Slashdot Mirror

"Think about how much of our human existence is dictated by the cycles of our single sun. I wonder how different things would be with three suns. Would agriculture ever start?"

Well the Aztecs seemed to manage with 5 different calendar cycles, and plenty of civilisations use a combination of solar/lunar calendar which are pretty independant.

The obvious answer would be "more sun = better crops", i.e. farming would do pretty well without the winter and autumn seasons...

Some notes from Sainsbury's responses to questions from various people here (about the UK view, not european).

What's my IP?

Not exactly $386,000-worth...

Obligatory link to the dead-pixel simulator - see what LCD screeens actually look like...

"We could use the so-called Aztec Calendar. Mayhaps it is not as easy to code with, but far more accurate."

If anyone wants to use the aztec calendars, I've put up some web-apps to show them

I wouldn't say it's hard to code with though, all the aztec calendars are extremely logical and regular.

Personally I prefer lunar calendars. 29.5-day month regardless, none of this pandering to Augustus, or adding 28-day months with wiccan names. Calculating easter is trivial, and you can still use weeks, years, months, and days. The only complication is the blue-moon, but if you can calculate it with a stone henge, it's probably doable on a modern computer.

Lunar calendars give you a much nicer choice of month-names too, although it's climate-dependant which ones you use (i.e. southern hemisphere might want the harvest moon during their autumn...)

"I vaguely remember there's a country where it is illegal to obstruct surveillance by way of encryption. And you may be required to hand over all your passwords (if some are protecting legal documents like a Will) if the police decided to take a good look at you."

Most countries are like this, but the UK is one of the most famous.

We really really want to use something else, but sadly we have a big pile of steaming custom code that generates project files that isn't going away anytime soon, so we are stuck with project, unless we can find a way to convert it to something more friendly.

Can you modify the code to spit-out SQL instead of an MS-Project file? Or to send an HTTP POST request with details of new projects? Or just create some formatted-text and paste it into a textarea in the web-application. What programming-language is the software in?

What is the software you have written tho, is it in sourceforge?

Have a poke around:
here

"From 12 september 2001 until bush started talking about invading Iraq."

Looks like that number may be negative (12 days) if you count destruction of the Basra radar as buildup to the Iraq invasion

"Black Moon is even more rare: When no full moons occur in a month (usually February)"

Of course, as someone pointed out, a "back moon" would imply
two blue moons in that year

So are we supposed to give them different names, or is it not possible to uniquely identify each moon in 2018? January Blue Moon and March Blue Moon or something?

And can you change when blue moons occur by selecting an appropriate timezone, or by changing to daylight-savings-time just before a full moon?

I have a calendar for lunar months if anyone's interested.

The "second in a month" definition for blue moons is obviously going to cause a hot debate here, but if you're interested in the 'original' definition, then 28th september will be the blue moon (4th full moon in a quarter (this quarter = jun,jul,sep)) and today would be the full Sturgeon moon.

Next blue moon is 2007, either on 31 May or 29 June depending on definition.

OJW

"I did domething similar once. I put a tiny transparent image URL in a letter to try to get the IP address of someone. Then I monitored the server logs where the image was hosted."

something like this

"Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers--a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself--still stands has one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age"

"I think personal websites are cool back in the day when... well, HTML isn't so complicated, and the average website is a few tables with a few pictures.
now, if you would just look at the mountains of shit you'd have to sift through to make a site (try webmonkey.com), it's unreal! Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before."

Alternatively, just pick a website-in-a-can, and you get slashdot-like polls, discussion boards, news, file-share, photo albums, weblogs, etc. with no HTML needed, just login to the website and start specifying content.

Admittedly, you need to setup a database, create some usernames, and do the installation, but it's not so hard, and may web-hosts will do the MySQL setup for you.

"which program? Just curious."

There was a calendar program on my site, with moon phases, sunrise times, easter dates, sundial generation, etc.

Probably easier to use than Emacs' "Meta-X calendar", but it doesn't do martian sundials!

The first I heard about the OpenCD project was when they started showing up in referer logs.

"Very informative....mod parent up."

Yeah, like anything non-trolling of mine is going to get modded up. It's a useful link though, just for emailing to people when they start discussing ISO9K+x at work: "Read about ISO9000, the company-killer"

Just store the links somewhere

Underreported stories?

probably the best resource is FAIR anyway, just to check-up on the 'actual' newspapers

The list of websites that've shut down is here (two and a half thousand sites so far)

My site is shut-down.
Others include KDE, Gimp, gnu-darwin, GNU-savannah, and most of the French and German linux sites.

"yet no one is seemingly able to get the GUI geeks to come together to for some sort of Linux UI standards consortium"

User interface standards for free software

Unless you meant "make KDE look the same as Gnome", which is kind'a like saying "make windowsXP and MacOs the same"... different products for different people.

Please, mirror the file instead of using this as sole source.

Okay

Do we have agreement on what the MD5 should look like for these files, before everyone starts hosting any file they find with a "waste.zip" filename?

"Sadly, in the UK, there is a law specific to encrypted data that places the burden of proof on you. If you forget the key to some encrypted data that the government decides it wants to read, you can go to jail."

Marutukku or plain old destruction

Does anyone else find it worrying that a privacy system designed to withstand people being tortured is of most use in the UK?

The UK government has put forward a compelling and intelligent case for this war and has won the hearts and minds of the nation because of it.

Yeah, the UK parliament is all in agreement. Not. Did you ever see so many ministers resign in a week?

/Links/Dir/Privacy/Anonymisers/

Just a list from my site.

"Personally, if everyone violated the DMCA on small scale"

Important point: copying movies won't work; it need to be something that people can relate to.

A good example would be using Sklyarov's e-book reader to copy the digitally-protected ebook of Paradise Lost to text. People will ask why we're being arrested for copying something which is public-domain.

Copying CDs onto an MP3 player, or watching rented DVDs on a non-approved player would all be 'good' methods of protest, but if you can make it something which is clearly and obviously morally-right (such as copying Paradise Lost from its ebook) then you stand a greater chance of support than simply ripping star-wars.

"Since I write scientific articles and need to be able to do all of the above ( cross-references, tables, figures, sections, formulas and headings)"

Have you tried LaTeX?

"pdfelatex" on linux, and MikTeX / WinEDT on windows, tutorials here

My site usage policy

( -5: Not funny.)

At the risk of starting an entire thread on browser stats:

- MSIE 73%
- Galeon 6%
- Mozilla 5 5%

And Mozilla3, Googlebot, Mozilla 4.x, OmniWeb and Opera each have less than one percent.

Of course, most visitors to my site come looking for Windows software, so those figures may be a little skewed in favour of windows browsers...

The stats themselves

My password trap with checking against two common password-dictionaries.

p.s. that page doesn't officially exist, so take the dictionaries for your own site rather thank linking to it.

List of other anonymisers

I put that up when my mum was blocked from reading my own website at school... I don't know which would be worse, someone at her school blocking a free-software/free-speech site, or the site being added by censorware companies themselves.

I'd add an anonymiser myself if I had the bandwidth, but it would give people too much false-security to be able to use one without an HTTPS connection

My PHP spider-trap - See an infinity of email addresses and links in action!

Although I don't want to post a really long comment, I did write an article on the trend for legal solutions to technical problems - read it here

Ok, I emailed the person who did their press release (Debbi Bauman) and got a prompt reply containing the report upon which they base their estimates on the "dollar value" of pirated software. I know people consider these estimates are notoriously inaccurate (distorted by crackers, open-source people, etc) so I was interested to find out how they did it, and what assumptions they made.

I know nobody likes multi-page comments on slashdot, so you can read it here on my website

http://www.blibbleblobble.co.uk/Downloads/KeyPad/i ndex.htm
Blatant advertising of a free open-source app for windows to type passwords using a randomly generated on-screen 'keyboard' !

I've written a program (screenshot here, about to be released soon) to enter passwords using your mouse, on a randomly-generated "keyboard"

The big problem with this approach is fairly fundamental of course. PGP encrypted discs don't let you paste text into their password dialog.

Oops, guess I should've checked this before I developed the app!

Do you get any help using an anonymiser?
http://www.blibbleblobble.co.uk/Links/Dir/Privacy/ Anonymisers/

Royal.gov.uk is back

And it's displaying M$'s default page...
Snapshot

I hear and agree with those who say the internet today is more important for news than any other medium. You can listen to the BBC or C4 on television, and their coverage of the live events was incomparable. Recent events were seen simultaneously on television by people around the western world.

However, when we start to look at the reporting of an event's aftermath, we see a different picture emerging. We get the plain facts (presidential speeches) etc. but the opinions are entirely those of the "political class", those who frequent the offices of government, and mainly those who agree with their government. Anyone anti-government typically has a problem creating a serious image on TV or radio, and comes off looking silly against the groomed, professional anchormen and ministers.

Now, we look at the net. For the basic information, everything is there, not just transcripts of the speeches, but audio and video too. The more sites it appears on, the more you can trust it. (I assumed the bombings on TV were a hoax or a film until I noticed it on all 4 channels) Sure, you might not trust the CNN website for whatever reason, but you can open 20 other news websites in 20 browser windows, and get the same story from all the angles, from various countries.

However, I find that many of the big news sites, those of TV stations, those of newspapers, those of the BBC tend to echo the opinions of their reporters in traditional media. No surprise there, but it still lacks the "opposing view" so essential to the balanced presentation of news.

But then I found slashdot, where people write the news for themselves. Since I started reading slashdot articles, I've only gone back to the BBC one or two times, to confirm things posted here. The "peer-to-peer news reporting" is much more useful than traditional websites, as people get the chance to discuss the news. If someone posts incorrect data, then you can read the comments, and see what the consensus is. You don't need to curse the smug newsreader on your TV; if you have a correction, you can say it.

So well done to everyone at slashdot for making the idea of internet news really work. The internet will become the staple of news coverage, especially for those in offices all day, and I hope that peer-posted and reviewed news sites become the standard in years to come.

Oliver White

My news