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This man http://www.geocities.com/cjstender/McArdle.htm/ has been selling plots of the moon for at about thirty years. I still have a certificate for the plot that I bought in the early eighties (just $1.00).

The US has less social mobility than Europe.

That's just utter and complete BS, sir.

A careful comparison reveals that the USA and Britain are at the bottom with the lowest social mobility. Norway has the greatest social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Germany is around the middle of the two extremes, and Canada was found to be much more mobile than the UK.

Over longer time periods, there is more mixing but still not that much and those who do slip into different quintiles are typically at the borders of their category (e.g. those dropping out of the top quintile are typically at the bottom of that group). Only around 5% of families rise from bottom to top, or fall from top to bottom.

British Keynesian economist Will Hutton quotes US data from 2000-1 which "compare[s] the mobility of workers in America with the four biggest European economies and three Nordic economies." The US "has the lowest share of workers moving from the bottom fifth of workers into the second fifth, the lowest share moving into the top 60 per cent and the highest share unable to sustain full-time employment." He cites an OECD study which "confirms the poor rates of relative upward mobility for very low-paid American workers; it also found that full-time workers in Britain, Italy and Germany enjoy much more rapid growth in their earnings than those in the US . . . However, downward mobility was more marked in the US; American workers are more likely to suffer a reduction in their real earnings than workers in Europe." Thus even the OECD (the "high priest of deregulation") was "forced to conclude that countries with more deregulated labour and product markets (pre-eminently the US) do not appear to have higher relative mobility, nor do low-paid workers in these economies experience more upward mobility. The OECD is pulling its punches. The US experience is worse than Europe's."

What I want to know is what ever happened to Andy Inkhnato's column? He was the "back page guy" for MacWorld, and I think MacUser before that (and his website still claims that he is), but I haven't seen him anywhere in MacWorld in a long, long time.

Maybe if the mac gets back to 20% market share he'll end whatever hunger strike he's been on and the MW editors will hire him back... probably not, but I can hope. He did invent Web That Smut back in 1996, that ought to be worth something on a guy's resume.

(1) No he doesn't, look closer.
(2) So what?

try bluemote [1] if you have a T610 mobile phone.
It locks your computer if your gsm is unreachable (bluetooth connection).

[1] http://www.geocities.com/saravkrish/progs/bluemote /

Given:

1. all the foment in the air.
2. the fact that the Tokamak was to fusion as the Shuttle was to cheap access to space.
3. I had been working on getting NASA out of the launch service business via grassroots legislation.

...as the, then, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce (that had been successful in passing the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, requiring NASA to buy commercial launch services whenever possible) I decided to go around to the various fusion contenders and come up with a set of about 10 milestones they all agreed would be worthy of prize awards, and came up with some legislation that would have awarded a series of $100M prizes, each for acheivement of one of those milestones.

This was 1992.

I never got very far with this legislation myself but about 3 years later, Bussard decided to submit this legislation -- with a kicker: He blew the lid off the early history of the Tokamak program in a letter sent to all the Congressmen and laboratories responsible for fusion technology wherein he said this:

The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try.

Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts. But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.

Five years later, after working with Koloc and recovering the original images, I discovered that the photographs of the Plasmak plasmoids were almost certainly an artifact of the way CCD arrays shift their images out: The plasma discharge is time symmetric which, combined with the shifting of the image out of the CCD array, produced the illusion of a prolate spheroid. The discharge was so bright it overcame the CCD mask and exposed the image as the image was being shifted out of the array.

This was highly disappointing to but it, along with Bussard's disclosure, shows how deceptive these things can be and why a prize system is superior to providing government funding for polit

Given:

1. all the foment in the air.
2. the fact that the Tokamak was to fusion as the Shuttle was to cheap access to space.
3. I had been working on getting NASA out of the launch service business via grassroots legislation.

...as the, then, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce (that had been successful in passing the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, requiring NASA to buy commercial launch services whenever possible) I decided to go around to the various fusion contenders and come up with a set of about 10 milestones they all agreed would be worthy of prize awards, and came up with some legislation that would have awarded a series of $100M prizes, each for acheivement of one of those milestones.

This was 1992.

I never got very far with this legislation myself but about 3 years later, Bussard decided to submit this legislation -- with a kicker: He blew the lid off the early history of the Tokamak program in a letter sent to all the Congressmen and laboratories responsible for fusion technology wherein he said this:

The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try.

Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts. But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.

Five years later, after working with Koloc and recovering the original images, I discovered that the photographs of the Plasmak plasmoids were almost certainly an artifact of the way CCD arrays shift their images out: The plasma discharge is time symmetric which, combined with the shifting of the image out of the CCD array, produced the illusion of a prolate spheroid. The discharge was so bright it overcame the CCD mask and exposed the image as the image was being shifted out of the array.

This was highly disappointing to but it, along with Bussard's disclosure, shows how deceptive these things can be and why a prize system is superior to providing government funding for polit

In the beginning there was the PLATO network which had a working prototype designed for mass-market which would have amortized itself within 5 years easily at $40/month service, including the rental of a bit-mapped graphics, touch screen, plasma displays. It had realtime multiuser games, even some multiuser 3D first person shooter games, as well as email, discussion fora (the origin of Ozzie's "Notes") and the ability for anyone to write programs for anyone else to run via the network. A single Cyber 760 benchmarked out at several thousand simultaneous users with 1/4 second response time. "Management" decided to focus on the higher profit margin corporate education market.

So I left PLATO and took up position as architect for the authoring system for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America. They had done market research which showed that the thing people most wanted was discussion. Having been from PLATO this was no surprise and indeed it was obvious to me people wanted to be able to provide publications and software services to the public. But when I presented an architecture whose primary discipline was to treat the desktop computer as the host system nearest the user (ie: P2P in 1982) I was told by a decision-maker that "we see videotex as 'we the institutions providing you the consumer with information and services'" Yes that was what he said. He may have been trying to get my goat but that is in fact the direction they took things. In any event I was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my P2P telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web. (Now that via AJAX people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System there is some resurrection of the original vision.) But this wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates coup but already Gates had locked in his position as the bottleneck between Moore's Law and software by retaining ownership of MS DOS while it was being distributed on IBM's hardware.

Lest people think the government is the ultimate savior in all this -- I did make a run at developing this sort of service on my own nickle using PC hardware but was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service, via MILnet, to a XENIX-based competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy. MILnet was, by law, not for public access. Rather it was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies. By that time Usenet was taking off and I couldn't get a seed market to finance any further work.

What Berners-Lee did was admirable in that he aimed lower -- for the low hanging fruit of simple document presentation. The sacrifice of P2P was, however a bit much to sacrifice. I still think that should have remained the "primary discipline". Things are slowly recovering though.

http://www.geocities.com/isaac_hee/Eben_Moglen.htm l

http://www.geocities.com/isaac_hee/Eben_Moglen.htm l

According to this Italian site... this is the The biggest Horn SUBWOOFER of the WORLD:

http://www.geocities.com/royal_device/

The world most powerful with less distorsion and with SUB HORN built under the Audio Room floor.

Don't forget the music (Yes, it's evil, but it could be much much worse.)

Don't forget the music (Yes, it's evil, but it could be much much worse.)

see http://www.geocities.com/floydian_99/poormantripwi re.html

Not quite what he ment...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art
www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Marina/4942/ascii.htm
www.asciiartfarts.com/

You mean Tripwire? Or maybe a poor man's tripwire?

...that was until the commercial fishing and technology came along to start wiping them out

And shark fin soup.

is all the protect we need from rogue robots.

Magnus rocked. He always kicked robot ass. Smashed them to bits. He even saved the earth from water stealing aliens! Whatta guy.

Council of American-Islamic Relations condemns 9/11 in national full-page newspaper ad the next day.

Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah of Lebanon condemns Osama Bin Laden.

Grand Imam of Al-Azhar seminary, Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, condemns Osamah Bin Laden (Plus official text)

Prominent Pakistani Cleric Tahir ul Qadri condemns Bin Laden.

Television preacher Yusuf Al-Qaradawi condemns Al Qaeda

Spanish Muslim Clerical authorities Issue Fatwa against Osamah Bin Laden. There are on the order of 250,000 Muslims in Spain.

High Mufti of Russian Muslims calls for Extradition of Bin Laden. Russian Muslims are 15% of the population there, so this is not a pro forma thing.

List of Muslim condemnations of Terrorist attacks. Also Scholars of Islam and the tragedy of 9/11 attacks

Expressions of grief and sympathy in the Arab world after 9/11. (Includes candlelight vigils in Tehran, anti-terrorism protests in Bangladesh)

Iraqi blogger Riverbend recalls the sympathy she felt on 9/11

You didn't hear any protests because it simply wasn't covered in American news. International news did pick up on these events. How about the people in Arab countries who donated blood after 9/11 because Qaradawi suggested it? What about the flower bouquets people sent in sympathy to the American embassy in Kuwait, so many that they ringed the fence?

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http://www.geocities.com/saravkrish/progs/joymouse /index.html

Try it. I wrote it quite some time back (several years). It hopefully should work now too. Sorry it's only for Windows... I was a windows programmer then. Hardcore linux programmer now.

Thanks,
Saravana

I don't know whether YOU are a Microsoft employee, Mr Anonymous Coward, and I never said you were. You did link to the homepage of someone claiming to be a Microsoft employee called Johnny Lee. See http://www.geocities.com/typopl if you don't believe me. Maybe he isn't a Microsoft employee,but anyone who'd fraudulently claim to be one is even less trustworthy on this subject, methinks.

"But that doesn't explain why AbiWord is still at least 3x slower than MSWord or OOWriter for this given test."

My point is that the given test could not be more Microsoft-centric if it tried. I don't dispute the results of the test itself.

"I fixed a perf bug in AbiWord. Would a Microsoft employee do that?"

So what? Raymond Chen contributes to the Linux kernel, and works for Microsoft. Go figure.

See http://www.geocities.com/typopl/bug5291.html#2005O ct3 for a speed and memory comparison. OOWriter is almost as fast as MS Word. But both AbiWord and OOWriter are getting slower with each new version.

See http://www.geocities.com/typopl/bug5291.html#2005O ct3 for a speed and memory comparison. OOWriter is almost as fast as MS Word. But both AbiWord and OOWriter are getting slower with each new version.

AbiWord and OpenOffice are bloated pigs compared to MS Office. See http://www.geocities.com/typopl/bug5291.html for a speed and memory usage comparison between MS Office 2003/AbiWord 2.2.X/2.4.X, and OpenOffice 1.X/ 2.X.

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20 Years of NES

Need a wallpaper? Visit my website!

Need a wallpaper? Visit my website!

"The biggest problem seems to be that the energy source available seems to be the light energy from a couple hundred watt lamp."

From TFA: 'an industrial searchlight'

I read this to mean one of those 10000W carbon arc searchlights they use to spot planes and highlight new shopping centres, like this: http://www.geocities.com/bobz299/searchlight3.htm

All you need is ColorForth. To be clear, this IDE driver's kind of compact.

Some more links.

They decided they wanted to continue to try to drive capital away from commercial launch services so they could continue to keep a strangle hold on access to space.

Time was when I would have supported NASA's science missions, supported by a commercial launch infrastructure. However, now its clear they just use their science missions as an excuse to block anyone from competing for their monopoly position.

Is this the same Los Alamos that lost 2 computer tapes containing nuclear secrets?

Probably the same Los Alamos that has flying saucers in the basement, if you believe everything you read.

http://www.geocities.com/external45739/Disagree.zi p

- Enables disabled buttons (like "Next" even if you don't select "I agree")
- Makes EULA edit boxes editable again
- Saves and prints EULAs

The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).

But the real source of the problem here isn't with the programmers or vendors of software. The real problem is the protected nature of the insurance industry. The insurance industry is structured to prevent competition from technically savvy upstarts that would be capable of underwriting warranties. Consumers aren't averse to signing end user license agreements with strong warranties. Nor are vendors averse to consulting contracts where the consultant's code quality is underwritten and guaranteed. The problem is basically the way capital is concentrated by the laws of the society. Those laws determine what kind of people have decision-making authority. Right now those laws are biased toward subsidizing wealth concentration which means we're systematically taking wealth out of the hands of the technically savvy and giving it to those who are wealthy.

The result is all manner of market failures impacting the high tech industry, including a failure of insurance underwriting for software.

Same thing happened with the laser used for speed detection aka the "Geico Gun" Not specifically with opening the source code but the company could not actually prove it worked and refused to release technical details of how the gun even worked.

http://www.geocities.com/speeding@sbcglobal.net/li darcase.html
http://www.radardetector.net/viewtopic.php?t=826&s tart=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

and many more links with Google.

Just because law enforcement is using a tool and has been for years, does not mean that it has been thoughly tested and actually works as claimed. Sure, some of these instances may be lawers trying to argue though a back door but hey, you could also refer to it as a check and balance in the system.

Cisco's Internetworking Technology Handbook is a bit dated but a great base resource downloadable in pdf.

Pair the above with IBM's TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview, and round things off by downloading Bable: A Glossary of Computer Oriented Abbreviations and Acronyms since you'll be in acrynom hell.

Probably few /.ers need the above but they've given me a good overview and reference.

For What it's Worth :)

Too thick? Hardly; 6 inches thick is all you'd need. You've never been to SeaWorld? :) Here's the dialog from the movie. I think it's safe to assume that they swapped the formula for several sheets of 6in plexi.

SCOTTY: I notice you're still working with polymers.

NICHOLS (mystified): Still? What else would I be working with?

SCOTTY: Ah, what else indeed? Let me put it another way: how thick would a piece of your plexiglass need to be at 60 feet by 10 feet to withstand the pressure of 18,000 cubic feet of water?

NICHOLS: That's easy: 6 inches. We carry stuff that big in stock.

SCOTTY: Yes, I noticed. Now suppose -- just suppose -- I could show you a way to manufacture a wall that would do the same job but was only an inch thick. would that be worth something to you, eh?

NICHOLS: ... Are you joking?

BONES: He never jokes... Perhaps the professor could use your computer.

NICHOLS: Please...

  He gestures, and Scotty sits at a nearby Macintosh. He surveys the machine quizzically, clears his throat, and in a loud voice says:

SCOTTY: Computer --

  Bones steps in quickly, picks up the "Mouse" and shoves it into Scotty's hand. Scotty looks at the mouse, baffled, then puts it to his lips like a mike.

SCOTTY: (continuing) Hello? Computer...?

NICHOLS (bewildered): Just use the keyboard...

SCOTTY: The keyboard... How quaint.

  Then, preparing his fingers like a concert pianist, he plunges to work furiously. An awesome series of figures and graphics are appearing. PULL BACK to reveal Scotty, now master of the keyboard, while Nichols watches in awe, next to Bones. with a flourish, Scotty hits a last command, and a wondrous three dimensional graphic appears.

NICHOLS (wide-eyed): Transparent aluminum?

SCOTTY: That's the ticket, laddie.

NICHOLS: ... But it would take years just to figure out the dynamics of this matrix...!

BONES: You'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

SCOTTY: So, is it worth something? Or should I just punch "clear"...

NICHOLS: No! (then) No... What did you have in mind...?

BONES: A moment alone, please. (continuing) You know, if we give him the formula, we'll be altering the future.

SCOTTY: Why? how do you know he didn't invent the thing!

http://www.geocities.com/ussmunchkin7/Star_Trek_IV .htm

You might think that it's a particularly great book, but in general people seem to like it. It's up there with other fantasy books like Lord of the Rings, A Song of Fire and Ice, Dune and Discworld *.

The book Enders Game probably wasn't the strongest of the series (IIRC it was expanded from a short story to fill the requirements of the second book in the series), however if all you took away from reading it was a shallow story about beating bullies then it seems to me you may be a poor reader.

* source THE INTERNET TOP 100 SF/FANTASY LIST

Ummm, someone does/did make a soda in a clear can. I cant remember the brand, but it had a clear, thicker and harder shell than a soft drink bottle, but it still had an opaque aluminium top. The drink was also clear, but had brightly coloured beads in it, like bubble tea, but not...

This wasnt it, but you get the idea...

The original freenet predates the web by ages (it started around 1984 or 5):
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/6271/fre enet.html
Alas, it shut down in 1999, after Case Western didn't feel like keep funding it anymore...

It provided a portal to the internet for many people long before most Slashdotters ever heard of this internet thing...

Given those points as a backdrop, your assertion that what you call "piracy" (and please do stop using industry-sponsored emotive buzzwords) caused the production of films in Hong Kong to fall of is certainly false.

It is no accident that cheap methods of reproducing DVDs coincided with the demise of the HK film industry.

http://cio-asia.com/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&artic leid=2175&pubid=5&issueid=55
http://english.sina.com/taiwan_hk/1/2005/0430/2961 6.html
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/8801/jcnopi racy.html
http://www.pwchk.com/home/eng/e&m_article_apr2003. html
http://www.grayzone.com/hkmarch99.htm
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDP/is _1999_March_22/ai_54400833

The above articles describe economic slumps as a factor, however they point to piracy as the primary reason of the demise of the industry. Basically few will invest in making a new film because the returns are crippled by piracy.

I can finally enjoy old episodes of the ABC classic, "Manimal"!

The problem with ID isn't just that it has no proof. It's that its unprovable and un-disprovable. THATs what makes it unscientific. For any scientific hypothesis there should be a measurement, analysis, whatever on which its conclusions depend, such that if that measurement is performed and a different result is obtained, it falsifies the hypothesis. It's all well and good to talk about looking at the evidence before you make up your mind, but that has to be within the context of things for which evidence can actually differentiate between different theories.

The way ID is designed, ANY measurement can be explained away by 'oh, the all-powerful intelligence just decided to set it up that way'. On the other hand, evolutionary theory makes predictions about speciation, the connectivity and mutural relations between different species, etc which can - and all HAVE been - attacked. It has withstood those attacks very well - that is what lends credence to it.

Unfortunately, some people look at that and say 'oh, there is controversy - so any old idea I can throw together must be equally valid!'. And if that 'any old idea' is designed in such a way that it is un-attackable, it comes out smelling like a rose 'see how easy it is to attack evolution? but my idea no one has even found a way to attack it yet!'. That's the logical fallacy that leads to this whole mess.

Anyhow, there are MANY problems with education, etc that are leading to the US falling behind. But that seems to me a lesser point (maybe not in 10 years?). At universities at least, large amounts of the graduate research are done by international students, and many professors are immigrants. That number can be as high as 50% in places. If our educational system is so wretched, at least theirs is often not. So we do still have a large number of brains working on problems within US borders, even if (thankfully?) only half of them were actually educated within the US.

However, the US appears less and less inviting every day to people from the rest of the world. Our standing in the international community has fallen because of our recent actions in the Middle East, and our standing in the scientific community has fallen because of the very visible religious zealots frothing at the mouth over stem cells, evolution, etc. Not to mention that the current administration has a bad track record with ignoring science advisors and trying to influence the results of research studies. Even if those zealots comprise a fraction of a percent of the population, they have a lot of clout. There seems to be an underestimation of just how far this ID thing has spread into law, lots of people saying 'its just in court in Kansas'. Well, its also in Pennsylvania

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9444600/
http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/dover.html

and there have been attempts to push it into law in Michigan (HB 4946).

Scientists in the US are already up in arms about all of these issues - we're nervous and wondering if this country is really a good place be a scientist anymore.
If you were a scientist from outside the US, thinking of a place to go to do your research, and you saw this sort of thing going on in the US, would YOU pick it?

The following article might be illuminating. Pay close attention to the use of the term heterozygosity which is a reference to the measurement of the presence of different alleles of a gene at one or more loci. A decrease of heterozygosity in a poplutation is a decrease in genetic traits available to that population. In other words genetic "traits" are lost.

Here is the link: http://www.geocities.com/farmcollie1/inbreeding.ht ml