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I saw a show on Disvoery or TLC about the Ark of the covenant and some speculation that it was actually similar to a Tesla coil.

I found a similar description on a web site.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the web site, since I'm not very knowledgeable on the topic, but I thought the concept was interesting.

What kind of world do we live in where people misrepresent their earnings, and then on being caught and come clean they are STILL LYING, how does $3.3 BILLION dollars fit into a fudge factor??????

BTW, everyone ought to check out a relevant piece of art work, I think the author here is really making a timeless point that can be applied to this situation.
US Gov't : HALLO!
World Com: pffft!
US Gov't : why?
World Com: french.

I know that may seem confusing, but check out the site, you'll understand.

The artificial muscle they are using are pretty interesting. Its called the Mckibben artificial muscle and the basic design has been around for a while. Here's a link that gives a basic overview and shows you how to make one:

Mckibben muscle page

And here's one where a guy actually integrated it into his lego mindstorms!
Lego air muscle

FYI...

VistaVision was a 35mm horizontal process that was used by such greats as Alfred Hitchcock and George Lucas (in certain Star Wars effect sequences). The conversion to IMAX for the opening sequence of star wars may turn out better than anyone could imagine since it was already larger than 35, and already horizontal!

here's a good guide on the larger than 35 mm formats (including VistaVision, IMAX, 65mm, and 70mm) that will hopefully clear any confusion.

OK, back when I was about 8-10 years old (can't remember exactly), I got obsessed about building a robot. It simply had to be done, and I pestered my father (an electronics engineer) mercilessly about it. He tried to explain that it was just NOT a simple project, but I wouldn't listen.

Finally, I wore him down, and "we" (meaning him, and I watched) built a robotic hand. It was actually pretty clever, considering the primitiveness of it. The thumb, index finger and middle fingers were completed before I FINALLY lost interest and saw that it wasn't as easy as I thought.

He basically used some steel pipe that he filed into joints, and used springs to return the fingers to the outstretched position. A cable running through the pipe connected to the end of the finger tips caused them to contract.

Unfortunately, the middle finger broke off at one point, and has been lost. For the first time on the web, here are some pictures. It was made a little under 30 years ago or so. I should have taken a picture of the fingers contracted, but I didn't think of it until now. Maybe I'll go back and add one. :)

My father died about 10 years ago, but this is one my most treasured possessions. It's a testament to the fact that he seldom blew me off when I was interested in something, and did his best to help me (and I probably deserved to be blown off for this request!)

It's times like these that I become a more firm believer in Heinlein's "The Crazy Years."

It's going to get much worse before it gets better. That, and a lot of lawyers are gonna die.

Yes, the "Deep Thought" was a 64 node of Ultrasparc 20 workstations, and the program was developed by a guy called Feng-hsiung Hsu. Some of the feats of Deep Thought can be found here and here .
Kasparov was the first of the international masters to beat Deep Thought. He was also the first world champion to be defeated by any computer... which at the time happened to be IBM's Deep Blue.

The name goes back to Deep Thought, one of the earlier projects which sought to beat human grandmasters.

Once IBM got on the bandwagon, they named their machine Deep Blue (Big Blue, get it?) as a homage/spoof of the earlier effort.

And now the newer programs are Deep x where x is whatever name you this is partcularly witty. It's sort of a spoof of a spoof at this point, and largely beyond immediate appreciation by the average person. Sorta like how Japanese ships have "maru" in their names.

For more info on the history and nomenclature, look here.

Where can I get my Nobel prize?

How about the "No Bell" prize. That we can do.

Here is a
photo of the previous winner.

Why not just make it a link? Then you can use as long a URL as you like and not worry about the filters trashing it.

HTML really isn't that hard. :)

Useless facts about the human body

some juicy bits:

The average Human bladder can hold 13 ounces of liquid

You loose enough dead skin cells in your lifetime to fill eight five pound flour bags

your skin weighs twice as much as your brain

When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop--even you heart!

have fun. remember kids, use knowledge responsibly.

It failed.

Mainly because its transmitters were often installed next to public phone booths (argh), and GSM turned out to have a much better coverage.

Nevertheless, I don't see what this has to do with WiFi failing or not.

So, you want to Meet the Spammers?

The beginning of the story is a bit dull, but it gets better near the end. Skip to the middle if you're too impatient.

Basically, this guy/gal conned a spammer to have a meeting in Amsterdam, and was able to get the spammer on a webcam! The photos are at the end.

(Yeah, slightly off-topic, but what the hell...)

So, you want to Meet the Spammers?

The beginning of the story is a bit dull, but it gets better near the end. Skip to the middle if you're too impatient.

Basically, this guy/gal conned a spammer to have a meeting in Amsterdam, and was able to get the spammer on a webcam! The photos are at the end.

(Yeah, slightly off-topic, but what the hell...)

See the "Petilon" critique.

Personally I think they're pretty even, which is something of an indictment of MS's strategic planning.

Autoboxing is of debatable utility - see this critique.

You can have a look to this one:
http://www.geocities.com/mailsoftware42/db/

If you have further questions, please ask me. I've played it a lot and have a good understanding of the game. See my home page for my email address.

I've had an account with Hotmail that I created in November 2001 for the express purpose of trapping spam. To this date, I have yet to receive a single spam to that account, aside from the regular hotmail notices.

I have never displayed the address on it's own in public, so maybe that's part of the problem. It can be viewed on the web page I created for this trap test , but nowhere else.

Hmm, now that I mention this page, two of the links seem to be down... looks like I have a bit of editing to do.

You think webcomics other than MT suck? Well you can all just DIE (shameless plug for my wife's web comic)

"...and since noone is making the C=64 now, this is sad..."

You spoke TOO soon! Check out the CommodoreOne, a re-creation of the famous C64, through the use of modern components.
(PS- Jeri, the lady making it, is a fine-looking female!)

Read We in HS and really enjoyed it. Worth checking out. @ amazon
reference to more works: History of Distopia

Seems like there's a lot of misconceptions about what the word "amateur" means. Amateur radio is named for its non-commercial nature (amateur as opposed to professional), and has nothing to do with level of competence. There are a great number of amateur radio operators who are experts in their fields of endeavor, and can hardly be considered "amateur" in terms of competence. Here's a list of some of the more famous amateurs. I see a Nobel Prize winner in physics on there, which I'd hardly consider "amateur."

aww JEAH! old sk00l ghetto synth in da hizzaus!

as mentioned above, the sidstation uses SID chips from the commodore 64 to generate all sorts of crazeh beeps and gronks-- the site also has a ton of demos as well.

for all you crazeh c64 SID toon fans, be sure to check out the High Voltage SID Collection! tons of great SID toons from your childhood, including, but not limited to:

- Contra! bew bew bee boop ba boodaboop!
- Commando! chikkachikkabowgronk!
- Ultima IV! ba blinng! ba da bling! ba da bling. ba da blonng...
- and who could forget the cutting edge voice synth of Neuromancer? SSSHOMM SHINNGS MMEEEVVERR CHANNNSGE!

you'll need the SIDPlay plugin to listen to these things with winamp. don't forget you can move the slider doohickey to choose from multiple tracks within each SID toon! WOOHOO!

Dunno if this helps, but there's a SID Chip emulator for the PeeCee called SIDPLAY. It only approximates the SID, which is really an impossible process, as the SID is a hybrid Analog/Digital Chip.

I vaugely remembered hearing discussions about a C64 on a ISA/PCI card, but don't know if it's real or if one can even be found today.

John Shirley this, Vernor Vinge that, William Gibson the other... I say the first cyberpunk story is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Mirror One Mirror Two _ I don't need the karma, but mod this up so people who read at a high threshhold like me can see it

Oh, how much time until I can drive my Patlabor? I just can't wait!

Cryogenics NOW!

AIGO is a shareware Go game for the Palm. It has a stronger AI.

For those of you who can't afford a BMW seat, progress has been made on taking a seat from a Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 (police package) and converting it into a desk chair.
This site contains the instructions, near the bottom. Scroll down to 01/06.

Chevy, Like a Rock!

JACK -- "I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula. It's a story problem.

TECHNICIAN #1 -- Here's where the infant went through the windshield. Three points.

JACK -- A new car built by my company leaves
somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up.

TECHNICIAN #2 -- The teenager's braces around the
backseat ashtray would make a good "anti-smoking" ad.

JACK -- The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: do we initiate a recall?

TECHNICIAN #1 -- The father must've been huge. See how the fat burnt into the driver's seat with his polyester shirt? Very "modern art."

JACK -- Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X...

CUT TO: INT. AIRPLANE CABIN - MOVING DOWN RUNWAY

Jack is speaking to the BUSINESSWOMAN next to him.

JACK -- If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

BUSISNESS WOMAN -- Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

JACK -- Oh, you wouldn't believe.

BUSINESS WOMAN -- ... Which... car company do you work for?

JACK -- A major one.

here
composite seat, gas shock, aircraft cables, & the seating position stolen from my favorite lazyboy

Elliptic Curves:

curves of the form y^2 = Ax^3 + Bx^2 + Cx + D

pick values for A B C and D, the locus in 2 space (the cartesian plane, or R2) is the type of curve Escher was using.

In analysis, which is where all of the headline making math using Elliptic Curves, A B C and D (as well as x and y) can be complex numbers.

At this point things get complicated. I'm not going to fill up 1000 words explaining Riemann surfaces, algebraic functions, etc.

There are a lot of good pages out there.

1. I have "Open Unrequested Windows" unchecked
2. I visit http://www.nytimes.com/
3. I am greeted with this
4. A quick check reveals that Mozilla's highly-touted anti-popup feature was easily defeated by this line of HTML:

   <img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/ads/usga/blank.g if" onLoad="window.open('http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi /N2870.ny/B961809;sz=720x300;ord=2002.07.30.11.41. 57','MyWindow','toolbar=no,directories=no,status=y es,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,width=7 20,height=300, top=0');window.focus();" BORDER=0">

Actually, this is an old concept known as Daedalus and was invented by the British Interplanetary Society.

Yours Yazeran

Plan: To go to mars one day with a hammer.

===///===

"Nik, I'm not comfortable with your hand being on my ass."

"But come on, baby, you know you want it," Nik insisted. How had I, Jeff "Hemos" Bates, gotten myself into such a predicament? Sure, I'd always thought Nik was cute, and even though I never formally came out, Nik always seemed to know the wife was a front all along. And when "Gay" Nik, famous in the Open Source Community for his insatiable desire for rough gay sex, invited me to help him set up his new FreeBSD box, I had an idea something was up. Little did I know that "something" was Nik's ten inches of rock-hard manmeat, pulsing through his faded Levi's jeans like a wild jungle snake.

"Nik, you're hurting me!", I whelped.

"And that's just the way you like it, bitch," Nik snarled. "You know that famous cartoon of the daemon giving it to the penguin in the behind? Thats gonna be you and me, mate," Nate said with a flick of his golden blond highlighted locks. His English accent was so charming... it almost made such awful things sound nice. But no, I mustn't go down that road... "But first," Nik continued, "we must set up this FreeBSD box. FreeBSD is the only true homosexual operating system, and so you will learn it, because I tell you to. I won't have any dirty Linux user sucking my balls."

"Oh, Nik," I whispered, batting my eyelashes, "must you always be so forceful?" Nik slapped my ass and laughed.

"Calm down, you pansy. You don't know the meaning of forceful yet. Now grab that 4.2 CD." I leaned over and grabbed the CD set for FreeBSD 4.2. Nik got his media free from Walnut Creek, because the admins there were terrified of him. Rumour has it that one Walnut Creek operator who refused to send Nik the latest FreeBSD CD kit for free was found in the machine room the next morning duct-taped to a chair with an RJ45 crimper jammed into his bloody asshole. Ever since, Nik has been sent prerelease copies of every FreeBSD set.

All of my administration experience is with Red Hat, so I was a little scared to try a real operating system, but with Nik's expert guidance, I was well on my way to learning this queer OS. Nik showed me how to use the curses-based installation tool to partition my disks, select an installation profile, and set up XFree86. Within an hour, the system was installed, and rebooted back to a command prompt.

I was standing in front of the console when Nik came up behind me.

"How's it going, mate?" he asked.

"Oh, Nik," I said, startled, "you startled me. I'm just trying to mount this CD-ROM's filesystem. The commands are similar, but this Berkely csh takes a little getting used to."

"Let me help, love," he murmured. He stepped closer behind me, and I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. I moved my hands away from the keyboard to allow him access, and he mounted the drive with blinding speed. "There, all better. Anything else you need mounted, love?"

"Oh, Nik..." I said quietly, my breath rushing out. Nik stepped closer, and I could feel his hot tool pressing into the depression of my asscrack through his jeans. "Oh, Nik, yes, there is something you could mount." I couldn't take it any longer. This strapping Englishman's dominant sexuality had overcome my fears of public embarrassment, and there I vowed to myself that from that day forward I would be Nik's woman. I threw my arms behind me, grabbed his ass, and pulled him closer. "Show me your hard drive, you naughty little daemon."

"Much obliged," Nik said with a wink. "But I'm anything but little." Nik slowly pulled off his tight jeans and out sprang the biggest, thickest cock I had ever seen. Now I watch a lot of gay pornography, but never in the depths of my deepest homosexual desire had I craved a dick this magnificent. It was like a juicy flank steak, dripping with juices. The aroma of ballcheese wafted up toward me as his mammoth testicles swung like pendulums of eroticism. I lost control and feel to my knees instantly, slobbering greedily at the wonderous thing, struggling, in vain, to fit the monstrous cockhead into my mouth.

"Oh, Nik," I cried, "I want you, I need you, I must have you. Make me your woman."

"And so I will mate, but first I must prepare you. Take off your clothes," Nik commanded. I clumsily undressed, unable to take my eyes off of his prodigious member. Nik reached over to his backpack (the one with the rainbow patches) and took out five jars of Astroglide lubricant. When I was finally naked, Nik looked up.

"Oh, well look at that," Nik said, pointing to my tiny, erect penis. "How cute. It's almost as small as Jon Katz's."

"Now, Nik, don't make fun," I said, sternly.

"I'm just kidding, love. To be honest, I like the 'little boy' look. I see you've shaved your pubes. Nice."

"Oh, Nik, I never had pubes..."

"Even better. You bald testicles remind me of my youth, when I was gang-raped by my daddy and four uncles."

"You were molested too?" I asked, hopeful.

"Of course, mate. All us faggots were. Now turn around and kneel in front of the couch." I did, and Nik proceeded to slather my virgin rosebud with three jars of Astroglide. As he did, he worked his fingers in and out of my asshole. My tiny penis was completely erect, almost touching my navel. Nik reached down and stroked it with two fingers (all that was necessary) was he prepared my anus. I moaned and sighed, and called out Rob Malda's name several times in my ecstacy. But Nik stopped before I could waste my seed, and stood back.

" Hemos, I think you've inspected my hard disk for long enough. Now I'm going to give your box more RAM."

"Oh, yes, Nik, RAM my box! R007 m3! 0wn me!"

"Hemos, it gets me so hot when you speak l337. Keep doing so." I let loose a string of l337 speak which would make even the most k-r4d w4R3z d00d blush, and Nik's penis began the descent towards my throbbing asshole.

"Oh!" I screamed, as Nik's gigantor began to rend my asshole to proportions only G. Oatse had known before. "Oh, Nik, pump my virgin geek asshole! Use and abuse me like Jon Katz did the Slashdot community! Pingflood my rectum like I'm running Red Hat 7! For the love of Barbara Streisand, Slashdot my ass!!"

The pumping and thrusting started, and didn't stop for 78 hours. Nik took me on a wild, shit-caked tour of Heaven, Hell, and San Francisco. I was on the edge of consciousness when he reached climax. He spewed gallons upon gallons of creamy sputum into my rectal cavity, filling my body up with his love. My abdomen swelled up like a water balloon, and I could taste his cum in the back of my throat when the tide finally ceased. I fell to the floor, and Nik stood up.

"Now you are mine, and a l337 FreeBSD user. I dub three Lord Hemos, proud and gay, and you shall sit at my right hand in Wales, where I rule the Court of FreeBSD Committers with an iron fist and a steel cock. Stand up, Lord Hemos, and let me eat your dirty ass."

Nik helped me up, and I weakly stood, amazed, as Nik proceeded to eat my asshole clean. Nik was on his knees behind me, lowered to the same level as the lowest California gigalo. Much like Jesus would wash the feet as his followers, Nik inducted his lovers into his secret cabal of Gay FreeBSD Love by dining on their sore, runny assholes. He ingested his own jizzm, completing the Circle of Gay.

When my rump had healed, I left Michigan (and my wife) on a journey with Nik to the UK, a Gay Wonderland rumoured to be the birthplace of homosexuality. I learned the gay alphabet, gay spelling ("It's 'coluououour', stupid American! Tee hee!"), and to use the gay currency (uro), and had a BSD Daemon tattooed on my ass with the phrase "Property of Gay Nik".

This has all happened so fast! It's hard to believe that only six hours ago, I was Jeff Bates, closeted homosexual and Linux user. I'm so glad that Nik and I got together, and I credit everything to FreeBSD, the l337est and Gayest UNIX-clone in the Universe! I invite you to check out your local FreeBSD user group and check us out!

These days, I'm very busy with FreeBSD and being Nik's trophy wife, but I've also created HEMOS, the Homoerotic Male Outreach service, an organization dedicated to saving poor young men from the perils of heterosexuality and Linux-userhood. We've already saved Cowboy Neal (how could a guy with a name like that not be queer?) and Emmett will be coming along soon. Please join us!

Love,
Lord Hemos the Gay

THE END.

come check us out! we have free watermelon, hot sauce, and pickles!

free hot sauce

check out this nomad.

The computers in the article are just glorified case mods. When you plug a modern keyboard monitor and mouse into those old cases and boot Windows 2000, you totally lack the retro look and feel. The coolest artifacts from the old days are green-screen monitors and heavy, loud keyboards. They are what create the retro look-and-feel that we remember from the old days.

There's an interesting project to build a modern version of the Commodore-64 called the CommodoreOne from scratch. This one is far from a simple case mod! It features a 20MHz 65816 processor, a VGA display, 32MB RAM, and full hardware Commodore-64 compatibility.

You can proclaim you are a god, but it won't make you one, the same holds for your attempt to hijack the word Libertarian.

Hey, you're the one who has the god complex, here, not me: IIRC you're the one who said he was "objective" - something which, as every philosophy teacher will tell you, is only an utopic goal for mere humans.

In the 19th Century the word "Liberal" ment someone who beleaved in freedom from state controls. In the 20th Century Statists hijacked the word for political purposes and are ready to toss it away now that Liberal dosen't confuse people anymore, and are trying to pull the same scam on the word "Libertarian" which was coined for the ideas that Liberal represented 100 years ago.

Yes, we have hijacked your precious word and we will kill it if you don't give us William F. Buckley, bound and gagged.

Give me a freakin' break! That word doesn't belong to anyone, much less a buch on laissez-faire fanatics who can't stand governments but don't seem to mind that we live in a dictatorship of the transnationals. You just don't like you oppressor to be elected - you want to be a rich boy's bitch instead, that's fine with me. But don't delude yourself if you think that word belongs to you. I'm a Libertarian Leftist, deal with it. I'm not trying to confuse anyone: I believe people are intelligent enough to judge me on what I say, not base the correctness of my discourse on what I call myself. Same for you, you call yourself an objectivist, when it's clear for anyone who reads your drivel that you're just another anarcho-capitalist, a Reaganoholic who's ready to let the whole world be guided by Milton's Invisible Hand - all the while history teaches us that unregulated markets are not self-correcting, and that they eventually crash.

As an aside, Webster's definition of Libertarian:
1 : an advocate of the doctrine of free will
2 a : a person who upholds the principles of absolute and unrestricted liberty especially of thought and action b capitalized : a member of a political party advocating libertarian principles

I don't see any reference to Adam Smith or any of the early liberal thinkers here. In fact I believe you are quite mistaken about the meaning of the word. It means a lot more than the narrow definition you would give it. Et cela est encore plus apparent dans d'autres langues que l'anglais; en français, le mot "libertaire" est en fait plus associé à la gauche qu'à la droite.

BTW your admission that yo use words to mean anything you want them to was a mistake. Now it's apparent that nothing you say is trustworthy

What the hell are you smoking? I did nothing of the sort - you interpreted something to that effect, I imagine. Which doesn't surprise me, my discourse being leagues above your pitiful excuse for a political paradigm. Ergo, as with all your previous posts, you don't actually challenge any of my arguments. None. Rather, you try to associate me with political philosophies I abhor, you insult me, you try to distort my words and you refuse to acknowledge simple facts. In other words you are a Troll. Thanks for wasting my time, Troll.

Just out of curiosity, how old are you? Your lack of arguments and tendency to rely on blatant distortions, prefab definitions and personal attacks show that you haven't really been doing this for long. I'd say, what 18? 20? You've still got a lot to learn about the world, son... Here, try these few Liberterian Leftist sites:

Movement of the Libertarian Left

A People's Libertarian Index

Critiques of Libertarianism

In the real world, a word's definition is derived from its general usage, not according to the desires of those, like you, who would hijack it (and accuse others of doing it when they want to revalidate the broader meaning of the word). It's quite obvious, looking at just these few web sites, that Libertarian is used both for the left and the right. So it seems that you have lost: the word is broadly recognized to describe both political options. But of course that's beyond your intellectual reach. Work on it, you'll get it eventually...I already know how you're going to respond to this, so I say to you: goodbye, Troll. I wish I could say this had been fun but you're just not up to task. Crawl back under your bridge and try to actually make a point instead of attacking your interlocutor. It might actually make other people take you seriously.

How about a Commodore 64 in a PC case?

So, um, I just got done masturbating, it was one of those web-masturbations, when you don't think that you're going to jack off at all, you're just going to look at some pictures, just for a couple of minutes, and then you'll go back to whatever the hell it was you were supposed to be doing, but of course, you end up unzipping your pants, taking your cock in hand, and going for it, hoping no one will walk in and catch you. This is the picture I was masturbating to, actually. Does that girl have a perfect ass or what?

And it's funny that I would be masturbating tonight, since I actually came already, just a few hours ago, by Topanga's mouth. Yeah, I ended up shooting another video with Topanga. It was the fake cum shoot that I was talking about in my last entry. . . the one I've been promising my client that I'd take care of for about a month now. I was having a lot of trouble finding a woman for the shoot, and so eventually I had to use Topanga again. Not that I really minded working with her again. She's a nice girl and pretty attractive, too. But it's almost like masturbating to a video or magazine that you've already looked at - it's just not as fun as the first time.

Pretty sad that I'm looking at this girl as masturbation material. However, that's exactly what she will be to the viewers who'll see her. . . so it's almost appropriate, in a way. This wasn't the first time that I've ever worked with someone twice - I shot two films with Megan, shot a film with Janay and then ended up wrestling her in another guy's video - which reminds me of a little story which I'll get to in the next paragraph - and like the others, there's a certain trade-off. You're more comfortable and familiar with people you've worked with before, and therefore can go a little deeper, but there's a certain charge, a certain intensity of interest, that happens when two new people meet - and that true to not only the director-actor bond but the actor-actor bond as well. There's a certain heat to two strangers fucking (at least there is in theory). I don't know if you've ever seen amateur videos that feature husband and wife going at it, or boyfriend/girlfriend, but nine times out of ten it'll make you wipe your lubed-up hand on your thigh and reach for the remote control.

So here's my li'l story: I finally got ahold of a copy of this tape that I was in about a year ago, in San Francisco - a video called Bitch Brawl Wrestling by Duck Dumont, of Redboard. It was a wrestling tape, a fetish wrestling tape. The theme of this video was female-domination, and what happened was, I wrestled two ladies (one of them was Janay) and sort of let them beat up on me. With Janay, I ended up losing so badly that she decided she was going to make me her bitch, and she brought out this strap-on dildo and made me suck it for a couple of minutes. When I originally made the video, about a year ago, I was pretty psyched- I was hungry for experience, (like I am now), and I had done something concrete and undeniably different that I could point to - a milestone, of sorts, me being brand-new to the porn world. I wasn't used to getting videotaped being bodyslammed inside of a boxing ring, getting cockwhipped by a beautiful blonde weirdo, and I loved that I (me! Little Jew Me!) was finally starting to have an Interesting and Unique Life!

But I'm ashamed to admit that when I started watching the video, here in L.A., (after being unsuspectedly jointed by Sergio, who, despite his generosity, had to be removed from my studio, since I got quickly became too self-conscious), I wasn't looking at how the video was shot (which, incidentally, was pretty good - ol' Duck's not too bad behind the camera), or how our convincing our playacting was, but rather, how good my body looked. And it didn't look good to me. I don't know if I hadn't started going to the beach by that time last year or what, but I looked pasty white. And the fact that I had given up going to the gym in favor of yoga didn't serve me well, either. I looked fat, childish, without muscle definition. And I have to say that bothered me!

And that bothers me, that it bothers me.

But at the same time, I don't want to get all intellectual and say, well, I shouldn't care about appearance, because that's not what sexiness is all about - I kind of just want to get my body in shape and be hot! Because in a way, that's what porn is all about - you got to work towards this perfect body thing. Yeah, it's not the healthiest thing in the world, I know. But if I'm going to show my naked body on film, I want to at least be putting forth something . . . good. Also, I've had periods where my body is really good. I like being in that space, to be honest. I get kind of confident and feel sexy. There are a lot of things about being young that are profoundly unsexy, I think, but body tone is not one of them. You can have a really hot ass, as a youngster.

And I need to start feeling sexy, because I need to start getting laid a little bit more often. This porn sex is not a good substitute for the real thing ( and it's not like I'm fucking a lot for my videos - I've just gotten head twice in the last three months, both times from good ol' Texas Topanga). I'm in sort of a bind because I wouldn't expect any real girl to have a relationship with me, if I expect to be slipping off for random on-camera sexual experiences every now and then, but the sexual experiences on camera, when they come, are just sort of lame. I mean, Topanga gives good head. And she's very sexy (she's got that kind of ass that black men dream about). But, I mean. . . what is it? There was no seduction. . no rolling around on a couch, making out. . . no dry-fucking and me slipping my fingers under her panties into her wet pussy. . . god, I need some sex! I thought I was getting into this biz so I could have a lot of sex! But I'm just as dry as my friend who works in a law firm! No! I'm drier! He just had sex with his old girlfriend! I don't even have the luxury of that, being as I'm new to the LA area. I was very horny , this afternoon, actually, and was thinking of who I could bootycall. Answer: absolutely no one. Yeah, I have some numbers of some girls. But they all would cost me about four hundred bucks.

Money. The end of the month is coming up - a week remains, as you know. . and I'm short a bunch of cash. The last couple of months the same situation presented itself, and both times I've squeaked by, so I'm hoping that the same thing will happen this time. I actually turned down a gig, which is something that I never dreamed I would do. But check this out: it was a job editing Max Hardcore movies. Now, there are a lot of things that I will do for money. I will pose nude for a gay internet site. I will sell ceramic costume horns on the side of the street. I will pick miserable tomatoes all day in the pouring rain, I will serve rich fucks triple decaf espressos, I will dance to shitty house music in my underwear in a fag bar. But I will not edit a Max Hardcore movie.

Now, to make things perfectly clear, it wasn't Max who asked me, it was a woman (Kelly Holland) who runs an editing/production house. She had just fired an editor and received a serendipitously-timed email from li'l ol me, and I was doing my ol' I-think-you're-a-wonderful-producer-there-needs-to -be-more-women-in-positions-of-power-in-this-indus try-by-the-way-could-I-have-some-work shtick. So she ended up asking me if I had ever edited an adult feature before, and I said yes, of course, and then she said Besides your own stuff. And I answered, my bubble burst just a tad, no, not really, and so she said Well, would you like to? And I said, Yeah, that'd be great. Then she let me in that it was Max. I don't know if you guys out there know who Max is. Probably some of you do. Well, the guy is pretty insane. I'm not going out on a very extended limb when I say he's kind of a rapist. He doesn't do good things to the girls he works with. He does bad things, I think it's safe to say. He sticks handfuls of pens in their pussies and makes them write cunt on a piece of paper. He fucks them in the asses and then jams his gross, shaven white, Viagra-hard fifty year old cock straight into their mouths. He calls the girls Cunt Slut Fuckhole and Cocksocket. He turns them upside down (in what is known as the piledriver), cums in their asses and makes them suck the cum out with a straw. And I may sink pretty low in my profession of choice, but I can't go that low and still be able to look myself in the face when I shave or when I go to the gym (there are mirrors all over the gym and I fucking look at myself like ten thousand times each time I go there. I wish there were less mirrors there.)

So I told Kelly no. I hope I didn't fuck myself; I hope I get some other kind of job with her company. Thing is, I know I made the right choice, and it has nothing to do with ethical grounds: I just know that I couldn't watch this guy's antics for ten hours a day, five days in a row. I would go insane. On the other hand, though, I will admit that I have masturbated, more than one time, to a Hardcore tape. I'm ashamed, but he picks young girls. That's what I'm into, to be honest. I don't like the degradation that he's into, but I do like those young asses.Oh, the shame, the shame of it. Yes, I go to Katie's-world.com. Yes, I go to TeenPlanet.

So what else? I'm teaching Final Cut Pro tomorrow to a ex-stripper. I started reading The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson - surprisingly good. I went to a garage sale on the way to the studio that yielded some good cassettes - Parliament Mothership Connection , The Best of Barry White, Run-DMC Profile, some Kool Moe Dee tape. (The seller, like me, was a whitey.) And it's still spring here, outrageously gorgeous, blooming despite the smog.

I would rather focus on the idea of getting Federal matching funds for Open Source than proving I'm a worthy soul. In on sense you're right. Its a close friend of mine, the author of OpenVPN who is the hard core Open Source contributor. (see SourceForge) but Since you ask, my personal contribution is a flight control system / collision avoidance based on the simplistic Ant Colony Algorithm. This is a system which would cost about $150 per plane which controls air traffic without infrastructure. It would have avoided many of the collisions in the last two years. Especially the recent tragedy involving a swiss air controller and a russian plane. AIK

I would tend to agree with the Dr. Richard's interest in looking beyond the neuron, but I believe his metaphor of looking at the transistor is wholly off base.

A CPU, even to an alien is composed of a lot of wired physics experiments built into a glorified chunk of sand. Not only would they have difficulty analyzing a transistor, they would likely miss the important parts, the logical gate structures. Without understanding these "higher level" abstractions (literally groups of physics experiments) the hardware and, more importantly the software that runs on them, is of little value.

In the case of brain tissue, the many neurons in even a simple creature bunch together to form clumps or 'nodes' almost equivalent to a CPU's register or other sub-elements. These nodes combine to create larger physical components, again like an ALU or FPU. The structure of the brain, in other words, is directly analogous to embedded, firmware-loaded computers (e.g. a BIOS is the first to come to mind.)

Fortunately for those children of Turing who are addicted to a formal systems approach, the black box of a brain, like any other system, is prone to reverse-engineering. I like to call systems like A.L.C.E. True A.I. (Since nature seems to have avoided using the formal-production rule methods of A.L.I.C.E. they are definitely artificial.) What interests many Computer/Electrical Engineers and current researchers are kinds of Simulated Intelligence (S.I.) that propose to emulate natural intelligence (whatever that is.) It usually involves like fuzzy logic and neural networks (neither of which is for the mathematically disinclined.)

To quote Larry Wall,

"Either approach may give birth to various sorts of monstrosities."

(disclaimer: my A.I. formal training has been exclusively GOFAI - Good. Ol' Fasion. A.I. while my prost-graduate research has to this point been exclusively )

So far I've read a poem that, while interesting, a quick search on google shows that the person who presented it is also the translator. Right. Can someone please find the original so we can verify this for ourselves? Thank you.

I've seen police, fire fighters, and medical personnel compared with researchers in the social science and humanities. I've seen proposals for information to be on a "need to know" basis, with the only people who "need to know" being the government and (of course) researchers. I love it when someone welcomes a loss of freedom provided it doesn't include them.

If you want some good music to listen to this to, I reccomend Love Me, I'm a Liberal by Phil Ochs unless you're too young, in which case you might as well listen to the Jello Biafra version

How many replies here say "they want to throw H1-Bs out, they want to throw H1-Bs out". I haven't seen any serious proposal to throw H1-Bs out, nor does Congressional Representative Tancredo's bill have to do with this. 195,000 H1-Bs can come in every year, a cap that was raised just recently, and many people want to lower that number at least to what it was a few years ago, especially with so many experienced people having their wages cut or being unemployed. Legally, H1-Bs must be the prevailing rate, but every study has shown they are paid below the prevailing rate, even the government reports say this - thus they are lowering the bill rate even though legally this is not supposed to happen. Also, the money paid for an H1-B visa is supposed to go for worker training but Bush wants to use the money instead to bring in more H1-Bs and have their paperwork done faster. This is not about the H1-Bs who are here, this is about the H1-Bs the ITAA wants to come in tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and next year.

I should also note that Harris Miller of the ITAA who is mentioned in the article is pure evil. Since this all affects my WALLET I pay very close attention to this. A lot of posters here admit they are H1-Bs. For some reason they feel compelled to fight against us to keep the door open for more H1-Bs. I don't know why they want to do this as it just lessens their chance for getting a green card, I really can't perceive why they're doing it at all, but it does make me understand why some people want to throw them all out. At least many of the people were honest that they were H1-Bs, thus, a lot of the comments you see here and moderation has a big agenda behind it. As does mine - I'm looking out for my interests, who isn't? I don't know why they're obsessed with keeping the H1-B visa cap high since they're already in, as it just pisses us off against all H1-Bs and lowers their chance for a green card. Maybe they're just stupid.

H1-Bs aren't the only issue of importance although it's up there. FLSA, section 1706, there are many issues which we should be thinking about. Doctors and Lawyers are smart, they have professional associations like the AMA and ABA, virtually every profession is organized in some fashion, with IT workers though, I guess everyone prefers playing Warcraft III and thinking they're a supergenius. When they survive the first and maybe second round of layoffs, they say those people were dead wood and all of this doesn't matter to them, the world's greatest programmer. But then the profession-wide salary and hourly bill rate drops. Suddenly those 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall are for less money - factoring in inflation, a bit less. The ITAA has been fighting to drive down our wages for years and they don't even know it, dumbasses like them will have to learn the hard way. They think the only people who worry about this are people who were paid $100k to write HTML, the reality is that the people most concerned about this are usually very competent in their particular field. Only an idiot doesn't worry about their bill rate and lets themselves get walked all over by the ITAA (funded by Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.)

In closing, as usual I find many of the postings regarding this issue sickening and repugnant. At least most of the posters admit they are H1-Bs, the fact that their side is posted so much and modded up so high is testament to how large this problem is. Read Norm Matloff's "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" to learn more, it covers all the bases. And as I said, H1-B is not the only issue - FLSA, section 1706, there's a lot of things to think about.

Here's my web page on these topics. Reading the replies here has me nauseated, BUT, there are a mass of people who think as I do, and we communicate and are helping organize things like discussed in this article, so knowing that gives me hope. We need every person on board to help us move this forward. The ITAA is coming to take money out of your pocket, only by joining together and organizing can we fight this. Also, people usually reply to my posts replying to things I never said, when I say organize they start listing why they don't like unions. Where did I say unions? I said organize together and fight for your own common interests like every other damned profession. The ITAA (Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.) are an organization attacking us, so what's so odd about organizing to defend ourselves from the ITAA, if we're all alone and isolated they'll just pick us off one at a time. Organize means organize how YOU want to - if you want a guild, join a guild, if you want a union, join Washtech/CWA, if you want a professional association, join a good one, or join IEEE and stir up a ruckus in their old-line, do nothing, corporate-sponsored meetings. A lot of people are stupid - they don't want to be in a union so they get up and shout that no IT person is allowed to be in a union. Uh, no, that means that's what you don't want in your particular situation right now. I personally do not want a union, I like the professional associations and guilds more, but I'm not going to be a little sycophantic lapdog for my manager and condemn unions - if someone wants to be try to form a union, more power to them - right now, telecommunications, government and aerospace has a lot of unionized IT people and I would personally love to see it spread to BODY SHOPS. But by and large, aside from body shops, I am going for the association/guild route. But I am not going to condemn anyone who wants a union, I only condemn the lapdogs and sycophants for the ITAA.

• Delegates
• Boxing/unboxing and Type System Unification
• Properties
• Structs
• User-defined implicit conversion operator

Don't you mean NAMBLA?

Before taking up this DMCA case, which NAMBLA organization did the ACLU defend?

• North American Man-Boy Love Association?
• Narional Association of Marlon Brando Look-Alikes?

Interoperate, AOL.

-DJ Ecto Blog

NoteTab, Golden Pen and HTML-Kit...

I'll just stick to Notepad personally, as far as windows is concerned. Other than that, VI forever!