Slashdot Mirror

Shameless plug: I started an online publishing company that distributes PDF texts free of charge for students' self-study. Our first book is designed to help the student move on from Calculus to more rigorous mathematics.

I know this might seem shocking, but I agree with you completely. :-) Very well said. I use MySQL at home for small stuff: calendars, MP3 data, that sort of thing. My hosting provider, like many others, has it installed as well, so that's a handy "feature" for me. I write an app for home use which can move to the outside world if I want it to. I also use it at work since it's ubiquitous there as well. Again, using it at home makes writing apps which can move around much easier. (Although I use DBI and ADOdb, so portability isn't much of an issue except for my own spinal macros.) I've also used PostgreSQL as well. We needed its features, so that's what we used. But for lightweight stuff, MySQL works fine. Anyway, like you say, use the right tool for the job.

BTW, I found a good comparision of open source databases that some people here might be interested in.

-B

Yep, it's available here: Microsoft's New Operating System. GIMPified and all :-)

too much beer.

The Infamous 419 Scam

It's a billion dollar industry in Nigeria, and has paid for the careers of much of that nation's government.

It has, however, allowed for some very interesting counter-scams:

The "Buddy Weiserman Counter-Scam

The "David Lee Roth" Counter-Scam, with cache

The "Kieron Dykes" Counter-Scam

:^)

Ryan Fenton

That company should be a study in how NOT to run a business, 10 yrs growth to build a brand name up there with Coke, then 10 years steady decline to oblivion. Bushnell cashed out just a little too early, Warner couldn't manage it, then Jack Traimel made a valient attempt, and eventually got the Swordquest prize over his fireplace.

Anyway, I was happy to find a 1979 Sears 'wishbook' with the Atari 400 in it. Also, the way to run a classic Atari 800(XL) system today is use the APE (Atari Peripheral Emulator), run it to your PC serial port, then you can mount disks from a PC and have tons of Atari software (my entire collection fits on a CD) at your fingertips. It also daisy chains with a normal 850/1050 fdd if you need to get data on/off 5.25" floppies.

Personal faves: Blue Max, Kennedy Approach, etc.

What no one remembers -- probably because they were too busy playing Pong or something else on their 2600 -- was that Atari made computers, too. My father bought an Atari 130XE back in the *day*. It was a great little box, comparable to the Commodore 64 (remember those?), although with 128K of RAM and a 300 baud modem. The greatest part was that it was primarily geared towards gaming. It wasn't one of these modern behemoths with a fancy video card and all that; the guts of it were those of a video game console. It was programmable in BASIC and the memory had massive constructs for tracking collisions and all sorts of things. It was like a mod chip on your desktop.

Ah, the good old days!

When I was a young boy, I awoke every morning to the delicious smell of penis. My father and his boyfriend's vegetarian health store contained within it a hot griddle perfect for making penis, anus, and a multitude of other stinky snacks. I remember them well -- The pleasant, care-free days of my childhood in the dojo were often spent peering into the kitchen with eager anticipation as my father prepared penis my family.

As I grew older, and began my journey to homosexual enlightenment, the memories of my penis-eating youth filled my heart and dreams with warm, fluffy goodness....Ahhh, yes..the sweet, sweet memories... The day I ate 10 penises... The day I placed a warm penis between my fleshy loins and performed the forbidden dance... The day pressed a penis to my buttocks and encouraged my dog to come eat.. Indeed, much of my childhood was spent in pure innocence -- An innocence only penis can provide. It was heaven. A heaven, filled with penis, where I sat at the throne of God, with my hand-maidens Rob Malda and Jeff Bates seated beside me. An indestructible triumvirate made of flesh, blood, semen, and love.

By the age of 15, the path of my life became unclear and confusing. Torn between my duty my health club and my love for penis, I foolishly left home in search of karaguchi ah-nowakadesu..The ultimate penis. My journey took me to the many streets of LA, many days away from the health club. My hunger for penis became my teacher, and foolishly I let it control the path that I fucked upon. My mouth, sore from sucking, ached as my heart and stomach did, until I came to a realization. My duty was clear. I needed to take a stand and accept my love for the art of vegetarian cuisine AND my love for penis. It was not wrong for me to love both. I love one as a dear friend, and one as a lover. Yes--My mission was clear--I must become a faggot, a secret pervert hired by Sarcasta BUT I MUST ALSO ENJOY THE OCCASIONAL penis.

My adoration for genetalia has placed me within an awkward position. Many faggots refuse to recognize me as their brother. I defend my father's land, but I am looked upon as weak and undisciplined. I tell them, "But, brothers! Listen to my plea! The penises do not weaken me, nor do they make me disobey the rule of my vegeables. They fill me with love." But alas, they do not understand...For the mind of a faggot is complex.

My only earthly desire is to be accepted for who I am. Yes, I am a FAGGOT--But I also enjoy penis. Will you accept me? If you were approached by a faggot who requested a penis, would you submit to his will?

- A Penis-Eatin' Faggot

The Olympus cards are special, all right. In price, that is, but not in technology. If you overwrite the header on generic smartmedia with an Olympus header, your camera will enable the panoramic feature. See this page, for example.

The plot starts to unravell!
Like I've been telling you for years : Philip Taylor Kramer died for your sins!

"O.J. is innocent. They did it."

http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Stonewall/3 731/evans.htm

This could, of course, be a code word for antisemitism. The problem there is not that it is hate directed at a religion, but at a group of people. Big difference. I think I even speak for most religious people when I say that there are more fundamentalist religious websites that scare me, offend me and can have far more dangerous consequences than any "anti-religious" stuff.

I understand your point. A good one, but also a very naïve one...
You must recall that governments usually are closely tied to it's land's industry and in my mind, this has become the true purpose of Echelon in the post-cold war aera: Industrial Espionage.
May I quote: "France, deeply suspicious of Britain's uniquely close intelligence links with the US, seized on reports that Echelon cost Airbus Industrie an 8bn contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994, after the US intercepted communications between Riyadh and the Toulouse headquarters of Airbus"

Some more links:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shuttle/5604/data. html
http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/highlights.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34932,00 . tml

And, yes, don't believe in a conspiracy unless it has been denied... ;-)

Given the increasing proportion of money velocity that happens electronically rather than the old-fashioned way (promissory notes, letters of credit, checks, paper currency and coins), I wonder how long it'll be before modern governments start phasing out non-electronic transactions entirely and start posting all buying, selling and lending against databases under control of their banking and finance authorities.

I seem to recall a passing reference in a short story of William Gibson's -- might have been "Johnny Mnemonic"? -- to the idea that paper currency might actually become illegal. Certainly it would be easier for the US to implement this in the guise of making us all safer from terrorism by allowing the Powers That Be to track every transaction. The IRS would love to make the underground economy suddenly 100% taxable, I'm sure. To the extent that it would aid in the War On (Some) Drugs, it's probably further desirable to certain folks.

In parting, here's a musing by Neal Stephenson about the very subject of electronic currency: his short story "The Great Simoleon Caper", a sort of a free-software take on the idea.

apparently we were the first country to use polymer notes...

two good links are here and here

and this shows all our polymer notes

-----

http://geocities.com/metrollica/

To all prospective CLIT members, Metrollica has published a wonderful guide to get you started on your journey of logged-in trolling and first-posting.

I forgot to mention that I claim my FP in the name of http://geocities.com/metrollica/

I'm not suggesting the people in the article are terrorists, but neither was the husband and wife team that invented the airplane.

Who was the wife, Wilbur or Orville?

Yes! Andy Griffith. I'd forgotten about that show. I remember having hope hopes for it, but then being slightly disappointed. But even so, it was Sheriff Taylor in a rocket - what could be better?

Googlizing brought up this link to a fan site.

Hydrogen peroxide has also been used as an oxidiser with kerosene fuel. The British Black Arrow launcher used the system to put our only satellite into orbit.

Take a look at the photo of the launch of Prospero (it's a Geocities site so it might be slashdotted by the second person who uses it :) ). There is a smaller image here.

Amazingly clean looking exhaust, the rocket almost seems to be hanging there.

The entire programme was cancelled in one of Britain's perennial financial crises of the time. The Black Arrow went on to become the first stage of Europe's ELDO launcher, which was in turn cancelled following failures of its upper stages. Sadly, we then abandoned rocket development.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Where have I seen this before?

http://www.geocities.com/s178.rm/index2.html

Damn. Now you've made me all nostalgic. Anyone here remember "World Beyond" in Phoenix, AZ in the summers on Saturday morning? They had great trashy sci-fi movies and a ZZ Top guitar riff for intro music? Anyone remember Edmus Scary? Had AC/DC's "Back in Black" for a doorbell?

Damn again. Sometimes I miss being a kid. Then I remember how badly 9th grade sucked and I get over it.

-B

If you like science fiction old and new, check out the Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List They have lists of both novels and short stories. No reviews, just the results of polls over the internet.

I don't think they'll go for it. It's already caused my property to lose half it's value! I'm getting kind of tired of driving that thing in circles too. I may turn it into a roller coster as soon as I get some time.

This has the potential to be a real win for journalists, students, bloggers, e-mail jockeys, and anyone else who's make use of computer is to read, enter, and edit text.

The big problem that I see is that it needs a hard lid that closes over the keyboard and screen to protect them so you can just toss this into your backpack without filling the keyboard with Doritos crumbs.

The eMate design handled this nicely, but any hard lid would be great.

-Mark

Ah - so you do have more time for these games. Great!

Wait a minute. You just said that there were judges that already expressed agreement with your position. Now you are saying this matter has not been decided in a court. Which is it?

Here is where i start doubting your mental acuity again. I said that it had not been addressed by a court that was capable of setting precedent. Until a case has been appealed to a higher court (eg appellate, or supreme court) it has no binding effect. Two local judges can decide similar cases in completely opposite ways before precedent is set, but once a higher court sets a precedent, then lower courts are expected to abide by it. You're either giving evidence of your ignorance or you're intentionally misinterpreting my statements, so which is it: are you dumb or dishonest?

The chances that you are my intellectual equal or superior are, statistically speaking, quite small.

Is that what it says on your Mensa card? To quote you: "That's just another unsubstantiated claim by you." So far, your astounding intellect has enabled you to: use a search engine, copy and paste, cling dogmatically to refuted claims, apply a separate standard to yourself than to your opponent, and to willfully and/or ignorantly misinterpret statements. Tell me again about how smart you is? What are those statistics that are so small? Oh wait - you're still in high school, aren't you? You still believe those standardized test scores mean something, don't you?

You don't seem to understand the difference between civil suits and criminal trials. The statute that I cited makes it a crime to split off cable signals without paying for them. How would the court trying you for a violation of federal law make the cable company guilty of fraud?

Right. When the cable company says, "You've been receiving these signals for the past 6 months, start paying or else," then that's attempted fraud. When they report you to the police for theft of cable in this situation (the police don't go looking for this on their own) then they are attempting to coerce you into paying for a service that they knowingly and willingly provided for free. They know that, in most cases, the consumer cannot afford to fight the fraudulent claim in court, so they use that to bully the subscriber into paying. You want an example or two?

I do understand the difference between civil and criminal cases - apparently better than you do. If these were civil complaints then it wouldn't be worth the cable companies' time and money, but since it's a criminal offense they can get the taxpayers to foot the bill for their dirty work and they can blame it on the overzealous DA/Police if they end up losing and/or catching some PR flak.

You said it was legal. I provided a statute that said otherwise. You provided your untrained, lay-person's opinion. I win. That's how such debates work.

Statute combines with judicial review to make law. Without the review all you have is a contested statute.

But if i'd only known you had declared yourself the victor i would've given up! My untrained, lay person's opinion that is based upon direct experience does trump your untrained lay-person's opinion that is based on your need to get in the final word regardless of the arguments. Sorry - you don't get to make the rules here, but hey there lil' buckaroo you're still a winner so long as you keep that positive attitude!

A "signal" and a "service", as applied to cable TV, are not the same and when you turn the former into the latter without permission, it is theft. It doesn't matter if you steal cable TV by using a splitter to get basic cable or a hacked converter box to get premium channels.

And aside from the fact that this distinction between service and signal are convenient for your argument, which bodily orifice was your source for this? The signal is the service. You cannot have one without the other. From the "definitions" section of your beloved telecom act: "the term 'cable service' means -
(A)the one-way transmission to subscribers of
(i)video programming, or
(ii)other programming service, and
(B)subscriber interaction, if any, which is required for the selection or use of such video programming or other programming service."
So what is being transmitted if it is not a signal?

But there is a big difference between a hacked converter and a splitter, as anyone with experience will tell you. The cable companies would love to go back to the good old days when they could multiply your monthly bill by the number of splitters you had, but they can't.

Maybe you should be when you don't even understand the words you are using (i.e., "receiving")

I was willing to give you this one, but since you keep harping on it... Refer back to the document's definitions section and you'll see that the term 'receive' isn't in there. If someone went before a judge with this then the definition of receive that was used - the common one (successful conveyance from point a to point b) or the more specific one (decoding into meaningful info) - would be a point of contention. So stop patting yourself on the back for your ability to use a dictionary - it's not going to slam dunk the case should it ever come up in court.

I went one step further. I called the Federal Communications Commission after my last message and was told, in no uncertain terms, that splitting off cable signals from a broadband connection in order to get basic cable at no cost was illegal. If you doubt me, call them yourself.

Good idea. What number did you call? With whom did you speak? (Are you sure it wasn't the janitor?) What was the exact wording of the question(s) you asked? (In short - yes i do doubt you.)

Want more? Here is a document [state.ma.us] from the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications & Energy which clearly supports my position and refutes yours.

That document only tangentially pertains the situations we are discussing and is not a statute or other document that is actable by law. It is merely an arbitrary rephrasing of federal law with no identifiable source or responsible authority. On top of that, it is only applicable to Massachusets, and is a brazen copy of the propaganda put out by the cable companies themselves. Summary: Some unknown state employee (was it the Attorney General or Joe Blow, the summer intern?) copied the scare-tactic propaganda put out by the cable companies to serve their own interests.

So I have now provided a clearly worded statute, the FCC's interpretation of the legality of splitting off basic cable from a broadband link, and a document from the state of Massachusetts that explains, in laymen's terms, what I've been trying to tell you all along. All that you have provided is your opinion and (mis)interpretation of the law. If you can't do better than that, let's just drop this now.

So you have now provided an (untested) statute, an unverified claim of FCC contact, and an irrelevant document. I've given you a cogent argument that you have failed to refute with direct evidence. It may be an opinion but it's of no lesser significance than your own and is based upon direct experience which you lack. There's no harm in either of us sticking with our opinions, but you're not going to convince me that you're right without real evidence - court case citations, judicial opinions, etc.

Feel free to drop it at any time. You did say you had better things to do, right? So go do them. Your feeling of moral and intellectual superiority should be enough to sustain you. Surely this isn't a matter of ego and one-upsmanship for you, right? It's not really about who gets the last word, right?

Too bad somewhere along the way we lost the American Way.

Converted links:
Texas Indecision http://groups.yahoo.com/group/texasindecision/
Dedman Site http://www.geocities.com/jdedman4/
David Rogers mailto:darogers@aol.com
"The Case for the Empire," http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Artic les/000/000/001/248ipzbt.asp

In fact, Country Music superstart Garth "Baldie" Brooks has been bitching about his lost revenue to used CD sales for years.

He even tried to strong arm reatailers that sold used CDs by not letting them have any orders for new CDs

There are some really good free software games, like freeciv. I'm enjoying watching them develop and begin to rival proprietary offerings. Also, this week on a whim I started writing a free clone of Stratego. It's not pretty, but you can get it here.

I'm not running 100% free software yet, but when I do, I don't think need for games is going to be a problem.

Sadly, independent sources cannot be found. Better Homes and Gardens and Reader's Digest haven't done a Mac review in ages.

I did find a couple of sites you will find that aren't biased towards Macs, but the have no lists either.

They're already heading that way; the Register had an article describing some work being done to do general raycasting in hardware. I guess it's heading towards turning graphics cards into boards full of many highly parallel mini-CPUs, since vertex and/or pixel shading are rather parallelizable in comparison to other things the main CPU might be doing. Of course, OpenGL is already a sufficiently versatile system that one can implement Conway's Life using the stencil buffer, so for a sufficiently large buffer, you could implement a Turing machine; I don't know how much (if any) acceleration you'd get out of the hardware, though.

Jack D. Ripper here also seems to agree.. calling them 'our precious bodily fluids.'

Or something.

Questioning the Simpsons knowledge of a Slashdot user, shame on you. :)

Mmm, mmm, perky.

The Plan

Our manifesto will follow.

well, I've inadvertently gotten the sun on my videotapes before, and it hasn't seemed to damage it.

More interestingly, I actually DID take a video of the February 26, 1998 eclipse from Venezuela. It turned out far better than any of our still shots! I got a pretty good zoom in on the sun during totality (I didn't point it directly at the sun during partial phases, so it may not apply to you).

In fact, here are a couple shots taken from my video with a Snappy:
The Diamond Ring Effect and the elipsed sun with planets (Venus and Jupiter IIRC).

well, I've inadvertently gotten the sun on my videotapes before, and it hasn't seemed to damage it.

More interestingly, I actually DID take a video of the February 26, 1998 eclipse from Venezuela. It turned out far better than any of our still shots! I got a pretty good zoom in on the sun during totality (I didn't point it directly at the sun during partial phases, so it may not apply to you).

In fact, here are a couple shots taken from my video with a Snappy:
The Diamond Ring Effect and the elipsed sun with planets (Venus and Jupiter IIRC).

Queen Amidala! Hot grits optional.

I can't wait until palm OS goes plaid.

I wonder, those 10 subscribers they are suing, who didn't respond to calls. Are they dead? Never existed? Cats? see http://www.geocities.com/flutocracy/cablemodem.htm

I think I'll go off and join a Buddhist monastery or become a homeless guy or something

Christian: Thou shalt not covet the possessions of thy neighbour
It's no secret that when you become rich your neighbours change.

Hindu: Material attractions corrupt the soul and are an impediment to a good reincarnation. Quoting from here,

All religions speak of an entity called God and teach man to efface his ego or 'I' feeling

There's a (not particularly well-written) Star Trek novel by the title of "Gulliver's Fugitives" in which our valiant crew (TNG) encounters a planet in which they have gone a bit further along the way with their legislation: You don't have to pay for reading or hearing anyone's works -- any 'fiction' is simply outlawed.

This is enforced by strange devices that fly around and read the people's minds. Once they encounter forbidden material, the police arrives -- and those policemen are equipped with helmets as described by Mr. Mohr to prevent them from committing such crimes themselves.

I don't know, but maybe we should all thank the {MP,RI}AA for their efforts to keep at least that from happening -- as it would tend to reduce their revenues even more than all of us habitual thieves combined.

Why in all the comments I've read din't anyone blast this whole topic for the name.

F*c am all
F* A Caml

If this is really true, someone needs to take a look back at some of the naming issues.

• Woody the woodpecker
• Pac Man (originally:Puck Man)

If it doesn't have a "sense of morality", then it dang well better have been programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics.

(And if you think it isn't a problem because it isn't a "robot" -- ie is immobile and has no manipulators -- well, it's connected to the net, ain't it?)

Another possibility could be that this was intentionally done - using a painting technique called "roll-over perspective". In this technique, you use different vanishing points for objects that are actually in parallel. If done well, when you view the painting from "proper" distance, you get a feeling of great space.

It relies on the fact that you can only focus on certain parts of the painting at one time, so in the major areas of focus, everything is basically in correct perspective. But if you stand too far away (or the image is made too small on your screen) it doesn't look right.

A great example and better explanation of this is on John Hagan's website on painting techniques, http://www.geocities.com/~jlhagan/advanced/persp.h tm

If the image on the BBC website were done at a large scale, say on a wall, it would probably look really cool and effectively portray a real sense of the size of the thing.

which got me thinking about automatic generation of realistic worlds for use as settings for rollplaying games.

You should check out Captain Barcode's War Room the best collection of computer world generating links anywhere.

Lutefisk!

• http://www.pali.sk/mozilla/splash_list.html
  
• http://www.lotekk.net/index.php?page=moz&sub=splas h
  
• http://www.geocities.com/mozillaman2000/