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Probably Victor Borge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Borge

http://www.archive.org/details/OTRR_Victor_Borge_Collection_Singles

Uh ... bread and circuses was not the reason Rome fell, just one of many reasons.

And I think you quite miss the point of the effect of "bread and circuses" contributing to the fall of Rome. It was because millions in taxpayer money were being spent on bread and circuses (like a form of dole) for the non-working poor, and this had economic effects (obviously) when combined with other factors.

All these expenditures had to be recovered from the taxpayer. To compound the difficulties, there was an adverse balance of trade. Roman currency, for example, poured into India and the East to pay for luxuries. Even in the time of Nero, Seneca estimated that it cost Rome five million dollars a year to import its luxuries from the East. In a word, though seemingly prosperous, in the second century AD the Roman empire was overspending to such an extent that it was moving to an economic crisis. When in 167 AD Marcus Aurelius was faced by the attack of the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi, he was forced to sell, is it were, the crown jewels as well as the household furnishing of his palace to finance the war.

When the US government starts spending millions of taxpayer money on Donkey Kong contests, then we can worry about it the role old computer games have on the destruction of modern civilization.

The only thing you could say here, really, is that this may be a symptom of overall decay, not a reason.

BTW, when did Cheerios lose the capital letter a la xerox?

Apparently it happened sometime between May 18, 2005 and Feb 03, 2006.

Now we need to establish the perp and the motive.

BTW, when did Cheerios lose the capital letter a la xerox?

Apparently it happened sometime between May 18, 2005 and Feb 03, 2006.

Now we need to establish the perp and the motive.

I finally managed to pull a copy of the v0.8 source from archive.org, and it seems that you can still access the CVS repository even though it seems to be missing from the SourceForge page. I can find references to contributions by Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir (the main developer) and Silviu Simen in the source code and Teodorescu Cristian in the commit logs. The latter is interesting as he seems to have started work on WinMTR 0.9 in 2004, contradicting Appnor's statement of inactivity.

The archive for that web site is here

I think Eric Idle said it best.

The site has been offline for two years, but the Internet Archive has most of it is HERE .

Read it and weep. Nothing will be done because most Windows users, like you, prefer to not believe that they are being spied on, or that former Microsoft employee James Plamondon trained "Technical Evangelists" who astroturf websites making fun of such claims.

You should read James Plamondon's mea culpa concerning his training of PAID "Technical Evangelists" to do the "Slog", the "Stuffed Panel", Astroturf congress and various websites with pro Microsoft and/or anti-Apple or Linux lies, etc...

Plamondon had to do a mea culpa because his activity was exposed in the Combs vs Microsoft lawsuit where the training documents he wrote were released to the public. As an example of how TE's work, read exerpts from Plamondon's training manual for the phrase "stacked panel", "The Slog", and other techniques here.

When Joe Barr wrote SLIME in 1994, he didn't know about the TE's Microsoft had unleashed on the world, but he described them to a tea:
http://slated.org/more_microsoft_dirty_tricks_history

Internet Achive has the "SLIME" article here.

A more complete, but not exhaustive list of dirty tricks by Microsoft are listed here:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

The site has been offline for two years, but the Internet Archive has most of it is HERE .

Read it and weep. Nothing will be done because most Windows users, like you, prefer to not believe that they are being spied on, or that former Microsoft employee James Plamondon trained "Technical Evangelists" who astroturf websites making fun of such claims.

You should read James Plamondon's mea culpa concerning his training of PAID "Technical Evangelists" to do the "Slog", the "Stuffed Panel", Astroturf congress and various websites with pro Microsoft and/or anti-Apple or Linux lies, etc...

Plamondon had to do a mea culpa because his activity was exposed in the Combs vs Microsoft lawsuit where the training documents he wrote were released to the public. As an example of how TE's work, read exerpts from Plamondon's training manual for the phrase "stacked panel", "The Slog", and other techniques here.

When Joe Barr wrote SLIME in 1994, he didn't know about the TE's Microsoft had unleashed on the world, but he described them to a tea:
http://slated.org/more_microsoft_dirty_tricks_history

Internet Achive has the "SLIME" article here.

A more complete, but not exhaustive list of dirty tricks by Microsoft are listed here:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

Your claim that Jimmy has been rewriting history is pretty much rubbish.

Sanger left the project in 2002, long before most of the most significant growth and development, and his own attempts to rewrite history long after his departure to reflect a greatly increased importance are trivially documented. Larry's self-promotion only began after he started seeking VC funding to build Wikipedia competitors— which he's had several more or less failed attempts.

Sure, Larry was around for the inception but he contributed almost nothing to the character, policies, or procedures that drove Wikipedia into exponential growth (having left several years before said exponential growth began). And if you're only looking to credit someone for the inception of a collaboratively developed free content encyclopedia, you ought to be giving Richard Stallman, of all people, at least equal billing because he was calling for this a long time before Jimmy and Larry were on the scene and he worked extensively with Jimmy early on (hammering out the licensing and such).

Really, a lot of people deserve credit equal to or even more than Jimmy for their early stewardship of the project. Larry, as one of Wikipedia's first quitters, is not really one of the most significant of them.

http://www.archive.org/details/TripDown1905

Heh... the /web/ "wasn't as prominent back in the 90s as it was (say) in the early-2000s."

That disagreement aside, by roughly 2005 you could buy a PC in a black aluminum case with a clear side panel at the local bigbox here in Canada. So for me that was the final tombstone of the original scene; the original creative thrust had long peaked. And in my personal awareness of the scene, I put the peak more at 1998 -- but sure, that's going to be a YMMV. If you were spending time on different corners of the web, it may well have appeared later to you.

I'm just pointing out the guy being nasty and abusive with his "correction", is actually flat wrong himself.

More 1990s scene -- remember PowerBook Army? Early powerbooks with paint and clear parts and LEDs. Good times.
http://web.archive.org/web/19981203135313/http://www.powerbook.org/

Sorry mods, but that troll wasn't "Informative". Modding was alive and well in the 90s. Here's a waybackmachine's 2000 save of Virtual Hideout's casemod gallery with 18 pages already.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815205655/www.virtualhideout.net/cool_case/index.shtml

And hell, Page and Brin /retired/ their famous Lego-cased server in 1999.

I'd love to see evidence of modding in the 80s. It probably existed, but I didn't start customizing till the 486. Maybe someone remembers a newsgroup?

Look at the signatories on this page, and tell me with a straight face that none of them have held public office.

George Bush could do it. The man can say any lie with not only a straight face, but a look of total empathic trust. It's a skill he picked up back when he was an alcoholic, and it served him very well in business and politics. Just saying: Some people are schemers, some people are sellers.

Look at the signatories on this page, and tell me with a straight face that none of them have held public office.

My new-years resolution? Find a site that is as good as Slashdot used to be.

This looks pretty good?

If you want good reporting on labor from anything but a business perspective (ie how will this effect share value), you have to look at the media of the labor movement itself, not the corporate owned and controlled mainstream media. On the Metropolis Honeywell workers in particular, I suggest these two episodes of Labor Express radio. Another good source for labor news is the Industrial Worker, the paper of the IWW.

If you want good reporting on labor from anything but a business perspective (ie how will this effect share value), you have to look at the media of the labor movement itself, not the corporate owned and controlled mainstream media. On the Metropolis Honeywell workers in particular, I suggest these two episodes of Labor Express radio. Another good source for labor news is the Industrial Worker, the paper of the IWW.

Abstinence and marital fidelity are the only effective methods that can stop this deadly trend. In fact, in light of the scientific and historical evidence, it is gross negligence bordering on manslaughter to promote "sex education" as a cure when millions suffer from the effects of this "civilised" education.

Actually, public health policy based solely on abstinence has not been shown to be effective.; it has a failure rate at a population level.

It seems that link may have been /.ed. They are doing precisely as you say.

Here is a dump of the information, last I had it.

IRC: irc.freenode.net #openbsd
Twitter: OpenBSDGate

The etherpad (most detailed and up to date):
OPENBSD IPSEC STACK VERIFICATION

Original Email:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2

The code:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/netinet/ipsec_input.c
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/netinet/ipsec_output.c

Misc:

What other software includes the OpenBSD IPSEC implementation?

Not Linux:
Triaging Linux; git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git
Initial commit 6c55c29fa, Oct 2002, Alexey Kuznetsov
Does not appear to be derived from the above? (checking strings from ipsec_input.c version 1.54.2.3, Oct 2002). Neither copyright information nor comment strings match. Linux's IPSec implementation looks original.
'git log -p --grep=IPSEC' on the above clone shows complete history for the period.

Communications:
IRC: irc.freenode.net #openbsd
Twitter: OpenBSDGate
PublicPad (this document); http://piratenpad.de/condition-beige

Press:

http://blogs.forbes.com/taylorbuley/2010/12/14/fbi-accusedipsec-of-decade-old-cryptography-code-conspiracy/
http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/10/12/15/004235/FBI-Alleged-To-Have-Backd

We have never allowed US citizens or foreign citizens working in the US
to hack on crypto code (Niels Provos used to make trips to Canada to
develop OpenSSH for this reason), so direct interference in the crypto
code is unlikely. It would also be fairly obvious - the crypto code
works as pretty basic block transform API, and there aren't many places
where one could smuggle key bytes out. We always used arcrandom() for
generating random numbers when we needed them, so deliberate biases of
key material, etc would be quite visible.
oored-OpenBSDs-IPSEC-Stack
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/elw0x/allegations_regarding_openbsd_ipsec_fbi_backdoors/
http://www.metafilter.com/98547/Subject-Allegations-regarding-OpenBSD-IPSEC

Docs:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000621015208/www.netsec.net/gsa.html
https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0040K/GS35F0040K_online.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/19980101000000-20040101235959*sh_re_sr_1nr_30/http://www.netsec.net/*
http://web.archive.org/web/20000816024729/www.netsec.net/ltr_doj.html

Source Contributors:
Jason: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwright

Possibility #1: (eldragon)
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvs

It seems that link may have been /.ed. They are doing precisely as you say.

Here is a dump of the information, last I had it.

IRC: irc.freenode.net #openbsd
Twitter: OpenBSDGate

The etherpad (most detailed and up to date):
OPENBSD IPSEC STACK VERIFICATION

Original Email:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2

The code:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/netinet/ipsec_input.c
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/netinet/ipsec_output.c

Misc:

What other software includes the OpenBSD IPSEC implementation?

Not Linux:
Triaging Linux; git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git
Initial commit 6c55c29fa, Oct 2002, Alexey Kuznetsov
Does not appear to be derived from the above? (checking strings from ipsec_input.c version 1.54.2.3, Oct 2002). Neither copyright information nor comment strings match. Linux's IPSec implementation looks original.
'git log -p --grep=IPSEC' on the above clone shows complete history for the period.

Communications:
IRC: irc.freenode.net #openbsd
Twitter: OpenBSDGate
PublicPad (this document); http://piratenpad.de/condition-beige

Press:

http://blogs.forbes.com/taylorbuley/2010/12/14/fbi-accusedipsec-of-decade-old-cryptography-code-conspiracy/
http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/10/12/15/004235/FBI-Alleged-To-Have-Backd

We have never allowed US citizens or foreign citizens working in the US
to hack on crypto code (Niels Provos used to make trips to Canada to
develop OpenSSH for this reason), so direct interference in the crypto
code is unlikely. It would also be fairly obvious - the crypto code
works as pretty basic block transform API, and there aren't many places
where one could smuggle key bytes out. We always used arcrandom() for
generating random numbers when we needed them, so deliberate biases of
key material, etc would be quite visible.
oored-OpenBSDs-IPSEC-Stack
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/elw0x/allegations_regarding_openbsd_ipsec_fbi_backdoors/
http://www.metafilter.com/98547/Subject-Allegations-regarding-OpenBSD-IPSEC

Docs:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000621015208/www.netsec.net/gsa.html
https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0040K/GS35F0040K_online.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/19980101000000-20040101235959*sh_re_sr_1nr_30/http://www.netsec.net/*
http://web.archive.org/web/20000816024729/www.netsec.net/ltr_doj.html

Source Contributors:
Jason: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwright

Possibility #1: (eldragon)
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvs

It seems that link may have been /.ed. They are doing precisely as you say.

Here is a dump of the information, last I had it.

IRC: irc.freenode.net #openbsd
Twitter: OpenBSDGate

The etherpad (most detailed and up to date):
OPENBSD IPSEC STACK VERIFICATION

Original Email:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2

The code:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/netinet/ipsec_input.c
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/netinet/ipsec_output.c

Misc:

What other software includes the OpenBSD IPSEC implementation?

Not Linux:
Triaging Linux; git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git
Initial commit 6c55c29fa, Oct 2002, Alexey Kuznetsov
Does not appear to be derived from the above? (checking strings from ipsec_input.c version 1.54.2.3, Oct 2002). Neither copyright information nor comment strings match. Linux's IPSec implementation looks original.
'git log -p --grep=IPSEC' on the above clone shows complete history for the period.

Communications:
IRC: irc.freenode.net #openbsd
Twitter: OpenBSDGate
PublicPad (this document); http://piratenpad.de/condition-beige

Press:

http://blogs.forbes.com/taylorbuley/2010/12/14/fbi-accusedipsec-of-decade-old-cryptography-code-conspiracy/
http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/10/12/15/004235/FBI-Alleged-To-Have-Backd

We have never allowed US citizens or foreign citizens working in the US
to hack on crypto code (Niels Provos used to make trips to Canada to
develop OpenSSH for this reason), so direct interference in the crypto
code is unlikely. It would also be fairly obvious - the crypto code
works as pretty basic block transform API, and there aren't many places
where one could smuggle key bytes out. We always used arcrandom() for
generating random numbers when we needed them, so deliberate biases of
key material, etc would be quite visible.
oored-OpenBSDs-IPSEC-Stack
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/elw0x/allegations_regarding_openbsd_ipsec_fbi_backdoors/
http://www.metafilter.com/98547/Subject-Allegations-regarding-OpenBSD-IPSEC

Docs:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000621015208/www.netsec.net/gsa.html
https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F0040K/GS35F0040K_online.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/19980101000000-20040101235959*sh_re_sr_1nr_30/http://www.netsec.net/*
http://web.archive.org/web/20000816024729/www.netsec.net/ltr_doj.html

Source Contributors:
Jason: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwright

Possibility #1: (eldragon)
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvs

He received his master’s in information technology and his bachelor’s in psychology and biology from the University of Maryland

The biology degree never showed up, and has since then been removed from all his bios. Let me be blunt. I have already reported this fact, reading my link would have revealed Dvorak's rebuttal to this weak defense. Vivek has made no attempt to clear up this biology degree question and continues to pretend the question does not exist. That you seem to believe this question does not exist and are willing to ignore this very big problem with the country's CTO lying on his resume exposes you as a political hack who would say anything in defense of your ideological allies.

Vivek is an empty suit - he is as ignorant as his idea: "Let's move our datacenter's to the cloud".

Try reading it this time!

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/

It has come to my attention that the entire Linux community is a hotbed of so called 'alternative sexuality', which includes anything from hedonistic orgies to homosexuality to paedophilia.

What better way of demonstrating this than by looking at the hidden messages contained within the names of some of Linux's most outspoken advocates:

• Linus Torvalds is an anagram of slit anus or VD 'L,' clearly referring to himself by the first initial.
• Richard M. Stallman, spokespervert for the Gaysex's Not Unusual 'movement' is an anagram of mans cram thrill ad.
• Alan Cox is barely an anagram of anal cox which is just so filthy and unchristian it unnerves me.

I'm sure that Eric S. Raymond, composer of the satanic homosexual propaganda diatribe The Cathedral and the Bizarre, is probably an anagram of something queer, but we don't need to look that far as we know he's always shoving a gun up some poor little boy's rectum. Update: Eric S. Raymond is actually an anagram for secondary rim and cord in my arse. It just goes to show you that he is indeed queer.

Update the Second: It is also documented that Evil Sicko Gaymond is responsible for a nauseating piece of code called Fetchmail, which is obviously sinister sodomite slang for 'Felch Male' -- a disgusting practise. For those not in the know, 'felching' is the act performed by two perverts wherein one sucks their own post-coital ejaculate out of the other's rectum. In fact, it appears that the dirty Linux faggots set out to undermine the good Republican institution of e-mail, turning it into 'e-male.'

As far as Richard 'Master' Stallman goes, that filthy fudge-packer was actually quoted on leftist commie propaganda site Salon.com as saying the following: 'I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance,' he says. 'It's about being able to question conventional wisdom,' he asserts. 'I believe in love, but not monogamy,' he says plainly.

And this isn't a made up troll bullshit either! He actually stated this tripe, which makes it obvious that he is trying to politely say that he's a flaming homo slut!

Speaking about 'flaming,' who better to point out as a filthy chutney ferret than Slashdot's very own self-confessed pederast Jon Katz. Although an obvious deviant anagram cannot be found from his name, he has already confessed, nay boasted of the homosexual perversion of corrupting the innocence of young children. To quote from the article linked:

'I've got a rare kidney disease,' I told her. 'I have to go to the bathroom a lot. You can come with me if you want, but it takes a while. Is that okay with you? Do you want a note from my doctor?'

Is this why you were touching your penis in the cinema, Jon? And letting the other boys touch it too?

We should also point out that Jon Katz refers to himself as 'Slashdot's resident Gasbag.' Is there any more doubt? For those fortunate few who aren't aware of the list of homosexual terminology found inside the Linux 'Sauce Code,' a 'Gasbag' is a pervert who gains sexual gratification from having a thin straw inserted into his urethra (or to use the common parlance, 'piss-pipe'), then his homosexual lover blows firmly down the straw to inflate his scrotum. This is, of course, when he's not busy violating the dignity and co

A foundation allows him to know the donation is spent the way he intends it rather than how some other "charitable" organization deems fit.

Right - the wealth is transferred to a privately held entity that runs in perpetuity according to the choices of its founder. Note that the poster above puts scare quotes around "charitable" when it is not a billionaire's own private charity. I guess only billionaires know what is best for the common good?

You should aware that due in large part to the U.S. having the lowest taxes on the incomes of the rich in the industrialized world essentially all of the economic growth of the last 30 years has flowed exclusively into their pockets, causing the income inequality in the U.S. to rise to the highest in the industrialized world by a large margin.* Only third world plutocracies match us in this (and some do better). Wealth concentration at the top is now about equal to the age of the 19th century Robber Barons.

So what are the super-rich doing to give back? They are locking this enormous wealth permanently into tax-sheltered foundations that act according to the desires of the founder. This means that an increasingly large share of the national wealth, remains under the control of a tiny group of private individuals whose decisions control the behavior of the economy, even when most of the profits are devoted to public-spirited activities (some are retained to grow the foundation further). And it means that the control will either pass to their dynasty, or else to simply be in the control of the dead hand -- fulfilling the wishes/whims of individual long after they pass from the scene. Even with the best public spirited intentions in the world this a serious problem for a healthy society. For one thing it destroys the dynamism of an adaptable growth-oriented economy.

In the lot so long run -- this process is well along its course already -- the economy will be largely controlled by a tiny group of private individuals. The economy will be largely owned in fact either by them directly or by the foundation they control.

This is called plutocracy - it is the death of the democracy and the Republic.

* The standard metric for this is called GINI. See: this chart for the history. It was 0.395 in 1974, already the highest in the industrialized world, to 0.466 in 2001, and has risen further throughout the past decade.

I wouldn't expect so ... there's prior art on that.

The site is down so here's a cached version.

I checked out wikileaks about a year or so ago. Back then it actually looked like a typical wiki and contained all sorts of leaked documents about scandals, companies and governments from all over the world. Here's an example: http://web.archive.org/web/20080113120942/wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks

I checked it out again today and it now looks more like a blog than a wiki. All I could see was 5 links: "Cablegate: 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables", "All released leaks archived", "War Diary: Iraq War Logs", "War Diary: Afghanistan War Logs", and "Video: Collateral Murder."
I find it interesting that 4 of the links seem to be directed at implicating or embarassing the US and the rest of the site content is now a bunch of torrent files in a 7z file.

Is this related to recent DDOS attacks on their site? Can a regular wikileaks reader shed some light on this?

Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it's beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.

Ivan to Alyosha, in Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. (Or, if that's too long, The Grand Inquisitor stands on its own as a masterpiece!)

And, just as a bonus parting thought because it's one of my favorite quotes and tenuously related, maybe we'd all be better off if we shared some of the 'coexistence of faith and unbelief' of Dostoevsky. It doesn't bother me if people turn to a God in search of answers, but when they're confident enough to build a theme park out of it, it makes me nauseous. To quote Dostoevsky once more in Notes from the Dead House,

Not because you are religious, but because I myself have experienced and felt it keenly, I will tell you that in such moments one thirsts like “parched grass” for faith and finds it precisely because truth shines in misfortune. I will tell you regarding myself that I am a child of the age, a child of nonbelief and doubt up till now and even (I know it) until my coffin closes. What terrible torments this thirst to believe has cost me and still costs me, becoming stronger in my soul, the more there is in me of contrary reasonings. And yet sometimes God sends me moments in which I am utterly at peace.

You need to get media attention to make a splash. The wingers who did the whole ground zero mosque thing had their material out for months with no media interest.

You nailed the heart of a large part of the problem... A lot of scandals are just ignored by all but some obscure media outlets. Just look at some of the stories on Project Censored (and the fact that they even exist). It really does show information does not have to be hidden to be unknown to the world... And some of the regular media can continue to ignore or distort the truth indefinitely, research like this well known 2003 report showing Fox information distortion was a real eye opener to me...

Yeah, a couple decades later it gets better.
For example, the 1929 original "When The Levee Breaks" (see http://www.archive.org/details/Kansas_Joe_Memphis_Minnie-When_Levee_Breaks) has some '78rpm hiss', but is still quite relatively listenable IMHO. Same goes for Robert Johnson's 1937/1938 recordings. That's all the sample data I have - not a big fan of early-20th-century music, just a Led Zeppelin fan checking out some of the influences.

For your information, here is his old blog, last updated in 2007:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/

You can see some of his background in that.

Can't help but notice that you didn't include any actual citations. If you're going to bother quoting, then the least you could do is provide links.

You should be able to verify any of these quotes easily. This is a slashdot comment, not an academic paper. But just so everyone knows what I said is accurate:

At its launch, WikiLeaks said it was "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa", and that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East". - Source

Steven Aftergood, a veteran crusader against excessive government secrecy and director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, notes, "WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals." - Source

And no, their efforts haven't just focused on the US because of the volume of materials involved. I don't care what has or hasn't been pulled from the web; the point is that the focus of WikiLeaks' efforts have changed to target primarily the US, instead of "oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East". Julian Assange's single-minded crusade against the US has caused rifts within WikiLeaks itself:

Despite latest coup, WikiLeaks facing challenges, Washington Post

Indeed, as WikiLeaks is trumpeting its latest coup, a number of former WikiLeaks activists are painting another picture of an organization that is out of control, still too driven by the personality and ego of its mercurial founder, Julian Assange.

"I'm too busy ending two wars," is the response one reporter got in an e-mail from Assange after asking for clarity on an issue, according to a source who saw the e-mail, and thought it captured Assange's crusading and peremptory nature.

[...]

But the phenomenal rise of WikiLeaks over the past six months has come at a price, former activists say. At least five people from the core group have left because of disagreements over the way Assange was running the operation, said Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old Icelandic activist who moderated a WikiLeaks chat room until about a month ago. "Quite a few others" who were more tangentially involved have also left, he said.

He said too many editorial decisions were being made solely by Assange, including to title the Baghdad video Collateral Murder, a move that suggested to some that WikiLeaks is not neutral. "It had unnecessary effects on how the project was perceived," he said.

Former colleagues questioned the focus on high-profile disclosures such as the Afghanistan records, which, they said, not only meant smaller projects languished but that the rushed staff was ill-prepared to vet so many records to ensure that names of civilians had been redacted.

WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety, New York Times

Mr. Assange’s detractors also accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States. In London, Mr. Assange said America was an increasingly militarized society and a threat to democracy.

[...]

In an encrypted online chat, a transcript of which was passed to The Times, Mr. Assange was dismissive of his colleagues. He described them as “a confederacy of fools,” and asked his interlocutor, “Am I dealing with a complete retard?”

"I am the heart and soul of this organisation, its founde

Speaking of Leslie Nielsen and sci-fi, I'll just leave this here. He looked very different when he was younger, but the voice is still recognizable.

Enjoy...

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wikileaks.org

Wikileaks used to feature leaks from all over the world, big and small. Truth and transparency for their own sake motivated the organization. In this capacity, Wikileaks might have been a force for good.

But a few years ago, Julian Assange (who is as autocratic as the rumors indicate) and his ilk abandoned the original goals of the organization to wage a political war against the United States. Wikileaks launched a massive fundraising effort, then started to ignore documents from the general public. Most telling is that the operators let the submission system stay broken for months at a time: if your leak doesn't harm the United States, Wikileaks isn't interested.

Today's Wikileaks uses methods that the old Wikileaks would have found deplorable: these include a strict internal hierarchy, deceptive video editing, spin-heavy public statements, marketing-driven timing, purity tests, and blackmail. Whereas idealism drove the old Wikileaks, every action taken by its present incarnation is informed by malice aforethought. It's no longer about the truth. Now, it's a vendetta.

Speaking as someone who was formerly involved with the organization, I cannot support today's Wikileaks or its leadership. They've been captured by their vanity and pride[1] and as far as I'm concerned, they can hang, then burn.

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

[1] That some prominent members of the organization consider this wretched document the "obvious truth" illuminates their mindset.

But there are even darker undertones to this company than most are aware of. Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent. It is now Apple Computers offering us temptation, thereby aligning themselves with the forces of darkness.

Http://web.archive.org/web/20021203213216/www.portlandcompany.com/z24/

This was in the late 90's and there was no such thing as portable mp3 players. In fact, the Roxio Rio with 32megs of capacity came out just as I was finishing the build.

Issues to consider:

• I blew 1 head unit ($300) while installing due to miswiring. Ow.
• MASSIVE PROBLEMS with feedback. Somehow the car-computer-stereo connections caused a constant background hum that I could only minimize. Tried induction isolators, even went to a few car stereo stores and they could only scratch their heads.
• It took me 3 months to find an ATX power supply that was designed to accept 12v DC rather than 120v AC.
• Unless you design in a battery back-up, you have to wait a few minutes getting in and out of your car while you wait for the system to start up or shut down.

This project was one of my major geek credentials, but you can see from the site that I quickly realized that I was being left in the dust when it came to my webdeveloping skills. I could talk for hours about how much fun this project was for a highschooler.

Here it is.

And he writes:
Citizens in southern and western states in particular tend to value individual liberty, property rights, gun rights, and religious freedom, values which are abhorrent to the collectivist elites.

Ron Paul can take his paranoid, hypocritical, bigoted viewpoint and go to hell. He would make a lousy president.

http://web.archive.org/web/19981202072738/http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/mp3-licensing-faq.html

The following letter from Mr. Henri Linde (Thomson) explains the patent and licensing situation for MP3 (aka Layer-3) as of April 1998.

Business Answers MPEG Layer-3 - Version 04.98-3 ...thank you for your interest in our MPEG Layer-3 audio compression technology.

In this document you will find answers to the most frequently asked questions about MPEG Layer-3, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, THOMSON multimedia and the licensing of MPEG Layer-3 technology.

The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.

The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is the leading organization of applied research in Germany. It operates 47 research centers in Germany with about 9,000 employees, about half of them scientists and engineers. The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft expands to a worldwide Organization, especially in USA and Asia. Home of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is Munich.

One of the goals of the Fraunhofer policy is a rapid transfer of innovations into products. The total research expenditure is about US $ 700 million.

The Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen (Fraunhofer IIS), based in Erlangen, is one of the 47 research centers. In the field of high quality low bitrate audio coding, Fraunhofer IIS is the leading international research lab. Fraunhofer IIS has been the main developer of the most advanced audio coding schemes, like MPEG Layer-3 and MPEG-2 AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). Fraunhofer IIS plays a major role in the ongoing work for the MPEG-4 Audio standardization process and contributes to many other standards bodies as well, like ITU-R TG10/4, ITU-R WP10C, AES, MPEG-IPR, and others.

WWW: http://www.iis.fhg.de/audio/

THOMSON multimedia.

The world's fourth-largest consumer electronics group, THOMSON multimedia develops, manufactures and markets: televisions, VCRs, camcorders, audio and communication appliances, satellite decoders, DVD players, as well as color TV tubes and professional television equipment (studio equipment, TV cameras, mixers, etc.).

With its pan-European brands - THOMSON, TELEFUNKEN and SABA - and its American brands - RCA, GE and ProScan - today the group is the leader in the United States, No. 2 in Europe and is strongly increasing its market presence in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

WWW: http://www.thomson-multimedia.com/ http://www.rca-electronics.com/ or
http://www.nipper.com/

OPTICOM

OPTICOM is a "spin-off" firm from Fraunhofer IIS. OPTICOM was founded in 1995 with the intention to assist you in finding the technical solution best suited for you through consulting and specialized tools.

WWW: http://www.opticom.de/

I) GENERAL

Q. I am interested in source coding technology. What can you do for me?

A. Licensing source code, developing real-time DSP code as well as DSP-based hardware, and developing codec libraries for desktop computers is part of the Fraunhofer IIS activities. The focus is on (mobile) high-quality low bitrate audiovisual communications (e.g. digital broadcasting systems or internet services).

Q. Regarding MPEG Layer-3, do any patent rights exist?

A. As for practically any important technology (and particularly for publicly established standards), you should know that patent rights for MPEG Layer-3 exist. Although others may also hold patents related to the MPEG Layer-3 technology, THOMSON multimedia and Fraunhofer IIS have pooled their interests and grant licenses under their combined patent portfolio.

Q. Who grants licenses under this combined portfolio to use MPEG Layer-3?

A. We have split the licensing activities in three parts:

i) THOMSON multimedia ha

Kuiper belt masses were initially estimated on the assumption that all KBOs have albedos of 0.04, like the nuclei of the Jupiter-family comets. These initial estimates gave masses 0.1 M [that is, 0.1 Earth masses - khallow] (Jewitt et al., 1998). Recent measurements of large KBOs suggest albedos on average about three times larger but it is not known if this is generally true or if the high albedos apply only to the largest KBOs (we cannot yet measure the smaller ones directly). In any case, 0.1 M is an upper limit to the total mass. With mass scaling as (albedo)^(3/2), the derived mass is 3^(3/2) 5 times smaller than first thought, corresponding to a few percent of an Earth mass. These estimates are still quite uncertain because we possess few reliable determinations of the albedos, because we do not know the densities of most KBOs and, especially, because we have meaningfully sampled only the inner regions of the Kuiper belt. For all these reasons, the relative masses of the various components of the Kuiper Belt are uncertain. A reasonably safe conclusion, however, is that the mass of the scattered disk objects is larger than the mass of the other components of the Kuiper belt (Trujillo et al., 2000).

[I had to manual edit the exponentials because superscripts aren't supported by Slashdot. So there's up to 50 times as much mass (Wikipedia is claiming 5-50 Pluto masses worth, using current estimates for Pluto's mass). Anyway, with that much mass swimming around, it's very likely that Pluto has at least a Pluto's worth in mass of other Kuiper belt objects within the neighborhood I specified. Which would mean it is not a planet even under a different definition of neighborhood.

Here you go. True this isn't the start of the web, but it's close enough. The web didn't change that much between the first PC client (AmigaMosaic in 1993) and the 1996 start of the Waybackmachine:

Sci-Fi Channel http://web.archive.org/web/19961114151757/http://scifi.com/
Netscape - http://web.archive.org/web/19961020015116/http://www3.netscape.com/

Here you go. True this isn't the start of the web, but it's close enough. The web didn't change that much between the first PC client (AmigaMosaic in 1993) and the 1996 start of the Waybackmachine:

Sci-Fi Channel http://web.archive.org/web/19961114151757/http://scifi.com/
Netscape - http://web.archive.org/web/19961020015116/http://www3.netscape.com/

Since the archive is around 2 petabytes it's probably going to be a while.

Did apple recently put up a robots.txt to block all robots including the internet archiver?
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://apple.com
It would be sad to miss out on their logos in the future.

Right, because no one's ever considered doing this before. Especially not in the UK!

Um, "a chance to build the browser once again"? It's not as if Marc has built *any* browser in the first place.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030212202753/http://www.chrispy.net/marca/gqarticle.html

Acer is a Taiwan-based company (always has been, welcome to the late 80's pc clone wars)

http://www.archive.org/details/CC434_asian_clones

Multitech (now Acer) ...

Some people get spam with a title like "Riga Girls Go Like This"

The genesis...

http://www.archive.org/download/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio.shnf/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio_24_introduction.ogg

the song:

http://www.archive.org/download/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio.shnf/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio_25_riga_girls.ogg

--
BMO

Some people get spam with a title like "Riga Girls Go Like This"

The genesis...

http://www.archive.org/download/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio.shnf/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio_24_introduction.ogg

the song:

http://www.archive.org/download/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio.shnf/weepies_2004-09-18_live_in_ohio_25_riga_girls.ogg

--
BMO