Slashdot Mirror

If "None of the Above" wins, you either start over or let the seat go unfilled

But, when you start over, what makes you think there will be a better option? Given the choice of voting "none of the above", or voting on a guy who looks like this and says everything can be solved by nuclear weapons, how do you think the Homer Simpsons will vote?

Then perhaps the seat should go unfilled, then.

If "None of the Above" wins, you either start over or let the seat go unfilled

But, when you start over, what makes you think there will be a better option? Given the choice of voting "none of the above", or voting on a guy who looks like this and says everything can be solved by nuclear weapons, how do you think the Homer Simpsons will vote?

...in recognizing fake passports?

That being a low paying job, I am guessing it employs many immigrants.
From like... I don't know... Nigeria?

And what are the current UK laws on creating and carrying around a obviously fake passport?
You know... kind that would have big red letters saying "FAKE PASSPORT! NOT REAL! NOT A FORM OF IDENTIFICATION! FOR JOKE PURPOSES ONLY!" on it?

I agree with your point that the new Penryn mac laptops are not orders of magnitude faster than the Merom based previous generation.
But it begs the question...

For example, recently I upgraded a 500MHz G3 12" iBook for a friend and it had FireWire ports on it... I imaged the HDD using the FireWire port and an external FireWire HDD enclosure.. I followed this complex procedure ( http://uk.geocities.com/ibookupgrade/lower_case_removal.htm ) for replacing the HDD in that little old laptop and re-imaged the new internal drive and it booted right up... I am very doubtful I could have done that with the USB ports..

If Apple saw to it fit to equip that VERY SLOW iBook with FireWire, then there really is not REAL Plausible excuse that these new Intel Mac Laptops are missing the ExpressCard slots and they do not incorporate FireWire as well? I think it is on purpose and they are saving probably a dollar or two in costs, but will make many more dollars as people who need it are forced to pay the stiff Apple tax and get the Pro model that has both the ExpressCard and FireWire.

Not that I am a fanboy of Apple, but my $600 old Dell Inspiron 6400 has BOTH FireWire 400 and ExpressCard 54 as standard equipment (but the back of the display is missing the glowing Apple logo)... Just saying.

Well this sounds like a great idea and I am all for keeping people safe from sexual predators but I do not believe this system can function properly unless all of those who must register will be honest and do so. Unfortunately as someone mentioned there is nothing to prevent someone from registering their email address in the registry and then turning around and getting a free email account with a false name. Probably these online sexual predators are using false names anyway. I think that in addition to such a registry, this country needs to fight this problem by discussing the dangers of online social networking in classrooms and demonstrating to the children what kinds of scenarios take place, in much the same way that educational movies on television show how a potential kidnapper says he needs help finding his dog or your mom asked me to pick you up from school so that children will recognize these ploys and learn to stay away from them. Kids think the online social programs are all fun and games and "everyone" is on there and doing that but popular as it is, it is a very bad idea to get mixed up with people you do not know personally. I do not have anything against those sites and they have many good uses. There are many people I know who I am staying in touch with through those sites and I would have lost touch a long time ago if they did not exist so they are good sites. But like anything good there can be a bad side to it and crazy people victimizing our children are ruining it for everybody. That is why the problem needs to be fought through the education system and by teaching the children how to avoid becoming victims. Being that this country spends the most on education in the world and ranks in the toilet in terms of our students' test scores, I think some of that money should be taken away from wherever it goes right now and instead they should invest a little bit of it to teach the kids about the dangers of going on to the online social networking sites and talking to weird strangers over there, as it were. I am putting together this new website and this last sentence will be a shameless plug for it. Right now it is about the upcoming election but I think this subject of social networking and the dangers of it should be documented over there too, as it were. The page is at this location over here. Thanks for reading my long rant. See sometimes the government tries to solve a problem with the best of intentions but they are not the best qualified to solve the problem. See sexual predators will sign up their email to the registry and then get a free email to work around it. Solution? Regulate free email. That will cause some new problem. Solution? Regulate that too. Sooner or later there will be so many regulations that we won't be able to fart without breaking a law somewhere. Instead sure keep the registry it's a good idea but also teach the children through education how to avoid becoming victims. Education and knowledge are the best power.

Take a cue from Microsoft and car makers and instead of using a version number, use the number of next year. So your software product if you release it by Christmas should be called Whatever 2009. If you release it after the first of the new year, it should be called Whatever 2010. That causes people to believe that the product is something very advanced and technological. Alternately you could take a cue from Apple and name your product after some animal family. Hey just a shameless plug but check out my new website that I am putting together it's not finished yet but it will talk about the upcoming Election. With so much time left until we go to the polls. Now is the time to put together a site like it. Nothing fancy but I will try to put good information over there. It's over here.

The trouble with big brother sort of things like this is that these programs get out of hand, go out of control, and end up making everyone's lives miserable. And do we really want to live in a world that is so full of cameras and government spying that we can't fart without being caught? And since I'm already on a rant about this sort of thing then what the hell, check out my new web site at this place where I'm going to write about my thoughts about the upcoming election and how I think government should be. Let me sum up by saying that all this government spying over the excuse of doing it to keep us safe well that is not the way I'd solve the security situation around the world. Because you have to find some kind of balance. If you have a government network of ten cameras on every street corner, then, well, you're going to receive so much video data that there won't be enough people in the Universe to watch all of it, much less to pay attention and look for activity that is really suspicious. It just won't work. There is infinity amounts of information in the world. The trick to figure out is how you reject nearly all of it in such a way that most of the remaining information is a positive hit on something suspicious. Unfortunately, governments do not know such boundaries or limits. They pass a law saying there will be fifty cameras on every intersection. They don't stop to think that it will cost millions or maybe even billions of dollars to do it. What do they care anyway? The tax payer will pay for it. This is no way to run a country. It's only a way to take away everyone's liberty without gaining any benefit from it at all. Because governments don't know limits or boundaries, and so they don't know how to do something in moderation. It's too much, too late, ineffective, expensive, and it will accomplish nothing. If only I were running for President right now. Everything would be okay.

GEOS was the beginning of NeXT.

GEOS was the product of Broderbund software. mID 80S.

GEOS Graphic Environment Operating System, v1.2 (Berkeley Softworks, 1985, d,o,b,m)

Taken from : http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/6757/CARTS.HTML

NeXTSTEP : Nextstep was the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer developed to run on its range of proprietary computers, such as the NeXTcube. Nextstep 1.0 was released on September 18, 1989 after several previews starting in 1986.

Taken from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

Gee, GEOS was a year before NeXTSTEP was even previewed. And GEOS was Gold, RTM, in the hands of users, etc. BEFORE NeXT was around.

Nice try, but Commodore ate Apple up in the early days.

Again, Apple innovated how? Seems to me, their innovation is more waiting for existing copyrights / patents run out / are forgotten about, and then they "originate" them for profit.

Ever since Woz left / was forced out of Apple, they ceased to be the company they started out to be. Strange, funny, and sad, all at the same time.

--Toll_Free

Judging from how you've stormed this article, I have a feeling you might be one of the people involved on the WP side. This is a sordid saga to say the least, and Wales was very much involved in making sure that the "SlimVirgin" admin was shielded from blowback on the whole thing.

Every single post you've made so far is nothing more than ad hominems directed towards Byrne, but nothing particular of value other than your opinion that he's an idiot. Which may very well be the case, but doesn't magically come true just because you say it.

Ultimately, even if it's true or false, it's just another internet drama, brought to you by the unintentionally funny faux secrecy so desperately and incompetently exercised by the people who control Wikipedia.

EA /Sony is firing DRM volleys at the pirates yelling "A vast ye thieving scum" and all their shots fall short landing on the merchantmen customers who complain about poor marksmanship.

Instead of adjusting their aim, EA / Sony fires yet a bigger broadside.

And the real pirates aren't even in this battle because they are sailing the Jolly Roger far off over the horizon playing all the de-tormented games that will fit on a 6 terabyte hard drive.

Comic on SPORE drm:

http://www.geocities.com/cloudchip

http://www.geocities.com/cloudchip/

http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)
http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/
http://srfi.schemers.org/
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
http://www.quickref.org/
http://java.sun.com/javase/reference/api.jsp
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.stackoverflow.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://yutaka.is-a-geek.net/
http://www.gotapi.com/
http://www.open-rsc.org/
http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/resource.htm
http://www.geocities.com/orion_blastar/contact/
http://en.wikibooks.org/

I can say with great certainty that I have no idea what anything is.

Exactly!

"Why is anything ANYTHING?" - the great philosopher Master Shake

Thanks for the pointer. And if you've never seen it before, let me present you with the equivalent for malt liquors, Spicoli's Liquor Store. A classic since 1997.

Oops! You're right. It's not the Gap of Rohan (though I hear that's where Strider buys his outfits). I meant the gap between the mountains of Gondor, and the mountains of Mordor, near Osgiliath. It doesn't seem to have a name. Perhaps it could be called the Gap of Ithilien

It does so in a carbon neutral way by starting with food production -- ending with a form that could quite easily be interpreted as a 1,000 meter high Minaret rising at the center of the population.

Net present value of all outputs of such a "Minaret Biosphere": $3.5 billion.

To begin, consider that a 2d picture can either be a picture (things can fall), or a map (things don't fall). Since the corresponding 3d thing is a picture/map of four dimensions, we can build objects like houses, furniture, etc from plan and views.

Not all seems to be aimple. A knife cuts: literally, it makes a surface by motion, and is therefore tipped by a space of N-2 dimensions. Rivers can be either "latrous" (1d) or "hedrous" (2d). A fault lake is 2d (since faults are a break of surface).

Holes come in two types, although these are topologically the same. One can have a "bridge" or "tunnel" kind of hole: in 3d, these are the same, in 4d they are different.

The planet rotates on clifford motion. This makes every point of the 4-sphere go around the centre. One sees this by equality of energy in modes of rotation.

None the same, there can be seasons. If the sun does not follow in the year-circle any of the circles of the earth rotating, then there will be seasons. You don't just have hemispheres in summer vs winter, but season-zones to match the time-zones. That is, for example, Christmas (normally in summer), can fall in early spring, or late winter.

The poles are replaced by circles of extreme climate. One has a "equator circle", and a "polar" circle. At the tropics (a singular torus-shape thing), the sun becomes to the zenith once a year. At the artic torus, the sun hugs the horizon for the equate of the shortest day.

Because the sun is relatively still in the sky, there is no variation in the number of hours. What makes the seasons is that the the sun is lower in the horizon, even at midday.

See, eg my site http://www.geocities.com/os2fan2/gloss/index.html

This 188,000 kg to LEO figure is interesting. That's a big jump from previous figures.
This page:
http://www.geocities.com/launchreport/ares5.html

shows the latest design at 145 tonnes in June 2008. Has there been another big boost since then?? The 188 tonnes figure is from NASA's page and copied to WP but I don't see when it changed...

I wasn't saying your head is under your 'heals'. Standing upright (like this) puts the head above and slightly in front of the heels. Rotating the linked image clockwise and the head arcs over the heels; hence, falling head over heels.

Also try this: "You can't continue to have your cake after eating it and eat it too".

You can get a FTA card from Sky - that gives you around 300+ channels. There's a good guide to FTA channels in Europe

Here's a free replacement, only about 60 lines of ColdFusion plus a few formula tables to fill in:

http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/payroll2.htm

Take advantage of web paradigm fights to get free payroll systems.
       

I still remember some of the opcodes from memory... I started out on an Ohio Scientific Challenger 4p, doing hand assembly. The $12 apple shouln't be hard, considering a C64 with a bunch of games on ROM can be stuffed into a joystick.

fixed

Oh, the irony.

I've been blocking Yahoo for some time.

Well, the poor Navajo Nation has lost its internet access, eh? Sounds like a step forward for human rights! Everyone knows that nationlism is the cause of genocide...

http://www.geocities.com/spiralxuk/trolls.html

From the heyday of /. trolling when we had our own hidden sids and community. I still meet up with a couple of guys I met here through trolling almost 8 years on :)

A troll should contain enough clues that anyone who stops to think should be able to spot its nature, whilst still eliciting frothing at the mouth from the gullible and/or easily annoyed. The more ridiculous the troll is while still getting responses (especially the classic point-by-point rebuttal), the better a troll it is. It's almost a spectator sport - if you spot a troll, you can then laugh at the idiots who have responded to something like this:

http://www.geocities.com/spiralxuk/texts/troll4.html :D

I seem to remember writing something on this some years ago... :)

http://www.geocities.com/spiralxuk/howto.html

Ah, happy memories...

You mean Engrish, right?

You are wrong, both Thomas Jefferson and John Locke supported copyright (Jefferson didn't like it in the Constitution, though). http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7842/archives/copy.htm

Also, John Locke was the true pioneer and he did far more for empiricism and governmental theory than Jefferson ever did.

Nope, they assfuck the taxpayers.

Well it's that, or they just lawyer up.

Eventually someone is going to say.. Hey, this stuff costs a bajazillion dollars to build and $14,000 an ounce to get into orbit, maybe we should keep it in orbit and see if it can be reused?

If that doesn't happen, maybe somebody else will scrap the stuff

Once upon a time, a junkman had a dream...
"I'm gonna build a spaceship, go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back and sell it."
So he put together a team. An ex-astronaut...a fuel expert...they built a rocketship...
And they went to the moon. Who knows what they'll do next?

As I say, reduce, reuse, and recycle. With Andy Griffith's help this will be possible with space equipment.

If you want a Virtual desktop that does not suck or get in the way. Try Secretly.

I have not run it on Vista. But I have used it extensively on XP. It is wicked fast at changing desktops. It has no user interface (it is keyboard driven). Which works out well. All of the graphical virtual desktop pagers I have seen in Windows suck.

Usage is not bad either. Unzip it to a folder you want to keep it in. I use C:\Program Files\Secretly. Log out and back in or reboot. You will need to hit F11 to start using it.

1. F12 Turn off Hotkeys
2. F11 Turn on Hotkeys
3. Ctrl+Alt+T sets the current desktop as the TARGET desktop for a window move
4. Ctrl+ALt+M moves the window that currently has focus to the target desktop
5. Ctrl+Alt+A Moves all windows to desktop 1
6. Ctrl+Alt+numpad 1 to Ctrl+Alt+numpad 9 will switch to desktop 1 to 9.

As I have said, it is wicked fast for changing desktops. So far it is the only virtual desktop program that has been fast enough at switching deskops, does not have teh gay pager that gets in the way and has sane keyboard navigation.

... a source of reliable news that includes all relevant facts.
--------

While I am not claiming that anything you wrote was incorrect, I hope you understand that relevant facts can, and in politics usually are, - subjective. What is relevant to one individual is not relevant to another.

Adam Smith in economics, and James Madison in politics, ( among many others ) used the term "interests." There are many areas of objective and common interests, but in general there can be no such thing as objective journalism. The advertiser funded media serves the economic and political interests of it's paying customers - above the economic and political interests of it's readers.

Democracy and markets are both based on serving the needs of their customers. They are both based on competition. Competition of politicians for votes and competition of products for sales. They both serve the PUBLIC interest.

An advertiser funded media does not serve the public interest.

I_Voter

Cotton Patch Socialism: Origins and Ideology
http://www.geocities.com/stewjackmail/cps.html

This Socialist Ideology is famous as the shortest and simplest Socialist Ideology known to exist. Additionally, it's near universal acceptance by the general public puts it into a class of it's own. No pun intended.

So when the Hindenburg burned, why didn't it explode?

A wavefront of about 100 feet per second on an unmixed fuel-air burn? That's *darned fast*. It only looks slow because the Hindenburg was the size of the Titanic. http://www.oldbeacon.com/beacon/airships/images/zmc-2-5.jpg">Another perspective.

That's *fast* -- way faster than batteries.

Given that 5-10 minutes is pretty standard for automotive fast charging (phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc), when you factor in the time to get off the highway, to get to a station, to connect, to disconnect, to pay, to get back to the highway, and get back up to speed, an extra couple minutes is hardly a relevant difference. I certainly wouldn't pay 5-10 times as much for my fuel and do ~3 times the environmental damage in order to save a couple minutes. Who would? :And about efficiency: Where are those numbers from?

I gave you a peer-reviewed paper; read it yourself. I can give you a dozen more that'll tell you the exact same thing. Li-ion batteries are nearly lossless. Electrolysis and fuel cells are quite lossy.

And in terms of efficiency, what are they even measuring? efficiency from battery to drive train? from power source to battery?

Are you incapable of reading? The paper is linked, right above. Need it linked a second time? Here you go. Do you not know what "well to wheel" means? That means measuring the efficiency all the way back from the source of the energy used in the power plant, all the way to the torque imparted by the vehicle's wheels.

If peer-review isn't good enough for you, I can show you where you can buy these things yourself and test them yourself. Get, say, some A123 batteries from DeWalt power tool packs or any other LiP from the open market, a Manzanita Micro charger, and an Azure Dynamics Force Drive. The batteries are 96-99% efficient (depending on how fast you charge them), the charger is ~93% efficient, and the drivetrain is 85-90% efficient (actually a bit low for an EV). The power going to the charger coming from the US grid has an average transmission efficiency of 92.8%. What part of this are you having trouble with, so I can give you a dozen references on the subject?

SF:
Dune by Frank Herbert
Asimov's Early Robot Series - Caves of Steel,The Naked Sun,Robots of Dawn
Heinlein's "Juvenile" books - http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/1872/juvie.htm I especially liked "The Star Beast" and "Have Space Suit, Will Travel"
Daniel Keys Moran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Keys_Moran Especially "The Long Run", "The Armageddon Blues"
Vernor Vinge: "The Peace War" The hero is a child math wiz.
Douglass Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book #1

Fantasy:
JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings
R.A. MacAvoy, Damiano Series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._A._MacAvoy
Gene Wolf Urth of the New Sun Series, maybe just the first book.
Terry Pratchett's Disc World books

After a stint doing politics, testifying before Congress, and successfully getting a law put on the books (PL101-611) forcing NASA to procure launch services from the private sector, I had gotten interested in the tax system as a source of market failures in high technology investment and, as a consequence, was researching some fringe ideas related to the income tax. So I ordered the two volume book "The Law That Never Was" by Bill Benson via mail. Literallyl, the very I sat down to read the book, I heard, quietly but quite distinctly a female voice say just the 3 words: "It's too late."

It was quite an experience, unique in my life.

When I mentioned it to a friend who was somewhat well connected politically, he said that he had heard of microwave devices that could project sounds into people's heads, and that this seemed like a good candidate for such a use.

I don't know, but it sure was spooky -- and keep in mind it was a one time event some time ago. I had done work for secret government projects in secured facilities with electromagnetic shielding but it was always with the understanding that there were ways of gathering data both passively and actively from within such facilities via microwaves as well as other frequencies. It really never occurred to me there might be some further purposes to such shielding. Now I'm not so sure. You have to wonder how many of the neocons are literally hearing "the voice of God"...

Whoa. Dude.

First off, learn to read. I didn't say anything about Obama, or carbon caps, or global warming, or any of that stuff, and your assumptions about what I would have said are faulty.

Second, to the extent that your points are on topic they are generally illogical, and sound more like memorized talking points that rational responses to what I said. For instance, you try to justify Bush lying when the point in question is whether or not he did lie, not whether or not it was justified. And what congress did with the information they were given is irrelevant to the question of Bush's honesty in saying that the information they saw was "the same" as what he saw. The information was not the same, he knew it, he lied when he said it was the same, and the stupidity of the Democrats in not seeing this isn't germane.

Finally, when you do make an on topic factual claim, it's wrong. For example:

Even the "he tried to kill my daddy claim" was a lie; there is no credible evidence that Sadam ever tried to kill Bush Sr

Uh, no. Bill Clinton actually broke up a plan by Saddam to try and whack Bush Sr on a trip to Kuwait.

Not according to the recent pentagon report:

The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence. "It was surprising," said one source familiar with the preparation of the report (who under Pentagon ground rules was not permitted to speak on the record). Given how much the Iraqis did document, "you would have thought there would have been some veiled reference to something about [the plot]."

...which continues to agree with what the CIA was saying as far back as 1993, less than a month after the event. The fact that Clinton acted on the story says more about Clinton's judgment than the truth of the story. In any case, Clinton didn't "break up" the plan, or claim to; he just retaliated. And unless you are trying to argue something along the lines of "Clinton acted on this rumor, so it must be true" I think you'd better just give up.

--MarkusQ

P.S. If you are trying to argue that Clinton's actions are an unassailable proof that something is true, please let me know. I could have some fun with that one. Seriously.

Waiting for portables, desktops, and servers to be completely intertwined - for the web version of this http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/

I wish. I've got a couple with dead keys. Haven't got the heart to throw them out. One day I'll spend a few hours stripping them down and cleaning them in the hope they'll come back to life....

And you can't plug them into modern mobos, they go crazy with phantom presses and wild repeats. Supposedly you can solder a resistor on its board to make it match, or just use a USB/PS2 adapter.
See http://www.geocities.com/jszybowski/keyboard/index.htm

Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions, memoizations, tablings and/or materialized views similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded hence time-optimized code base.

Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.

Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.

This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:

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

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

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

It may turn out that due the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity, the growth of reward may need ultimatelyto go exponential but the principle remains true.

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.

They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.

No they should calculate the The Nine Billion Names of God and earn a visit from The Doctor

So, the court upholds the constitutional guarantee of free speech. But... only if the speech is against people.

This is not a joke: In 13 states, you do not have the right of free speech if you talk about food.

Read about food libel laws. Say anything you like about people, but don't libel food!

Don't read this, if you live in these states: Citizens of Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, you may not read the next paragraph:

Large amounts of caffeine have an effect on the human central nervous system that many people consider to be unhealthy. In my opinion, it is better to avoid caffeine. That means avoiding soft drinks with caffeine, and avoiding coffee unless it is de-caffeinated.

Citizens of those states, resume reading. If you care for yourself, you will care for your government. Read the many, many books about government corruption in the United States. Take some action against abusiveness.

More stories about your loss of the right to free speech:

Talk Show Host Gets First Taste of Food Disparagement Laws

Food disparagement laws: A threat to us all.

Food Fights

Food Fight - food disparagement laws fought by Center for Science in the Public Interest's FoodSpeak Coalition project

The http://www.arrickrobotics.com/ A-Robot is an excellent beginner's bot. It is rugged (can survive 10 years in a drawer and still function) gets you up and running quickly, and is expandable. A 12V, 2A power output, 3 spare RC servos, and a 40 pin I/O header (that takes an IDE cable) will let you play with electronics. Roger Arrick wrote "Robots for Dummies" that shows one project at a time how to breadboard a peripheral and code for it. Buy everything that's in the T1 kit, but don't get the BS2 - get the BS2e. $400.

The closest second for a beginner's bot is the BOE bot fromParallax. It's based on the same processor. The problem with the BOE bot is that when it breaks, it's dead. It's not really expandable like the A-Robot is. you would have to see the A-Robot (1 ft x 1ft) next to the BOE Bot (6in x 6in) to understand.

For less beginning, and more electronics, check out http://www.ere.co.th./ You are trading BASIC for assembly, and no longer have a beginner's book to guide you. You do have http://www.avrfreaks.net./ The really cool thing is all the peripherals on 16 pin headers, so you don't have to spend 3 days to get a stepper motor to spin. You will be able to bread-board parts too, with 16-pin headers on the boards.

A close second in this field would be the boards that accept Atmel STK-style headers. That's what I use when I'm not building a custom board. I'm too entrenched in 10 pin headers to go to 16 pin headers, though I made some 10-to-16-pin-adapter-boards.

Finally, you could get an AVR board like I use for my projects from http://www.geocities.com/mengjinsu. Meng's boards are great if you know how to stuff PCBs and solder them. I order them by the dozen. Get the ABR chips from http://www.digikey.com/ and the rest of your stuff from there or http://www.mouser.com./ Also, take a look at http://www.sparkfun.com/

Andy Out!

Well, if that government is Swedish Borg and looks like the femme fatale Annika Seven of Nine, then they can tunnel me and my data all the time...

(Seven: Ensign Kim, would you like to have sex?

Kim: (Flustered) Bwa, bwa, why do you ask THAT?

Seven: Your perspiration has increased, your pupils are dilated, your temperature has elevated, and you are emitting pheromones. Those are common indicators in your species...)

Oh, and if you want to read FANFICTION about 7 of 9...

http://www.geocities.com/voyagerbluealert/VOYORGY.html

This is a standard field manual that has been used for special forces training for almost two decades. I read it on a lunch break nearly five years ago while attached a unit that wasn't even special forces. It's also posted on the internet:

Here: http://www.counterinsurgency.org/doctrine/31-20-3/31-20-3.htm
Here: http://www.geocities.com/tominelpaso/armymanual.htm
oh and on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/FM-31-20-Operational-Techniques-Department/dp/1581605463/

Also, Anyone who is familiar with the School of the Americas, the United States history of engaging in false-flag terrorism, or the CIA's cocaine trafficking business should not find any of it a surprise.

Hey! It's called Starbug and it's nothing to be ashamed of.

The general topic of skepticism is one that is treated at length in Philosophy. A great Philosophy resource page is Epistemelinks.com. A search under 'Epistemology' could be fruitful. However, one of the best texts on skepticism is The Outlines of Pyrrhonism, by Sextus Empiricus. The first book especially is a great read, even if is is nearly 1,500 years out of date. The text of the book can be found on-line (scroll down) here. This is the best resource I know to teach skepticism to students.