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Can you offer anything with which to back up this ridiculous assertion? [Hitler was a socialist. He has much more in common with modern day liberals than conservatives.]

Howabout this? [The political compass]

Say, linkin park (I'm making an extrapolation. If you hate it, sorry.)

Apology accepted.
Just out of curiosity, what data are you extrapolating a "geek" like of Linkin' Park from?

Either way, I don't find it particularly dangerous for record labels to attempt to be compensated for their products. I think it's fairly natural for them to use increasingly more extreme measures of reducing the brazenly open distribution of their content.

I mean really did you expect them to just bend over and take it?

The more people steal their products, the more they're going to do everything within their power to reduce the effectiveness for the average person to do so. Dangerous? Not particularly. The people that whittle away your fair use rights are the people that think they're the ones with the power, take whatever they want, and fail to understand that the music industry isn't just going to sit there and let them pick its bones.

If you want to find someone to be angry with download this program, do a search for some of Arista's artists, and then message all of the people distributing their work. Something like, "Hey Fuckhead, you're evaporating my fair use rights of copyrighted materials."

You can download OpenOffice v1.1 off of G2 here. You'll need a G2 client, such as Shareaza.

Slashdot seems extremely bad at magnet links, so:

Sharelive

or

Bitzi.com

Bah, stupid Slashdot can't do MAGNET URI's. Here it is on ShareLive.

Gnutella 2 link for Win32 version on Sharelive.

I've posted up a Gnutella 2 link on Sharelive. Download using Shareaza.

I just posted a Shareaza-compatible link for it at Sharelive.

this cool pic
a cookery lesson

A Love Spell

Can we say "Tipper Gore"? How about "Hilary Clinton"? "Joe Lieberman"? Need I go on?

It's a good and oft-ignored point -- censorship (or, more accurately, attempted legislation of consumption behavior) isn't a Left/Liberal-Right/Conservative issue. There are plenty of folks on both sides who'd love to prevent potentially "offensive" material from being sold in stores.

There's more on the differences between the "Left/Right" axis and the "Libertarian/Authoritarian" axis here:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/a nalysis2.html

Or, if you want to take the test first and see where you stand:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/q uestionnaire.pl?page=1

Can we say "Tipper Gore"? How about "Hilary Clinton"? "Joe Lieberman"? Need I go on?

It's a good and oft-ignored point -- censorship (or, more accurately, attempted legislation of consumption behavior) isn't a Left/Liberal-Right/Conservative issue. There are plenty of folks on both sides who'd love to prevent potentially "offensive" material from being sold in stores.

There's more on the differences between the "Left/Right" axis and the "Libertarian/Authoritarian" axis here:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/a nalysis2.html

Or, if you want to take the test first and see where you stand:
http://www.digitalronin.f2s.com/politicalcompass/q uestionnaire.pl?page=1

As a white male whose excellent test-taking abilities which have saved my grade in a few classes in which I did little else, I may be biased in making a response. Just the same.

That's very strange - surely it's also "discriminatory" to say that women and minorities aren't as good at test taking as white men?

I can't comment upon the basis of the statement since I was merely quoting the linked article, but my guess would be that studies have been done which show females and minorities tend to do worse on written tests. A quick google brings up this article which sites just such statistics for the SAT of 1995. And then there's this article on women and minorities in science with relevant data from 1999.

I've seen otherwise very competent people, both male and female, crumble in tests here at college. Heck, I've watched my sisters and mother have the same problems. Generally, the factor seems to be a matter of believing in one's own ability. People who know what they're doing overlook simple details because they're nervous or are worried that they don't understand a problem when they actually do (Why would they give me this piece of data if I didn't need it?). Myself, I was exposed to tests frequently when young which helped me learn the habit of confidence.

Now, I can't comment on any tendancy of females or minorities to be more timid than males or whites respectively. Statistical studies could quite possibly do that.

And isn't it strange that they could potentially be worse at test-taking, but not worse at job-doing? A well designed test will be statistically well correlated with job ability. If it's not, then we might as well not bother licensing surgeons!

But the thing is that two things are being tested: the ability to know the correct answer and the ability to recall and relay that answer clearly while udne pressure. It is that second matter which some might find causes a statistical discrepancy which could amount to discrimination. Like I said, though, IANAL. I'm not even an engineer, yet.

Self-responsibility is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; it is better characterized as an authoritarian vs. libertarian issue.

Excellent point. More on both (left v. right and authoritarian v. libertarian) here:

Two-axis political compass test and info...

>Please, take the survey @ Political Compass [politicalcompass.org]

FYI:

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: 1.12
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -2.36

Which makes me slightly to the right and slightly libertarian.

I remember taking that same test a long while back, but as more and more injustices to people's freedom have happened (such as it now being illegal for Canadians to participate in American TV culture, and my being painted a criminal every time I buy a CDR by the Canadian piracy tax) I've moved far away from my original position, which was give or take spot on with Gandhi.

Funny how certain leaders can do that to people...

I use f2s, which costs me GBP40ish a year including domain name. Logs (raw and Webalizer), CGI, MySQL database and so on. Extremely cheap, extremely reliable. I'd recommend them.

Protect-my-ass-disclaimer: YMMV, of course :)

PLANET: An object that formed in the disk surrounding a star. To be called a planet, an object must be more massive than Pluto

Assuming they meant as massive or more massive than Pluto so as to not actually exclude Pluto from the definition, then that definition would include the following moons each with a mass as great as Pluto's (1.36 x 10^22 kg), as planets:
Earth's Moon (7.35)
Ganymede (14.9)
Callisto (10.75)
Io (8.92)
Europa (4.87)
Titan (13.46)
Triton (2.16)
Arguing the precedent argument that Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery and the others have not, would be false since the four Galilean moon of Jupitor were named by him as new "wandering stars" (ie planets) when he discovered them since arguing formally that they orbited Jupiter instead of the Earth like all the objects in the sky were believed to, would have been heresy. So I guess according to CalTech we have 15 planets in the solar systm.

[Pluto]'s the largest (discovered) Kuiper Belt object

Which would therefore make Pluto the first discovered Kuiper Belt object to have a moon, making a total of Eight with the seven referenced in the article.

It was later discovered that it was smaller than originally thought. We still call it a planet today because we've been calling it one all along.

Given that there are other Kuiper Belt objects on the same order of magnitude in diameter as Pluto, and that Kuiper Belt objects with moons seem common, isn't there even greater reason to reclassify Pluto? With a mass of just 4% of the next smallest planet (only 1/8th the most massive moon in the Solar System), why should it continue to be singled out from the other KB objects? Isn't science about taking new information and changing our assumptions and definitions to comform with new facts as they discovered?

static mirror can be found here.

Realplayer sucks and you know it. Boycott Realplayer! http://www.hawk606.f2s.com/burp.htm

It's here, on The Red Thread site (which is going to be moved to a new address soon). They have a nice collection of related quotations, sorted by author and by subject.

It's here, on The Red Thread site (which is going to be moved to a new address soon). They have a nice collection of related quotations, sorted by author and by subject.

It's here, on The Red Thread site (which is going to be moved to a new address soon). They have a nice collection of related quotations, sorted by author and by subject.

It's here, on The Red Thread site (which is going to be moved to a new address soon). They have a nice collection of related quotations, sorted by author and by subject.

Unhappy ? thanks to the beauty of Matts formail you can mail them by simply clicking this link :)

Click here to mail them :)

Whether or not they continue serving up spyware to the public? Yea, you get your songs, but they get your information! Why would anyone want to install a bunch of garbage on their system? Here is a link to a page with more information.

Thanks for pointing out these sites; I hadn't run across them before. I'll have to grab the URLs for my own links. :)

I know enough Russian to get into trouble and I'm a filksinger, so I've been enjoying reading and translating Russian filksongs posted on the Web, as well as downloading filk mp3s and fanvideos (including some fun LARP ones). I've got a short list of links and translations I call Gateway to Russian Filk. I recommend it especially to Tolkien fans. (I also apologize for the ugly HTML.)

If you know Russian, Kilor's Catalog is a massive Russian filk mp3 link site, leading you to songs by over a hundred different filkers.

Russian fandom is immensely freer than it used to be, and they seem to be making the most of it.

Maureen

Crap! Url didn't show.

http://www.randomrandumb.f2s.com

I would also like to know how the worm was labeled as non-destructive if it, "will try to delete files of common anti-virus and firewall products. If the files are in use and cannot be deleted, the worm will create the file %SYSTEM%\Wininit.ini, which causes the files to be deleted when the computer restarts." Granted it doesn't try to fry your BIOS chip, but I last time I checked anything that deleted files was destructive.

Extropia has a detailed tutorial on databases of all types.XML:DB discusses the differences between object-oriented databases, hierarchical databases, and relational databases in detail. You may be interested in DBX a DBMS that is written completely in PHP, and works using XML style text files as its native format.

I found this SQL queried XML database in PHP. Seems very kewl.

taskbar grouping (of a kind) was also sort of implemented in that you usually had just the one icon on the taskbar for each application, irrespective of how many documents/windows it had open

it also had some lovely features, such as the ability to give a window the input focus or move it around whilst keeping it's z position in the window 'stack'; something i really miss in windows even now.

me and a few friends have made DBX - a DB system in PHP that uses SQL as the query lang., and XML files as the storage format at the backend... tediuous, yes; wierd, yes; but beautiful, and FAR FAR easier to install/use than MySQL/anything else if all you've got is a guestbook running. It's available here.

me and a few friends have made DBX - a DB system in PHP that uses SQL as the query lang., and XML files as the storage format at the backend... tediuous, yes; wierd, yes; but beautiful, and FAR FAR easier to install/use than MySQL/anything else if all you've got is a guestbook running. It's available here.

me and a few friends have made DBX - a DB system in PHP that uses SQL as the query lang., and XML files as the storage format at the backend... tediuous, yes; wierd, yes; but beautiful, and FAR FAR easier to install/use than MySQL/anything else if all you've got is a guestbook running. It's available here.

me and a few friends have made DBX - a DB system in PHP that uses SQL as the query lang., and XML files as the storage format at the backend... tediuous, yes; wierd, yes; but beautiful, and FAR FAR easier to install/use than MySQL/anything else if all you've got is a guestbook running. It's available here.

me and a few friends have made DBX - a DB system in PHP that uses SQL as the query lang., and XML files as the storage format at the backend... tediuous, yes; wierd, yes; but beautiful, and FAR FAR easier to install/use than MySQL/anything else if all you've got is a guestbook running.
It's available here

me and a few friends have made DBX - a DB system in PHP that uses SQL as the query lang., and XML files as the storage format at the backend... tediuous, yes; wierd, yes; but beautiful, and FAR FAR easier to install/use than MySQL/anything else if all you've got is a guestbook running.
It's available here

The site is here.

Though I'm a server jockey, and working on mostly server apps that are deployed on linux, I am currently being forced to use W2K at my office for development, which are then ported to linux for deployment. Screwy engineering process, but one I've learned to cope with because other developers have felt our pain, and made life better for everyone by porting the best of the open source tools.

I use Cygwin for most of my CLI tools. It provides a bash prompt and an incredibly useful set of tools such as grep, find, diff, ssh, tar, gzip, autoconf, automake, make, gcc and others. Beyond that, many other useful tools have been ported or are easy to port because of the services provided by cygwin. I have had problems getting cvs to work correctly. I have also had problems getting emacs to look correct in the console window.

I also use emacs for all of my text editing and devlopment needs. Not only does it give you a powerful development environment in conjunction with visual c++, it can also be hooked into cygwin. I tried VisEmacs and didn't like it (YMMV) as much as simply setting the proper environment variables and churning out programs with emacs 'compile' set to run nmake.

Here you go. It is the Windows version of StarOffice (I am at work), but it should be just about the same look and feel as the linux OpenOffice.

The formulae for static and kinetic friction are:

F(s) (lessthan)= u(s)N *

F(k) = u(k)N

Where the u's are actually mu's (use your imagination), which are the coefficients of friction, and N is the weight of the object (mass*9.81 m/s^2)

If you look at a table of friction coefficients, you'll see that the coefficient of static friction is always less than the coefficient of kinetic friction.

As far as why static friction is always higher than kinetic friction, I always thought (IANAPhysicist) that it makes sense if you look at it on a microscopic scale. Surface roughness now looks like "mountains" sticking out of the surface of the two objects in question. When there is no relative motion between the objects, the mountains are fully interlocked, and it takes some extra force to get them unstuck. But once you get them moving, they bounce along off of each other, but they don't get fully interlocked of course, because on the scale of surface irregularities, 1 mm/sec is still pretty damn fast.

I always thought of friction coefficients as a statistical average of the "roughness" of two surfaces.

* sorry, I don't know the Unicode for a lessthan sign.

WinMX is an excellent replacement for Napster.

You need to use it with an updated server list. The default list is pretty
useless.

Instructions

1. Get WinMX 2.6 at http://www.winmx.com
   
   
2. Install it and run it once
   
   
3. Replace the "nservers.dat" file with this file:
   
   http://www.trippynet.f2s.com/nservers25.dat.
   
   You'll have to rename it to nservers.dat
   
   
4. Run WinMX again. It will squeak about the sever list being out of date.
   Choose the final option, "ignore". It may prompt you for a default login
   and password. You can enter anything for these values.
   
   
5. Once you're done, select "connect all" on the high capacity networks
   section and start searching.
   

WinMX searches on several networks at once, so results tend to trickle in
rather than hitting you all at once like with Napster. This can get annoying
since it sorts new results on the fly which means that previous results will
jump around in the list. You may wish to let it go for a few seconds, or
until you get the results you want, and then hit the "stop" button to
prevent new results from coming in.

Also, set your defaults for screening files. I go with "cable or better" for
connection and a bitrate of 128 k (only). Some audiophiles find this
insufficient and go for a higher bitrate, but to most ears, the only
difference is the larger file size and download time of mp3's with high
bitrates.

WinMX will find everything you search on, much like Napster, but the
connections aren't quite as reliable. If you get "connection refused" or
most other errors in red text, forget it and move in. If it says "busy, but
may join queue", you can join the remote queue by right-clicking on it.
WinMX will update your status periodically to tell you your position in the
queue.

It also works for other file types, like pictures and videos. You can
probably guess which types of multimedia are most commonly traded :)

hey man its 2 cool. i want that. are you gifting that to me ???

Linux client is here (lameness filter on the actual file) php frontend phpdonkey also here.

http://www.metlin.f2s.com/a2u.html

So I was looking around and found some
interesting interviews. I guess he's a chess outlaw.

It is really depressing to see that Bobby Fischer finally went over the edge mentally. In 1999 he accused Jews of causing all of his problems. Here is a transcript of the radio interview where he first talked about it.

The following links may shed more light on this whole thing:

Tim Krabbé's Chess Curiosities, entry #134 -- which links to further stories at Chlodwig's chess page and Leonid's chess theory page.

I, for one, tend to think that it is Fischer; the style of play is definitely not computer-ish at all, and as was pointed out, few and far between are the players who could expect to achieve these kinds of scores against strong grandmasters -- let alone with those kinds of garbage openings.

And for the record, I'm a player of about 1750 USCF strength; by comparison, a rank beginner is about 800-1000, a weak master is rated 2200 or so, and a strong grandmaster would be 2600 or above.

I came across a JavaScript Eliza implementation and turned it into

Virtual Tech Chat

A parody of AOL UK's online tech support, which arguably gives more sensible answers ;-)

There is an article about it here, as well as his own words here.

I have started to use PayPal to send a few bucks to people who's freeware I use or who's causes I like. I keep about $20 in my PayPal account that I have generated from ebay sales of thinks like junk-to-me books or electronic bits, and occasionally send $5 to someone for GPL software or things like that.

I think that this model for content payment is workable, but maybe not at the corporate level.

Maybe I'll send fairtunes a few bucks...