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Political dirty tricks have been an amusing part of campaign season for a long time now. The Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia has a number of examples, particularly in their Guerrilla Hacks and News Trolls sections.

Among these:

The punk rock group Crass spliced together bits of speeches by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, along with background noises, to make a tape that sounded like a phone conversation between the two of them that had been recorded from a crossed line. The U.S. State Department denounced the recording as the product of the KGB.

The legendary Dick Tuck played a number of tricks on the other Tricky Dick during his campaigns.

You should definitely check out this parody billboard altered as a commentary on the latest Bush candidacy.

The group ®TMark has made parody web sites of Rudy Giuliani's and George Bush's campaigns, amongst their many other hacks.

But also, citizens have been able to use sneaky and theatrical tactics against their oppressive governments. Some of the street theater being practiced now against Fujimori in Peru is similar in flavor to that of the recently successful Otpor group in Serbia, which in turn owes a debt

Other good sites on campaign hacks include: How to Make Trouble and Influence People and Dirty Deeds and How To Deal With Them.

Just take a look at his homepage.

"This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided, along with a comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of Latinized Perl. The paper also explains the special source filtering and parsing techniques required to efficiently interpret a programming language in which the syntax is (largely) non-positional."

"This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided, along with a comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of Latinized Perl. The paper also explains the special source filtering and parsing techniques required to efficiently interpret a programming language in which the syntax is (largely) non-positional."

I've been to a couple of his talks and $55k USD is easily worth it to get this guy writing perl full time.

Who else is going to write Lingua::Romana: :Pe rligata, Quantum::Superpositions, Class:: Mul timethods and Coy.

This guy write the funniest, most intriguing perl modules around. And he gives really funny presentations. If you ever get a chance to see him give a lecture in person be sure not to miss it.

Give this a try. However, its not babelfish ease of use. This is a translation of the url as above:-
Î¥Û¼¥à¥Ú¼¥Çϥե켥àòÈÍÑÆ£|¥Õ¥ì¼¥àÂбÎ


¥Û¼¥à¥Ú¼¥ home page (WWW); CO
¥Õ¥ì¼¥à a frame; ED
ÈÍÑ Úè¦Û (vs) use; application; employment; utilization; EP
¥Õ¥ì¼¥à a frame; ED
Âб Ú¦Û (vs) interaction; correspondence; coping with; dealing with; EP
¥Ö¥é¥¦¥¼òÈÍѼ£|
¥Ö¥é¥¦¥ browser; ED
ÈÍÑÄǽ Úè¦Î¦Û available; enabled; ED
¼ë ÚÀëÛ (IV) (hon) to give; to confer; EP
And that is only the 'your browser must be frames enabled' message.

well here 's a start.

Japanese characters recognition. Katakana, hiragana AND kanji.

I just discovered this a few minutes ago, but it's a pretty impressive-looking plugin for the Gimp that can automatically remove objects from images - I imagine it works in a vaguely similar way.

It's here. I haven't tried using it yet (I'm not at a Linux box, sadly) but it looks like it'll be bloody useful for texture manipulation for Half-Life stuff. :)

Ford Prefect

It is much more reasonable to suppose that electronic "life" arose spontaneously than biological life. For example, given a universe in which every single atom represented a useful amino acid, and havin them all recombine a billion times a second (never mind the effects of distance/separation, decay, radiation, gravity, temperature...), you still require a universe nearly three powers of magnitude older than anyone has dared postulate just to bring the odds down to even of life having ever happened once, anywhere.

Computing the odds of life occuring is currently an exercise in futility. It's pasting a lot of assumptions together with a fact or two and proclaiming the result as useful.

For an interesting discussion of the probability of biological life forming spontaneously (abiogenesis), read Lies, Damned lies, Statistics and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations. It's more aimed at creationists claiming life couldn't have formed on its own, but it's a good article.
---

Those of you who might scoff at mentioning such an ancient language may be interested to know that this idea of separation between abstract and concrete syntax (as part of a development environment) is an important part of Intentional Programming, which is a very new research direction. It all comes full circle.

Maybe someday we'll even have some language which grants its users the capacity to be as productive as Lisp hackers were in the early 70s. :-)


~wog

I don't think that's why there aren't any gas giants in the inner solar system. Jupiter is pretty big, I doubt that you could really affect it by being too close to a star going through "teething problems".

This and this link should give you some good information. The first one is for the Modern Laplacian Theory, which is my personal favorite, and the second gives some quick information on some other formation theories, and talks a little bit about Bode's law.

I saw somewhere else that people were talking about vulcan. If memory serves, I think that vulcan was the name given to the planet inside mercurys orbit. This planet was predicted by using Bode's law, and searched for in the 1800's (I think?). I guess it was a kind of cold fusion of the day :)
__

According to Ebert, . . .

Please link to your source. This review by Roger Ebert doesn't mention anything about it. From reading the review, it sounds like Ebert wasn't paying too close attention as several facts seem to be worng in the review (the UN was on Ellis Island itself, not a nearby island, Wolverine's 'power' is the blades coming out of his hands, and Wolverine being the 'top-ranking superhero'.)

Though there apears to be someone claiming to be 'Roger Ebert' that has posted what seems to be inside information on the film (see this script summary) to X-Men fan sites. From the great interest and knowledge of the subject, I don't think this is the same Roger Ebert.

There are at least two conflicting stories regarding the origin of the name "Godzilla" itself. Depending on whose story you believe, the correct pronunciation is either the common American English one with which we are all familiar, or "Gojira," which is the most-correct transliteration of the Japanese pronunciation of this name.

One suggests that it was the suggestion of an American boy, who lived in Japan and whose father was somehow affiliated with Japanese film producers at the time. In this case, the most correct pronunciation is the English one, "god.zil.la."

(BTW, this explanation was revealed to me on a websurfing excursion for Mac OS-related software several years ago, so this should be taken with at least three grains of salt. Since this was a while ago, unfortunately I no longer have the URL handy.)

The other explanation, which for some may be more credible, is explained here. In this case, the most correct pronunciation is the Japanese one, "go.ji.ra."

I had heard this latter explanation before the first, but somehow I was convinced after reading the "American" origin that it was the more likely of the two. Still, when speaking Japanese, I always say "gojira," just like I always say "youguruto" when referring to yogurt in Japanese.

But then, this is all irrelevant. The Mozilla folks are mostly Americans, so it would be American English, meaning "mo.zil.la." Of course, that will not prevent native Japanese-speakers from pronouncing it as "mo.ji.ra," which is perfectly fine too, for them. =)

< tofuhead >

There is a Perl module written by Damian Conway called Coy which performs error handling in haiku. It has an extensible grammer...

• The presentation on Coy from The Perl Conferenct (TPC) 1999
• It covered extensively in the Winter 99 Perl Journal.
• You can pick up a copy from your local CPAN.

Email: Bertrand.Meyer@csse.monash.edu.au

Home Page: http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/~bertrand/

Email: Bertrand.Meyer@csse.monash.edu.au

Home Page: http://www.sd.monash.edu.au/~bertrand/

I learned my Perl OO from perltoot and the O'Reilly Advanced Perl Programming book. Does this book provide much more than that?

Well, you could check out sample chapters on the Manning web-site. I also got my perl OO from the sources you mention, but I was impressed with the Conway samples and would buy the book in a minute on impulse if I could find a local bookstore that stocked it.

But I guess a large part of my enthusiasm is driven by the fact that this is a book by Damian Conway, the man, the myth, the crazed hacker, the co-author of "C++ Re-syntaxed", the author of the Coy module, and so on. Seriously, I figure I'd give the guy like $10 if I ever met him in person, so why not just buy all his books and let him have the royalties instead?

--Fesh

The result was a language with C++'s semantics (at that time) and a much cleaner syntax. Which, of course, went nowhere. Do you have any comments on SPECS itself or any other attempts to improve what might be called the "human factors" aspects of the C++ language?

My reaction...

try this link: Penrose is Wrong by Drew McDermott

information is free.
the only question is:

How about someone to comment on the /. effect while you wait, or to grumble allong with the poor choice of poll selections? Let me see, I'd like my personal assistant to send hate mail to various people that post 'Troll' and 'First Post' topics. Better yet, maybe they could beat us to submitting stories.

And then *wham* a new thought hits me ... To let loose an informational deposit like this really makes the knowledge base in the /. community obsolete.

Consider: If this thing lives up to its claims, it theoretically knows what stories are going on, checks for /. relevance, and then kicks off an email (short randomly generated title etc...) Now, when the discussion pops up on the article, *bam* it's also the first to post additional information, correct posters with incorrect knowledge, and otherwise run a discussion with itself...Now all we have left is 'First Post' and 'NATALIE PORTMAN BLAH BLAH BLAH' messages we can post.

My suggestion, fight this. Fight this hard... What do I think is the best way to do so? A Nonsense generator like this postmodern-generator. All that needs to be done is modify this so that it uses places in the news, people in the news, current political philosophy and then *boom* - the Digital assistant starts posting crap.

"Calculus" is just a term for a formal system, usually equational in nature, which supports some form of deduction based on rewriting. There are easily hundreds, probably thousands, of calculi which appear in the programming language theory and related literature, and few of them if any have anything to do with the differential calculus you are familiar with from high school.

If you are interested in learning about lambda-calculus, you might want to start with untyped lambda-calculus, unless you have a background in logic. There are many books on the subject; I started with Chris Hankin's "Lambda Calculi: A Guide for Computer Scientists", which is IMO quite readable. You can also find many tutorials and lecture notes on the web, for example here, here and here. If you know Scheme, or have read SICP, then you already know mostly what lambda-calculus is, though you probably don't realize why it's so remarkable. (Hankin's book is good for that.)

it does look better than winamp, in fact.. there's a utility to use with xmms.. kint_xmms, i think it is.. http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~timf/xmms/ but what does WinAmp do that xmms can't do..? I haven't found anything I miss from WinAmp...just curious

Here's the start:

Abstract

Before use Coy: run
code...read rebuke. After use
Coy: run code...haiku!

Introduction

Error messages
strewn across my terminal.
A vein starts to throb.

Their reproof adds the
injury of insult to
the shame of failure.

When a program dies
what you need is a moment
of serenity.

The Coy.pm
module brings tranquillity
to your debugging.

The module alters
the behaviour of die and
warn (and croak and carp).

It also provides
transcend and enlighten, two
Zen alternatives.

Like Carp.pm,
reports errors from the
caller's point-of-view.

But it prefaces
the bad news of failure with
a soothing poem.

Haiku as error messages

The use of haiku
to couch an error message
is by no means new.

The easiest way
to ornament errors is
with a "canned" haiku.

Salon magazine
suggested this approach in
1998.

They asked readers to
submit error messages
written as haiku.

The winning entries
are now widely known. The best
of them is perhaps:

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

But just as canned fish
soon grow less appetizing,
so too canned poems.

Inevitably,
constant repetition robs
them of their piquance.

Besides, there are too
many error messages
that need a haiku.

Perl's diagnostics
alone would require just
under 500.

And, of course, there's an
endless supply of user-
defined messages.

Here are references for you:

• The paper referenced above
• Damian's directory on CPAN
• The Coy.pm module itself
• Damian's home page

I imagine that this module will now allow ending haiku postings on Slashdot.:-)

That Katzdot headline generator is good for a laugh, but I was hoping it would actually write an article. You know, like Pakin's automatic complaint letter generator. Oh well.

Or the fabulous Australian Postmodernism Generator.

• • technical
    bandwidth - because of the lack of competition, Telstra has effectivly hindered any growth in high bandwidth access to the backbone. What access exists is too expensive, is inflexible. Telstra goes out of it's way to extract $ (and hugh profits) but any implementations of broadband is laughable.
    
    IT skills - it skills levels are good to very good, but there is a severe shortage coupled with a brain drain of top technical staff.
    
  
  
  • human rights
    privacy laws - lack of, hence allowing business, government and external bodies to push the limits of basic privacy and rights, that other countries take for granted.
    
    government censorship - federal government trying to force internet censorship that is technically very difficult even of it forces local ISP's for a lot of extra expenses.
    
    governent cracking - ASIO given rights to crack domestic computer systems with permission from the crown, no legal process can be involved.
    
    business - weak privacy laws allowing business (PBL) to attempt to capture, store and profile the entire country.
    
    
  
  
  • business
    business conservatism - banks, big business, the engines of change for the country are reluctant to go boots and all>.
    
    e-business's - toe-dipping, lack of funds, lack of business exploitation skills (not techincal skills) is holding back the growth of e-commerce.
    
    venture capital - venture capital is looking up. More vc's are looking at funding start-ups.
    
    
  
  
  • education -
    funding - funding to education is being cut (Monash University), privatisation and business driven courses is the word.
    
    course access - hard core science (and other non essential academic cources) are being replaced with vocational courses.
    
    
  
  

Someone should rewrite UNIX in FORTRAN.

Too right. It's time the Real Programmers reclaimed UN*X from the quiche eaters. Recently, the trend has been to make UN*X easy to use. The 'people' behind this abomination seem not to realise: if we do this, people will use it!

It is clear that steps must be taken. In addition to rewriting UN*X in FORTRAN, I propose additional measures:

• All UN*X program names to be shortened to 6 characters or less, by arbitrary removal of letters. Obscurity is a plus.
• UN*X shell to be rewritten: Shell programming is now done in INTERCAL. (it goes without saying that we rm -rf the entire X source tree)
• The only editor available will be TECO (although I suppose ed may be appropriate also).

It is only through measures such as these that UN*X can return to its glory days.

Fight the good fight, gentlemen.

Remeber: If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.

--
Repton.

Mentioning the $2 million sounds more like an effort to stir up interest in this lame "challenge".

Getting a computer to generate text is not that big of a deal (unlike, say, getting it to play chess really well). The postmodernism generator does a pretty good job (and funny, too) and I'd venture to say for far less money.