Slashdot Mirror

History? Soviet revisionist history maybe.

From the linked article: Pre-order sales reached 1.5 million, more than any other game in history. Oh really? Then how come I clearly recall Warcraft III having 4.5 million pre-orders, more than any other game in history. Looks like lots of other people remember it too.

All the official torrents are mirrored on http://tinyurl.com/4azec.

Perhaps This site will enlighten you. Sheesh.

I'm from Michigan. Libertarians were running for every (or almost every) position: federal, state, and local. Greens were running for most positions. But only the dems and pubs have the boxes.

As for the style of ballot, it's pencil and paper, with an optical scan.

I'm just going to keep holding on for Instant Runoff Voting.

This patent is ridiculous. If they are going to outsource their patent approval personnel, they should at least outsource it to someone who speaks English. People have been making international transactions by computer since before the computer even existed. Yes, people were using a digital network (the telegraph system) to do business before Alan Turing was born.

The Flemington Markets (where the victim worked) have always attracted a criminal element, as silly as it sounds more than a few of the produce stall vendors there have a connection to organised crime (note that in this city "organised" crime is way down the ladder in severity from the American Mob.)

I live in out in the midst of all this, and have seen first hand the way these guys operate. Make eye contact and they will literally go berserker on you. I watched three carloads of these guys stomp the living shit out of a scrawny 19 or 20 year old guy because he told them to "fuck off" after they threw fireworks at his girlfriend. I've seen brawls outside my apartment that could be called small riots and I've been attacked myself after one of these macho dickheads sexually assaulted my girlfriend in front of me. One new years eve I was in a crowd at Darling Harbor counting down at midnight, right on the stroke of midnight a gang of these guys linked arms, charged the crowd and just started wailing on anyone they could catch. Minutes later they'd fled. It's not politically correct to identify a gang by it's ethnicity but a large degree of their behavior arises out of environmental factors, especially their treatment of women and their gang-culture of machismo-on-steroids violence. Drive by shootings are a new phenomenon in this country and nearly all of them in this city are internecine warfare between rival groups of Lebanese and Arab young men, typically over the drug trade. In 1998 a police station was shot up with a fully automatic weapon.

Which brings me to my point that if they were dressed in paramilitary gear it was probably more to do with that than any exposure to Counterstrike. This wasn't some random assault by kids "corrupted" by some computer game, it was more than likely a gang reprisal where the assailants were known to the victim.

The rise of Lebanese gangs in Sydney

Sydney police besieged in their own station by Lebanese gang

Serial gang rapes in Sydney

Bilal Skaf, the leader of the rapists converted to radical Islam in jail and has openly avowed his support of Al Qaeda and sent death threats to the judge and witnesses at his trial.

The Flemington Markets (where the victim worked) have always attracted a criminal element, as silly as it sounds more than a few of the produce stall vendors there have a connection to organised crime (note that in this city "organised" crime is way down the ladder in severity from the American Mob.)

I live in out in the midst of all this, and have seen first hand the way these guys operate. Make eye contact and they will literally go berserker on you. I watched three carloads of these guys stomp the living shit out of a scrawny 19 or 20 year old guy because he told them to "fuck off" after they threw fireworks at his girlfriend. I've seen brawls outside my apartment that could be called small riots and I've been attacked myself after one of these macho dickheads sexually assaulted my girlfriend in front of me. One new years eve I was in a crowd at Darling Harbor counting down at midnight, right on the stroke of midnight a gang of these guys linked arms, charged the crowd and just started wailing on anyone they could catch. Minutes later they'd fled. It's not politically correct to identify a gang by it's ethnicity but a large degree of their behavior arises out of environmental factors, especially their treatment of women and their gang-culture of machismo-on-steroids violence. Drive by shootings are a new phenomenon in this country and nearly all of them in this city are internecine warfare between rival groups of Lebanese and Arab young men, typically over the drug trade. In 1998 a police station was shot up with a fully automatic weapon.

Which brings me to my point that if they were dressed in paramilitary gear it was probably more to do with that than any exposure to Counterstrike. This wasn't some random assault by kids "corrupted" by some computer game, it was more than likely a gang reprisal where the assailants were known to the victim.

The rise of Lebanese gangs in Sydney

Sydney police besieged in their own station by Lebanese gang

Serial gang rapes in Sydney

Bilal Skaf, the leader of the rapists converted to radical Islam in jail and has openly avowed his support of Al Qaeda and sent death threats to the judge and witnesses at his trial.

Here you go: ebay item

This "quest" for a Linux mapping solution reminded me of my own; I've recently been thinking about (rather procrastinating) over buying a Garmin IQUE 3600. In my reading and comp'ing of pdas with GPS/Mapping software, I looked at the Linux-OS-based Sharp Zaurus which gets a lot of (well earned) attention here.

I was looking for more than the Zaurus was offering, but here's what I found and bookmarked. I'm sure others here using the Zaurus will be able to fill in the blanks and share other gps mapping OSS projects out there, if they exist, which I wasn't able to find, other than three below. Zaurus Users Group might have some info as well. Bill Kendrick is also a good resource about these.

SOFTWARE:
GPSGaugeLite
MFG: Serialio
http://www.serialio.com/products/GPSGaugeLite.htm

SOFTWARE:
qpeGPS
http://qpegps.sourceforge.net/

Screenshots | Tested GPS Units

SOFTWARE:
zGPS
http://www.handango.com/sharp/PlatformProductDetai l.jsp?siteId=423.............
http://tinyurl.com/6lau7

HARDWARE:
Model Name: CF Card -GPS Navigation Receiver
Manufacturer: AmbiCom
http://myzaurus.com/acc_Comm10.asp

HARDWARE:
Serial GPS Receiver
Model Name:GPS-U2-Z9
Manufacturer:Serialio.com
http://myzaurus.com/acc_Serial10.asp

• Do you enjoy APOD?
• Do you have a picture that would make a good APOD? If so, we would enjoy hearing from you. Images are most often submitted by email or by posting to a web site. Please write to Robert Nemiroff at nemiroff@mtu.edu or Jerry Bonnell at bonnell@grossc.gsfc.nasa.gov regarding image submissions.

some techincal details on how to replicate the vulnerability can be found here

"It doesn't support a minority of sites that are IE-specific:

In case anyone is wondering, there are 305 such sites, many of which are using browser-detection, and many of which are just rude messages to non-IE users.

List is here[bugzilla]

According to google, these sites represent approximately 0.000007% of the web

Tinyurl has lots of good examples of how the astute user can still be burnt. If the status bar shows "microsoft.com/whatever/whenever" but the actual site has the usual garbage, the user will not be clued in. Indeed, the user may not even be able to see the root of the site through the three thousand character url which so many legitimate sites generate.

Your example is trivial and misses the potential of the exploit:

You might as well say that links themselves are a security risk, since a link that says "Microsoft Web Site" but really goes to goatse.cx is a dangerous spoof.

How about a link that says "citibank.com" in an email and on your status bar that tells the recipient that they should log in to check for suspicious activity? The user goes to the bogus site, which may have valid certs and make the little lock appear and looks just like the citbank site. The user then gives the sender their citibank name and password without thinking twice about the random character url they are confronted with because it's what they are used to seeing. The sender then cleans out the user's account.

A status bar that works is an important part of preventing that kind of fraud.

Water probably boils at that temperature, but you must understand that air does is not a good heat-conductor.

212 F does not boil you from the inside. (I'm a living proof of that if you find it hard to believe) The air is also very moist, because you throw small buckets of water over the rocks (the resulting steam + heat wave is called "löyly").

Here's some links for you: at Virtual Finland, and a nice site written by a non-Finnish person.

If you have never been to a sauna, you should try it. I don't know if you can get a good and proper sauna where you live. But here's some checkpoints: if it's near 212 F (80 to 100 C is good) and you can throw water on the rocks, and nobody is chasing you out or monitoring your time inside or other such nonsense (they do this in Central Europe for "health reasons" (!!)), then go for it.

Or visit Finland, you'll probably be hauled to a sauna before you're even fully out of the airplane.

Check eBay, they're going for about $50. I bought one years ago and am collecting the games. The thing's damn cool, but it makes your eyes burn.

Ugh. Sorry, ignore that link, I forgot that links to Bugzilla are disabled. Try this.

http://tinyurl.com/6bbou/

This should help you understand the parent post. http://tinyurl.com/4ejg

Lots of these services require a SSN: http://tinyurl.com/4wc4u

What's wrong with programming with a standard?

Obviously the Moderator who voted this "Offtopic" does not watch or know anything about the Soprano's. A little help for future moderators: http://tinyurl.com/5k8yg

I can't put my finger on it, but the design if this thing just makes me squirm. Why not be intelligent and just rip-off Apple instead of revisiting the mistakes of the Barbie and Hot Wheels PCs?

if you look on the BBFC page http://tinyurl.com/6t96x you'll see that GTA:SA completed certification on 4th October, a week before going gold. Vampire: Bloodlines a week prior to that and that one hasnt even gone gold yet afaik. Factor in that the process takes a couple of weeks then you could still be looking at anything up to a month before it even goes gold.

How about we cut the size of the federal government, and all its associated wasteful and slow bureaucracy, and slash taxes for everyone at the federal level? Devolve healthcare, education, road construction, and more, down to the state level. This would give everyone more say in how their money is spent (because your local representative is much more accessible than your rep in Washington D.C.); and would provide an opportunity for different states to try different methods of administrating costs and managing overhead -- making solutions more customized to local needs and giving fertile ground for the best ideas to grow and flourish.

This is the original idea behind having multiple states instead of a massive federal bureaucracy that has too many layers and too many factions to be efficient.

This would give *everyone* more money, and more say in how it's spent. We know this works, because it's the way our country was run until the last few decades. Just compare the prosperous 1950s (where the average tax burden was only about %12 of income); or pre-1913 America (no income tax); to the ruinous %40-50 tax burden of today (once you factor in the hidden costs of tax compliance, taxes during production, and accounting overhead) which requires both parents to work and leaves the children to the not-so-tender mercies of the public school system.

So far, the only party that supports this is the Libertarians [lp.org]. Listen to Michael Badnarik [badnarik.org] speak sometime, like on this radio interview.

You are 100% correct. These are all liberal supporters of http://www.americavotes.org/

The devil is in the details. This is an ENTIRELY different organization, "Voters Outreach of America" has been misrepresenting itself as "America Votes" to accomplish it's goals. The article doesn't point out this fact, but others do, here's ONE:
Portland Communique

In the case of a crash of civilization, I think that rather than gold or silver, you'd be better off with respect or weapons than gold.

In the case of a crash of civilization, I think that rather than gold or silver, you'd be better off with respect or weapons than gold.

Yep - I remember being briefly floored in the local bowling alley in South London when this appeared:

http://tinyurl.com/6uuwx/

It used a curved mirror to allow for multiple viewing angles and laser disc for playback. Not bad for '91. Poor game tho...

Badnarik Gets Arrested At 2ND Presidential Debate 100804.mp3

- the 27 minute compilation of live audio from last night's Presidential Candidate's
arrest, courtesy of Mad Studios, is available now at:

http://www.tinyurl.com/4hpsz

Get it quick!
(this link will self destruct in 4 days)

Let Badnarik Debate!!!
the Badnarik files found at:
http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=mo vies&identifier=mad_studios_-_let_badnarik_deb ate

"Check the facts before spreading rumors and insinuations: http://www.smart.com/-snm-0135145948-1096715329-00 00001072-0000006372-1097324828-enm-is-bin/INTERSHO P.enfinity/WFS/mpc-en-content-Site/en_EN/-/EUR/SVC PresentationPipeline-Start?Page=issite%3a%2f%2fsma rt-Site%2fsmart%2ecom%2fRootFolder%2fsmart%2fmodel le%2fsmartcitycoupe%2fsicherheit%2fkonstruktion%2e page"

Can I offer you some compression?

There are not "many" color or sound trademarks.

An interesting/sad story about color trademarks from a forum I frequent where a fellow wanted to sell an electrical drill that happened to be yellow on ebay. A company (Vero) hired by DeWalt to "protect" their trademarks got ebay to shut down the auction, claiming that they guy was trying to pass off a non DeWalt tool as a counterfeit, intentionally using a look-alike to sell it.

This is just plain wrong! Nowhere on the ebay ad did it say it was a DeWalt nor was any attempt made to pass it off as one. Vero/Ebay cancelled the auction for no other reason than the drill happened to be yellow.

Is this a sign of things to come? This sort of thing seems to be happening more and more.

Want to read the tale? Here's a link: http://tinyurl.com/633c4/

Head down the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and ask the people who live there. Coal mining has done substantial damage to the environment, and to people's lives.

Coal mining today is not about underground mines - it is about strip mines and mountain top removal. Instead of digging holes underground you blast the top few hundred feet off of a mountain and dig straight down. Of course the blast debris - thousands of tons of it - has to go somewhere. Usually into the neighbouring valley, destroying homes and watersheds.

The Industry says that today's coal burns cleaner. Do they tell you how?

That's because the coal is washed before being trucked to users. Where do you think the solvent laden waste water goes? Into large holding ponds, dozens of which are known to be on the brink of collapsing.

One such pond broke in 2002. The Martin County slurry spill, at over 300 million gallons, was the largest disaster of its kind ever in the southeastern United States. The spill released nearly 30 times more liquid than the Exxon Valdez.

You also need to factor in the coal company's history of just abandoning mines, leaving them for local and state governments to clean up. And the ongoing damage and injuries caused by coal trucks hauling grossly overwieght loads - by ten or twenty tons - on narrow highways.

There's more to being clean than measuring smokestack emmisions.

Please explain!

please try to keep posts on topic

I just checked the October edition contents page of Psychopharmacology http://tinyurl.com/6pneo and the item isn't there. Mind you there is something on Clitoral Priapism (third item from the bottom of the page).

rotsnakes.ai(4MB)

What each of the reforms discussed (Borda, Condorcet, IRV) has in common is that it incorporates voter preference between all the candidates rather that just their first choice. In that sense, each method is better than our current one. They differ in how the voter's preferences are aggregated.

Each of these voting systems has "problem scenarios" in which an unexpected or undesired outcome is produced-- that is, one that runs counter to intuition in some way. The observation that all reasonable voting systems allow for problem scenarios is crystalized in Arrow's impossibility theorem.

One of the usual responses to the impossibility theorem has been to develop various desirable criteria other than those required in Arrow's theorem, and see which voting method satisfies the most criteria. You'll see an analysis like this at Election Methods that argues for the Condorcet method.

An alternative analysis has been developed in recent years by mathematicians that identifies the voting method with the least number of problem scenarios. We've known for many years that every voting method has problem scenarios but very few people have asked how many problem scenarios there are with each voting method. It turns out that this question is rather hard and requires some sophisticated math to answer.

Say we have 5 candidates and 1000 voters. On each of the 1000 ballots, the candidates can be ranked in 5!=120 different ways. To each possible "1000-ballot-profile," a voting method assigns a ranking of the candidates-- that is, a winner, and the runners-up. For each method, we want to find how many of the 1000-ballot-profiles result in unexpected outcomes. The upshot is that the analysis shows that the Borda count has the least number of problem scenarios and is robust in another sense. (The Borda count is when the candidates ranked first through fifth by a voter get 5 through 1 points respectively. It should be familiar to many people because it is often used in athletic contexts.)

I recommend looking at Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting for an expository account and Basic Geometry of Voting for the details.

What each of the reforms discussed (Borda, Condorcet, IRV) has in common is that it incorporates voter preference between all the candidates rather that just their first choice. In that sense, each method is better than our current one. They differ in how the voter's preferences are aggregated.

Each of these voting systems has "problem scenarios" in which an unexpected or undesired outcome is produced-- that is, one that runs counter to intuition in some way. The observation that all reasonable voting systems allow for problem scenarios is crystalized in Arrow's impossibility theorem.

One of the usual responses to the impossibility theorem has been to develop various desirable criteria other than those required in Arrow's theorem, and see which voting method satisfies the most criteria. You'll see an analysis like this at Election Methods that argues for the Condorcet method.

An alternative analysis has been developed in recent years by mathematicians that identifies the voting method with the least number of problem scenarios. We've known for many years that every voting method has problem scenarios but very few people have asked how many problem scenarios there are with each voting method. It turns out that this question is rather hard and requires some sophisticated math to answer.

Say we have 5 candidates and 1000 voters. On each of the 1000 ballots, the candidates can be ranked in 5!=120 different ways. To each possible "1000-ballot-profile," a voting method assigns a ranking of the candidates-- that is, a winner, and the runners-up. For each method, we want to find how many of the 1000-ballot-profiles result in unexpected outcomes. The upshot is that the analysis shows that the Borda count has the least number of problem scenarios and is robust in another sense. (The Borda count is when the candidates ranked first through fifth by a voter get 5 through 1 points respectively. It should be familiar to many people because it is often used in athletic contexts.)

I recommend looking at Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting for an expository account and Basic Geometry of Voting for the details.

Example of Diebold at it's best

You can still get the evaluation version, but unfortunately this will probably not be supported. I wish companies that had dying software would open-source it instead of shelving it.

Your sig currently says:

"Slashdot editors delete posts: see time difference between first and second posts"

Is your tinfoil hat screwed on a little tight this evening?

Yeah, yeah, I know, IHBT, IHL, yadda yadda...

Who said anything about stealing? Check out this patent. Every operating system on the planet does that. It's a required part of loading every executable file format since the early 50s. It's really really easy for someone to violate a patent without even trying. You write code, you make up all your own ideas, but because someone had that idea 5 years before you and hired a lawyer he's gunna sue you.

http://tinyurl.com/4qz7l

This reminds of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, I think it was in the Weirdos from Another Planet! collection. They use their, very flexible, carboard box to travel to another planet (I'm pretty sure it Mars) and Hobbes makes a comment about them leaving garbage lying about

Or you can just order the service packs on CD for free from MS. I got mine in like three days. I had already installed SP2 RTM, but i wanted the disc so I could help my broadband-impaired friends and family.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updat es/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

Or in case line breaks mess that up:

http://tinyurl.com/6g675

Enjoy!

Or you can just order the service packs on CD for free from MS. I got mine in like three days. I had already installed SP2 RTM, but i wanted the disc so I could help my broadband-impaired friends and family.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updat es/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

Or in case line breaks mess that up:

http://tinyurl.com/6g675

Enjoy!

I believe most of the money that you are talking about ("all resources don't remotely add up to our tax dollars") goes to administration. You know, the people that don't belong there.

Really, the problem with public schools and our tax money is that the school don't have to be competitive in the marketplace. No matter what the results, voters choose who runs the school board. Failed leaders get re-elected based on their name recognition and advertising spending, successful leaders are ofter pushed out no matter what. On the otherhand if someone raises through the ranks and changes schools, and they aren't liked by the schoolboard then they also hit the streets.

A good example is El Paso's Yselta school district. It's one of the countries poorest schools and one man Anthony Trujullo raised test scores to some of the highest in the country. Parents were happy with the change but he was fired by the board 4 to 3. One of his supporters said it was politics, and they fired him based on no more than "a personal dislike by four members".

There is no 'market check', if you want to call it that and no competition for funds. Not that I'm for starving bad schools to death, but it makes you wonder. There is no incentive to actually make the schools better.

"No Child Left Behind" was supposed to fix this, but it has by and large failed. That isn't just my opinion. (See this NYT Article, reg required... basically there isn't room in "better" schools for those wishing to switch from "bad" schools, a provision of NCLB.)

Many times, the failures of the public school system in America is deeper than it looks. Take school violence for example. I had to do a report for school with 4 others. When I suggested that violence had nothing to do with video games or TV people looked at me with awe. For more into that subject, read Preventing Violence in Schools Through the Production of Docile Bodies by Pedro Noguera (PhD). Good read, I promise. It basically says the failure of the public schools in general is based in the founding years and how they were formed after mental asylums and prison...

We all have to be educated in these areas in order to exact change. Better public schools are our way to make this country better for all, it's the first line of defense (IMHO).

And please don't answer, "We won't do anything illegal." We know the Justice Department drated a memo showing how torture could be legally justified.

Isn't this contrary to 228 years of being the world's guiding beacon in the struggle for human rights?

And please don't answer, "We won't do anything illegal." We know the Justice Department drated a memo showing how torture could be legally justified.

Isn't this contrary to 228 years of being the world's guiding beacon in the struggle for human rights?

I'd never heard of the Canadian Arrow before it was mentioned on /. a while back. I can't find the answer on their webpage, so I'll ask if anyone knows: was the name "Canadian Arrow" chosen with the Canadian Avro Arrow in mind?

If so, that would be cool. If not, I hope it's a happy coincidence and not a prophetic one. Just don't let "US" steal the idea this time, guys.

Free flatscreens. Proof here.