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This destroys the Raspberry PI for 4Euros :
https://www.dlsweb.rmit.edu.au...

The Microsoft Select agreement enables RMIT University to purchase Microsoft applications, operating systems, server software licenses and a range of associated documentation products at significant savings compared to other purchase arrangements.

During discussion about proposed changes to our campus-wide wireless network, I asked if the new system would support Macs, Linux and other Operating Systems.

What is the authentication and accreditation methods/technologies involved with this "new system?" It's entirely possible the meeting was for 10,000 feet people and not the actual IT folks. For instance, your current system appears to support Linux (PDF Warning) and I would be surprised if the plan was to drop this.

When I went to the University of Minnesota 2000-2004, the wireless was more or less agnostic to the operating system and their documentation has gotten much better. When I was there I helped set up some Gnu OCR stuff on Linux so that people could scan books in the labs and at halls--perhaps if your response had been to investigate and volunteer documentation for a Linux solution, they wouldn't have treated you as the punchline to a joke? (I know that not everyone has as much free time during college, this is just a suggestion.)

Have IT staff ever ridiculed you for asking questions about Linux?

Yes, of course, back in 2000 when I was fresh off the farm, I was constantly ridiculed for asking questions about Linux. But for different reasons. Because I didn't know the difference between Linux, Unix, Solaris and BSD. The labs at UMN supported all of those widely with many many seats (well, maybe not BSD) and when I sat down at one I was temporarily outside of my comfort zone and would ask incredibly stupid questions. If you adopted the role of being the friendly helper to your administration, perhaps they could, as did I, eventually realize the amazing awesomeness and power of these operating systems? If they don't, you can always argue that diversity is great and offer to help with supporting your operating system of choice by making some documentation.

I think it's not only uncontroversial, but hardly could be otherwise. You couldn't live in an unpredictable world. We predict things all the time. Like that when we walk forward we'll actually move in the intended direction, and that when a bear is running straight at you it'll probably catch you soon enough, if you don't find a way of getting away.

The only reason we dare take a step forward is because we have a reasonable certainty that a wall won't suddenly materialize out of nowhere right in front of our nose. If reality isn't predictable, then taking any kind of decision becomes impossible, and having a brain is pointless.

A partly predictable reality works just fine though. You can decide whether to step out of your house when you have information like "When raining, people who go outside sometimes get struck by lightning". Even if the reasons are obscure, and the underlying mechanisms unknown, there's still something useful you can do with information like that.

I don't think reality needs to be objective though. We get by just fine by working from out subjective perception. For instance you can describe a flower as being yellow. An insect will see something different. And in fact any possible perception of color is equally valid because color is something that only exists in our mind. But so long there's consistency to that subjective interpretation we can make use of it.

This almost exactly mirrors my career.
I faced the same dilemma as relliker about 4 years ago (turned 40). I didn't want to go into straight management because (a) I neither am good at nor enjoy the administrative minutiae of managing people, and (b) I was never a good arse kisser.
However, I felt that my brain's ability to grasp and be effective with every detail of new tech was diminishing. So I transitioned into a software architect role which basically involves doing the tech stuff at a slightly higher level (still designing, in fact more responsibility for the broad design, but less implementation level detail).
I've since become an integration architect and am six months away from completing my Masters in Enterprise Architecture. I get to avoid the shit parts of management while (starting to) deal with the strategic aspects of IT use in the company.

In addition to this, if you want to study online with some of them, you can do so via Open Universities Australia (OUA) I've found them to be quite good so far, especially the courses offered by RMIT, the subject I did covering Immunology, Microbiology and Genetics was by far the most enjoyable experience I've ever had at an education institution, unfortunately it requires a practical week in-lab, so it's probably not possible for people overseas to do.

Disclosure: I don't work for OUA, however it was my experience and subjects I did through them that got me interested in Bioinformatics and the Graduate program I wanted to do.

The panels turn transparent when they come in contact with water, so it's mainly for when it's raining (I suppose there are other, far less peaceful circumstances in which water can hit them). Otherwise they're translucent.

• Lambda calculus-ish
  • Scheme
  • Haskell
• Combinator/Forth-ish
  • Joy
  • Interesting but not practical: unlamdba iota and jot
• Logic
  • Prolog
  • Mercury - compiled and pure
  • Lygon - prolog like linear logic programming.
• Pi calculus-ish
  • Join calculus
  • Nomadic Pict

I think I want to master logic programming next, though it may be better for me to do some haskell programming first so I have a better foundation. Monads/Arrows give me a headache, but with enough time, I'm sure I could get used to them. s-expressions a-la lisp/scheme are very similar to xml, except better, but logic programming seems more likely to make the hardest parts of internet programming easier.

Unfortuately, I have nowhere near enough time to get proficient in all these languages.

The reporter who wrote the article was actually Annalise Walliker about a dance party. http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22903261-2862,00.html

Which included great "quotes" such as this gem
Ralph Wiggum reported slabs of Smirnoff spirit-based drinks were selling for $240, and cans of spirits for $10.

Which I find kind of Ironic when in university she conducted a survey about a problem with the community and journalistic credibility http://fifth.estate.rmit.edu.au/a-credibility-crisis.php

Advanced Communications Technologies (ACT) in Australia was doing this with GSM back in 2000 (probably before). AFAICT they never did manage to make it work. Spent millions.

Anyone from ACT/SDR reading this could perhaps fill in more details.

I think the company is out of business now. Here's an early press release:

http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse/News%20and%20Events%2FFor%20Media%2FNews%2Fby%20date%2F2000%2F;ID=poid0yrprddq;STATUS=A

"I think they should take the same approach in this situation."

I'm an Aussie with two grown kids and a partner who selects students for a university degree in the state of Victoria. I can attest to the fact that your post describes the way the system works in Australia fairly accurately, the math to determine the final "score" is quite complex and the "score" cannot be determined before all year 12 students in the state have taken the test.

Truth is some people can't do math just like some people can't kick a football or paint a picture. To be able to do the "hard math" in the final year (year 12) the student must do the preparatory "hard math" in the preceding two years, if (as many do) they can't cope with the year 10-11 "hard math" I can understand why teachers suggest a less demanding course. It's the same as a kid who never practiced football but suddenly wants to be picked for the school's senior team, it's simply not going to happen that quickly.

Personally I dropped out of high school at 16 and ended up going to uni at about age 30, however having dropped out of HS I could not just waltz in as a mature age student, I had to do a year 12 math course by correspondence and sit the HS "hard math" test to meet the selection criteria (also it was a good way for the uni to see if I was serious).

A good high school "score" is important when you are young because it gives you an advantage over others entering the workforce/uni. It's basically societies reward for your efforts to complete the "grasshopper" stage. It's not a guide to "intelligence" or "wisdom" any more than a fat wallet is, and it's most definitely not a "make or break" moment that follows you around society for the rest of your life.

Like the use for Farcry for geovisualization*

*I have plenty more were that came from for anyone interested.

"One could readily imagine many uses for immersive 3D environments from remote medical procedures to collaborative architecture to interior design to automobile sales to video games to many other things."

This bibliography is organized to provide a structured introduction to graphical interfaces to information systems.

Geospatial Decision Making Blends 3D World Visualizations With Background Data

IMPROVING HUMAN SPATIAL COGNITION OF BUILT ENVIRONMENTS USING COMPUTER GAMING TECHNOLOGY

Writing for Computer Science by Justin Zobel is also a very good book in this area. It focuses on academic writing but has a lot of detail on how to create good figures, graphs, tables and so on.

Korba, Larry and Kenny, Steve (2002): Towards Meeting the Privacy Challenge: Adapting DRM. NRC paper number NRC 44956, November 2002, http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/iit-publications-iti /docs/NRC-44956.pdf

I have an interest in this and am looking at alternative approaches:

http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~crpearce/research/pu blications/ifip-sec2005.pdf

PS: Long time reader, but first post (loooong overdue!)

I agree. Not only does Lucas key on the need for love but he keys on the love of the nuclear family and especially maternal love. There's an amusing anecdote of a young spanish boy chosen by itinerate Buddhist monks, who inform the boy's mother that her son was spiritually advanced, and, was meant to be schooled in their faith. The monks wanted to take the boy with them to be schooled. The mother refused, saying, even a Buddah needed his mother.

On a more mundane note Romanian orphans, who had been given room and board but no love and who were adopted, for the most part, by North American families, were found to be devoid of empathy and unable to consider the needs of others. David Suzuki approached this subject in his book The Sacred Balance. While Anakin was taken from his mother at a very early age and denied continuing maternal love Luke was raised in a nuclear family with, we assume, adequate maternal love.

Speaking personally I support FOSS because my mom taught me to play nice and to share.

SCI conferences series is a well-known scam in academia that accepts *any paper*, gets registration money from "happy authors" and does nothing. You can send a blank page there and it will get accepted, so this is not a big story. :-(

Here is a link describing the scam:

SCI conferences scam

Cheers,
Alex.

I should probably mention that this is just the articles themselves. No talk pages, no administrative pages, etc. So maybe my compression is only about equivalent to yours anyway. But one nice thing is once you're done the search index is already most of the way built.

Anyway, see here and here for my inspiration. I had to adapt things somewhat, though.

The real fun is going to come when I try to compress the history database. My idea is in addition to the dictionary for the entire database, I'll have an additional dictionary per article (and compress the article dictionary itself using the master dictionary). Who knows if this will work or not, but I'm hoping to achieve results on the order of compressing each article separately but with the advantage of random access capability.

I'm a bit of a midnight oil fan and have been since I was at Uni. so Imagine my suprise when JJJ re-release a concert televised back in '85 - Oils on the Water. The concert was recorded in 1" broadcast video, 4:3 & digital stereo tapes for the Goat Island Sydney Harbour concert. On the same release is a Super 16 mm film and analog multitrack recordings of the Capitol Theatre concerts back in '82.

I guess some of the key lessons to learn can be read in the detailed discussion of how they re-mastered the images & sound to produce a DVD and CD of the original concerts. Some of the key takeways are:

• keep track of items together so they dont get lost
• check your media as it decays - especially transitional new media that has yet to reach stability
• you may only have one chance to re-record, transcribe the originals so get good technical advise
• have a continuity plan for resurecting the data as it was originally intended

The reason I've bothered to highlight this restoration is so you can see what happens with information stored on old media over period 20 years. In both cases, Goat Island & The Capital, the original data had been collected but only the prior data had been kept in a professional archival environment.

Is your data as future proof ?

why use gps?
I wonder what the *opponents* would use GPS for? GPS is great for finding unknowns, like your current position or a position you want to navigate towards. But you dont need GPS for locating a known like a city or infrastructure.

sps, pps
Back in my undergrad days I remember that GPS had 2 modes of usage: standard positioning service (sps) that degraded the information (lat and long, elevation and time) by 5%. Remember for nav 5% of anything is a lot. This is commonly used by the public. Precise positioning system (pps) is about 5 times more accurate than the sps in lat/long and elevation and about 2/3 more accutate in time. This is the restricted military version. It is more accurate and has various counter measures to avoid being compromised and is restricted in use.

availability
The kicker is that pps requires the use of restricted kit, encryption and hardware. It can be made unusable through encryption.

why shutdown
so why the shutdown? does this mean the *opponents* have access to GPS pps hardware and encryption? If the pps GPS was being interfered with (a real possibility) then you might expect some anti spoofing counter measures.

How would they use it? Is GPS being used not only to position but time events? Personally I doubt it as a 50c quartz watch does just as good a job.

My bet the reason for shutting down withing the US is to avoid marine navigation. The only way the US can avoid opponents using ships is to turn off GPS as a last ditch attempt.

[1] NavStar GPS Operations, USNO NAVSTAR Global Positioning System.

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gpsinfo.html

Instead of doing something as obvious as big dots, they could be smart and digitally put different details in the background of certain scenes - a bookcase with a code corresponding to different colored books, say.

The technology already exists to do this in real time for TV - it's used to do virtual advertising (replacing billboards in stadiums, so the ads seen by the home viewer are different from the ones in the park). When films are distributed digitally, it should be possible to invisibly watermark each copy - you wouldn't see the difference unless you went to two different theaters.

No one can tolerate DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks in this Information Age economy that relies so heavily on the Internet.

Although it takes a different form, that's what SCO is trying to do in convincing people that they must license SCO software to use Linux. I don't support DDoS as a concept, including when SCO does it.

At a minimum, IP sources should be checked to assure that copyright contributors have the authority to transfer copyrights in the code contributed to Open Source.

So SCO ensures that all employees have the authority to transfer copyrights to code contributed in their private developments, does it?

This is what global corporations will require. And it is these customers who will determine the ultimate fate of Open Source - not SCO, not IBM, and not Open Source leaders.

I decide what gets into My Projects, not global corporations. Hell, I don't even know who uses my products. That's the point with open source.

In copyright law, ownership cannot be transferred without express, written authority of a copyright holder.

Look, I'm a Law student. Anybody who's read the GPL knows that it doesn't transfer ownership at all. Ownership is retained; certain rights are licensed in respect of that ownership, including the right to freely redistribute on the same terms. This statement is simply not legally correct.

It is easier for some in the Open Source community to fire off a "rant" than to sit across a negotiation table. ... respect for intellectual property is not optional - it is mandatory.

Listen to yourself! Declaring something to be "mandatory" is not negotiation! While what's said here is technically true, the inference of "respect" is that that respect has not been honoured, a factually dicey proposition.

I would like to be able to migrate to SVG for vector-based plotting and diagrams. At the moment I tend to convert to PNG, but ideally there would be solid support for SVG on Mozilla for both Linux and Windows. We would also look at bumping SVG into our Web3D course:
http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~nigels/Web3D/
Native Mozilla support would be ideal, but a solid plugin (Adobe SVG is broken on Linux) would be a great step forward.

Here are some links to indexing and searching software. There is a lot of stuff oriented towards providing search functionality on web pages, but you may want something that just searches your local drive.

• MG (it is not necessary to buy the book just to use it).
• DesktopDig; nice graphical interface, I had trouble installing it.
• Clucene, a C++ version of Lucene. Stay away from Lucene, it's in Java.

This type of platform is small enough to wrap your hands around it ;-) and learn the whole API, quarks and all. It is even more personal because you can take it with you anywhere, try that with a S100 system. It also has a real cool factor because you can show-off and share your work so easily.

King Charles 'beheaded' guests who bored or annoyed him by viewing them at such an angle that his blindspot was over their head. Try it for yourself

Yep, it's also in Zork along with XYZZY, plugh, and possibly other references.

http://www.bf.rmit.edu.au/~fayep/Zork~fayep/Zork/l ingo.html

I've been video blogging for 2 years. the manifesto is at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/manifesto/ and the vogs are at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/ and part one of a tutorial (which also explains a bit about why video one a web page on a regular basis is not really a video blog but just tv) is at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/desktopvogging/de sktopvogging.html everything requires a decent install of quicktime, version 5 or better. most of the issues raised in this thread are moot.

I've been video blogging for 2 years. the manifesto is at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/manifesto/ and the vogs are at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/ and part one of a tutorial (which also explains a bit about why video one a web page on a regular basis is not really a video blog but just tv) is at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/desktopvogging/de sktopvogging.html everything requires a decent install of quicktime, version 5 or better. most of the issues raised in this thread are moot.

I've been video blogging for 2 years. the manifesto is at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/manifesto/ and the vogs are at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/ and part one of a tutorial (which also explains a bit about why video one a web page on a regular basis is not really a video blog but just tv) is at
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/desktopvogging/de sktopvogging.html everything requires a decent install of quicktime, version 5 or better. most of the issues raised in this thread are moot.

Disclaimer: I work in text retrieval for a living.

And the claim that vector search is faster than a database search is true, for as long as you can fit all the document vectors into RAM.

This is not true.

Recent research has shown it's quicker to access a compressed inverted file than it is to access an uncompressed inverted file, even if the whole index fits in RAM, provided your compression method is fast on your processor.

The reason for this counter-intuitive result is entirely due to cache performance. For a vector search, say, you have to consult the whole index, so your working set is the whole memory. For an inverted file-based search, you only need to consult the terms of interest. Not only is your working set much smaller, it's mostly accessing contiguous blocks of memory in a coherent manner.

Consider Commercialism:

• GPL, section 2:

  b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

• OSL, section 2:

  Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license under the Licensed Claims to make, use, sell and offer for sale Derivative Works.

So the OSL is a commercial open-source license, whereas the GPL is a free-as-in-beer open source license.

To me, this looks like a broad philosophical departure that means the two licenses are from different schools of thought and can't really be reconciled. The OSL is a move towards an Open-Source but not free-as-in-beer license. This could hurt Linux distributors.

IANAL, but I am a Law student ;)

- Malx

http://yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au/~malsmith

...these would include his sons Lachlan and {name escapes me at the moment, though I want to say James}...

I'm not 100% sure of this, but you may have mixed in James Packer (son of Kerry Packer, the other (ex-in the case of Murdoch) Australian media giant).

Incidently both Lachlan and James have both screwed up big time recently with daddies money when they invested in One. Tel

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

The ultimate link site for all anime, praise be its name, is the animation turnpike,
Anime Turnpike
where you can graze and explore for days.

If you want some comments and suggestions there's a number of good anime review pages. Here's a page with links to a couple
Anime Meta review sources page
There's a link there to Anime on DVD, which is your best source for finding out what's commercially available.

As for the article, looked like a bunch of factoids compressed into a rambling article. But at least it was relatively fair on both sides.

1. BSD doesn't have runlevels. You've got single-user mode and multi-user mode. FWIW, I have yet to see a Linux distribution with a usable single-user mode.
2. Although BSD doesn't have run-levels, it does have per-service (init.d style) scripts available as an option if you want to use them. See /usr/local/etc/rc.d for example.
3. BSD has rc.conf which is a huge list of shell variables (effectively; some are defaults), which is sourced by the individual script that uses it.

-Dom

Flashback: 1989 - Intel releases the i860 64-bit microprocessor, dubbed a "Cray on a chip" (okay, so it was only a Cray 1, and I think it was only a third as quick as that, but hey - it's a "Cray"!) I even remember some of the RMIT ubergeeks designing a kick-ass computer based upon the i860... Unfortunately, I don't think it was ever built.

2001 - Intel releases the "i860" chipset to support the latest of its flagging 32-bit microprocessor range. Intel's 64-bit microprocessor, the "Itanium", is due for release real soon now...

</irony>

The Murderous Little Toy
Words: Mike Roberts
Music: The Marvelous Little Toy: Tom Paxton

When I was just a wee little lad, my Daddy brought to me
A toy he made down at the lab; it filled me full of glee!
A wonder to behold it was, with many buttons bright.
From the moment that I turned it on, it filled us all with fright.

Chorus:
It went ZAP! when it fired; it cursed when it missed,
And whirred as it took aim.
It didn't know if we were friend or foe:
It attacked us just the same.

Curiosity killed the cat, and the dog was next to go.
The parakeet beat a fast retreat, as the wall began to glow.
A turret turned, some bullets fired, and the TV was no more.
My friends, you should have seen it as the napalm hit the floor.

Chorus

It broke each window down the hall, and then I heard it laugh.
I must admit, I chuckled when it cut my brother in half.
My sister made it to the stairs, when it caught her in the pants.
My daddy had the shotgun out but he never stood a chance.

Chorus

It fired two mortars at the wall, and when the smoke had cleared,
I looked all around for my murderous toy, but it had disappeared!
Then I saw it leave through watered eyes; the tear-gas smelled so sweet.
Things weren't too good for the neighborhood, as it ambled down the street.

Chorus

Well that's the last I ever saw of my murderous little toy.
It might be dead but I hope it's not, `cause it filled me full of joy.
They say it reached the Bearing Strait, and crossed the icy flows.
The Russian Army ain't killed it yet, but it keeps them on their toes.

Chorus

Well, the years have gone too quickly now, and I've my own little boy,
And just last night I told him `bout my murderous little toy.
I recognized his crafty look, I could almost read his mind.
My son has grown up like his dad, `cause he wants one just like mine.

Chorus

oh yeah: stolen and reformatted from: another fan site
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!

Yeah, that's the really interesting thing about evolution, it's really a giant game of level-N mediocrity. And there's no way to know what the "right" level is to play on.

If you're an individual parasite or germ, you win by reproducing. But if you reproduce too much, you kill your host before your children can jump to a new one and... you lose. If you're an elephant and you eat some trees, you win, but if your herd eats all the trees before the drought... you lose. If you're a human and you hunt some game, you win, but if you kill just about everything, well...

These days, ecologists thinking beyond "charismatic megafauna" (like pandas and whales) haven't really agreed on how to prevent humans from losing, or even, what winning or losing entails.

As a stopgap, many people have come down on ecological diversity with the general idea, if we don't know what we're going to need, let's keep as much as everything possible around.

Problem with cloning and sticking things in is: any time big changes happen (hurricanes, volcanoes, humans killing things, humans adding new species to an ecosystem) things tend to get simpler and less diverse for a while. If these happen regularly on a long term scale (like hurricanes) this lower diversity on one scale can lead to more diversity on a larger scale (there's that level-N thing again). But if not, things get more screwed.

So, the question is--- is the "natural Darwinistic act" of an intelligent species evolving and destroying things before going extinct something that happens every several millioin years? If so, no problem! First the sleestack, next us. I think the crows are next in line. They look like they're bored, overly smart, and waiting for something.

The chip really based on the VAX was the National Semiconductor 32016 and 32032. I'm not sure that chip ever made it out of test marketing.

I assume the second sentence is joking; the first Sequent machines (Balance) were NS32K-based, as were Encore's first machines. Sequent switched to 386's for the Symmetry machines - I forget what Encore did.

There was also a PC532, which was a home-brew NS32532 design for which there's a NetBSD port.

1) This is not 'one of the few cases'! As far as straight (civil) libel goes, existing 'cyberlaw' goes back to the 80's, with mailing lists and BBSs and has definitely been upheld internationally. "international" is important, because you can be sued in jurisdiction where the 'damage' occurs or where the 'victim' resides. Here are some cases/sources:

• Here's a Richmond Law Review (Va.) article suggesting unified approaches to cyber-defamation.
• Here's a Harvard Law Review article on cyberlaw.
• Here's a Georgia State review article of Alabama cyber defamation law (for details and contrast with Utah)
• Blakeley v. Continental Airlines is a 1999 case involving a private company-only BBS
• Rindos v. Hardwick was a famous case where an American was successfully sued in Australian courts for defamation on a e-mail list. [Summary] [Judgement]
• A CyberLibel FAQ -- primarily non-US 'British tradition' (Australia, Canada) useful as a basis for further understanding.
• Here's a 1994 Australian review of Defamation laws in cyberspace.
• Here's a course reading list (with links to cases and other resources embedded in the course outline) for a comparison of in the US and Australia with references to other law (Roman, English, Dutch, etc.) It hits some very relevant points in vey few words.
• Here's a review of British cyber-defamation law (incl. BBS and e-mail)
• Similar US Criminal Libel cases against students have been reported widely in the media for years (names are not cited, because they are minors): [Colorado, 1997 (ACLU) and verdict, 1998]
• Nervous? maybe you should be Here's a (English language, published in Denmark) peer-reviewed law journal article on 'Defamation Havens' ('peer-review' is when articles are reviewed by experts before publication)

2) Do a websearch for "criminal libel" and you'll find that its primary use worldwide, historically and currently is against journalists . One of the 'Inciting Abuses' that contributed to the American Revolution was a (then British) court verdict that a newspaper was guilty of defaming the reputation of the Governer-General of New York by (accurately) revealing his corruption.

• Criminal Libel use.abuse is often cited in the annual US State Department Human Rights reports on each country. [Gabon, 1999]
• In Ireland, journalistic websites get away with a great deal that print journalism can't.

3) To address another of Katz's points, here are mini-case studies in dysfunctional human behaviour on the net

Katz was on my 'exclude list' for a few months, not because I dislike his writing, but because his loose use of facts and analogies leads to a sloppy, infuriating discussion. A profesional writer should investigate his facts and limit his speculation to what those facts support; If he doesn't, the readers will certainly go hogwild. This is the first Katz article I've read in a while. I am not pleased.

The Australian TV broadcast was of NGE TV only, thus it didn't include any of end of evangelion, so the question of editing is not relevant there. I've never heard any suggestion that the SBS presentation had additional cutting performed on it.

Check out my review of both products, as well as 303 other titles, at The Anime and Manga Meta-Review Page.

A brillliant, charming fun anime...sort of! There are two three episode OAV series that are excellent. Then there is Nuku Nuku Dash! Which is awful and Nuku Nuku TV which is very silly. Only the original OAV's are worth putting money down for.

Of course they are VERY worth putting money down for.

The Anime and Manga meta-review page, 305 Anime hints and warnings :)

You are doing really well then, because as far as I know only two episodes were produced. Some believe that this was the target, although more complex reasons abound.

The Anime and Manga Meta-Review Page, 305 Anime hints and warnings.

As far as I know Riding Bean was the original source, but the character got tied up in some sort of contractual dispute. The authors solution was to take his sidekick and do gunsmith cats, in which bean eventually showed up as a minor character.

The Anime and Manga Meta-Review Page. 305 Anime title reviews.

Rumiko Takahashi manga is *very* addictive. And while her artwork seems simple her sense of character is excellent. She also leaves a lot of `normal' Japanese events in the background for those who like that sort of thing.

As far as I know she made it onto the list of Japans 5 richest women. She also got paid a sizable loyalty bonus because she was so valuable to her publisher.

Heck, this is the exact question I designed my web page to answer. It has medium length reviews (100K words so far) as well as links to other reviews of the title. It's pretty ugly as web-pages go however.

And everything in the `exemplary' category I recommend (Although some are for historical reasons), While I really enjoyed everything marked `fav'.

There was a defamation judgment in about 1993 in the West Australian Supreme Court that held that calling a copyright infringer a "thief" or a "pirate" was defamatory. Damages were around AU$25,000 from memory. Given that Australian defamation law depends on the place in which the publication is received, I would exercise a little more caution in using those terms on a site that is received by a number of Australians. Of course you have to refer to a particular infringer as a "pirate" or "thief" in order to defame them ;-) except of course for criminal defamation :-( more details )

- the IB project at Basis Systeme netzwerk,

- the former commercial products from PLS that AOL is now giving away,

- the ASF project,

- the Webglimpse pages,

- the pages for the mg system.

For a comprehensive presentation on the subject, see the searchtools site.

When I was in Sydney last year, I ran into some folks at an XML conference that were pushing the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's then-new all-online certificate and degree programs. The program seems pretty solid, and the University is a hotbed of XML work. They have since been marketing to me pretty hard, and both my conversations with them and the materials portray it as a no-bullshit all-web-based program for BS, MS, and PhD in technical fields. Check it out the online program here.

While it seems all well and good, can anyone who has actually attended a program there comment on it? RMIT seems more serious than the current wave of schools using the shovelware method of developing online course offerings. Is it as good as it appears?