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If it is, don't accept it. by TuRRIcaNEd · 2000-06-05 01:16 · Score: 3 · on Criminal Libel, Free Speech And The Net

I nearly committed suicide twice, and I know one or two friends that actually did

I don't know what to say to you about that, because I didn't know your friends, and I don't know you. I do know that the same things happened to me however. I lost one friend to suicide, another to heroin addiction (to this day I don't know if he's still alive, because he wouldn't talk to me), and one to what I still believe to be a grisly murder at the hands of a group of yobs with nothing better to do than make other people's lives hell. I also know that he was a bright kid with a bright future. That was the one incident that made me stop being so maudlin, wake up and start standing up for myself. I don't mean physically, any heavily-built human could probably kick my butt if they wanted to, but that's irrelevant, because as you do get older, brains do become more important. You're obviously bright enough, to see as far as you do. I bit my tongue, finished my exams and got the hell out of Dodge, moved to town and am currently heading towards the last year of a Uni course that will (hopefully) see me financially secure at the end of it. Every so often I go back to my home town (to see my family), and see those that used to taunt me, still stuck in their mindset. It's been years, but they haven't moved on. I see them, and realise that I was mentally killing myself with fear and worry over nothing. I may not make much of a difference on a global scale yet, but I'll do my bit from where I'm standing to help those who were in my position out. If you have the ability to think like that, you've already got the f**kers beaten. They're stuck on their islands, proclaiming their manhood, but they've never touched anyone deeply, and it's them who are condemned to eke out an existence as a mediocrity until they keel over.

We're so hyped-up on the sanctity of life that we won't let people opt out of living - people who the rest of the world has already decided are totally worthless;

If I were them, I'd set about trying to prove the rest of the world wrong. Worked for me ;-)

But seriously, If you can transcend the prison that they built for you (and you finished, by letting them get to you) in your head (It will be rebuilt from time to time, recurring depression still affects me. I've done my fair share of crying, but now some people depend on me, and they're so important to me that, well, any problem I have can wait), and look at it from the outside, hopefully you'll see that you don't deserve to be there, not for them, not for anyone. If you're bright enough to use a computer, you have a skill that many don't (even if you're only starting out). Remember, though they don't understand it yet, they'll be working on cars and in factories, or maybe even working in stores when you're outclassing and out-earning them.

Few ever achieve happiness, and the rest either live in their misery or delude themselves that they really are happy, after all, painting on hollow smiles and crying themselves to sleep every night.

I used to think that, and I have the right to feel pain over my problems, but compared to Jason Haas, or the guy on here whose wife was killed by a speeding drunk, or my friends, lying passed out under a bridge, or six feet under somewhere more permanent, hell, I've got a better chance of dealing with my problems than they have. My smile when it shows is definitely not painted. I won't fake emotion for anybody. You can get out of the ruts you're in without letting go of life. For those who genuinely didn't believe otherwise, it's a tragedy. I wish the old adage 'Only the good die young' wasn't true, but sometimes it is, and all we can do is not add to the statistics.

When you wake up tomorrow morning, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, "Where did I say I was going to be today, when I was 6?" Then let me know whether you start crying.

When I was 6, I said I was going to be a pilot. And you know what? I joined the Air Training Corps, hated the herd mentality there and left. But one day, either with money from my music or my work on computers, I'm going to take my money, learn to fly, and I'm going to plot a course directly over my old school, and the places I've been taken to remind me of 'the way it is' with sticks, fists and white trainers, and I'm going to spit on them from a thousand feet.

A hard goal, but not impossible. Please don't give up. Life was much simpler and nicer when you were young, don't think I don't know that. We all wish we could go back sometime, but the sad truth is, we can't. All we can do is take what we've learned and pass it on, while trying to make our lives as much fun as we can (and I can still have a lot of fun at 21). Read Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith for a more eloquent analogy on this and other things.

Obviously something shitty has happened to you, and I hope that it can be resolved. Just remember that pain fades, hate becomes irrelevant and life can be worth it. You could blow your brains out tomorrow, and they wouldn't care, because they don't have the mental capacity to go beyond certain things. They fuck rather than love, they work/drink/fight rather than think and they'd rather die than admit they are wrong. I suspect you are more than that. Don't die because of them, we need more people like you. Live to prove them wrong. And I hope you can hear me too, Ian.

Re:Reminds me of this UNIX "virus" I recieved once by roman_mir · 2000-06-05 00:56 · Score: 2 · on Gnutella VBS Worm

Big deal. I conducted an experiment: a user gets a file that says: This is the Unix version of "I Love You" which works on the honor system. If you receive this mail, you should delete a bunch of GIFs, MP3s and binaries from your home directory, then send a copy of this email to everyone you know and then click on the following link: click this in order to increment the count of systems that this virus had spread to. Thank you. ----- The worst thing is that in less than a week over 480 clicks have being recorded!

I know where he's coming from by felis_panthera · 2000-06-05 00:29 · Score: 1 · on Criminal Libel, Free Speech And The Net

High school is hell.

Unless you are good looking, athletic, dumb as a brick, and don't know a computer from your own ass at least.

People who don't fit in have always been around. People who dare to spet outside the norm for a while have always been criticized. Gallileo was branded as a heretic for his belief that the Earth revolved around the sun. Do you think that if he had had access to something as global and far reaching as the internet that he wouldn't have used it to put forth his theories??

People in general are not open to new ideas. If something comes along to alter what they percieve as reality, they lash back. To many people I went to school with, computers weren't useful, fun, interesting or anything else but boxes that made clicking and buzzing noises from time to time. I will note that these are the same people who thought that reading the ingredients on the side of a cereal package a challenge. Since I preferred books and computers to sports and cars, I was labelled a freak, subject to ridicule, and occasional violence. I was not given the right to retaliate, as my parents, teachers, and many other prominent adult figures agreed, although silently, with the judgement of my classmates.

This young man fought back in the only way he saw available to him. He went to a medium that most of them would never see, but he would be vindicated and justice would be served in his own mind. Was he right to say those things about those people?? Absolutely. He didn't say about them anything that hadn't been said about him or his friends by them in the first place.

In this day and age, people are still being branded as heretics for standing up for their beliefs. If you do not believe what everyone else believes, you are wriong. If you have been branded as an outsider, you'd better damn well stay an outsider because any sort of retaliation is just going to get you into more trouble. I only wish that back then I had have had the power to set up my own webpage with my thoughts and feelings about those who tormented me, it may have made my life a little easier.

Why is a person not allowed to speak his mind? Why is he branded as a potentially dangerous sociopath for standing up for his rights to security and peace of mind... basic, inaliable human rights?? Perhaps society is about ready for a radical change. I suggest a call to arms for all the downtrodden (Bring us your poor, your downtrodden, your huddles masses) people who have put up with crap from a bunch of clean cut, athletic go-getters. A call for all of us who have been labelled 'Geeks', 'Nerds', 'Wierd', or any other insult designed to slander you for being smart, or for being non-athletic. I issue this call, post your rants somewhere they will be seen, post names you remember from childhood that made your lives particularily hard to bear.

Do not break the law, this is not intended as a call ot violence, but a call to exercise your rights of freedom of speech. They can't charge us all, they can't even find us all. I'll be the first person to go, my web-page is started, it'll be posted here for all to see.

Don't let these people take away our dignity by silencing a simple act of retaliation.

Re:Viewers and Players by bonehead · 2000-06-02 01:48 · Score: 1 · on Video Shrinks With MP4

OK, first, there's really no such thing as MP4. This article is the very first time I've seen that term used. What they are really talking about is MPEG-4. Or, more specifically, Microsoft's implementation of MPEG-4. Or, more specifically yet, a hacked version of Microsoft's implementation of MPEG-4. This hacked version is being called DivX, and is basically Microsoft's implementation with a binary patch that removes some restrictions (like only being able to use the codec to encode .asf files)

As far as players go, if you're playing an .asf file, then you're pretty much stuck with Windows Media Player, unless you can still find a copy of VirtualDub 1.3c (see this page to see why you need an old version)

If you're playing a file encoded with the DivX codec, then pretty much any .avi player will suffice, provided you have the codec on your system.

Remember, MPEG-4 is a codec, not a file format.

Re:Open source MPEG-4 encoder/decoder? by bonehead · 2000-06-02 00:43 · Score: 3 · on Video Shrinks With MP4

No, no, no....

There is no relationship between DIVX, the lame pay-per-view DVD scheme, and DivX, the video codec.

DivX, the codec, is simply a version of Microsoft's MPEG4 codec which has been hacked to allow it to be used for file types other than .asf. It's my understanding, though I could be wrong, that it's just a patch to the MS binaries, so no source code available.

(btw, look about half-way down this page to see what Microsoft has to say about other folks writing software that reads .asf files.)

Re:Ranma's not for everyone. (Shampoo) by la1n · 2000-06-01 22:47 · Score: 1 · on Essential Anime

I was kinda indifferent towards Ranma 1/2 until I saw episodes where the Shampoo character was emphasized. Now I've seen the light. See http://www.geocities.com /Tokyo/Flats/2950/shampooincs.html for a good shine :-) Ni Hao Wo Ai Shampoo

Gunbuster I, II, III by vindaci · 2000-06-01 02:59 · Score: 1 · on Essential Anime

I've been watching Anime since I was a little kid. Anyways, the bestest everest Anime film I think is Gunbuster. It's a classic mecha flick from the 80's but I still haven't seen anything that can quite match its drama, scientific accuracy/slander, and its puns/parody and such.

The setting is in sometime in the future (2XXX). The first spaceship Leuksion (sp?) capable of traveling at relativstic speed is launched (by Japan, of course :P) This ship encounters a space creature that destroys it.

The earth, finding out of these space creatures, realizes their danger and mobilizes troops to fight against these creatures (they fight in robot suits, of course). One of the cadets is the daughter of the captain of Leuksion, Noriko. She wants to avenge her father's death but she doesn't measure up, and she doesn't have the zeal for the job.

For some reason, Noriko gets to be one of the two cadets from her school who gets to be part of the first ships to be launched to defend the earth against the space creatures. During their travel on this ship (now the technology has advanced enough to travel at warp speed that does not get affected too much by the relativistic effects), Noriko encounters her first love and learns to build strong relationships with her partner ("older sister") and her coach.

Anyways, going further than this would be ruining this wonderful movie. There are many surprises and twists. It also has a lot of real science stuff in it (Doppler effects, relativity) as well as all those sci-fi science (warp theory... among others). There are "science lessons" every thirty minutes that make a good comic relief.

Any science + Anime fans will fall in love with Gunbuster. Gunbuster link at Geocities (Just picked it out of Yahoo.)

It makes sense? (added bonus: Humor link) by cprincipe · 2000-06-01 02:33 · Score: 2 · on Essential Anime

It makes sense in the end? That's great, because it sure as heck didn't in the middle!!!!

For a laugh, check out The Revolutionary Girl Utena Pants Page. Pure silliness.

Re:Stuff I Dig/Dug. by CodeWright · 2000-06-01 02:10 · Score: 1 · on Essential Anime

FINALLY!

I was beginning to despair of seeing any mention of the ABSOLUTE BEST of all anime' -- the Patlabor duet of films.

In order, my favorite anime' would be:

Patlabor-1 : The Babylon Project [10/10] : The best anime film ever. Hyper-realistic believable near-future high-tech mystery-thriller.
Patlabor-2 [10/10] : One femto-meter from being the best anime film ever. Hyper-realistic believable near-future high-tech mystery-thriller.
Armitage III: The Polymatrix [9/10] : Explores transhumanist evolution on a terraformed future Mars.
Gho st in the Shell [8/10] : Considered the "definitive" exploration of what defines one's humanity.
Battle Angel : Gunnm [7/10] : Dystopian cyberpunk drama.
Appleseed [7/10] : Strange dystopian future with hopeful ending.
Dragonball Z [6/10] : Fun filled kung-foo fighting!

Here's a start by Nezumi-chan · 2000-06-01 00:42 · Score: 1 · on Essential Anime

Try a few of these, they're worth the trouble: Ghost in the Shell - An obvious choice for a geek crowd, the lines between human and machine grow rather thin at times. I recommend the subtitled version, particularly since the soundtrack was altered from the original natural-instrument version (reminiscent of Akira and making a good counterpoint with the relentless tech of the visuals) to a rather yawn-inducing techno mix. Patlabor - The movies were done by the same director as GitS above and are quite well done, but I recommend checking out some of the TV series first to get the background. Essentially, this is a near-future story where humanoid robots are used by the police and military, as well as criminals. Akira - A little old, but a classic of its type. Both high- and low-tech thrills covering the spectrum from orbital lasers to pipe-weilding motorcycle gangs with psychic powers and spontaneous mutation thrown in for fun. Slayers - A personal favourite, pure goofy sword-and-sorcery following Lina Inverse's quest to get lots of money and eat delicious meals. Her companions are every bit as odd and make for a very entertaining mix of personalities. Whisper of the Heart - Not commercially released in North America but available as a fansub I believe, this is my absolute favourite movie. Very low-key, the story hinges on a young girl discovering herself in urban Tokyo. The rendition of "Country Roads" in Japanese halfway through is an experience that you'll remember. Martian Successor Nadesico - The aliens from Jupiter (or further) have attacked humananity and it seems the only chance we have is a privately built battleship called the Nadesico. Unfortunately, the best and the brightest have all been snapped up by the military so they were forced to choose a bunch of talented lunatics as crew. Vision of Escaflowne - High fantasy at its best. A lovely series with a solid plot that gives little away lightly, the visuals are stunning and the music is even more stunning. Don't miss this one. There are literally tons more, but that's a good start. The best in Nova Scotia fandom - NSAMO

1/2 Offtopic: What happend to Project "�bermensch" by Hanno · 2000-05-31 23:33 · Score: 2 · on Answers About The New NOAA Massive Linux Cluster

On the topic of Beowulf clusters, does anybody know what actually happend to Project Übermensch? It looked like fraud right away, but I wonder whatever happened to those involved.

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check this funny napster picture by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-31 23:19 · Score: 1 · on Do-It-Yourself Sue Napster Software

just for laughs - check this picture

Re:Internet Hall of Fame? by Vanders · 2000-05-31 20:00 · Score: 2 · on Donald Davies: End Transmission

Hang on a mo. From http://www.geocities.com/~anderberg/ ant/history/

1961
July
Leonard Kleinrock publishes the first paper on packet switching networks: 'Information Flow in Large Communication Nets' while at MIT.

Is this a paper based on Donald Davies earlier work, or a paper published almost at the same time and i'm getting confused?

Re:Internet Hall of Fame? by Bodero · 2000-05-31 18:21 · Score: 2 · on Donald Davies: End Transmission

Here are a couple of sites you may be looking for.

http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline
http://www.geocities.com/~anderberg /ant/history

Sound Clip by Zeus305 · 2000-05-30 14:05 · Score: 1 · on Pushing Microwaves Faster Than Light

Sound clip here.

Fox lawyers can contact me here or here.

Re:But... by Zeus305 · 2000-05-30 14:00 · Score: 1 · on Pushing Microwaves Faster Than Light

Sound clip here.

Fox lawyers can contact me here or here.

Dare I say this was the Amiga MCC? by theinfobox · 2000-05-29 21:05 · Score: 1 · on AOL/Gateway/Transmeta Team for Internet Appliance

If you ask me, I think this was the so-called Amiga MCC... Want to see the evidence? Just check out this technology brief presented by Amiga on July 16th of last year... or this Amiga Music Video from July 28th, 1999, in which the Transmeta name is seen. The technology they were talking about then was truly exciting. However, if it has all been wasted on an AOL version of WebTV, it will be boring.

-------
TheInfoBox
Another techie hangout... Please visit and crash my site so I can say I've been slashdotted!!

(spread like butter) by LoonXTall · 2000-05-29 08:08 · Score: 1 · on Oxford Yanks Student Page Over Spoof DeCSS

At time of posting, Crosswinds mirrors are down (502 Proxy Error) and AngelFire shot it (404). .sig update please...
http://www.crosswinds.net/~loonthetall
http://www.crosswinds.net/~thesapphirecat
http://www.geocities.com/LoonXTall
http://www.angelfire.com/pa/synder
http://wpoison.netfirms.com/source.html
They're just the source, carefully designed to avoid search engines.

-- LoonXTall

Re:Furst Post by Mr.+First+Post · 2000-05-29 05:45 · Score: 1 · on GNOME 1.2 - What's In It For You?

You didn't take a look, did you?

Re:Fair? No. Cost effective? Probably. by Wah · 2000-05-29 01:13 · Score: 1 · on EBay Pulls MS Auctions, Neutralizes Complaints

True, True. The DMCA only applies if ebay refuses to remove them, correct? It's the gun, not the person. Waving it around is still pretty scary though.
--

Rational Programming is Not an Oxymoron by Baldrson · 2000-05-27 21:57 · Score: 2 · on What Will The Internet Of The Future Be Like?

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

So the art sux? big deal. by Rhinobird · 2000-05-26 15:08 · Score: 1 · on Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell

Too many people say the art in User friendly sux. Big whooping deal. Half the art in the comics section of your local newspaper probably sucks too. It's the writing. (which i admit seems to have gone downhill a bit lately) I've always enjoyed UF, been reading it for about a year and half now (also gpf-comics,and elf life). Hey why not check out my comics?

One more benefit by Kwil · 2000-05-26 03:48 · Score: 1 · on Best Way to Get Kids Started in Programming?

Additionally.. there are a bunch of games already out there that have been written in Java, and you can easily pick up a Java Decompiler and let your kids mess with code that's already been built.

I personally like JAD for opening up java programs:
http://www.geocities.co m/SiliconValley/Bridge/8617/jad.html

KWiL