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There's a package called vgetty that will let you do exactly what you're after.

Assuming you have a caller-ID-capable voice modem and a beat-up old unixish computer lying around, you can do pretty much anything you can think up.

The key to most of the call filtering stuff is to turn off the ringers on your phones and instead hook a speaker to the box you have running vgetty. Someone calls in, your box answers it, and if it likes the caller it plays ringback into the modem and generates an audible signal through the external speaker (this signal, of course, can vary based on caller ID or on a PIN the caller entered). If it doesn't like them, it can tell them why or just hang up.

Coupled with caller ID, you can do things like having different messages for different callers (for instance, people you know can always get a recording with your pager and cellphone numbers, while strangers just get the standard). You can have it never wake you up prior to 10am, unless someone touch-tones in a special code you've given them. If you have two phone lines and a little extra hardware, you can do discretionary follow-me forwarding so certain people can always find you. If you live in an area where pay phones accept incoming calls, you can use your two phone lines to make unlimited-length, unlimited-number calls for a quarter (plus your home landline call cost, which shouldn't be much) from any pay phone. You can make the phone of your choice into your personal private office. The sky's the limit.

My next project is to make it so I can call in to my 800 number and have it read my email to me using Festival.

After that, I've got to do something about my apartment building entry system - the landlord charges $50 for extra Mul-T-Lock keys (anyone know where I can get them copied on the sly?), so when I have visitors stay over, we have to play the key trading game. I'd like to be able to give my computer a heads up with my cell phone, and then if I call it from the box downstairs within the next couple minutes, it will just send the tone to pop open the door for me.

I don't think you looked very hard...

http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/rxp.html
http://www.k-3d.com/projects/sdpxml.shtml
http://freshmeat.net/projects/xmlforc++/
http://www.vividos.de/index.php?page=projekte.xmlp p

...to support the aim of giving students some real sysadmin experience. It also deflects a lot of energies that would otherwise be devoted to hacking.

Edinburgh University's Tardis Project gives amateur admins free reign with a bunch of systems which are not used for any critical work. They learn both sysadmin tech and the interpersonal skills of an IT team.

you can't turn off animated gifs. I don't think that's accidental

Actually you can, I mostly don't bother - because I use my own modified version of Junkbuster - which filters out JavaScript popups too.

Still here's how you do it:

• Menu: Tools | Internet Options
• "Advanced"
• Multimedia > Play Animations -> Off

The apple is spelled McIntosh. A Mackintosh is either a rain coat or a producer of musical theatre depending on whom you ask. I'm sure Apple Computer used neither spelling in the effort to make something trademarkably misspelled, after the manner of the Prevue Channel, E-Z whatever, and other such tripe.

The Festival Speech Synthesis System actually runs well on Linux, and can synthesize several different voice, with English and American accents. I think there is also Spanish synthesis available. IIRC they are kinda short on female voices :-(

I am trying to create a "book-reader" for a friend who is losing his sight, & now cannot read print. He cannot claim against any insurance, so this has to be an "economic solution". Thus Linux is a very viable platform for us. I have found a suitable scanner controller, ( http://www.mostang.com/sane/, ), and a pretty good text to speech system ( http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ ). We like the fact that it is possible to choose a voice with which we are comfortable. The missing link is the OCR component. There doesn't seem to be anything out there in ftp-land which works sufficiently well for us. As I only have a relatively limited amount of time and level of skill, and cannot catch up with the details of 20 years of Neural-Network technology overnight, this has to be a rather better goer than trying to get an "academic project" to work properly. If IBM could help with this one it would earn big Brownie-points I'm sure of that. I'd be more than happy to make available any glue files I create.

I was an OS/2 user and really miss the WorkPlace shell and the "e" ( Watson Works ) editor. IMHO "e" is a much better editor than anything currently available for Linux. If these things could be made available for Linux this /. reader would be a very happy chappie indeed. As OS/2 is really no longer a commercial earner, I'm sure that there wouldn't be any real financial loss in doing that, and there is the possibility that KDE and GNOME would benefit considerably.

Lastly is there a genuine implementation of REXX available for Linux?

Yes, you are right, though it doesn't explain lycos. I was about to slam you for not trying an Inktomi-based search and posting the results.... but I tried to do the same, and it's damn difficult to tell if someone's using Inktomi or not. I found (via google) this out-of-date list. Inktomi has a list of partners, and yahoo's on the list, but it doesn't say what services each partner actually uses. This page at Inktomi mentions that AOL, iWon, MSN, and more (aprarantly 125) are using their search (it's mentioned in the top yellow box on the right side of the page). So, with that in mind, let's give these three a try and see if they product any porn sites with a query for "black bear":

• AOL's results list Condos, T-shirts, AllAlaskanGifts (paid adverts), pages about actual black bears, the B&B, Hunting, Campgrounds (not the nude one from yahoo's present search), wildlife and conservation. Pretty good...
• iWon's results page displays nothing if Javascript is disabled. I gotta get that javascript popup filtering junkbuster patch installed. For the sake of this slashdot post, I'm turning javascript back on for a moment: hmm, they're doing funny stuff and that link may not take you directly to a results page.... easy enough to do the search, but here's what I'm seeing: page about different types of bears, lodging per state, travel info, photos and articles about american and alaskan black bears, more stuff about american black bears, american bear association, dietart habits of bears, wildlife park, black bear systems (a company, funny that none of the other searches turned this one up in their top results), campground, an inn, web design company named black bear, more stuff about bears and camping. So far one of the best search results in this "black bear" benchmark, and not a single porn site yet (neglecting yahoo's return of a clothing-option campground with black bear in the name), but still one more chance for porn at MSN.......
• and here's MSN's results (damnit, went to MSN before turning javascript back off, going to shut if off right now.. ok), so let's see how MSN did: Univ of Maine Athletics (mascott is a black bear), more pages about univ of maine, info about diff species of bears, research about animal social systems, stuff about yellowstone, miccesota wince shute wildlife sanctuary, even more pages about univ of maine, the sanctuary in minnesota again, and the texas zoo

I did read the original post, and admittedly his point was that his friend tried "black bear" on yahoo 6 months ago and got porn, but for crying out loud, how fucking difficult is it to actually visit the search engine and type in BLACK BEAR and see for yourself if it really dishes up porn links? Ok, not everyone knows HTML to include nice formatting and links in their messages, but it's pretty simple to visit a search engine and actually see if it dishes up porn, instead of posting about how a third party accomplished this feat half a year ago!

(ok, rant mode off, we all know the cronological order and moderation system reward early postings)

I think it's pretty safe to say that one doesn't risk getting linked to porn when searching for "black bear" these days, and I'm skeptical that this condition really existed 6 months ago on yahoo. Some search engines (notably yahoo and MSN) have problems with wasting valuable browser screen space with redundant links, at least in this simple "black bear" benchmark. For a while now I've believe google was the best, but I'm pleasantly suprised to see that other search engines are doing quite well.

Except I have it read my firewall logs in real time. My roommate is also posting a comment about it right now. Anyway, here's the info:

Required software:
festival (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/)
speechd (http://www.speechio.org)
firewall-reader.pl (http://movealong.dhs.org/firewall-reader.pl

On startup, my loghost (the one with the soundcard and speakers) starts up speechd and firewall-reader.pl. speechd implements /dev/speech, which works like this:

$ echo "look who's talking now" > /dev/speech
The computer now says "look who's talking now"

speechd grabs the text from /dev/speech and passes it through to festival, a speech synthesizer.

firewall-reader.pl is the glue code (written in the ultimate glue language). It opens /var/log/messages read only and watches line by line for firewall packet logs. When it sees one, it formats it to be spoken, and appends it to /dev/speech (by the way, /dev/speech is a fifo).

It works very well. The only ongoing resource consumption is memory, because festival can get quite weighty. It's usually taking up about 10% on my loghost, which has 128MB RAM.

Oh, and by the way, firewall-reader.pl does need improving. Unfortunately my perl skills suck.

For those of us who like strong typing (yes, I'm a masochist) I'd like to tip the hat towards Java ML or Haskell-to-Java.

JML
J HS

Neither is an interpreter, but for sheer perversity, they're both worth a look.

Johan

Here is a fairly detailed description

The short answer is that it uses a variable pitch turbine. The idea is somewhat related to tacking a sailboat.

and we have to ration his access to the power cable

Which is interesting because my cat, Tigger, has just learnt to turn my PC off when I'm not paying too much attention.

I've seen him do this out of the corner of my eye - its litterally one large bang against the, recessed, power switch .. with his nose.

Må jeg få en tjener? www.nine9.ukshells.co.uk

XD/Repl ay can record and play back user actions in java applications. Xd/Replay may or may solve mnalsky's problem; I'd need more details to say for sure.

ML programs are hard to compile to Java bytecodes, since Java functions aren't tail recursive. There exists ML to Java byte code compiler (MLj) but it suffers from this limitation. The MLj Compiler

(No, I wasn't touching my keyboard when I heard of this -- Festival was reading the news to me...)

There is some quite cool work going on in Edinburgh Uni making very small very high definition colour screens which we could see in products soon.

Yeah I believe the AI department at our university do something simliar with their workstations when they have lots of calculations to do.

They've got a tonne of ultra10 and a few ultra60 machines and as I understand it they just start idle priority threads in the background of everyones machine.

However i'm sure they run down to play with the supercomputers on our campus when they get bored :)

MMmmm if you like big computers look at this but it looks far better in real life :)

The Homepage of Edinburgh Univeristies Computing Department.

Leading the world in research in Speech technology, Bioinformatics, Cognitive science and other such leading fields - I challenge you to spot any differences between how their webpage renders in Netscape 1.0 and IE 5.5.

Have a look at some of this stuff on very small (still quite high resolution) and very fast refreshing FLCOS displays. They have a 1024x768 display which is only 12.3x9.2 mm in size!!

Rather than trying to have complicated pixels from what I can make of it they build up colours by simply flashing the primary colours at you in different proportions, and with frame rates in the kHz bracket it looks very interesting.

Then why not use my hacked version of Junkbuster - which stops you from having to see popup windows.

Check it out here.

I modified my copy of Junkbuster to stop it from allowing JavaScript popup windows..

You can find it here

I wrote a MDI Wrapper for Internet Explorer, on Windows. Its got the best easter egg I could think of...

An embedded game of Tetris!

I like quake, et al, but for me Tetris is still one of the best games around.

(To see the game, type "steve:kemp" into the URL field ;)

Greengard and Rokhlin's Fast Multipole Method (FMM) algorithm computes an approximation for the sum total of the interactions between all pairs of elements out of a large group.

For instance, in astrophysics simulations, one quantity that needs to be computed is the total force on a star that results from the gravitational attraction from each of the other stars. If you have to do this computation for each star, then the total ammount of computation required grows as N^2, given N total stars.

This is where the name "The N-body Problem" comes from.

The FMM algorithm essentially models distant groups of particles (stars) as a single mathematical object and by using other fairly complex operations and representations, reduces the overall complexity from N^2 to N.

The importance of this algortihm comes from the fact that in many different types of scientific simulations (astrophysics, molecular modeling, computational fluid dynamics, etc.) the N-body computation was the limiting factor in the performace of these algorithms. Use of FMM and similar algortihms has reduced the overall simulation times by orders of magnitudes for large systems, allowing simulations that once required CPU-decades to be completed in CPU-months.

There are several good sources of FMM material on the web. You can try:

Mario's Nbody resources

More Nbody

Leslie Greengard's page

And of course, I'll have to plug our research group page at Duke

Hope this helps

-bill

By reading this article I don't really get the difference between this search method used by gnutella and the harvest web indexer. I have to admit that I don't know much about both of them but for me it looks nearly the same.

At the moment the UK is not looking like a good place to stay. I think the RIP bill working its way through parliament is an evil abomination (basically escrow to screw the nation over some poxy criminals - and Jack Straw expected me to believe this!), and with censorship on the rise as well... you can hardly say we're one of the 'Net's leading countries, can you?
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

I liked the posts on "Ideas are not the same as Expression" and "Private Property" ("... Economic systems derive from the fact that resources are limited.") below. New songs are Expressions, so (making loads of assumptions about capitalist worldviews etc.) it makes some sense to copyright them -- people had to make an effort to create them. OTOH, each CD of a song takes very little effort to create, so doesn't fit into the "scarcity economics" model.

Not that I've got all the answers(!) but how about finding a way to pay people for creating something rather than for getting a (cheap) copy to you? The Street Performer Protocol (previously seen on /., I'm sure) suggests one way to do this: in brief, lots of readers pay authors a tiny advance on their next work. Several unresolved issues, and I don't recall it addressing the question of how an artist becomes "known enough" that people would be willing to make such an advance, but interesting anyway.

As for doing "honest" work as well: I've nothing against people doing all "honest" work or all "creative" work but personally I think I might like to do a bit of both; e.g., work 3-4 days a week and write free software (or whatever) for the other 1-2 days (and however much of my weekend it took up ;-). I suspect (i.e., completely guess ;-) this is how most free software has been written -- people need to make at least enough to live on.

Hugh Greene, q@NOSPAM.tardis.ed.ac.uk

Yawn... Old hat. Can't you slashdotters have a look at history? Otherwise, you'll be condemned at repeating it... badly.

First, a brief word about ekranoplanes (a.k.a. Wing-In-Ground effect). Here is an actual picture of such a beast in flight (Gerry Anderson fans will be delighted by this one). They have been around for almost 40 years, having been devellopped in the defunct Soviet Union . You may look at this page for historic information, as well as pictures of enormous ekranoplanes as well as the 400 ton Lun ICBM launcher . For those who worry about greenhouse gas emissions, there is also a pedal-powered WIG !!! Oh, yes, those craft are already covered by a Canadian regulation, proof that they've been around long enough to rouse the attention of regulators...

Now, about trains. Nothing really new, there either.

In the 1960's, french engineer Jean Bertin (1917-1975) pursued the développement of his ill-fated Aérotrain , which, 30 years before the recently-canned german Transrapid maglev, almost reached the realization stage (both in a commuter rail line betwen Paris and the western sububurb of Cergy, and a line between Lyon and Grenoble for the 1968 winter Olympic games). Bertin's Aérotrains ran on a single inverted T concrete rail, and used a cushion of air for sustentation. An early prototype, the Aérotrain expérimental 02 (which looks like it was inspired by this), reached the speed of 400 km/h in 1966 and 422 km/h in 1969 (not an impressive achievement, since at that time, the rail speed record was achieved in 1955, when an ordinary locomotive pulling four totally normal cars reached the speed of 331 km/h on a perfectly standard railroad line). More pictures are available here.

Despite that, Jean Bertin built more prototypes, and a 20 km long rail line (which still runs accross the countryside, completely abandoned) on which a much bigger "train", which ran not much faster than today's TGVs do (note that the record certificate is issued by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale , and not the Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer ...).

Bertin's Aérotrain technology almost got selected in place of the current TGV, but at the last minute, State support was withdrawn from the Société Bertin. The Aérotrain (and any other newfangled guided transportation system such as maglevs and monorails - we're in the real world, here, not in Disneyland) suffered most from gross incompatibility with existing rail lines (necessary to enter the core of cities) and an extremely heavy implementation of switches, which precludes their widespread use and thus reduces the flexibility of their rail networks.

Jean Bertin never recovered from the shock of losing State support; he died a few months later, despite having built a prosperous engineering company which still thrives in high-technologies.

Throughout the Aérotrain's history, the French National Railroads (SNCF)'s attitude was extremely interesting. Despite all the media hoopla that surrounded the Aérotrain and the political interest, it did not say anything at all. Not a single word either for or against the Aérotrain was uttered in official french railroad circles. But during that time, the SNCF worked hard at perfecting what is seen today as the epitome of high-speed travel technology, the TGV.

So, it is quite safe to say that this oldfangled flying "train" will certainly not fly very far, because the theorical speed limit of ground travel, the speed of sound, is within reach of conventionnal steel-wheel-on-steel-rail technology, which without much pain, ran at 515,3 km/h on May 18th 1990 (gee! Almost 10 years ago!!!).

(What is the speed of sound at 20C at sea level anyway???)

--

All of the required technology is present in Harvest, it just never became popular. My guess is that cool ideas have to be reinvented in Berkeley before the world gets to see them applied at large, see Yahoo! for another example.

With Harvest, indexing software that is several years old, an indexing engine that identifies documents by their MD5 signature is easy to build, I've done this. So what these people are proposing isn't exactly rocket science

• Look at the Font De-uglification HOWTO
  FDU-Mini HOWTO
• Install some True Type fonts from ...... Microsoft!
  They have a fontpack
• 
  which provides some nice stuff like Arial Black etc...and then install one of the TT font servers:
• One of the most popular is xfsft
• Another available for download is xfstt
• Use RH6.1 which has xfs prepatched with xfsft for TT fonts
• If it's just the sizes that bother you, that's a pretty oldish problem which is fixed by switching the order of the 100dpi and 75dpi fonts in your font catalogue
  There's a note about it from as far back as NS2 at bigfontsthat might help
• Finally Christopher Browne has really helpful web-pages with this topic indexed (among many others) at cbbrowne

I'll run it through the text-2-speech processor that I have (festival) tonight. I'll post a link to it if I can. (Look for responses to this post over the next few days.)

The Grip is a nice GTK app. It uses cdparanoia for the actual ripping and your choice of encoders. For encoding, LAME (LAME Aint No MP3 Encoder) is a good choice.

The CDRom should be OK if it's not actually ancient (and may be OK even then). Things will go slow on a P75 though.

IANAL either (nor an American) but ...

From a quick scan of the GPL, and the orignally referenced news story (not the UCITA itself), the GPL offers no protection at all, because

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted ...

So, GPLed software which was distributed with an additional UCITA-oriented license (applied even to the source, but which didn't conflict with GPL distribution terms) would be freely redistributable and modifiable, but you might not (always) have the right to run it (or even recompile it? debug it?)! Any other agreements about anything other than distribution and modification are also not covered, e.g., the service agreement you mention. (This is separate from the question of whether the GPL would be enforcable under UCITA, which other posters have said is not the case, it not being a shrinkwrap EULA.)

BTW, the Infoworld article reports Joe May, a/the sponsor of the bill as saying companies can generally reposess things you haven't paid for, e.g., "banks repossess cars if the buyer does not make loan payments". Perhaps this is a big part of the problem: most commercial software licenses explicitly say that you don't gain title to the product, just the right to use it under the remaining terms. What if we couldn't ever buy, say, cars outright, only lease them from the manufacturer? Would we (or government) stand for that?! (And why on earth do those licenses say that, anyway?)

My parents bought a Commodore CBM-8032 in 1983, and it's what hooked me on computers. I still have a huge number of the cryptic SYS and POKE commands programmed into my fingers -- I sat down at an emulator recently, wondered out loud what was the system command to hard-reboot the machine, and my fingers typed SYS 64790 without the slightest hesitation. Eerie!

The best PET/CBM/C64/VIC/etc emulator is the VICE emulator. I recommend it to anyone running Unix, MS-DOS, Win95/NT, OS/2 or RiscOS who wants to remember the good old Commodore beasts. I've used it in the DOS and Windows versions, but not since I migrated (graduated?) to Linux. I might just check it out tho...

: Fruitbat :

about the signature... my computer CAN talk!

Check out the festival speech synthesis engine. It rocks!

There were plenty of tyrants, its just that they varied greatly in the degree to which relied on hypocritical moral indoctrination of their subjects.

Tell me how is evolution politically correct.

On the contrary, the open and honest study of evolution is almost the definition of what is politically INcorrect. Reread what I said.

Most of what I have seen in the world in terms of political correctness has essentially been groups whom they think are under represented are suddently in a position to exploit a government or a faction for their own self interest.

Exactly, and this is within a society that has, as a cultural norm, placed examination and open dialogue of the genetic drivers of such groups in about the same class of moral bankruptcy as child molestation. Hence, hypocrisy and self-deception is the goal of the current eugenics progrom conducted by the Politically Correct Empire as it is with all heterogenous empires built primarily on moral control of their subjects.

What exactly is a "genetic self-interest".

The behavior of organisms that appears to place propagation of their genes above their individual well-being -- such as a male frequently engaging in sex without a condom with lots of partners of the opposite sex, as one minor but graphic example. Cynics might try to give such a character a "Darwin Award" but the laugh would be on those cynics -- evolution doesn't always select for intelligence.

See Dawkins The Extended Phenotype.

Tell me why nationalism is hypocritical

Nationalism is certainly is less hypocritical than JudeoChristianity, Marxism and Political Correctness, but a very good example is the difference between pre-unification Prussia (attacked by Marx) and post-unification Germany (that spawned National Socialism):

Prussia represented a smaller set of tribal groups (root word of demography) that had a lot more in common than did Hitler's unified Germany, so it was less hypocritical to be a Prussian Nationalist than a Nazi just as it is less hypocritical to be a Nazi than a Marxist. These days, we have this "european identity" hypocrisy in the form of the European Community, the Euro, etc. which is bound to get worse as it takes hold.

The last part of that sentence translates (again correct me if I'm wrong) says:

"The people who don't agree with the program and feel united are then enslaved by the people who don't get with it."

That is a bad translation.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is about people having a choice to cooperate and share big winnings, vs one exploiting the other, in which case the exploiter wins bigger than he would if he had cooperated and the exploited loses big, or, in the ultimate degeneration, they both try to exploit the other, and everyone loses big.

Real life is a lot like that, which is why that particular scenario is studied so heavily in game theory.

By the same token, since real life is a lot like that, there many who would rather not study the genetic evolutionary implications of the Prisoner's Dilemma. One exception to that rule is Michael Oliphant, and I strongly suggest reading his stuff.

Now I am a little confused about what you mean by "morality" in this case.

I mean the capacity to take on a system of morals and abide by it with fidelity, even when it runs counter to one's self interest or the self interest of one's genes.

So are you saying that anarchy is the best form of government

No. I'm saying tribal/clan/kindred identities are rooted in evolutionary history more than are national identities and national identities are more rooted in evolutionary history than are universalist ideologies. If you want to see how I would handle governance, please read what I have to say about the nature of money and government.

Karl Marx ... Between genuinely opposing interests, there can be no compromise.

And Marx was essentially a means by which the ancient enemy of all honorable peoples could continue the essential "we are the world" hypocrisy of JudeoChristianity despite the disruptions of post-Enlightenment forces like Darwin.

There is a reason why Drawin's theories and study of genetics were suppressed in the empires spawned by Marx/Engels, and it is essentially the same reason they are taboo in in much of JudeoChristiandom as well as the newest religion of Empires, Political Correctness:

The real and enduring opposing interests, until we take responsibility for them as a technological civilization, are genetic self interests. Within JudeoChristianity, Marxism and Political Correctness (not to mention lesser forms of hypocrisy such as Nationalism) we are all supposed to identify as one people so that those instinctively less prone to having their kin-altruism abused can exploit us at their leisure -- until there are no people left who are capable of morality.

That means the end of the moral animal: Man.

I don't think Open Source is therefore working against the existence of Man, but I do think we had have to start paying a lot of attention to studies of altruism and communication in the presence of the Prisoner's Dilemma predict for Empires built on over-extended kin identification -- as well as the history of moral systems that condemn open dialogue about genetic tendencies to defect within our global Prisoner's Dilemma.

If you want decent speech sythesis for Linux, try the open sourced "Festival Speech Synthesis System" from Edinburgh University.

You can get tarballs for source and binaries and last time I looked there was a Red Hat rpm available too.

Festival can be used with a range of supplied voice patterns, accents and languages and is completely configurable. I particularly recommend the MBROLA voices. Not as smooth as the AT&T TTS example, but pretty close.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Neutron

Has BillG actually written any code since that Altair Basic Emulator 25 years ago?

As far as I can remember, the last program Bill ever wrote (or at least part of it) was the BASIC interpreter for the TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer. He managed to fit BASIC in its original 32k ROM along with a scheduler/address book, text editor, and terminal program.

The Model 100 was a favourite of journalists due to its small size and built-in 300bps modem. I've always wanted one of them, mainly for the "neat" factor...

It was built by Kyocera, sold by NEC (as the PC-8200) in Japan, and by Olivetti (as the M-10) in Europe.

Most of my info was found here: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~alexios/MACHINE-ROOM/T andy,Radio,Shack_TRS-80_Model_100. html.

Chris "Bob" Odorjan

Citizens,

We have come a long way in the last few years.
The inspirational guidance of Our Immortal Leader
has brought us to a peak of development
unparalleled in human history. Surely our
adoration of Him is right and just, for He is
responsible for our present utopia.

Nonetheless, it grieves me to say that some
dissidents, enemies of our state, have been
spreading poisonous seditions, saying that our
fine country is no longer what it once was - false
lies that Our Immortal Leader has authorised me to
put straight.

The first allegation to deal with is that Oceania
is a recent amalgamation of four ancient
countries, called 'America', 'Canada', 'Great
Britain' and 'The Republic of Ireland'. It is
further alleged that the moon landings of 1969
were not carried out by our fair Oceania, but by
this fictional 'America'. We have decided to
release to you the people the video of that
glorious happening. Note as you watch the video
the Oceania flag flying proudly over the duned
surface of the Moon; note the insignia on our
brave astronauts uniforms and on the landing
craft. See also the footage of Our Immortal
Leader greeting the astronauts on their return,
and decorating them with the Cross of Oceania.

Citizens, beware of these seditionists! They
allege further that the colonisation of the
surface is a myth, that we are no nearer to
returning there than a decade ago; but this
video will help convince you, citizens, that
they lie; see Our Immortal Leader viewing the
fields full of crops and giving His blessing to
the workers. See also the fine houses we build
on the surface; and we promise you citizens that
your efforts are not in vain; when you reach the
age of retirement you too can live there, in these
paradisaic and blissful surroundings. Those
who have already retired are waiting there for
you to join them, so do not believe the rebels'
self-seeking lies. We encourage all approaching
retirement age to approach their local
Commissioner and get him to sign their passes
to the Colonised Surface.

Citizens, I thank you for your patient hearing
of my address. As always, in the name of Our
Immortal Leader,

Chief Citizen of Lundun,

Fiscio Snark.

Citizens,

We have come a long way in the last few years.
The inspirational guidance of Our Immortal Leader
has brought us to a peak of development
unparalleled in human history. Surely our
adoration of Him is right and just, for He is
responsible for our present utopia.

Nonetheless, it grieves me to say that some
dissidents, enemies of our state, have been
spreading poisonous seditions, saying that our
fine country is no longer what it once was - false
lies that Our Immortal Leader has authorised me to
put straight.

The first allegation to deal with is that Oceania
is a recent amalgamation of four ancient
countries, called 'America', 'Canada', 'Great
Britain' and 'The Republic of Ireland'. It is
further alleged that the moon landings of 1969
were not carried out by our fair Oceania, but by
this fictional 'America'. We have decided to
release to you the people the video of that
glorious happening. Note as you watch the video
the Oceania flag flying proudly over the duned
surface of the Moon; note the insignia on our
brave astronauts uniforms and on the landing
craft. See also the footage of Our Immortal
Leader greeting the astronauts on their return,
and decorating them with the Cross of Oceania.

Citizens, beware of these seditionists! They
allege further that the colonisation of the
surface is a myth, that we are no nearer to
returning there than a decade ago; but this
video will help convince you, citizens, that
they lie; see Our Immortal Leader viewing the
fields full of crops and giving His blessing to
the workers. See also the fine houses we build
on the surface; and we promise you citizens that
your efforts are not in vain; when you reach the
age of retirement you too can live there, in these
paradisaic and blissful surroundings. Those
who have already retired are waiting there for
you to join them, so do not believe the rebels'
self-seeking lies. We encourage all approaching
retirement age to approach their local
Commissioner and get him to sign their passes
to the Colonised Surface.

Citizens, I thank you for your patient hearing
of my address. As always, in the name of Our
Immortal Leader,

Chief Citizen of Lundun,

Fiscio Snark.

Thanks for the warm fuzzies.

Over here we've had the Demon Usenet-hosting debacle to cope with and I'm not happy that an ISP should be liable for anything other than equipment and service provision. As soon as you get governments, courts and corporations involved in the 'Net, you've got problems - all the innocence of one's student days is over.

If you want an example of the sort of depth of argument that does the rounds nowadays, check here.

-=-=-=-=-

Maybe somebody could start designing a prototype of Captain Steve Zodiac's space scooter as well.

--

I must admit, I was quite surprised to see this here. I`ve had the right-hand-side on my website for several years now. (Yes, I don`t change it that often. So what?)

A wonderful little program (5.5k) by Tim Clarke called MARS.EXE let you move with your mouse through shaded voxel-based martian terrain under a cloudy sky. It an at fantastic speed even on a 386.

Read the original usenet posting here.

We have this at our Uni too, but it is a subtle rip-off. Not only can you only use the "cash" in very select places but the bank running the scheme (the Bank of Scotland) makes a fortune. It does this in a way which most people don't notice. You take money out of your account and put it on the card. You no longer earn interest on that money. You don;t spend it for a week, and the bank pockets the cash! Multiply this by the ~20000 students and hey, thats a tidy profit.

We have this at our Uni too, but it is a subtle rip-off. Not only can you only use the "cash" in very select places but the bank running the scheme (the Bank of Scotland) makes a fortune. It does this in a way which most people don't notice. You take money out of your account and put it on the card. You no longer earn interest on that money. You don;t spend it for a week, and the bank pockets the cash! Multiply this by the ~20000 students and hey, thats a tidy profit.