Domain: geocities.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to geocities.com.
Comments · 8,978
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Re:not a patriotic song
That, and the song was originally called "God Blessed America", and the original final verse went:
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people --
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me.
Manuscript version -
Nostalgia
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Ahhh.... Fellow BBSer
Just when I thought I was the only one who checked the boards, I find out there are two. j/k.
Anyhow, I've encountered the exact same problem, and our friend who posted the fonts on his .Mac site looks like a good bet.
http://homepage.mac.com/kiddailey/files/misc/ibm-f onts.sit
There are a couple of other things I'd like to bring up. First, I noticed that the backspace doesn't work automatically under the terminal when connecting to telnet sessions. There is a check box in the preferences to change that. Secondly, I write messages in some of the games and apparently the terminal puts in some bogus characters here and there. This may be related to the fonts yet again. However, I thought it was worth mentioning.
For those of you who scoff at playing some door games on the BBS, I suggest you try Usurper. It is a lot of fun. Here is a link to a page that talks about the game in detail, and has some links to where you can telnet to, and play it.
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Castle/7177/u surper.html
P.S. Some BBS installs have a web front end leveraging Java, which work quite well. -
I've been predicting this for a few years now.My past usenet posts on the topic of the amygdala and behavior have been topical. This sort of came together in something I call the Genetic Omni-Dominance Hypothesis, or GOD Hypothesis which discusses the politics of the amygdala:
THE AMYGDALA AND PARASITIC CASTRATION
A key structure in human fertility, particularly male fertility, is the amygdala, which dramatically reduces in size upon castration. According to Malsbury and McKay, the amygdala shrinkage can be about 25% within 8 weeks of castration. (Malsbury, C.W. and K. McKay. Neurotrophic effects of testosterone on the medial nucleus of the amygdala in adult male rats. J. Neuroendocrinology, 1994, 6:57-69.) Although reduction in size is not the only way this brain-structure may be reprogrammed to effect parasitic castration, it is a possible observable. Furthermore, since large changes in human migration patterns have occurred in living memory, there should be plenty of intact amygdala specimens that can be correlated with their genotype as well as changes in the environmental genotypes that may impose extended phenotypic parasitic castration.
During the period of greatest environmental influx of more dominant genes into the environments traditionally reserved for more recessive males in the United States, autism rates have increased four-fold, from 1 in 2000 before 1970 to 1 in 500 in 2000. Furthermore, although reporting is always problematic, the increases are most apparent in peripheral geographic regions associated with more recessive traits that have experienced some of the greatest rates of change in geneflow as measured by dominant:recessive ratio -- regions such as the Pacific Northwest.
Furthermore, as reported in The Geek Syndrome:
In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California... Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."
California is not alone. Rates of both classic autism and Asperger's syndrome are going up all over the world, which is certainly cause for alarm and for the urgent mobilization of research. Autism was once considered a very rare disorder, occurring in one out of every 10,000 births. Now it's understood to be much more common - perhaps 20 times more. But according to local authorities, the picture in California is particularly bleak in Santa Clara County.
What genetic change has occurred in Santa Clara more than in California, in California more than in the rest of the world, and in the rest of the world over the last decade, more than other times in history ?
Immigration and high degrees of integration among populations that have undergone very little coevolution.
Furthermore, according to Dr. Jeff Bradstreet a little-mentioned fact is that over 90% of autistics are blood type A. If true, that would be better than twice the expected frequency for American "whites" and so close to 100% that the probability of it being due to chance is disappearingly small. Add to that the fact that the only type A blood common among "whites" is called ABO*A2, and that this blood type is centered in northern Scandinavia, according to the gene map on page 3 of the world gene maps in "The History and Geography of Human Genes" (unabridged
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I've been predicting this for a few years now.My past usenet posts on the topic of the amygdala and behavior have been topical. This sort of came together in something I call the Genetic Omni-Dominance Hypothesis, or GOD Hypothesis which discusses the politics of the amygdala:
THE AMYGDALA AND PARASITIC CASTRATION
A key structure in human fertility, particularly male fertility, is the amygdala, which dramatically reduces in size upon castration. According to Malsbury and McKay, the amygdala shrinkage can be about 25% within 8 weeks of castration. (Malsbury, C.W. and K. McKay. Neurotrophic effects of testosterone on the medial nucleus of the amygdala in adult male rats. J. Neuroendocrinology, 1994, 6:57-69.) Although reduction in size is not the only way this brain-structure may be reprogrammed to effect parasitic castration, it is a possible observable. Furthermore, since large changes in human migration patterns have occurred in living memory, there should be plenty of intact amygdala specimens that can be correlated with their genotype as well as changes in the environmental genotypes that may impose extended phenotypic parasitic castration.
During the period of greatest environmental influx of more dominant genes into the environments traditionally reserved for more recessive males in the United States, autism rates have increased four-fold, from 1 in 2000 before 1970 to 1 in 500 in 2000. Furthermore, although reporting is always problematic, the increases are most apparent in peripheral geographic regions associated with more recessive traits that have experienced some of the greatest rates of change in geneflow as measured by dominant:recessive ratio -- regions such as the Pacific Northwest.
Furthermore, as reported in The Geek Syndrome:
In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California... Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."
California is not alone. Rates of both classic autism and Asperger's syndrome are going up all over the world, which is certainly cause for alarm and for the urgent mobilization of research. Autism was once considered a very rare disorder, occurring in one out of every 10,000 births. Now it's understood to be much more common - perhaps 20 times more. But according to local authorities, the picture in California is particularly bleak in Santa Clara County.
What genetic change has occurred in Santa Clara more than in California, in California more than in the rest of the world, and in the rest of the world over the last decade, more than other times in history ?
Immigration and high degrees of integration among populations that have undergone very little coevolution.
Furthermore, according to Dr. Jeff Bradstreet a little-mentioned fact is that over 90% of autistics are blood type A. If true, that would be better than twice the expected frequency for American "whites" and so close to 100% that the probability of it being due to chance is disappearingly small. Add to that the fact that the only type A blood common among "whites" is called ABO*A2, and that this blood type is centered in northern Scandinavia, according to the gene map on page 3 of the world gene maps in "The History and Geography of Human Genes" (unabridged
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Re:WAIT
This isn't new, I wrote a little rant about this four years ago, making the exact point of the hypocrisy of the interview is onk but not a diary and print is ok but not online.
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Even if they offered 500 GB...
... I still wouldn't go back to spam^H^H^H^Hhotmail. Not ever since Micro$oft bought hotmail and took away every single useful feature one by one. Back in 1997, things like auto-forwarding emails and POP3 used to be freely available. There was no time limit set on how often you had to check your account either. Heck, I was away from the Internet for nearly 4 months, and my account still existed. There was even a time when it didn't require cookies. Ah the good old days....
Then one day I logged in to find all my Sent messages had been wiped out. There were over 300 of them, all used to keep track of things. That was the final straw. I had already switched to the far superior Yahoo and will never ever go back to hotmail.
For those feeling nostalgic, I found an old page of what Hotmail used to look like. (Disable Javascript first to get rid of that annoying geocities garbage.) Too bad I can't log in or anything. -
Re:Where have I heard this before?
The fact that crows can count without having language makes an argument that Sapir-Whorf has nothing to do with this.
The other fact is that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is dead. If language influences us, it is in a much more subtle way than what we're seeing in this article.
I'd recommend The Number Sense to anyone who is aware that Sapir-Whorf is gone, gone, gone. Dehaene explains how the lower-level numbers (1, 2, 3) are built into our cognitive systems at a most basic level, whereas anything above that is just "many" (he illustrates cross-species differences with examples such as crows counting to seven). His most convincing example outside of experiments is the expression of numbers in various languages.
In Japanese, the kanji for the first 3 numbers are one stroke, two strokes, and three strokes. only on the forth number does it increase.
In Cuneiform, wedge-shaped strokes are expressed in columns and rows with a maximum value of three.
Roman numerals, I, II, and III... then IV.
In current arabic numerals, supposedly, 1 is a single line, 2 is two lines with a connecting stroke, while 3 is 3 lines with two connecting strokes.
This page illustrates the supposed evolution between a few different number sets (Tamil, Hindi, Brahmi, early Arabic) and if you look at the pictures you'll see they all seems to grow out of counting strokes for 1-3, but 4 is a completely different character.
Trinary, anyone?
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Re:thank god for school!It doesn't take a village to raise a kid, but it takes a society to socialize one. As the parent post implies, segregating kids away from society in
... a real school and at a real playground ... prevents socialization.Want your kid to know how to behave in the real world? Make him spend almost all his time in an artificial environment, with a bunch of young savages just like him, who have no more idea how to behave than he does. Yeah, that's the ticket.
School isn't about ``socialization'', it's about free babysitting so mama and papa can both work to get all the little luxuries that are obviously more important than the kids. All families teach their kids something at home, even if it's just: ``You're not as important to us as our jobs.''
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Re:How to block them ...
Problem solved. Just updated my Adblock settings to allow universities foolish enough to use '.ads.'.
*ads* line is now:
/[^\w|&|=|\+](html|live|main|net|show|view)? ad[sv]?(ales|bot|center|click|client|content|counc il|count|data|ert|ertise?r?s?|ertising|erve?r?|iew |gifs?|id|images?|info|juggler|link|log|man|max|ne t|optimis?z?er|pics|popup|proof|redire?c?t?)?[\W_] (?!\w+\.edu)(?!aware)/
Current Adblock ruleset is 2004-08-19a -
Comrade Smurf
p.s. Please see this page for more details on the insidious propaganda that underlies the traditional depiction of Smurf society.
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BAN SCAMMER COUNTRIES FROM THE INTERNETEducation will only help so long. What happens when someone writes a worm/virus that replaces the
/etc/hosts file with one hacked up to send people to phishing sites instead of banking sites?I'm beginning to think ICANN or whoever is responsible for internet access should just BAN anyone from these scammer countries or whatever other country they're using to scam on unless they have genuine official business on the internet. This would really reduce the scammers' abilities to scam. And Law enforcement has to be a lot better with heavier penalties.
Education only goes so far. Technology(like ebay's toolbar) only go so far before the scammer evolves.......
when buyers were getting scammed on ebay to wire money for expensive stuff like laptops, ebay people recommended buyers use escrow. Guess what the scammers did? They made fake escrow websites and buyers got scammed again.
when buyers wouldn't trust the escrow sites and wouldn't trust dealing with foreign countries, guess what the scammers did? They now use people who are desperate for jobs in the US as "foils" or "agents" by pretending they're an overseas company that hires the "foils" so they can use their Paypal accounts and have them send $$$ overseas to these scammers. Sometimes they'll just say they'll give them a reward of some kind in items or money if they can use their Paypal accounts. Then, the scammers use their stolen Credit Card numbers to "buy" items off of sellers and send these to the buyers. Guess what happens then? That's right, Police come knocking on the buyers' doors and the foil's door.
Govt officials won't help you out unless the $$$ amount is over the thousands. The scammers' country government are most times just scam accomplices or don't care.
What's all this forcing ME to do? Ditch IE browser for another browser. Firewall & AV on all the time. I no longer store financial/personal info on my computer. I do less business on the anonymous web and especially less on evilbay and would rather do business locally in person. I've pretty much ditched my email. If my banks or anyone need to contact me, they can do so the old fashioned way----->U.S. mail.
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Re:D-Link catching upYour post pleases me in two ways:
- You reminded me of Wonkavision. (Not the band, the movie.)
- I see that there are now more than 800k registered users on Slashdot, which means that I'm that much closer to being able to sell my "low" userid on ebay.
Thanks for the laugh! -
Re:This explains it all
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Re:olbigatory quote
I think everyone prefers this moon!
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Re:Cold War Rockets Better?Ok... would 50-82% with an average of 79% success rate of the 364 Atlas-Centaur & Atlas SLV-3 [ICBM launcher] test launches be a better comparison? (Or 86.46 by other studies.)
Seems they do about the same or even worse than cluster bomblets.
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two pages about the dangers of organ donationThe Real Myths of Organ Donation -- An Invented Death
I thought they were pretty disturing when I read them a few years back.
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two pages about the dangers of organ donationThe Real Myths of Organ Donation -- An Invented Death
I thought they were pretty disturing when I read them a few years back.
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IncentivesThe government fusion program was from the start a badly managed program-as even its founder admits
IMHO there is a valid role for the government in technology, but it should be manily providing an incentive structure via prizes and intellectual property law. These big socialistic programs have simply not provided a lot of benefit for the money expended on them.
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von Foerster's SingularityAs I've said elsewhere:
A vital side note: Heinz von Foerster had published a paper in 1960 on global population: von Foerster, H, Mora, M. P., and Amiot, L. W., "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D." 2026, Science 132, 1291-1295 (1960). In this paper, Heinz shows that the best formula that describes population growth over known human history is one that predicts the population will go to infinity on a Friday the 13 in November of 2026. As Roger Gregory likes to say, "That's just whacko!" The problem is, after he published the paper, it kept predicting population growth better than the other models. (see section 4.1 "Systems Ecology Notes") One of Heinz's early University of Illinois colleagues was Richard Hamming of "Hamming code" fame. Once while visiting the Naval Postgraduate School, I asked Dr. Hamming what he thought of Heinz von Foerster. Professor Hamming's response was "Heinz von Foerster: Now there's a first class kook!" I suspect Heinz's publication of, what Transhumanists call, "the singularity" had really gotten to Hamming -- not that Heinz wasn't eccentric enough get Hamming's goat in any case. Well, to continue this digression so as to give the damn Transhumanists a much-deserved keyboard lashing: It's one thing to be a guy like Hamming and denounce Heinz as a "kook" for following his formulae where they lead -- it's another to turn Heinz's formulae into a virtual religion, call it "the singularity" and totally forget where the idea came from the first place. I suggest the Transhumanists cite Heinz in the future whenever they refer to "the singularity" and think about his assumptions -- the primary one being that societies success varies directly with population size. It might be good to see if his model fits the data subsequent to the last check of which I am aware -- 1973 -- which just happens to be right at the point high population density societies decided to abandon their forward progress toward the space frontier.
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Truer words were never spokenJuan Antonio Samaranch is a Fascist. Cohort of Franco and all...
IIRC, he resigned a while ago, but he sure set the tone for the whole damn Olympics.
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Not even closeMy friends and I have been going to the movies for quite a while. By unanimous vote, Miss Firecracker holds the title of worst movie, followed closely by Cyborg.
After all these years, the memory is still burned into our brains. Make it stop!
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Net Asset TaxSpectrum is purely descriptive...
All property rights are described by law otherwise they are uneforceable by law. Indeed, it is their very enforceability by law that makes the case for a net asset tax being the only proper basis for government revenue.
From the Net Asset Tax white paper:
One of the greatest strengths of Henry George's land tax was that it would have promoted a much more rapid development of the American frontier by allowing the government to simply open more of its territories to private claim, without worrying about unproductive hoarding of those territories.
Because of this fear of hoarding, the government resorted to a highly political system of land grants which created the rail road trusts that became a persistent blight on society.
Similar blights are now being created in the bureaucratic allocation of frequency spectrum by the Federal Communications Commission and geostationary orbits for communications satellites.
In reality, we are surrounded by "frontiers" in many dimensions. Few have the profound implications of a physical frontier such as the American west or space, but all share in common the attribute that proprietary access to them is restricted by government so as to prevent unproductive hoarding.
In the case of technological frontiers, this problem is solved by limiting the patent claims to 17 years. An inventor can sit on an invention doing nothing with it for up to 17 years, but beyond that time, its use cannot be inhibited by the inventor. In practice, most inventors are so eager to see their invention brought into widespread use, they endanger their own claim. The patented technique is unique among frontier claims in that it's use is not inherently limited -- techniques are not "resources", and in that it is truly the creation of the inventor -- not an emergent phenomenon of civilization and nature.
But in other areas, such as radio frequency and orbital slots, the analogy with frontier "land" is almost perfect.
The NAT, unlike George's land tax, makes it possible for the government to open up all frontiers to private claim and development. Claimants must simply define and register the nature of the property rights that they wish to claim so that others can avoid overlapping claims or negotiate easements.
Naturally, there are many such abstract property rights which are now in use by people, although unclaimed. The principle of first use, like first to invent in patent law, should be the criteria for priority on a claim. "Use" should include not only direct physical utilization, but declaration of intent to use the property right via claim.
NAT liability begins with the date that the claim is protected under law.
...THE NET ASSET TAX
The existence of pervasive capital welfare discussed above provides the basis for a system of taxation.
The principles of freedom upon which our country was founded provide the basis for exemptions from taxation.
These insights yield the following proposal for a Net Asset Tax (NAT) reform:
The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property should be exempt.
The levels typically protected by personal bankruptcy can be approximated by the median price of housing an individual added to the median capitalization of a job in the economy. Together, these exemptions add up to between $50,000 and $100,000. Additional but smaller exemptions may be added to represent the lower levels of bankruptcy protection typically extended to children within families.
The NAT is a self-adjusting system that seeks an equilibrium between government debt levels, current tax rates and private wealth distribution, without attempting to achieve an outright balanced budget or direct intervention in the economy.
Under current (1992) asset distribution and government debt the NAT would generate between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion in revenue, thus totally displacing other forms of taxation.
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Re:You mean like half.com?Yeah, it makes perfect sense to "merge" a perfectly good, usable, and friendly system like half.com into ebay. Everything, after all, should be an auction..
yeah, it makes so much sense that evilbay, i mean "community-minded" PRETENTIOUS evilbay, dragging along its scam sellers & scam buyers wants a cut of non-corporate-profiteering community-minded craiglist. evilbay auction must be desperate!! hehehehe
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Re:You mean like half.com?Yeah, it makes perfect sense to "merge" a perfectly good, usable, and friendly system like half.com into ebay. Everything, after all, should be an auction..
yeah, it makes so much sense that evilbay, i mean "community-minded" PRETENTIOUS evilbay, dragging along its scam sellers & scam buyers wants a cut of non-corporate-profiteering community-minded craiglist. evilbay auction must be desperate!! hehehehe
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12 European Community countries are Allies in Iraq
Britain is the last staunch ally we have
This is an insult to the following Coalition countries that have soldiers or officers in-country in Iraq (as of March 2004):
Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Poland, Thailand, Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine , Romania, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Albania, Georgia, Moldova, Macedonia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Canada
http://www.geocities.com/pwhce/willing.html
The population of Coalition countries is approximately 1.23 billion people.
Coalition countries have a combined GDP of approximately $22 trillion.
Every major race, religion, ethnicity in the world is represented.
The Coalition includes nations from every continent on the globe.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20 030321-4.html
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This is more fun!
In my opinon, Tom Hudson's way of dealing with these critters, is far more entertaining, than just ignoring them.
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Re:Text-to-speech demo
I'm dismayed to see a space in the URL I gave -- here's a proper link to it: my Firefox sidebar, with cool text-to-speech bookmarklets that operate on the selected text
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Windows CE-ME-NT
Hahahaha... haha.. heh. Welcome to 1999.
Not exactly. The Windows CEMENT image refers to Windows ME, which wasn't first published until late 2000. In fact, the image was Last Modified in January 2001.
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Women and MoneyWomen like money the way men like sex.
Understand we're talking neolithic perversions of human nature here.
If we go paleolithic then we might say women like men with territory the way men like sex (which is the real reason men are so territorial).
US programmers have been losing a lot of territory lately so whether you're talking neolithic perversions or paleolithic instinct, women aren't really all that excited by the geeks anymore (as though they ever were really -- that was just a lot of Wired hype).
Now, if you want to really get women interested in technology, do something that is going to expand the territory of life itself -- but you'd better have the right stuff.
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Re:In World War II....
As made famous by the movie (which I can not find presently!) where the teacher inducts the teen kids into a new code of conduct which turns out to be Nazism.
Are you thinking of The [Third] Wave? Students couldn't understand how ordinary citizens could become genocidal Nazis, so their history teacher (Ron Jones) decided to, well, show them. It was a classroom experiment that got out of control, and later the whole thing was turned into a book and then a movie.My high school US History teacher had us read the story about it. Pretty frightening, interesting stuff.
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Re:Where was the outcry?When the President is basing his decisions on "how do I avoid criminal prosecution for this?" then I think there's a problem.
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Re:I'm beginning to be swayed...Bah. IRV is just a scam to trick 3rd party voters into ranking one of the Top Two somewhere on their list, thereby giving them your vote. The system completely and utterly goes to hell if there are more than two viable candidates -- we're talking insane shit like if you switch a ranking from 1st place to last, they can change from losing to winning.
IRV is (slightly) better than Plurality, but I approve of Approval Voting.
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Interesting Hubble write up
There is an good write up on the bealagured hubble http://www.geocities.com/visitbipin/crazy.html here.
It goes through all the seemingly endless problems hubble has had! -
Re:Democracy..
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Revisionist history above.
In 1988 I had a system with an ATI EGA Wonder 800 card. This card could do 800x600 in 16 colors, which was significantly beyond what the equivalent Macintosh hardware could do, which was 1 bit monochrome in 512x384. This card was nothing special.
The first color Mac was introduced in 1987, and the second model (IIx) didn't come out until September 1988. Incidentally my system was about $700. The Macintosh II would have run close to $4k in that time frame. The max resolution was 640x480x256. Of course, you could just as easily have bought a VGA card that supported high resolutions, if cost were no object. Virtually no one owned the above - let's compare apples to apples. (heh heh)
Where does this 'square pixel' shit come from? Because at low resolutions they were blocky looking? That applied to both a Macintosh and clone PC. Are you trying to imply that Macintoshes had round pixels. Please...continue...entertain me.
Most Macintoshes had sucky video compared to PCs, the IBM compatible systems just didn't know what to do with it.
System 7 was a buggy piece of shit and didn't settle down for a long time. You're welcome to it. I liked 6.0.x - or 7.5.3, far better. By the time 8 came around, I gave up on Macintoshes.
GEOS for the PC was released in November 1990, sadly after Windows 3.0, which had already taken over the PC GUI world by then.
Bzzzzt. You lose on the facts, dude. Mac zealot.
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Re:Wow, what a load.....
There was the MagicSac program (later Spectre) with allowed the Atari ST to use more-or-less legal Mac ROMs and run Mac software.
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Re:I installed Thunderbird today...
I've been hunting for a win32 email client that doesn't suck a bag of cocks. Anyone got any suggestions? I'd appreciate it a lot.
There you go. -
Re:why 0.9Ghz is better
Free space loss for radio transmissions (in dB):
L(f,d)=20.log(f*d)+92.5
(got it from http://www.geocities.com/senol_gulgonul/linkbudget /formula.html, which is a list of formulas for calculating link budgets for satellite communications, but it's the same physics as for a cordless phone...)
f is frequency, d is distance.
So obviously L(2.4GHz,d) > L(0.9GHz,d). Meaning lower frequency leads to less loss (further reach). -
Dual boot fix?
As I recall, the Mandrake 10.0 versions (both community and release) will try and "fix" the MBR and partition table if it sees a Windows XP install on the same drive as the Mandrake install. This results in a broken Windows install - this issue was minimized on the dev lists and wasn't fixed in the release version.
Blew away the MBR and almost had to reinstall until I found the "dd" trick that allows you to rewrite it.
In any case, I fixed it by partitioning manually and loading from the NTLDR in Windows.
See here for a description of the same problem with FC2, here for a description of how to make a dual-boot system with problem work. Lastly, see here for the skinny from Mandrake themselves.
Of course, one should always have backups of any and all valuable data, but it's still a pain to bring a system back from the undead.
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Re:Umm I'm not so sure
Remember: It's a small world after all. It's a small small world.
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Re:Disney is off its rocker
I don't think Disney cares if your typical
/.er can crack it. I think they just want to make it difficult for the typical consuming sheep. At least at first.
Consuming sheep not to be confused with these dangerous and intelligent creatures:
http://www.geocities.com/sheepagainsthumans/ -
DARPA: Almost As Bad as NASADARPA's history of supercomputing initiatives isn't quite as bad as NASA running the Shuttle program but its up there.
If you want fast computers developed in the US, buy them from the US market and try to mould your tax incentives so that they simulate, as closely as possible, a net asset tax as described in "A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation".
The reason Cray Computer Corporation's gallium arsenide fab went out of business wasn't for lack of funding -- it was for a lack domestic market for the end product, supercomputers, in the wake of the end of the cold war. One could also chalk it up to Cray's fixation on supercomputers since the output of the GaAs fab line could have been altered to serve high speed telecom markets, but if DARPA wants fast supercomputers, there was help available from private capital sources.
Its never a good idea for government to compete with private capital sources in high technology.
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Futurama killbots reference continued...
Leela: They say Zapp Brannigan single handedly saved the Octillian System from a horde of rampaging Killbots.
Fry: Wow!
Bender: A grim day for Robotkind. Eh, but we can always build more Killbots!
[...]
Fry: I heard that one time you single hadedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system.
Zapp: The Killbots? A trifle! It was simply a matter of outsmarting them.
Fry: Wow, I never would have thought of that!
Zapp: You see Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them. Until they reached their limit and shutdown. Kif. Show them the medal I won.
[Kif sighs and points to a medal on Zapp's uniform.]
[Scene: Nimbus Dining Room. Leela, Zapp, Fry and Bender sit at a table, looking down at the rest of the crew who are eating. Kif is grating cheese over Zapp's food.]
Zapp: More please.[Kif grates.] A little more. [Kif grates.] More. [Kif grates.] Keep going.
Leela: Captain Brannigan we really need to talk to you about our mission.
Zapp: Whatever it is I'm willing to put wave after wave of men at your disposal. Right men?
[He raises his glass to the crew. No one acknowledges him.]
Crewman: You suck!
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Here.
For some reason, I was reminded of this.
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Government: Reinsurer of Last ResortAs part of my efforts to commercialize space technology and operations, I came to a simple realization:
People get all confused about the role of property rights and governments because the tax base has shifted from assets to income.
If the tax base were on assets, where it belongs, it would be much more intuitive to people that government, when functional, provides an insurance service: it insures that property rights are protected.
The simplest way of envisioning this is to imagine a reinsurance network where the reinsurer of last resort is what we call "the government". Where "citizen franchise" comes in is in the fact that during times of emergency, "governments" have historically conscripted able-bodied men (and to some degree and in some roles women) to enforce the property rights insured by the government. This citizen franchise is in the form of votes on things relating to the conscription of citizens but it also is in the form of exemption from certain other duties or taxes -- which would otherwise be paid in the form of insurance premiums.
Imagine a situation in which if you declare something to be insurable, you do nothing more than pay your insurance premiums and that's the end of your tax liability. Certainly, the guys who run around the globe tormenting Muslims wouldn't like this -- since they would have to actually end up paying for the risks they bring upon themselves and others in places like the US, but really -- do the rest of us need atavisms like the World Trade Center that much?
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Government: Reinsurer of Last ResortAs part of my efforts to commercialize space technology and operations, I came to a simple realization:
People get all confused about the role of property rights and governments because the tax base has shifted from assets to income.
If the tax base were on assets, where it belongs, it would be much more intuitive to people that government, when functional, provides an insurance service: it insures that property rights are protected.
The simplest way of envisioning this is to imagine a reinsurance network where the reinsurer of last resort is what we call "the government". Where "citizen franchise" comes in is in the fact that during times of emergency, "governments" have historically conscripted able-bodied men (and to some degree and in some roles women) to enforce the property rights insured by the government. This citizen franchise is in the form of votes on things relating to the conscription of citizens but it also is in the form of exemption from certain other duties or taxes -- which would otherwise be paid in the form of insurance premiums.
Imagine a situation in which if you declare something to be insurable, you do nothing more than pay your insurance premiums and that's the end of your tax liability. Certainly, the guys who run around the globe tormenting Muslims wouldn't like this -- since they would have to actually end up paying for the risks they bring upon themselves and others in places like the US, but really -- do the rest of us need atavisms like the World Trade Center that much?
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Re:Heinlein
I can recommend another book in a similar vein: Armor, by John Steakley. It's similar in that humans in powered, armored suits fight vaguely giant-insect-like aliens, but it's less focused on the military aspect and more on the psychological. It's about this poor guy who, due to a computer glitch, keeps getting sent on dangerous drops, as a Scout (the most dangerous role). More reviews here and here. I thought it was pretty good.
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Not so...One of the main issues with Linux Live CD's is the fact that it is rare for a live cd to properly initialize ALL the hardware on the computer. (i.e. sound card and wireless 802.11) Until something happens to allow universal driver support, live cd's will leave a bad taste in people's mouths who use obscure / cheap hardware (most windows users)
I ran Knoppix 3.3 and the newest 3.4 on Dells cheapest laptop. Inspiron 1100, Everything detected perfectly and runs great. Even the Netgear wireless NIC. Knoppix is good at even the cheapest hardware. As long as its common, thats what they shoot for. Ease of use.
Heres a good site for Linux on the Inspiron 1100.
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Betrayal of Krondor