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Since *BSD is dying and there are no good looking geek women, last chance to view BSD vs Linux.

1. Do more research. There is much more to the law than the OP mentions including....wait for it....exemptions for political calls. Imagine that. And for pre-existing relationships, research surveys (provided they are real surveys, not disguised sales calls), etc. There is also a mishmash of state laws to consider - many of which have not been well tested in the courts.

2. If you have the time and inclination and are willing to do the additional research, go for it. You are doing the rest of us a favor.

3. If you would rather have some fun instead (only for live person calls), use the anti-telemarketer script found here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html

As requested

We do not advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising: this is not feasible. Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life. But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication. We hope that our society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on our skills will be for worthwhile purposes. With this in mind we propose to share our experience and opinions, and to make them available to colleagues, students and others who may be interested.

There is the Robinsonlist. Also look at the Anti-Telemarketing Script and then there is: The counterscript available in several languages and also in PDF.

Please have a look at the The EGBG Counterscript.

is to use the counterscript (assuming I don't hang up).

Ah, I see. And I tend to agree.

I was kind of dissapointed (though not too surprised) that MNG never took off. (see also the libmng site).

Looks like it's not TOTALLY dead, but isn't especially active, either.

SVG supposedly has a shot at replacing at least some of Macromedia flash, but that, too, remains to be seen.

I don't use Windows, but for my friends (the ones who can actually be made to care about backups), I recommend this:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~edienske/abakt/

Support both 'traditional' (compress/split) type backups and a file copy method (good for a USB hard drive, for less savvy users who want to be able to just plug the thing in and retrieve the file they just borked).

Open source. Feel the love.

Not the easiest thing to setup, so I set it up for them, save the profile, and tell them how to do a backup (plug in drive, start program, press go).

I wrote something like that a year ago: here. Took about week in the evenings. Why all the fuzz?

I used to have an old Radio Shack Electronic Chess Board and it used to beat me pretty easily. I've never really considered myself a good chess player, but there's probably some pretty old computers that can beat most people. I remember setting that thing to the highest level. It would take about 2 minutes to make each move.

1. Put large speakers outdoor facing neighbor.
2. Turn on outside monitoring video system.
3. Get large nervous dog and place in your back yard with some food and water.
4. Get this recording.
5. Put it on loop replay and start playing it in the morning when the law allows and stop playing it in the evening when the law requires.
6. Leave after starting the music.
7. Don't come back until it's time to turn off the music.

The recording is of the song "Louie, Louie" played by a variety of bands. My favorite is one by the Rice University Marching Band. I give your neighbor 3 hours tops before he commits an irrational property crime of significant proportion, all recorded on video.

When I used this laptop, I ran Linux. If you do as well, I advise using 'hdparm -S5 /dev/hda' and laptop mode. That way, the harddisk spins down and this really cools the harddisk. You can noticeably feel the difference in warmth.

Duh, nevermind... a search on Google turned up this working copy of Planetfall... very cool.

i'm too paranoid to use stuff like this for backups.. sure 25 gigs is nice but whats the use if i just burn everything in 35 copies on the disc incase one part becomes unreadable?

as media starts to hold more, i just start creating more copies of the same backup on the disc. bluray/hdvd scares me because if it gets scratched you lose so much more than if a cd gets scratched

For those that don't know, PAR2 files are parity files that can efficiently reconstruct missing or damaged blocks in your archive. If you have more PAR2 recovery blocks than damaged blocks, then you can completely reconstruct all of the damaged files in your archive. The best newbie explanation I've seen is the "PAR & PAR2 files" section from Slyck's Guide To The Newsgroups.

If I'm backing up to a data DVD-R (capacity 4,706,074,624 bytes), I'll leave around 4GB of space for the actual data and fill the rest (to the brim) with the PAR2 files that I created for that data. I name the PAR2 files starting with the letter 'z' so that they get burned on the outer edge of the DVD. When creating the PAR2 files, I choose a block size that is a multiple of 2048 bytes because that is the block size of a DVD sector.

Some easy-to-use tools to create PAR2 files:

• Windows: QuickPar (freeware)
• OS X: MacPar deLuxe (shareware, $15)
• Linux/OS Independent (GTK): GPar2

Some DVD data recovery software (to get every readable block off a damaged disc):

• Windows: IsoBuster (recovery functions are free)
• Linux/OS X (command line): dd_rescue

Thanks, WuphonsReach.

http://dribibu.xs4all.nl/dilberteng.html

The 6bone dying means the last ipv6 broker I know of just went out of commission...

Intersting... perhaps you should try a "search engine" to find a new tunnel broker. It's a technology that lets you enter in one or more keywords and it will try to find web pages that have that word. Here's a site that I hear it is pretty good for this:

http://www.google.com/

If that's too hard, I can recommend the following tunnel broker. I use it for a server I have in a non-IPv6 network (my server is in Amsterdam, and the broker is in Switzerland, so I have an extra 20 milliseconds of delay for IPv6 traffic vs. IPv4 traffic, but the broker seems to be reliable):

http://tunnelbroker.as8758.net/

My ISP at home, xs4all, provides IPv6 for their customers. So everyone who wants it gets a /48. I'll give you the link, which you can use until you figure out this whole "search" concept:

http://www.xs4all.nl/

Personally I don't see little that can be really achieved with this approach to actually prevent terrorist, since there are dozens of ways that can be used to circumvent this data mining approach.. and even a 12-year old can think of them.

I think one might only be able to do something with when something has actually happened, parsing these amounts of data in real-time andextracting something you didn't know from it is extremly hard.

Note number 1: The famous Dutch ISP xs4all has started a counter in the beginning of september 2005, giving an indication of how much cd's one would need to store only their traffic (~6% market share AFAIK). As I write this, the counter approaches 62 million cd's.

Note number 2: I once saw someone make a small calculation on the back of an envelope about how much physical space would be needed to store all this information using hard disks.. and how many disks would fail every day given their MTBF of such a large 'warehouse filled with disks'. IIRC, one would need about 10 FTE only to replace the failing disks..

Note number 3: It's obvious that these ideas are not made up by people with technical expertise

Note number 4: perhaps it's not a bad idea to start buying shares of companies that provide storage solutions ;O

Note number 5: I'm really wondering how this whole non-sense would hold up against the 'innocent until proven guilty' idea. If I'm innocent, why am I being tracked?!?

Sally: Then I guess I did shoot twice.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~mrrob/policesquad/ps2.htm/

Technically the Poles (and maybe Czechs, I can't remember) fighting in the Battle of Britain were an independent force. Although logistically absorbed and attached to the RAF after the fall of Poland, the Polish Air Force was an independent, Polish trained and financed entity with its own units commnaded by its own officers. After the war the UK billed Poland for the materials Poles expended defending Britain. The Polish Airforce attached to the RAF was the fourth largest allied air force in the war. During the Battle of Britain, the Polish Air force accounted for 18% of German air-to-air losses and produced 40 aces.

Amazingly, the Polish air forces even mounted a reasonably effective defense during the German invasion of Poland. Flying 158 woefully obsolete PZL P.7 and PZL P.11 fighters they managed to destroy between 100 and 200 German aircraft.

Incidentally, the highest scoring US ace of the European theatre was a Polish-American who served in the Polish Air Force. Francis Gabreski volunteered for the 315th (Polish) Fighter Squadron "Deblinski." Later he founded an exchange program between the Air Corps and the Polish Air Force and flew for the US. He ended the war with a total of 30 kills. In Korea he added 6.5 more.

birdy num num? peter sellers in "the party"

1. What caused the big bang? or What external force was there that caused the big bang?

I'm sorry, what does this have to do with evolution versus intelligent design?

Though the big bang cosmology theory has nothing to do with biology, I would agree that Science in general probably doesn't at current have an answer to what caused the big bang. I've seen a few tentative attempts to answer that question, but I don't think there's a consensus. The thing is though, this doesn't exactly matter. We don't take the big bang seriously because we know or care where big bangs come from; we take it seriously because we observe it's what seems to have happened. Nobody particularly wants the big bang theory to be true. Nobody has a particularly vested philosophical interest in the universe being an explosion. We do, however, have rather a decent lot of evidence concerning the exact way that the universe formed, gathered from looking at the aftermath (i.e.: the universe). That evidence has come to suggest what is called the big bang theory. If this is messy, or strange, or we can't come up with a good explanation as to what caused the cause behind that big bang, there really isn't anything we can do about this. Unlike religion, science doesn't get to decide what happened. Science is forced to go whereever the facts the universe contains takes it. And whether we want them to or not, those facts point at this.

But of course our inability to explain the Big Bang is quite separate from the status of other theories-- for example, the theory of Evolution-- in which we understand not only what happened, but the mechanism, reasons, and context that brought the thing that happened about.

2. Why did the sea creatures decide to go on land?

Oh, that's easy; there was food up there. Plants have been on land since at least 475 million years ago. Creatures have been permanently stationed up there since at least 425 million years ago. It's entirely unreasonable to say those millipedes "decided" to get up on land; this is undue anthropomorphization. The change to settle on land was made possible by mutation, which was a random act not guided by any conscious decision making process. It also seems unlikely to me that the first creatures to leave the ocean had any kind of purposeful goal, since I doubt they had enough sensory equipment to tell what the heck they were even doing.

More likely the very first time it happened, it went like this: something that could eat algae was crawling along a rock eating algae. This rock happened to be partially in, and partially out of, the ocean. The thing kept crawling along the rock, eating algae, and eventually it reached the interface between the ocean and the atmosphere, and it kept on crawling, and kept on eating algae. Why not? Of course, it may well have died very shortly after that, depending on whether and how long it could survive in the atmosphere. But: if there's all these algae and plants out in the dry world, and nobody's out there eating them or their dead, well heck, free food and no competition. This creates what we think of (it's a metaphor of sorts) as "evolutionary pressure", kind of like how, if we lived in a world where canned food was common but there weren't any can openers, the process of capitalism would create a tremendous metaphorical pressure for somebody to invent and start selling some.

Now let's say there's not just one thingy that eats algae and one rock where the algae is growing out in the atmosphere. Let's say there's lots and lots of thingies and lots and lots of rocks. The earth is pretty big. If, by coincidence, one of the thingies somewhere on the earth eventually winds up with some genes that, in its little gastropod nervous system, make it feel like it's a really good idea to

Netscape 1.0 Unfortunatly only for Windows and many sites won't work.

A combination of several hosts files available online:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~marschip/hosts

Add those entries to a Windows system (c:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers/etc), and you can watch your browsing experience slow to a painful crawl.

The approach may work or work better if the DNS client service is disabled (which, incidentally, can be typically turned off without issue), though I haven't bother to check. Maybe someone else can comment.

At the places where I am the root, doubleclick.net and the likes are DNS-null-routed (to a localnet IP 127.0.0.127)

A combination of several hosts files available online:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~marschip/hosts

You need to ADD it to your current hosts file (not replace it)

The actual figure from BigChampagne, as reported by Cory Doctrow, is "less than three minutes"

"In the DRM world, security is breached so long as there is any person with the wherewithal to make a cleartext copy of an asset and put it on the Internet. In practice, this happens with amazing swiftness. Big Champagne, a company that monitors P2P networks, says that iTunes-only tracks (e.g. assets that are only released within DRM wrappers) typically appear on P2P networks less than three minutes after they are released to the iTunes Music Store."

http://www.xs4all.nl/~collin/test/hpdrm.html

FBreader, the e-book reading application available on the Nokia 770, supports a format called FictionBook 2 (.fb2) that is apparently very popular in Russia.

There is also a beta CHM viewer available for the 770 that seems to work.

While it was originally designed as a way to import wxWidgets code into your project I have found that the wxCRP project can be very useful for storing snippets of code for reuse. It is language independant and easy to use. It also has the nice feature of avoiding most copy/paste problems by having variables that get auto filled in by scripts that respond to questions. This may be more what you were looking for in your original question than a repository although all code should be stored and revisioned with history.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jorgb/wxcrp/

For me, it's live! And it works terrific in both IE and FireFox!

How does it compare to Laptop Mode?
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/laptop_mode/

> Please no. Wiki != CMS. I really hate the current trend of open source projects putting all their documentation in a wiki.

Why not? Wiki is the only tool that really allows multiple shared views on your (collaborative) information. Everyone can change and add his own view (page with tree of links for example).

Today, I put all my information at work in wiki pages, with the exception of passwords. The Wiki tool I use (and developed myself) has a flexible access rights system plus treats an attachment as a wiki-document as well. Unfortunately most open source wiki-tools are aimed at public websites and not corporate use where access rights are important, even in a closed intranet.

Another nice thing about Wiki tools is that it merges nicely with other tools (mail, etc.), as long as they have an HTTP interface (even Lotus Notes has that).

For those who have NO idea what you are talking about.
1) What are you doing here
2) A sample by the author from this set

Here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~mudy/

Actually, in The Netherlands there was a programme on radio that broadcast data tapes (!). Just tape the radio show to cassette, run a translator from BASICODE (which was the "univeral" basic dialect the broadcasts were in) to your home computer's very own basic dialect, and you were in business.

Fond memories, indeed. Funny how history repeats itself: BASICODE could be seen as a precursor to Java. Write once, run anywhere, early 1980s version.

One funny detail is that the former Communist East Germany's state radio (of all places) copied the idea and also broadcast German BASICODE programs.

Also, I recollect (fondly) an issue of MSX Magazine which had a flexi disc record

I still have that issue. :-) That was specific to MSX computers, though.

Verdana makes the web unreadable. For reasoning see this article:
Why you should avoid Verdana

The Dutch government has made it clear that they won't be paying ISP's for it.
The Dutch ISP xs4all is actively campaigning against this law.
They give the realistic argument that this law will commercially cripple European ISPs, and the government paying for the storage is unrealistic.

"And screen works even better!"

Damn...for one reason or another I never get to test the anti-telemarketing Counterscript

There was this story on slashdot a couple of months ago and was detracted by many as opterons being out of place in the real time market. I guess we see it does have use =P

This is not "real-time" application. This is hardware-in-the-loop simiulation. Moreover, not only is Linux inappropriate for real-time primary defense system.. it is generally strictly prohibited (almost uniformly) by military specification because it is not a true real time operating system. Back at the old job, VxWorks variants were most common.

VERDANA IS EVIL. Every time I see one of our web designers using Verdana, I cringe. Arial displays much better, and is more widely distributed.

I am getting a lot of these at the moment, or just silence for about 20-30 second before someone "answers" their end. They are all from indian call centers for a range of tellicommunications companies, which i would suspect are just the same people trading under a dozen different names so they can keep calling when i tell them to bugger off...

I once got a wake up call, only to be cheerfully greeted with a "good-afternoon!", now i know this is /. but it *was* the early morning. I completly stumped the droid when i asked them "what time is where you are?" and "where the hell are you calling from anyway?". I then informed them to practice their *australian*-english a little more and try harder next time.

I really want to use the counterscript on them, but they only call when i am busy doing something, and not when i want to sit down and have a deep and meaningfull converstion with someone in another continent...

The telemarketer counter-script.

BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE! THE INVISIBLE KILLER

Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills
uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are
caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen
monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes
severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive
sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea,
vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become
dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

Dihydrogen monoxide:
* is also known as hydric acid, and is the major component of acid
    rain.
* contributes to the "greenhouse effect."
* may cause severe burns.
* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of
    automobile brakes.
* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

CONTAMINATION IS REACHING EPIDEMIC PROPORTIONS!

Quantities of dihydrogen monoxide have been found in almost every
stream, lake, and reservoir in America today. But the pollution is
global, and the contaminant has even been found in Antarctic ice. In
the midwest alone DHMO has caused millions of dollars of property
damage.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:
* as an industrial solvent and coolant.
* in nuclear power plants.
* in the production of styrofoam.
* as a fire retardant.
* in many forms of cruel animal research.
* in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce
      remains contaminated by this chemical.
* as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.

Companies dump waste DHMO into rivers and the ocean, and nothing can
be done to stop them because this practice is still legal. The impact
on wildlife is extreme, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer!

THE HORROR MUST BE STOPPED!

The American government has refused to ban the production,
distribution, or use of this damaging chemical due to its "importance
to the economic health of this nation." In fact, the navy and other
military organizations are conducting experiments with DHMO, and
designing multi-billion dollar devices to control and utilize it
during warfare situations. Hundreds of military research facilities
receive tons of it through a highly sophisticated underground
distribution network. Many store large quantities for later use.

IT'S NOT TOO LATE!

Act NOW to prevent further contamination. Find out more about this
dangerous chemical. What you don't know CAN hurt you and others
throughout the world. Send email to no_dhmo#NoSpam.circus.com, or a SASE to:

Coalition to Ban DHMO
211 Pearl St.
Santa Cruz CA, 95060

(from http://www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes/3_8.html I can take no credit for this one. just reposting someone elses genius... this page contains many other wonderful versions)
For the chemistry challenged... Dihydrogen Monoxide = H20 = water

Is this what you were looking for?

Strong ties with Bits for Freedom (our version of the EFF), best Dutch ISP year after year, support for *nix systems, frequent new experimental services. Only pain is that they're also one of the more expensive ISP's. You get what you pay for, and with XS4ALL they give you the works.

(for the record, I'm a long-time customer so I am rather biased. But these guys aren't your average ISP)

I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea here: New platform.

I'm newly skeptical of the approach of endlessly creating side-systems on the web browser.

There are amazing things that are possible when you make a new platform for integrating ideas.

For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them. We can imagine working on documents together with others in real-time. We can imagine social networks, we can imagine shared web browsing. We can imagine going to a web page, and seeing other people who happen to be browsing the web page at the same time as well. We can imagine looking at them, seeing what their affiliations are; There are all these things. We have seen voice communication. Within 10 years, good voice synthesis will be coupled, and we'll be able to look and sound like anybody.

Now, what we haven't seen, even in our imaginations, is all this stuff working together. Integrated into one platform.

Doing this stuff piece-meal, a little bit at a time, on the edge of the network, isn't going to work. It's just not. It'd take forever. Building new standards into the existing network just takes forever. There is no design team. Nadah. Nothing.

Where we see the cool stuff happening, really, is in these large behemeouth new platform.

Now, sure, we can get some milage out of AJAX. We can do sophisticated things with that.

But are we really going to make a 3D world with live document editing, voice & synthesis, presence, infinite versioning on everything, avatars, the whole thing, yadda yadda yadda, using just AJAX? Within 10-15 years? Hell no! It takes at least at least 5 years to make a new specification pretty much standard amongst users. Even RSS aggregators have only 10% penetration amongst blog readers.

What does this mean? It means that a new platform is in the works. Whether you know it or not, a new platform is in the works. Which of the new upstarts is going to be it, remains to be seen.

Sure, sure, sure-- there will be gateways between the world of Vanilla HTML + AJAX into these new worlds.

At some point, you can make a computer render pictures of the new world, and ship them off in AJAX. You can even play Lemmings in the browser now. (Well, you could have...) But the new world is going to be built in the new world. It's not going to be built piecemeal out here in weblandia. When we use browsers to access it, it will be a window into that world, but it will not be that world.

It also seems to be higher among Democrats.

Robodoc is similar to Doxygen but is more liberal in the languages it can recognize/work with (i.e. it does not require a C-family syntax).

http://www.xs4all.nl/~rfsber/Robo/robodoc.html

I dunno but Donner and Balkie combined with Zalm smells awefully neocon to me! The case may stem from a previous cabinet but the coverup was Donner's administration. As for the dataretention dutch ISP xs4all.nl has quite a scoop about the local implementation!! http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/bericht.php?id=671 Donner being a big proponent of gestaponet(tm) being implemented!

The default Cinelerra is quirky enough that gentoo doesn't want to install it by default - is this fixed in 2.0?

Cinelerra-cvs http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ is a fork which incorporates a variety of patches (apparently the original Cinelerra is developed by a single author, so cinelerra-cvs tries to avoid the bottlenecks that often result). cinelerra-cvs can be installed on gentoo, and once one switches to the Bluedot theme it's not half bad to look at :-).

Also of interest are LiVES http://www.xs4all.nl/~salsaman/lives/ and Jahshaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ - there's also Kdenlive but that seems to not be actively developed any more: http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/index.html