way better project hosting services around in the early 2000s too.

I had in fact been wondering for quite some time how come a technology oriented site isn't securing traffic with TLS.

Because until relatively recently (September 2013), ad networks did not support HTTPS. Thus browsers would block ads as mixed content. So in order to make the ads appear, Slashdot would redirect HTTPS visits from non-subscribers to HTTP.

From: http://web.archive.org/web/201...
===
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?

An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan--at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.

And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars--why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?

It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold. According to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw three hundred worldwide (two hundred at the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to four hundred thousand smoking-related deaths in the United States alone. When we consider our assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism.

Notice how quickly people learn to drive well. Early failure is efficiently corrected, usually self-corrected, because the terrific motivation of staying alive and in one piece steers driving improvement. If the grand theories of Comenius and Herbart about learning by incremental revelation, or those lifelong nanny rules of Owen, Maclure, Pestalozzi, and Beatrice Webb, or those calls for precision in human ranking of Thorndike and Hall, or those nuanced interventions of Yale, Stanford, and Columbia Teachers College were actually as essential as their proponents claimed, this libertarian miracle of motoring would be unfathomable.

Now consid

There was at least one Y Window System project, which evidently died on the vine.

Not surprising, since it looks like another open source project run by one person who bit off more than he could chew.

Actually, SSI and Medicare are not self-funding; they've been running in the red for several years now. They are drawing out of the total Federal revenues. And the funds are not a "lock box" for you - the Supreme Court has ruled there is no right to any Social Security payment. Its funds have been part of the official budget for nearly 50 years, and funds have been used to buy T-bills (loans to the Federal Government) since the beginning, by statute. FICA payments are made to the Federal Government, those funds are loaned to the Federal Government, and the Federal Government has no legal requirement to pay back any of it. Does that mean it's separate and self-funding? In any real sense of those words - not a chance.

Awesome, thanks. My memory's fuzzy in my old age. I've put some strange chemicals through that brain of mine. I'm not shocked when I forget, I'm shocked when I remember. I thought I remembered DEC on the chips on MODEMs and NICs. I'm pretty sure that I'd even seen them on stuff that wasn't branded Digital.

Now that I think about it, I was not a resident at the time, I think they did some of their networking stuff in Augusta, Maine. I didn't live in Maine back then but I've heard people mention it. That makes me curious and I'll have to spend some time with Google tomorrow. I'll see if I can dig up any information about what's left of them.

I don't know how true it is but I've read that a DEC employee was the first person to send out what we call spam today. Some invite to a conference, trade show, or sales event and was UCE/spam. Something like that. Alas, It's nearly 0100 and Google is so very far away. Meh, it'll give me something else to look up when I'm more alert and more likely to retain it.

I'll be home in the spring. I'll have to see if I kept one of the old workstations. I'd not be surprised to find out that I had and that it still has its peripherals and an OS installed. As I recall, they were incredibly heavy and sturdy. They were made out of a heavy gauge sheet metal with not a whole lot of plastic. I almost want to say that I've come across one from sometime after the sale as it was just a re-badged workstation. That has to have been somewhere close to 15-20 years ago.

To Google or not... If I start this trip, I'll never get to sleep. Ah well, I cheated. It looks like it was the AlphaStation that I'm thinking of. Sadly, it doesn't look like it is very well documented:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There's a slim chance that I have some paperwork from over the years. If I do then I'll see if I can get it scanned and then send the physical copies off to the Archive.

That page leads me to here:
http://web.archive.org/web/200...

That seems about right. Amusingly it says this:

Pricing for the XP1000 starts at $7,152 (U.S.) for a system running Windows NT with a 500 MHz Alpha 21264 processor, ELSA GLoria Synergy graphics, 128 MB of RAM and a 4 GB Wide-Ultra SCSI 10,000 rpm hard drive.

That is $10,170.61 adjusted for inflation. And so much for going to sleep and being bright eyed and bushy tailed in the morning.

It died in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve but few were willing to accept the fact until '64, when we enjoyed a coup and had our coinage debased.

Indeed.

For those who do not understand, try reading "The Creature From Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin.

https://archive.org/details/Cr...

Strat

Graph 1
Graph 2

You will note Graph 1 is from the internet wayback archives, Graph 2 is the current one from NASA's website. They changed the data and made older temperatures colder and newer ones warmer.

No editorial, just the outright facts.

Remember, you are a member of your state first....THEN you are a member of the United States.

At least..that's how it was set up.

This is very true, and it's something that's almost completely forgotten today. It's the reason why Charles Francis Adams -- grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams -- a man who led black Union troops in the Civil War, and a president of the American Historical Association, could argue in 1902 that Robert E. Lee should be given a statue in Washington, D.C.

Why? Because Lee first-and-foremost saw himself as a Virginian, and he was literally defending his country in his "native state" of Virginia (a "patriot" in the sense of "patriotism" from the Latin patria referring to "fatherland") from Northern states invading potentially sovereign Southern ones. (I'm not agreeing with Adams's argument here, just noting what he says.)

Nowadays we make fun of quaint Southerners who speak of the "War of Northern Aggression," and we seek to tear down vestigial confederate monuments. Perhaps we should, given that they have become largely symbolic of slavery alone for many people.

But Charles Adams is an actual voice from the time of the Civil War and before -- a Northern voice, from someone who had supported the African-American cause. And his essay describes the radical transformation of views on the sovereignty of states that happened during and after the Civil War.

Obviously we view things differently today, and for many people it's hard to understand such a perspective in today's politically divisive climate. But the individuality of states was central to the original conception of the United States.

FIRE does take a lot of those cases, but yeah your post is pretty ignorant and downright incorrect. Let me list a few: 1) Defending a self-described socialist - http://web.archive.org/web/200...
2) Student suspended for reading a book from school library on the downfall of hte KKK - http://www.thefire.org/article...
3) Defending a student who'd been unilaterally expelled over a joke - http://chronicle.com/article/F...
4) Defending an atheist college professor - http://insidehighered.com/news...
5) Calling out Depaul for not recognizing a pro-marijauna group - http://thefire.org/article/123...
6) FIRE calls out university for denying an LGBT group school recognition - https://www.thefire.org/fire-l...

I can go on if you want. Lots of these cases do seem skewed toward benefitting white males, but if you look at the actual cases well you'd see why. Lots of the decisions they draw FIRE's ire are fucking stupid, short-sighted, and somehow scraped their way out of a poorly run administration meeting.

roughly what a 2.5" magnetic drive with equivalent capacity cost me three or four years ago

Try 7 years ago.

Well, the Internet Archive has copies of it.

The only thing is it has an older version of AnyDVD HD and a couple of other programs, too.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...