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There's strange stuff happening much closer to home, too. Any bets these cases have something to do with each other?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly

I tried this, but it didn't help much.

As I ran out of memory, it will throw away the disk cache (including copies of currently running programs, IIRC) until it's constantly running back to the disk to grab the next chunk of needed code or data. At any rate, I had the exact same symptoms, but perhaps more acutely. A SSD might really help this as the random access thrashing wouldn't delay I/O nearly as much..

Linked to by the article, this might address this situation: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODQ3Mw

My solution was to learn the key combination Alt-SysRq-F - this basically tells the kernel to find the process taking the most memory and kill it. Hitting this (possibly a couple times) was the only realistic way to solve the situation, as I couldn't get to a terminal (due to the system being totally unresponsive) to check the currently running processes. (see also: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key ) Note: it might need to be enabled, though in my experience it was enabled for some of the mainstream distros.

You are perceiving part of a much larger problem. The United States is a deeply dysfunctional country that should be recognized as existing to provide an example of failure.

According to Oxford, it isn't right https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Plural_of_virus#Virus

Captain Cyborg's implants aren't exactly stupid. They at least mean the doors in his department buildings open automatically for him, and he *is* a professor of cybernetics!

Yeah, they just have to deal with scientists turning into zombies and the forces of hell pouring through a hole in spacetime. Other than that, it's clear sailing on Mars.

Yeah, they just have to deal with scientists turning into zombies and the forces of hell pouring through a hole in spacetime. Other than that, it's clear sailing on Mars.

Then perhaps those states should mandate that they get the new formula. Any Sudafed I've bought in the UK and Canada no longer contains pseudoephedrine, the offending ingredient.

The box of pills in front of me now lists the active ingredient as phenylephrine and the nasal spray is xylometazoline hydrochloride. These are the UK products.

And the customary link to Sudafed's Wikipedia page for your reference.

Please learn what URL encoding means. All URLs should be posted in this form, with any characters that are not in the URI character set in percent-escaped sequences. The standard has been around for a couple of decades, is used on the majority of web pages, and is supported by every browser.

The French police officer, Alphonse Bertillon (April 24, 1853 - February 13, 1914) was a biometrics researcher who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals.
?This was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting, because os inconsistancies in measurement. Using computer- or video-based measurements should help standardize measurements and increase statistical accuracy. Wikipedia article on Bertillion: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Alphonse_Bertillon

Chinese is boring. They may have thousands of characters, but each one has a single unique reading. My recommendation is Japanese. It uses a fork of the Chinese writing system, but with a vastly improved ambiguity factor, having some characters with as many as 30(!) different readings. Furthermore, 2/3 of the Japanese words are homophones and the remainder are near-homophones of the first group. Even better, pretty much every part of speech save for particles can be conjugated in a variety in different ways. Nobody has ever been able to stand the persuasive powers of negative potential polite verb forms! Not only that but, with Japanese, you get to order your sentences Subject->Object->Verb, just like Yoda.

Now that I think of it, that's pretty much what C++ does.

Wouldn't this paper glider have encountered jet streams? How did it survive them? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jet_stream

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PDMI

dell streak and samsung galaxy tab makes use of this, iirc.

1995's 3D Movie Maker - Nice UI, impressively fast realtime rendering, machinima... you know, for kids.

1995 also had MS VChat, which if you had a machine fast enough not to choke on it, gave you that whole Second Life avatar-ish vibe a decade early.

1995's 3D Movie Maker - Nice UI, impressively fast realtime rendering, machinima... you know, for kids.

1995 also had MS VChat, which if you had a machine fast enough not to choke on it, gave you that whole Second Life avatar-ish vibe a decade early.

Sorry, I must be "evolved". This meat does nothing for me.

Calming Images:
A pile of classic arcade game cartridges.
Earth as seen from the mother ship.
Our place in the known universe.

{{citation needed}}

This not Wikipedia, wiki markup doesn't work here. But, if you insist, here is your citation.

Sci-Fi is worthy of historical landmarks or monuments. Too bad that Arizona gaming company couldn't do a big promotion, like putting a full-sized Stargate by the end of the London Bridge. Of course the remote wilderness of Lake Powell to the north feels ideal, as much like another planet as any place on Earth. A Stargate would look great out by Rainbow Bridge, an amazing natural arch.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lake_powell

Someone filthy rich should build a town somewhere with different sections that are all built from various sci-fi constructs. Turn it into a cool town, playground, resort, school, or campus for some hot new startup?
Steve: sell that MS stock and do something fun while giving geeks and other jobs

(wondering when the next season of Eureka starts...)

You can eat gold and it won't hurt you.

I'm pretty sure as amusing as it is to see "Diaper Dave" Vitter and other oddities in your representation, it's pretty clear that in highly corrupt areas, not only do big-ticket items cost more, but quality of those things is dangerously low. Take a look at those schools in China.

This among other reasons, is why corruption can be deadly and should be fought tooth and nail.

I'm pretty sure as amusing as it is to see "Diaper Dave" Vitter and other oddities in your representation, it's pretty clear that in highly corrupt areas, not only do big-ticket items cost more, but quality of those things is dangerously low. Take a look at those schools in China.

This among other reasons, is why corruption can be deadly and should be fought tooth and nail.

Legacy technologies?!
I don't think that word means what you think it means.

(Another too-late post...)

The difference between US "Fair Use" and UK "Fair Dealing" is at least somewhat described at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fair_dealing#United_Kingdom and in greater detail by a McGill Law Review PDF paper linked there.

As I read it, broadly the UK system enumerates a (restricted, fixed) set of allowed exceptions, while the US system allows any use conceivably to be "fair" pursuant to a set of factors (that are in practice defined by the court as-needed.)

Apparently the UK system doesn't explicitly allow "parody" which is one reason this comes up (as sort of referenced in the BBC article).

But I suspect the UK copyright minister isn't really interested in promoting "parody"; it's more about trying not to strangle the next Google from being invented in the UK. Ask yourself the broader business/economic question like "Google has taken such liberties with copyright fair use in their business model... man that worked out well... why couldn't Google have been invented in the UK? Oh yeah, the copyright system is really picky about what is/isn't allowed and this is anti-innovation; maybe we should legislate by liberty-allowing priority/tests than explictly enumerating consumers' rights and let the courts sort it out".

    --LP

Yay - text! I was quite thrilled with the technology at the time. Gopher and BBS systems actually made a 1200 baud modem seem useful. For you youngsters that don't know what we're talking about see here. Now get off my lawn.

What next, will the US demonstrate that cars can be made with tail fins?

If they did, and actually carried through on the demonstration, maybe we wouldn't have had to bail them out...

If it's off Catalina Island, then obviously it's The Company. On the other hand, it could just be the usual OGA, The Company.

If the Ex-Ambassador's suggestion, that it might be a demonstration for China related to Obama's tour, were anything other than random blathering, it's a bloody stupid demonstration if there isn't a big press announcement about it from the White House, unless it's various government agencies demonstrating that Obama's not The Decider just because he's Commander in Chief.

What next, will the US demonstrate that cars can be made with tail fins?

Considering the state of Detroit today, people may be wondering whether we still have the capability...

it MIGHT be a demonstration to China that US Subs can launch intercontinental missiles

Considering that the US first launched an ICBM from a sub in 1960, this demonstration seems a bit late by now.

What next, will the US demonstrate that cars can be made with tail fins?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pirate_radio

I'm just tired of the completely psychotic behavior of the FLOSSies here, that think they can suddenly get Joe Average to WANT to use Bash and learn strings of CLI commands

Yeah, for some reason *NIX fanbois can't get it through their head that roughly half of the population are of below average intelligence(<100) and will absolutely never be geeks. Much like Mac fanbois can't understand that some people don't like Steve telling them what they can and can't do with something they paid for.

Honestly, I think any OS the user has to install in the first place is pretty well doomed to nichedom on the desktop. Therein lies the possibility that their hardware might require configuring at all. Assuming for the sake of argument that the OEM installed and configured the system beforehand though, I think most users could get around fine on Ubuntu 10.4+. It's not like they really use much outside the web browser, instant messenger, and whatever mindless games came pre-installed. They probably still wouldn't see a compelling reason for switching but I don't think they'd do much screaming in fear either.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Strict_Transport_Security

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.

the wiki even points out that the mac had crappy sales in the 80s, and well into the 90s.

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/sales.html

The Amiga had functionality we wouldnt see again until windows 95.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Amiga “ "[AmigaOS] remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space. --John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, October 1996.[38]

Compared to the Amiga, the Mac of the 80s was nothing more than an over priced door step that few really paid any attention to.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.

the wiki even points out that the mac had crappy sales in the 80s, and well into the 90s.

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/sales.html

The Amiga had functionality we wouldnt see again until windows 95.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Amiga “ "[AmigaOS] remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space. --John C. Dvorak, PC Magazine, October 1996.[38]

Compared to the Amiga, the Mac of the 80s was nothing more than an over priced door step that few really paid any attention to.

In many Common Law jurisdictions, the equivalent concept to Fair Use is Fair Dealing. A recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling described Fair Dealing as a right.

Mmm I have not pasted the link properly... EFF's plugin can map automatically from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Google It is not possible with force-tls

The scientist obviously got their inspiration from this double feature: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/be/I_Drink_Your_Blood_I_Eat_Your_Skin.jpg

"PayPal is a transaction broker. "

Paypal is a bank.

"As of July 2007, across Europe, PayPal also operates as a Luxembourg-based bank."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Paypal [wikimedia.org]

"In the United States, PayPal is licensed as a money transmitter on a state-by-state basis. PayPal is not classified as a bank in the United States, though the company is subject to some of the rules and regulations governing the financial industry including Regulation E consumer protections and the USA PATRIOT Act."

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Paypal

"PayPal is a transaction broker. "

Paypal is a bank.

"As of July 2007, across Europe, PayPal also operates as a Luxembourg-based bank."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Paypal [wikimedia.org]

"In the United States, PayPal is licensed as a money transmitter on a state-by-state basis. PayPal is not classified as a bank in the United States, though the company is subject to some of the rules and regulations governing the financial industry including Regulation E consumer protections and the USA PATRIOT Act."

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Paypal

"PayPal is a transaction broker. "

Paypal is a bank.

"As of July 2007, across Europe, PayPal also operates as a Luxembourg-based bank."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Paypal

Bush started a war he didn't know how to finish, [...] Patriot acts, color-coded fear against Muslims,

Yep. It sure has been great now that Obama has ended the wars, repealed the patriot act and no longer uses Muslims as an excuse to further the police state.

presided over the passing of the DMCA

Wow. It's amazing that Bush presided over a bill that passed more than two years before he came into office!

The 'outsourcing', when done on such a massive scale, is definitely detrimental. Peter Schiff and other Austrians argue that large trade deficits for extended periods destroy economies. It's basically a direct transfer of wealth. The problem is when this is presented this to policy makers, they tend to think this means they should employ protectionist measures, but those only make the situation worse by igniting a trade war.

What our nation must come to grips with is that the world has scarce resources and we cannot attempt to put so many social guarantees into law, especially federal law, without eventually suffering economic catastrophe.

You may be closer to the answer than you think. One of the proposed explanations for hyperbolic discounting is taking the uncertainty of risk into account. Within certain assumptions, if you don't know the actual risk level, or how likely it is you need to do the work, hyperbolic discounting becomes consistent.

Mehserle acted in the course of his duty as a police officer and, because of the slightest misstep that can't even properly be caused gross negligence, caused a person's death. The circumstances in which such a thing was possible came about not because of any malice or negligence on Mehserle's part, but through normal police procedure. Oscar Grant's death was terribly unjust, but the responsibility lies with society at large for relying on fallible human beings with guns for their safety, not with the fallible man himself whose finger moved half an inch further than it should have. (And no, I'm not suggesting that we should forgo police protection, nor that police policy should necessarily be different, nor that I have any idea how to create justice in this situation. But that's how it is.)

Frost, on the other hand, perpetrated a willful and malicious action with the purpose of denying his fellow citizens their free speech. It is quite literally an assault on our constitutional freedoms, something that is usually taken quite seriously here on Slashdot, and it is no less serious for having been committed by a civilian. (And no, I'm not saying this for partisan reasons—if we're talking about the likes of Ann Coulter, we're clearly in "nothing of value was lost" territory, but that doesn't excuse Frost.)

Consequences matter, of course, but mens rea matters too. I can scarcely find any mens rea at all on Mehserle's part, maybe none at all, but Frost has got it coming out of his ass. So yeah, Frost deserves to be punished more than Mehserle does.

That whole page untrue?

Not the whole page, but Lenin wasn't exactly known for giving only sound bites, he spoke quite some time. Trotsky and Kamensky didn't just stand there like statues during the whole speech. Using photographs without Trotsky and/or Kamensky is not the same thing as altering photos to remove Trotsky and/or Kamensky. Comments like In this file the viewing direction of trotzki has been altered. In the original image he is viewing directly to the camera. kind of show my point: not only the viewing direction of Trotsky has been altered, almost everyone has moved their heads. ;-)

Seemingly cute, too...

(I am not the only one thinking "ze german villain and his accomplice" at the above, right? Anyway, certainly nothing better than to be such villain and have such accomplice)

Maybe the next step: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union

That's US black propaganda. See for example http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archives/User_problems_14#User:Erik_Warmelink, The person noting some obvious holes in the story of newseum.org (full disclosure: that would be yours truly) is now blocked indefinitely from commons.

In fact every copyright act I've read is explicitly not merely a regulation on business, as they specifically assign liability for infringement even if it isn't commercial in nature.

You are ignorant then. It was only in 1997 that non-commercial infringement became a criminal offense.

There is no money in the trust fund. To quote from this government document: http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/51264.pdf - "If in any year revenues are greater than costs, the Secretary of the Treasury, as Managing Trustee of the trust funds, is required to invest this positive annual balance (or cash flow surplus) in securities backed by the U.S. government(3). The purchasing of the securities allows the surplus to be used for other government purposes(4)". Reference (4) goes on to say, "This is often referred to as 'borrowing from the Social Security trust fund.'". So the trust fund contains in essence only IOUs.

Since there is effectively no differentiation between the SS monies and the general pool, interest is not being earned, but being paid on the net negative balance. If you isolate just the SS trust fund, then you're missing the whole picture (large total federal debt and its ongoing growth).

Further, SS ran a deficit this year: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html. Deficits are expected to grow rapidly after 2014 - read the document. But even had this recent downturn not happened, the situation is still dire. Here is a chart showing the problem - made before the recent increases in federal outflows: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Medicare_%26_Social_Security_Deficits_Chart.png.

Not an issue of spending? This government spreadsheet of the most recent and prior federal budgets contradicts your claim: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/sheets/hist01z1.xls. Note how the growth in outlays out-paces the growth in revenue. Note the much bigger jump in outlays between 2008 and 2009 (nearly twice the magnitude of the drop in revenues over the same period).

Then again, since snakes don't have original sin

According to the book, snakes are the origin of sin.

a linux RDP client perhaps?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol