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

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

I hope that this new Congress can and will reverse this situation, so that we can achieve clean, safe and economical fusion power sometime in the next 5-10 years. The country badly needs practical fusion for its near - and far-term survival; the enclosed bill has been constructed to do this.

Please don't replicate the "every SUV must have bad fuel economy" meme. It's just not true. I drive a SUV and it's fuel economy is better than that of many ordinary 2WD vehicles (22-27 mpg). This meme is dangerous, because many Americans believe that and therefore American companies see no reason to improve the fuel efficency of their horribly heavy, clunky and obsolete 4x4 behemoths. Japanese car companies do not have this luxury and it shows - Subaru Forester, Mitsubishi Outlander, Honda CR-V or Nissan X-Trail are great family machines and they are as environment-friendly as regular (non-SUV) vehicles. So you don't have to give up anything, if it's really that important for you to have American company badge on your car, buy a Subaru rebadged as Chevrolet.

It establishes a pattern of Clinton seeking sex with other subordinates.

In the end of course it did not work. Clinton got re-elected.

In the end, of course, the Lewinsky scandal arose in 1998, so clearly you not only don't understand the details of the subject, you're disqualified from discussing the "purpose".

silly impeachment process

So "silly" that the Arkansas Supreme Court recommended that he be disbarred, and which recommendation eventually led to his being disbarred by the US Supreme Court, and to his law license being suspended for five years. Face it: Clinton was guilty of a felony, and paid a professional penalty for it. Now perhaps you don't think that lying under oath in a court of law is a big deal, but happily enough our courts seem to disagree. The only pity is that the gutless, spineless, useless Republicans in the Senate refused to address the problem.

It's a limitation of the Unix user model (and probably also the Windows user model) that only root can change userID to become a less priviledged user (programs like su, sudo, ksu, etc. are all setuid root, or at least communicate with something that is, in order to accomplish this). Making a program that can switch UID thus requires setuid bits and other unpleasantness, and requires active intervention from root.

(It's particularly nasty if you want to avoid active attacks rather than just mistakes, because you then have to ensure that you've irrevocably changed UID and that there's no going back - looking at Linux man pages, there are some unwelcome interactions between real, effective and saved UIDs, and between BSD and POSIX semantics.)

It would be nice to have some feature where there's a hierarchy of users, either hard-coded (e.g. a user fred can setuid() to any user whose name starts with fred-, but the sub-users can't setuid() back), or, better, dynamically defined by root (e.g. by writing something into /proc or /sys, which you'd normally want to do during boot).

I might see if I can implement this after my exams finish: "Feudal Linux", perhaps?

Idle musing about what I'd want to happen, assuming that fred-www is a sub-user of fred:
- if a file's permissions let fred-www read or write it, so can fred
- if fred-www can traverse a directory, so can fred
- fred can't execute fred-www's files? Fairly useless in practice, since the problem is more likely to be with scripts, plugins etc., in which case it's the application's responsibility to protect users from accidentally executing other users' files
- fred can send signals to fred-www's processes (so kill/xkill still work, for when the browser crashes or uses excessive CPU time), but not vice versa (because otherwise fred-www could be extremely annoying)
- root (or, looking at kernel/sys.c, anyone with capability CAP_SETUID) implicitly has everyone else as a sub-user

Of course, this idea is partly inspired by the vapourware/semi-hoax project Jesux (I don't agree with the goal, but that doesn't mean they can't have good ideas :-)

(Alternatively, User-mode Linux could be an idea to look into.)

That is a cute word, but when you herd it you misunderstood its definition. a mockumentary is a humorous film. check out this site for examples.

Check out Uve Rick's EV conversion calculator page. I've been building an EV, for what was to be a 40 mile one way where I could charge up for the return commute. Since I now work from home most time, due to the demise of my former employer, haven't had much time to finish up; also I'd recommend not doing what I did, and try to build an ultimate supercar. A simple conversion can run about $6000; fewer moving parts ( like one in the motor ), never needs oil or coolant, cost of travel per mile is mostly in the lead, which isn't that bad. An interesting development in CrFeLi Batteries is actually available in mass production and more cost effective than gasoline, gets 100k charge cycles, and for the same weight in lead gets similar range as ICE. A good set of these will run $6000 but would be good for the life of the vehicle. Almost there really, the end of the ICE era.

# THX 1138 was based on a student film Lucas made while attending USC.
# The original title was Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB
# The stars of the film were Robert Duvall as THX 1138 (yes it's a name!), Donald Pleasence as SEN 5241, and Maggie McOmie as LUH 3417
# THX 1138 was not only ahead of its time in sound effects, but also in the themes which it portrayes, such as the loss of individuals for the good of the group, the self-corruption of the human spirit, racism in science fiction, and yes, even channel-surfing
# The film was produced by American Zoetrope Studios, then co-owned by Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola
# The extras used in the film came from a drug rehabilitation center called Delancey Street Foundation. The only way to enter Delancey Street was to have your head shaved. (Thanks to donasso@pacbell.net)
# When George Lucas lived in the San Francisco Bay area, where the tunnel scenes in THX were filmed, one of his phone numbers was 849-1138, or as a mnemonic, THX-1138. (Thanks to nbeckett@gte.net)
# The "shell dwellers" in THX served as the basis for the Jawas in Star Wars.
# The sound made by the staves which the robots use to condition prisoners are remarkably similar to the lightsaber sound effect.
# Star Wars was, at one point, going to be a prequel to THX, with the character who would become Luke Skywalker conceived as a young THX.
# The licence plate number on Milner's deuce coupe in American Graffiti was THX 138.
# In Star Wars, Luke says "Prisoner transfer from cell block 1138."
# During the car chase scene, someone can be heard over the intercom saying "I think I ran over a Wookiee back there on the expressway." As any good Star Wars fan can tell you, Chewbacca is a Wookiee.
# In The Empire Strikes Back, General Rieekan says, "Send Rogues ten and eleven to station three-eight."
# Not from a Lucas movie, but in The Lawnmower Man, the experimental chimp is named Rosco 1138.
# This is unconfirmed (I'll confirm it as soon as I can get to the theatre again!) but a reliable source told me that the battle droid who loses it's head in The Phantom Menace has the number "1138" on its back.

shamelessly stolen from this site (it's geocities, so go easy)

From a bit of internet sleuthing on fan sites and the DVD petition, I can state with reasonable certainty that the nameless THX-1138 fan site is here, with associations to here.

If not, we'll get some other poor sap. Slashdot away! ;)

From a bit of internet sleuthing on fan sites and the DVD petition, I can state with reasonable certainty that the nameless THX-1138 fan site is here, with associations to here.

If not, we'll get some other poor sap. Slashdot away! ;)

Google is your friend.

Justin Orndorff seems to be a nazi lover:

Romanian fascism and anti-semitism

Justin trading warez.

Greetings to stats_for_all on the yahoo SCOX board for the excellent research:

Justin picked his Yahoo handle, "Coldwindflame" from an CD produced by "Genocide Music" in a **"legendary release feature 2 of Americas Elite kults going head to head in an all out BLACK METAL assault."**

The set list say it all:

Knights Of The Holocaust
Fallen Ones
Slit Their Throats To The Spine
Shadows Of The Fallen Kingdom
Power Of Darkness
Coldwindflame

SEE: www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Loge/3625/genrelease s.html

This is the person working at AdTI trying to FUD linux!

Justin Orndorff seems to be a nazi lover:

Romanian fascism and anti-semitism

Justin trading warez.

Greetings to stats_for_all on the yahoo SCOX board for the excellent research:

Justin picked his Yahoo handle, "Coldwindflame" from an CD produced by "Genocide Music" in a **"legendary release feature 2 of Americas Elite kults going head to head in an all out BLACK METAL assault."**

The set list say it all:

Knights Of The Holocaust
Fallen Ones
Slit Their Throats To The Spine
Shadows Of The Fallen Kingdom
Power Of Darkness
Coldwindflame

SEE: www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Loge/3625/genrelease s.html

This is the person working at AdTI trying to FUD linux!

If so one can imagine that, as with other pathogens, there are different natural susceptibilities to said autoimmune diseases in different populations from different human ecologies.

It may be that this is the underlying mechanism that seems to be driving up the rates of autism among populations high in Finnish ancestry and recent increases in immigration from India. Liberalization of immigration laws in European-derived populations and a rather aggressive affirmative action program within India aimed at dismantling the caste system there may have unleashed something on particularly susceptible populations and it may prove very difficult to ferret out what that something is if it turns out to be nanobacterium.

Not to mention the various versions for Csound, including Chaosynth.

After following some links, here's some cool human-assisted mathematically-generated music:
http://www.geocities.com/vienna/9349/

The first prime number and pi midi files are awesome ;)

Might hafta wait til tomorrow tho - looks like the guy's geocities account got /.'d already =)

• Tatooine is Dune:
  • The sand people are the fremen.
  • Jaba is Leto II, the god emperor of Dune.
  • The Sarlac is Shai-Hulud, the great worm.
  
  
• Corruscant is Trantor: The galactic capital, situated near the center of the galaxy, its entire land-mass and a good portion of its ocean covered in one gigantic multi-layered city.
  
  
• The storytelling is Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress".
  
  
• Han Solo is a space-cowboy (picture him with a cowboy hat...there you go), and Chewbaca is his indian life-partner.
  
  
• The story itself is "Young peasant saves beautifull princess from dark knight's fortress with help of old sorcerer and comic-relief sidekicks", cookie-cutter fairy tale storyline.
  

Amen to the banning of phones in lots of places but surely just because there is an _incredibly_ _slight_ chance of something bad happening is no reason to legislate against something or we'd all end up never doing anything at all. Does the chance of getting run down when crossing the street stop you from doing so? I can guarantee more people are injured/killed crossing the street than in mobile phone related gas station explosions but its not illegal to cross. How about flying? Lots of people fly (they say that statistically its the safest form of transport) and some die in horrible air crashes each year - again more than those who die in mobile phone/gas station disasters but lots of us still do it.

Most "accidents" can be prevented by a nanny state through the judicious use of legislation - hey, lets ban everything that has even a slight chance of being dangerous - but I thank god (figuratively at least) that I don't live in one, at least not yet!

Just how statistically probable does something need to be in order for you to want it banned? Lets look at the probability of a mobile phone/gas station disaster... I'll take your figure of 100 accidents and say that you mean per year (you didn't specify) - this seems a little high but we'll take this figure to start. Next, we'll estimate how many people in the world own or drive both cars and mobile phones - This article suggests that worldwide, the number of cars in use are somewhere between 580 (1990) and 816 (2010 est.) million - lets be conservative and say it has not increased at all since 1990. Finally we need to know how frequently they are refuelled. Lets estimate that, on average, a car uses one tank of gas per fortnight (lets in fact round down to two tanks per month). That makes 24 visits to the gas station per vehicle per month.

Now we'll estimate the number of car owner/drivers who also own mobile phones. A quick google leads to this article which in turn references several other sources. It would appear that both Europe and North America (the majority car owning nations) are reaching the stage where everyone who wants a mobile phone has one - lets call this around 70% of both car owners and mobile phone owners. so:

(580 million car/owners x 70%) x 24 fill-ups = 9.7 BILLION visits to the gas station annually.

So if there are 100 incidents, the probability is 1 in 97,000,000. Lets put that in perspective - the chance of winning the Canadian lottery is 1 in 13,983,816 and the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11,000,000 and the chance of dying in a car accident is (from the same source) 1 in 5,000.

So, statistically, its far safer to talk on your mobile phone whilst filling up than it was to drive to the gas station in the first place - by a huge margin!

Maybe we don't need to ban mobile phones at forecourts, maybe we need to ban cars :)

Basically when you have an entrenched bureaucracy receiving huge amounts of money to solve a technical problem, they have an incentive to not solve it and indeed to make sure no one else solves it.

I would be one to say that Jesux shall smite this thing you call hell, but there hasn't been much activity on the website in a while. I wonder if they'll ship creationism as their mailer/Outlook replacement, for they surely cannot ship evolution .

INSERT WITTY BSD DAEMON JOKE HERE

I would be one to say that Jesux shall smite this thing you call hell, but there hasn't been much activity on the website in a while. I wonder if they'll ship creationism as their mailer/Outlook replacement, for they surely cannot ship evolution .

INSERT WITTY BSD DAEMON JOKE HERE

The best is the original anti-419 Lovecraftian binge. At least, I believe it was the first. Horribly funny, though:-)

• fuck you, you stinking fucks. this is where anti-americanism stems from. right here, from your stinking ignorance and disrespect.

Back to the topic... I find it amazing that the land of the Berne Convention may stand against software patents. The French should really make up their minds. Do they want to screw the public or not?

The dude's 2000+ years old. That's pretty stale if you ask me.

It's like asking for a fresh batch of Ramses the second. Fresh isn't so fresh.

wbs.

How would it be possible to come up with a better explanation? This woman was of the family and is in the best possition to know.

I wouldn't be so sure about that...

"'He bowed with the look of a man who is utterly crushed, and slunk past me without a word. The taper was still on the table, and by its light I glanced to see what the paper was which Brunton had taken from the bureau. To my surprise it was nothing of any importance at all, but simply a copy of the questions and answers in the singular old observance called the Musgrave Ritual. It is a sort of ceremony peculiar to our family, which each Musgrave for centuries past has gone through on his coming of age--a thing of private interest, and perhaps of some little importance to the archaeologist, like our own blazonings and charges, but of no practical use whatever.'

"'We had better come back to the paper afterwards,' said I.

"'If you think it really necessary,' he answered, with some hesitation.

Well, it is my home town. I was born and raised there many moons ago.

Anyway, to give some perspective and background:

• Here is a Map of Alexandria.
• The Brucheion would be on the promontary that is just east of where "Raml Station" is marked, facing West.
• Where it says, Qaitbay Fort still stands today, and is said to be on the site of the famous Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the world, and build using the stones from its ruins.
• Just at the base of the promontary, the new library of Alexandria recently opened.
• The original library was most probably burned during the Roman attack of the city.
• The story of the Arabs buring the library is inaccurate and discredited by most historians.
• There was another daughter library at Pompey's pillar (which was not built by Pompey by the way). This one survived for 4 more centuries, but was plundered by Christian fanatic mobs. The same mob dragged the philosopher/mathematician/priestess Hypatia
• Here is another map of underwater artifacts
• Yet another older map from 1855 depicting the battle of Alexandria on 1801 between the French and the British.
• Franck Goddio has done extensive marine archology excavations in the eastern harbor and other places in Egypt (Abu Qir for example). Interesting photos there, including this map of underwater buildings and artifacts, and an artist view of the same.

Egypt is floating on archeology, literally. It is very common to find amphorae and stuff when digging foundations for buildings.

Oh, and by the way, here are some pictures from the city today, focusing on the electric tramways, two types, narrow carriage for downtown, and a wider one for the eastern parts.

I miss it!

oops direct link doesn't work try http://www.geocities.com/uniball13/tmp/

don't worry coversation is mostly in english or engrish on the forum and IRC channel.
katoob has a win32 port here
its very alpha though.

By the way... here, is a better starting point (yeah, yeah, geocities, I know...still, it's the best place to go first) than the link you posted above.

If you want to get *really* confused, get into the dirty details about how Murphy's Law might not have been uttered by Murphy.

Shining a laser-pointer, through the jaws of a pair of nailclippers, onto a screen, you can get a Single slit diffraction pattern.

In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128 kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they took the original CD samples themselves.

Grant's Dale is the one pictured on the right

Salvage 1 webpage

Scientists are theorizing that this is mainly due to air pollution - so this trend might reverse if air pollution clears up.

According to this, that quote isn't from Sir Winston.

PS: That award offer will have been outstanding for a decade come a year from this coming fall.

PPS: Does anyone know why the CATS prize had (and Ansari X-Prize has) time limits?

Name: hello, world
Dialect: English
Version: 5 June 2000
Comments: Not the canonical var'aq "hello, world"; actually prints "What do you want, universe?" in Klingon

~ nuqneH { ~ 'u' ~ nuqneH disp disp } name
nuqneH

Agreed. Link

Originally from The Onion:

Department of Education: Metric System Thriving in Nation's Inner Cities

What I used was the iBook Upgrade website. But be aware that there is a lot of difference between the 12" and 14" versions, so screws are not always on the same location as shown on the pics!

Google > Dell

ESA's new prototype shuttle was again recently re-dubbed Firefox (formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix) to avoid confusion with a NASA program that had started up some months earlier...

... and receives a hefty lawsuit from Craig Thomas and MiG. Lovers of red pandas everywhere remain baffled, but the Mozilla project team see very little for potential in confusing a web browser with a space shuttle, and so choose to say nothing.

It's a real shame that supporting more than one option is considered an error, rather than good open-mindedness. Approve Approval Voting Now!

Man, imagine all the free time the ladies would have out there to chase jocks if that question were answered. Actually, if we got a good designer working on that robot, the balance of power could swing our way! "Flowers? Pff. Dinner? Ha!"

You got metal fever, boy! Metal fever! My God! You never saw the propaganda film. It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times.

[He presses a button and a film title appears on the screen: I Dated A Robot!. In the movie a couple sit in a café and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]

Narrator: Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to...tragedy.

[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]

Billy: Neato! A Marylin Monroebot!

Monroebot: Ooo! You're a real dreamboat (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen!

Narrator: Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next!

[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom. He is kissing the Monroebot. Enter his mother.]

Billy's Mom: Billy, do you want to walk your dog?

Billy: No thank Mom, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.

[Enter his dad.]

Billy's Dad: Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?

Billy: No thanks dad, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.

[Enter his girlfriend, Mavis, from the café.]

Mavis: Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.

Billy: Gee Mavis, your house is across the street, that's an awfully long way to go for making out.

Narrator: Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance of performing the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty American football field] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand continues to drift across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of a pair of human and robots making out on beds.] They are trapped - trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex. And sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?

[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but he is still with his Monroebot and still making out with her.]

Billy: Farewell!

[He dies.]

Narrator: The next day Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [In the movie a fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with a quick laser shot.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't Date Robots!

[A caption appears on the screen with the same words on it and the movie ends. The space pope is displayed on the screen with Crocodylus Pontiflex written around him in English and alien.]

Announcer [voice-over]: Brought to you by the space pope!

[3ACV15]

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

This particular question of whether computers are faster, and its moral that they are for some things but not for others, was the subject of a 1957 movie with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Desk Set. In it, Hepburn is a librarian afraid that Tracy is planning to replace her with a large mainframe computer with lots of flashing lights. And in the end we find that yes, the computer is faster for some things, but no, it's not faster than a good librarian for all things, and there's a place for both.

(And yes, I couldn't remember the name of the movie, but it took all of about 5 seconds to find the answer in Google; searching on "hepburn tracy library computer" got me several links, and the second one was so obviously on point that the answer was in the snippet that Google itself quoted.)

...might be better passed with a completely different theory. Find the cartoon of Calvin's dad explaining the sun to him one day and read it.

Let x1 = 3D X coordinate
Let y1 = 3D Y coordinate
Let z1 = 3D Z coordinate

Let x2 = 2D X coordinate
Let y2 = 2D Y coordinate

Let cx = Center of Screen X
Let cy = Center of Screen Y

x2 = x1/z1 - cx
y2 = cy - y1/z1

What, are we going to have 3D word processors? Play a game of Q2A to kill a process? Or have 3D File managers? Maybe Superior Speech Recognition?

Maybe the average computer will not do more. The average computer user seem to have problems using email without getting viruses. They can not rip mp3's. They get confused using software that that is about as simple as it gets to convert a digital camcorder to a DVD. Both Apple's iMovie and Sony's Click to DVD boil down to little more complex than a "push here dummy" button. The only thing that an average user wants is to have a computer that wil do the thinking for him.

I guess he's going to add WiFi access to the Bar/Quiki-Wed.

(source)

International Rescue
Written by Fuzzbox and Liam Sternberg

There's danger on the way
But you won't need to play
There's just another life to save
A daring crime so bold
To steal a nation's gold
The force is launced to catch them cold

5...4...3...2...1...
Thunderbirds are go!
Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue...

They're off the beaten track
Preparing for attack
Blinding flashes, don't look back...
The clock is ticking down
Save them, save them, 'fore they drown

5...4...3...2...1...
Thunderbirds are go!
Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue...

F.A.B. you're coming through
They need your help, no one else can do
Taken, gagged and tied
Who's captured them and why?
Send a message to the sky
(Help, help, can anybody hear me?)

5...4...3...2...1...
Thunderbirds are go!
Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue...

Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue
Calling, International Rescue...

5...4...3...2...1...Zero!

And can we made a programming language out of it ?

Done.