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http://linuxman.blogsome.com/2007/06/28/linux-store/

Actually, the trademarking of the Windows store was just a follow up to the Linux store's trademarking in 2009:

http://linuxman.blogsome.com/images/linuxstore.png

Wrote some more about this on my blog All Things:

  Every Millennium or So, Paper Is Re-invented

    I have to post AC on this one..

    Here's a map for those who don't know. :)

    TFA is a piece of crap story. It's very small on some women, but I've always managed to find it. Any women who haven't had it explored, drop me a line. :)

    It does exist on both men and women. It can also be slightly manipulated from the outside.

    On women from inside, touching towards the abdomen, you will feel a spongy area. Just up (towards her head) from there is it. It's not in exactly the same place on everyone, but it's there. Every woman is a bit different on how manipulating it feels best for them too. Experiment, and learn what your lover is telling you.

    You can manipulate it from outside too. Basically, pressure on the abdomen, just above the pubic bone, curling your fingers down (towards her feet) slightly.

    The combination of those will drive her wild. With enough practice, you can hit it right off every time. After a few demonstrations, even the threat of it can drive her to an orgasm. :) The combination works much better on skinny women. The external stimulus simply doesn't work well through layers of fat. (no offense to large women, just the facts)

    The g-spot can be reached from the rectum also, but there is more stuff in the way. Some women like it that way though.

    As for fingers in my rectum.. Well.. I'd prefer that be left alone. I'm perfectly content having orgasms without anything in my ass.

A lot of the tie-ins are kind of meh; but the "cut part count nearly in half by encouraging re-use of parts and stopping one-off pieces" aspect makes everything better, and the bad aspects pretty much irrelevant.

"POOP"s(Piece Out of Other Pieces are, along with wholly inflexible merely decorative elements, pretty much the biggest enemy of Lego as a reconfigurable imaginative toy. Instead of getting a bag of bits that can be the model on the box, or any number of other things, you just get a snap together model. Might as well come with hobby glue. If that is the case, the quality of the model on the box really matters; because that is more or less what you get.

With the sharp reduction in one-off overdetermined crap, the goodness or badness of the model on the box matters a whole lot less, you can always just treat it as a kit of parts and rebuild it. The only thing that ends up really mattering is whether the color scheme of that particular tie-in is close enough to what you want.

If movie tie-ins are what it takes for Lego to stay solvent(and volume sales almost certainly are, I don't even want to know how expensive Lego sets would be if they went from doing high-precision ABS injection molding to short-run high-precision ABS injection molding), that may well say something unfortunate about the buying public; but(as long as the sets aren't made of worthless pieces) that doesn't really harm old-school enthusiasts. If anything, the more sets sold, the more bricks will show up in big Ebay lots, or on Bricklink.

... if it weren't for the fact that I'm skeptical enough to know better.

Ignoring the fact that they spend twice as much on advertising as on R&D, routinely dump their toxic crap in underdeveloped countries; the truth is that the majority of their products are worthless, and may do more harm than good

I've been wondering when investors would finally notice how little Microsoft gets out of their huge R&D investments. I bet they'd do better if they cut everyone's budgets!

Here's what I wrote in 2005:

"... In general, while Microsoft prides itself on the billions it spends each year on research and development, I suspect years from now it will be regarded as a case study on how not to do R&D investment. It's not at all obvious that they have gotten much for their billions. For years they have been touting natural language and usability testing, for example, but there seems to be little to show for it in the first area and still a lot of frustrations at times in the second.

... Ultimately, what Microsoft needs to do is to grow up. Gates and Ballmer have long touted the need to be 'paranoid' in order to survive in the tech industry. This may have worked when Microsoft was small and IBM was the giant, but now that Microsoft is dominant, the idea of a paranoid 800-pound gorilla doesn't bode well for the industry as a whole or for the users.

Like a teenager, Microsoft shows much promise in an industry that is entering a new era of innovation, but it must mature and come to grips with its own limitations. It can't be everything to everyone..."

http://allthings.blogsome.com/2005/09/27/microsoft/

Quote from a BBC article: "... the dirty and degrading implication of the sole of a shoe crosses all religious boundaries in the Middle East".

However, show-throwing is mild compared to this, or this.

Light-Bulbs Of DOOOOOOMMMM!

Worse, it's an outright lie. The record companies are freaking out about uncontrolled downloads, not because their music is being copied around (it is), but because of Free Albums Galore, headphonica, Jamendo, Internet Archive Audio and so on.... There are dozens of places to get completely free music and this is the single most terrifying use the Internet can be put to, from the big label perspective. It has the potential to break the spine of the industry's decades-cultivated promotional and sales lock-in.

Yes, there's sharing of big-label music, but I share a half dozen freely distributable albums and no big-label music at all. I'm sure that bothers them a lot more than if I were serving up the manufactured pop of the week.

It seems they're getting it slowly, though. More and more songs are distributed for free as a loss-leader on iTunes and Amazon every day. If they keep that up, they might even figure out a business plan that treats their customers like people... but I'm not holding my breath.

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2008/12/27/led-street-lighting-not-as-good-as-you-think/ this is greenwash. the numbers dont work. add the cost of upgrading and its just tax payer money funneled to a special interest

To add to this list, I found this a well-edited list of notable legal free music downloads, with a great variety from Butthole Surfers to Beethoven:

http://freealbums.blogsome.com/album-directory-a-z

enjoy!

I agree wholeheartedly. Come on, the dude rewrote SunOS in a single weekend!

Good news, someone saved the information from that page here:
http://dragonwritingprompts.blogsome.com/wikipedias-list-of-fictional-expletives/

In this interview with the CEO of Lego he talks about going back to more normal pieces.

Link stolen from Dan's Data.

The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze wrote the following prophetic words 30 years ago:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a model that will determine how problems of terrorism will be dealt with elsewhere, even in Europe. The worldwide cooperation of states, and the worldwide organization of police and criminal proceedings, will necessarily lead to a classification extending to more and more people who will be considered virtual "terrorists." This situation is analogous to the Spanish Civil War, when Spain served as an experimental laboratory for a far more terrible future.

Today Israel is conducting an experiment. It has invented a model of repression that, once adapted, will profit other countries...This conflict is a curious kind of blackmail, from which the whole world will never escape unless we lobby for the Palestinians to be recognized for what they are: "genuine partners" in peace talks. They are indeed at war, in a war they did not choose.

They said the same thing about DVD. About Blue-Ray. About Securom and Safedisc and Macrovision. About your XBox and your Playstation. About the ECU controller in your car.

If anyone is an ignorant asshat, it's you. History is on my side in this argument. And if you had half an ounce of brains you'd understand that a system is fundamentally flawed when someone wants to hide content from you, but also hands you the keys.

The stupid thing is, they already provide free filtering software to download. The government has paid for it, on our behalf.

The licence for the filter software cost them $AUD 85M, with only 145000 downloads of the software, and no doubt even less active users. Those that want it, have it. But it seems not many people care.

Dan Rutter brings some light on the insanity here.

Apparently the Australian government have already tried this on a PC-level...and it was pretty much viewed as a massive waste of money, the guy from dansdata has an interesting piece on the cost/usage but hey, children - somebody won't think...

I'm no physicist, but Dan's explanation here seems to explain it all, and make sense -- the motor draws more current, so it's not really being more efficient at all -- in fact, it's probably *less* efficient if anything.

Anyone care to comment?

Dan from Dan's Data offers a possible explanation: http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2008/02/08/more-perpetual-motion-with-video-this-time/

... at Free Albums Galore

This guy has brief but (to my taste) pretty accurate reviews of free albums. I found some really great stuff there.

And be gentle, don't know how much traffic the site can handle.

You have no idea how much I want one of these things. They often run to about AU$700 on ebay.
Dan, of Dans Data, found one for AU$40. Lucky bastard!

Interesting timing - a few hours ago I came by this, and read your article. Interesting stuff.

Excellent! Where can we find those?

How about the Internet? Start with the "Male Privilege Checklist": http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2004/09/15/t he-male-privilege-checklist/

Then start reading in the feminist blogosphere, two decent entry points into it are http://pandagon.blogsome.com/ and http://feministing.com/ .

Then begin looking up "white privilege" and "anti-racism", since the strategies are nearly identical between both problem domains. Google for the excellent essay "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", normally at http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpa cking.html , but tonight the server is down so try this instead: http://justworld.typepad.com/perspectives/2005/11/ peggy_mcintoshs.html .

After some time it might start making sense.

Dan's Data has posted some thoughts on the subject:

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2007/07/27/000000-for -the-environment/

"I've never been able to figure out how it is that these sorts of aimless fabrications get tacked onto much-forwarded messages. Somebody somewhere along the line had to make up the "Google created" factoid all by himself and add it to the text... but why?

Snopes is full of stuff like this. Sometimes it's obviously someone just making up a story to go with a funny picture because it entertains them to start a hoax or they want to reverse the political slant of a forward they just received, but just as often there's not even that much justification."

To do damage to a monster or beast I was playing a guitar at it. A mother fucking guitar. To do damage. Call me strange but that was just odd to me.

Obviously you haven't heard Madonna with a guitar.

http://eugenia.blogsome.com/images/madonna6.jpg

Believe it or not, high-power CFL lamps exist. This one apparently is equivalent to a 400W incandescent (it consumes 85W).

Driving is just a minor issue. The big "cop exemption" involves evasion of the Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban by cops. This prohibits any gun ownership or possession in the US by anyone convicted of domestic violence.

Including cops and soldiers.

The Army has faced up to this. A domestic violence conviction for a soldier means no more access to small arms. (Aircraft, artillery, and other big stuff are still OK.) But many police departments are really lax about this. Nationally, about 60,000 cops should have lost their jobs when that restriction became law in 1996, but to date, only a few hundred actually have. However, at least it's usually checked when hiring new cops, and gradually, departments are coming around. Even the Fraternal Order of Police finally gave up fighting this.

Btw, I found a thinstalled version of IE7

http://mikicun.blogsome.com/2007/02/14/virtual-int ernet-explorer-7-final/

It can be run off a USB stick without installing anything or system changes.

Reeeallllly.

Try this baby:

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2006/10/15/85w-cfl-bi znatch/

Its an 85 watt not so Compact Flouresent.

What's this?! The great hacker god Eric Raymond is not in this list?!

http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them- the-code
http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/suit.html
http://www.self-gov.org/celebrities/images/eric-ra ymond2.jpg
http://pepelucho.blogsome.com/images/eric_raymond. jpg
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bos/bos086.htm
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.htm l

• Asian input method. My friend here has managed to install scim package from Kubuntu repo to provide him alternate input method. Japanese input method in this context. Hard? It was simply apt-get install. Yes, it need the power of technical-user. You need to know how to install stuff ;)
• Media playing. I dunno dude, I mostly met with mp3, mpg, avi (XviD), VCD, and DVD. I don't need extra stuff to install than the base codecs from mplayerhq (win32 codecs). I've installed this codecs a long time ago when this machine of mine still labelled FC3 (now it's FC4 via apt-get)
• Device support. You've got a point there. It needs driver that is somehow, sometimes, hard to be found in Linux world. I wish somehow the hardware vendor found a way to either make the documentation public or make the binary linux driver available to download
• Font. I'm no graphic designer so I don't need any fancy font. But I do picky when faced on a visual environment. As I can recall, default Kubuntu install which what my gf is currently using is visually appealing. No clunky font used on the UI. and if I want other font, I could just simply install it as usual, with GUI.

Eugenia, Eugenia, Eugenia, when will you learn?

http://eugenia.blogsome.com/2006/05/31/mugshot-mug shot-you-said/

Yes they can.

Investors obviously wouldn't like it, but according to that link, microsoft makes 10 million in profit (40 million in revenue) every single day.

Time to wake up, the alarm has been sounding for years. Recently people far removed from president Bush have also begun sounding it as loud as they can.

Read http://agora.blogsome.com/2006/02/28/salman-rushdi e-ayaan-hirsi-ali-et-al-slam-islamic-totalitariani sm/

Only the delusional worry about rainy days with a knife at their throat.

Looking back

A lifetime ago, it was observed that the Universe is expanding. A few years ago, Scientists made another shocking discovery. The rate at which the Universe is expanding seems to be accelerating.

Since then, it's been speculated that something called "Dark Energy" is responsible for the apparent accelerating expansion; Einstein's "Cosmological Constant" (which he later called the biggest blunder of his career). It is supposed to make up 70% or more of everything in the cosmos, and IIRC, was supposed to have become the dominant force of nature a billion years or so before our solar system had formed. I suppose it could well be the case, but I am not so sure. I often wonder if perhaps the people involved have missed something obvious. (I am not a cosmologist, so obviously take what I am about to say with a grain of salt ;^).

My reasoning follows:

The farther we look into the cosmos, the further back in time we are seeing, as light travels at a finite speed (~300,000 kps). Our best instruments are showing us the Universe as it was half a billion years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was very much smaller, and everything was therfore closer together. I don't recall the exact estimated size, but lets say the Universe back then was 200 million light years across. Did it take light 200 million years to cross that distance? No. It took nearly 13,000 million years (13 billion), because of the Universes expansion.

At what speed does gravitational force propagate through the cosmos? Is it an instantaneous thing, or does it travel at a finite speed, as does light? If in fact the gravitational force travels at a finite speed, then masses at the edges of the Observable Universe would only now be exerting their (now greatly diminished) gravitational forces on each other. Additionally, if the rate of the Universes' acceleration is a constant (doesn't increase over time as with the Dark Energy scenario), then it would appear to us looking back, that the rate increased once the Universe got to a certain size, when it was just too big for the gravitational force to have had enough time to travel between them by that point in history.

I've made a few assumptions there, but until I see anything from a credible source showing my assumptions to be incorrect, I find my scenario to be more likely than "Dark Energy." It's an interesting Universe either way.

-------

The above is slightly modified from when I first posted it on November 17, 2005 @ 5:44 pm

http://cogscanthink.blogsome.com/2005/09/26/contra dictio-in-terminis/

--Trent J. Townsend

It would be quite useless. I am always aware about the temp of my food cooking, either on the XBox 360 PSU (also useful as a foot warmer in bed) and on my overclocked intel (great for pot noodle) using the motherboard temperature sensors ;)

I actually think it could be feasible to harness all that wasted heat from electronic equipment to cook food

http://petantik.blogsome.com/ - A Lucid Look at Reality
http://www.xanga.com/petantik - The Golden Nugget

Ah.. there's too much free (legal!) music on the internet nowadays to warrant shelling out cash for 'pop' music from the big dogs.

http://freealbums.blogsome.com/
http://www.archive.org/audio/netlabels.php
http://www.magnatune.com/

Laters...

I just posted on comp.lang.python asking about available protection schemes for python code

Python obfuscation thread at comp.lang.python


petantik.blogsome.com - A Lucid Look at Reality

These kind of schemes always end in tears for everyone. Sounds like a good idea on paper but the system complexity will end up being enormous.

1. The information will be organised and recorded at one central location - which will break
2. It uses the latest technology and, i assume, some stastical/mathematical techniques - which will probably be
incorrect and will end up giving false results anyway
3. 1 and 2 will cause extra congestion and extra cost - yippee!!!




http://petantik.blogsome.com/ - A Lucid Look at Reality

Well, forgive me for seeming like a pedantic prick, but with over 400,000 words in the English language, and nobody can seem to agree to the definitions of about a quarter of them for everyday use, it seems pretty stupid to have a definite meaning written in one book, and then inside another book the same word has a tirade on how it's really tough to define the word. Frankly, my 2004 Encyclopedia Britannica doesn't even state what the Wikipedia article says, and it's got about ten times the amount of information.

BTW, Wikipedia has problems with inaccuracy, and several professors at several prestigious universities are currently busy pointing them out. Seeing as Wikipedia is an open-source information depot, there's bound to be inaccuracies, and I'm willing to bet one of those disputed is about planets in general. I'll look for any debate on that and post links to you, but in the meantime, refresh your brain with real books. Remember back when everyone said "Don't believe everything you read over the internet?" That's probably the best advice anyone here on /. could ever take.

In the meantime, go read this little rather well-informed blog about Wiki. Here

These are exactly the questions that need to be asked. Of course, they are simply dismissed as "silliness."

You're absolutely right; all of the mathematics of the original post are constrained to a very specific (and very complex) system, based upon monstrous, unsupported assumptions.

Evolutionists always argue accordingly: "You can't say that something couldn't come from nothing just because we don't know that yet!" Putting in place as much faith as any of their religious counterparts. Yes, the Big Bang is built entirely upon faith.

You're spot on by pointing to the "first amino acid." Let's all - by faith - assume that this universe burst into being from absolutely nothing. With a universe full of inorganic matter, how did that matter spring to life, much less organize itself into amino acids or DNA? Billions upon billions of years don't answer that question.

Improbable is an understatement.

Me - "Yes"

It's actually a 3rd person game: Link

amazon is making a profit as indicated by this quick link provided by a google search :

http://zwz.blogsome.com/2005/04/27/amazon-posts-lo wer-profit/