Slashdot Mirror

http://mcdermot3.home.mindspring.com/Moldarama/Mol daFrameHome.html

This shows some of the piping:

http://mcdermot3.home.mindspring.com/Moldarama/Mol darama3.html

http://mcdermot3.home.mindspring.com/Moldarama/Mol daFrameHome.html

This shows some of the piping:

http://mcdermot3.home.mindspring.com/Moldarama/Mol darama3.html

I concur. If the article did not contain pictures, the editors might've wanted to add them. Anyway, a quick search, just for YOU, dear viewer, with only a few working images.

The results.

Isn't the day of the month the most important thing you look at first, so it's written to the left first. Just seems logical, the day / month / then the year. It's in order :)

OTOH, you ended with a smiley, so maybe you were being sarcastic.

Web mashups are hot. It's hard to look at a list of websites offering an API -- Google Maps, Yahoo Geocoding, eBay, craigslist, Flickr, YouTube -- and not start thinking about great ways to combine them.

Some links of interest:
API list is here.
GPS Tracking demo here.
Map projects at Google Mapki.
Recent Earthquakes here.

See Monty Python's The Argument Sketch .

Apparently one of us is in the wrong room.

Are you a member of this cult? ;)

If your system suffered a successful intrusion, you wipe.

It wasn't a good principle in the old days, and it's not a good principle now.

In the olden days, if your (say) Windows 95 box was compromised, and you wiped (and presumably re-installed), then it would be compromised again very soon, from the same security hole that was used the first time.

Unless you have some guess as to how the intrusion worked on your system, what makes you think it won't happen again?

My advice: Don't panic! A system was probably compromised long before you noticed. There is little reason to pull the plug and wipe it right away... a few minutes or even hours will probably not cause more problems. At the very least, try get a disk image of the system that you (or someone else) can use for forensics later.

Sure, you will need to wipe and reinstall (hopefully with a little more attention to security), but it should be done after you figure out what's going on.

The beta of Inform 7 (A.k.a Natural Language Inform) has already had two extensions written to write Choose-your-own-adventure type games.
  There's the simpler one from Emily Short: http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/CYOA.txt
  And a more powerful, but more complex one from Mark Tillford: http://www.glpics.com/ralphmerridew/Simple%20CYOA

  Inform 7 is a pretty nifty language, and I'm surprised /. hasn't had a story up on the beta yet: http://www.inform-fiction.org/ has the IDE for Windows and Mac OSX. There's an alpha Linux IDE in progress (currently using the Windows compiler through Wine, although a native I7 compiler should be out RSN) over at http://thewhitelion.org/inform7 .. It was down earlier today. Linking to it here probably won't help, huh?
  There's also an overview of Inform 7 language and what it gets you over at http://www.brasslantern.org/

"The big problem with IF is that you can't do whatever you want. You're limited to what the creator was able to forsee and program."

Not really true any more. Authors like Emily Short with 'Savoir-Faire' have included a degree of simulation into their work. This means they do not have to predict the result of every choice the player can make, but rely on the game engine to do the right thing as it's treated as normal physical interaction.

Here's a page on the liquid modelling in 'Savoir-Faire'
http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/liquids.html
exeprt:

# Some materials, such as cloth, are absorbent

* Placing an absorbent object in a liquid or pouring a liquid over the absorbent object will cause it to become wet
* Absorbent objects remember what kind of liquid they contain
* Squeezing an absorbent object will dry it
    o Squeezing an absorbent object into a container will move a quantity of the appropriate liquid into that container
    o Squeezing a wet absorbent object over another object, or wiping another object with a wet absorbent object, will cause the other object to become wet
* Absorbent objects, if white to begin with, will take on the color of the liquid in which they are dipped, assuming that color is not 'clear'

I'd suggest that alot of the better Interactive Fiction works are also artistic. Galatea is a good example:

http://www.mindspring.com/~emshort/galatea.htm

In any case, it's absurd to suggest that adding even the tiniest bit of interactivity or fun removes all artfulness. In any case, Ebert's complaints are not issues of medium, but of genre. Games are only not art because they aren't trying hard enough.

You can record on an iPod

iPods come with voice recording straight out of the box? Wow. Belkin must not be getting many sales with its voice recorder.

the iPod is also not tied to iTunes.
Wow? Last time I touched an ipod you couldn't play music on it that wasn't synced via iTunes. I guess now you can use an ipod like a hard drive and just throw your music on it so it can play! When did that change?

the iPods are really quite rugged - and there are thousands of different protective cases available.
I wasn't really debating that at all... but if you wanted to go that route - click here here here... and there're lots more that you could find.

and you appear to be perpetuating these misconceptions.
And you appear to be a mindless fanboy.

people invest in for-profit companies to make money. it's not a law (duh), but that's the whole purpose of a for-profit corporation: to make money.

All you have done is ignored my points, re-iterated your original point and thrown in one or two gratuitous ad-hominem attacks.

Those controlling Google can easily argue that they have a goal to maximise profits, but that their means to achieve this requires reducing short term profits in favour of greater long term profits.

yes, so?

My point is that companies do not exist solely to make a profit. Many companies have other goals that are listed in their company articles and prospectuses. If people invest in such companies without understanding the companies' goals and expecting them to pursue short-term profits at the expense of all other goals, then they may well be investing foolishly.

In defense of Topsy, one of the people she killed enjoyed throwing lit cigarettes into her mouth. Elephants can't "spit" out lit cigarettes. Source: http://johnhaskell.home.mindspring.com/topsy.html
I would have killed the son of a bitch too.

Well, the point of that is that one of the things that I find entertaining about the Hulk is that he is not subtle and not complex. (Yes, I realize that there have been a few storylines since the 70's that made changes to this formula, but I hadn't kept up with it by then.) This comes through at some points in the game, such as when you hear a police report saying, "Be on the look out for Dr. Bruce Banner, suspect is approximately 12 feet tall, with green skin, suspect is considered armed and dangerous."

Of course, I'm a throwback, I think that if a game isn't fun to play then it is pretty irrelevant whether it has a great storyline or not. (Although I have plowed through a small number of games based on story and not game quality.) The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is fun to play. It's fun to pick up a city bus and throw it at a helecopter. It's fun to watch the puny humans running in terror and screaming. It's fun to run up the sides of building and jump long distances crushing the concrete under your feet.

As to the cinemas, Ron Perlman does his usual creepy villain voice for Emil Blonsky. The storyline is good enough to drive the storyline forward, and the poor Hulk has plenty of opportunity to be persecuted by General Ross and wreak havoc on the city. Here's a review I find pretty accurate, http://www.pro-g.co.uk/review/221/

So now, here's hoping that the come out with The Tick: Ultimate Destruction next...

Um, so evolutionary theory and ID are the only two *possible* explanations for the existence of life?

No, thats not what I was trying to say at all. I was trying to say that any theory you can come up with will fit into one of two categories, materialistic and non-materialistic. To put it another way, materialistic theories would not require an intelligent agent, non-materialistic theories would. Evolution would certainly fit in the materialistic category, ID the non-materialistic one. But they wouldn't be the only ones.

OK, first off nobody is violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Overall entropy is increasing, but entropy can most certainly decrease locally. See here under the heading, "Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics" for a quick explanation.

I've heard the arguments given on that webpage before regarding the 2nd law of thermodynamics(I'll shorten it to 2nd law), and I do not find them compelling. I took a quick scan through the Wallace refutation of the FAQ and the refutation of Wallace by Duck. I don't think Duck does a good job of refuting Wallace's point. It doesn't seem like he understands the very equations that he's citing here: http://www.mindspring.com/~duckster/evolution/ther mo.html. The entropy of a system can decrease if external sources cause it to decrease. However sunlight, heat, shaking, whatever, do nothing to decrease entropy as those are all uniformly applied. So if you take a box of watch parts, and you add energy by shaking it, you're not going to reduce the entropy of the system because the energy being added to the system is uniformly applied. If you were to use tools to put them back together, you would decrease the entropy of the system since the energy you added was not uniformly applied.

Further, if the entropy of a system decreases because of non-uniform external forces, then the rate of entropy increase within the system will increase proportionally. So take the case of lightning which was used as an example on that talkorigins page you mentioned. The open system is the ground and the air. The entropy decreases as the electrical potential increases because of friction in the non-uniform air movement, an external non-uniform energy source. So the entropy in that open system can decrease temporarily from non-uniform introduction of energy. Then the lightning serves to increase the entropy back to at least it's original level. Notice that as the external force decreases the entropy of the system, the entropy level will then snap back up more rapidly. So in lightning, as in all electrical systems, as the voltage increases the current increases proportionally, i.e. Ohm's law. This concept is shown in the equations for the 2nd law on that page.

So if by some chance there was some decrease in entropy that led to the sudden appearance of an IR system, it would snap back to the higher entropy quite fast.

Secondly, what makes the odds of beneficial mutations so low? Do you have some figures on mutation rates, number of organisms mutating, generation time, possibility of beneficial mutations, etc? Have you ever seen how quickly bacteria can evolve into different strains?

Although I forget the figures, to my understanding beneficial mutations are extremely rare compared to detrimental mutations. So a species would need to have a small body mass, high population, and short reproduction cycle in order to speciate before going extinct. So something like a bacteria or a virus could do it pretty well, but something like a fish, horse, whale, or basically anything bigger than an ant would have essentially no chance of speciating whatsoever. They would go extinct too rapidly.

ID makes no predictions that can be tested in order to falsify it (name one test I could do that could produce a result that re

Reminds me of the Monty Python argument sketch

It's bascially a personal opinion if something is art, though there is no shortage of people who will tell you what to think if you let them.

and yet, mysterously, i've never seen a gun nut able to present evidence of this.

Evidence.
Evidence.

Although I'm not a nut so perhaps this doesn't count.

I've struggled with this for a long time. Firefox has the wonderful ability to be put on a disc as a kiosk which is fantastic for setting a known baseline for presentations exported from PowerPoint. It would be a wonderful way to avoid all the security/configuration issues you run into with distributed presentations in the real world, especially if something more capable than MPEG1 can be used such as Flash.

However, Windows Media and M$ Office embedded media use a lot of M$-specific stuff to make it work properly. It's not just windows media that is a problem, it's also scaling graphics.

Here is a sample with IE and Firefox screenshots showing both image scaling problems and embedded media problems. This is from a few months ago but the problems persist with Firefox.

http://home.mindspring.com/~fredthompson/PowerPoin tHTMLTest.zip

Yeah, sorry, I would have responded sooner if I had some kind of monitoring for the threads here...but I don't.

Newsweek, April 28, 1975 is an easy to find resource. It should be available in most college libraries. I've posted a copy at http://home.mindspring.com/~fredthompson/coolingwo rld.pdf

Oh, sorry, that was 30 years ago. I must be getting old but my memory is pretty darn good. I remember this being on TV and the magazines. It might even have been the topic of one of those "In the News" shorts that woudl run during Saturday morning cartoons.

In any event, it was monstrously common then to claim we were going to freeze to death. President Carter would wear a sweater, the oil embargo happened, and so on. Those were the days of sandals made from old tires and "homemade formula" books for people to make their own shampoo and other household chemicals. What else?

...there was a Dilbert comics, which infuriated some of the pointy-haired bosses at the time.

Oh, I forget which division of which company this was, other than it was not oilfield services:
http://www.mindspring.com/~benbradley/dilbert_and_ boss.jpg

This is common to other M$ Office applications.

Try loading PowerPoint-created HTML into something other than Internet Explorer and see what happens.

I've got a short sample with IE and Firefox screenshots here: http://home.mindspring.com/~fredthompson/

OpenOffice doesn't properly load all M$ Office files, especially those with fine formatting control or embedded video.

Have you ever used WinFax to send a Word document? You'll notice the margins change.

PDF seems to be the only way to keep the formatting but then you don't have the raw text content.

Supposedly, the upcoming major release of M$ Office won't use proprietary formats. Yeah, well, we've heard that before so maybe yes, maybe no.

Not quite addressing the question, but perhaps others will find this interesting. This is a webpage I wrote six years ago about doing factorials (also prime numbers on micros, but scroll down about halfway for factorials), and what a difference a couple of decades made in the availability of computing power:
http://www.mindspring.com/~benbradley/number_theor y.html

I imagine that court room sounds something like this

Do yourself a favor, follow these links, play these short (one or two hours) games.

Galatea

Photopia

"No it isn't! =)

Of course, as I noted, much of the problem is than it is not also true that anyone is necessarily up for rational debate.

[Faith] is the act of choosing to believe something where certainty is difficult or impossible and the probability of it being true is greater than it not being true, and is perfectly reasonable behavior.

As long as one keeps clear it's only a working hypothesis, and up for periodic re-examination as new evidence arrives, yes. I'd also be a little more cautious with acceptance and more frequent with re-examination where faith determines that others must be made to suffer, but that's a minor quibble. You are correct: it's the Blind faith that's most impeding to rational debate, compromise, and progress.

Now, since we're getting along so well, shall we next try to solve the problems of the Middle East?

...you can just get this.

Rob

• Difficult conversations, a book about confronting people in tough situations.
• The argument clinic, Monty Python (If you've never seen it, watch it before reading this script. It's in the 3rd season, disc 9 of the boxed set). Also see the splunge scene in episode 6.
• Games people play, Eric Byrne. A book on transactional analyis: a model for why people behave as they do in certain situations.
• The informed argument, Robert Miller. Textbook style coverage of both proper and unfair argument tactics.
• With good reason, Morris Engel. a short summary of common logic manipulations, explained with a sense of humor (over a dozen cartoons).
• Why smart people can be so stupid, Salon.com
  

During a 20 Questions interview with Playboy magazine, Cleese spun a wild yarn about his ancestors being named "Cheese". Couple this with the fact that close friends call him Jack (a common alternative for John), Cleese joked that he might go back to his old "family" name and move to Monterey, California... thus becoming Monterey Jack Cheese. In fact, though, his grandfather's name *was* Cheese and he did change it to Cleese!

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000092/bio

As with most Python-related stuff, I'd take this unsigned anecdote with a grain of salt.

Would you like to argue about this?

P35 is a beer

That must be a pony beer. A real beer is an 807 (in the fancy shaped envelope, I forget what it's called, where's my RCA manual...).

He tried to kill me with a forklift!

Fuck yeah!

Adobe has a bad history of integrating two similar, but different products.

When Adobe bought FrameMaker they already had PageMaker. Instead of figuring out some integration or replacement product, they have slowly stopped improving both products and made a PageMaker (not FrameMaker) replacement called InDesign.

Best of both worlds? Hardly. Worst of both worlds? Close. InDesign is a pretty cool product for the layout crowd (PageMaker and Quark users), but it doesn't do nearly unusable for large document authors (see Notes on InDesign 2 as compared to FrameMaker 7 for reasons why). It's really just an evolution of PageMaker. If Adobe had focused on improving PageMaker, they'd probably have a better product than InDesign by now.

So, if history is any judge, Adobe will continue to sell GoLive and Dreamweaver, while creating a competing tool to GoLive. Nobody will know what to buy ("Why not buy all 3?", Adobe will ask), and none of the products will improve rapidly.

Does anyone have $100 they can lend me? Better yet, please make a donation.

That's tricky to do. Which tool's responsibility is it?

What you may or may not realise, is that you are quoting a well known (fallacy?) from Boswell's book, Christianity, Social Tolerance & Homosexuality (1980)

There are quite a few flaws in his argument, and therefore, flaws in your argument.

The fact is, if he was refering only to male prositutes, Paul would have used the word pornos (which was the word used at the time for male prostitutes), since that is related to the purchasing of sex.

Even if you know greek and hebrew, you will be unable to understand completely the words in the context of the times they were written.

If you do a Google Search for "Boswell Critique" you will find a lot of information regarding this.

Here is some text from http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/greek/boswell. html

Often the evidence about a word's meaning in a certain context is not conclusive but merely indicative. When the best and strongest evidence consistently points to the same conclusion, however, we can become more confident. In this case, the immediate context of the word arsenokoithV (arsenokoitês), all throughout the New Testament, its Septuagint parallels, and its usage among the Apostolic Fathers, like Polycarp, all point to a meaning of a homosexual and not a male prostitute. Boswell's general argument, apart from a facile consideration of the context, relies too much on the argument from silence and an egregious etymological analysis.

It is very important to note the context from the other parts of '1 Cor 6'.

Paul's message is not one of fear or hate, but rather joy and thankfullness for forgiveness; he goes on to say:

"But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." NIV.

GPS is very good at determing velocity (and acceleration).

It can be if you are on an open road and free from antenna obstruction but what happens quite often is that you can go from moving to stopped to moving again in an urban setting (ie tunnel, under a bridge, between large skyscrapers) and it causes errors in speed and distance calculation. The GPS estimates your direction of travel during the stopped time so that when the receiver begins to work again you can be in a completely different area causing the GPS to report that you traveled several miles more and at a higher rate of speed than you did.

I have seen pictures (ie this one) where the GPS is reporting 1500+ mph. Are they just going to ignore that speed/distance calculation or will the tax you on it anyway?

MS does not buckle under this threat, they never do.

Even with cost as a factor...the transition to OpenOffice, the support of OpenOffice and the maintenance of OpenOffice all cost money.

Does anyone have a link to a reliable study that compares the maintenance cost of OpenOffice with MS Office?

Interactive fiction author Emily Short (under the guise of "Lord Lobur-Bytton") once published a clever little Z-Code multiple choice game that casts you as a writer juggling wild ideas. She doesn't seem overly proud of it, but I really enjoyed it. It was humbling, too - I find it quite easy to come up with cool sh*t, but terribly hard to turn it into stories. Available here (and here as part of the full LoTech comp package).

Not sure if the figures are better, but the following might be interesting to you: http://mentock.home.mindspring.com/autorisk.htm

Original link: http://www.teemings.com/issue07/safety.html. But the site seems to be gone now.

Check out my page below, with some non-guaranteed C code (compiles with Borland C++ 4.5 compiler). Using a full 8 bits to store prime gaps is rather inefficient, I do the same with almost half the number of bits. Since the vast majority of prime differences for primes less than 2^32 is less than 30, the differences can be stored as one of 30/2=15 numbers, and thus stored in four bits. I only use 15 values available in 4 bits to represent gaps from 2 to 30, and use the 16th for an escape code to mean the next 4 bits represents a gap value of 16 through 30 (or something like that - read the webpage, read the code documentation for whatever you can get out of it, I wrote this last century...).

http://mindspring.com/~benbradley/number_theory.ht ml

I did a little more work since writing the webpage. Using four bits for gap storage appears to be the most compact up to 2^32, but not too far above that (I forget where), five-bit gaps become more compact. Writing code to pack and unpack five-bit gaps is, of course, left as an exercise for the student.

(btw [sneaking in metadiscussion], for some odd reason, I now have excellent karma, and my posts sart out at +2, which I can presumably prevent by checking the "No Karma Bonus" box. Why would I ever want to do that?)

Well, it's not hard to sort your bookmarks. Just click bookmarks, then manage bookmarks, and then right click on any link and select "sort by name". There's also a plugin called "sort bookmarks" that does this and more.

Regarding the importing of passwords, the mozilla site says:

"Firefox imports your existing settings from Internet Explorer. An import wizard will run when you first install Firefox (and is also available later through the File menu, File > Import), and it imports your Favorites, options, cookies, stored passwords, and a variety of other data. This saves you time customizing Firefox to fit your needs."

I haven't tried using this but if this didn't work as advertised for you then that is certainly a cause for concern.

If you don't like the spinning circle at the top you can simply install another theme that doesn't feature this. Right now the mozilla site is really slow so you probably won't be able to reach the themes site, so try later.

Personally I could not live without tabbed browsing so IE is no longer an option for me. Also there are plugins like Adblock (I use these filters) that make it indispensible for me.

If you thought random clipping was fun (thanks Beacher!), modern (well, since the Hitman series) physics offer unintentional humor galore!

Talk about making up your own fun... Here's a shot from lineage. heheheheh

From http://www.foxforums.com/index.php?showtopic=543.. .

http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2953....com% 5D.torrent (BitTorrent)
http://www.worldofepic.net/ep3.mov (Mirror #1)
http://members.cox.net/chambers30/teaser.mov (Mirror #2)
http://www.larney.co.uk/ep3.mov (Mirror #3)
http://www.jackpearce.info/full.mov (Mirror #4)
http://www.astercity.net/~jerry/full.mov (Mirror #5)
http://ufies.org/txt/switzler084hs_dl.mov (Mirror #6)
http://www.mindspring.com/~bodyslide/Video...er084 aol_dl.mov (Mirror #7)

IMDb:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0121766/

Rexx
Lexx

Have you tried Galatea? If not, you will be surprised by this character.
If you want interesting people and stories, probably you should try Interactive Fiction text games rather than viedogames.

I got this popup, apparently from going to the patent link:

http://www.delphion.com/assets/homepage_unk4_pop?0 1

This is the very first popup I've seen in about two months of surfing with Firefox:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.9.2

Okay, just to make this on topic:
http://mindspring.com/~benbradley/grat_cat.jpg

The Phantom is innocent, I tell you! Some villain has framed the Phantom - I don't know who it was, but once he's free, the Phantom won't rest until he has uncovered the devious plot and cleared his name. You must release the Phantom!

Yes, the Estes "Camroc" took a shot at apogee. The "Cineroc" took a movie.

The only newsy thing about this is the interest from makers of space probes; the thermoacoustic engine has been around for a while (combine with a thermoacoustic chiller and you've got a gas-liquefaction system with no moving parts; here's another one from 1999) and the page from LANL on thermoacoustic systems is almost two years old already. These guys were plugging their sound-to-electricity converter some time ago.