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But why are these things not open-source? It sounds like Canonical are just a bunch of a**holes.

There are really two different issues at play here: Does Canonical have packages in Ubuntu that aren't licensed such that a derivative distro couldn't use them without begging for permission? (that they have copyright over: if Canonical managed to get a 'yeah, you can put our firmware blob in your repository; but that license is non-transferable' agreement out of some hardware vendors, that wouldn't be GPL-purist; but it wouldn't really be Canonical's call that FungusNix isn't allowed to reproduce those packages). To the best of my knowledge, while some of their server-side stuff (Landscape, Ubuntu One) is proprietary on the server end, there aren't any Canonical-owned client packages that aren't GPLed.

The second issue is that of Trademark: Here, Canonical shows no signs of enthusiasm for losing their trademarks through inaction, and they definitely have the law on their side if anybody starts naming distros in a way that suggests a connection with their projects.

However, I don't think that this is really a bad thing, or that OSS licensing would even be desirable(if it appeared that a distro were deliberately sneaking trademarked assets into every nook and cranny, or doing something analogous to the old Nintendo Gameboy cartridge header logo lockout stunt, I'd prefer that they die in a fire, that would be a different case entirely). Trademarks are a (sloppy, antiquated; but nevertheless common) tool for knowing what people and companies are associated with what products and services. This seems like a good and valuable function. Isn't it good to be able to distinguish between something that is or isn't provided by Canonical? Now(as trademark law allows) it is perfectly valid for non-Canonical (har, har) distros to make it clear that they are derived from a Canonical distro, they can even mention it by name(just as store-brand products are free to say 'compare to X-Name-Brand-Product!'). They just can't insinuate that they have an association with Canonical that they do not.

I don't bother sorting or categorizing or anything. I just have procmail send a copy to an archive file which I rotate once a year, and I index it all with mairix: http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ . I can search on date, sender, subject, body, etc, and in a few seconds I have what I need.

I wouldn't posit this as the best way, but it's what I do. I keep my archival mail on a local filesytem arranged in directories, stored in the old-school mbox format. I run Dovecot under OS X for IMAP access to those messages from anywhere; when I need to search through the whole collection, I use mairix (an indexing and retrieval system).

mairix is a useful addition to a maildir setup: http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/

You failed to mention the wonderful telephøne system and mani interesting furry animals. Those responsible for that post have all been sacked. signed : JUTTE HERMSGERVORDENBROTBORDA http://www.smouse.force9.co.uk/monty.htm

Incidentally, we here at Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse in Baltimore used some free software to help kick off the latest salvo in the Maryland ACLU's battle to reveal the full extent of the MD State Police's activist surveillance program.

We used mairix, the excellent command line email search tool, to turn up some correspondence that basically caught the State Police in a lie - we found some messages from one of the undercover agents involved that predated what the MSP was claiming was the temporal extent of their operation, and pointed towards a broader police fishing expedition the details of which should be revealed as soon as (if?) the MSP and other agencies comply with the information requests the ACLU has filed.

It's really satisfying to use free software to fight for civil liberties!

http://www.area52.force9.co.uk/ekiga/

Thats a howto for ekiga for windows :) works very well,

Some of those comments are references to the opening credits of Mønti Pythøn lk den Hølie Grailen.

In case you're like me and never watched "Robot Wars"

http://www.tectonic.force9.co.uk/bestbots.htm/
http://www.m5industries.com/html/press/sfweekly.ht m/

I have pretty modest requirements, but still found a lot of solutions lacking. At the moment, I am pretty happily using Plans (http://www.planscalendar.com/).

For ToDo functions, I use TDL (http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/tdl/)

Convert everything into mbox format. formail will help you with that.

Use mairix to search through email.

mutt is the best mail client ever.

-rsw

Rough trans: The address of the homepage you wish to find is not here or doesn't exist any longer. You can try the following: Check if the address is spelled correctly. Notice that it has meaning if you use capital or lowercase letters!

Or maybe it says something about a moose.

It's not so much that this will be implemented camera-side. It won't. EVER
But this patent would give HP the opportunity to sue anyone utilizing face-obscuring techniques to prevent their photograph from being captured. This would put Michael Jackson squarely in the crosshairs of HP's legal patent defense team for infringing on their patent.

Well, the point is that you shouldn't have to remove it, as (one would imagine) websites should not be going out of their way to identify you as an Opera user so that they can serve you something broken. (Although there are a very small number of sites that do this as a misguided protest over Google AdWords in the unregistered version of Opera - I can't find any references right now.) Opera actually explain how the spoofing works here and point out how you can always still detect Opera.

Opera would have a vested interest in making sure that the string is always there for people who are actually looking for it, to compile market share statistics (there is some discussion of the spoofing problem on that page also).

It appears to be a mix of leet speak, m00se credits and Knights Who Say "Ni", the latter two being from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".

Try http://alsutton.force9.co.uk/

It keeps track with releases :)

I suppose if you think that science is a religion, you could argue your points. However, the definition of religion I get in Meriam-Webster implies faith, which my Sunday school teacher always defined as belief without proof.

Now the idea of science as religion is not new. In fact, there is a nice bit about it in Contact by Carl Sagan, in which the religious guy tells the atheist that she believes in science and does a cool experiment with a Foucault pendulum.

The difference between science and religion is then not that they believe but what they believe. Everyone believes in something. That's what humans do. Science just attempts to get proof, while most religions (I would say all, but I don't know all religions) are characterised by the lack of proof.

Now the forth road bridge is a stunning design to look at. Opened on the 4th of September 1964 the bridge connected North and South Queensferry replacing the regular ferry service that had stood for 800 years.

If anybody doesn't know it take a look here:

• http://www.firstcity.force9.co.uk/bridges.htm
• http://www.photoguide.to/edinburgh/forthbridges.ht ml" - Lovely photos

No, Nicola Tesla did.

"The Great Radio Controversy
He (Tesla) invented Wireless radio, but Guglielmo Marconi was given the credit until June 1943,
when The U. S. Supreme Court finally settled the matter, after 16 months of investigating patent records and scientific publications,
and declared that Nikola Tesla was the true inventor of modern radio technology.
This was known as the Great Radio Controversy.
Unfortunately, most school children are still taught that it was Marconi, which shows
how simple it is for us to regurgitate uncorroborated legends, without checking on the up to date facts."

Also...along the Bell lines...

Bell Labs invented the "cellular concept"...many stations sharing common channels...

Satellite communications were another first.
(And yes, Arthur C. Clarke invented the idea of
geosynchronous orbits which the first Bell Labs Comm Satellite used.
This orbit is also known as the "Clarke Orbit")

An American programmer goes nuts trying to work within a group of Indian programmers who in his mind "write half-assed code, cut corners, and cover up mistakes."

Meanwhile, an Indian programmer goes nuts trying to work within a group of American programmers, who in his mind are slow, lazy and underproductive team members.

In India after the Bhopal disaster, were new enforced laws brought into existence that would prevent a repeat? No. That BP/Amoco gas pipe that everyone in Nigeria was told NOT TO GO NEAR. What happened? Boom and lots of people died. Quoting,

There have been similar incidents in other parts of Africa. More than 30 Kenyans died in July as they collected petrol from an overturned tanker lorry. In Cameroon, about 120 died as they gathered fuel at the scene of a railway accident.

Did I miss something, or have the scenes from Mad Max with the fuel shortages become reality? To give a more measurable indication of this, third world driving is world famous, neither the right nor the left side is reserved for cars driving in a particular direction. Instead vehicles are just grateful that a road exists at all and drive in a haphazard way. If you watch Lonely Planet on the Discovery Travel & Leisure channel you will see that head-on collisions occur far more than any other in all countries except developed ones. Here are some statistics (scroll down to automobiles). From this same source, I quote,

Ferries in places like Bangladesh, Haiti, The Philippines and Hong Kong have had major disasters from capsizing due to overloading and collision. In roughly an eight-year period, there were more than 360 ferry boat accidents killing 11,350 people.

Like in the US, if you picked up a dog and ripped his heart out in the mall everyone would be like "Oh my God!" but if you do it in a market in China/India it's, well, it's like pointing out that the sky is blue. This lack of respect for animal life and human life (road crash statistics) is indicative of the peoples' thinking. Anyone says, "but eberybody is different" is wrong to some degree. There's always some level of conformity. Even a staunch anarchist in the US can drive, he doesn't "disobey" red lights all the time and "ignore" stop signs all the time. A true anarchist would sit at the roadside and throw roadkill at passing vehicles, would piss in the middle of the freeway stopping all the cars, would attack a drive-thru bank with a sledgehammer, would walk in the street with a long knife in his hand, would throw a lit cigarrete on the floor at the gas station so he doesn't have to pay for his gas, etc.

I could fill this post with my personal experiences whilst visiting India e.g. electrician "If it catchs fire, then I give you half your money back and I fix it". Suffice it to say that look at my website to see the conditions your Indian software is written under. Notice the walls inside the houses - no wallpaper, shredded paint. But that's normal and natural, npbody notices it, it doesn't occur to them, just as making dangerous shortcuts whilst designing & coding don't occur to them. Same as that lost puppy look that you get when you tell a newbie that his PC has been fried because he opened an email with an attachment. He then says "What's an attachment" the thought never occurs, same as nobody *demands* to look at a company's balance sheet in the middle of a job interview. Read this to find out what these countries are actually like. No marketing trash. News like this happens all the time. I mean skyscrapers collapse by themselves all the time - they don't need Osama binLaden.

This one doesn't appear in a lot of older comp sci books, because the UK kept it secret for a long (very long) time. But it predates ENIAC. Now we're back to definitions of "computer". Make it wide enough, and Bababage wins (by a healthy margin)

BugBear

A computer and network geek who seems to go by the name of markl and nothing else has some fascinating pages on the Domesday Project. He even seems to have some movie clips but I have not looked at them.

And it's Doctor Doom. Neophyte...

Really all you'd need would be the Doozers from Fraggle Rock and you'd be set. They'd build the loader in the morning, it would work all day, then you could snack on it at night...

And yeah, I know, that's the NRA so you won't believe _them_, even though the references are complete enough to track them to their original sources _outside_ the NRA

I am amused by the irony of it all. The subject line is "Logic Failure". I ask for references to studies that indicate whether the more guns argument will lead to a reduction in the crime rate to prove this is not a myth perpetuated by the gun lobby, and all of your links are from the NRA website...

You are correct, I do not believe a single word they have to say, because they are biased and I have no reason to believe that any study they have commissioned or refer to has any academic validity.

Tell me, would you go to the website of big tobacco to find out the health risks of using their products?

There's gobs of less-scientific, anecdotal evidence to suggest that guns have major defensive utility in the hands of law-abiding citizens:

BFD! If you are inclined to believe such "evidence", there is a lot of "evidence" to suggest that people are being abducted by aliens...

The liberal mainstream press chooses to ignore all this data. Really! But it's nontheless out there.

Bravo! Spoken like a true conspiracy theorist!

I do a search for "izzy's theories", looking for an fanart site hidden deep in the bowels of Tripod:

Google gives me what I'm looking for in its first result.
The newcomer (Tea? O, Ma!) gives me Conspiracy Theories.

I hope they fix their design by the time they get out of beta, or else Teoma is doomed. BTW, I'll never switch over from Google, what with the cache option and all.

Remember that episode of 'Married with Children' where Al couldn't remember the name of a record of a tune he had stuck in his head? He kept asking everyone if they knew where `"go with him..."' was from, but no one knew.

Wasn't MIT working on something like this? Some kind of fuzzy waveform pattern recognition?

(There's still the same old problem of needing legal access to ALL recorded songs known to man, in order to have a complete search domain.)

What are you doing, debugging with the lights on? :-) Also, from a walkthrough for Infocom's "The Lurking Horror":

"Some notes about the game before we start, TURN OFF the FLASHLIGHT when you are in lighted areas to conserve the batteries, I won't mention this is the solution. When and where you start getting tired will vary depending upon the number of moves you've made. So when you are told that you are getting tired go back to the kitchen in the computer block and drink from the bottle of Coke which you will find in the refrigerator."

Later on, it gives instructions on how to get the hacker to repair your filesystem, and borrow his valuable master key for some Chinese food.

I sure hope ESR has implemented these features...

• http://www.OliveTree.com Bible-In-Pocket
• http://www.landware.com
• http://www.infinitysw.com
• http://www.standalone.com
• http://www.halcyon.com/ipscone/apcalc/overview.htm l
• http://snafu.de/~tjawer/tjhome.htm
• http://home.earthlink.net/~davidzimm/dizzysoft.htm l
• http://www.evolutionary.net/
• http://www.arslexis.com
• http://www.pocketsensei.com
• http://www.orbworks.com/
• http://www.netplus.freeserve.co.uk
• http://www.mobilegeographics.com/
• http://pdabusiness.com
• http://216.91.254.26/palm/
• http://www.tealpoint.com
• http://www.note-smart.com
• http://www.iSilo.com
• http://palmdepot.dir.bg
• http://www.mobilegeographics.com/
• http://www.ellams.force9.co.uk
• http://members.xoom.com/PPilot/
• http://www.beiks.com
• http://www.tobelstudio.com/
• http://cnr-oxy.cnr.pmf.hr/~kdekanic
• http://www.ecamm.com
• http://www.fortunecity.com/underworld/rpg/22/
• http://www.mti-mimir.com
• http://www.micoks.net/~dbennett
• http://aws.com/
• http://www.cityinyourpalm.com
• http://zerodefect.net/danreed
• http://www.dogpatch.org/etext.html
• http://palm.dahm.com
• http://www.firepad.com
• http://www.vindigo.com
• http://www.innogear.com
• http://www.cue.net
• http://www.avantgo.com
• http://www.hz.com
• http://www.geodiscovery.com
• http://www.laridian.com
• http://www.eyemodule.com
• http://www.atelier.tm/palm/scc.html
• http://www.tealpoint.com
• http://www.purepalm.com
• http://www.pdatoolbox.com

I think the most obvious predecessor to the Data Haven is the "Swiss", or Overseas Bank Account, affording the rich and discreet the opportunity to hide their wealth in a safe place away from prying eyes and overzealous governments. Use the equation that information is money and the Data Haven is a new feather on an old hat idea that frankly has taken far to long to be implemented imho, and not a creation of Islands in the Net or Cryptonomicon.
In that vain I would like to congratulate HavenCo for getting us up to speed, and ask the CTO:
During the 1980's insider trading crackdown, the US government, specifically the FBI, was able to use intimidation and clout to break open the records of one of those supposedly impenatrable overseas accounts to gain eveidence in the case against the infamous Michael Milkin. Do you forsee history repeating itself and HavenCo or the Sealand government being intimidated or coerced into opening up your data to other nations with vast and far reaching power?
And the question we all *really* wanted to ask: will the dramatic theft scene in the next Mission Impossible sequel be Ethan Hunt stealing valuable data from under the noses of highly trained HavenCo guards?
-chorder

Shocking as it may sound, cloning humans is possible and has been done already. A small image of a cloned subject is available here. The scientific article has been published here. However the behaviour of the clone may be unpredictable.

I didn't have any trouble accessing the Sunday Times page from here in the UK.

I've mirrored it if people are interested.

I don't know if you noticed the last word in the original message. It happens to be "haha". Now think. I think I would class this message in the "taking-the-piss" dept. And I'd just like to let you know that I am a "computer nut" to use the fools words and I just got back from a five day Biology field trip. So if we "computer nuts" know nothing about bio, then why the hell would I want to go on a bio field trip?

Gotta get in a plug for my web site:
http://www.lord1.force9.co.uk

(Source: Neural Networks - Artifical Brains by Chris Lucas)
--

For those of you who (like me) can hardly find the Polar Star, here's a nice constellation-browsing site:
http://www.stargaze.force9.co.uk/.

-Lars

I started setting this Linux Nurture site up a few months ago. It's not fully functional yet but you can see the idea. It uses a strange, but lightweight mix of awk, bash and the NoSQL RDBMS and I'm having trouble exporting varibles between scripts.

From the site: "This site connects people with little or no experience of Linux with those who are reasonably experienced and feel willing and able to help others"

Is this a good idea? Would people use it, both helpers and helpees?

If anyone wants to give me hand completing it, or even better hosting it I'd be happy to hear from you. One idea was that it could spawn other sites each with different emphasis (language, distro., interests) but all linked together by a webring.