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Ok, slashdot isn't letting me log in for some reason so I'll just post anon.

I tried emacs for about a month, trying to give it an honest shot. I actually quite liked it for editing latex docs. The problem was, there was some key combination I was hitting on accident (probably since I am used to nano keybindings) that was causing me to delete large chunks of my document (usually everything above my current view). I didn't realize it, then I would save and have to restore the file from backup. This happened several times. I think it was happening as I was saving, but could never trace back my error.

Second, although I've read Understanding GNU Emacs and Tabs I still couldn't get tabs to just be tabs, especially when using ruby-mode, which apparently sets it's own tab behavior and overwrote my own.

Any ideas? I'd like to give it another shot someday...

Like....
the Norse creation myth...
or how about the Egyptian one? Or maybe Greek? or Babylonian

That's weak, man. And how many people even know about sed anymore?

I always liked AWK, but these days I use Python.

remove extra slash at the end of the link

http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/USA/T eaParty.html

http://www.oldnorth.com/hist.htm

http://www.bostoncitylinks.com/boston_revolution.h tml

If the British had this system, the whole Boston Tea Party could have been stopped. http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/USA/T eaParty.html/

In addition.. just think of the heads up that the Red Coats could have had when Robert Newman climbed the steeple of Christ Church and hung two laterns for Paul Revere to see. http://www.oldnorth.com/hist.htm/

In fact that whole nasty war with Britain could have been nipped in the bud with proper intelligence.

http://www.bostoncitylinks.com/boston_revolution.h tml/

Personally -- I'm not sure what the real answer/solution to the security issue is these days. I understand the concern. Maybe the solution is to hold events such as these in areas that is it easier to "secure" -- say something in a remote part of the country (like the Burning Man event) or a smaller town outside of the mega metro areas. May not be popular with the media, or other those businesses that look towards making a profit over these conventions.

Another possibility is to "network" the conventions. Why does it have to be all in one place, real time video conferencing, etc. could eliminate the need to have all those people at one place at one time.

Anyway -- just something to think about.

Okay, I did a cmd.exe "port" for you :) I could use Windows versions of find , grep , sed , diff and less to create a direct port, but you clearly want to highlight the supposed weaknesses of cmd.exe. Well here it goes:

C:\>cmd /v:on

C:\>(for /r . %D in (*.log) do @set filedate=%~tD && if !date:~4! == !filedate:~0^,10! findstr "foo" "%D" >> tempfile) && (for /f "tokens=*" %L in (tempfile) do @set line=%L && echo !line: censored =bar! >> !temp!\newlog) && del tempfile && fc !temp!\oldlog !temp!\newlog 2>&1 | more

Not long after 2001-09-11 attrocities, I saw the words 'NUKE 'EM' scrawled in the grime on the back of a semi truck trailer traveling down the highway.

That the USA didn't rain down instant death and destruction on the homeland(s) of those perceived responsible for the attacks shows a commendable measure of restraint on the USA's behalf not to 'replay' Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In a ghoulish(?) coincidence, the death toll at Pearl Harbor (1941-12-07) is about the same as that of '9/11'. Is it no wonder that the events of 2001-09-11 are now inextricably linked to the date 'which will live in infamy': 1941-12-07?

What a day '9/11' was....

The attacks were vivid, simple, and brutal.

THEY GOT THE WHOLE WORLD TO TAKE NOTICE--the hallmark of such activites.

As an 'encore' of sorts, we now have the terrible events of '3/11' in Madrid, Spain (2004-03-11).

How does one defend against such attacks by using 'the right tool for the right job' without the 'kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out' results one would get using nukes in retaliation against the homeland(s) of the perpetrators of such attacks? Take a look at what happened in the past:

Pearl Harbor: 2,403 dead. Source.

Hiroshima/Nagasaki: 350,000 dead. Source.

Take a look at what is happening now in Iraq:

US soldiers killed: 544 Source.

Iraqi civillians killed: 8,700-10,000+ Source.

The punishment(s) doesn't seem to fit the crime to me....

It seems a massive correction will come one way or another.

I would believe that the politicians do need to wake up. it's not that destroying the terrorist is bad, but it's time to review that why there are terrorists, are they simply shitty pimpy-faced nerd that hates the whole world? probably not. they are there because of something.

There are no "innocent" nations or people's in this world. Every country, every people has done something bad to someone else sometime in history. Westerners tend to maximize our own "evilness" and minimize other's bad deeds, but history just doesn't justify that. For example, everyone brings up the *EVIL CRUSADES* but passes over the Islamic invasions of Europe. See Battle of Tours for example.

Neville Chamberlain thought like you do about Germany and the Nazi's. Looking back at the Treaty of Versailles, it was a pretty mean spirited vengeful treaty to force Germany into.

Chamberlain felt so guilty he gave the Sudetenland and Checkoslovakia to Hitler. His actions almost led to world domination by the Nazi's. He did so because he thought he could make peace and somehow right the wrongs the British committed. He refered to it as "Peace in Our Time". Tens of millions died as a result of his "Peace".

Just because we at some time or another did something bad does not mean we should give in to the bad guys ourselves. We should stop doing things that are wrong and start making up and doing things right. However, just giving in to evil is just going to cause more evil. Do you actually think you can appease the terrorists? That they will just go home and live in peace? Or will they most likely see your actions as a sign of weakness and bomb us even more and get even more concessions out of us?

Too many so called liberals want to, for example, hand over Israel just like Chamberlain handed over Checkoslovakia.

Brian Ellenberger

Why are Minsky and Shiber so upset that a sex-addicted pothead is sponsoring an A.I. prize, when the Father of Dynamite sponsors a Peace prize?

Loebner can do whatever he wants with his dough. No one is being coerced into entering his contest.

I really don't understand why you use an argument like this. It's old and tired. Rah, rah, rah. We represent freedom and everything that's right with the world. Yada-yada-ya. Yes, I know that's the claim. The other guys are worse than us and all of that.

I assert that the reality is that we aren't that terribly different and that while the U.S. government is rigorous in it's defense of the freedoms of your average American, it really couldn't care less about anyone outside it's borders regardless of what the propaganda machine claims.

For instance, there are the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg (~175-200,000 dead), use of Atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki (~350,000 dead), and significant loss of life for Iraqi children (~200-500,000 over 5-10 years).

Sadly, you point out that the U.S. formed it's policy against Saddam Hussein based, amongst other reasons, on their concern over the plight of the Kurds. This while they provide and continue to turn a blind eye to the large numbers of deaths of these exact same Kurds in Turkey (~40,000 dead). Note that the above listed numbers are predominantly civilian casualties. When other countries do this it's called terrorism. But the U.S. government does not engagement in this. Nor do any of it's "client" states. Like Turkey, of whom, 75% of their arsenal is supplied by the U.S. government. The arsenal used to kill these same Kurds. The U.S. government's desire to help the Kurds is clearly overwhelming in it's earnestness.

You are using typical apologist tactics for people unwilling to take any time to do a careful analysis of the actual facts or to use sources beyond those provided by the mainstream media. "We had to do it." "We're not as bad as the real bad guys."

How many people died crossing the Berlin wall? Was it any where near the roughly 1 million civilians (from above) that the U.S. has directly or indirectly killed? This isn't even a significant sampling of the number of civilian casualties the U.S. has at least some responsibility for.

Sort of, but at least in Arab countries, there's still a very pervasive and very effective propaganda machine. The percentage of the population that believes that the attacks of Sept 11 were orchestrated by Mossad (Israeli intelligence service), not by Muslim terrorists is pretty large.

Prove it.

He's not the one who started trolling, dude. Something about pots calling kettles black.

No, I'm just vehement. I'm very frustrated with people who just parrot the party line. I will avoid any further "trolls".

because he was opposed to the brutally repressive Iranian regime which was at the time just as bad and openly hostile to America and openly supporting international terrorism.

Right. The one we were also funding and arming during the Iran-Iraq war. Playing both sides against eachother essentially. See any of the Iran-Contra investigation information available on the web. Arms sales to Iran were occuring at the same time as arms sales to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).

Nicaragua is a good example. Democracy is taking hold there, after years of bloody Communist dictatorship.

The "bloody Communist dictatorship" doubled literacy, among other things. Also, they were in the process in 1985 of building a democratically elected government. Admittedly, very Sandinista biased at first, but it could have gone somewhere but for U.S. embargo, U.S. funding of the Contras (funded by arms shipments to Iran and drug money). Who knows? Do you? No.

Regardless, atrocities on both sides are well documented and there are not clear "winners" as far as any kind of moral conscience. You can't really prove that the Contras were any less "bloody" or that Democracy would never have been established.

As far as I know this was only the second use of weapons of mass destruction since the end of WWII (the other being Soviet gas attacks in Afghanistan). These were carried out against civilian targets and horribly effective. At this point the US began open opposition to Hussein's regime.

Well, I don't really understand why you use this argument. Dead is dead. I'm not really clear why it should matter what the mechanism is.

Are you aware that the total tonnage of bombs dropped on Vietnam is significantly larger than all of that dropped during WWII? That's not a Weapon of Mass Destruction?

The US tries to be a force for good. Sometimes we fail. Others not so much.

Regardless, you haven't really made any arguments that prove that the U.S. tries to be a force for good. Or, if we take your assumption that this is true and agree with you (for a moment), then we must also assume that the end justifies the means even when we kill more than we save by doing so.

I don't buy it. The use of force as a mechanism for solving problems (while effective in many ways) simply leads others (usually the ones on the receiving end) to the conclusion that opposing force is required in response.

A spiralling cycle of violence.

Ensuing power struggles.

In summary, I think it's pretty clear that U.S. government simply tries to maintain it's dominance and the reason it is not involved in conflicts like Myanmar (as you point out) is that there are no political (read: domination/power) reasons for it to do so. If it were so concerned about being a force for good it would be more concerned about Myanmar, East Timor, and the myriad of other examples where it essentially ignores suffering people because there is no perceived benefit.

Sed is a stream editor-- it takes a file and modifies it according to your instructions (such as "add a space at the start of every line"). Here's a quick introduction, and here's the sed FAQ from comp.editors.

Anyway, isn't this all unconstitutional? Maybe not. The constitution (Article I, section 8) grants authors and inventors "exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Seems like this could conceptually include access restrictions.

Remember that this bit of the Constitution that we're talking about is also the basis of patent law. The fact that this particular right has never been part of copyright law before now is irrelevant to the Constitutionality of the DMCA. It has been a part of patent law, meaning that Congress does have power over this right, and it is granted by the clause in question. They've just decided that copyright law needs it, too.

I think the first amendment issue is the direction to attack the DMCA. That and a demostrative example or logical argument of how the DMCA actually harms society. Here is one (taken from the Chicago Protest Information Packet, which I co-wrote):

"...the DMCA is materially harmful to society. Under the DMCA it is criminal to discover and openly discuss a flaw in a security system which is designed to control access to information. The net effect of this provision is that flaws in such systems are 'protected' from ever being fixed. The result is an accumulation of security systems which don't secure anything, due to their flaws, placing people at risk of such treacherous acts as identity theft and fraud."

Horsepucky. Boycotts work, but only when people realy want them to. Boycotting something like like RJR or the MPAA is a cakewalk compared to, say, boycotting the only economically viable method of getting around your city.

"Just turn off the TV." "No more Mac and Cheeze." My goodness, the hell we'd be going through. Please.

Don't confuse "Boycotts don't work anymore" with "People are too lazy to boycott anymore". Do you honestly think that sacrificing your digital toys could even start to compare to the daily hell of not having reliable transportation in an urban area? And yet people have done just that, for months on end, with fairly constant harassment from law enforcement and the rest of the community.

Boycotts are hard. They will affect your daily life, sometimes profoundly. This does not mean, however, that they're no longer possible; it just means that our society doesn't give enough of a damn yet to make their own lives less comfortable.

It was Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria that was assassinated while in Serbia by Gavrilo Princip, a member of The Black Hand. Here is more info on the event.

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