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I don't think it was lightbulbs he was holding.

I don't believe Myst III was released until 2001, since it was scheduled to come out that in the first quarter of that year . I bought it not that long after it came out in my current house (which I moved into in October of 2000).

Anyway, it's too bad you're right about the death of the adventure game.

You're thinking of the Tracer Bullet stuff, it's hilarious. Here's a link: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1961/ch_trac er.html

When I saw this article in The Onion, it reminded me a lot of these episodes of Futurama.

A choice quote:

Giant brain: Pathetic human race. Arranging their knowledge by category just made it easier to absorb. Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands.

I would put it to anyone to find more than 5 people in the entire world that *seriously* believe any of those theories, and not merely claim to as a response to somehow satirize or ridicule another person or group of people's sincere beliefs.

Don't be so hasty, you can make a very rational and scientific sounding case for "Intelligent Falling" such as Uncaused Force. It sounds every bit serious and believable as any Intelligent Design piece, and I'm sure you could find plenty of people in the US who, presented with the article, would more than happily sign on for Uncaused Force and the belief that gravity is a lie.

Equally you could look at something like Time Cube which looks like a load of crap, but then there are people like this guy who seriously believe it, and try to make arguments as to why -1 * -1 = 1 is stupid and evil.

Jedidiah.

But are we the buyers are to blame here. Beyond that the market has fragemented. Anyone who expects that there will a killer game that everybody would like is a fool. The tastes of the market are far to varied now. That games are getting lame is because people buy lame games. I have noticed that on Broadcast TV it's sucks. That's because the people who were interested in good shows were willing to cough up a few bucks a month for cable/Sat. Now cable and Sat are starting to suck because of torrent and netflix.

What's it mean?

[Shrugs]

Ultimately, there has to be a tax imposed by the Meta system to remove Metas from circulation just as governments control demand for fiat currency by demanding said fiat currency for legal tender (primarily tax payment) -- but the principle should work to let small game authors get a presence and make money if the rules of their game are more appealing to the players than other games.

That metric is compression.

If there were funding for the C-Prize these guys might have walked away with a large chunk of it but then they might not have been able to acquire the monopoly rights they're pursuing via the patent application. The C-Prize description follows:

Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:

The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.

The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

ExplanationA very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.

Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:

Kolmogorov Complexity

Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.

Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:

Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.

In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.

The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.

Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.

Actually I'm an upper-middle-class moderate libertarian with a spoonful of environmental green, although my voter registration says Republican. I'm heavily in favor of smaller federal government, personal responsibility, and more state rights, unlike our current glorious leader.

-F.

"Alas, I don't think writing will help. This would require someone in the industry to have the vision to uncover the rights-holder, license or buy the rights, then make the game themselves, most likely. Considering that Slime World is woefully unknown in gaming these days, and I'd have to say the chances of that happening are slim unless one of us starts our own company."

Bah. Don't give up. I pestered Atari Corp. each month from 1986 to 1990 about licensing (or acquiring the company) the Atari Games Corp. post-1984 arcade library for their machines since consumers such as myself did not know they were two separate companies and thus expected the arcade titles to appear on the Atari branded consoles. I was a very torqued Atari 7800 owner when I found out they were separate companies...and especially torqued when "Gauntlet" appeared on the NES and not the 7800. Finally, my complaints were finally heard.

Slime World is a gem, but it is obscure. Not many people remember it. But yes, the rights question is troublesome. Here's the Wikipedia entry for Epyx:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyx

According to this site, most of the Epyx titles are the property of Atari/Hasbro/Atari aka Infogrames:

http://www.geocities.com/conspiracyprime/e2_epyx.h tm

If nothing else, the current "Atari" probably owns the handheld rights to the title.

I'm up for writing a letter to the Atari CEO. Are you? :)

(shameless plug)

For those of you who have struggled to make your favorite OS recognize some old, dated, or esoteric piece of hardware picked up from your latest dumpster dive, I bring you the status bar to end ALL status bars:

http://geocities.com/she_died/#bootSplash

Thanks that rocks. With GRUB for Win I could port something like: bootnext [warning: use adblock or privoxy].
 
Lets me pick my next boot choice from Fedora without waiting for the GRUB menu or messing with my default. Would be cool to get that running on Windows too.

visit this informative website

The short version: a) emotions != logic because the two are frequently unrelated, b) an emotion without logical cause is: worry.

The long version: It is often useful to look at abnormal or abberant versions of a given object of study to ascertain more about the workings of the 'normal' object.

I am male, I score within the 90th percentile on IQ tests (99th percentile for visual tasks), I am an INTJ on the meyer-briggs scale (which has an incident of less than 1% of the population), I have a mood disorder (depression with suicidal ideation), most of my blood relatives are either very smart (similar IQ scores to myself) or autistic/aspbergers, some of my relatives exhibit dyslexia (as I do, to a minor degree) and I am gay (the jury's out on whether this is a genetically heritable trait, but I include it for the sake of completeness). I believe that these factors make me 'abnormal' enough to offer some useful insights into the relationship between emotions and logic.

In my experience, both of myself and through observation of others, I have come to the conclusion that emotions frequently have little logical relationship with anything. Emotions can occur without a clear connection to any internal stimulus (thoughts) or external stimulus (events). Emotions can occur with a physical stimulus (ie. people with serious illnesses often experience 'personality' changes (even prior to diagnosis), taking drugs or medication can alter mood, small children frequently cry and become fractious when tired (which, when you think about it, it totally pointless. Tiredness is rarely painful and can be easily remedied by sleep - why cry about it?). Emotions are frequently out of scale with the stimulus.

I personally don't operate on an emotional level. I'm not without emotion (on the contrary, I find my emotions to be more intense than most people's) but I don't use it to form my thinking or make descisions. To me, emotions are meaningless and often without value, being happy or sad is irrelevant - It doesn't change anything, it's pointless.

When I am seriously ill (psychiatrically speaking) I am unable to control my emotions (I burst into tears for no reason - completely without a stimulus, 10mins later I'll be fine, 10min after that I'll be in a homicidal mood, etc.) and I have uncontrollable thoughts of killing myself - not because I feel like killing myself but because my brain chemistry is awry. So many of our thoughts and feelings have direct biological causes - I think and feel the way I do because my brain is 'broken'.

Worry is a good example of a pointless emotion. First, because the language used to describe emotion is so broad, I will define worry as stressful, obsessive and unpleasant thoughts/feelings which focus on negative outcomes of past (usually as they relate to present or future events), present or potential future events. Worrying is pointless because it doesn't contribute to solving problems - it focusses on the (potential) negative outcome of a situation not all possible outcomes of the situation (it also tends to amplify the negative consquences of the situation ie. the worst possible outcome will happen, with the most negative emotional effects ie. catastrophising). This is not logical as the emotional value placed on a outcome has nothing to do with the likelyhood of any given outcome occurring - how you feel about something cannot effect it's likelyhood of occurring. Worry is not the same as being prudent, ie. X happened in the past when I doing Y, therefore I will be mindful not to cause X again. Worry is: X happened in the past when I was doing Y, therefore X will always happen when I am doing Y. This line of thought/emotion is not logical.

Most people accept their emotions without

People talk about "the cost of living" but what they don't talk about is "the cost of reproduction". Some people think this difference is subtle but really it is enormous.

Why do you think all the open-borders, guest-worker and outsourcing advocates continually talk about the "greying of America"?

It's because there has been a demographic collapse caused by movement to the cities. The early boomers surfed the wave of real estate and lots of cheap younger labor from their younger cohort but the mid to late boomers were hit by a crushing confluence of circumstances that effectively sterilized them. No profession was hit harder by this de facto sterilization than programmers who worked in male-saturated ghettos.

The "leaders" responsible for cramming the boomers into the sterilizing cities, frequently touting the value of "Zero Population Growth" and the "ecological footprint of US citizens" are the same "leaders" who opened the borders and threw middle-aged programmers out on the street to find jobs competing with illegal Mexican laborers in Home Depot and Walmart.

That's funny.
I actually got that information from Dr. Joe Wallach's lecture series, "Dead Doctors Don't Lie". Site 1 and Site 2. There's a Geocities site that dismisses these claims. But the link is broken. Damn.

Which reminds me of something my mom asked me about. She wondered, if aspirin can prevent heart attacks, then why do they also say it is bad for you (I don't remember what bad effect she referenced)? I was having to tell her that (besides the occasional good-hearted independent study) there is business involved. I somehow doubt Florida Orange Juice commercials (e.g.) just come on because doctors make them; I'm sure there's some commercial promotion intended too. (That bitch Katrina doesn't help matters there...)

Cue the Michael Douglas quotes...

Well, actually, the F-15 is the Eagle. I know the F-16 is officially called the Fighting Falcon, but it is also often referred to as the Viper.

A couple of years ago, I had a Compaq that was giving me problems. I think it wasn't turning on, so I wanted to try to swap parts out to find they were proprietary (I was still somewhat new to the hardware side of things at the time.) Anyway,seeing as how I couldn't replace parts, somehow a mishap occured involving me, some friends, an axe, a pick axe, a sledge hammer, and some fire. See a pic of it at http://www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/7745/burning_ compaq.jpg

Check out Mike Sparks EXCELLENT combatreform.com website for useful info on gear and much more.
http://www.geocities.com/paratroop2000/surviveiraq gearlist.htm

Eugen Sänger's Junkers RT8 Study from 1961 and based on that the Sänger II. Why use a huge rocket in the atmosphere?

How about rabbits which are bigger and carnivorous? In Australia?

(Read _Year_of_the_Angry_Rabbit_ by Russell Braddon for more info. See http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/angry_rabbit.html
and movie Night of the Lepus based on the book
http://www.geocities.com/tyrannorabbit/nightlepus. html
http://www.agonybooth.com/lepus/
http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsn- z/nightofthelepus.htm)

Newton's _laws_ were and still are wrongly named.

Newton's Laws are perfectly fine, the first: an object in motion will continue in motion until acted upon by an outside force is perfectly consistent with General (and of course Special) Relativity, although it's very difficult to talk about acceleration in Special Relativity (see Newton's Second Law)

Newton's Second Law: that the change in motion is proportional its change in momentum (which is the product of mass (or inertia) and velocity) is very difficult to state in either General Relativity or Special Relativity. This is because a decision must be made about which observer's concept of time to use to take the time derivative of momentum and this in general the notion of force is avoided in relativity. But it's there usually referred to as the Minkowski Force.

Newton's Third law, Every reaction is met by an equal and opposite reaction is simply conservation of energy and is not violated in any classical theory, of which relativity both General and Special are.

What Newton was wrong about (and it's not really fair to call him wrong since he lacked a theory of electrodynamics and accurate measurements of the speed of light and the fact that it's independent with respect to the motion of observers so it's better to call him ignorant) was instantaneous action at a distance as implied by his theory of gravitation (Special Relativity gets around the instaneous part, General Relativity explains the action at a distance part, but not in a fashion consistent with the best theory of electromagnetic interactions QED) and the nature of light as a particle. Given that like Einstein's annus mirabilis, Newton's major achievements in physics and math were accomplished over the period of a little more than a year before he even finished the equivalent of his undergraduate degree I think we can cut him a little slack. After all, what world changing intellectual feats did you accomplish this summer?

The problem with the idea that Newton was wrong as opposed to under-informed and that Einstein made Newton's theories irrelevant in some fashion is what leads Intelligent Design proponents to claim a similar supercession of Evolution via Natural Selection claiming they are the Einstein's to Darwin's Newton. Since Einstein is more or less the Paul to Newton's Moses (or the Plato to Newton's Socrates although I think that's a poorer analogy) in the sense that he represents a fuller, different yet complementary and compatible ideology, it's ironic that IDers claim to bear the same relationship to Darwin.

Check out these links where people have made similar arguments:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hollow/1093/tva ndvideogames.html

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/116 16646.htm

http://www.playattention.com/attention-deficit/art icles/computer-video-games-do-have-benefits/

Maybe this:
http://www.newton.mec.edu/Franklin/Yes/Lessons/Ski ncolor/skin.htm
Or this:
http://www.mrsmcdowell.com/summer%20fun.htm
Lots of uses for Kool Ade:
http://www.geocities.com/knitter01/koolaid.html

Marge: Go crazy?
Homer: Don't mind if I do!

Gore stating "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." is a pretty straight forward lie. Not at all out of context.

http://www.geocities.com/omnipyre/multimedia/algor e_internet_inventor.mp3

All of Gore's "misstatements" seen in the context of his history, makes it clear he was a compulsive liar.
http://www.hench.net/2002/z070202a.htm

I did a little research myself and it turns out that there is one project on sourceforge in prealpha for linux that's GPL'd. Maybe after my finals i'll help with some patches..

i see a way to use google maps API by continuously updating the source address when your GPS "address" changes and using the number of miles left until the next turn, and using EPOS to convert text to speech: turn right at upcoming ford street.

ps: this guy made me want to save up some cash and have one of my own

(I've taught Perl as an introductory programming language. Seriously. What can I say; bioinformatics is a macho subject)

For example, they don't show the vast over crowding on the penguin preserve on Pluto caused by the tanker spill of liquid dark matter. (Futurama: The Bird-bot of Ice-catraz)

No, the environmentalists don't show you this, do they.
Freakin' hidden agendas - sheesh.

FYI, the "Rape of Nanking" is a term popularized by Iris Chiang, whose poorly researched and referenced book is really a mockery of historical journalism. Nasty stuff happened at Nanking, but lets not blow the Nanking Massacre (actually the Fourth Nanking Massacre - essentially every time the city had been conquered in its history, the defenders melted into the civilian population and the conquerors metted out revenge on the people for it).

First off, Chiang's reference to Japan as "complicit in the holocaust" is way off. As Rabbi and author Hillel Levine (and former visiting professor in China) wrote in "In Search of Sugihara", the Japanese Consul-General in Lithuania issued visas to over 6,000 Jews fleeing from the Nazis. Lt. Gen Higuchi Kiichiro supported the first conference of Jewish communities in the Far East in 1937, and later aided Jews who had fled to Manchuria (and is mentione in JNF's Golden Book). Col. Yasue Senko did similar. As a body, the Japanese government was unwilling to do anything to interfere with their ally, but had a stated opposition to participation ("Outline of Measures Toward Jewish Peoples", 1938).

Anyways, back to Nanking. The city fell on Dec. 13, 1937, to Japanese forces under the command of Gen. Matsui. In his diary, he wrote at the time that he ordered that anyone who looted or starting a fire, even accidentally, would be punished; he also sought to eradicate the "disdain" for the Chinese among many of his men, who had been fighting them for so long. In the same entry, he wrote "I could only feel sadness and responsibility today, which has been overwhelmingly piercing my heart. This is caused by the Army's misbehaviors after the fall of Nanking and failure to proceed with the autonomous government and other political plans."

He caused conflict with his division commanders when he propose that the memorial for the Japanese war dead also honor the Chinese war dead; they compromised by holding a separate service. After Matsui returned to Japan, he erected a statue of Kannon (the Goddess of Mercy) on Izuyama in 1940, to deify both the Japanese *and* Chinese soldiers.

His Buddhist confessor wrote, after Matsui's death, that ""I am ashamed of the Nanking Incident," said Matsui according to Hanayama.

The statue of Kannon, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, erected by Matsui.

"After the memorial service, I gathered up everybody and warned them with tears of anger. Both Prince Asaka and Lieutenant General Yanagawa were there. [I told them] we came all the way to stand on the majesty of the Emperor, but the dignity [of the Imperial Army] was lost at a stroke through the brutal acts of the soldiers. But then everyone laughed. To my displeasure, a certain division commander even uttered, 'of course.'" By all accounts, he was a true "unified asia" believer who saw the Chinese not as enemies, but as future allies and friends whom he wanted to unify against Western intrusion, but was unable to control his war-weary men when it mattered.

The photos in the book are just embarassing - at least the ones that have been traced to their sources. One of Chinese heads on the ground was traced to Sato Susumu, who purchased it in a photographer's studio in Huining, where it was labelled "Heads of Bandits Shot To Death in Tieling" (i.e., killed by Manchurian nationalist Zhang Xueliang's men). Another claims to be Japanese soldiers cutting someone's head with a hay cutter, yet the uniforms are clearly Chinese nationalist (Asahi Shinbun later posted a retraction after posting the picture as it was originally claimed). Another is a cropped image of bodies washing up on a beach downstream from clearly war-devastated area, leaving only the pile of bodies in frame. The photo "Comfort Women Being Rounded Up" is actually a picture from a 1937 edition of Asahi Graph, the

Salvage One :P

The official reason for the war has changed over the last couple of years from "weapons of mass destruction", through "harbouring terrorism" to "saving the people from Saddam's tyrany".

There were either 22 or 23 "reasons for the war" in the bill that authorized it. The vote was not close.

We shouldn't have gone in and when we did we fucked up.

We did the right thing going in, and the strategy is working.

It's not that simple - games really do have a strong effect in on impressionable youth of all ages. Ah, I remember back in my college days, whenever the latest version of Grade Killer (i.e., Nethack) would come out, it would easily affect my life. I'd sign off all my work with '@', and use a pickaxe to create shortcuts between my classrooms. I'd go around campus killing everything in sight (and eating corpses that weren't my species when I couldn't get to the cafeteria). I'd try to borrow books from other students, reminding them that they wouldn't need it again for another 20,000 turns. I spent my evenings quaffing unidentified potions, and called it "research". Ah, good times, good times.

(many thanks to the Internet Oracle)

I wish there was some sort of repository of this kind of stuff. A place which has a listing of all things in the Bible where it has off measurements and things easily provable (both right and wrong) showing just how horribly inaccurate the Good Book(tm) can be.

Check this out: Rejection of Pascal's Wager.

http://www.geocities.com/longhorn6482/JimRome.html
That should take care of it.

We even have a yahoo listing... http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Humor/Science/

When we first started talking about the hole in the ozone layer, everone said the only hole was in our heads. But after an article in the in OMNI magazine on the CRDS, they ran a big story on the ozone hole the next month and then other news sources started talking about the ozone problem again.

If you check the link I provided above at... http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/1483/ozone.ht ml You will find many links to real cosmic ray information. In fact many of the major cosmic ray sites link back to the Cosmic Ray Deflection Society.

I meta moderate regularly and I always check out the links provided if I don't immediately understand the post. Obviously whoever has modded this post down hasn't bothered to see what is there.

Thanks for any /.ers that actually take the time reading a post longer than one or two lines and check out information provided in the linkage...

Or Space Mumps

I have not been able to get into the pages since Yahoo took over Geocities so the pages suffer from the link rot. The SF chapter is still active, but not on the web, we also have a chapters in Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, Greensboro and about 150 memebers all around the world.

Short history
Knowing, that in some future time, when the ozone layer has been further destroyed by man-made chemicals such as flourocarbons and exhaust fumes, the earth and it's inhabitants will be mercilessly bombarded by deadly cosmic rays, the Cosmic Ray Deflection Society of North America, Inc. has been organized to discover ways of surviving the coming onslaught...Krudzna Ink is a loosely knit organization of crazed, forward thinking environmentalists dedicated to the survival of the human race in general, and life on the planet in particular...

While the society itself was formally organized in May of 1984, cosmic ray deflecting as a mental attitude was first realized in the fall of 1973 when reports first came out on the impending destruction of the ozone layer...Ozone, O3, the thin layer of our planet's atmosphere found 20 miles up, protects us from dreaded cosmic rays. Something had to be done!!! An Anti-Cosmic Ray Suit (ACRaS) would be constructed! Man-made items that are really unnecessary and have no real value for our lives were attached to a hat and a shirt... By believing the collection of trinkets, tickets, plastics, toys, auto parts, jewelries, beads, buttons, and other trivial items would repel the cosmic rays, the CRs were actually repelled!!!

We call the point at which the cosmic rays actually start being repelled CRITICAL MASS...As you attach each piece to your cosmic ray deflection item be it hat, shirt, car, house, shield or footgear, you think that this will be the item that gives you critical mass...At some point it actually starts happening!!! We hope...

Since those early days of CR Deflection, several cars, or Cosmic Ray Deflection Motor Vehicles, have joined the growing collection of CR items. We are now working on a Cosmic Ray House & Garden with patio in New Orleans as well as shields for urbanwear...

Dysonberg Confusion Principle
The first principle of CR Deflection has been joined by a second, more controversial theory... We now also believe that cosmic rays have a low level of intelligence which allows them to be easily confused by actions contrary to what is considered normal. Once confused, CRs tend to retreat on their own to whence they came. This Dysonberg Confusion Principle, or DCP, blends well with the society's life-style while wearing our ACRaS and riding in the CRDMV...To put the DCP in other terms, we believe that cosmic rays are semi-intelligent and therefore easily confused...That's why we wear foster grants, even though we are not movie stars...That's why we shoot off fireworks on December 25 and exchange presents on July 4th...That's why we celebrate Valloween, the only holiday celebrated twice a year on Feb 14 & Oct 31...All these activities as well as wearing our cosmic ray suits confuses the cosmic rays, which slows them down...Then you just step aside and they go past you...

Here are directions on making cosmic ray deflectors... http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/6167/

Here's our page on the ozone hole and real cosmic ray deflection... http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/1483/ozone.ht ml

Please don't confuse us with tinfoil lining, though the chapter in Charleston goes there a bit much or any of the other psuedo-sciences. Krudzna Ink is the real thing.

I have not been able to get into the pages since Yahoo took over Geocities so the pages suffer from the link rot. The SF chapter is still active, but not on the web, we also have a chapters in Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, Greensboro and about 150 memebers all around the world.

Short history
Knowing, that in some future time, when the ozone layer has been further destroyed by man-made chemicals such as flourocarbons and exhaust fumes, the earth and it's inhabitants will be mercilessly bombarded by deadly cosmic rays, the Cosmic Ray Deflection Society of North America, Inc. has been organized to discover ways of surviving the coming onslaught...Krudzna Ink is a loosely knit organization of crazed, forward thinking environmentalists dedicated to the survival of the human race in general, and life on the planet in particular...

While the society itself was formally organized in May of 1984, cosmic ray deflecting as a mental attitude was first realized in the fall of 1973 when reports first came out on the impending destruction of the ozone layer...Ozone, O3, the thin layer of our planet's atmosphere found 20 miles up, protects us from dreaded cosmic rays. Something had to be done!!! An Anti-Cosmic Ray Suit (ACRaS) would be constructed! Man-made items that are really unnecessary and have no real value for our lives were attached to a hat and a shirt... By believing the collection of trinkets, tickets, plastics, toys, auto parts, jewelries, beads, buttons, and other trivial items would repel the cosmic rays, the CRs were actually repelled!!!

We call the point at which the cosmic rays actually start being repelled CRITICAL MASS...As you attach each piece to your cosmic ray deflection item be it hat, shirt, car, house, shield or footgear, you think that this will be the item that gives you critical mass...At some point it actually starts happening!!! We hope...

Since those early days of CR Deflection, several cars, or Cosmic Ray Deflection Motor Vehicles, have joined the growing collection of CR items. We are now working on a Cosmic Ray House & Garden with patio in New Orleans as well as shields for urbanwear...

Dysonberg Confusion Principle
The first principle of CR Deflection has been joined by a second, more controversial theory... We now also believe that cosmic rays have a low level of intelligence which allows them to be easily confused by actions contrary to what is considered normal. Once confused, CRs tend to retreat on their own to whence they came. This Dysonberg Confusion Principle, or DCP, blends well with the society's life-style while wearing our ACRaS and riding in the CRDMV...To put the DCP in other terms, we believe that cosmic rays are semi-intelligent and therefore easily confused...That's why we wear foster grants, even though we are not movie stars...That's why we shoot off fireworks on December 25 and exchange presents on July 4th...That's why we celebrate Valloween, the only holiday celebrated twice a year on Feb 14 & Oct 31...All these activities as well as wearing our cosmic ray suits confuses the cosmic rays, which slows them down...Then you just step aside and they go past you...

Here are directions on making cosmic ray deflectors... http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/6167/

Here's our page on the ozone hole and real cosmic ray deflection... http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/1483/ozone.ht ml

Please don't confuse us with tinfoil lining, though the chapter in Charleston goes there a bit much or any of the other psuedo-sciences. Krudzna Ink is the real thing.

If you want to make claims like that, it'd be much easier to believe if you had some references to back it up with.

For example, in a People article quoted here:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/7880/h amill3.html

Hamill seems to have gotten $1000/week during filming, and 1/4 of 1% of the film's profits. It would make sense that characters with similar screen time would get similar deals.

"Femputer sentences them to death... by snu-snu!"

Amazon Women in the Mood

in WW2 and the Holocaust:
The google search
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
http://www.geocities.com/theawakeningnews/Big_Brot her-IBM_Auschwitz.html
And a Wikipedia section about it.

Yet, are there things that are more important than money?

Fortunately, many of my peers in the United States of America feel that some things are more important than money. Consider the case of Stanford University. It is probably the most commercial of the elite universities and has strong ties to industry. Yet, Stanford University recently divested its investments in Chinese companies like PetroChina, which is commited to indifference to the Sudanese victims of human-rights abuses.

What surprises me about the lead article in this discussion is that Boston Common Asset Management, which (to my knowledge) is not an official advocate of socially responsible investing, has done such a clearly socially responsible act. Does anyone know of any funds managed by Boston Common Asset Management? I want to invest a significant amount of my 401K monies into those funds.

Like Stanford's Board of Trustees, I too am committed to the cause of human rights. I invest exclusively in socially responsible mutual funds.

By the way, there is a significant and measurable difference between Western society and non-Western society. In the West, you will often see incidents of this kind, where shareholders actually demand that companies support human rights. Cisco will change. Reebok has already changed and is now an official supporter of Amnesty International. Can anyone find examples of such shareholder activism in, say, the Chinese province of Taiwan?

According to this link, the trap was invented by the Swedes. NHL teams like the Panthers, Ducks and Devils trap far more than say Edmonton or Calgary. In fact, I think the only Canadian team that traps is Ottawa. So no, trapping isn't a Canadian thug thing, it came to the NHL when expansion diluted the talent pool and brought a bunch of useless US teams into the league.

The EFF is concerned about this technology because they've read their history books. And because some people who participated in writing the history books... had to be very careful about what they printed those books on. And because the systems of government used in the Warsaw Pact countries from 1917-1991 was - to many people, myself included - "evil".

I posted this a few months ago, the last time the topic came up. This is not just about counterfeiting. (And as a guy who likes money, I hate counterfeiters with a passion almost equalled to my hatred of spammers, which is pretty freakin' intense.)

In Soviet Romania [google.com], a sample page from every typewriter had to be registered with the police, so that any samizdat produced could be quickly traced back to the typewriter's owner. Use your imagination as to what happened to the owner, or Google for it.

In Romania every typewriter had to be registered with a local magistrate. Samples of letters typed on these machines had to be produced under the observation of the secret police so they could trace underground publishing activity.

- G. Davey, Christian Publishing: Before and After the Communist Collapse

In Soviet Russia [geocities.com], all photocopiers were registered with the KGB and kept in secure rooms, to which physical access was restricted.

Some samizdat works, mostly magazines, were typed on typewriter. The copies were indistinct and hard to read. I realized that the movement against violating human rights was doomed to be an eternal amusement of the few intellectuals without proper copyprinters. But where could one find a copyprinting machine in the country, where all the copiers were affixed with seals at night and placed in the special rooms where only proved KGB members could work on it. There was the only decision - to make the machine ourselves. It had to be easy to make and quite efficient.

- A. A. Bolonkin, Memoirs of Soviet Political Prisoner

The West is probably still playing catch-up.

The concern that I have with the "download one song at a time" idea is that it may end up being a disincentive to the artists to actually create quility music;

My look of it is the opposite, by having individual songs to buy artists won't get as much as they would if people had to buy the whole album unless the song is real good. Instead they'll have to release better and more music to keep the same or get better sales. There've been a number of songs I loved and would of bought but I didn't like other songs on the album and therefore wouldn't spend the money just to get the one song I liked. One such song I love I wasn't able to find as a single was Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". It might be available now, I don't know.

You obviously haven't heard about Drop Bears... the evil cousin of the koala:
http://www.cfr.com.au/dropbears/
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/3695/db.htm

This concept of physical access required is insane at best. Done right, almost any device can be re-flashed, if a buffer-overflow is created by a payload, not only can the drivers be infected but the flash-memory itself can be infected. A good example is this: http://www.geocities.com/mamanzip/Articles/Low_Cos t_Embedded_x86_Teaching_Tool.html Note: this was done using the boot-from-lan option for testing, most devices can execute code at boot, no mater what the boot-from option is. As software becomes more patched, I would worry about legacy harware in the future. This is one of many exploits heading in that direction.

How about this:

The Wave or The Wave

To explain to his students the atmosphere in the 1930's Nazi-Germany, history teacher Burt Ross initiates a daring experiment. He declares himself leader of a new movement, called 'The Wave'. Inspired, he proclaims ideas about Power, Discipline and Superiority. His students are strikingly willing to follow him. Soon the entire school is under the spell of 'The Wave'. Anyone who refuses to be a part of the Movement, faces threats or worse. Ross himself gets carried away by his own experiment. Or has it turned into something more than an experiment? A climax is unavoidable, resulting in a hard lesson for both Ross and his students...