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And "property rights" aren't exactly basic rights. They're second-tier rights useful only becasue they perserve certain first tier rights--namely, liberty and the right to a fair share of the profit from your labor.

Any "right" is tied inherently to property and ownership. If you own something, you have complete control over it. Sale of goods transfers those rights.

Property rights do, in fact support liberty and fair wages, in that they are the foundation of those rights. You have a right to fair wages because your work is a product of your body, which you own.

You might do well to listen to a class on the constitution by Michael Badnarik (which you can download here). He's extremely well-read and very informative on this subject in general, and how it fits into constitutional law specifically.

NEW site? Why don't you crawl out from under that rock you've been living under and accept the fact that just because YOU haven't seen a site mentioned on Slashdot doesn't mean it hasn't been there? I've been reading SA for YEARS and think they're awesome. That's opinion of course, so don't waste your breath refuting that; instead look at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.somethinga wful.com. They go back to AT LEAST the year 2000. NOT new.

They sure as hell moved fast when it was time to attack Iraq. Or when it was time to push the Patriot Act through. Or many other things that directly help whatever agenda they have.

Really? How many days did those things take?

The Senate passed legislation in response to 9/11 two days after the attack.

The USA-PATRIOT act was submitted to congress less than a week after the World Trace Center attack. The President signed it on October 26, 2001.

Major fighting in Iraq lasted 43 days. The attack began on March 20, 2003. Bush announced that major combat had ended in iraq on May 2, 2003.

The references to Linux are largely recent Red Hat spin. Cygwin was originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, who described their tools as 'ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows' that work by 'using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API':

http://web.archive.org/web/19990210095919/sourcewa re.cygnus.com/cygwin/

When Red Hat acquired Cygwin they kept this description around for a while:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000815200506/sources. redhat.com/cygwin/

but later removed the reference to GNU:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030205205726/http://c ygwin.com/

(ironic since 'Cygnus' was derived from 'CyGNUs')

and eventually dropped Unix in favour of Linux:

http://www.cygwin.com/

This is the sort of thing that justifiably annoys GNU supporters (and even others who don't normally subscribe to the whole 'GNU/Linux' thing). Cygwin has no more connection with Linux than BSD does (except that nowadays it's developed by a Linux distributor, so perhaps userland tools are compiled for both operating systems from similar source tree versions?).

The references to Linux are largely recent Red Hat spin. Cygwin was originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, who described their tools as 'ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows' that work by 'using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API':

http://web.archive.org/web/19990210095919/sourcewa re.cygnus.com/cygwin/

When Red Hat acquired Cygwin they kept this description around for a while:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000815200506/sources. redhat.com/cygwin/

but later removed the reference to GNU:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030205205726/http://c ygwin.com/

(ironic since 'Cygnus' was derived from 'CyGNUs')

and eventually dropped Unix in favour of Linux:

http://www.cygwin.com/

This is the sort of thing that justifiably annoys GNU supporters (and even others who don't normally subscribe to the whole 'GNU/Linux' thing). Cygwin has no more connection with Linux than BSD does (except that nowadays it's developed by a Linux distributor, so perhaps userland tools are compiled for both operating systems from similar source tree versions?).

The references to Linux are largely recent Red Hat spin. Cygwin was originally developed by Cygnus Solutions, who described their tools as 'ports of the popular GNU development tools and utilities for Windows' that work by 'using the Cygwin library which provides a UNIX-like API on top of the Win32 API':

http://web.archive.org/web/19990210095919/sourcewa re.cygnus.com/cygwin/

When Red Hat acquired Cygwin they kept this description around for a while:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000815200506/sources. redhat.com/cygwin/

but later removed the reference to GNU:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030205205726/http://c ygwin.com/

(ironic since 'Cygnus' was derived from 'CyGNUs')

and eventually dropped Unix in favour of Linux:

http://www.cygwin.com/

This is the sort of thing that justifiably annoys GNU supporters (and even others who don't normally subscribe to the whole 'GNU/Linux' thing). Cygwin has no more connection with Linux than BSD does (except that nowadays it's developed by a Linux distributor, so perhaps userland tools are compiled for both operating systems from similar source tree versions?).

F-secure is doing this for years ... The wayback machine for f-secure starting from 2002...

Your post would have been more productive had you avoided calling the GNU General Public License "viral". What you think of the GPL is not on topic here, as this discussion primarily concerns how the public domain works, not your views on how distributed GPL derivatives are licensed. Similarly, a previous poster used the word "fell" to describe entry into the public domain. I'd argue that the popularity of the term in this context is irrelevant and that we are better served by examining the connotation that being in the public domain is somehow lower or lesser than being in copyright.

Getting back to your point raised by calling the GPL "viral", there is a bit of this for the public domain as well. Works in the public domain remain in the public domain even if fragments of them are built upon in other copyrighted works. There are parts of the movie Amelie which come from the Prelinger archives. These fragments are in the public domain and one can extract them from Amelie and end up with a series of public domain fragments. So, the public domain is self-preserving but this effect doesn't extend as far as the power copyright holders have in licensing derivative works. Of course, it's possible to transform the work so completely that such extraction is impossible.

Get your http://bnetd.sourceforge.net/dist/bnetd/snapshot/b netd-snapshot-20020623.tar.gz">bnetd tar balls here!

Uhhh, actually, you are

Actually the movie industry as we know it came out to Hollywood, CA, US because they wanted to distance themselves from Edison's Patents Trust and their hired goons. Ergo, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount, United Artists, 20th Century Fox...all founded by "pirates" who didn't want to pay their tithe to the Edison Patents Trust.

Que ironico: Edison's audio recordings wound up in the public domain and are downloadable via http://www.archive.org/ , along with other music and movies which have entered the public domain.

One should take note of the age of most of the public domain documents in the Internet Archive...except for those who specifically give their works a Creative Commons license, the gusher gives out during the '20s. There is a trickle up until 1976, when the US passed the Copyright Act and ratified the Berne Convention. Thanks, Sonny Bono.

It would seem that you too are also a wee bit confused.

eDonkey came out in 2000, emule in 2002. From emule 's site: " The best p2p Client base on the eDonkey Network."
http://www.edonkey2000.com/>eDonkey first archived web page. Harness the power of 2000 electronic donkeys

More info on early WinFS development is available here.

The Open Source IT centre did seem useful...

Myself and about 230 of my closest friends and developers used to work there. It was called "Linuxcare", maybe you've heard of it. You might recall we were called "The 1-800 Number for Linux", and we were.. not only for users, but for hundreds of big players in the market (IBM, HP, Intel, SGI, 3Com, etc.). We had quite a nice portfolio of custom applications for these companies, as well as supporting most of the Linux distributions and applications that were available at the time.. which the clueless project managers and business managers shortly killed off to save their jobs instead of ours.

(Note: They're now a 100% proprietary software company, rebranded after the 7 rounds of layoffs and 5 CEOs liquidated any intelligence they had left).

Libertarians (or the pro-drug legalization special interest group) tend to have a more anarchic "one-size-fits-all" view of what freedom means. They seem to forget about freedom of assembly in the broadest sense (the freedom to live in a society of like-minded people with like-minded laws).

Where's democracy and freedom where drugs are involved? I seriously doubt most have had a vote on drug laws and in the states that have most voters have approved medical marijuana. Then when one patient who depends on marijuana for her health sues the feds the USSC rules states don't have the authority or right to decide for themself, that only congress can. They didn't even cite anythng in the Constitution that precluded the states from making the decision or that the federal government had the right to make it.

Fact is is that hemp, aka marijuana, had an important roll in history of the USA. Thomas Jefferson, who grew hemp, once proposed that there should be a law requiring farmers to grow hemp. But he couldn't follow through with it himself because he knew that such a law would be denying farmers their rights. It wasn't just TJ who grew hemp, many of the Founding Fathers who were farmers grew it as well. Even the DOI, Declaration of Independence, had something to do with hemp. TJ wrote the DOI on paper made from hemp.

The only reason hemp was made illegal was because it posed a threat to the wealth of some rich and powerful people. Even after hemp was made illegal, via the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the federal government encouraged farmers to grow hemp during WWII. The government made the movie "Hemp For Victory" for this reason. The cords of the parachute that George Bush Sr used when he bailed out of his plane when he was shot down over the Pacific was probably hemp.

Yeah, they didn't mention it, but that's not the same as a false statement. Apple's older archived iPod page doesn't say anything misleading, only that it's a Lithium Polymer battery that lasts 10 hours of continuous playtime.

Couldn't it just be the fact that files in general are getting larger? 10 years ago, how many 1 gig files were out on the Internet to download?

Nowadays, look at all the huge files out there... movies, music (look at archive.org's collection of music), pictures, flash websites, etc... Everything is bigger. Getting back to your original point, whether it's p2p or straight http download, these files do account for a LOT of the bandwidth out there. My college professor told me that in the Napster days, their bandwidth was always at 100% utilization until they installed packet filters. I'm sure that a large percentage of University bandwidth does go to this type of thing...

Getting back to my original point, since a larger portion of the population has access to broadband internet, the average file size is able to get bigger. I feel sorry for anyone stuck using a 28.8k or 56k modem nowadays.

Archive.org's cache of Google's Ten-Things list:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.google.com /corporate/tenthings.html

Personally, I think funds should be spent on longer hours for libraries, before getting the latest computer toys.

In San Jose, California, we have a new downtown library that's hooked up like you wouldn't believe. It's not open enough hours for the public to truly use it well, though. Fortunately, the library is jointly owned by the nearby college, and the college funds additional hours during the school year. Extended hours at the library are quite convenient because most downtown parking in San Jose becomes free after 6pm!

Unfortunately with government projects it's often easier to get money for new construction/projects instead of maintenance. New toys are sexy, and sexiness gets votes.

If the funding for your library is with strings attached, and those strings have to be spent on new computer technology, I suggest these:

* Free Wi-Fi everywhere in the library and as far into the surrounding areas as your access points can reach, if you don't already have this.

* CD-burning kiosks that burn CD's full of public domain books, from the Gutenberg Project and other sources.

* Similarly, DVD-burning kiosks that burn DVD's full of public domain videos/movies, from the Prelinger Archives and other sources.

* Book-on-demand printing presses for public domain books, something like this!

Good luck with your funding!

AOL was fun to one person.

You can add rigged show trials. Show trials with the outcome predetermined by the government are a classic characteristic of a police state. Two Arab men in Detroit were convicted on terrorism charges. The government's case rested on two pieces of evidence:

- A tourist video the men had made of their family's trip to Disneyland. The government insisted they were casing Disneyland for a terrorist attack, and they just cleverly made it look like a tourist video to conceal their nefarious plan.

- The testimony of a con man who was up on fraud charges. The government offered to reduce the charges in return for his testimony against the men. Needless to say a conman offered less jail time opted to lie and say whatever the DOJ wanted him to say.

The men were eventually freed after the conman started making jailhouse confessions to his cell mates that he had lied to get his charges reduced, otherwise two innocent men would still be rotting in jail thanks to zealous DOJ prosecutors trying to build terrorism cases their boss could parade on TV, even when there was no case. This case is described in the excellent BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares on the similarities between neocons in the U.S. and Britain, and Al Qaeda and how they are using each other to institute repressive societies dominated by religious fanaticism.

You may recall another tourist tape made the news a while ago, where a Muslim tourist's video of Las Vegas was insanely declared by the government to be evidence of planning for an attack on Las Vega. Needless to say you are no longer free to video tape your vacation in America especially if you are Muslim, though the government can now video tape you every minute you are outside. They really need to start working on true Big Brotherism and make TV two way so they can watch us inside our homes (though they can already watch and listen to everything we do on the internet, telephone or our settop boxes, and the Patriot act gives them the right to secretly break in to our home and look at our personal possessions without ever telling us, this is referred to as "sneak and peek".

try visiting some net labels. You can find a lot of legal / legit sites listed at archive.org. Some I like are Kahvi Collective and Thinnerism although Thinner seems to prefer IE browsers and MP3 over Ogg, but you can work around it. The pieces are Creative Commons licenced, so it's free, but if you like these groups, consider donating them some money.

If you're not into techno, Thinner's sister label AutoPlate is good too.

Net labels are the way of the future. I've considered entering the music business, and from what I am seeing, media groups like RIAA / ARIA offer no market advantage over the Net now, and frankly I reckon I can make more money and get at least as wide a distribution without a corporate music label's help, thanks very much.

As for mainstreme penetration of music into the Net, RIAA and Apple are doing a grand job of advertising the fact that you can get music off the Net, thanks.

Now it is up to more musicians to shurk the big music companies that only serve to rip you off (witness complaints by Michael Jackson, Prince and others over their own deals). Get on the net, distribute your tracks yourself and be free -- you may even make a living in your own lifetime.

I usually copy the most interested deleted Wikipedia entries to my wiki, but I think Wikipedia is already archived automatically by many sites around the world, including the Internet Archive.

• Each producer of link suggestions has a unique address, something like channel/user@example.com. (This implies resolution via DNS, but probably people will end up using the URL of an XML file.)
• The channel address points to the producer's server.
• The subscriber to a channel tells their server to subscribe to the channel. The subscriber's server talks to the producer's server.
• When the producer makes a new link suggestion, their client pushes it to their server, which pushes it to all the servers whose subscribers have subscribed to the channel.
• Each server pushes the link suggestion to their clients (by whatever means).

The pattern of client to server to server to client is a bit like the architecture of email, but it is quite spam-proof because you only ever receive what you asked for.

Additionally, subscribers can instantly "repost" a suggestion to their own channel, which will be read by their subscribers. To avoid reading duplicate posts, servers will optionally filter out duplicates. However, this has a major consequence, which is that subscribers are only ever guaranteed to see the URL, which means that anything you want to say about the content of a new page has to go into the URL. The current system of RSS titles and descriptions will not work under reposting and duplicate filtering.

The combination of real-time pushing and reposting could lead to a speeded up Internet, where exciting new ideas spread from one user to the next in a matter of minutes, without having to go through the bottlenecks of centralised attention and popular websites (such as Slashdot). This could be enough to turn the Internet into a "Global Brain", and perhaps even trigger the Technological Singularity.

I invented Miski to solve the problem of getting people to take notice of new ideas without having to engage in a massive publicity effort, but unfortunately I've failed to get anyone to take any notice of the Miski idea.

...but they don't have a right to copy all of a libraries' book, nor do they have the right to distribute (AKA show to you) any pages from these books

For example, [...] If I wrapped numbers and words believed to be numbers in bold tags, technically I'd be violating this patent.

Actually, you might not. According to the patent, one of the major features of the software is the ability to remove the highlighting.

Ah, so what actually violates the patent is using CSS like:

a { background: white; }
a:hover { background: yellow; }

Yeah, no one would think to do that. Almost makes you wonder why they put :hover or the entire manipulable DOM in the Javascript spec given that there were no obvious intended uses.

Hmm. Is it possible that Microsoft itself was publicly using this so-called "non-obvious" kind of scripting years before it applied for the patent (Feb 11, 2004)... Time for a trip to the Wayback Machine, I guess...

1. cease driving an internal combustion vehicle.

Up until I had a bad accident my primary transportation was a bike.

2. shutting off power to your residence.

Not needed if you generate the power you use. Going Off the grid is being done more and more.

4. growing your own food and processing it.

Yeap, I love to garden and I like to can and otherwise preserve what I grow.

6. avoiding the use of anything that is made with plastic.

Again not needed. Plastics were originally made from plant material. Cellophane was made from the cellulose of plants. Hemp, aka marijuana and probably the most industrially versatile plant is a good plant source. On his Iron Mountain estate Henry Ford not only built an automobile using hemp for some of the material but was also powered by fuel made from hemp. Rudulph Diesel designed his diesel engine to run on most any oil made from plants. Both alcohol and biodiesel are carbon neutral and both can be made from hemp. Actually the reason hemp was made "illegal" via the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was because it posed a serious threat to some rich and powerful people. When congress was "debating" the act Dr James Woodward who was both a doctor and an attorney testified on behalf of the AMA. He said all of the testimony in support of the act was nothing more than tabloid sensationalism and that it could potentionally be a powerful medicine. During WWII hemp was so important the US government made the movie Hemp for Victory in 1942 in an effort to get farmers to grow it.

Get several of these!

-make a personal backup of archive.org
-Store digital photos of every square inch of your neighborhood.
-ASCII pr0n. lots and lots of ASCII pr0n.

"300 GB ought to be enough for anybody"

You're correct that disc IDs are based upon the number and duration of the tracks on the disc. Ideally, CD->FLAC->CD should produce a binary-exact copy of the original CD that produces the same result from CDDB/freeDB. However, due to slight variances in CD/DVD drives, it can be tough to produce an exact copy - most rippers will produce a copy that comes back as an "inexact match" in CDDB. The only ripper I'm aware of that can produce binary-exact copies is Exact Audio Copy, and that's only using secure mode and after you determine your drive's offset value. There used to be an online tutorial on calculating the offset value; it's no longer there, but can still be found in the Internet Archive.

I don't speak Jewish either, but thanks to the Internet Archive, I don't have to!

...and the bandwidth is usually pretty good; here's their collection.

Santa Cruz Hemp AllStars

a-HA! I knew there had to be a reason they act like they don't know what they're doing in court.

The Grateful Dead

And hundreds of other bands in Archive.org

The Grateful Dead

And hundreds of other bands in Archive.org

My first attempt was to build a stylish case with large fans, quiet hard drives, and a massive heat sink for the CPU. It worked fairly well, though the CD drive was incredibly loud in comparison.

My second attempt was far more successful. The CPU is in another room, with a hole in the wall for cables. This is a far better approach as the only noise I hear is the quiet hum of the monitor.

There's one down side, of course. I have to walk through a couple doorways to put in a CD, though that's a fairly rare occurrence these days. If I was really hardcore I'd have a USB CD-ROM drive next to the monitor to solve that problem. Still, it's probably good to get me out of my chair from time to time.

The IFS can be ordered here:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ifskit/Serv erIFSKitOrderinfo.mspx

It isn't free, but the current price of $109 is a lot cheaper than the $900 it used to be:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041012080008/http://w ww.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ifskit/ServerIFSKit Orderinfo.mspx

He argues that developing space weapons is a surefire way to launch a new space weapon race.

He didn't write that much about his theories on the modern world he injected in to neoconservatism. He mostly shunned speaking engagements, interviews, etc. When he did give interviews he didn't share the heart of his doctrine.

So lack of proof of his dastardly plan is itself proof of the insidious nature of his dastardly plan? Isn't that the same flawed brand of logic Adam Curtis accuses neo-conservatives of in the OP-referenced documentary (Power of Nightmares)?

Dude its early yet. If you saw Blair's speech last week he is starting the first concerted wave of outlawing websites and bookstores carrying a message the government decides it disapproves of.

Care to provide some evidence that any legitimate websites or bookstores that have been censored by the UK? Or is that information censored too?

Providing detailed instructions describing how to carry out terrorist attacks in websites, books, mosques, or anywhere for that matter is unacceptable. It's organized crime, and the government has not only a right but an obligation to fight it.

If I lived in the U.K. some of the stuff I post here seeking to provide understanding for why Palestinians and Muslims might rationalize what they do, may well soon be illegal in the U.K

May well soon? What kind of fantasy are you constructing? The British people are far more liberal than us Americans. They especially would never stand for that kind of political censorship. The only people who will be affected by this will be those aiding and abetting in the crime of terrorism. You needn't worry about either the U.S. or British governments knocking down your door for posting your misguided views on Slashdot.

-Grym

Al Qaeda is also a brand name being dramatically inflated by the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. If you understand the philosphy of their mentor, Leo Strauss, their objective is to create myths of good and evil they can use to unite disaffected Westerners behind an easily understood cause of good versus evil. They also server to distract the public as they reinstate a very regimented, very religious society. In this the neoconservatives have a lot in common with Islamic fundamentalists, who also want to restore a very regimented, very religious society. Only different is the choice of religion. The neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists are in fact using each other to gain their ends which may be one reason the U.S. seems to be in no hurry to catch Bin Laden and Co. The necons need Bin Laden, al-Zarqawi and al-Zawahri in the wild to demonize and terrify Americans to make Americans easier to control and manipulate. al-Zarqawi in particular is a convenient demon on whom to blame every bombing in Iraq. The neocons desperately need to make it look like Al Qaeda is to blame for the mess in Iraq when in reality much of it is a a homegrown Sunni insurgency, but anonymous Iraq Sunni's don't make for a powerful good versus evil myth and al-Zarqawi does.

The neocons needed a new boogie man when the Soviet Union collapsed. Saddam filled the bill but badly and now he is in jail so is a write off. At this point Al Qaeda fills the mortal enemy role. Al Qaeda is a great adversary because its unlikely to ever go away like the Soviet Union or Saddam did.

Al Qaeda likes the neocons because they have given Al Qaeda vast prestige by constantly building them up as a vast global terror network in "60 countries" when in fact they were early on probably a small organization with some sympathetic extremists around the globe. The U.S. helped make Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda also like the neocons because their heavy handed tactics, persecuting innocent Muslims, snatching Muslims around the world for torture with Rendition, torturing prisoner in Gitmo and Iraq, and of course invading Iraq in general is driving recruits to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in droves.

A good primer on the reality of the neocons and their fondness and similarity to Al Qaeda can be found in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. The necons have a long running histroy, dating back the Reagan years of pick an adversary and building them up in to an evil monster on the virge of destroying the American way of life.

- In the Reagan years they created a shadow intelligence office called Team B featuring none other than Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Team B took the same data the CIA had which said the Soviet Union wasn't that much of a threat, and was crumbling from within, and instead found the Soviet Union to be a massive and imminent danger, engaging in a massive arms build up, and leading a "global terror network". Sound familiar. Whenever they could find no evidence of a weapons build up the neocons devised a perfect solution. If they can't find evidence of it that must mean that it is so nefarious and well concealed that it is even more dangerous than programs they could see. William Casey was a big subscriber of the Soviet Union leading a global terror network. People of the CIA tried to point out to him it was untrue, because in fact it was black propaganda the CIA itself had started.

- The Power of Nightmares contends they used similar tactics of demonization to create a myth of evil around Bill Clinton. That is a bit of a stretch though there certainly was a concerted campaign on someone's part to destroy him. There was never any evidence produced to support all the conspiracies they tried to pin on him which makes it sound a lot like a Team B style operation based on fantasy. It was a campaign that was VERY successful since it regained control of the Congress and then the White House for the Republicans and the neocons.

- In more

Will that be anything like disccussing the tactical importance of Jessica Linden's uterus to national security?

(curse you theOnion for taking your archives offline)

How did anyone expect to make money on providing free internet service with no ads?

"Is privacy no longer a concern to people now that we have terrorists to worry about?"

The stock response is if you aren't doing anything illegal why would you care about privacy. This is only to catch bad people doing bad things. You aren't a bad person doing bad things are you? At this point you can see why only activists will fight it. Your average citizen isn't going to complain because that just makes you ripe for further attention by the authorities. The man in the suit might come knocking and ask, "Why are you wanting to use encryption and hide your activities from us Mr. Garstka."

American's don't really have much of a sensitivity, at present, as to why police states are bad. They aren't likely to start caring until its to late. At the moment its really only Muslim's that are taking the brunt of it and most Americans aren't Muslim. For example two men in Detroit were convicted on terrorism charges by the DOJ. The two main exhibits:

- A homemade video of their trip to Disneyland which the government insisted was really a surveillance tape to plan for a terrorist attack, and just cleverly made to look like a tourist video.

- A conman up on fraud charges was offered a reduced sentence if he testified against them. Predictably he took the offer. Unfortunately for the DOJ he started talking to cell mates and admitted he lied to get his charges dropped and the case was overturned, but not until two Muslim men and their families had been put through living hell for having video taped their Disney vacation.

This instance is covered in the fascinating BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares. If you want a primer on why your right to privacy is being eviscerated by the powers that be, its a good starting point. It also highlights some fascinating similarities between the neoconservatives currently running America and Britain and Islamic fundamentalism. In many respects they need each other and are using each other to attain their goals, the end of western liberalism and liberties. They both want a return to regimented societies dominated by their respective religion's concept of law and order.

Correct "more"-link

Here's a film from the Internet Archive:
A Tale of Two Cities" (1946)

There is be more ...

Here's a film from the Internet Archive:
A Tale of Two Cities" (1946)

There is be more ...

"... all the while knowing that the civilian leadership at the top of the pyramid has let them down in a monumental fashion."

To understand Iraq and why it is like it is you need to understand the real motivation of the people that started it. A good primer often posted on Slashdot is The Power of Nightmares a 3 part BBC documentary. It gets a little weak in chapter 3 but chapters 1 and 2 are priceless in understanding the Bush/Blair administrations, Islamic fundamentalists and how much alike they are.

In synopsis, there are a number of people in the Bush administration, who subscribe to the theories of or were educated by Leo Strauss.

Strauss' driving theory was the western liberalism and moral relativism was a disastrous failure, people are losing their compass in life because of it, and this was leading to a breakdown in society. The solution Strauss proposed was that the leaders of the nation need to create easily understood myths, that could be used to unite people behind causes they could easily understand and support, causes that would give their lives meaning, direction and purpose.

Anytime you hear Western leaders describing the world in terms of good and evil these days chances are you are hearing echoes of Leo Strauss and neoconservative speechwriters of his school. Their objective is to paint their nation, its leaders and its people as champions of good and their nations enemies as the epitome of evil.

One of the first modern instances of this philosophy, in action, occurred during the Reagan administration. The neocons created a shadow intelligence agency called Team B. Team B analyzed all the same intelligence the CIA analyzed on the Soviet Union. Who was on Team B, among other Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The CIA found no evidence of a serious buildup or military threat from the Soviet Union. Team B found evidence of nothing but a massive buildup, secret weapons and an imminent danger of sneak attack. The neocons, in particular William Casey, head of the CIA insisted the Soviet Union was behind a global terrorism network. CIA analysts said it wasn't the case. Why because they had planted all the propaganda about this global terrorism network and they knew it was a lie but the neocons insisted it was reality.

You see the neocons were manufacturing a myth, that the Soviet Union was the epitome of evil and an imminent threat to the U.S. and the world when in fact it was a decrepit and incompetent regime heading towards collapse. You might remember Reagan calling it the "evil empire" which is classic Staussian rhetoric.

Fast forward to Iraq and you find George W. Bush calling them part of the "axis of evil", classic Straussian rhetoric. You find once again a special office was created, this time in the Pentagon, to analyze all the evidence on Iraq that the CIA was analyzing. It was called the Office of Special Plans, though it was really Team B, the sequel. CIA analysts found no case for WMD's in Iraq, or ties to 9/11. This special office under Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, found nothing but evidence of WMD's, ties to 9/11 and imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. You might recall the one about drones from Iraq spraying American cities with chemical and biological weapons Fox News in particular played to great effect right before the war.

What you see in Iraq today was another case of the neocons creating a myth, one in which America was the force of good while Saddam's Iraq was evil incarnate. The war in Iraq had no real justification because all of the purported threats posed by Iraq were based on fantasy and myth creation. The only purpose of the war in Iraq was to unite the American people against a regime that was easy to portray as evil. It was an easy myth for the American people to understand, and it was a target that was easy to destroy with a modern military, while scattered underground Islamic extremists were not.

The problem wi

The symptoms are weird select() failures (falsely indicating that socket fd's have data available for reading), connect() failures, and spontaneously dropped connections. I have been able to reliably replicate these problems with a program which simply forks off 32 child processes and enters a select()/read()/accept() loop, while each child process opens several SOCK_STREAM connections to the parent and writes data to them as select() indicates the connections are available for writing.

The perl source is here, if you can stomach the rather disgusting code structure (or lack thereof -- I wrote it as throw-away code, and haven't gotten around to rewriting it). The TCP failures were first seen in a native C program, so it's not a perl issue. I've replicated it under 2.2.16, 2.4.18, 2.4.21, and 2.4.25-1.

-- TTK

OK - you point to the "first mouse" -- something cobbled together from bits of wood, wheels, and wires about 1963. Obviously a test device to see if the idea even works -- why add more buttons if you don't even know the wheels will work (I have no evidence this is how it went, but for testing out an idea, I wouldn't invest any more time than absolutely necessary to see if it will work at all).

So after Engelbert thinks about what a mouse should do a bit, he comes up with this (scroll down for pic). The famous 1968 demo was with a three button mouse. Some parts of that demo are absolutely fabulous. For example, there is a segment showing a collaborator appear on the screen, webcam style, and the two people work together on a single document, all the while hearing and seeing each other. There is an excerpt from the presentation in Alan Kay's talk. When I watch this, I can't help but wonder why the heck computers haven't really advanced in UI terms in the last 30 years. Ok processing power yada yada -- but when I watched this the first time, I felt like nothing had changed except for the addition of color, better refresh rates, and smoother mousing. Those are just tweaks, not innovation.

Anyway, the very first test device mouse had only one button. Thank goodness it has advanced and evolved.

It was a kind of portal, I could customize the soruces of news, horoscope, weather and the page used to have indicator to show how fast it would download in 56k modem. More stuff added to it, indicator would go up.

Here is a sample of what it used to be.