Slashdot Mirror

Space colonization is more than survivalism. President Reagan in 1988 also called "to colonize the galaxy." But rather than a warning of possible extinction, it was an optimistic call to fulfill our "manifest destiny." Reagan said, "It is only in a universe without limits that we will find a canvas large enough for the vastness of the human imagination." http://theklugblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/reagan-198 8-anticipates-hawking_03.html

Space colonization is more than survivalism. President Reagan in 1988 also called "to colonize the galaxy." But rather than a warning of possible extinction, it was an optimistic call to fulfill our "manifest destiny." Reagan said, "It is only in a universe without limits that we will find a canvas large enough for the vastness of the human imagination." http://theklugblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/reagan-198 8-anticipates-hawking_03.html

They have every right to take pictures along the road. Its the law as long as they aren't on any private roads. Plus, I can't see any problems between this and google earth. Google Earth has done the same thing. http://newsads.blogspot.com/2006/09/google-earth-s hows-topless-sunbather.html

It's all under the gpl, and you can see what we're up to here:
http://reprap.org/
http://reprapdoc.voodoo.co.nz/bin/view/Main/WebHom e
http://reprap.blogspot.com/
http://reprappers.blogspot.com/
http://objects.reprap.org/

If you want to make your own 3D printer, or borrow one of our loaner machines (once we have some), please come check us out.

It's all under the gpl, and you can see what we're up to here:
http://reprap.org/
http://reprapdoc.voodoo.co.nz/bin/view/Main/WebHom e
http://reprap.blogspot.com/
http://reprappers.blogspot.com/
http://objects.reprap.org/

If you want to make your own 3D printer, or borrow one of our loaner machines (once we have some), please come check us out.

Does this mean that they will help the OLPC project out with some funding now rather than making fun of it?

Russia exports 8 grams of polonium-210 monthly, all to the United States. He said there had been no exports to Britain in five years.

Russia exports 8 grams of polonium-210 monthly, all to the United States. He said there had been no exports to Britain in five years.

A cold chill just fell on relations between Russia and the West.

An even bigger chill will occur if we get too uppity with Russia about this. As a major supplier of European natural gas, we could be sitting freezing in our homes within a week or two if Russia turned off the taps. We have been on the verge of a gas crisis here in the UK for some time now.

Diplomacy cuts both ways, and I dare say the UK government isn't going to push this too far given the energy situation.

Not the greatest link but, excerpted from http://iagblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/faa-vs-la-sher iff.html

"For RC aircraft flight, the A/C must stay lower than 400 feet AGL (FAA Advisory circular 91-57), and according to the Associationof Model Aricraft's safety code, must stay in the control of, and stay within the sight of,an operator at all times. Autonomous flight is forbidden."

It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a size limitation as well.

This article refers to changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and as such would applicable to all companies involved in federal litigation. Note that IANAL. You can find a number of articles providing more detail than this one, including:

http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/Reports/ST09-2005.pd f
http://www.lexisnexis.com/applieddiscovery/lawlibr ary/whitePapers/ADI_FS_Top10TipsforFRCP.pdf
http://infogovernance.blogspot.com/2006/08/federal -rules-of-civil-procedure.html

http://informata.blogspot.com/

This article refers to changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and as such would applicable to all companies involved in federal litigation. Note that IANAL. You can find a number of articles providing more detail than this one, including:

http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/Reports/ST09-2005.pd f
http://www.lexisnexis.com/applieddiscovery/lawlibr ary/whitePapers/ADI_FS_Top10TipsforFRCP.pdf
http://infogovernance.blogspot.com/2006/08/federal -rules-of-civil-procedure.html

http://informata.blogspot.com/

We try to make better guesses on whether someone is a mass-murderer, based on past behavior
They ... well I really can't describe it any better than this : http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idartic le=6845

And we also tell them that newspapers lie for political correctness, then don't fix the mess they create :
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006452.htm

Or worse :
http://www.seconddraft.org/movies.php

Or worse :
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/corruptio n-of-media.html

And then you read your headline again ... then think 5 seconds on who is more honest
-> the policeman that can get fired when he steps a toe out of line and checks airline passengers
-> or the reporter who is not checked by anyone, a sensationalist, and has a political affiliation

Then you think another 5 seconds.

Apparently the shareholders aren't the ones calling the shots at Hewlett-Packard, then.

Cool links.

Good businessmen do not make good presidents, because policy-makers are a different type of animal.
I hope Giuliani runs, even though he is a republican.
I pray Hilary looses the party nomination! http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/11/would-hilla ry-make-good-president.html

You: "Microsoft makes such a bloated terrible operating system"
Me: "XYZ in a OSS distro is crap"
You: "Well its free. what do you expect?" Exactly."

Classic example of this linux truth right in this post. Omg some of you linux nerds are unbelievable.

For a perfect explination of way OSS sucks, read http://microsoftisawesome.blogspot.com/2006/11/why -does-open-source-software-suck.html

Social Security numbers were introduced by the Social Security Act of 1935. They were originally intended to be used only by the social security program. In 1943 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9397 which required federal agencies to use the number when creating new record-keeping systems. In 1961 the IRS began to use it as a taxpayer ID number.

Here I was, thinking that we simply lived in a modern, bureaucratic state with social welfare benefits, and it turns out that it is all a secret plan established and repeatedly expanded by Democrats to number, track, and control us all! Insidious! Ingenious! And they just took control of Congress with promises to further expand social welfare programs! I thought that they were just beneficail social welfare programs, but your case that they are the road to totalitarianism is worth study.

Yes, we do need to be protected from Al Qaida and other terrorists, but not at the expense of the constitution.

Yes, that is a worry. President Roosevelt did directly threaten to pack the Supreme Court by expanding the number of justices to get them to stop rulling all of the social programs he was pushing as unconstitutional. That should have been a key tip off, don't you think? Clearly, President Bush is in the junior leagues when it comes to influencing the Supreme Court even if you assume the more lurid fantasies about his designs on the court are true.

Things are not bad yet, but they could go bad. Pieces are being moved into place that would give a dictator all of the tools that he would need to exercise incredible power. We are already seeing the media bullied, silenced, and propagandized. I guess the next sign of things getting worse would probably be disappearances and prominent people flee^H^H^H^Hleaving the country.

It is hard to get good information from the media about the war against the Islamist extremist terrorists, especially when the media uses imposters as "news sources".

Where do you think people will go? Eurabia? It looks like France is in worse trouble than the United States:

Since appeasement alone is not a strategy. French authorities are keeping a force of some 50,000 riot police in permanent stand-by. A ministry spokesman said it is important to find "the good balance: not overreact to the situation, but at the same time, not underestimate it either."

A local prefect (a provincial governor) added: "In case of trouble, we will have to

but this link may be informative:

Good Agile, Bad Agile

I hope they don't give in

I wrote about this about a week ago when I first heard of it on my blog and instead of coping all that here, I'm just going to include the link.

http://sams-rants.blogspot.com/2006/11/universal-m usic-group-can-kiss-my_14.html#links/

I've been very impressed with Venkat's teaching...

Yes, he's very enthusiastic about whatever subject he's teaching. Too bad he took so much time out of class to travel and lecture at other companies, though.

...and am convinced that Agile development models are beneficial for commercial application development.

That's something that I've noted (2nd to last paragraph) as well. Right now, everyone is impressed with the new and different way to do things (the intital wow factor) and are still in the honeymoon stage with the console. Nintendo's still riding the chance wave.

Can the console hold everyone's attention? The majority of that (if not all of it) will depend largely on game developers. We know that tons of dev companies are jumping at the chance to make games for the Wii, however if the games suck, people aren't going to buy them and it will reflect poorly on the console. Quite a few initial titles seem to focus around the mini-game theme (shake the Wiimote and Nunchuck up and down in one game, twist the Wiimote back and forth in another). Hopefully either devs won't run the same idea into the ground so that people get bored with it quickly, or they'll think of new and entertaining ways to implement these features so that people don't think a game is just a mirror of another.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Wii (man, that will never stop sounding weird) and have enjoyed playing it. I'm still waiting for some good titles to come out, though."Also, with PS/3 being a fully functional computer with a keyboard/mouse/blueray, its more than just a console. And Xbox live with internet access to media is more than a console. The Wii is a console and priced like it."

Careful...The Wii has different features through the channel meuns - Mii, Photo, Shopping, Forecast (soon to come), Weather (soon to come), Internet browsing (soon to come), and messaging including email. And, supposedly, the next gen of Wiis should feature a DVD channel. To me, the Wii seems more like an entertainment console.

Blind obedience to the government is tacit support.

The rest of your post is just regurgitation. You seem to be avoiding taking a firm position (flip-flopper!) because you know I will nail your balls to the wall when you do. Good luck with that.

I just have to pick on you for this one, though:

but until you get some evidence that it's without warrants, then it's merely a conspiracy theory

Aahhahaaaa!! Your ignorance is perfect shield for your argument, isn't it? Hahahaaaaa. You fool, the Bush administration has admitted on numerous occasions that they monitored people without warrants. They even tried to ram a bill through Congress that would make the program legal -- obviously this would not be necessary if the program already was legal.

And this is my favorite part of your Kerry-esque tap-dance routine:

Now, if someone presents some actual evidence, then it's a different story...we DON'T need to make up accusations of wrongdoing when we have enough evidence to actually investigate.

So is there evidence or isn't there? I guess with your head stuck so deep in the sand you wouldn't know. That's the whole point, though, isn't it? Me and several other posters have provided you with tons of evidence, but it's clear from your posts that you've studiously avoided reading any of them. Either that or your comprehension skills are so incredibly low that you shouldn't be able to string 2 sentences together. Since that doesn't seem to be the case, it's clear that your ignorance is actually stupidity -- that is, "willful ignorance." I hope you will actually read my links this time. The fate of our nation depends on people waking up to the malfeasance infesting Washington.

Remember, these are the same guys who predicted that the earth was going into another ice age in the 1970s

You blew your cover right there. This is a standard skeptic line that is false and has been debunked.

The NSA warrantless wiretapping is already officially illegal.

Bush violated the FISA. The FISA is an exception to basic Constitutional guarantees of protection from government privacy invasion and arbitrary searches, within an extended compromise with rare, extreme cases where the government claims extraordinary necessity for speed and secrecy that the normal due process cannot accommodate.

Bush violated the FISA exception that requires him to get a warrant. Therefore he violated the Constitution. Many times, over many years. As a matter of policy, with a large staff behind him. Bush is a criminal of the highest order. That means impeachment. You or I would go to Federal prison for years and be bankrupted. Bush will clear brush at his ranch.

Try it - it is also enjoyable and innovative, has nice graphics and sound... no squids though. There was a PSP version called Every Extend Extra, but it was not as good.

I agree wholeheartedly that 'supporting independent music' is something which belongs on our list of things we can do. I've been maintaining, on my blog, a list of sites that are sources of non-RIAA music. I call the list Liberated Music. If anyone has suggestions for additions to the list let me know.

We hear about all the ridiculous cases, but do you have any credible evidence that the majority of these people being sued are innocent? ....So now you want me to give you the evidence of the defendants' innocence in 20,000 cases? Anything else I can get for you while I'm collecting it?

What I can tell you about all 20,000 cases is that the cases are not based on any evidence at all of copyright infringement.

They are all based on exactly the same spurious "investigation", which the RIAA itself claims that ANY Kazaa user could do him or herself:
-the RIAA 'investigator' pretends to be a normal Kazaa user
-he finds a shared files folder with what appear to be some copyrighted songs in it
-he downloads a sampling of the files, usually from 6 to 9 song files
-he allegedly plays them to verify that they are the song files they appear to be
-he somehow finds out what the dynamic IP address was for the shared files folder at the time he made his screenshot
-he gets the ISP to tell him the name and address of the person who paid for the internet access account which allegedly was used for that dynamic IP address at the moment of the screen shot, and
-he sues whoever paid for that internet access account.

That's it.

That's why there are so many "ridiculous cases". Because the basis for the lawsuit is ridiculous.

From the Associated Press: ...

Generally they only doctor photos, not report biased stories.

Generally, they not only doctor photos, they report biased stories, use bogus sources, edit stories out of the news when they don't fit the AP's agenda, and are just generally corrupt. The facts are an enemy of the AP.

If the model were making valid predictions (the same model, that is), you could parade an endless list: our model predicted this climate change in this region, and this increase this this kind of weather activity. No, not the past. I mean, predict it *now* and see if it bears out in the future. But obviously, you aren't getting that, or it would be used ad infinitum to shut up global warming skeptics.

Or, you could make accurate predictions, and some skeptics might claim (i.e. lie) that you didn't.

The producers of An Inconvenient Truth have offered to supply American classrooms with 50,000 copies of the movie free of charge. That offer has been rejected by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the nation's leading science education teachers group, citing a risk to funding from key financial supporters.

One of those supporters is Exxon-Mobil.

Well in terms of a completely automated approach, I think it's entirely possible for sites with a simple post mechanism and that this has actually been done and that spamming like you're suggesting is not actually profitable at all. From my own research on this topic spamming only begins to see worthwhile profits (ie $10K a year) when the number of spams they have made is well into the millions.

As far as how big a problem it is...

http://dotnetmick.blogspot.com/2004/07/first-blog. html

I created this blog two years ago and left it open for spammers as a test. A total of 6 spams have been posted, this might suggest blogspot has been crawled by bots a total of 6 times in the last two years. I've run other sites with similiar results. As a web administrator in my view it's not a big deal.

I think if you had a high profile site of course the results might be a little different. It's quite likely they would get specifically targeted as slashdot did a number of years ago (which is probably what started half of this paranoia).

However I wasn't talking about high profile sites, I'm talking about the vast bulk of the web which is mindlessly protected by CAPTCHAs.

I would still contend that if you could run stats on how many times CAPTCHAs have denied use of a site to someone visually impared, as opposed to a bot, the result would be one heavily biased towards inappropriate denial of service.

In my view this is immoral. Which is why as a developer I've created a project to try to do something about it, and why I've persisted trying to get my point across in this discussion, which has pushed a view point which in my view is based on fantasy and paranoia - not reality and therefore totally counter productive.

This problem of bureaucracy and overbearing process is uniform across Microsoft. If you don't believe me, visit MiniMSFT and browse the archives.

The whole point of the GPL - see the printer driver story - is that end-users should be able to modify AND USE software released under the license. The deal is "if you use this software in your product, you're expected to give users that right.

Tivo have taken advantage of the benefits of Linux and found a legal loop-hole with which to weasel out of their responsibilities over the code. The cost of using GPL software on your hardware offerings is that users SHOULD be able to replace it on the hardware, regardless of how you feel about that. The Xbox is irrelevant in this case - it's fair enough that Microsoft deny Linux installations on their hardware, because they haven't benefited from the GPL in the first place.

The sum of the software I've released publicly amounts to a few Bash scripts, but if I were a Linux kernel developer who had purchased a Tivo I would be LIVID that my work had been used in this way, preventing me from modifying & using my own code, now resold to me installed on hardware I'd PAID good money for!!

Sure, the GPL v2 permits Tivo to restrict what kernel can be run on their hardware, but it's an unforeseen loophole - certainly against the original spirit of the GPL - and the contract should be changed.

Stroller.

Thanks for the link to weierstrass' Implicity blog. His diagram of the 102 unique two-color patterns is very useful in this context.

So 102 patterns using 2 colors multiplied by the number of combinations of two colors that can be drawn without replacement from a palette of 256 colors... it has been a while since I've worked combinations but I know how to use Google as a brain prosthesis:

Google this, guys: "256 choose 2" yields 32,640 unique two-color schemes.

So 32,640 * 102 patterns = 3,329,280 possible combinations within each 3x3 matrix. 85,000 such matrices on the 8.5x10 inch sheet yields 2.9*10^11 unique patterns possible on one page. That's a pretty long bit stream. Converting from bits to something understandable yields 33 GB per page.

This unsophisticated technique shows a sheet of paper can hold more than 1500 times the information that the one-bit-per-dot crowd was thinking was the max (22 MB iirc). It is still an order of magnitude lower than the reported achievement of Sainul Abideen-- but I am working as a Resource Support Assistant in a Community College and I don't profess to know much about combinatorial math or pattern recognition. I think it enlightening that Google says that "256 choose 3" gives 2,763,520 unique three-color schemes...

I do, however, know a thing or two about Google and how to use simple resources like it to make the world a little more understandable.

http://retropolitan.blogspot.com/2005/06/all-ways- of-colouring-3x3-square-with.html

This has been proven to be a scam. It needs to be removed before people begin believing that this is even plausible. http://itsoup.blogspot.com/2006/11/scam-of-indian- student-developing.html

http://itsoup.blogspot.com/2006/11/scam-of-indian- student-developing.html

I expect to see a story like this on Digg, but I thought Slashdot was better than this.

It's a scam.

http://itsoup.blogspot.com/2006/11/scam-of-indian- student-developing.html
http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Scam_of_Indian_stude nt_developing_technology_to_store_450_GB_on_paper

according to this Indian blogger.

What type of management do you have?

Found this over on Digg, and it looks like a good place to start:

http://openubuntu.blogspot.com/2006/11/visual-deve lopment-of-linux.html

You'll just have to make better use of your feet. (Hey, if a guy with no arms can play the guitar for the pope...) Or just wait for FDA approval of some direct brain link device.

Time and again research has shown that people think of more new ideas on their own than they do in a group. The false belief that people are more creative in groups has been dubbed by psychologists the "illusion of group of productivity". But why does this illusion persist?

You sound a lot like radio host Bill Cunningham talking to Sean Hannity about the kid whose chair was forcibly taken from underneath him for not standing during the national anthem: I think to have the chair pulled out from under you is the least of what should happen. And back in the good old days at Deer Park High School, Alan Colmes, the board of education would have met my derriere, and Ma Cunningham would have beat me about the face and head if I had done similar things.Video of the FOX Child-beating support-fest here.

The blog Teacher Videos has these sort of negligent teachers on parade. They need to be held accountable for what they're doing.

After all of the teacher videos I've seen, I'm thinking this sort of teacher accountability is necessary for our kids to be safe and not traumatized in school. The teacher pulling the chair from underneath a student, the teacher physically threatening and emotionally scarring an entire assembly of students, and completely blazed teachers are all good reasons kids should be able to videotape their negligent teach.

After all of the teacher videos I've seen, I'm thinking this sort of teacher accountability is necessary for our kids to be safe and not traumatized in school. The teacher pulling the chair from underneath a student, the teacher physically threatening and emotionally scarring an entire assembly of students, and completely blazed teachers are all good reasons kids should be able to videotape their negligent teach.

After all of the teacher videos I've seen, I'm thinking this sort of teacher accountability is necessary for our kids to be safe and not traumatized in school. The teacher pulling the chair from underneath a student, the teacher physically threatening and emotionally scarring an entire assembly of students, and completely blazed teachers are all good reasons kids should be able to videotape their negligent teach.

After all of the teacher videos I've seen, I'm thinking this sort of teacher accountability is necessary for our kids to be safe and not traumatized in school. The teacher pulling the chair from underneath a student, the teacher physically threatening and emotionally scarring an entire assembly of students, and completely blazed teachers are all good reasons kids should be able to videotape their negligent teach.