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Probably because unions in Germany are altruistic, whereas American unions are greedy self interested asshats. Don't take my word for it:

http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html#unions

Reminds me of http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html, an article I came across that compared US culture to German culture. (not sure how applicable it is to Europe in general

I want to read my man pages in my $PAGER, not in a dumbed-down Emacs mockup where the info I need is typically buried away in some untold subnode.

Info isn't for man pages. Info is for larger documents.

You don't want to read the complete elisp manual (about 340,000 words, according to cat /usr/share/info/elisp* | gunzip | wc) in $PAGER.

These days, you might distribute that sort of documentation as a tarball of HTML files. And indeed, you can get HTML out of texinfo files - as well as PDFs for printing, or on-line viewing if your tastes run that way.

If you don't like the default reader, there are others.

At least they don't whine about a nipple in Germany. Geez.

I didn't know Germany had only 1 southern neighbor.

A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States

The University of Paderborn in Germany (http://www.uni-paderborn.de/) uses a wifi network for about 14000 students plus profs and bureau staff. There are sometimes problems with the connection due to heavy traffic at some access points, but the overall performance is excellent.

I don't think you could generally say: many users in a small space over wireless = problems

For the people with hearing problems, I think a well designed GUI is the key. We take 70% of our input visually, so it should be easier to overcome the dificulties of a hearing impaired user than those of a user with vision problems.

For those with vision problems, I've found quite a few links on software that will definitely help out. I'd suggest going with Linux because you can write your own stuff or customize something that's already written much easier.
BLINUX
General
ORALUX
ZipSpeak

As far as making an OS from scratch for people with different needs, here's what I'd do: I'd make native support for ASP.net applications. The user would only get HTML output from any program they use, but with different interaction capabilities than the traditional web. HTML is already very sensitive to the needs of the visually and hearing impaired users, therefore, you'd be leveraging technology that already exists.

Umm... OS X and Linux both are about the same number of viruses and worms. To say that Linux has none is as wrong as some Apple fan-boy saying that OS X hasnone. While it's not some comprehensive list, I don't believe I have a burden to provide one; but there was that bliss virus/trojan, and others. That was simply one of the first hits provided by Google. Finding more is left as an exercise for the reader.

The problem with putting a telescope (or any other facility, for that matter) at L2, or any of the other Lagrange points, is that their location puts them out of the orbits reachable by the Shuttle for repair purposes. All maintenance would have to be done robotically, and considering the delta-V to return any robotic craft to LEO, it's likely that the service robots would be single-use only.

For those not space-science oriented, the Lagrange points (L1 through L5) are points in space around any two orbiting bodies where their gravity exactly (or nearly so) cancels out; as a result, other objects can be left in stable position at those points. It's even possible to put an object in orbit around a Lagrange point, even though there be no mass there. These are referred to halo orbits. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is in such an orbit around L1, the postion directly between the Earth and Moon. More information is available online (the last link is a PDF, sorry).

I never managed to get my head around it fully, but it is an intriguing package. GPL'd, too.

• And how is the meaning behind a string of characters given? For example, lets say you want to give the meaning behind a strong of characters that describes to a human the proof of Skolem's Paradox.

The point isn't that a computer program will ever "know" what Skolem's paradox is, in the same way a human would "know" what it is. The semantic web isn't about building artificial intelligence into computers, but rather adding knowledge statements to information.

If you tell a computer than Einstein is a scientist, that Einstein is a German, that Einstein won the Nobel prize in physics in 1921 and that this is an image of Einstein, then a computer will be able to infer that this picture is of a German scientist.

Based on this information, I could ask the computer for pictures of all the other German scientists who were awarded the Nobel prize in 1921, or some other time. Clearly the computer doesn't need to know about nationalities, or dates, or to understand pictures.

There are simpler use cases, too. Say there's a product called Paradox (well, there used to be one). People searching for just the word "paradox" might get matches for pages about "Skolem's paradox". But if the pages were appropriately marked up, Google (or whatever) could ask you whether you meant a specific paradox, just the way Google currently asks if you perhaps meant something else.

The Amiga did this over a decade ago with it's "locale" settings. Anybody could produce a localised translation of application menus etc. In fact there are hundreds of such "locale" settings on aminet.

Never heard of a Linux virus?

Granted..it is a LOT more steps to go through to get it to do anything meaningful.
But, could you write a set of instructions that:
runs a keylogger
asks for admin rights and pops up the Admin pw box
Searches through all docs, and finds valid email addresses
Sends itself to those addresses
reports back to home base
and as an after thought, deletes all your /jpg files.

Sure you could.
The tricky part is getting the user to run it. And that's where this one is pretty good. It doesn't do anything that can't be done on another system. It just needs to convince the user that it is something else.

A huge list of math texts.

David MacKay has posted his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms on his website. (This is despite it being a recently published work available through major bookstores.)

The classic, Numerical Recipes in C, is available online for free.

Some more math texts.

Another grab bag of online texts (mostly math).

Yet even more math and CS stuff.

And, BTW, what about Latex? There are plenty of books (not just journal papers, but *books*) in Comp. Sci. and Mathematics that are typeset in Latex. I mean, high quality books, e.g. "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest, or Modern Computer Algebra by von zur Gathen and Gerhard. You cannot say they are done in a "Kinko's-type place". And yes, both of them are typeset in Latex.

Number of Windows related viruses over the years...
Too many to count

Cost due to Windows server based attacks on a global scale...
gazillions

Number of Linux viruses released to the masses...
1 maybe 2

The cost due to a Linux virus on a global scale...
0 USD.

The price for a Linux admin's good night's rest because he/she doesn't have to worry about security attacks? Priceless...


For everything else, there's a CC EAL4 cert, symantic or norton.

For those interested in Computer Chess, there is a tournament starting shortly: information here

Here are different sites that offer the old files. For those of us who are willing to pay the license fees only, of course.

1
2

The mere existence of that term IMHO shows that the threshold is greater than 0.

1. The documentation you link to is another copy of the canonical documentation, in an only slightly different form than that behind the link in the review. Both are based on the gnuinfo-formatted documentation that comes with cvs (and can be easily read off-line with products such as tkinfo). This documentation has proved for me to be quite sufficient for most day-to-day CVS questions.
2. But, as the review points out, there are some things which are not well explained in the canonical documentation. These basically involve serious repository restructuring and/or repair. You rarely have to do these, but if you do them wrong, your repository will be seriously damanged if not totally kaput.

Ron Obvious

the measurement of a particle will change the state of that particle.

So why are top researchers putting so much time and energy into this field? What am I missing?

Not stictly relevant to anything here, but..: a nice intro to quantum logic
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Sega, of course. The only thing that really stuck in my head about it was being afraid of rupturing myself trying to do a fatality in Mortal Kombat. Now that i'm thinking about it, didn't the NES have a VR glove? Maybe with a needle, thread, some duct tape and a little creativity, you could get it on your foot.

Yes, it was called the "power glove". Apparently someone at Nintendo has a complex about powerlessness. Anyway, we revisit the peripherals page at nesfan.com to find this information:

The 'Power Glove', released by Mattel in 1989, was an attempt at incorporating virtual reality with the NES. The glove emitted the movement information (left, right, up, down, etc.) of the gamers hand and fingers to sensors that were placed on each corner of the tv screen. Although the 'Power Glove' would work with almost every game available, it didn't work well unless it was with a game that was designed for it (i.e., 'Super Glove Ball'). With a costly price tag of $79.99 (U.S.) being coupled with the peripheral's unreliable control, the 'Power Glove' was quickly forgotten.

It however was not forgotten at all. There is a device called the PGSI which is a preconstructed serial interface for the power glove. It also seems to support the Sega LCD shutter goggles for 3D, but I don't know much about that. As an aside, if anyone has a set of the Sega Master System shutter goggles, and is willing to part with them, I need a pair. I have the interface controller but not the goggles.

See also:

• Powerglove FAQ
• Aminet Amiga Hardware Drivers
• Another powerglove faq

Sometimes I get asked a question I can't answer, or have a hankering to fill in some blanks, so I search the web. Obviously google is my primary tool but I've realized a few tricks for using it. I use the "show 100 results" option in the advanced section (to filter out the porn) and add in the additional term "lecture notes". I usually wind up with a few postscript documents that serve quite nicely. For example, I just typed in "algorithms lecture notes" and the first result generated was Collection of Lecture Notes, Survey Papers, etc., including a few great booklets by Laszlo Lovasz. In fact, I think I'm going to be up for another 10 hours...

No waaaaaay the revolution will be televised, uploaded to Aminet and supplied with full DeCSS source code

Who the f**k moderated this 100% valid and relevant question as a troll?

There are some good sites out there for keeping your Junkbuster block lists up to date. Although I can't vouch personally for the following, here's what my blocklist has to say: (I actually got this file from the second link below. The comments below are from the block-list's author.)

Hope that helps.

Bliss and Staog are the first two known Linux viruses. Of those, I believe only Bliss has been found in the wild. They both seem to suffer from a serious fertility problem though.

• FilterProxy
• Cut The Crap
• Junkbuster
• WebFilter/NoShit
• Muffin
• Proxomitron

Everyone go out and try an ad filtering proxy today! It makes your browsing experience so much more tolerable!

--Bob

And for man pages, you definitely need tkman.

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Kavalier yammered:

eah I guess you're right.. I'm not considering spamming, I'm just trying to view this from all directions.. however, if I have a good standing relationship with my provider and he with his provider, and me with his provider, which has a direct connection to a major backbone, nobody could stop me right? like say my best friend works for splitrock.. nobody would risk cutting off a whole backbone for a simple spammer so it wouldnt be pushed too far if my ISP ignores the requests. I'm just saying this because I've noticed alot of spammers that I've been spammed with have their own mail server and had a direct connection to a major backbone provider and its possible they had inside connections that would prevent them from getting disconnected. right?

Not only could many ISPs blackhole an entire backbone to "get rid of a single spammer", entire backbones have historically been blackholed to get rid of spammers.

Some examples I can think of off the top of my head:

AGIS, a backbone which was given the "Internet Death Penalty" (had all Usenet posts shunned or cancelled, and many sites shunned all email and blocked all other connections, including web and FTP, to sites that got feeds through AGIS) due to their hosting of several major spam sites associated with the IEMMC (a now-defunct spammers' trade group) including sites associated with Nancynet and Sanford Wallace's spams. AGIS refused to remove IEMMC sites, even when confronted with info that IEMMC "remove" lists were actually being used to add folks to spam lists. It literally took a large portion of the sites on the Internet refusing to exchange ANY packets that went through AGIS's backbone before AGIS finally dropped Sanford Wallace and company like a hot potato.

UUnet's dialups have been periodically blackholed by ISPs because of severe problems with net.abuse (including spam) from the dialups and UUnet being slow to provide tracing info. It took the real threat of possibly the largest backbone's dialups being left to talk to the ether bunnies for UUnet to shape up.

While not backbones, national-level ISPs and servers have been blackholed for reasons of spam and/or net.abuse. (Among a short list: AOL, Netcom (has been IDP'd at least twice), Earthlink (in association with Scientology-related net.abuse), Zippo (pay news service; was unblocked after strong AUP enforced), Altopia (blackholed due to "Hipcrime" related net.abuse and refusal of admin to investigate), Demon Internet (open NNTP servers), etc.) In fact, there is serious talk of blackholing an entire name domain registry due to spam (Network Solutions, aka InterNIC).

An increasing number of sites--largely because it's been shown that People Just Plain Don't Like Spam and because spam does consume a gawdawful amount of system resources (I've done a rough essay on the subject)--are joining blackholing mechanisms. Spam-cancels and UDPs were the first of these; a later incarination is the famous Blacklist of Internet Advertisers, then NoCeM was developed to replace spam cancellation (as well as provide for global killfiles for end-users) and now blackholing mechanisms such as the Realtime Blackhole List; the RBL is now explicitly supported by most modern mail daemons, including sendmail.

In other words...don't assume that people won't blackhole an entire backbone if the backbone won't wack people who are using it to spam. Some folks will. They've done it before, they'll do it again, and it is literally easier than ever to leave a spamaceous site--backbone or no--talking to itself and the ether bunnies. This way of dealing with Bad Folks is as old as the Amish and it's not gonna go away anytime soon. >;)=

as a culture, america does not value quality so much as quantity. "well, i've got enough quality, what are you talking about?", you exclaim. thank you for demonstrating my point exactly.

america is one of the only cultures that de-values education, and deceitfully misguides its children from understanding that all people are both teachers and students. to paraphrase, "a good person is a bad person's teacher, a bad person is a good person's job."

people, fix the design for the next release. don't keep kludging the implementation; that path is for fools. why condemn your children to following you into the abyss? enlightenment w/o action guarantees endless bondage on the wheel. what can we do to escape this?

The SCI adapter cards don't cost more than other high speed adapter cards.
See http://www.dolphinics.no for more information. The University of Paderborn has a 192 node cluster interconnected with SCI.
See http://www.uni-paderborn.de/pc2/s ystems/index.htm and
http://www.uni -paderborn.de/fachbereich/AG/heiss/arminius/index. html for Linux Cluster Based on SCI

The SCI adapter cards don't cost more than other high speed adapter cards.
See http://www.dolphinics.no for more information. The University of Paderborn has a 192 node cluster interconnected with SCI.
See http://www.uni-paderborn.de/pc2/s ystems/index.htm and
http://www.uni -paderborn.de/fachbereich/AG/heiss/arminius/index. html for Linux Cluster Based on SCI

I've written up this proposal in a bit more detail here.

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