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That's why PCWorld as worst in Customer service and in practically every single other cateory as well among the 14 Top ISPs? That's why the BBB had previously warned people about Charter's miserable customer service?

Are you one of the customer support reps that LIE to people on the phone when they ask when the installer is coming?

You can resent my stance all you want, you can pretend that the constant heap of shit you pile on your customers is making them happy, but it seems like there is an awfully large amount of incredibly unhappy customers.

Well... yes, why not? Anyone can easily opt-out. I don't see why this wouldn't fall under the same "fair use" as Google cache or Internet Archive. First of all, this is news and links in summaries are the source of the news; citing the sources wouldn't be wrong, as long as you make it clear that it's a copy of the web page, for the sole purpose of citation. Mirrordot would actually protect other peoples' servers load and bandwidth costs.

http://www.archive.org/donate/

a new 4.5 petabyte data center

4.5 PB? Is that the best you can do? sheesh, amateurs....

Though it also did surprise me they only get 200,000 hits/day. I expected the WayBack Machine to get a lot more traffic than that.

63 servers * 48 disk of 1 TB = 3024 TB. According to the announcement on the archive.org 3 Petabytes would be right.

Until these people start getting held accountable for their actions, truly held accountable with full criminal system consequences, they're just going to keep on plowing ahead full speed.

From TFA: "Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules," the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, "only that she was never caught."

^^^ They forced a 13 year old girl to strip to her underwear and then expose herself to them with nothing but their own suspicions and the word of a few random people to back them up and now claim that they were perfectly justified in doing so and that on top of that a spotless record means she's just as guilty as if they HAD caught her doing anything, just that they don't have anything on paper.

Everyone involved in making this decision, allowing it to go ahead, and participating in the search should be arrested and tried for as many sex crimes as they can fit into the trial. This is rape, there's no excusing or justifying it.

And people wonder why kids have such a hatred for authority figures and absolute lack of trust in them.

I'll note that not only did I just list three proposed theoretical methods to explain it, but even the DOE encourages further study (Charge Element 3). Yes, this is still highly controversial science. Yes, more people than not disagree that it's fusion (in the case of the 2004 DOE panel, 2/3rds said that they didn't think it was fusion -- although with a spate of more controlled experiments since the panel convened, who knows if they'd get that many opposing voices today). But you should stop acting like it's phlogiston or luminiferous aether or something. It's in the "we don't know what's going on" category, not the "we know what's going on and it's not what they claim it is" category.

In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what.

Which is precisely why the Department of Energy unanimously recommended further study on an individual-case basis for well-designed experiments (Charge Element 3). Which this one would definitely seem to qualify as.

One thing that occurred to me a while back was wondering whether there could be any influence from phonons on the fusion process. Phonons are the virtual particles associated with crystal lattice vibrations that arise due to the wave-particle duality. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me; after all, other particles such as muons can outright catalyze fusion reactions, and phonon effects might play a significant role even there (in the solid state). Yet most of the basic "disproofs" of fusion in the cell act as though there's no lattice at all and only focus on the Dt density (which on its own is way too low for fusion at a relevant rate). I just thought to google for it, and what do you know... others have been considering that very idea and think that it has merit.

I'm also particularly interested in the possibility of surface reactions due to localized quantum effects. Palladium electrodes can form dendtritic palladium hydride spines on their surfaces in some circumstances, and most of the direct evidence of cold-fusion reactions, such as hot spots with associated pitting, occur at microscopic features on the surface of the electrodes. If it were such a surface effect, that could also go a long way toward explaining the inconsistency of results.

Some time back Dough Bagley did an interesting project to compare the performance of all programming languages. You will learn a great deal if you try to refine and rewrite this project.

There's a really well-written and interesting article elsewhere on Gamasutra that describes how Thief's "sensory" system worked. Great read.

The original link seems to be having trouble with broken images, so here's the Wayback-Machine version.

The original, if you are interested.

I wonder if that includes both home and business accounts. I'm sure you can Wayback the archive provided you have an original link or precise search terms, but this apparently affects quite a few people although the summary doesn't mention what exactly the revealed username/passwords are to.

If I had to take a guess, I'd say email or online customer accounts (although I don't recall having one during my painful time with Comcast), which either opens up either a financial or spam-exploitable security issue, not sure which.

...In a nutshell: This is pretty bad, but how deep does it go and can Comcast be held responsible in any way?

Chicks Dig BSD

Since purebsd.com appears to have expired this is the wayback machine

Even the ATF isn't stupid enough to try to ban peeing without a license.

What makes you think that?? They've ruled that shoelaces are machine guns, ruling that pee is an explosive would be a return to common sense by their standards

It was just a link to "Astronaut Farmer" and common decency took the link away. No, I kid, I kid. It's far worse than that. It was a Andy Griffith space Sanford and Son show.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080108041600/http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/9782/salvage1.html

>>>If anything, in the early days gopher was more convenient for multimedia than the web.

Yeah but scifi.com had these cool *pictures* man. Gopher was just a dull directory-like listing. The web was far more entertaining. See for yourself: http://web.archive.org/web/19961114151757/http://scifi.com/ - Ooooo pictures! :-)

Aside -

Looking at those 1996 schedules makes me miss the old SciFi Channel. "SciFi Trader" "Antigravity Room" "SciFi Buzz" "FTL Newsfeed" "Animation Station". That channel was so cool back then - the modern SciFi channel feels like just an offshoot of USA or TNT. Zzzz.

Worlds.com (or worlds.net) isn't a patent troll, like Caldera (who bought SCO before they started suing).

I remember participating in Worlds.com back in 1996. How many of your precious 3D MMO environments existed then?

http://web.archive.org/web/19961108105356/www.worlds.net/news/press_releases/press-101.html

I think many of you are reacting emotionally to any threat against your favorite current games. But please do a little research before the name calling. As much as I disagree with intellectual property and software patents, this one is at least slightly more legitimate than most.

I actually took a screen shot of it. Then went to a window to see if the apocalypse was happening. Sun working with microsoft?!

You're kidding, right? Sun has been in bed with Microsoft since shortly after the Java thing was settled. Interestingly that "in bed" link has some extremely telling content permanently removed links, especially including this link: Sun and Microsoft Announce New Identity Specifications and Additional Measures for Product Interoperability which goes to a "Content Removed" page. Wow, trying to bury the truth already? Hooray for the internet archive! You might also be interested in Sun/Microsoft Q&A with Greg Papadopoulos. It's interesting that Sun is too stupid to put a year in their datestamps. Did they not expect to exist past 2005? I certainly stopped even considering them as a solution to anything in 2004...

You're correct Bruce, I'm off base this time. I got contacted by the writer this morning who told me that the SFLC had told him that a fixed cap would work with GPLv2. So being in the middle of coding something (ie. not paying enough attention), and remembering the fixed price we paid to get access to the EU Workgroup Server docs, I just agreed that it sounded like this would be a work-around for v2, but not for v3 where section 11 is much stricter about patent licensing (explicitly the bits about extending the license downstream), and bingo - there goes the story with the quote. You know how these things go :-(. My fault, and I'll be more careful in future.

Looking closely at the license here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060207034921/http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp

the devil is in the details. Someone just mailed me a comprehensive analysis and agreeing to this license, even with a royalty cap, would violate GPLv2 in several ways.

There is a field of use restriction : "Pricing for other device types can be negotiated with Microsoft."

Modification restrictions: "devices are fully compliant with certain required portions of the Microsoft FAT file system specification"

and a per-manufacturer limit: "a cap on total royalties of $250,000 per manufacturer".

So yes, I got it wrong and this license is in no way GPLv2 compatible.

Sorry for the mistake. Blame me, not the journalist who was just trying to get his story.

Jeremy.

I think you mean "Win32", as that's the library most user-mode systems guys program against.

"Win32" hasn't been the official name for a while, and it's now called the Windows API. (After all, it also works on 64-bit builds of Windows.) See the second sentence on Wikipedia.

I don't know why people keep imagining all these "undocumented" interfaces. Microsoft lost all those lawsuits long ago, and everything is documented (though sometimes crapily, as with anything).

I'm not as convinced I'm right, but I'm still seeing some evidence. For instance, there are several functions on an old Sysinternals page on the Native API that I can't find documentation of (either under the Nt* name, Zw* name, or Ke* name), such as NtCreateSemaphore. undocumented.ntinternals.com has a bunch that I can't find on MSDN. Still, I'm willing to concede I might be wrong on this point, and merely say that until relatively recently (even in terms of the history of NT), it was undocumented.

Nickelback recycles their songs. Several years ago someone mathematically picked apart their songs and showed they are all the same.

I can't seem to find it, but I did find this example from the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20070928171441/http://www.thewebshite.net/nickelback.htm

reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work

is another way of saying

when "they" have made enough money.

So you are being a hypocrite. Any decision on copyright length, whether it be 0, infinite, or anything between, is a decision as to how long an artist can make money on his work.

Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book.

In this day and age of making digital copies, turning a copyrighted work into a physical form is a service. Everyone could have it digitally. However, some people want to put it up on the wall or whatever, which most people can't do as easily. So yes, once a work has gone into the public domain, the creation of the words is already done, had it's time in copyright (whether it's 5, 15, 30, or x years) and so only someone providing a service beyond that should get paid. I'm not into audio books, but I know people who would pay money to listen to Jim Dale read to them works that are otherwise free. I'd be willing to bet, some of them would even pay him to recite the constitution. He's providing a service beyond the original work. Yes, it is more valuable now.

Also, value and cost are not directly related. Certainly only an idiot would pay more than what they value something at. But everyone would love to pay less. I value Night of the Living Dead (whose copyright has expired), but I wouldn't pay anything for it because I really don't value having a physical disk at all. I value Washington's Crossing the Delaware (whose copyright has expired) but I would pay a small fee to have a print because I do value having that in physical form.

In fact, if you look at How to Design Program's introduction (the server seems to be down right now; here an archive page), you'll see that it was written with this sort of a class in mind. Even if you use a different language, and even if you disagree with its philosophy, you should at least be familiar with it as an important work in this area.

A relevant excerpt from the link:

Many professions require some form of computer programming. Accountants program spreadsheets and word processors; photographers program photo editors; musicians program synthesizers; and professional programmers instruct plain computers. Programming has become a required skill.

Yet programming is more than just a vocational skill. Indeed, good programming is a fun activity, a creative outlet, and a way to express abstract ideas in a tangible form. And designing programs teaches a variety of skills that are important in all kinds of professions: critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail.

We therefore believe that the study of program design deserves the same central role in general education as mathematics and English. Or, put more succinctly, everyone should learn how to design programs.

[......] early in the HTML standard, you didn't have to close paragraph elements.

Early in the HTML standard, 'p' tags didn't refer to paragraphs at all - they signified paragraph breaks.

Not long ago i dug up a page i wrote back in about 95, which is archived in the WayBack Machine, and i was really surprised to find i'd only put 'p' tags between paragraphs - and not at the start of them. Checking the HTML 1 standard (it wasn't called "1" though) it seems that this was the correct way to write HTML back then. I'd forgotten completely.

You gotta be quick. They're reading this page and fixing stuff while we make fun of them. That keyboard must be humming about now.

Which is kind of a strange way to do website security, if you think about it. All of that information is probably still available in the Google cache, or at least on the wayback machine.

Actually, once upon a time, there was a distributed Java applet, alot like BOINC but in a browser. This particular project was about calculating the emission of gamma rays from nuclear waste.

It didn't last long, probably about a year or two, but it did get quite a few results.

And yes, downloading music without paying for it is STEALING

I believe the people who run this site would disagree with you, and they aren't being sued anytime soon. Now, for bonus points, would you please explain why it takes 90 years after the death of the artist for something to be in the public domain?

This was because no mainstream American channel would touch that documentary. Can't imagine why not, although I gather the phrase 'we would be crucified if we showed that here' was used at one point. So they released it freely to let the Internet bypass that unfortunate bottleneck.

In case you're interested to see what the media thought you shouldn't, it's right here.

And nothing stops the vendor from stopping the Wayback Machine from chronicling its changes by telling it to not archive - http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#2

Not unless you're providing access to the web in the checkout line at the store.

They do. Lately, Best Buy and Office Depot stores in Fort Wayne, Indiana, have been offering access to the Web on at least one demonstration PC in the store.

Also, there's nothing stopping the online EULA from being changed between the time you read the EULA, the time you buy the item and the time you open it.

Nothing stops it from being changed, but Wayback Machine stops the changes from going unnoticed. If a seller's standard terms of sale change during the hour that you are in the store, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer nor even formally a law student, so I wouldn't know about the case law in such a corner case.

This pointless technology serves no more audio-fidelity improving purpose than the hundreds of ridiculous inert gimmicks gullible "audiophiles" have been buying for years, such as Stop Light Pen or the fabulous $485 wooden knob. Disappointing to see cash-hemorrhaging Sony in desperation stoop to the level of these other scamsters.

SACD and DVD-audio both offer actual audio fidelity improvement, but were always commercial non-starters given the expensive and mostly obscure hardware needed for playback. Imagine if the DVD consortium back in the day had included the DVD-audio specification in the basic DVD player profile so that all the millions of DVD players out there today could play them. We would have had ubiquitous high-quality audio playback hardware today, and a greater market would have accordingly existed for high quality disc-based audio formats. It might have kept the recording industry scam going for longer.

And I was about to suggest putting "Also sprach Zarathustra" to the video, but perhaps that would make matters worse.

they want to see them unquestioningly as sick pedophiles that are destroying society, inhuman evil monsters that can not be related to.

Er no. These parents don't see homosexuals as monsters or anything like that. That's an absurd characterization, and its made so that you can, in turn, demonize the opposition.

Most don't. Some do.

References:

• Rick Warren compares gays to pedophiles
• "There is a strong undercurrent of pedophilia in the homosexual subculture. Homosexual activists want to promote the flouting of traditional sexual prohibitions at the earliest possible age....they want to encourage a promiscuous society - and the best place to start is with a young and credulous captive audience in the public schools" -- Robert Knight, Family Research Council
• More from the FRC
• Report: Pedophilia more common among 'gays'
• Fred Phelps

Of course, this is mostly a bunch of demagoguery, but there are some Americans that buy it -- for example, take this sampling of Arizonans. I don't really think it's fair to claim that this is "demonizing the opposition" when prominent figures have actually said these things. Publicly. On the record.

While I accept that most folks in 1996 did spend 30 minutes a day or less and had dial-up and used AOL, most is not all. I published my first web page in March, 1995, but the oldest copy of my 'homepage' I can find on archive.org is from October, 1996, archived December, 1996.

penguincentral.com in late 1996

As for "blogging", I was writing about my day-to-day experiences starting from the day I put up those webpages 14 years ago. It's all still online, along with newer stuff.

Project Gutenberg is already a very good example of what you're looking for, having the advantage of already existing and having thousands upon thousands of works available. It also has the advantage of having an army of volunteers keying in, scanning and proofreading public domain texts.

The Internet Archive is another example, which also hosts video and audio archives, as well as the Wayback Machine and who knows what else.

While neither of these is the all-encompassing resource you might be imaging, they are both well-established extremely good resources.

For the Google-enabled, many, many other resources for public-domain and otherwise free material can easily be located as well. You'll never run out of good reading material without having to pay anything but Internet access charges.

You can literally carry the contents of a small library on your computer wherever you go and have instant access to it.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000614000435/http://www.satanic.org/GST/rants.html

No, the majority of Sky News viewers allegedly supported 90 days detention without charge. Sky News is just the UK version of Fox News but either way the link to both the poll and the analysis of it on that WP page are now broken links.

Actually, here's a copy of the analysis:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071222223751/http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2005/11/yougov_poll_biased_questions_o.html

The contents of the PDF seem to all be in that analysis, as this looks like it might be a copy of the PDF. It's just very loaded questions, and choices of being either one thing or another, or a "don't know". It is not a good enough quality survey to objectively say whether the public supported the 90 day detention without charge, especially as it was a telephone poll, so only the kind of Sky news watching dipshits who vote on telephone polls would have voted!

For kicks I spot-checked every year of google's homepage at archive.org. Not one was compliant.

I started to RTFA when something caught my eye: "his discovery of a significant DNS flaw -- known as the Kaminsky Bug"

Except Kaminsky wasn't the original discoverer of this bug (or the workaround). Dr. Bernstein is. Dr. Bernstein discusses hte Kaminsky bug here; that page has been around since about late 2000.

For the record, I am no fan of DJB. I feel he has acted unprofessional and childlike at time; his response to an announcement of my DNS server on Bugtraq being just one example of his inappropriate behavior. But, personal differences aside, I recognize he's a genius and that he's the original discoverer of this particular DNS issue.

(I also wish DJB would own up to the remote denial of service bug DjbDNS has, but that's another issue)

I'd love it. I've been making little stereo movies for years with Firewire cameras and EvoCam, which lets you put two or more video feeds on one 'canvas' (Mac OS). One short one here; if you can "parallel view" or have a lorgnette type viewer (two cheap magnifying glasses or wedge prisms basically) you can probably get fusion and watch.

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

Software authors please note, I want the dang software to take care of aiming and matching up the cameras for me; getting the angle and focus right for different distances is a nuisance.

Also, don't let the computer accept the image unless it can see me wiggle my ears the number of times I input as part of the security code ...

Hence the complete craziness of throwing away all those shuttle primary fuel tanks.

Many of them are still in orbit, still being tracked by ground stations. But you're right, most of them are actually ditched over the Indian Ocean. The irony is that the shuttle could actually be more efficient if they knew they were going to re-use the tank in orbit, because they wouldn't have to waste the fuel necessary to perform the MET ditch maneuver.

Each fuel tank weighs more than the total shuttle payload. That's an enormous amount of raw materials that are already up in space to work with. But this is not an original idea... people have been talking about converting main fuel tanks into crew habitats for years.

The first mention was back in 1979 by a group of undergraduate students writing for a competition at the International Astronautical Congress. It was entitled, appropriately enough Space Shuttle External Tank Used as a Space Station.

They ended up winning first prize, but naturally nothing was ever done about it.

lots of reinventing the wheel I see. http://web.archive.org/web/20060820072349/http://scott.weston.id.au/software/pymissile-20060126/ http://code.google.com/p/pyrocket/ and now this article.

I have seen it written both ways for years.

Where have you seen Apple use "MacOS"? If you haven't, then it's wrong.

I don't think it matters all that much

Yet you went out of your way to correct someone else. If you're going to correct someone, isn't it better to be sure that you're it right?

but when there is no space, it is always cased the "MacOS" way, not "MACOS".

Who suggested it should be in all-caps?

Exactly - it is just lay-term, marketing stuff. Hip, kewl, non-technical common reference.

No, it's not a lay-term. What does the iPhone run? OS X according to Apple. Also, marketing != non-technical e.g. Apple can only market Mac OS X as UNIX because it has been technically certified as such.

Well, we just agree to disagree.

Then you disagree with Apple, whose opinion matters more than either of ours.

Saying "Mac OS Ten Version Ten point Four" is just redundant and silly to me.

That amy be, but it's the scheme Apple have gone with. Go to 'About This Mac' in the Apple menu and you'll discover that. Check System Profiler and you'll get the very similar "Mac OS X 10.5.6".

Not really. If you just said "MS Windows", that doesn't imply it runs on 3.11 or 95 does it?

No, but that's Windows, not the Mac. It is standard practice to differentiate between classic versions of Mac OS and Mac OS X by using "Mac OS" and "Mac OS X" because that's how they're branded.

If you want to be specific, you add the version/rev to it: "Mac OS 10.3 and above"

Then why did you initially 'correct' "OS X" to "MacOS" when you were in fact reducing the information available in doing so?

Funny, for many, many years, I have seen it written both ways. I just searched and found lots and lots of occurrences

Where? Has Microsoft ever used it? If they have, then fair enough, but I just tried Googling and despite me inputting "MS-Windows", it just returns hits for "MS Windows".

but calling it just "DOS" would be completely incorrect, just like calling something "windows"; both are entirely too generic and presumptuous

That would be one of the reasons its capitalise i.e. "Windows", not "windows" - if you're quoting, make sure you're quoting correctly, particularly when this all started with you correcting someone else.

which Microsoft loves, of course...

Would you say this is comparable to your use of the generic "MacOS" instead of the more specific "Mac OS X"?

just like "word" instead of "MS Word" or "office" instead of "MS Office"

Where do they do it, other than places where the Microsoft branding is already clearly visible? Even on their own site its called "Microsoft Office [version] [year]".

"A course of pure mathematics" by G. H. Hardy

It is a pure gem and a pleasure to read: unfortunately I found this book five years later. It is freely available here, as it is out of copyright:
http://www.archive.org/details/coursepuremath00hardrich
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_course_of_pure_mathematics:
A Course of Pure Mathematics is a classic textbook in introductory mathematical analysis, written by G. H. Hardy. It was first published in 1908, and went through many editions.

It was intended to help reform mathematics teaching in the UK, and more specifically in the University of Cambridge, and in schools preparing pupils to study mathematics at Cambridge. As such, it was aimed directly at "scholarship level" students -- the top 10% to 20% by ability. The book contains a large number of difficult problems.

The content covers introductory calculus and the theory of infinite series. The exposition is quite leisurely, but the attention to rigour high. Hardy at the period when he wrote it had successfully implemented reforms of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, making it less a test of sheer problem-solving technique. In writing his Pure Mathematics he was proposing a course of study preliminary to a French-style Cours d'Analyse, at the time a benchmark for a mathematical education leading to research in the field.

.. and some karma whoring. Archive.org has a 1984 demo/interview with Budge on Computer Chronicles. A quick youtube search finds it here also. That guy from EA still creeps me out... as does the space shuttle guy.

-metric

The ECMA process requires that all patents held by member companies that are essential for implementing its standards are available under "reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms" for the purpose of implementing those Standards.
(emphasis mine)

Nope. ECMA has not forced Microsoft to give up its patent claims. The only requirement with respect to patents is that they be available under "reasonable and nondiscriminitory" terms -- which basically means that Microsoft can charge whatever it wants for patent licences, as long as it's the same fee for everyone. So MS can still threaten to sue for patent violations. And any fee of significant size is of course fatal for free software. So you are wrong.

Microsoft dominates ECMA and practically owns it, as show in the unbelievably corrupt ISO OOXML case. So what proof do you have that ECMA has forced MS to give up its patent claims with respect to C# ?

Here you go. But somehow I doubt that this or any other evidence will change your belief in the conspiracy theory.

Bleh, talentless hack.

Try The Credit Crunch Blues instead. Yes, it's on archive.org so the page may be a bit slow to load.

since you asked... http://web.archive.org/web/20010309130834/http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg

Go watch the documentary "Why we fight" It's a great eye opener on the American military culture. Its on youtube and archive.org.

This video? http://www.archive.org/details/Why-We-Fight

At a university I worked at in the late 80s, the vaxen were named Bilbo, Frodo, and Gandalf.

Our University had a cluster of DEC Alpha Servers, named in a similar fashion. The cluster was named HOBBIT, as a play on the computing term High-Ordered Bit. I believe the individual nodes were named Bilbo, and Frodo. I seem to remember Pippin, Gamgee, and Gandalf nodes, but I could be mistaken.