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According to this, it's the 747 SP.

Let me guess... you're a [Everything2|noder], right?

Electronic music has been around since 1900 and really picked up steam after the German invention of magnetic tape during World War II. 1979's three decades too late.

Triv

April 1st should just be renamed "Day of the Troll."

Everything 2 is four years ahead of you.

Everything2 has apparently been taken over by Google as well.

I don't know about history of slashdot, but if you are interested in Slashdot history of world

Alright, I'm going to have to pull an IANAL, but clearly neither are you. First of all, I believe incorporation normally requires a flat fee around a hundred dollars to file the form, so it's not entirely painless to make another company. Secondly, this sounds questionable as far as taxes go. The company would be making profits from these contracts, so there would be corporate taxes on that. Then the company would be paying those profits to its sole worker, CEO, and shareholder who would then have to pay income tax. That sounds a bit to me like having to pay taxes twice. Taxes are complicated so I won't pretend to know if this is the case, but I'd want to know for sure before I spent a year potentially not paying taxes. And I believe that simply disolving the company might be an issue. Granted, I don't know contract law entirely, but at least as far as bankruptcies go, the courts require that as a company goes under, it treats its various creditors fairly, so one creditor doesn't get a sweetheart deal, and all of the others get nothing. Well, if your company is folding, disregarding its contractual obligations to its former clients, and yet giving its last assets to a single employee, it sounds imbalanced to me. I would wager at least some of the recent earnings of the company would be at risk. But if you're using a single company as your face for all of your clients, that could mean all of your income for the last couple of months getting taken away, let alone the attorney fees and court costs. Perhaps keep a bunch of separate corporations, one for each client? This all seems rather crazy.

Now, I could be off my rocker on this one. But I know that, no matter how out of it I was, I'd make sure to spend the extra few hundred on a lawyer who was a bit more sane if this were me. After all, I'm already paying that much just to file for my dozens of shell corporations.

It's amusing that you link to e2 since I wrote this writeup on amiga custom chips on the same site.

The amiga was the first cheap machine to have a blitter, which copies rectangular blocks of memory. Thus its sprite performance was amazing and that's what made it such a good game machine.

To clarify this, while many people think of a sprite as something that moves around the screen (which I believe is what you meant), on the Amiga a sprite means something quite specific - here's a definition I found:

Sprites are a method of integrating unrelated bitmaps that appear to be part of the normal bitmap on a screen. A sprite is a hardware construct that employs custom DMA channels to fetch source images and integrated them with the main screen. It is related to what a genlock does when it super-imposes two discrete video sources. They are also somewhat related to a playfield in that both or handled by the same sort of circuitry.

The advantage of sprites, as opposed to using a processor or blitter to manually alter the screen bitmap, is to provide fast and efficient visual priority, movement, and/or collision detection. This means less processor time is used to accomplish certain goals, but it also means writing software is easier for developers and they can produce smaller programs, since the hardware provides certain innate abilities ready to be exploited in a variety of ways.

Sprites tended to be small compared to actual screen size (for home computers of the 1980s, some tens of pixels in each dimension) and optionally partially transparent, allowing them to assume shapes other than rectangles. In machines like the Amiga the sprite height was arbitrary. Generally sprite height and width do not necessarily have to be constrained by anything other than the designer's wishes and available bandwidth. The number of available sprites is also dependent on available bandwidth, register real-estate and engineering goals.

On the Amiga a sprite could be a different resolution to the bitmap it was overlayed onto. A sprite was also used as the mouse pointer on the Amiga's operating system, and after using an Amiga for a while many users belive they see the mouse pointer in Windows flicker - something which I remember noticing but have got so used to now that I can no longer see it.

Oh yeah, you really should have mentioned the copper too - which made all sorts of effects possible...

This is a good time as any to mention Vinge's Singularity. The main topic is AI, but he also talks about IA or Intelligence Amplification. The DM in the article is a type of IA for communications systems between people. It would merge the useful parts of online communications such as active logging without the problematic impersonal problems that are sometimes caused. This gets extended further when people are connected 24/7 and they have the ability to treat the real world and the wired world much more similarly

--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof

Why hasn't anyone mentioned Everything2 yet?

This is yet another root to Ping-chan's family tree.

And yes, I want one.

Die, heretic pagan scum! If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!

wikipedia entry

everything 2 entry Kilroy was here !

The user is playing a game in a room, With a chest.

When They open the chest there is a minature room, which they enter. Then that room is connected to the room that had the chest, which has the minature room they were now in.

The left the minature room and re-entered the original room (now minature too?) that had a chest with another minature (minature) room.

It sounds merely like a gamespace realization of a usage-produced hypertext system, such as used with the softlinks over at Everything.

Well I say "merely," but this is actually a very powerful idea.

Thank you both for your concern about my grammar. I've never really thought about that one, and you're both right. I'll nod to your knowledge.

However, slashdot is not known as a haven for good grammar. There are greater grammar issues on slashdot than this one, such as the famous loose/lose. Heck, this peeve isn't even in the Everything 2 list of grammar pet peeves. Perhaps one of you could add it so that other clueless clods like me don't have to be prodded.

Cheers,

I would like to add, that some military forces, like the US Navy, have better appreciation of D&D players:
" Most of D&D's early players were ex-military, notably ex-navy. The military connection no doubt helped vector and spread the game, transmitting the game from ex-military to current military and then to all the locales from which the services drew these recruits. I believe at one point every submarine in the navy had a D&D group. "

Movie? Wasn't ir a real case where a woman claimed that a dingo had eaten her baby? Later on she was accused and jailed for murder of said baby.

More info here and here.

Given the replies and personal email I got, I wanted to specify something :

I wrote "I had" becase it's over.
I'm cured.
I was having a bad time: I lost a job which I actually hated, and I also considered changing my life.

I then had the following strategy : Waiting until the temperature would fall below -10C and sleep naked in my balcony.
The cold came... but too late.

I did not want to end it abruptly because I am married with a delicious woman and I wanted it to look like an accident.

Finally, I decided to perform my auto-therapy.
I am creative, you might not lik what I do but I have fun doin it.

I recorded a rock album which is described here and available (for free) here.

My advice ?
Spit the anger and the fear. You'll end fearless, stronger and alive !
God bless you.

Wikipedia will tell me who starred in The Fifth Element, but E2 will tell me if it's any good.

An example. Take Kung Fu. I don't know about you, but I find this to be far more useful and relevant than this.

As for E2's social aspect, the truth is that I'm not interested in their parties, chats and other social gatherings; when I want that I walk away from my computer.

I get the distinct impression that E2 noders see E2 as more of a lifestyle whereas Wikipedians see themselves as producing something. If E2 noders have a great community and enjoy spending hours on end on their site doing their thing, then thats great. But it won't necessarily result in something that is useful to the 99% of the world's population whom are not E2 noders.

Chop a wire and measure it from A to B, read that number in binary, and there is your data

So if the Plank length is the smallest unit of space that we can measure, then how long does a wire need to be to measure a megabyte?

Well, let's do the math - for 1 Meg, we need to have 8 bits/byte * 1e6 bytes/meg * 1 binary digit/bit = 8e6 binary digits required. Well, 8 million binary digits means that your length has to be on the order of 2^8e6 units, so let's make our units plank length and figure out how many meters that is.

2^8000000 plank lengths = (10 ^ log_10(2)^8000000 plank lengths =~ 10 ^ 2408239 plank lengths

Which, in meters, is 1e2408239 plank_lengths * 1.6e-35 meters / plank length = 1.6e2408204 meters

Now how big is 1.6 * 10^2408204 meters?

Well, the answer is VERY BIG. As in, it's a number that has no meaning big. I can't describe it's biggitude. Space is peanuts compared to IT. Much larger than the diameter of the universe. Much larger than anything ever imagined ever. Much larger than everything imagined ever all put together.

Heilein's ideas were definitely stuck in a pre-quantum model of the universe. We can't encode one megabyte this way, much less a CD/DVD/Encyclopedia or anything else like that.

(Not a physicist, but I have a deep love of Fermi problems)

That was actually a standard english fuckload of cash, which is only 8 shitloads.

There is a converter, to make this easier.

Here's another interesting take on dungeon hacking. This one's based on nethack.

You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes

You'll laugh. You'll cry. It's (arguably) postmodern. And it's only one page long.

Great. Unfortunately the commissioner from the UK is Peter Mandelson. Twice sacked from his own government for corruption, he is seemingly impossible to get rid of. I don't know anything about his fellow commissioners; is it safe to assume that they are all held to the same standards of honesty and integrity by whatever body oversees appointments to the European Commission?

There is no reason to keep working unless you are absolutely extatic about what you are doing. This is, of course, subject to two assumptions:

1) You are very intelligent and would have no problem finding a job in a week
2) You don't feel like you must constantly waste your money on better car, larger house, wife and kids

Work should be abolished, it's an abomination and people (intelligent people) should not have jobs, this is degrading and boring.

I found it much more rewarding to just do whatever I happen to enjoy right now and quit soon after I stop enjoying it. I quit a job in a small investment bank when I decided I'd rather not work overtime to finish urgent projects. Went to study for a year. After a while I found that I enjoy small short-term projects most, where I do something new, learn new things, challenge myself and then move on.

And since I don't feel obliged to engage in rampant consumerism, I always have more money than I need and can afford slacking when I want to.

This isn't apropos of anything, but the price of drugs do, in fact, drop precipitously when the patents expire. Haven't you heard of the "brand vs. generic" thing?

Some prescription drugs never go generic because their manufacturer lobbies for them to be labeled unsafe just as the patent is about to expire. This happened with the antihistamine Seldane (terfenadine), which was obsoleted in favor of Allegra (fexofenadine) at about the same time that Allegra was first made available for sale.

Do you think professional audio equipment is free? Do you think talented recording engineers work for nothing? Of course recording studios deserve their money. They work for what they receive, just like you and I do.

They also "work for hire", meaning that they retain no share of the copyright and collect a flat fee rather than royalties per copy.

You also had current textbooks, notebooks, pencils, crayons, etc. You shouldn't scoff at this is not that easy. It's not about technology, it's about accessabilty. Schools today (in the US no less) *still* struggle with funding for current textbooks (which, I might add, are rather spendy even by US standards). If you can replace the cost (or in this case the basic lack of access to a Walmart) with technology it's properly applied. I actually see a stronger case in Africa than in the US for this because of the ready supply here of other things.

I think the one thing that people should be working to 'Open Source' in the US is quality educational materials. Devices like this would then replace costs of textbooks rather than compete.

IMHO using technology here is a Good Thing(TM). Education is the best economic equalizer. One has to wonder the effect if things like Stephenson's Young Lady's Illustrated Primer really existed.

A statement may be true, but we may not be able to prove that it is true. Similarly, a statement may be false, but we may be unable to prove that it is false. This is true even in formal logic, but it's must more obviously true in everyday life, where we are always using inductive logic to may what are, in essense, educated guesses about things. There are many situation where one guess is as good as another, meaning we're unable to rule any out with reasonable confidence.

In many formal logical systems, a statement may be true but not possible to prove (see here for some discussion of the idea). In fact Goedel's Theorem is famous result in mathematical logic showing essentially that any sufficiently complex logical system is incomplete (has true statements that are not provable).

So, back to reality, the point people are making is that with "black box" voting, where there is not verifiable trail of voting, the vote tally may be incorrect, but there may be no way of proving that it's incorrect. Similarly, there may be no way of proving it's correct. What others are asserting is that we should require a voting system that is verifiable, where we can show that the person declared the winner actually is the winner. It does not seem we can do this with the current generation of touchscreen voting machines.

Remember, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

A statement may be true, but we may not be able to prove that it is true. Similarly, a statement may be false, but we may be unable to prove that it is false. This is true even in formal logic, but it's must more obviously true in everyday life, where we are always using inductive logic to may what are, in essense, educated guesses about things. There are many situation where one guess is as good as another, meaning we're unable to rule any out with reasonable confidence.

In many formal logical systems, a statement may be true but not possible to prove (see here for some discussion of the idea). In fact Goedel's Theorem is famous result in mathematical logic showing essentially that any sufficiently complex logical system is incomplete (has true statements that are not provable).

So, back to reality, the point people are making is that with "black box" voting, where there is not verifiable trail of voting, the vote tally may be incorrect, but there may be no way of proving that it's incorrect. Similarly, there may be no way of proving it's correct. What others are asserting is that we should require a voting system that is verifiable, where we can show that the person declared the winner actually is the winner. It does not seem we can do this with the current generation of touchscreen voting machines.

Remember, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

I think it was a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Golgafrinchans who decided to rid their world of stupid people.. golgafrinchans

Heck, there actually *are* cheap animated knockoffs of the same stories redone by Disney.

Which I buy whenever I can find them because I love to support Disney's competitors. In fact, a couple of the Pinocchio knockoffs stick much closer to Collodi's novel than does the Disney version. However, doesn't Disney bring (allegedly frivolous) lawsuits against the producers of such knockoffs, alleging misappropriation of the visual designs of characters?

It is if you recognize the reference.
Some of the source can be seen here.

We "bash" Bush because he is doing a bad job as a president. Unfortunately, a large portion of the populous is still ignorant of the facts, so he got reelected, but pointing out where the government goes wrong is still an important duty, not just during election time. This has nothing to do with "my guy lost"; this has to do with the fact that truth and liberty lost in the 2004 election.

Here's hoping they make a come back.

1913'Webster mentioned that "The term has recently been used for remote clusters of stars".
So I guess it will have to be updated.

The on-cartridge chip in question is internally called the Acumen chip. It's really just a tiny ROM + FLASH combo storage device containing a few dozens of ROM bytes and a few dozens of re-writable FLASH bytes.

Encoded in ROM, among other info, is a "shelf life" or freshness date -- this is effectively the date of manufacture of the cartridge. If the cartridge is not unsealed and put into service within a certain number of months (something like 18-36 months I think), it will be deemed too old. The printer will refuse to use it.

The cartridges' ink reservoirs do lose moisture over time (osmosis and all that) and will eventually be unable to print as the ink's viscosity rises.

In addition, as an in-service cartridge is used, its osmosis rate becomes much higher. (It's factory applied nozzle tape has been removed, it sits docked in a relatively more porous "garage" when not printing, it prints sometimes and the nozzle then contact open atmosphere, etc.) The freshness date is thus shortened significantly once a cartridge goes into service. This new info is written to Acumen's FLASH area and checked from print job to job.

-----

In HP's defense, it is possible muck up the print head if old or sufficiently dried-out ink is passed thru the nozzles. For printers with permanent or nearly permanent print heads (you replace the ink supplies only, not the print head each time), this is a real problem. Using sufficiently viscous ink will actually kill the printer.

The reasons to do this on devices that use combo printhead+ink cartridges are less strong: you're typically not gonna kill the printhead (and thus the entire printer) because you throw away the printhead each time you run out of ink. You get a brand new printhead with each ink replacement cycle; this occurs [typically] well before the onboard ink becomes viscous enough to kill the attached printhead (unless your printer sits unused in an Arizona school house all summer...). You are, however, going to reduce the user's effective print-quality (PQ). PQ is something HP and competitors care dearly about. They basically don't want you to ever get a "bad" image. So they punt the cartridge when the ink is deemed old enough.

These design requirements lead the manufacturer to "freshness date" cartridges. I'm pretty sure Canon, Epson, Lexmark, and Tektronix (oops, Xerox) do the same thing.

As I understand it- and I'd LOVE to be courteously corrected, the law only applies to products moved across state lines (or into the country) so a product manufactured, marketed and sold in the same US state, is actually still a possibility.

I doubt it (IANAL). Since the case that broke the interstate commerce clause involved a farmer growing grain on his farm which happened to extend across state lines. The farmer was feeding said grain to his animals in part of his farm that was in the other state. It was argued that since he was growing the corn instead of purchasing corn, he was affecting commerce. Since corn could potentially be brought in from another state and sold to said farmer, he was affecting sales in the interstate grain trade. Thus, his actions were subject to Federal jurisdiction. From that point on, anything which "exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce" has fallen under the aegis of the Commerce Clause. I think the same would apply if I built PVR's and sold them. TiVo's sales would be affected, (people who bought my system wouldn't likely buy the TiVo system), and I would thus be required to abide by the Federal Laws.

For more info see this article

Popular hoax. Try this for size: ""iltmiaemedy uopn eienntrg we pyeard to the irenentt gdos for awnolilg us to pre-rstgieer our ttkeics. The lnie to get bgaeds was HGUE (I haer ploepe wree wtniiag on the oerdr of hruos). We setrtutd our pinnnlag-aaehd svlees oevr to the wlil clal lnie and wtiead lses then two mnetuis for all of us to pcik up our bgedas and pre-rsgoiitatern tkteics."

It's a good thing that I got hooked on everything2.com before I even heard of wikipedia. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to get my info fix.

And, more importantly, if you were wondering if gorillas are the same as bears, read this FAQ (number 1).

Only if they don't know how to make coffee. IIRC the coffee in question was substantially cooler than normal coffee brewing temperature.

So, the best you can say is that people might have an expectation that fast food places let the coffee go tepid by the time it gets to the customer.

Oh my, do you have your facts Wrong. The coffee in the McDonald's case was served at 180-190 Fahrenheit. At that temperature, flesh will suffer third degree burns within 2-7 seconds of exposure. Ever seen a third degree burn victim? Their skin looks *charred*. They can be fatal.

A normal temperature for coffee to be served at is, at most, 150 Fahrenheit, and even that is considered quite hot. Home-brewed coffee is usually served around 120-130 degrees Fahrenheit, maximum. Shriner Burn Institute (people who know about burns) had told McDonalds that they should not serve their coffee above 130 Fahrenheit. McDonald's had over 700 cases of severe burns inflicted by spilled coffee, which they chose to ignore. Liebeck asked for her medical bills to be paid; only when McDonald's refused, did she take them to court.

I think most people have an expectation that the coffee they are served won't be capable of burning their skin clean down to subdermal tissue. I think that's reasonable.

The entire user interface of Mozilla is defined by XUL, a markup language. But XUL only says "create a menu and add these menuitems". It does not implement any program logic, for, say, what to do when a menuitem is clicked. All actual behavior has to be implemented via Javascript. So it's not so much Gecko that needs Javascript but that the UI of Mozilla does. And that includes such things as pop-up menus when you right click.

They did this to Adobe Type Manager (which competed directly with their Truetype font technology), too.

I don't think he did anything malicious, but he admitted he did things that anybody competent in security work or system administration at the time would have told you are a bad idea (moving password files from one system to another, gaining unauthorized access to internal systems and moving password data off them, etc.)

He did not, in fact, go to jail (except for the time he was held during booking). He was sentenced to restitution, appealed, and the restitution order was sent back to the lower court. Ultimately he did community service and paid a fine.

It's true that they were selling hot coffee and that hot coffee is known to be mildly dangerous, but in this case they had knowingly adopted procedures of holding the coffee at a temperature far higher than normal or reasonable, causing a danger far in excess of what one would normally expect from a cup of coffee. It's somewhat analogous to a restaurant serving you a plate that has been heated to 500 degrees in the oven and then saying, "be careful, it's hot." When you burned the hell out of yourself (expecting the plate to be, say, 120 degrees), I think you'd feel this was not responsible behavior. What's more, McDonalds had already been advised that this procedure was dangerous and ignored those warnings. The suit sounds unreasonable at first, but when you read up on the facts of the case, you realize it was just corporate negligence...or really even depraved indifference.

See this link for more detail.

No he didn't.

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story.

here for example...

the complete name is the USA PATRIOT Act where "USA PATRIOT" are acronyms for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"
Here's my source, fairly informative although it isn't official. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=125463 6&lastnode_id=124

There's also Video Ouija and Meatwad's untitled insult game ("You stole my wristwatch." "You dumb, I already have a wristwatch! You dumb!" BUUUURNED!)

But what I wouldn't give for a re-release of Clamdigger...