Slashdot Mirror

It is an Aurora alright, like in the not so secret U.S. spyplane. Take that Ruskies!

the ability to remove Microsoft programs like Explorer and Media Player and promote non-Microsoft programs exclusively;

So they'd let me build this for peoples' gardens?

http://snow.prohosting.com/sthemes/Windows_XP_Wall paper_3.jpg

Maybe with Microsoft embrazed in Hollywood hill letters.

I originally had a Commodore 64, but the first actual PC game I can remember playing and being addicted by was Castle of the Winds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_of_the_Winds

I received both games with my first IBM PS/2. It was the first game, after Solitare that I ever played on windows. I probably spent upwards of 100 hours playing through both games, and even have it loaded on my laptop right now.

Both games are now freeware and can be downloaded leagaly. (Drop the author, Rick Saada http://www.exmsft.com/~ricks/ , an e-mail if you like it.)

Be careful of these websites. They appear to be a bit underpowered to handle the slashdot effect.

http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4403
http://wind.prohosting.com/cotwrpg/download.html
http://digital-eel.com/files/castlewind.zip
http://www.exmsft.com/~ricks/castl11a.zip
http://www.freewebs.com/castleofthewinds/Downloads .htm

The legal situation in the UK is a bit different - it used to be illegal to try to kill yourself due to the fear that there wouldn't be enough people left to fight wars if everyone was at it. The government saw sense last century and repealed that law, but if a doctor considers a person a harm to themselves or others due to a psychiatric condition (like depression) they are legally obliged to ensure the patient is kept in a secure place (usually a psychiatric hospital) until they are no longer considered a danger or the doctor gives up on them. This confinement can be up to three months at a time, with further time possible if the relevant professional considers it necessary.

If you're thinking of suicide, visit my site here. It's ancient so some of the links are dead but some of it might be useful to you

As for the song - I'm also thinking 'Suicide is painless (it brings on many changes and you can take or leave it if you please)'

LAUNDRY WORKER: "We need more Calgon!"
CUSTOMER (to Asian cashier): "Ancient Chinese Secret, huh?"

http://dt2.prohosting.com/70s/adulttv/calgon.au

There is a great C++ library for shared memory support: SHMEM. It can place complex objects and STL-like containers in shared memory. And it is crossplatform (POSIX and Windows are supported).

And it will soon (hopefully) be a part of Boost!

One of these? I think my dad had one of those. At the time I owned & used an HP28, which allows programming but has an awful keyboard (non-qwerty take a while to get used to). Ran for 100 hours on a couple of AAA if I remember correctly!

IMHO opinion neither has a display that's acceptable nowadays. Even a game console has colour and hi-res. (downside is of course that energy requirements are likely to double...)

I agree on keyboard and one or two usb ports (who needs pcmcia?) and I'd probably prefer bluetooth over 802.11, since the latter consumes considerably more power. You don't need an FPU to speed-up Google earth since the bottle neck is going to be the bleutooth-GPRS/UMTS/EDGE/GSM connection anyway in every cases where it would be useful.

I guess you could just order some stock laptop chassis, w/ keyboard, screen, and even batteries but sans mainboard. Would it be hard to find a small one with no-nonsense design?

Great ideas, now let's start a company!

I used the Amiga Workbench 1.2 for a few years. The Amiga offered multi-tasking at the time and, whaddya know, overlapping windows. Wow! Here are 3 actual screenshots of my old Workbench. (Sorry about the lame ads and stuff.)

Bad things

• 4 colors unless you had the RAM to spare, and then I think you could only use up to 16 on the workbench
• horrible "skinny" pixels, unless you had some kind of VGA adaptor/card, and a VGA monitor of course
• very few applications lent themselves to actually windowing on the desktop; most would use a separate screen (where you could have more colors, different resolutions, etc.) which you could switch to with a key combination (like Alt-Tab)

The Amiga made somewhat a home for itself in the video industry. Back in the late '80s, the conventional wisdom was that IBM compatibles were business oriented, Macs were print and publishing oriented, and the Amiga was video oriented. It was not that long ago (2-3 years) that one of my cable channels "blanked out" for a moment, leaving an image of Amiga Workbench 3.x on the screen :)

I, for one welcome our new Jovian methane lake-dwelling overlords.

Here ya go:

http://lightning.prohosting.com/~bjgeiger/doodles/ livingroom/Creature/c3.gif

while [Religion] explains, it cannot predict

This is why I said, for purposes of this discussion anyway, that science could be usefully viewed as a subset or religion, and not vice versa. Prediction is not a goal of all religions, only explaining is. Prediction is a goal of some religions. Moreover, each religion has the burden of at least explaining the effects of science, even as science evolves. But most religions don't stop there--most seek to explain other things, too.

In the context of this article, Science may explain that molten lava, or lichen, or mineral deposits made this glow on Titan (just to keep this on topic). But religion and philosophy are free to go farther, asking whether if there is lichen present, does that mean God had a backup plan in case earth failed, or does that mean there is no God. Either of these positions must be taken on faith since neither can be proven. You may appeal to Ocham's Razor in preferring the "no God" theory, but that is hardly proof.

I'm just saying that science and religion are about Man's basic desire to put the world into a frame of reference, and that some of the questions man asks are not answerable by science, so religion (and, incidentally, philosophy) exist as broader nets to discuss the unanswerable.

Incidentally, in terms of the basic questions Man asks, I always appeal to the set addressed by the Dewey Decimal System. It seems as an indexing system not to be as popular as when I grew up, but I still always liked the questions it asked. Even those who know it may nto know its basis, and may wish to follow that link to understand.

I think you're right that pretty much anything can be religious. If you look at the list of accepted religions in the world, many are pretty much equivalent to believing in the Easter Bunny. I have friends that make up very elaborated theories of a "next life" that don't come from any organized religion. Each person answers the basic questions in a form appropriate to them. The thing people in disparate religions seem to agree on more than the answers are the questions, hence my reference to Dewey above. The fact that there is no set answer is why some people might say the concept is useless. But there are many questions for which there is no set answer that are not useless. Most questions of ethics and morality fall into that category--and it's usually the asking of questions and the search for answers that is important, not the fact of a particular answer.

Required Viewing: Dark Star (particularly the discussions of Phenomenology).

Having played and finished SW: KotOR, they mention in the game that the Sith as a race died out long ago, but that Korriban (the Sith home planet) was populated by outcast Jedi who took on the Sith name as a faction.

More information here

I've always wondered why the classified and confidential stuff is always in black and white - never in any other color.

The department that declassifies material is probably still using their first gerataion PaperPort and Mac Plus.

Proteins and enzymes, and probably even DNA (IANABC) rely heavily on steric (shape) effects to do their work. Why cannot microwaves cause a molecule to flip and turn into a stereoisomer of itself ?

Consider the horrors of, for example, prions such as those that cause CJD. Here is an example of a simple stereoisomer of a protein, wreaking havoc by its mere presence causing the production of more of the wrong stereoisomer.

So, Maybe if microwave radiation does not affect DNA, what about the proteins found around it that function to repair and monitor damage ? How about turning them into stereoisomers and stopping them from functioning ?

mc chris is dope an all but I heard this song _way_ before he was rockin' the scene..

I selected the URL http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=6434 1 and used the Web Search for functionality of mozilla and got this as a result.

There are a lot of companies that depend on trade secrets and copyright rather than patents for their softwares' protection -- for example, the the EDA industry). Forcing disclosure would ruin a lot of the "secret sauce" that these companies closely guard.

Trade secrets do have backing in law (this was an aspect in the DVD CCA vs. John Does cases) and if software copyrights go away, there might be a resurgance in trade secret cases (even though programs are released to the public).

I doubt copyright would go away; it looks like Aharonian is just trying to reform it by pointing out how whack it has become (Sonny Bono Copyright extension act, DMCA)

I can say from experience that this guy's done a pretty good job, and I've also written an 'installer'.

If you're the type of person (like me) who enjoys reading articles like the one this thread is based on, check out this. It's a nice little story about the ease of growing poppies, and a break down of the US DEA misinformation tactics, claiming that poppies are difficult to grow and that you need very bright scientists to extract opium from the plants. Good read.

If you enjoy mindless games I suggest you try listening to audiobooks at the same time. You can have fun and justify the time spent because you're educating yourself.

Also, while on the subject.. if you listen to a lot of audiobooks, I highly recommend checking out pacemaker for winamp. Most books are narrated way too slow, this plugin is a godsend.

• Linux Versus NT
• Linux versus FreeBSD
• Linux versus TwinView Nvidia GForce4 MX 4000 (ok, it's a bizarre one, but we are being thorough :)
• Linux versus MacOS X Server
• Linux Versus On Time RTOS-32 for Real-Time Embedded Systems

Ok, this was the first page.. I got bored copy'n'pasting afterward.

• Linux Versus NT
• Linux versus FreeBSD
• Linux versus TwinView Nvidia GForce4 MX 4000 (ok, it's a bizarre one, but we are being thorough :)
• Linux versus MacOS X Server
• Linux Versus On Time RTOS-32 for Real-Time Embedded Systems

Ok, this was the first page.. I got bored copy'n'pasting afterward.

The guy who owned the fallwell.com site did so with the intent to:

a) deceive those who intended to visit the evangelist's site using a similar address

b) profit from the deception by selling literature critical of Mr. Falwell

I think that B alone should be legal. However, A is questionable--unless there is a valid defence for using the domain name or trademark.

That said, since the intent was both A and B the ruling was absolutely correct. It doesn't impede on free speech--the same exact content could be put online at falwellsucks.com.

I figure the case should've been ruled the other way if:

* The site clearly stated it was AGAINST Jerry Falwel, or was an obvious parody (and perhaps a link to the site most visitors probably intended to visit)

* If the owner of the site actually WAS Fallwell (regardless of the content), or was a business with that name but in an unrelated industry (first come first serve in cases of conflict I'd say)

There are some cases that went the WRONG way. MikeRoweSoft.com was one of them. The owner was named Mike Rowe and the name was clearly a parody of the Microsoft name. Although software was the subject of both, they were clearly different entities and could not be confused (it isn't easy to mistakenly type or be confused by MikeRoweSoft as is the case with Fallwell vs Falwell).

There was also the case of PETA.org vs PETA.com -- the legitimate site for some reason was the latter, and when they decided .org would be more suitible they discovered to their dismay that PETA.org was already occupied by a parody site called People Eating Tasty Animals. The site clearly stated it was a parody and had a link to peta.com (the "real" PeTA). At that point I don't think it was selling merchandise, but it was clearly anti-PeTA. Even if it was a for-profit site (doing both A and B above) it should've been allowed because:

* It was clearly a parody site and directed those deceived to the "real" site.

* There was a real reason to have the domain--PETA matches for both organisations.

* First come first served--The "real" PeTA drgeed its feet on .org because it had already secured .com

So yes...first come first served--IF you have a convincing argument to retain the name and it wasn't a blatant, greedy example of sqatting.

But learning Portuguese will at least allow you to talk to a lot of real people (instead of a bunch of nerds) and understand some of the better music that is made in this world.

BTW, everybody knows that nobody really lears Klingon or Elvish -- they just pretend they're learning it because they'll hardly ever have a chance of being tested. Talking about interesting languages to learn:

1. Greek
2. Russian
3. Welsh
4. Indonesian (Bahasa)
5. Swahili
6. Arabic

And, yes. I am Brazilian And I have nothing against Americans.

i feel your pain on that one. the trick, however, is to drive a burly enough machine like mine to be able to handle just such an occasion :-) on the bright side, sometimes this behavior can be used to your advantage. have you ever had somebody just driving in your blind spot? just turn on your signal to that side and they will pass you in no time. stupid drivers are usually at least somewhat predictable.

the moral here is that the best option is to own the oldest car you can get your hands on.

I just went looking for a few of my favorites from when I was a kid:

The Fantastic Journey: Weird adventures in the Bermuda Triangle

Ark II: Keeping technology alive in a post-apocalyptic Earth.

Run Joe Run: A german shepard who could put Lassie to shame

And we can't forget the pretty much forgotten Andy Griffith in space show, Salvage One: Using the trans-linear vector principle to build a rocket out of junkyard parts. (An early concept of Junkyard Wars?)

And a whole bunch of other shows from what used to be known as Cartoon Day (Back when cartoons were only on saturday morning, before Cartoon Network.)

I find that for spoken word (such as audiobooks), I can increase the playback rate to as much as 150% and can understand and enjoy the material for an extended amount of time. If I am really paying attention, I can play back at 200% for shorter lengths of time & if I'm feeling "distracted," I may have only a ver small increasae in the rate.

I don't know what hardware currently has this feature (I'm sure other /.ers will know & hope they post it, as I'm in the market for a player), but the winamp plugin pacemaker works quite well in winamp or Xaudio.

No way! What you need is a flying surf board. Let's see you build one of those.

I plan on voting for President Bush because I believe unborn, half born, and seriously ill people should have the right to live.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the only true God. He has saved me from my sin, and given me new life. I praise him.
If you confess the Lord Jesus with your mouth, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you'll be saved.

Let the Lord be magnified.
My Web Site

A while ago someone did his best [odin.prohosting.com].

You would be a virus if you have kids and teach them not to use MS. :-)

they are great but are they correct? i know it sounds like a crackpot conspiracy type observation but i think this question is sound. I mean, everyone knows it's a dead red dust laden planet. so why do we keep seeing blue skies in various ap photos of nasa press conferences?

press conference

here is the link to the same photo from the press conference. it's a little bit more red, don't ya think?

official for public consumption

here is a page of comparisons of various jpl/nasa official public photos with links to originals off of nasa.gov...

comparisons all around

and as far as canadian press is concerned, it seems they are gonna go with the blue "arizona-like" version...

canada knows

i don't believe in little green men but i know when my images are too red and have the need for the curves tool in photoshop.

I guess I just don't follow the progression of "if they do this, then what's stopping them from doing this? Then this?" What's stopping them is if they put too many restrictions on their own software, people will stop buying it. Then the restrictions will go away.

As far as Palladium goes, I agree that I do not want those restrictions placed on me. Therefore I will not buy into it. If enough other people feel the same way, it will fail. Kind of like Circuit City's DIVX.

If you really need a picture of money from somewhere, a quick search on Google is all you need.

True. Napster was the greatest form of promotion that the recording industry ever had, and they looked a gift horse in the mouth. They didn't even have to give Napster payola like they do with radio. They even made "copy protected" CDs that won't work in a cd-rom drive to keep people from sharing their music on Napster. Now, they have millions boycotting them. Stupid recording industry! Read more at dontbuycds.org

True. Napster was the greatest form of promotion that the recording industry ever had, and they looked a gift horse in the mouth. They didn't even have to give Napster payola like they do with radio. They even made "copy protected" CDs that won't work in a cd-rom drive to keep people from sharing their music on Napster. Now, they have millions boycotting them. Stupid recording industry! Read more at dontbuycds.org

There are actually a few NES one-handed controllers to display.
Quickshot XII: The Joysticks of the NES age had both buttons accessible and you could play games with one hand. Unfortunally, directional controls are a PAIN with joysticks in most games.

Game Handler: I've never seen one of these before, but it obviously seems custom-made for the purpose of one-handed gameplay. Interesting design.

ASCII Stick L5: Scroll down a bit and you'll see it. It's held in your hand sort of like a hand-fan.

One Handed: Scroll down about half way and to the controller with the caption: "Looks like a freaking droid from Star Wars". This is the controller I originally posted the picture about. It's held sort of like a stopwatch.

Cool, no?

I don't know much about the hack, other than than the information regarding the camera at http://earth.prohosting.com/puredig/. What I'm curious about is why no one has posted or is interested in a USB hack similar to the Ritz one. A smartmedia reader, as some have pointed out, is much more expensive than a USB cable. I know that I would not spend 10$ on a single use camera, then spend an additional 30-50$ on parts to make it arguably equivalent to a 60$ cheapie digital.

From a source of unknown and possibly questionable repute:

However, C was (and is) still highly useful and well worth keeping around, so a sort of extended C language was developed. This language was essentially "C and then some", or C-plus (C+). As the concepts of object-oriented programming continued to develop, C+ had to be upgraded, and became C++.

So I'm not the only one who was mistaken.

But with a little more research we find out Ch is C+. Not what I was thinking of, but interesting in its own way.

There is also a Small C+ sublanguage for developing on the Z88 portable computer. I haven't been able to find anything specifially about Small C+, but it seems to just be C with support for the proper address size on the Z88.

Of course, none of this is really what I thought I was talking about.
After spending a bit of time trying to vindicate myself, it looks like what I remember as C+ is actually a set of headers to implement object oriented-ness in C. This project is a little bit newer than I thought, but is probably what my brain was triggering on.

is available here.

What, no Voodoo 6 8000?

It works very well, and keeps my AOpen hx-08 silent.
It does, however, increase heat drastically... a link to the worklog is here
(I'm referring to the design mentioned in the text, from http://www.carsten-buschmann.de/noise-protection/)

... But it is definitely not a resolution. Just because the artists "speak out" against the RIAA's practices doesn't the RIAA gives a damn. When the artists start pressuring their respective labels to break away from the RIAA, that's when they will make a difference. Also, a shameless plug (apologies for the terrible server): My letter to the RIAA

Reading the article, as I read about the trap doors, the randomly enchanted/cursed objects, the randomly generated levels/monsters/drops, Castle of the Winds immediately came to mind. I'm frankly extremely puzzled why they didn't list this on the site -- it's not exactly a new game.

you might want to have a look at AntiCrack which is a huge collection of tutorials cracking , reverse engineering, and programming. They also have a copy of the Old Fravia'Site, the new one being about searching).

There's a few games/challenges out there about reverse engineering, cracking, logic and programming. Give them a try if you wish (Arcanum is really nice):
AngularVision, Apotheosis, Arcanum, Aspect, Aspect2, C&CDisIncorporated, CyberArmy, Disavowed, Electrica, Escape, HackME, HackersGames, HackersLab, HackQuest, Hybrid, ICEFortress, Lamebulun, Mod-X, NetSplit, NGSEC'sSecurityGame, ProblemSetArchive, ReverserCourse, SlyFX, TheGame, and Try2hack.

have fun ;-)

And yet, we've never seen the Silver Surfer use a windsail on his surfboard. Go figure.

Well, here's a start:

Secret Police

And here's a longer explanation:

Direct quotes on "blood atonement"

I'm sure there's more. I guess your ancestors' dissent was negligible.

Excerpted from 2003-06-17: The Underground Railroad, Intermission 1

Face: Why destroy copyright?

Machinator: Because it is a legal solution to a social problem. And as always, it creates more problems than it solves.

Face: Like, individual copyright?

Machinator: All copyright. We should still have social expectations of crediting people. And creators *will* profit, I think considerably better than now. Plus, the quality of art will improve, because it won't reward the same sorts of commercial behaviors.

Face: I'm not sure how creators will profit better than now in, say, literature. Or books. I don't know. Music: I think I agree, at this point.

Machinator: Because people will pay authors to write.

Face: [Laughs.] Fair enough.

Machinator: And publishers will not capture the main part of their revenue.

Face: Which is?

Machinator: Publishers take (I think) well over 95% of the revenue that would go to the author.

Face: I'm just curious, though; if company A pays an author to write a book, and company B copies the book and reprints it sans royalty, how does this one work?

Machinator: If you're thinking corporations, they need to go too. [Smiles.]

Face: But they won't.

Machinator: Think people. People will pay authors to write because they appreciate their work, and because they want to read more.

Face: Consider the SoulSeek model. Less than 1% of the user base pays Nir.

Machinator: So? Nir is profiting handsomely, I think.

Face: True.
So say that group A agrees to publish a random author.

Machinator: You're talking about printed matter?

Face: Yes. Or electronic.

Machinator: Then they can print it...and they must credit it (or be considered very rude). And if they promote it successfully, they make lots of money selling books for awhile. Then maybe another publisher picks it up, and makes money too. And meantime, the author gets famous, and people pay him to write more.

Face: Why do they pay him?

Machinator: Because they want him to write.

Face: Fair enough. Any proof for said model in human history?

Machinator: Yes. The Italian Renaissance.

Face: Good one.

Machinator: There was *no* copyright. It was one of the most artistically amazing eras, including literature.
Artists create to be appreciated, anyhow. Not to make money. If you just want to create product, maybe this model doesn't work as well for you. So? Boohoo, no Britney Spears; I'm crying in my coffee.

Face: Yeah. But you have to convince people of that. And they *like* Britney.

Machinator: Did I convince you?

Face: I'm not your typical audience, by far.

Machinator: Yes, you are. I only try to convince intelligent people. I don't *care* what the mainstream thinks. Truly. They will be led to whatever, because they don't think, period.

Face: Literally. They don't think, but they shell out money, and detest change.

Machinator: So, they can detest it. Change happens.

100 BILLION DOLLARS! (austin powers :-) )

ok its old but i only read this the other day, it is in IMO the greatest unmade SCI-FI script ever.

Alien III (Screenplay by John Fasano)

set on an orbiting artifical planet/monestary contructed almost entirely from wood with no technology. basicaly the xenomorphs are mistaken for devils and the Monks want to burn ripley.

there are thousands of scripts floating around google's cache, and they are often more informative than watching the directors cut/VO, or bonus scenes on DVDs. I find reading scripts more efficient than reading a novel - novels are often just scripts with lots of added page-filling inner-monologue fluff.