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If it's going to have a sci-fi sound, though, why not go all the way. I'm currently torn between Landspeeder and Tie Fighter.

I mean, VW/Audi already has the licensing rights for its commercials, why not take the next logical step: "Audi e-tron Star Wars Edition". Available in Darth Vader black, Yoda Green, or Orange-and-White Rebellion Sport.

If it's going to have a sci-fi sound, though, why not go all the way. I'm currently torn between Landspeeder and Tie Fighter.

I mean, VW/Audi already has the licensing rights for its commercials, why not take the next logical step: "Audi e-tron Star Wars Edition". Available in Darth Vader black, Yoda Green, or Orange-and-White Rebellion Sport.

An intriguing response, but the ion wind argument has been made years ago and been found to be wholly inadequate to account for the propulsive effect found in lifters.

So as has already been established, lifter devices work in a vacuum and ion wind can't account for the propulsive effect found with lifters.

So what's the actual mechanism to account for the propulsive effect? Unknown, but that's what makes the scientific endeavor interesting.

With something that looks this hot, why advertise?

Tiled UI

Control Center

Help System

A Way to Get OUT

who built a what that looks like a what now?

But, do, continue with the belittling of those silly fundamentalists accomplishments.

Project Caret, anyone?

DOS v1 had 301 confirmed bugs in IBM's bugs database so IBM wrote DOS 1.1 from scratch, all versions since are built on that version

According to the Wikipedia entry on IBM PC-DOS, DOS 1.1 was written by Tim Paterson (the original author of 86-DOS) after he started work at Microsoft. A quick scan of Google seemed to back up the idea that Microsoft wrote DOS 1.1 for IBM.

You might still be able to process it into B&W. I don't know how this would be done with K-14, but I recently found a roll of K-12 in an ancient camera (Undevelopable for a VERY long time, even at Dwayne's) and developed using D-19 and this process: http://lavender.fortunecity.com/lavender/569/k12bwnegdev.html

Jet Jaguar approves of this vehicle.

You forgot the obvious link in case you're not the only WHOOOSH in this thread.

Back in the 70s, I always thought Frank Rizzo was a little "out there" when he had all of the Philly police vehicles painted bright blue like this one.

Now, with this new finding, over 35 years later, it all starts to make sense.

I would say that your list should be the other way around and the most important factor is to understand and communicate not with the people that are paying you. They are often just accountants and similar people with little insight in how the customer actually behaves.

The essential point here is that if you can understand the need of the customer really well then you are already ahead of the crowd. Every customer has their own semantics, business language and methods no matter how similar their products are to their competitors products.

If you can't understand the customer you can produce something completely and utterly useless or even something that's harmful for the customers business. That regardless of how good code you write.

But writing good code is of course also important. And if you select the right languages you can get a lot of help on the way to write good code. For Java you have FindBugs and a lot of other tools.

And if you can communicate with the people that are paying you it's an added bonus, but if they consider you a grumpy and obnoxious nerd that still is able to do a good job and actually takes good care of the customer you may have your ways. A satisfied customer is good for the business.

And even if you don't directly communicate with the customer in day to day work it's not wasted time to actually try to understand their case. Don't be afraid to check out what they actually do, and get a sense of their situation. Most customers aren't starting from zero, but have a long history of how things are done.

But be very careful with cases where the application requirements are passed through several layers before reaching you as a developer because that is How Shit Happens.

Somehow we keep going... I'm gonna go listen to some Dust Bowl Ballads, excuse me.

May I suggest "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd"? Awfully relevant these days: "Now as through this world I ramble / I see lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a Six gun / And some with a fountain pen."

I get amused when I hear folks complain about how rap music glorifies crime. Songs have celebrated criminals for hundreds of years: "I Shot the Sheriff", "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd", going back to "Whiskey in the Jar" from the 17th century, and of course earlier to ballads of Robin Hood. When the system is corrupt -- which it always is to some degree, but sometimes worse than others -- when every cop is a criminal, than people will glorify the outlaws, and take the sinners to be saints.

I've also noticed that this fortune city personal hom page from 1999 is still under construction... Any one know when it might be done?

Wish I could.... Many of the current motherboards have an 8G max, so 4x2G is all the RAM you can stuff into them. For those who don't have the system RAM to spare for a ram disk, it is another option.

For those who do, I've had good luck with this.

I get $19.71 (24 hrs/day * 365 days/yr * 75% sleeping) * .02kW = 131.4 kWh/yr * $0.15/kWh = $19.71.

If you want to talk about power hogs, I remember when all-tube TVs starting coming out with the 'Instant On' feature - the TV was designed to keep all of the vacuum tube filaments hot all the time so that when you turned it on, it popped into life instead of taking 30-45 seconds for everything to warm up. Those suckers drew serious Wattage! We're talking 10-15 little heaters drawing a couple of hundred Watts in total.

I am the angel of death. The time of purification is at hand.

Actually you're a little bit off base with your analogy, Theo.

I'm into kung fu, rather than yoga.

And I'm a lowly novice, not a master.

But as to where Dhalsim is coming from generally, he seems like my kind of guy. I would be wearing symbols of the victims who need to be avenged, rather than the skulls of my vanquished enemies. Unfortunately my only super powers are (a) perseverence, and (b) the extra adrenaline one gets from being on the side of justice.

... but on the "races" bit, yes, for the same offense, blacks more often get jail time while whites walk. Justice might be blind, but it ain't colour-blind when it comes to sentencing.

Did it ever occur to you that there were circumstances, such as prior history, that could affect the sentence? The claim that blacks are being unfairly punished is a totally bogus one.

George W. Bush does coke, gets arrested, gets a new drivers' license number "000000005" to hide the arrest, gets a bunch more DUIs ... and hasn't done any jail time yet.

If he were black?

You don't want to use a dish for that sort of work, helix antenna's like described at http://members.fortunecity.com/dimoni/ant_qha.htm would work much better.

But there is no denying that Gates did have this vision of a software company at a time when operating systems and most applications were bought bundled with the hardware in EVERY case.

Looks like people (and companies) were writing Operating Systems (and apps) without selling hardware for YEARS before that.

Also, in the English language, "every" and "most" are not synonyms.

I thought they were searching for Olive Oil.

Or maybe it was only for Oil, I don't remember for sure...

http://reactor1967.fortunecity.com/nuke.html

Seem pretty obvious to me. Of course if you are making substantial progress on this, you're going to get something a little more difficult to ridicule than a cease and desist letter from some lawyers.

Actually before the unveiling of the F-117 there was MUCH speculation as to the existence of a secret stealth fighter. There was in fact a game released called F-19 Stealth Fighter.
There was also the speculative Testor's model kit of a F-19 Stealth Fighter from the early 80s that caused much uproar on the US senate floor.
The "stealth fighter" was much speculated before it was revealed. Designation was assumed to be F-19. Of course when the F-117 was revealed it looked nothing like the model designs .

You're joking, but sometimes it's for real. Care to try PL/SQL for that instead?

By gum, you're absolutely right that the authoritarian nightmares of the twentieth century were mostly non-religious. (Not uniformly, though; the Taliban may have been small, but boy, were they scary.) The key difference isn't between religious and non-religious systems, I think, but between different ways of knowing. There's an interesting letter from Richard Dawkins to his daughter, which lays out a foundation for this idea, in that reasoning from evidence is depicted as a good way to know something, while authority, tradition and revelation were bad ways. Authoritarian murderers relied on the strength of their authority--when the people in North Korea were so indoctrinated that they'd rather eat their family members than rebel against the government, that's authority. When Stalin made his wacky decrees because they came to him in a brain cloud, that's revelation. Those aren't good reasons to rely on anything.

Stalin, Mao and their link are no more morally equivalent to your average liberal-democratic secular humanist than a member of the medieval Inquisition is morally equivalent to your average nominally religious member of a Western democracy. The former members of each pair have more in common with each other than either does with the latter set, and it's completely missing the mark to point at secularism as the cause. While religion is the most obvious embodiment of ways of knowing that lead to authoritarianism, it's hardly the only road that leads there.

Does SQL Server Gal look just like Trillian with pony tails, or is it just me?

Not compensating artists/creators for their works = immorality.

Complain to the movie and television studios and record labels then. They are by far the biggest pirates of all. Hell, their entire industries were founded on piracy to begin with!

That's a laboratory curiosity, not a technology to stake your fortune on.

And homebrew Microcomputers were a lab, er home, curiosity as well. If not for them there would be no /.or the web as they exists now. The point is is they are both possibilities, one realized and one needing more research which is what Tesla was doing.

We certainly have software that can take a video of static objects and turn it into a 3d scene.

We have, in TFA, software that can take frames of static objects, remove the dynamic objects among them, and leave us with a 3d scene.

We probably have software that can interpolate a static object which is bounding a nonstatic/elastic layer (the shape of a statue under a swaying tarp, the dimensions of a box inside a grocery bag someone is swinging).

We probably do not, however, have software that can efficiently calculate the at-rest dimensions of an elastic, mobile object(Jessica Alba) beneath a nonstatic/elastic layer (clothes). We've just barely reached the point where we can depict the behavior of the squishy, bony, muscular, hairy human body accurately, much less interpolate a hidden body.

One wonders what it would cost to develop such software to the satisfaction of a pervert, compared to what it would cost to simply fund a movie where the pervert gets to do this.

The London underground isn't a "subway" in London. Yes there are adverts but also other interesting things. There is a definite style to the London underground, which makes it unique. Take a look at this page

http://victorian.fortunecity.com/finsbury/254/tubeads.html

You mustn't forget the poetry either which is all over the underground. The underground is pretty much a historical site, part of the character of the city. If your going to use the underground for a setting you should endeavor to do it well.

It seems to be a missed opportunity to create really great atmosphere.

Mind the Gap ?

shame on you Homer. Or maybe it is not the same thing.
http://www.fortunecity.com/lavendar/poitier/135/jip.wav

And shame on me for remembering Simpsons episodes I saw 10 years ago or something like that.... and then for googleing for a clip.

"... Sun doesn't use Java on a single one of their internal projects (it's banned by policy)."

I've heard that too, but I don't have a link. Can anyone help?

From a recent comment: My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

I think Sun and Microsoft are far more destructive to the computer world than anyone has analyzed thoroughly. This XML thing is just one example.

Quote: "I don't think Java is a particularly big reason for people to like Sun, and tying your company's future to it seems ill-advised."

Exactly. The name change is evidence that Sun has some very technically ignorant marketing people, apparently, or maybe just a very technically ignorant, but imperial, CEO.

My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

From Wikipedia's Criticism of Java: "The look and feel of GUI applications written in Java using the Swing platform is often different from native applications." It seems to me that the average person's experience of Java is that programs written in it are slow and funky, not a good advertisement for a large company.

Eventually, Java will be completely open source. It is not now. Once it is open source, Sun loses control. Does Sun want to lose control of a symbol it is using for its company?

Java is an Indonesian island of 124 million, the most populous island in the world and one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. There have been political problems there in the past. If there are problems there in the future, the word Java will be in the news. More than 90 percent of Javanese are Muslims. Does Sun intend to involve the company with the uncertain future of a Muslim island?

I will now quote someone who considers himself an authority, the CEO of Sun: "Granted, lots of folks on Wall Street know SUNW, given its status as among the most highly traded stocks in the world (the SUNW symbol shows up daily in the listings of most highly traded securities)." -- From the August 23, 2007 badly formatted article linked by Slashdot, Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, written by Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz.

Mr. Swartz, are you an imperial CEO like Gerald Levin of AOL Time Warner? (Time Warner's merging itself into AOL is considered the worst business decision of all time. The company immediately lost $88 Billion.) Mr. Levin called himself an "imperial CEO", meaning that he made decisions without consulting other people.

Mr. Swartz, if you don't have enough technical knowledge even to format your own web page, are you technically knowledgeable enough to run Sun? From the biography on Sun's web site: "Schwartz received degrees in economics and mathematics from Wesleyan University."

I don't believe it will actually happen, but if it does, by changing away from the strong brand of SUNW, known for serious servers, to a brand largely outside its control, Sun will weaken its position in the marketplace, in my opinion.

I don't think it is wise for technically knowledgeable people to work for companies managed by people with little or no technical knowledge. When technically ignorant managers try to run technically-oriented companies, a lot of unpredictable, weird things happen. Why take the risk?

What I was trying to say is that the assumption doesn't necessarily hold, and both the Big Bang theory and the belief that God created the everything share the same illogical assumption.

I don't necessarily want a dump before I set off; it's the nutters one encounters on the Tube that scare me shitless by the time I get to work.

It's called an input-output matrix, kind of like how your favorite search engine aggregates web page votes, except it handles supplies instead.

And that doesn't even consider the possibility of special built relatively independent machines, or of bootstrapping.

The stuff that gets REALLY censored is the animal abuse in slaughterhouses, the toxicity of water supplies by water plant companies, radioactive waste leaking into soil. This is the stuff that is much harder to come by, cause they cause so much controversy.

• First link on Google to "slaughterhouse animal abuse" complete with nausiating pictures
• You are a bit ambiguous with your toxicity of water thing, but I found many sites dedicated to improving water quality. There are even Dr. Strangelove-esqe wackos talking about fluoride conspiracies.
• The very first result on Google when you search for "radioactive waste leaking into soil" is a PBS transcript from 1998. If there is censorship in the US on this issue, then they have done a terrible job by leaving it up for 9 years.

You mean the jolly, candy-like button!

They've moved close to a million units.

Where to? Putting them on store shelves is nothing more than supply chain squeezing. Sooner or later, they are going to end up in a landfill like thousands of Lisas did. You should be able to put them in a much smaller space than the Lisa, so M$ will have beaten Apple in one small way.

Apu .wav file

Evidence in support of Julienne Moore being more sexy than Scully, at least at some point in time.

I've never been able to figure out why if there's a crowd of people there, 1 person ends up doing all of it while the others get in the way.

"As two-person CPR requires a degree of synchronized technique, it is usually more effective for first aid providers to perform individual CPR, and change operators after ten minutes or so." - http://www.fortunecity.com/campus/springbank/973/f irstaid/cpr.htm

This was also before I learned how Apple ganked it from Xerox

Apple didn't steal the GUI from Xerox PARC. In return for an investment in Apple Xerox invited Steve Jobs to Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in 1979. There he saw some of the technology Xerox was working on there. Seeing the gui Xerox came up with he took the idea back to Apple where the Woz, Steve Wozniak, had a team work on the Lisa which became the Macintosh.

Now here I am 12 years later, typing on an AMD based computer running Windows XP, with my semi-new Mac Book Pro getting more and more use each day; I'm trying to "switch"(back). Much of this desire to switch is fueled by Microsoft's political moves, and not their technology. 2 examples...

For the past 10 years I've used Windows PCs 99%+ of the tyme however I too am switching because of Microsoft. Because of MS's policy of requiring Activation as well as WGA/WPA a few months ago I got a desktop PC with Linux preinstalled and hopefully rsn I'll be getting a Macbook Pro as my laptop.

In my perfect world, Microsoft, Apple, and a major Linux distribution each get 1/3 of the market share, with plenty of room for new up-and-coming OS's.

I'd add interoperability.

Good point about "gamers." I find it really odd that the "hard-core gamer" title goes to the people who stick with the same type of games over and over. FPS, Madden, and WoW all have their place, but the guy who spent hours (days?) waiting to play Madden with purtier graphics isn't really my idea of a "hard-core gamer." Trolling ebay and the dearly departed lik-sang for an import title () that'll never reach the shores of your particular nation is more of my idea of a hard-core gamer.

that or the guy who died from playing too much in theR.O.K

By 1 time limit, I mean that if you have been elected as the governor of a state, that's the last time you get to be governor period, in any state.

Some of them have a solution time in the hundreds of hours.

http://underworld.fortunecity.com/track/946/

Wow, free web hosting! How could it fail?

The "MP3 player made from duct tape" was presumably an early version of the Eiger MPMan. I own a Compaq/Hango PJB-100 (first hard disk based MP3 player, i.e. the ur-iPod) which still works fine (now playing Prokofiev's second piano concerto). Ironically, it actually is held together with duct tape now.

For those who don't like 8.1 meg PDF files, here is a 2.1 meg HTML mirror including images and all.

Bit late, but maybe better late than never.

Thank goodness there are people like you to save us from "nonsense" of those "quacks" at Scotland Yard, MI5, FBI, NSA, and the rest.

Good point, but then again, maybe you're looking for quacks in the wrong places. Also, here is some perspective published 19 days after the MSNBC article.

I guess it is "well known" that explosive could in no way be made from a wide range of readily available materials like peroxide as was used last year in the London subway attacks.

Yes, it looks like it would be pretty easy to make HTMD, especially on a plane.

The question here isn't whether or not there are bad guys out there. The question is about how to respond to them. It seems to me like we might be getting it wrong.