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They simply cannot be beat, especially the special Christmas version with bouncing Santa hats....

Lemmings
3D lemmings
DHTML Lemmings

To get a glimpse of what sort of evil is at work here, just look into the history of actuaries being accused of "discrimination".

You didn't post a link to the original lyrics, so here's one

My favorite - in reference to this whole copyright BS is this:

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing --
[God blessed America for me.]

That's not surprising news, since the public schools quickly picked up the insane ``Look-say'' method, which teaches that words are ideograms, rather than that words are collections of sounds. This left children who didn't get phonics instruction at home out in the cold, and may have kept some children from learning to read who would have learned to read if left to themselves. Furthermore, the children were entirely dependent on their teachers, since Look-say provides no tools for learning on your own.

You can find some practical information on phonics and Look-say on my web site.

The official statistics show that white school enrolment had essentially no affect on white literacy, while black literacy tracked black school enrolment fairly closely. That is, whites learned to read whether they went to school or not, while blacks learned to read at school, only. That may be because white parents were able to provide their children with phonics instruction at home, while black parents more often couldn't.

If you want a good history of the public school movement, I'd suggest starting with Gatto's book Undergound History of American Education and Richard Mitchel's Graves of Academe. Market Education: the Unknown History is another excellent resource, but unfortunately isn't available online.

Ahhh. The mark of the Paranoid Leenucks Zealot. You wouldn't happen to be related to my friend twitter, would you?

let's see you debunk the accepted record

I don't see how I can prove a negative, and I sure as hell haven't seen anything that approaches an "accepted record". The "hidden APIs" thing is just another one of those myths you wonderful people like to repeat and spread.

If you had a few more usable brain cells you would have figured out that undocumented != hidden, and that undocumented doesn't mean jack shit. Or do you think someone brighter than you already ran Word or Excel through a profiler to see which of the "hidden APIs" they call? Maybe you're hopelessly confused by things like these, which are not "hidden APIs" but undocumented things that you're not supposed to use, although you're more than free to do so if you figure them out, like Mark Russinovich and other people already did.

The fun comes when companies play stupid tricks with the native API and kernel-level functions (no doubt with Russinovich's book in hand) instead of with the goddamn published API - next version of Windows comes around and because the kernel people changed something (as they should have the damn right to do; that's why there's a fucking layer on top of it), the assholes that thought they were so cool to call NtCreateFile() directly are screwed. So that must be proof that Microsoft is evil!

If you're referring to the "Settlement APIs" that Microsoft recently published, here's a newsflash: Those were figured out fucking ages ago. Their ordinals in the system DLLs located, methods and structures and flags worked out by people (again) brighter than you. There's an entire class of these functions that are nothing more than fucking shortcuts to well-documented interfaces. Their existence has never been denied by Microsoft, and in fact you can even find some in examples used in the knowledgebase. The only thing Microsoft did was say "look, these are not documented because we might remove them later from the system. Use them at your own risk, or write your own wrappers". These are the only things al those bright Netscape engineers could find after digging around for a year, and they pointed at them as evidence of Microsoft's evil practices. So they were published and Microsoft was immediately forced to provide support for them (real support, you know, not in IRC). Well there you go. Now, given that you're so obviously intelligent I'd like to have your opinion as to what exactly in that list would give Microsoft a competitive advantage - especially considering almost all of those functions were already known in the developer community. Oh, and remember that there are about 30,000 APIs in Windows.

Shit. You know, I suppose the fact that Oracle and the Sun Java VM run fucking faster on Windows than on Unix (not to mention the fact that Oracle is a far better database than SQL Server) proves that Microsoft has all these hidden APIs working for them as well to crush their competitors. Why didn't I think of that before.

Jesus H. Christ, you people are quite the piece of work. All promethean and chest-thumping martyrs when it suits you but perfectly able to turn into bottom-scraping offal whenever you're desperately trying to spread some FUD about Microsoft or anyone/anything else you hate.

1. The legal system biases "justice" toward those with money more than those with creative skills.
2. Patents depend on the legal system.

W. D. Hamilton wrote of this sort of thing as being the down-fall of civilizations:

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). /blockquote

A quick reference to his copyright notice...

And another -- than includes a reference to him being blacklisted for suspected communism.. (I mean, giving away your music -- how communistic can you get?)

Yes -- of course -- the government should not and never should have been involved in space transportation let alone human space flight (perhaps with the exception of militarily justified missions). Everything operational and developmental should have been up to free enterprise. But lets give private adventurers their due. We're natural predators -- curious as cats. We need to know what's around the corner and in space just because it is what we do as humans. Science is an aspect of this predatory instinct as is pure adventure. Some may say that science is more noble -- especially scientists -- but when people put their own money and lives at risk to pursue their own adventures, whether it be Biosphere II, X-Prize or Touching the Void it should be viewed in a moral light as an entirely different thing than government funding pseudo-heroes from an affirmative action line-up.

Not as funny as the Firefox parody.

lyrics from Guthrie's original manuscript

India has such a HUGE variety of languages that almost 100% of computer users know English and are often unwilling to use PC's in their native language. (I belong to this category). A Hindi version of WinXP would suck totally ... in the market and everywhere.

I was involved with a bit of work on Pango rendere r for my mother tongue ... the unicode renderer was fairly easy to handle - but the translation was a horror . Imagine translating Abort :) Look at all the scripts available in Indic languages , and that's just the first grid. You might realize why India reads , writes and speaks english.

It ain't easy, it ain't viable ... but a blind eye towards home-piracy and a watchful eye on corporate licensing has been MS's ploy in India.

Actually, I think Wheelie And The Chopper Bunch is more accurate. In this show, the VW bug showed facial expressions with the lights and bumper as well as showing exclamations and other symbols on the windshield.

Funny thing is, Wheelie was the only character on the show that didn't talk.

• The Dawoodi Bohra Academic Union - Describes fundraising activities of this body which provides books and other facilities to needy students, and is based in Bombay.
• Dawoodi Bohra Internet Resources - Links, resources, downloads, essays, and other content of use to the Dawoodi Bohra community of South Asian Muslims.
• Dawoodi Bohra Net: - Contains information for Dawoodi Bohras, a religious community centered in India, with adherents worldwide.
• The Dawoodi Bohra Webring - Collection of Dawoodi Bohra Web pages maintained by Murtuza Shakir. Includes a basic FAQ of the religion and community.
• Malumaat.com - A portal for the worldwide Dawoodi Bohra community. Includes matrimonials, employment,business, as well as weather and news.

Huh? How are our farm subsidies causing problems abroad?

Here are a few links: 1, 2, 3.

U.S. Farming is way outside my realm of knowledge, but it seems obvious being sure we're able to produce our own food is quite necessary.

In fact I've been worrying a bit lately that we're migrating too much to a service economy and moving more and more production and manufacturing out of the country; we need the ability to produce our own goods, too.

You mean like another military power before the US?

The point, though, is that bipedalism could just as easily been passed down *socially*, rather than genetically. So your little snipe about lamarckism was just silly and narrow minded.

Since you seem hellbent on trading insults instead of ideas, there seems to be little point in continuing this, so I'll conclude by saying this: I very much doubt that a major anatomical trait such as bipedalism would be passed on by social effects as opposed to straightforward genetic mutation and natural selection. However, the idea is not completely without precedent, and I would not dismiss it out of hand. See the Baldwin Effect.

Acutally I'm thinking of the ranch owners that have been leaving the land as is for over a hundred years and are now being bought out by Ted

Have you ever heard of the dustbowls? The crop failures of sodbusters that sent topsoil blowing into the ocean? There is no purpose to Industrial Livestock Operations for a product that ALREADY saturates the marketplace - from grain to beef.

As for restoring "bio-reserves", is that what you call trying market buffalo meat, failing miserably, and getting yourself susidized by the fedral gov't.

He is harvesting a sustainable amount from the heard. What is wrong with that? Harvesting from the land isnt immoral -- f'ing it up with your fenced-in cow farm at the exclusion of any other purpose IS destructive. As for subsidy, the whole American Farm industry is subsidized. http://www.heritage.org/Research/culture/BG1510.cf m, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/05/01/farme rs/, http://www.geocities.com/ericsquire/articles/ftaa/ cp040401.htm

American Farmers are givin big tax dollars to keep them on the side of the Plutocracy. Doing so flies in the face of the free-market-theists morality, which likes to pretend a free-market A) exists and B) works.

So, is Ted's subsidy a good or bad thing? Its as American as ApplePie and the overall benefit makes him more deserving than some redneck pumping cows full of hormones for f-ing Walmart.

Try here. (Search for "spank")

I second that! My nephew bought a bunch of used CD's at Amazon. The sellers sent him something else. He reported it to Amazon. Amazon fixed it and the sellers sent the right stuff. And i'm pretty sure Amazon would have given back his money if he lost it with him and Amazon knowing he paid by CC so is disputable with his CC company. You can NEVER do that with ebay. ebay looks the other way "we're just a venue."

And i don't see how buying at ebay is safer than buying at a flea market. At a flea market, you SEE and CAN TOUCH for youself the item. You can't do that on ebay where you have to rely on the honesty of the seller. I've seen 100% positive sellers with lots of feedback DELIBERATELY LIE on ebay, lying even when you email them questions. So that once you pay for the item, it's too late and you've lost your money!! Many sellers on ebay don't use CC's or paypal or escrow.com. So who the hell's gonna protect the buyer if ebay doesn't????

for anybody wanting to see the gruesome insides of ebay.

Free fall = orbit = Effect of gravity is negated by the centripital force. ( things do not orbit around something else, they both orbit around a common mass point ) For the Gravity Vector and Centripital vector, If equal, then object stays in sky, due to orbit. Zero gravity = stuff flies off into space. Escape velocity = sustained centripital force nessesary to overcome force of gravity. Free fall in vomit_Comet is a type of orbit. ( kind of like the orbit of a comet crashing into the earth ). http://www.astronomynotes.com/gravappl/s3.html ( as long as the distance is finite, there is some gravitational force ) Henry Cavendish measured the gravitational constant with freaking CANDLES! http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Cavendis h.html http://www.geocities.com/neveyaakov/electro_scienc e/cavendish.html

yes it really works...

Anarchist FAQ

The people who think property damage is a valid/proper/appropriate means of expression for anarchist ideals are not anarchists, they're vandals and criminals. If they think of themselves as anarchists, then they are misleading themselves and others Anarchy is NOT "fuck shit up and get away with it". Anarchy is NOT chaos, or destruction - though this is often how it is portrayed by its many detractors, and unfortunately how it is portrayed by those so called "anarchists" who have no clear idea whatsoever about Anarchist ideology.

Read people like Goldman, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Chomsky, Tolstoy and others - anarchism is a political ideology of peace and true liberty; it seeks to undermine the greed, heirarchy, control, coercion and force inherent in government and other similar institutions on the core belief that man has the means and the ability to act harmonious with his fellow man; that man can, and should, be able to organize himself in positive and productive ways without forming the central force of government.

Anarchy is not naive or unrealistic - extremely difficult to acheive perhaps, especialy as the institutions and governments and status quo is only getting stronger. But to say it is naive, unrealistic or impossible is a wholly defeatist attitude, and shows a distinct lack of outward/forward thinking, not to mention a complete lack of regard or faith into what we as humans are capable of achieving, sooner or later.

Don't concentrate on the spectacularly difficult notion of changing the world - but instead focus on all the ways you can realize and act upon the ideas of freedom and liberty starting with just yourself.

Also understand that there's alot more of us out there than you may realize.

Links:

http://www.infoshop.org/
http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html
http://www.infoshop.org/fake.html

http://www.practicalanarchy.org/

http://www.voluntaryist.com/

http://www.strike-the-root.com/

http://www.voluntaryist.com/

http://www.no-treason.com/resources/Spooner_No_Tre ason_VI.html

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5065/between. html
--

"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."
- Arundhati Roy

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
- P.J. ORourke

"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years."
- Lysander Spooner

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin

"Every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against himself, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will."
- Lysander Spooner

I've never understood if there is one political ideology based on anarchy or two. One where people think it's good to smash windows and one where they do not (and, presumably, a lot of other stuff).

The same can be applied to Capitalism, Christianity and just about any other group you care to name that doesn't have strict membership control.

I'll speak first as someone who has participated in some very large protests (mainly anti-war) which have attracted a large number of people who describe themselves as anarchist. The vast majority were very peacable, even one time in the face of police aggression in Bristol, UK. Nor did they support property damage. They pretty much denounced such people as not being proper anarchists in the same way that hackers denounce script kiddies, muslims denounce Al Quaeda and Americans denounce Bush (at least on /. ).

However, I would say that the most fundamental definition of anarchy is that mankind is better off living without central control than with and this does not comment on violence one way or another. Nevertheless, few anarchists have such a low-level definition of anarchy. You can find anarcho-captialist factions, anarcho-socialist factions, and others, but most (all?) of these begin to denounce violence. Once you begin to use violence to get your way then whatever your intentions were, you'll find it very hard to stop using violence.

The non-window smashing anarchy that you are interested in consists of finding ways of returning people's repsonsibility for their lives to them, taking it back from the government. The example I usually use is local currencies. See here, but as I'm on /. the best example would probably be Linux. There is organization, but authority is not imposed, it merely arises through the consensus view.

In this sense Anarchy seems very much like a more humane capitalism; humane because anarchists are usually very community orientated. They have to be community orientated because the intention is to replace Government force with self-governance. However, likening anarchy to enlightened capitalism is only my view. Others will draw closer parallels to Socialism. In reality it is neither - it is simply the belief that mankind functions better working together willingly and co-operatively, than he does through force and the threat of force (which is what government is based on.) If you find your belief falls under this then it is in accord with anarchism.

There are few hard and fast definitions, but like hacking, it is only outsiders who think anarchism==criminal. More depth can be found here. Whether you agree with anarchism or not, if you find a group of them, you can usually be sure of some lively political debate. ;)

At it's core, Anarchy has a faith in mankind. The general reasoning is that any form of government can become corrupt because the people it is comprised of can become corrupt. The only revolution that will really change things is a social one, one that deals with people. If that can be achieved, then the question of what system of government to use comes down to one of efficiency, which is anarchy. Anarchy is more efficient because it is willing and unrestricted co-operation.

Anarchy is a faith in people's ability to work together without coercian. It is most definitely not disorganisation - just lack of control.

It's rather cruel to post a geocities site on /. but for the lucky first hundred or so, you can find some interesting information on Anarchy here. And more is here

If you don't beleive me, then maybe you'll beleive this guy.

BTW, that's being generous, both in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the resistances. Take the case of Executive Outcomes, for example.
A modern, well equipped force - no matter how tiny - can crush third-world level resistances (such as in Afghanistan). And a military our size is hardly needed to defeat a nation such as Iraq; it's needed to rout a nation such as Iraq while at the same time having troops engaged in operations all over the world in dozens of bases.

I seem to remember that, in the recent past, we were running budget surplusses.

I feel dirty for posting a link to a geocities site on slashdot.

Yeah - actually, the whole premise of Ultima IV and forward was about religion - or, rather, virtues and ethics, which I think is what all religions ultimately are about.

Ultima VII was different because it was also about organized religion. Previous Ultimas were mostly about golden rule - you're supposed to be the embodiment of Virtues, to set an example for others to follow. Ultima VII, then, was about organized religion - and why organized religion can easily go wrong and be ultimately harmful to its followers.

And meanwhile back in real world, Ultima VII was supposed to tell a thing or two about new age religions, specifically Scientology.

Yes mercy is a virtue in Buddhism. And I try to follow it on a daily basis. But so is telling the truth. So is pursuing that which is right.

I am not trying to spread hatred of Christians. I am a former one AND and married to one. What I am trying fight is the Christian belief that they have cornered the market on truth. And many of them act as such. If you ar not with them or like them, you are against them. There are more sources of truth out there than Christianity.

As for your historical evidence of all those things and events that happened during the dark ages, I certainly am not disagreeing that they happened. I postulate, of course, that all those things are the exceptions not the rule. Like Galileo, they happened despite living under Christian Theocratic Rule as opposed to a very tolerant pagan Rome. Remember, the lack of new thought and science is why it was called the Dark Ages, not because the sun wasn't as bright.

BTW, More on the fate of Hypatia can be found here, about halfway down the page and about the library (which they have found a very small part of because it was purposely hidden to protect it from destruction by the Christians!).

You realize that there was no number "0" in the west until probably the middle of the 12 or 13th century because "0" meant the abscence of anything and since God was everywhere, there could be nothing, therefore the number "0" was heresy? How much math can you really do without a zero? Yet you claim discovery flourished under these conditions?

I'm sorry to pick on Christianity but that is the topic of the thread and the one I know the most about. Does Islam and Hinduism and the other have there warts? Sure they do. Pointing out the issues and problems with Christianity does not automatically mean I agree with the other or think they are ok. Christianity is the current topic. Start a thread about the evils of the caste system in India, or the sudden rise in violent Islamic fundementalism, and I'll happily bash the Hindus and Mulsims too.

If you wish to say this is "hate" or "bigoted", you are entitled to your opinion. I prefer to think of those things I am saying as acting like the conscience for Christianity (and other religions too). If you say you are a religion of peace and love, I'll remind you of the myriad instances this was not true. If you say that rational thinking and discovery flourished between 300 AD and 1450sih, I'll point out that it didn't. If you put certain people up as heros or Saints, I'll point out how thery were evil and vicious and deserve contempt rather than praise.

I'll simply try to make you live up to your word. I'll try to educate you on the history of your religion. But I won't shut up.

Yes mercy is a virtue in Buddhism. And I try to follow it on a daily basis. But so is telling the truth. So is pursuing that which is right.

I am not trying to spread hatred of Christians. I am a former one AND and married to one. What I am trying fight is the Christian belief that they have cornered the market on truth. And many of them act as such. If you ar not with them or like them, you are against them. There are more sources of truth out there than Christianity.

As for your historical evidence of all those things and events that happened during the dark ages, I certainly am not disagreeing that they happened. I postulate, of course, that all those things are the exceptions not the rule. Like Galileo, they happened despite living under Christian Theocratic Rule as opposed to a very tolerant pagan Rome. Remember, the lack of new thought and science is why it was called the Dark Ages, not because the sun wasn't as bright.

BTW, More on the fate of Hypatia can be found here, about halfway down the page and about the library (which they have found a very small part of because it was purposely hidden to protect it from destruction by the Christians!).

You realize that there was no number "0" in the west until probably the middle of the 12 or 13th century because "0" meant the abscence of anything and since God was everywhere, there could be nothing, therefore the number "0" was heresy? How much math can you really do without a zero? Yet you claim discovery flourished under these conditions?

I'm sorry to pick on Christianity but that is the topic of the thread and the one I know the most about. Does Islam and Hinduism and the other have there warts? Sure they do. Pointing out the issues and problems with Christianity does not automatically mean I agree with the other or think they are ok. Christianity is the current topic. Start a thread about the evils of the caste system in India, or the sudden rise in violent Islamic fundementalism, and I'll happily bash the Hindus and Mulsims too.

If you wish to say this is "hate" or "bigoted", you are entitled to your opinion. I prefer to think of those things I am saying as acting like the conscience for Christianity (and other religions too). If you say you are a religion of peace and love, I'll remind you of the myriad instances this was not true. If you say that rational thinking and discovery flourished between 300 AD and 1450sih, I'll point out that it didn't. If you put certain people up as heros or Saints, I'll point out how thery were evil and vicious and deserve contempt rather than praise.

I'll simply try to make you live up to your word. I'll try to educate you on the history of your religion. But I won't shut up.

It's amazing how the same stupid slander keeps rising to the surface. Hitler was born in a Catholic family and later rejected Christianity. He was about as Catholic as Martin Luther and not even remotely Christian.

I'm too busy to do your research for you, but here's something to get you started.

I'm not a Roman Catholic, but repeating the same old lies about the Roman Catholic Church is just silly.

...gecko is written in C++, which uses the dreaded ...gasp...OOP paradigm...oh, the humanity! ;o)

For humour impaired see tablizers': OOP =bad

Of course, if hundreds of us were to host accessible interfaces to the Odeon site, it would be very difficult for Odeon to take them all down.

Particularly now that there's an open-source Perl script available:

http://www.geocities.com/opensourceodeon/

So what you're saying is you're going to host it on Tripod? Or will you use Geocities instead?

As long as the internet exists, so will pages like this - and this is indeed the beauty of the whole thing, how anyone really can (and does) create HTML.

"If US companies are considering outsourcing to Canada, it seems like they could try other places in the US where they could hire people for less then in California or NY."

Like, for example, outsourcing to US prisons where they can get workers for less cost even than India.

As a bonus, the people they laid off when they closed the previous factory (nextdoor to the prison) eventually end up in the prison (no job, no money, right?) and come back to work for "less than the cost of slave labor"

Of course, that's like saying that the average Fiat owner is a better mechanic than usual. The ownership does create the intelligence, it just acts as a filter to reject those that lack it.

Of course FISHER is not the only chess genius having (had) a hard time, another US-example is Morphy.

Of course both are not alone ;)

After all, if one looks at this game (FISHER-BYRNE), one has to appreciate Fisher's chess playing capabilities.

CC.

http://geocities.com/common_chaos/another_log.txt

I couldn't get around the lameness filter, so there is a link for as long as the bandwidth holds out.

Did you even look at their homepage before suggesting they are a threat to google? It is horrible. Their motto is "blinkx And You'll Never Miss It." They can't capitalize their own name but they can capitalize "And." Looks like a spyware company without a webmaster to me.

Threat? Google? This must be a joke. Maybe Webtek is a threat as well.

Scott McCloud discusses this at length in Understanding Comics. As a rendering of a person becomes more stylized and abstract, the viewer begins to fill in details on their own. Not only can our minds fill in more details than an artist can draw, but the content we fill the drawing with is our own, which makes the character more accessible.

A similar effect occurs with The Sims. Their reductionist design and behavior allows users to ascribe all sorts of baroque narratives to their simple actions.

There's a nice Case study of upgrading from Suse 8.2 -> 9.0 using APT. Didn't quite work as cleanly as a major Debian upgrade, but sure as hell beats re-installing the whold OS (as redhat and suse's yast installer seem to enjoy)

If you need decent Unicode support, don't try Ruby, 'cos it's author arbitrarily dislikes Unicode and refuses to implement it.

The dislike isn't arbitrary. There is considerable resistance in Japan and China to Unicode, in part due to the fact that the ordering of characters is different than the order of established standards. The same is true for East Indian languages (although the objections are rather different).

Unicode is western-centric, a bias that can be seen in the fact that 7-bit ASCII maps one-to-one to UTF-8. Imagine, if you will, if -- rather than a clean 1-1 mapping of ASCII-7 to UTF-8 -- UTF-8 rearranged the characters, so they were ordered:

P e g 6 u l o G K x 1...

These aren't the only objections, but they illustrate that any dislike of Unicode is far from arbitrary.

Ruby does have Unicode support; granted, Ruby strings are not UTF-8 by default, like they are in Java, and you can't write Ruby programs using UTF-8 characters for variable names, and so on, like you can in Java. But Ruby does have basic support for dealing with UTF-8 strings, sufficient for most purposes.

The story reminded me of this site. I'm not sure if the responses are real but I particularly enjoyed reading the Cthulhu response to a 419.

The History of Superhero Comic Books

Speaking of novels and comic books, I don't think Farenheit 451 would ever have been written if not for what the House Subcomittee on Juvenile Delinquency did to comics (and, almost as an afterthought, to pulps).

I'll be happy if American comics just catch up to where they were pre-HSJD. (I'm still waiting...)

(Gog and Magog)

Points:
1) Ice
2) Numbers
3) Calamity

original lyrics

...like this guy. You can't get much closer to making your own webcam than this. It's not like you can print a CMOS Image Sensor from your bubblejet.

While Australia herself is nuclear weapon free,

I seem to recall reading that one of the reasons used for acquiring the F-111 was to have something to drop nukes on Indonesia and other neighbouring countries in the event of Communism spreading into our immediate region.