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Umm, let's put this into perspective.

It's a well known fact that the former Soviet Union spent, and later earned, the lion's share of its hard currency on the manufacture of arms. While they were building some of the most lethal weapons systems on earth, an ordinary citizen could not buy a decent refrigerator, let alone a reliable automobile. I contend that this led to the collapse of the nation and put them where they are today, having to rely on space tourists and such to help fund their high tech programs.

Comparing a Mig-25 to a SR-71 is ludicrous. The Foxbat could sprint at high speed for a short distance while the Blackbird cruised above Mach 3 at around 90,000 feet. They are not in the same class at all. Anyone remember the Mig-25 pilot that defected by landing his plane on Hokkaido in the mid '70s? All the radios used vacuum tubes. Hardly what you could call sophisticated.

BTW. Way back in my USAF days, stationed here and here from '78 through '81 this was the sort of thing that we kept track of 24/7. There were very few areas where their tecnology was on a par with the west.

Hire a few minimun wage tape monkeys to change tapes on command

I have lots of powder monkey experience, can I send you a resume?

geez man, i dunno about you, but i'd rather not see a website degrading lude.

of course a lewd, denigrating bunch of porn is another matter...

The last Egyptian dynasty wasn't started by an Egyptians. The Ptolemaic dynasty was Greek (or Macedonian), or at least, descended from Greeks. After Alexander the Great died, his empire got divided by his Greek generals into three pieces. Antigonus got control of Greece & Macedonia. Seleucus got control of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. Ptolemy, a Greek commander, got control of Egypt. Although he was Greek, he took on the title of Pharoah and he and his descendents ruled as such until the Romans invaded. One interesting thing about the Ptolemaic dynasty is that they were very incestuous, with each king often marrying his sister (seen here and here.)

So there is historical evidence that Cleopatra was of Greek descent.

We need a viable low-cost solution

Having said that, were anyone to do this and be 100% satisfied with it (or hell, 80%) then I'd love to hear about it.

Schnapple

Oh, and nevermind the fact that with today's technology and a greater emphasis than ever on DVD and digital picture we're willing to throw away $10 at whatever snake oil peddler comes along. "Just project it on your bed sheets!"

For shame this made it as a Slashdot topic.

Schnapple
http://members.tripod.com/schnapple99/

I'm the unfortunate owner of one of their low-end "Fun! Flash 640SE" cameras.

My complaint with it has nothing to do with the low quality of the images (which look as though they are merely "interpolated" to 640x480 rather than actually BEING 640x480 as advertised) nor the cheap construction - I rather expected both for a ~$80 digital camera.

My complaint is their horrendous support for it. In my specific case, I'd emailed to them asking about protocol specs so that the gPhoto project might be able to put together a working driver. Now, the fact that they would give no useful information is, sadly, not all that unusual, but the form of the response was rather unimpressive. Over a month after sending the email, I got back a medium-sized email in reply. ALL BUT ONE LINE of that email was form-letter "thank you for contacting polaroid blah blah blah". The very first line was the only unique one. It said "that information is not available."

Given that Xirlink actually made the camera core, and there APPEARS to be some sort of business-stifling "Intellectual Property" agreement between Polaroid's digital division and that "ArcSoft" company that makes the obnoxious 'pretty bird' program (I forget the name of the windows 9x-only software - its mascot is a clown-colored bird...) that is supposed to keep it such that only the Polaroid/ArcSoft drivers are able to get to the camera, so I wrote back asking if they meant that they didn't HAVE the information (i.e. that I should contact Xirlink or ArcSoft instead) or that they were not allowed to release it. Over a week later, another one-terse-line-plus-formletter-crap response - "We do not make that information available." (which is not only somewhat rude but as before doesn't even answer the question.)

It was then that I figured they were screwed...if they had no interest in AT LEAST being polite to potential new markets, let alone actually encouraging their development, it seemed pretty obvious that other digital camera companies would roll over them, and, as others have already pointed out in this vein, considering how expensive and low quality their other "instant photograph" products were, that digital cameras would slowly devour that market as they got cheaper, and polaroid would have nothing to fall back on. Nice going, Polaroid.

(On the plus side, last I heard there was some progress in getting recognizeable images from the Polaroid "Fun!" cameras, so maybe I'll be able to actually use mine eventually...More info about the cameras here and, more currently, here.)

The new site is: http://members.tripod.com/rkusnery/remorse.html

Ashcroft distorted the record of Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White and misled his Senate colleagues in order to sabotage White's nomination to a federal district court

He has opposed legislation designed to end workplace discrimination (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act) and to protect vulnerable groups of Americans against hate crimes (the Hate Crimes Prevention Act). He voted to weaken a federal law that helps protect minority communities against "redlining" by banks and other financial institutions.

He voted to roll back clean water protections and introduced legislation to undercut efforts to limit emissions of man-made greenhouse gases.

He has praised the far right magazine Southern Partisan, a neo-Confederate publication that promotes the view, among others, that slavery was beneficial to the slaves.

In just six years in the Senate he introduced or sponsored no fewer than seven different attempted amendments to the Constitution. In 1996 he proposed a radical amendment that would have made it much easier to amend the Constitution, opening the way for disastrous political and ideological mischief.

He voted to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts

Can anyone explain why this guy gets to be attourney general ?

even more

"Only In America" gets a whole new meaning

Getting arrested when you did nothing wrong ? Jep

Getting executed when you did nothing wrong ? jep

Rich kids getting of cheap ? duh

http://shrimp.tripod.com

Dear lord - did they have to call it Mojoworld?

I hope that Mojo Nixon doesn't decide to sue, seeing as how he's already written songs about it, and all.

I hope they lift the Estonia next. And expose the Swedish role and responsability in the "accident".

Your view is heavily skewed by being a Slashdot regular. 99% of web users don't do any ad blocking. 98% accept all cookies. People who use Junkbuster or Webwasher or a Hosts file are in the deep deep minority.

Nevertheless, I do try to be reasonable with my ad blocking. I don't block most 2nd party banners, or ordinary 3rd party gifs on the sites that I use regularly.

Just don't throw 3rd party cookies or javascripts at me and I'll look at what you have to say. If you slow down my page loading to wait for your 17 different web bugs, I'll route the requests to nowhere.

I just wrote this yesterday - it's quite appropriate to this thread.

Privacy and Encryption, Lose one, lose 'em all

I had been admiring how nice looking the ship is, but now that you mention it, it might be a bit too pretty. It might have been more effective to have a spacecraft that seems ugly at first but we grow to love, like the The Millenium Falcon the Apollo LEM. That would have been more in keeping with the spirit of just getting going.

Certainly sir: some kind soles just for you!

Lots of Tanks

Is that what you saw? I got that link off Fark...

The *real* tapes are here. Open your eyes to the NASA conspiracy!

...interesting to see if Internet traffic jumps sharply as people switch to using steganography to stuff their confidential emails inside mp3's and jpg's.

Are you totally incapable of separating two personas in the same person? I'm sure you have opinions on software. Do those opinions void the value of your political opinions?

Yeah and no.

Stallman is a software engineer of godlike proportions. I don't say this because he's on the side of Free software, or anything like that. Count the lines of code he's produced. If I could crank out in a month what he can do in a day, I would be a happy coder.

Because of his stature, and because of how much code he has contributed to the FSF, and all that, his opinions on other subjects get amplified somewhat past their intinsic value.

Of course I largely agree with Stallman, so it doesn't bother me much.

I perceive that damage can be done when people who are well-regarded in one field start remarking on others. The great industrialist, Henry Ford, had some remarks on human behavior (including some well-circulated quotes about the correlation between smoking cigarettes and criminal behavior) which would cause a reasonable person to gasp in disbelief.

The question is not whether Stallman is allowed to have political beliefs. Of course he is! The question is how seriously you should take those beliefs.

j.

I have decided for my own mental health that it is time to move on and attempt to spread as much support and peace as I can. I have been occupying my thoughts with what can be built on the spot where the trade center stood and the healing of the citizens of the world after this atrocious and sickening occurence. Another thing that I have started doing is listening to classical music.

For laptops, the RedHat Linux on Laptops page is really useful.

And when/if the US invades Afghanistan, who do you think will be there with them?

It seems to be a common assumption these days that the United States will be invading Afghanistan (it is at least around the office I work in), but I would just like to point out a few statistics that I gathered doing a quick google search:

Russian Invasion of Afghanistan:
Years: 1979-1989
Soviet Killed: Official count is 13,714 but it is estimated to be closer to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000.
Soviet Wounded: 469,685

American Involvement in Vietnam:
Years: 1964-1975
Americans Killed: 58,202
Americans Wounded: 303,704

Just thought that comparison was interesting.

Sources: http://aryana_afghan.tripod.com/statisti.htm
http://www.no-quarter.org/html/jake.html

I don't think I am qualified to answer your question but for those interested there some links to info on steganography: Link 1 Link 2 Link 3

This is just merchandising slapped on top of a game concept that has already been done.

I won't argue that merchandising is involved, but nintendo re-released TETRIS® Attack on N64 and GBC because people were still demanding it after the Super NES had been dead for a while (Frogger was the last Super NES game). Because nintendo no longer had the TETRIS® license, the company just released a Pokemon themed "official clone."

The graphics for the blocks are even the same.

Yes, the tile graphics are the same on GBC and Super NES, but they're somewhat different on N64. The N64 also adds a cylindrical board in addition to the rectangular board.

Copying games you own is illegal because semiconductors don't have the fair use or backup exception for their first 10 years. However, Matthew Leverton made a TA clone for the PC called Who Let The Blocks Out. Unfortunately, every path given to the file is a 404.

Proof that this is the apocalypse:

http://wtcstuff.tripod.com/The_Face_of_GOD.JPG
http://httpd.chello.nl/~m.vandeven11/face2.jpg

Both the face of god and the wicked outline of the devil with a scythe, casting a wave of punishment to the wicked sinners.

I wanted to test my antagonist further so I thought of a number of tricky questions as we gossiped. For example, I asked him: "Do you know Armando Acevedo?" Senor Acevedo is an obscure Mexican player, not remotely of Grandmaster strength.

My opponent's reply came instantly, if cryptically: "Siegen 1970". Now if you look in the tournament book of the Siegen Chess Olympiad of 1970 you will find that Bobby Fischer played a certain Armando Acevedo in a preliminary round. He was obviously trying to tell me something.

Typing "Fischer Armando Acevedo" into Google turns up a reference to the 1970 Siegen match on the 3rd link. (The 2nd link is a consequence of Short's article.) It's in Spanish, but the exact phase "Siegen, 1970 appears explicity next to the first occurrance of "Fischer". See for yourself. The point is that one need not have access to a thirty year old tournament book, as Short suggests, to quickly generate the reply that he received. Thus this particular piece of evidence is a lot weaker than it appears.

But we have seen this before in human history, for example, the Ming Dynasty of China and the voyages of the eunuch Zhen He (Cheng Ho). China at that time had broken free from Mongol rule, and centuries of progress in engineering, science, arts, and philosophy could justify a Chinese feeling that the Ming Dynasty was the greatest civilization the Earth had ever seen. For seven voyages Zheng He captained a stupendous fleet that explored the coasts all the way to East Africa, trading and exacting tribute. In theory Southeast Asia, the surrounding islands, and the coasts of the Indian Ocean lay at China's feet.

The problem was that China was the center of civilization. There was no immediate reason to conquer and displace inferiors. What could they offer China? China had no incentive to put skin in the game. And since China's explorations were financed and controlled by the government, once the program lost favor with the leadership, all such exploration could be swiftly terminated.

Today's space craft sent to other planets or other outer space bodies are our equivalent of the voyages of Zheng He. For a generation the idea of exploring space captured the imagination of a rising and relatively rich civilization. But now the civilization is facing other concerns, concerns closer to home. And the civilization believes that it is the greatest of all time with no competitor on the horizon. The greatest science, the greatest engineering, the greatest arts, the greatest philosophy all permeate the civilization, one which can earnestly ask if it has reached the end of history.

And the civilization has a better alternate space program than one that could actually be physically constructed. Through the magic of special effects in television, movies, and games all potential space programs and futures can be experienced by the masses, the ultimate space program of the mind.

The cycles of history teach us that such a period of self-satisfaction turns into degeneration and finally collapse. After the wise king follows the corrupt sons and grandsons who cannot hold the kingdom together let alone promote expansion. The failure of this generation to take its shot at further manned space exploration means it will be a while until the next window of opportunity opens.

These are actually pretty good points, although the fact is that I already have a personal boycott against almost every one of these companies. No money for stocks right now. Any other suggestions? I also have a few more suggestions, which are in the following article.

EarthHack4777

Regards,
proclus

Where does this myth come from that Office is loaded with features no one uses? Please name me some features that "no one" uses.

The easter eggs?

Here's an index of sonic boom photos

Undernet, Overnet, Wombling Free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the net that we find,
Nets that the everyday folks leave behind.

(Original here)

I found the ascii version of goatse, from a nameless but fanatical counter-culture.
A HREF=http://cakerx.tripod.com/goatse.txt DON'T ASK ME TO POST IT AGAIN

No no no, its turtles all the way down

The article was funny, and a good reminiscence, but:

Shockley, Teller, and LeMay

what an unholy trinity that is!

Shockley, the Nobel Prize winner who determined to devote his life to eugenics;

Teller, the brilliant scientist who pushed the DoD further into the realm of "The Super", and beyond;

and, finally, LeMay (brilliantly portrayed by George C. Scott in "Dr. Strangelove"), the hawk's hawk who would stop at nothing to achieve global superiority for his country, even at the expense of the American people.

These men, while they performed great deeds in their lifetimes, are to me a good example of how excessive hubris in the scientific and technical arena can be a very dangerous thing, indeed. None of these men can be considered Great Men, in my opinion, because they wandered from the path of integrity and truth in their zealous pursuit of technology for technology's sake.

But the article makes for a great read, and I'm sure in their day these men were admired and respected. I have the advantage of hindsight, and hope that we can all learn from these men how, for some vicious mole of nature in them, even the greatest of men are prone to fall!

And when we ship prisoners off planet to small colonies and guard them with these giant roving balls....

Pennyfarthing bicycles on Mars anyone?

Maybe more of a slanted table. Who's next? John C. Dvorak?

I really don't think Dvorak would go for that. Especially not after his little run-in with Mr. T!

http://members.tripod.com/steganography/stego.html
is a great place and has a software archive.

Me and Marcus Allen went over to see Nicole
When we heard a knock at the door, must have been Ron Gold'
Jumped behind the door, put the orgy on hold
Killed em both and smeared blood in a white Bronco (we did it!)

I don't have the link to that page anymore or I'd post it!

Site du Jour of the Day Archives

You are a chickenhead.

I like Farscape. Apart from the damn good writing and story lines that address moral issues that Star Trek wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, they have that white chick. Woah... That white chick... drool... She makes that Voyager borgette look like Rosanne Barr.

You mean that "grey chick" (Chiana). Actually Chiana is kind of white, but it is a white that is almost gray (grey?). Chiana is played by Gigi Edgley, who is prety damn hot out of makeup, as well. Here's a website with some pics (this is a legit link; AC's honor):

http://www.gigiedgley.com/

The real "white chick" (you know what I mean) on Farscape is Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black) who I think is the hottest chick in Farscape (at least, the hottest one not under a ton of special effects makeup). Claudia Black is captivating on camera. Her face gets more and more interesting. Just watch her. You will see what I mean.

Well, I might as well include a link to one of the Claudia Black fan sites, too:

http://ukculttv.tripod.com/claudiablack.htm

Kangaroo Koncepts

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Nah, it was both Hicks and Ripley.

I didn't know there was a soft drink called White Lightnin'. I was thinking about the beverage Merle Haggard sang about in Okie from Muskogee, the same kind Robert Mitchum ran in Thunder Road. I think Mitchum sang the Ballad, too. I just remember white lighnin' and mountain dew being euphemisms for moonshine whiskey. There's a silly song about mountain dew that's innocuous enough for kids to sing as a campfire song. I thought the hillbilly ad campaign was pretty corny; it's remarkable that they've been able to reposition it as something that people who consider themselves cool would even consider drinking. (It's not too bad with Cruzan's Pineapple Rum)

I highly recommend checking out some of the homebrew jet websites these guys have. Its wild to see the different approaches they take to reach the goal of self-sufficiency. One guy used plain old cast iron pipe you could buy at Home Depot and got it working. Another is working on an engine that uses a turbocharger from an M-60 tank! He's also got one that has an afterburner on it with some REALLY cool pictures.

This is quite the hobby. On guy built a really sweet engine that used a PLC to help start the engine which is a multi step process. His worked so well he sometimes had trouble keeping his cart braked. Interesting to see how folks also try various fuels from K-1 to LP gas to Diesel.

I honestly was blown away by the time and effort folks put into one of these just to have it run - but it really was a blast browsing all these sites all day - careful!! You might get hooked! :) Geeks with jet engines is a scary prospect!

Ah, those were the days! Not only did Kroyer save the Kuwaiti water supply, but he also saved the insurance lots of money. Nowadays, Disney would probably sue for a cut...

Raising ships with ping-pong balls

Solar sails for spacecraft

Laser-powered spacecraft

Supersonic speeds underwater

Fake breastesses

Sometimes it feels so good to be a human being :)

"Has sensational journalism gone too far? Find out at eleven!" - John Stewart

Steganography will be where it's at. They say Usama bin Laden is the king of stego right now. Check out this site for stego tools.

One tool alone, "snow", allows you to hide text in other text via random white space being appended to each line. It would therefore become very easy to hide uuencoded binaries in postings in all USENET groups. Much higher bandwidth than just a few dozen groups.

You could also stego mp3's into alt.binaries.pictures.fractals or alt.binaries.pictures.furniture. There's another tool, who's name escapes me right now, that I think holds a lot of promise. It's very raw right now, but provides a very good starting point for allowing peer-to-peer connections by hiding data in TCP header fields. It even supports bounces.

If I wanted to transmit a file to you using this software, I would send a SYN packet to a web server on port 80, setting the TCP initial sequence number to the byte I'm sending and spoofing your IP address and the high port your listener is on as the source. The web server would reply to you with a SYN ACK and the ISN+1. Your listener would subtract 1 from the ISN and store the byte. The listener could drop all SYN packets on the floor, defeating port scanners.

Does anyone really think that Yahoo! logs half-open connections on port 80? Nope. You can even spread the half-open connections over dozens or hundreds of web servers. I hope someone who knows a lot more than I do builds on this starting point. And yes, I do realize that transmitting one byte at a time is painfully slow, and I suppose routers could drop unsolicited SYN ACK packets. Not to mention, ISP's may one day block outbound packets with spoofed source IP addresses.
Until then, this is pretty sneaky.
--
Steve Jackson