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Unless they have patents, there is nothing they can do to stop someone from building a microscope using their plans. The only thing they can do is stop you from copying the plans themselves (under copyright law).

John D. Alexander, the inventor of the disk scanner, also has a 'free' STM design on the web. Incidentally, this guy took out a patent on the disk scanner, then withdrew the patent application! Now that's a smart way to make sure others cannot lock up a design with patents (or he just ran out of money).

US Federal receipts have been rising at a fairly close to exponential rate of a power of ten every 20 years from about 1950 until today. The total debt has been tracking Federal receipts very well for a long period of time, with debt 2-3 times yearly receipts.

Federal receipts have been slightly down since 2000, but I suspect they will rise shortly.

The big economic threat to the US Federal financing is Social Security pension system. But I suspect that will be restructured shortly once people realize how horrible it is going to get.

This has already been done. It was a DARPA project back in the 70's. You think S11 happened by terrorists armed with pocket knives? Please.

Who, underneath the bad manners, complete lack of charm, and overall repulsiveness, really aren't worth bothering with at all. That's why we have- RealDoll!

Here

In one respect I'd sad that such a law has to be passed... What kind of idiot would use his laptop while driving? but then what kind of idiot reads a bok while driving, watches TV while driving, puts on MAKEUP WHILE DRIVING????

we all must remember.... over 50% of the population has an IQ below 100. so I guess such laws need to protect the rest of us from the complete morons that are just a inch away from being drooling idiots. now we have to deal with the retards that drive BMW's 3 inches form the rear bumber. why is it that the more you spend on your car the smaller your brain get's behind the wheel?

ummm by definition of IQ exactly 50% are above and 50% are below.

Definition of IQThe average IQ of the population as a whole is, by definition 50.

Instead of purchasing a gameboy advance last summer I upgraded my Ipaq 3630 to a Dell Axim X5. My plan was to use it as an MP3 player as well as being able to emulate SNES + Genesis games on it. After all, most of the decent games on the GBA are SNES ports anyway.

Although the Axim has a 400Mhz CPU in it, it really struggles to emulate the SNES or the Genesis. NES games are very basic. What I have found to be a good play though is a Game Gear / Master System emulator called CE/GG. I used to have a master system and playing Sonic, Sonic 2 and Sonic Chaos is superb. It's interesting that whilst Genesis games are far too slow to be playable, I've managed to get some SNES games going. (Not sure if this is the quality of the emulator or a reflection of the speed of the original system). Using PocketSNES as an example, by switching off the audio and skipping frames, Super Mario World for example is relatively playable. MODE 7 games such as Super Mario Kart are far too slow tho.

Not particularly related to the DC homebrew scene I know, I just thought it was interesting that 2 separate platforms had similar experiences with emulators.

It isn't just accent. It is huge, huge, huge cultural differences. Sometimes you would be able to understand their words more easily if it weren't so difficult to believe what they are saying.

About two weeks ago I was helped by a Microsoft tech support person in New Delhi, or maybe Bangalore, I forget which. Some otherwise correctly running Windows XP computers had trashed themselves so that it was impossible to run the Recovery Console. The MS tech support guy had absolutely no clue about how to fix the problem, although he did have plenty of time-wasting ideas. This is not unusual, of course. The Psychic Friends Network is sometimes equally as good as Microsoft technical support at understanding bugs in Microsoft software.

What made this technical support call different is that the Indian Microsoft technical support guy was the most arrogant person with whom I've ever talked. He made Larry Ellison look humble. He was cheerful enough, but entirely useless doing technical support because of believing that I am an inferior who should believe any lie he tells me.

After a while, for me it stopped being a support call and began to be an interesting social interaction. In Hindu culture, if you don't belong to one of the castes, you are an untouchable, a person below any of the castes. Obviously, I don't belong to any of the castes, so you know where that left me. To him, I was of the social class that cleans up after bodies that have been burned on a funeral fire, or empties latrines, or eats dogs.

Many, many Hindus are little influenced by the caste system, but this guy seems to embrace it completely. Whenever I would tell him that it was obvious that what he was saying was untrue, he would tell me another lie. No amount of mentioning that what he was saying was obviously incorrect stopped him. To him, anything that popped into his mind should be gold to someone like me. I would say, "You invented that; there's no reason to think that whatsoever", and he would just cheerfully continue with another invention.

If you aren't familiar with the arrogance and disconnection of the Hindu caste system, here is a quote: "By his very birth a Brahmin is a deity even for the gods and the only authority for people in this world, for the Veda is the foundation in this matter." -- Manusmrti 11:85.

For another example of Indian arrogance, see this story by an Indian : Hindian Arrogance on a Tourist Bus.

We hear a little about the problems of outsourcing technical support, but things are a lot worse than most stories say.

One of these talking points is to license software developers and make them accountable for security breaches.

It seems to really prevent all possible security breaches, you need to prove that the program is correct first - I don't know of many entities that even try to prove their programs. I have heard of a few telecom infrastructure programs, but remember the big SS7 outage caused by one tech some years ago? The SS7 code is probably better "audited" than most code but would that outage have been construed as a "security breach"? - Yes, after the lawyers were done with it.

What about how quickly the world changes after a program is released? You use the best encryption technology of the day, you prove your programs correct, not just audit the code or use "good" software engineering/management methodologies. But you used DES (back in the day) or MD5 more recently, then MD5crack comes along or quantum computing and suddenly you are responsible for a "security breach" because of some exploit that didn't exist when you created the program.

That is nuts, who would want to sign up for that?

Besides DJB does anyone even have the balls to reward people for finding security problems? Or even advertise security as a feature? OpenBSD (yeah, I know its dead, blah, blah, blah), pureftpd, NSA Linux
I expect not many others, because people expect code to have security issues.

Since security is such a big concern now (and in the past), I would think that people who wanted to show off their programming prowess would be bragging about how secure their code is. But no one does, that I know of - why? because its just damn hard to be sure that the code is perfect - which is what is required to prevent all possible security problems. So where are all these people with the big security cahones going to come from?

Can a program be proven correct for all inputs?
If it isn't stateless then can each permutation of state and input be proven?
Are all the protocols used by the program verified?

The impossibility of preventing security breaches seem to make this kind of government action more likely. Burn the witches!! They hexed our computers, and were seen in the woods cavorting with unaudited code fragments!

If nobody saw her when the picture was taken then she wasn't nude in "public".

This is not a legal argument you are making, but a "what I think it should be" argument, and those don't usually hold up so well in court.

if I were defending myself on this I'd argue that since nobody saw me (assuming this is the case) it wasn't a "public" display.

And the judge would laugh at you. :-)

Laws are usually quite specific about what their terms mean; some less so than others, but "public" is very clear in law.

I found one Nebraska public decency law, for example, that says "in a public place and where the conduct may reasonably be expected to be viewed by members of the public". Whether or not someone saw anything is irrelevant, in this law: it only matters whether the act might reasonably be expected to be seen by members of the public.

So, if it is a private party in a public place, not a problem. If it is during public business hours at a table in the local pub, that's a problem. The law she was cited for is not this one, but it is likely the wording is similar, as most of them are.

I think it would be very cold and windy...

I'd worry more about the bullet going through a fuselage skin. The puncture shouldn't tear, but shit does happen. (Remember Aloha Airlines Flight 243 and the ill-fated DeHavilland Comet...)

Just to give this a little context, it's awesome that he has been knighted, especially for a techy guy, but it's not quite as unique as it seems, given that dozens of celebs have been offered knighthood and refused just in the last few years.

On a side note, did anybody else read He will join luminaries like Isaac Newton, Francis Drake, and... Mick Jagger and subsequently have a phrase pop into his head:

... and Tom Paris.

Will there be a duet with Leonard Nimoy?

They're just resting.

When just a sprout, I had a copy of Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy. The wierd part is that I distinctly remember my copy containing the track Twinkle, twinkle little Earth, and also remember noticing that after 'Bilbo Baggins' got to be something of a hit, later pressings of 'Two Sides' no longer had that track.

Its a true screenshot. What isn't true is the actual clock... I ran some ASM that had a typo in it, and it somehow accelerated the windows timer, thus making apps see my CPU as something faster.

Even more amazing is what 3D mark 03 sees. Yes, to that program, I have a 60.1Ghz processor (not a typo)

Image 2

And I didn't even have to use any more cooling than the laptops normal fan.

Any Questions? ;)

NeoThermic

Its a true screenshot. What isn't true is the actual clock... I ran some ASM that had a typo in it, and it somehow accelerated the windows timer, thus making apps see my CPU as something faster.

Even more amazing is what 3D mark 03 sees. Yes, to that program, I have a 60.1Ghz processor (not a typo)

Image 2

And I didn't even have to use any more cooling than the laptops normal fan.

Any Questions? ;)

NeoThermic

Here is an obscure movie with Nimoy as an alien zombie! I would really like to see Radar men some day. Leonard also appeared in several episodes of Bonanza

I guess I'll add it my collection, which includes these records.

...perhaps he might no be far behind with another of his very successful albums.
Hope against all logic.

...to do a duet with Ol' Yellow Eyes?

Mr. Sparkle!

You can also download the videos with mmsclient. It works like wget -- you just give it the mms:// url. You can get it here. That site has an XMMS plugin, too, but I haven't tried it.

Or his little brother.

(after leave into the real world :) ... ... basically, I disagreed with the argument that healthiness is increasing and just gave one example why I do so.

If one additionally factors in 'mental state' and looks at the fact that depression is becoming quite threatening (among a variety of other mental disorders (e.g.)), it might become clear that just looking at life expectancy figures is not enough for a thorough assessment of - to be a little broader in scope - 'quality of life'.

Related to the topic: organic agents seem to be closely linked to mental disorders (including depression), and as far as I can judge, little is known about interdependencies (I am a (close) relative of a victim diagnosed as bipolar (after exposure to an organic solvent)).

CC.

"Every free copy of Word that goes out there, every stolen copy of Windows, serves to cement Microsoft's monopoly in place."

Did you say Cement?

Not mine, but a good classic. :)

just host their site on geocities like everybody else!

Gamespot voted it Best Strategy Game of 2003, and I heartily agree. Some call it derivative of AoE, Empire Earth and their ilk, but it is really only superficially similar. Brian Reynolds' take on epic RTS is epic RTS done right.

For those people who can't be bothered to read the article, one of the main points was that:

A record 3 million people around the world are now studying the Japanese language, compared with only 127,000 in 1997, according to the Japan Foundation and Tokyo's Marubeni Research Institute.

So, in other words, there is a measurable increase in the cultural cachet of Japan, it's not just a static, ongoing event. And it's not just about manga and anime, but food (sushi restaurants are now ubiquitous in any large city), and jrock/jpop, the prime examples of which are Glay, KinKi Kids, Puffy (known in the US as Puffy AmiYumi so as to avoid confusion with a certain hiphop impresario), Hamasaki Ayumi, the New York born Utada Hikaru and Morning Musume, a group of currently 15 girls that form the most well known part of a pop empire.

Furthermore, even anime seems to be taking up an ever larger bite of the US Cartoon Network's schedule and the traditional Saturday Morning/after-school children's fare. It's even made a few recent ventures into wide release cinema in the US.

However, one could argue, I think persuasively, that's Japan's cultural upswing is part of a larger trend in the Asia-fication of Western culture. What started with egg foo yung and chop suey has now branched out to shabu-shabu and kimchi. What began with Speed Racer and Godzilla has developed into Princess Mononoke, cosplay and Shaolin Soccer.

There's more than one way to skin a cat...errr...dog. Message

Japan's karakuri Ningyo in is the oldest evidence of the begginnings of the robot. 12 Century. but the earliest robotic device was dated back 2600 BC.(China).
Gion Festival, Kyoto
This festival began in the year 869, and is held during the middle of July annually. link 2

Ebul-iz smail bin ar-Razzaz el-Cezeri - is in the 13th century.
Golem, a magical living statue created by a rabbi living in the ghetto of medieval Germany. Great stuff. 16th Century think it is a story and myth. Not mechanical but made of clay.
(fictional) Boilerplate and all the victorian robots are still far away at least a few centuries later than the Japanese robots eh? Should see them in action, quite cool.

see. victorian robotics not ancient enuff.

ooooooooo
Have u been to the website coming near you...
www.tsunamii.net

Come on, if you can get your picture in a ROM sold in thousands of computers, surely that deserves a mention?

Ctrl-Alt-Reset

India becoming a superpower,Heh don't make me laugh.I know what India could become and what India is already in terms of being a superpower.It is a superpower all right,a superpower (or is it a pooh-power of corruption,(Everybody agrees India is a ,corrupt land),genocide,dowry deaths(bride burnings bride burnings ,losers,and a country of losers.

>but in general, the idea that "gun-control" affects the "bad guys" is mostly a myth.

They say that, but in my home country (Canada), I rarely hear about any weapons being used in crimes apart from handguns and rifles (and even then that's quite the rarity and always front page news, every time). Fully automatic weapons, to be honest, the only time I've ever seen one on TV news was when Denis Lortie tried to take over the Quebec parliament. For an idea of Canada's gun control laws, here's a paper.

That all being said, there's limits to what I can take, and Canada's latest gun control bill, C68, is going way too far. Sorry to bring the Canadian perspective into this, I know the US is a different country with different needs, but we do seem to have fewer problems with people shooting each other.

As I've mentioned, I'm a fan of allowing organized groups ("militias") to own weapons. That's simply because as part of an organized group, with any luck you'll either be let go if you go insane, or better yet, others in the group will advise you not to do idiotic things.

>Obviously you accept that widely quoted argument

I did at one point, but I have had the figures countering it shown to me. That's why I say I wouldn't want to make it true -- it might not be right now, but it could be. No sense in helping it along.

>Please don't get the idea that I'm blood-thirsty or anything though

I wouldn't... the only people here like that are the deranged trolls. :-)

I'm not talking about % im talking about sheer numbers. In the 1991 Cencus there were 101 million muslim's in India. According to CIA world fact book, there are currently 126 million in 2003.

I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground ...

I would recommend "The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List" as a good reference for finding alternatives. It's really a fantastic resource (it's where I found "A Song of Fire and Ice"). I stopped reading the WOT when it seemed to cross from "great series" to "author's pension plan".

"The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism."

I thought email with unnecessary formatting and graphics was called NeXTmail, not cubemail...

thank you Unix for combining data and error conditions into one convenient return value!

I'd love to see the day when one of these functions actually returns an error. AFAIK most C programmers only check error codes on functions of which they expect that they can actually fail when they are used correctly. Getting the current time is not one of these functions. :)

OK, to be fair, I'll quote the list of errors from the time(2) manpage:

EFAULT t points outside your accessible address space.

So the only thing that might cause this is a case of programmer stupidity. I'm not sure whether this error set is specified by POSIX however, so other systems might be able to return additional errors. For instance:

* EWORLDHASENDED past 21 March 2008 on The Lord's Witnesses's fork of Jesux
* ESCOLICENSENOTPRESENT on the latest, fully security patched versions of Caldera Linux, etc.

I'll be laughing my ass off when a system gives me a timestamp in 2116.

I can't speak for XM, but Sirius isn't censored. One example that comes to mind is the track "People = Shit" by Slipknot (which I heard on Sirius' metal channel). Not that it's a particularly good track ;), but they left it all in there -- "shit", "motherfucker", "fuck" and so on.

I just googled it.

Here's a site

It looks like the most fun I will ever have in my life. I need to get a bunch of friends together and play a few games of that.

How about Kevin Poulsen? Pretty famous, had some skills, still does and uses them intelligently.

Yeah, but what software on the Amiga is really worth porting to a new OS?

I'd like to see YAM (open source email client), and MUI (GUI toolkit - sadly closed source, but there is an open source clone, Zune).

The only tool I would like would be Bars and Pipes Professional, but then there's no source code for that.

I believe Microsoft released the source code when they brought out the company who developed it, and discontinued it. Check out here.

CDC sets aside money for the states often called "Ryan White" funds by DOH workers that is specifically for caring for those with AIDS. It can not be spent of prevention. If you read one of the webpages about Ryan White you may understand why CDC thinks this is so important.

lol Maybe you should read up on thse systems first. North Korea communist? Cambodia? If those countries are capitalist, Iraq is too (we all know how much USA supported it, don't we?).

Capitalist? I have no idea what you are saying here. The USA supported what? Could you try to make some sense?

Do you need to get your brain examined? How about Nazi Germany which was capitalist?

The Nazis were also known as the National Socialist party. The only difference between the Soviets and the Nazis is that the Nazis were smart enough to let qualified people run the companies. The State still owned them for all practical purposes. The notion that the fascists were the opposite of the communists is an oversimplistic fallacy.

To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, there are only really two types of political thought. Those who think people need to be controlled and those who don't. The natural state of commerce is free markets. To control markets requires controlling people. Controlling people requires force. Force requires disarming the people and making examples of dissidents.

You can't have real socialism without totalitarianism (which is the real enemy of the people as you correctly stated). You can have a centrist mix of free markets with social programs like the U.S. and Europe. All of our economic power depends on the (relatively) free market and capitalism.

Your typically Leftist condescension is repulsive and infantile. You think that anyone who disagrees with you must be an idiot. You know nothing about me. I'm an avid reader of history and political theory, I just happen to disagree with you. Please make some reasoned and supported arguments if you wish to carry this discussion further.

Failure to account for government costs in this way taxes productivity and creates untenable centralization of wealth which, in turn, causes collapse of demand for goods and services in the economy, as well as attacks on centers of wealth such as occurred on 9/11/2001.

All those things are taxed under the current system -- it's just their productive use that's taxed. One can say any particular tax will kill the economy if one presumes a high enough level, right?

So, if I stop taxing the productive use of an asset the only change in incentive is to increase productive use of the asset, not to avoid investment in it.

Moreover, all the capacity in the world is worthless if your inventories are high. The incentive to increase productivity is driven by lowered inventory levels. If you have a larger consumer base you have an additional incentive to productively use your assets.

The restructuring of incentives could disappear only the most highly centralized, low-rate of return infrastructure. However unless you are in love with making terrorist targets because the government subsidizes your moral hazard, there is no particular reason why an economy built on those kinds of investments has to be more productive. Economies of scale are more a matter of technique, than business necessity. Moreover, by unencumbering the small inventor you have just incresed technical innovation in exactly the sector of the economy you want. The small inventor with a good idea will love this tax because he is already taxed on his asset in the form of patent maintanence fees, and frequently has to give up ownership to highly centralized asset pools. If he himself can recover the value stream of his invention, then he's far more likely to invent technologies that are not dependent on huge economies of scale.

Look at what happened to the boomer generation's capital accumulation (not to mention fertility) and then consider the current hue and cry for boomers to take care of their GI generation parents -- a cry made all the more urgent by the siphoning off of medicare and other social benefits by immigrants. If the boomers had been able to accumulate assets (not being taxed on asset accumulation up to around $100k since that is equivalent to the home and other immediate possessions such as tools of the trade and/or subsistence acreage) not only might they have been more capable of stepping into that gap, they might have had actual families and children which would have prevented the need for so many immigrants -- and much of the opportunity for employers to abuse immigrant employees.

Moreover, they would have had equity in the stocks of the corporations that are now so aggressively divesting themselves of the boomers. This would have placed demand into the consumer market to keep inventories down and people to work.

Too bad a generation of pioneer-heritage Americans had to be lost before releasing that culture to pursue space as a place.

Here's a dirty-mirror.

1) It's a geocities link, so it will likely die quickly.
2) The movies are all gzipped since geocities doesn't seem to accept .wmv files.
3) The last movie isn't there because you aren't allowed to upload more than 5MB to geocities at once.

http://www.geocities.com/ahaning/

Enjoy while it lasts.

On my Japanese-model Clie, the following applications make an excellent solution.

KDIC)
Shareware dictionary front-end.

WWWJDIC
Free Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionaries

Radic
Look up kanjis by radical, for when you don't know the pronunciation.

PocketKanji
Draw simpler kanjis in a box and have them recognized.

All of these together make for a pretty great and complete solution whenever I am reading or writing Japanese.

It boggles my mind that people are saying "you should learn the language instead of using a dictionary". One of the best ways to learn a language is by reading, and no matter how many hours you spend in a classroom, you WILL eventually run into a word you don't know and can't intuit.

There's another 'antiterror' drama on too, one episode they landed a cargo plane on a carrier (which has been done, once).

That isn't an anti-terror drama. It's JAG.

The original landing of a C-130 Hercules, a quad-turboprop transport plane weighing in excess of 85,000 pounds, on a carrier deck, on which that episode of JAG was (very) loosely based, occurred in October of 1963 and was achieved by Lt. James H. Flatley III. He later received the Distinguished Flying Cross for this amazing feat.

Perhaps the "antiterror drama" you're thinking of is "Threat Matrix" on ABC. It's actually a good show, and doesn't mangle jargon/geek terminology.

p

Bob and Doug's Christmas

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

Eight comic books
Seven packs of smokes
Six packs of two-fours
Five golden toques
Four pounds of back bacon
Three french toasts
Two turtlenecks
And a beer in a tree

(Bob & Doug didn't cover days nine through twelve.)