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First, they have you on camera? So? Only a problem if you do something illegal.

Eh? Did you really just make the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to be worried about" argument?

Second, if people wear masks they're going to feel like they can get away with things. It encourages violence and mob behavior.

And if people are allowed to own handguns, it will just encourage violence and mob behavior. Sorry, but this seems to be a bit of a tautology.

Third, you see people wearing masks at protests in third world countries where they worry about a secret police tracking them. This is not a reasonable concern in the first world.

The first world that has FBI files on nonviolent actresses and civil rights activists?
The first world where undercover agents go so far as to impregnate the nonviolent activists they are spying on?
The first world that constantly uses entrapment to prosecute "terror" cases?
The first world which has recently passed both laws allowing military detentions of citizens and criminalizing "disrupting events" where someone is under Secret Service protection?

Lets say you decide to protest a Bank of America shareholder meeting at a convention center. You're peacefully protesting in the street and the parking lot, but totally unknown to you, Jill Biden was quietly on her way to meet some Democratic donors in another room at the convention center.

But she was a few minutes late getting past the crowd, so you and your fellow protesters "disrupted an event" where the Secret Service was protecting someone. That spiffy new spy center in Nevada runs CCTV footage through their facial recognition software, and not only picks you out of a crowd, but is able to cross-reverence your location with a warrantless wiretap on your cell phone. Presto, you receive a summons in the mail a few weeks later.

It'll be the new speed camera fine-by-mail.

I was referring to the US deposing Allende in Chile. However, there are many, many other cases of extreme US interventionism. Here's a partial list for you to suck on:

http://www2.truman.edu/~marc/resources/interventions.html

Here's another, because I know how much you love having the facts regarding US interventionism shoved in your face:

http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

Here's a general list of interventions, not Latin America specific:

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

We are not the good guys. We are not the global police. We are a nation of brutal, arrogant, power hungry thugs, destroying anything that displeases us. You want to know why socialism fails? US. We do it. We infiltrate, kill, lie, steal, rape, and do whatever we have to to "protect" our interests, which really means protecting the interests of rich, owning class Americans, not the peons.

The thing is, we could be the shining beacon of freedom and democracy we pretend to be if it weren't for people like you sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" every time someone constructively criticizes the US.

All my favorites, right here: http://limestone.truman.edu/~dbindner/mirror/#Vi-Ref

I don't know if it is a good tutorial, but a skeleton bare "good start" is at http://limestone.truman.edu/~dbindner/gitnotes/git -notes.html

My favorite cheet sheet is the one here:

http://limestone.truman.edu/~dbindner/mirror/#Vi-R ef

"The spirit of Vi on one page."

If that's the game, then I suggest the The FSCK FreeCD or download the iso.

If that's the game, then I suggest the The FSCK FreeCD or download the iso.

I am not aware of any widespread rejection of evolution as a scientific theory in any other geographic location, or social group

Allow me to enlighten you.

Bite-sized enlightenment: Modern anti-evolution sentiment always comes back to America.

Beefy Enlightenment: Turkey is currently a hot-bed of Islamic anti-evolution activity. Anti-evolution has only begun to take foot in Turkey in the 80's. Before that, most fundamentalist branches of Islam denied evolution but hadn't put any real effort into their opposition to it. Their argument was simple - Islam is true, evolution is false, The End.

One day, the Muslim clerics woke up and said to themselves "Allah shit! The sheep accept evolution!" and realized they had to do something. But what? So they turned to their friends in America and said to them, "How did you guys deal with those secular-humanist-communist-evilutionists?" and the evangelicals responded, "Well here, take these books and spread the word!"

So they did. Anti-evolution books in Turkey are virtually identical to those we'd find here in the US, with the exception of the whole 'Allah' thing.

For a slightly more in-depth look at Islamic Creationism, check out http://www2.truman.edu/~edis/writings/articles/isl amic.html and the rest of the papers on that site.

> ... I'd encourage other geeks to compile their own Open Software CDs,

Like
    http://limestone.truman.edu/pub/fsck/freecd/doc/

> I made my own "Open CD" just for giving out to friends / family / whatever that has an assortment of my preferred OSS.

I did too. I keep it updated online at http://vh224401.truman.edu/pub/fsck/freecd/doc/

We've always known that octopi could walk.

Telling school children that scientific theory is just theory is a game of dishonest semantics. The sense of the word theory in a scientific context is quite different from its common usage. In everyday usage, theory means an opinion based upon sketchy evidence. In science, a theory remains a theory no matter how well founded--even when everyone agrees that it is a fact. Gravity is a theory. Changing your mind about it will not give you the power to fly. To confuse the two meanings deliberately in a children's textbook, as this does, is a deliberate lie.

All over the world, religious adherents are using the old arguments of postmodernism to try to discredit science wherever it contradicts their beliefs. They are not engaging in scientific debate, but in meta-debates, using methods from literary criticism to paint science as mere opinion and orthodoxy. They are not talking about evidence. They are arguing that evidence itself is irrelevant. And they are not talking to scientists, who have already heard all their arguments and refuted them soundly. They are talking to people without any scientific knowledge, preferrably as young as they can get them. From the sound of some of the responses on this post, they've been talking to a lot of the people here. The goal is political. They can't refute science, but if they get enough votes, they can outlaw it.

I'm not kidding about this. The strategy is called The Wedge, and the long term goal (we're talking in terms of generations here) is to encourage a widespread attitude of distrust towards science and skeptical thinking. The have identified science, quite correctly, as the greatest threat to the type of magical thinking required for fundamentalist religions. Muslim and Hindu extremists have come to the same conclusion, as have a horde of New Age con men and fortune tellers, and are fighting for the same goal; the disparagement of science and the scientific method.

Anyone here who does not think that the scientific method works, throw out your computer now. And your car, all your appliances, hell, you should probably burn your house, because all of these things, the way they're made, the materials they are made of, are possible because of science. You probably would not be alive without the medicine and food that scientific advances have made possible. Think of the number of people who just died in the Asian Tsunami who would have lived if there had been an early warning system. Ignorance kills.

And if you think that evolution is just a theory or 'pseudo-scientific propaganda', that there are lots of arguments against it and its on shaky ground, then you haven't bothered to read the literature. I'm sorry, but all the arguments against it advanced by ID theorists and Creationists have been answered, and there is no alternative theory that has anywhere near the same volume of evidence to support it. If you don't know this, I suspect you either don't care to know it, or would refuse to acknowledge any evidence no matter how sound.

Yeah, they taught that as an intro language at my alam matter Truman state university. Can't say that I cared for the language. I really think its a poor choice. Its not used for much outside of the aviation industry, and its not very simular to any other language outside of pascal/delphi.

FAQ and "What is this?" links also included...

It's huge and very beautiful! The one at San Siro in Milan stands on a 1.5 metre high marble plinth, so your head is just about level with the horse's hooves, above that you have this enormous animal giving the impression that it is bearing down on you (which is just what the Sforza family would have intended it to do).

But it is also been given an extremely animate pose - the horse is trotting, twisting its head, eyes rolling, nostrils flared. Leonardo broke with centuries of tradition in doing this - horses had always been depicted with heads straight ahead and without character.

Clearly Leonardo loved horses, he sketched thousands of them, dissected them - the musculature on his horse is far more accurate than those of his contemporaries and he went on to write the first accurate book on equine medicine!

Take a look at the picture of it being assembled by crane to get some idea of its size. In some ways the modern statue is less ambitious than Leonardo's. He wanted the statue to be self-supporting without an internal skeleton (known as the armature).

To do this, Leonardo intended to create his statue in a single pouring of bronze (about 80 tonnes of molten metal). This had never been attempted before (or since) and so he had to develop a completely new casting technique, very similar to the way we now make injection moulded plastics.

Leonardo sketched the process for casting his statue and clearly worked out how to do it, but we now think that he couldn't have got a good cast. Hence the recreation used conventional bronze casting technologies.

Obligatory self promotion approaching. If you're in the UK, you can learn more about the Sforza Horse in the Open University course A178 - Perspectives on Leonardo da Vinci .

And of course, when you're in Milan, drop by the statue itself!

Best wishes,
Mike.

and now im getting sick of you.
didnt you read the post ? i already made my point by noting that if the US congressmen were really thinking about iraqi peoples future they would have chosen GSM over CDMA, but instead they take their decisions based on profit.

so yes, the american government (or 1/3 of it as you naively put it) is in for the money.

look, if you cant see that the actions of your government through history have nothing to do with "liberation" and everything to do with profiting then you must be really blind.

or really patriotic (orwellian style).

i come from south america and ive seen lots of this things happening. and i know from experience what im talking about. whenever the US government gets into "helping out" some south american country it means fucking the people there and getting away with as much as they can in their wallets
of course its not like they get into that countries national reserve and start filling their pockets... its more like setting up a friendly "representative democracy" - or if that fails, a "moderately repressive regime" - and tell them to start signing out contracts for US corporations to start exploiting its oil, gold, silver, etc. etc.

and that of course with very low to none at all taxes.

here is a list if you care to see of _some_ of the things US government has done "in the name of freedom".
yeah, in the name of their freedom to profit

Upstream entities can implement these sorts of controls without telling users, and it's tempting to do so because it will reduce the number of user complaints.

Actually, it doesn't. I work for my schools ITS Department, and we get PLENTY of calls about "the internet being too slow". These calls range from all sorts of people, from the computer illiterate, to the tech savvy. In fact, I think it increases the amount of calls, because no where does it say that their spyware-ridden KaZaA is slower at college, than it is at home on their dial-up connection.

When napster first came out, it took up more than 85% of the total bandwidth. That meant people trying to do searches in the library weren't able to do so in a timely manner. This way, everything works, and people are still happy (because happy students == more tuition). It just means that you can't get instant gratification. You actually have to wait for your songs to download overnight. And movies/pr0n? They turn into a week-long wait.

I am very happy with what the school did with it's P2P apps, even though I live off campus. :P

~Mike

I think most people will find all the VI they need to know on the Vi reference card at vh224401.truman.edu

At Truman State University we will be taught Ada. I've heard it is a good structured programming languager which forces the programmer to use good technique. Ada is I believe related to Pascal. I've read that is mainly used in embedded devices (probably embedded as in the program in airplane, as opposed to a Palm). It has some OOP, but they were added kind of as an afterthought (as opposed to Ruby which lives and breaths OOP.)

In theory I think it is a good idea and it probably will be in practice as well. You go to college so you can have a basis of knowledge to work with the rest of your career. I have some programming experience and know that it isn't that difficult to apply your experience from one language into another. So colleges top priority should be picking an language that is best for teaching with. The professors that I've talked to seem to really embrace Ada, and that's important. I wonder what kind of reception C# is getting from the U of Waterloo. Its one thing to learn a somethinge new, its another to have to teach it.

I was in my CS Class today from Dr. Jon Beck and we talked about packages. He said private instances in a spec were a good thing. This way you really don't need to know EXACTLY how they work, just the fact that they work. He said this way if you have, say a List, you just know that, it's a list. But not what type. The API (or packages) do that for you. It could very well be an array, or a linked list, or a doubly-linked list. You don't know. But you just know the API does it for you. I don't necessarily agree/understand completely, but it really makes sense when he teaches it.

I will be mirroring this at http://www2.truman.edu/~u789/alf/ if anyone wants to see it.