Slashdot Mirror

" Also with this post it it does scare me to read how familair the descriptions sound. The mood swings, even the Nymphomania part. same goes for some other reply's. I feel dumb for not seeing it for eleven months."

Nonsense! Don't feel dumb. It's always easier to see things in retrospect a lot clearer than it is while it's happening. Hence the saying, "Hindsight is 20/20".

Now I feel compelled to point out that mood swings and sexual deviance (nymph/fridge) are also symptoms of other mental imbalances. Bipolar Disorder, for instance, is almost typified by these two symptoms. There's no quick and dirty way to determine what someone has. It requires one who is well-educated in psychiatry, and even they often need several sessions to determine what is wrong (unless the doctor in question is just a pill-dispensing Dr. Feelgood, in which case, he'll have one "figured out" in under 5 minutes and a nice perscription handy).

I would encourage anyone who suspects themself or someone close to them of having a real mental disorder to see a doctor. A big advantage to this is also sifting through genuine cases, and drama-queens/kings who want a new affliction to append to themselves.

-The Libra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!"
- my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.

1. I never bothered reading a MacOS manual. I never really needed one. It was intuitive enough. (DOS, on the other hand, I read the hell out of).
2. I didn't hang around "stupid" computer users... I didn't even know any at the time. Closest I came to them were lamers who wasted BBS time posting stuff like "OZZIE RULEZ!!!" over and over and over.
3. As for the HP OS... well, that's not one I was into...

"Bill Gates takes a look at the increase in Internet users. Shortly afterward, memo to all of Microsoft: Windows 95 must be Internet-ready."

Oh, come on... that's like saying "George Lucas took a look at the increase in movie-goers, so he made movies." You might as well accuse him of buying a real nice house, because he saw other rich people buying houses. Making his O/S internet-ready was simply a good business decision. It wasn't copying anyone.

-The Libra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!"
- my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.

Ingres is a backronym for "Interactive Graphics REtrieval System" (the task from which Stonebraker got his original funding). It was named after French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

• Windows was definitly not a generic term in 1985. Heck. DOS was closer to being a generic name than Windows. Back then, Windows wasn't even popular enough to be known to most end-users. Despite Lindows' claim that "strong evidence establishing the generic use of the terms "windows" and "windowing" during the time Microsoft first began using them in 1983 and 1984" I was quite heavily into all 3 major OS's at the time (DOS, Mac, Commodore/Amiga) and Windows absolutely was not used nearly enough to be a generic term. Societally, it was just some vague concept of an idiot-friendly OS, and those it would affect most were not real keen on the transition from DOS.
• Lindows' OS looks an awful lot like Windows
• Lindows, phonetically, sounds a lot like Windows.
• Their claim that "Microsoft, from 1990 to 1994, continued to use the term "windowing environments' to poll consumers..." also holds very little water, as I answered these polls. They said WINDOWS environment. Not Windowing. Additionally, I don't see how referring to their particular brand of platform makes it a generic term. If you were a restaurant owner for McDonald's, and you asked your customers how well they enjoyed the overall McDonald's environment, or McDonald's experience, this would not make it a generic term. It simply means you are clarifying your brand for an otherwise stupid customer.
  If you poke the bear (read: Microsoft) then expect it to suddenly get very interested in poking you back. Linux had their own thing going, and MS, while not happy about not being the only O/S, has not, to my knowledge, made a Lynux-type product. (correct me if I'm wrong). Lindows should have expected this reaction for piggybacking off MS's success.

• From what I have been lead to understand, (note the disclaimer so I'm not sued) Microsoft stole their OS idea from Apple, whom I believe, stole it from Xerox. They should just accept that there is nothing original in literature or programming anymore, and it's time to allow someone else to steal the torch.
• Lindows is the name of the COMPANY, not the O/S. Linspire is the name of the O/S, and bears no resemblence to Windows. Nor does Lindows bear any resemblence to the word Microsoft.
• Even if Lindows is exonerated from all charges, Microsoft will simply buy them out if neccesary, just to make the point that they should not have poked the bear.

1. Yes, L0phtCrack has special character substitutions. I never once claimed that made it uncrackable. I believe I said that it increases the time it takes to crack (adding additional permutations to the password). Used alone, it doesn't work. Used in tandom with required password changes, and a minimum length, it can act as a deterrant.
2. Obviously these areas were tongue-in-cheek. However one cannot argue with results. When the carrot doesn't work (and I've NEVER seen the carrot work), then it's time to try the stick. If someone calls you out at the office, recruit them. It's not that hard.
3. Yes, they are tools, and they require training to use properly. But I would hope that the IT person in charge of password policy implementation has enough training to know what the results mean in a LANGuard scan (not to mention the various warning and info messages provided by the software a la' nice graphic HTML). I would also assume that at least someone in the department knows about ports and IP addresses, or how to look them up in the case of YAPS (Yet Another Port Scanner). In any event, these suggestions were not so that the admin can crack his own site, but see what would be immediately obvious to anyone running the appropriate scripts, and allow him/her opportunity to do something about it beforehand.

1. Educate your users in 1337-speak. - You know, 3's as E's, 7's as T's, etc. Point out that they can make nearly any normal, easy to remember password more secure by using 1337-speak. This will help prevent tools like L0phtCrack from breaking the code in minutes, but rather might change it to days. I did a bit of security consulting and found this to be the easiest way of ensuring compliance at the user level. For added security, have them make phrases using the special characters. For instance $4Bugs is a rather secure six-letter password (though really I'd prefer 8+).
2. Fear Works Wonders - Divulge that if their account is hacked because of a non-compliant password, the entire office will know of it, and they will probably be lynched, but only after the cracker has stolen all their bank account info and ss#. This may or may not be the truth, but the people listening to you say this are the same people who are using their CD-ROM drive bay for a cup holder.
3. Tools a la Sneakers - Of course, you can turn on password enforcements, that's the first one. Now try to crack your own network. Not a Cracker? All right, then just go download YAPS, LANGuard, and L0phtCrack and run those. Yeah, they're only scripts, but unless your network has somehow garnered the attention of a serious cracker, the only ones assaulting you will be script-kiddies. So fill in the blanks, and see how your network holds up.
4. Given Time, Serious Hackers Will Get In - There's only so much security you can have without just simply yanking the network from any outside connections. If the network you are supporting is government, big-money, or anything of interest to a serious hacker, it is only a matter of time. Forced PW changes (every 14 days) or so, will help reduce this chance a lot, but will also anger your users. But if passwords are allowed to sit for 30 days, and a compliant admin-access password only takes 25 days to crack, then it will be cracked.
5. Sure, let them keep their PWs on stickies... IN A LOCKED CABINET - Most offices will give you a drawer with a lock on it. These locks are almost never used. Find the Facilities person for this office and get those keys. Let the users write down their PWs in a notebook or stickies, but make it clear they need to lock those books up at night or take them home. Getting a custodial job to crack a network by writing down PWs from stickies on the monitor is the oldest trick in the book (and by god, it still works great). If you catch someone with password stickies on their monitor, punish them.
6. Breed ph34r and paranoia - I printed out some old WWII propaganda posters and changed the lettering on them to refer to passwords and security. It was fun, livened up the walls a bit in the office, and served as a subtle reminder to the users that SAM the Cracker was always out there, trying to steal their (fill in the blank). Of course, in truth, we only had one serious hacking attempt, but it was a lot of fun scaring them, and it made them more attentive to possible security breaches. Sometimes annoyingly so, but hey, we never got cracked in the time I was there.

"Dude you're talking about this guy's sister! You could be a little more sensitive in how you put that couldn't you?"

Well... yes, I suppose I could. My apologies to the user whose sister it is. It was not my intention to insult, but rather to give good/clear warning. Schizophrenia has a very high tendancy to cause either an extremely high or extremely low sex drive, and sometimes additional deviances from the norm. I didn't want to get too flowery or obtuse with my choice of words because I didn't want to be too vague to give warning about these possibilities, so that they didn't come as a surprise later. But you are correct, my choice of wording could have been better.

-The Libra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!"
- my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.

And oh, completely offtopic -- what's the deal with saying, work fine in OOorg -- shouldn't that be works fine with OO? Why the org/.org thingy?

"The name is "OpenOffice.org" and not "OpenOffice", because someone else already had the trademark. The name should be used as an adjective: "OpenOffice.org Application", "OpenOffice.org Community" and so on..." Link

Monsanto is pure concentrated evil.

For a slightly longer form of what you can find above, see Monsanto on E2 (but please don't click just for the hell of it, E2 is too fragile for slashdotting)

Even if they managed to produce such a modification, since they were created/modified by humans, error is inevitable, like what happened in the movie Jurassic Park.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but evolution works in part because nature makes error after error under the influence of assorted mutagens and occasionally the errors turn out to be fortuitous. Humans don't have an exclusive license on the act of fucking up.

Monsanto is pure concentrated evil.

For a slightly longer form of what you can find above, see Monsanto on E2 (but please don't click just for the hell of it, E2 is too fragile for slashdotting)

Even if they managed to produce such a modification, since they were created/modified by humans, error is inevitable, like what happened in the movie Jurassic Park.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but evolution works in part because nature makes error after error under the influence of assorted mutagens and occasionally the errors turn out to be fortuitous. Humans don't have an exclusive license on the act of fucking up.

That's 'cause the parent post was completely wrong on the computer (almost offensively so, if you're a computer geek). See a much better history over at Everything2.

• Smart people need to make it their duty to breed.
• Women, currently being the bearers of life, need to be more selective in who's child they choose to carry. Men, likewise, need to be more selective about their seed.
• There needs to be a license instituted that prevents stupid people from breeding.

Heck, most of us have to pay, either monetarily, or emotionally (from our significant other) in order to play games. I think if it were actually a lucrative, well-paying career, then us "geeks" could probably get our hitherto negative appelation put on par with "big baller".

Money makes the world go around, and with a six-figure income, where you don't have to retire due to old age, it could become quite an attractive trait. "I make 300k competing against some of the top professionals in my field" sure sounds a lot sexier than "I do tech support for XXXXX..."

-TheTXLibra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!" - my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.

Heck... these whipper-snappers today all want their fancy-schmancy pictures and animated graphics. In my day we used LYNX and LIKED IT!!!

But seriously... why doesn't someone start low-graphic mini-browsers. They could use LYNX or some other text-based browser. After all, when you're looking at a very limited amount of real-estate on your screen, do you really care about missing out on those stupid "Punch The Monkey" ads?

Pheh... give me the good old days of BBSes.

-TheTXLibra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!" - my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.

• Medication: A lot of the quality of life is going to depend upon her medication. Stelazine, for instance, made me completely numb to life. While it stops the audial/visual hallucenations, it also blocks creativity, sex drive, and emotion. Unfortunately, those are very common side effects to many anti-psychotic medications. I can't tell you the medical reason why, only that it heavily depends upon the individual's brain chemistry. She may end up going through 5-10 different meds before she finds a balance between supression of the illness, and supression of one's emotional life.
• Paranoia: This is probably the worst effect she will have to deal with. It can be mild (ie. "Did you hear something?") to extreme (ie. "You're trying to poison my food!"), and it can bounce between the two based on stimulus. Two bits of advice. NEVER lie to her. Once you have, you get categorized as someone who has lied. It doesn't matter about the reason. Even if the truth hurts, and she screams that she hates you, as long as you maintain her trust, you have a chance to be her confidant. Secondly, don't dismiss her paranoia. Sometimes, in the throws of "everyone is out to get me", a schizophrenic just needs to vent. Instead of saying "You're just being paranoid", give them rational fact against their feats, and accept the fact that it might do nothing to dissuade them. Illogical fear is simply a fact of Schizophrenia.
• Nymphomania/Frigidity: Without medication, she might either become a roaring slut, or a frigid ice queen. Or neither, but most likely, expect some sexual tendancies that are deviant from the norm.
• Hallucinations: There will most likely be audial and/or visual hallucinations. The frequency and intensity will largely depend again on her chemistry, medication, and how severe the illness is. I fortunately have a very light case, and mine have usually been limited to something as mild as a woman leaning against a wall, and whisperings. As long as she can keep aware of what logically should and should not be there, she can dismiss these as "background noise". Sometimes she won't be able to ignore these, and it will cause sleepless nights and agitated working conditions. In this case, I recommend a soporific. With sleep, the symptoms will often die down. However, thanks to paranoia, you might have trouble getting her to take them. Seriously, though, a doctor's opinion is vital on this aspect. She might have them so bad she cannot drive.
• Severe Mood Swings: Schizophrenics are often ruled by their emotional state. I call my bad days "Black Moods". You would probably do best to steer clear of her on these days, unless she actually seeks you out. Then be there for her, but don't try to be "proactive" in solving whatever sparked the emotional problem. This will usually pass, followed by remorse and apology. Try to be understanding.
• Barriers: Set barriers as well. If her case is light enough that she can more or less live a normal life on her own, she needs to know what barriers there are going to be, up front. As with many other mental illnesses, there are certain individuals who latch onto someone, much in the way a drowning victim does, and won't let them go, effectively ruining their life. Don't let this happen to you. Fortunately, I've always been of the isolationist variety. It's others that must respect -my- barriers. This might also happen to her. If it does, then respect her wishes as much as is reasonable.

The original web server and browser written by Berners-Lee was a read/write interface. The browser was an HTML editor, and you could edit pages that you viewed from the server. This makes absolutely no sense to us now...

Actually, with the rise of Wikis it makes quite a lot of sense.

1. It's history, not his story : George gave us 3 (2 if you don't count Return of the Jedi) great movies that did something no other movie had before. It gave the idea of a space movie new depth and dimension that cause such a great deal of sensawunda it developed its own cult following. This wasn't just some plucky group of adventurers in some rocket, and tin-foil robots anymore. It was a slice of life and events spanning an entire galaxy, with entire stories behind the characters untold. It was, at the time, the greatest outer-space Sci-Fi movie ever. It was a new era in filmmaking history. No one else had done this before... but a lot have done it since. The story wasn't his, it was Kurasowa's. Before Kurasowa it was someone else's... The story was another rehash of many stories. We who originally saw it in the theatres have claimed it was one of the best stories ever, but perhaps the truth is that it was the first time we ever felt true sensawunda on the big screen. Now, over 20 years later, special effects have become so grand as to numb us. Low budget sci-fi network shows can get better effects than the original, yet they fail to impress us because we are innundated with them everywhere from web-pages to TV commercials, to TV, to movies. Is it any wonder that nothing a mediocre talent like Lucas could produce would ever evoke that same feeling as the original?
2. I hate what Hitler did, but he still ended up ruling most of Europe: No, I don't think Lucas is Hitler. I may dislike his style, but he never committed an atrocity worse than Eps 1 and 2. My point is this... we can complain as much as we want to about how Lucas did things wrong in the new triliogy, but the fact remains that:
   1. He is rich, and we are not.
   2. He became rich off his films, and his new movies made him richer.
   3. We do not live in a Meritocracy. If we did, he'd be Whuffie poor. We live in a Capitolist state that values accomplishment by the money it makes. Ergo, technically, he did good.
   4. Even if he were dirt poor, I am assuming that he's still managed to get more movies produced and released than any of us here, which is an astounding feat in and of itself.
3. Rights make Right: Lucas owns the rights to Star Wars. If he wanted to, he could have chosen to do much worse. He could have decided to yank the original off the shelves, replace R2 and 3P0 with the Wayans Brothers, Solo with Jim Carey, and put Elen Degeneress as the Princess. Darth Vader could have been played by LL Cool J, and Obi could be played by Woody Allen. Instead of light sabers, maybe they would use Pokemon duels... it could have been worse... ludicrously so. At least he made a vague attempt to remain in a similar universe as the originals. Sure he may have crapped all over his own work, but at least he didn't ruin the originals...yet... (for the record, I did enjoy Spaceballs)
4. An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters: Someday, something will elicit the same sensawunda as the 3 originals did. In fact, I believe for many, the LotR series already did so. In another 20-30 years, it will be something else. Perhaps a Western.

It should be noted, that Opera's initial response to MS's clear disregard for web standards was perhaps the funniest move ever by a tech company.

Just ask the Swedish Chef...

There is no credible evidence that large amounts of money were used in USSR to counter SDI. There is, however, evidence that large amounts of money were sucked (and stil lare, after 20 years) from American taxpayers.

As for misleading Soviets, this was a dangerous business. Once this nearly led to the full scale nuclear exchange, other times it led to USA being left in the dust (such as when they pretended to be building a network of tunnels between launch sites, to which Russians answered with a cheap solution of using their extensive railroad system for the same purpose).

Star Wars was never a great idea.

yup, also very much like Schrödinger's Cat.

Schrodinger's Cat

its a different way to get there, but the same exact premise,
and the same bits of quantum theory involved.

• H2 = Hitch-Hiker's
• G2 = Guide to the Galaxy

I prefer E2 though.

I LOVE Wikipedia, but I find myself staying away from it due to the tangents that the parent post mentions. Maybe it is my adult ADD (ha), but I can't keep focused when I am there. I start by looking something up about Alan Turing and then all of a sudden I am reading about the Republic of China (yes, this topic is ~5 jumps from the page on Alan Turing). It kind of reminds me of Everything2.com... i just wish I could keep myself more focused!

I only ask because this sounds like something I can *possibly* dig up off of Everything2.

what the fuck is a quatloo. thats the stupidest fucking currency name ive ever heard.

Try Google Quatloo, Wikipedia Quatloo, or meta-dictionary search Quatloo (though the only result here is the wikipedia link I gave already).

I was also going to provide an Everything2 link, but surprisingly no one has created a Quatloo node (yet). Of course that will probably be corrected within a few minutes of this posting.

However by far the best refference on Quatloos is Quatloo Valuation in the 20th Century , the first result for a routine Google groups search on Quatloo.

Come on, this is the INTERNET. There is no excuse for silly posts asking "what does [word] mean?"

Of course once you *do* look up Quatloo you're perfectly welcome to complain it's stupid all you like :D

-

An important distinction to be made is that sex is not gender. Sex should be used only when referring to the biological nature of the object in question, whereas gender refers to a set of socially-constructed rules governing the objects behavior in society. To quote Everything2: "In anthropology gender is the accepted way to refer to a set of behaviors/beliefes often related to physical sex traits. You can have a gender that is different from your biological sex, if your culture premits."

Robot Sex

Sure, they're only machines. But the more they interact with us humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes.

By Simson Garfinkel
The Net Effect
May 5, 2004

Is your Roomba a boy or a girl?

The Roomba, of course, is that clever little house-cleaning robot. I reviewed Roomba in October 2002, then bought my own a few months later. Since then it's been happily sweeping my living room and dining room every week or so. It also terrifies my cats and my three-year-old twin boys. All well and good--but what's the Roomba's gender?

"It's a girl," says my wife. "It's round. It's close to the floor. It ends with an 'a'. I always think of it as a 'wom-ba.'"

But if the Roomba is a girl, then Asimo is definitely a boy. Developed by Honda Motor, Asimo is a humanoid robot that walks around like a short astronaut in a white space suit. Four-foot tall Asimo is the latest in a long line of the company's bipedal robots. These days Asimo spends his time as Honda's goodwill ambassador to the world's science museums, auto shows, and other venues. Last month he was spotted in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Asimo doesn't look especially boy-like--there's no slingshot in his back pocket, there's no telltale bulge under his belt, and there's no hint of facial hair. In fact, you can't even see his face: the robot's head is covered with a visor that has just two big holes for its video-camera eyes. But Honda repeatedly refers to the robot with the pronoun "he" on the Asimo website.

Indeed, Honda has taken great pains to make its walking robots more lifelike, and part of that realism appears to include giving the robot a friendly sounding name (the previous generation was called simply "P3"). The company's earliest attempts at walkers were really nothing more than a pair of legs and feet with a big box on top of them. But over the years the robot forms have become decidedly more human--and more male.

Whether or not you think that gender belongs in our mechanical creations has a lot to do with your vision of how these creatures will fit into our future. It certainly takes more effort to make a robot that's gendered than one that's asexual. But engineers just want to have fun. Building gender into robots might be a way for the robots' designers to express their own playfulness and creativity.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll discover another reason why gender might be a good thing for our robot servants: gender will make robots more compatible with their human masters.

As human beings, we constantly try to layer emotions, desires, and other human qualities onto our machines. Computers aren't aware of the emotional traits that we assign to them, of course. We might say "the computer ate my file because it's having a bad day" because we lack a better explanation for what's happening inside the system's microprocessor (its "brain.") Yes, there have been attempts to develop synthetic emotions for machines, but that's all artifice. Most people realize that fundamentally there's nothing going on inside the silicon except the cold calculation of ones and zeros.

Still, if you are interested in building an effective interface between humans and computers, you might just be better off creating a machine that projects a simulated emotional response. Because human beings are hard-wired for emotions, we might find it easier to work with such machines--especially if these machines were sharing our physical surroundings, rather than being good little drones on the factory floor or up on Mars.

Such thinking is behind a growing movement in robotics to build machines that portray emotions. Cynthia Breazeal was a

Actually the H2 is just a hummer made street legal, in that respect the '2nd Hummer', or 'H2'. Definitely a sequel to the original, and, as with most sequels, inferior.

"Hemi" engines are called such as they have hemispherical combustion chambers, i.e. the top of the cylinder is a hemisphere instead of a wedged plane.
This allows for better placement of the spark plugs, thereby increasing combustion efficiency. It's widespread use today has nothing to do with sequels, and more to do with Americans wanting more power in their trucks and SUVs.
It was originally designed for racing. It has been available in street cars since late 1964, and was used widely in racing predating that.
More Info on the Hemi

There is a reason...

IMNSHO, you can't update a firewall enough as much as you can misconfigure it, and by the looks of things, this is what happened.
Same goes for the UK coast guard btw.

I bet these incidents are the results of networks that were not designed and implemented in one go, but has evolved over time (I know, I know, most networks are built this way),
leaving 'grey' or 'forgotten' areas with noone directly responsible for audits and security.

There are no excuses for having an insecure network, regardless of your choise of OS'es attached.
Hooking mission critical machines, not responsible for networking, directly to your DMZ is generally a bad idea[tm]

But what if you find out that the paper scissors you bought could easily cut through flesh and bone with very little pressure applied? You just wanted to open the envelope, but accidentally cut all your fingers on your left hand. Wouldn't you be both surprised and pissed off?

The woman that sued McDonalds received third degree burns over 6% of her body because the coffee wasn't hot. It was scalding. Normal coffee is 60 degrees, McDonalds served coffee at 85, because it was cheaper. Coffee at 85 degrees is capable of causing full thickness burns to your skin in as little as two seconds. Do you really expect your coffee to be more dangerous than hydrochloric acid?

Smart people DO still get respect if they're not smug about it and have other aspects to their personality.

Add in to this the fact that American institutionalized education today is not designed to educate, but rather to make people conform, and you have a recipe for the decline and fall of an empire.

The reason is not the terrorist attack. The reason is called "Bush".

No wonder science is declining when it's easiest to get funds to craft new overblown rocks and wooden spears.

The traditionally best known areas of U.S. dominance in science are: fighter plane and "nucular" arms research. That is, killing people. Space flight and aeronautics, nuclear technology and supercomputing are the areas which did develop significantly because of the American need to blow shit up. There's no Soviet Union anymore to justify this. Those days are now over.

Bush is trying to avoid this by staging wars.

Another problem is the Bushist notion that caring for the environment and developing new technology would be mutually exclusive. These days are over, too. Today, making technology environmentally friendly boosts development (which is NOT the same as economic growth). Europeans have been constructing safer and more efficient cars while USA has fallen to the bigger-is-better SUV craze.

--
hahaha... and he thought I was kidding

It seems we're approaching another kind of "technology singularity" in the cryptology arms race: trust is reduced back into the human. In the stone age, trust was based only on humans, because all communications were conducted in interpersonal meetings. Now, with all this measure and countermeasure, we've gone thru a full circle: trust is in the human, not in technology.

On the other hand, the curl was nonzero: there was a net privacy and distance increment when integrating around the full circle. That is, for secure communication, meeting is not necessary. The rest of this "development" is not real development but measure and countermeasure.

Flash Mob
419

Flash Mob
419

Piri Reis' map,

Sorry to burst bubbles here, but it ain't no antarctica without ice. Piri Reis only drew the coast of South America a bit weirdly.

Here's a good commentary on the matter, with pictures and discussion.

Here's a writeup about it. There's also My writeup on Buache map, which is a simiar "Antarctica without ice" story.

Piri Reis' map,

Sorry to burst bubbles here, but it ain't no antarctica without ice. Piri Reis only drew the coast of South America a bit weirdly.

Here's a good commentary on the matter, with pictures and discussion.

Here's a writeup about it. There's also My writeup on Buache map, which is a simiar "Antarctica without ice" story.

I remember a product for The Sider hard drive that allowed you to multiplex it with 4 other Apple ][ computers. Cost a few hundred bucks (not to mention the interface cards), but wow that would have been sweet for my BBS back in the 80's :-)

• IPO = Initial Public Offerin
• SEC = Securities and Exchange Commission (currently DDoSed)

"In the filing, Google said that it generated revenues of $961.9 million in 2003 and reported a net profit of $106.5 million. Sales rose 177 percent from a year ago although earnings increased by just 6 percent." - LISnews.com.

More stories are available from CNN and The Associated Press.

So, if the universe has a limit, and the Mind isn't infinite, and we're all constrained by the entropy of the ever so slowly expanding universe, I have just one question.

Would anyone like some toast?

As a desktop Linux user I find this kind of argument tiring and irrelevant. I want an OS that works, and I really do not care if RMS approves it, I don't care about the "tainted kernel" messages, nor about binary-only drivers. THIS is the real world, my dear friend.

So go use Windows. No one is stopping you. You have chosen to state that you do not care if software is Free, so I feel pretty safe in making the statement that you can only harm Linux and not help it. The fact that manufacturers are releasing binary-only drivers might be the status quo, but it doesn't mean it's desirable.

Also, your argument about what would happen in 20 years is simplistic. In 20 years you would not dream of installing a modern OS on an ancient machine.

There should be machines from 1984 which you can install Linux (or some downsized variant thereof) on. If not, then by 1985. People do more than dream of it. Next bullshit objection? If you examine my timeline of microprocessors you will see that the MC68020 was commercialized in 1984. Also, in 1986, intel sold the 80386, which linux obviously runs on; So even if my time scale is off it is only by a year or two. What's two years anyway? (One tenth of the total time scale, that's what. On a 20 year scale that is not that much, though.)

As a user, you SHOULD care about the political issues, but no one can make you, and most users don't. Linux sliding down the slippery slope to closed-drivers-land is a distinct possibility if people do not pay enough attention to these issues.

Your radical ideas about society, individualism, and religion have already occurred to others

No, 240v outlets use a different prong configuration. More info here

Of course, I have been playing this game for over 10 years, so I wouldn't doubt that there are things that stick out like a sore thumb to me, which other gamers can't see.

In my experience playing the Mario Kart games, I found some design oversights in the games. Some are listed on this page. The most important bug is that Nintendo has been too lazy in all three versions reviewed on that page to add bots in battle mode.

Here's a link to the true story that became the legend.

Sample:

"You may have heard the urban legend about that student who died playing a "live" version of Dungeons and Dragons in the steam tunnels at Michigan State University. How about the one where the RPG player killed himself because his gaming character died? These stories have been adapted into a pretty funny Chick Tract, a thriller novel, and a made for TV movie."

This is actually very productive if you can train your body to do it properly. It's called a polyphasic sleep schedule (Uberman sleep). You essentially train your body to go directly into REM sleep (the important sleep) right when you lay down. The end result is several extra productive hours a day; considering that you only sleep for about 15 minutes at a time every 6 hours.

Thomas Edison (documented) and DiVinci (rumored) used this technique.

The only drawback, however, is that you can only stay awake contiguously for about 6 hours at a time until your body FORCES you into a nap.

A ton of information about it can be found on the web and in print. Of course, don't lose any sleep over the cost of that book over at Amazon.com.

WARNING: My personal experience has been that it is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to go back to a normal (6-8 hour a night) sleep schedule after getting into a routine such as this. I did it for quite some time with no ill effect, however, when I started working for an employer (where I couldn't get a medically approved "nap") it became quite tricky to maintain. If you work for yourself, however, it's very effective. Another thing to note, is that alcohol can seriously affect this process.

I think it is time for someone to brush up on his Freud.

This is OT, but as for bleeding brakes (That's my e2node on the subject) the link you gave has at least one error in it, where it talks about the order in which you should bleed the brakes. The order in which they should be bled varies from car to car and on some brake systems it is absolutely critical to bleed the brakes in the proper order or you will end up having to do it three or four times to get all the damn air out.

What about the university bandwidth? I for one am glad that my workplace is cracking down hard on all P2P use. I want a working net for doing my job. So, run a client, get caught and after one warning you're expelled/fired - doesn't matter if you are staff or a student.

Woah, there -- back up a sec. There's nothing wrong with P2P use in and of itself. I'll say it again (just for effect): There's nothing wrong with P2P use in and of itself. Unless you're a government like the Chinese government who is afraid of giving people a voice, you have to understand that P2P is an incredible tool that can make everyone their own publisher. It can make everyone their own record label, and everyone their own private movie studio. Just because people are (widely) using P2P for piracy doesn't mean that it's automatically a horrible thing. It's a great way to distribute content for a small amount of resources.

University bandwidth? Are you kidding? You think that every chunk of bandwidth that doesn't go to P2P goes to educational use? That's not right -- I went to college within the last 10 years, and I know what we used the bandwidth for: Porn, games, music, websurfing, screwing around. Sure there was some research, but if you think that the majority of that bandwidth is used for research, you're kidding yourself.

And no, you can't just pipe the stuff over another port or encrypt it. Your bandwidth use, source+destination IP and a variety of other things will give you away.

This statement is just plain wrong. Check out Freenet. This is a network which anonymizes content creators and allows people to share with confidence. If you don't want to spend alot of time researching it, here's a basic summary. It's partially intended to be a tool to get around folks like the Chinese government (who are afraid of giving people a voice) by encrypting the data and distributing the content in a way that's anonymous.