Most people skilled in a language (yes, even perl) can figure out what a piece of code actually does given enough time to look through it. The comments are to tell us what the code is *supposed* to do and *why*, so when we need to debug it we know what you were thinking when you wrote it and what you were trying to accomplish. When you're trying to figure out why a piece of code doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it's very helpful to know what it was supposed to do first.
It wasn't just because they wouldn't let their slaves go, it was because they wouldn't give up all their gods and worship the God of Israel. Throughout that section of Exodus, God "hardens the heart" of Pharaoh repeatedly specifically so Pharaoh wouldn't give up so easily and God could therefore plague them some more. The idea, apparently, was to try to convince the Egyptians of his (God's) power so they would worship him. Since they still didn't end up worshiping him after all that, God told his people to steal as much gold, silver, and jewelry as they could from their masters and get out of town. If the Bible is to be believed, they ended up stealing so much that much of Egypt ended up impoverished as a result.
So, if you take the Bible as the literal truth, it was less about freeing the Hebrews and more about trying to get the Egyptians to worship God, and then trying to break their backs when they didn't cooperate.
I know, I was using the SunRay more as a means of attempting to illustrate what it would look like to the end user, not how it would really work on the back end. Ideally I would like to see technology get to the point where these things actually *could* move over the wire instantaneously so there would be no need for a central server. That's probably many years away, though.
Java is easy to use and highly portable. There are also legions of very low-cost Java programmers available in any number of countries like India and China. Moving to a different language would be highly painful for most companies, especially in the highly competitive world of mobile software where speed to market and cost are key, and 99.9% of your users don't give a damn what language you're using or what Oracle thinks about it.
I agree that integrating the desktop with the mobile more completely will be key to future success in the industry, and the line will begin to blur more between mobile and desktop operating systems. I think concentrating on the social networking aspect of things is thinking too narrowly, though. Social networks are already pretty well integrated into most smart phones by now, and moving between form factors on them, dependent as they are on centralized servers, is already pretty seamless.
The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back. Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone. Imagine being able to do that, except between your smart phone and your laptop or desktop, even for things like full-featured word processor and spreadsheet programs or Visio or whatever other productivity apps you use. Now imagine being able to do that seamlessly without a central server or even without the little cards the SunRay depends on. You could couple all of your devices together and they could be in constant contact with each other so switching between them would be completely seamless and near-instantaneous.
We can do some of that already of course, but insufficient software and hardware on mobile devices, as well as deficiencies in disk and network speed (especially cellular network speed) make it impossible to really accomplish all of it now. I do think this is where we're headed though, and I can't wait.
$500 is well below the going rate for killing the key witness in a felony trial. Maybe he would have gotten a more positive response if he hadn't been such a cheapskate.
I have to go with the GP on this one. It's not that vim is inherently bad, it's just that it's *unnecessary*. It includes tons of features that an old-school admin has no use for. Sure, most of us use it anyway because modern Linux systems usually don't include our good friend vi (it's usually just a symlink to vim), but we rarely use the features that separate vim from vi. Moving in and out of edit mode is second nature. Hell, even using the arrow keys to move around is a needlessly inefficient waste of motion, since the arrow keys are usually far from any other useful key on the keyboard. The first thing we do in vim is turn off syntax highlighting and silently curse whoever keeps turning it back on.
The comparison to ssh is inaccurate as well. We use ssh because ssh gives us clear security advantages over telnet and rsh, and allows us to use one tool where we previously needed two. Any Unix admin worth his salt, no matter how long and luxurious his neck beard, will gladly upgrade his tools to improve his own efficiency or increase security. SSH does both of those things, while vim does neither.
Jeopardy players aren't permitted to ring in until Alex has finished reading the answer. Actually, the buzzers aren't activated until about half a second after Alex finishes reading. When you can buzz in is signaled by a light that comes on that is not seen on TV, but can be seen by the players. If you buzz in too early, your buzzer is locked out for some period of time (one quarter of a second IIRC).
The best Jeopardy players (and Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings are certainly among the best) will quickly scan the written answer while Alex reads and, if they're reasonably certain they can provide the question, buzz in reflexively as soon as that light comes on. Actually, to be more accurate, often times they'll start the physical motion of buzzing in milliseconds before the light comes on, anticipating that their finger will depress the button right when that light illuminates.
It's likely that Watson's ability to detect when it's okay to ring in, and then quickly do so, is probably superior to most human reflexes. However, that advantage is not related to reading speed when up against the best human players, and is probably measured in milliseconds.
All revenue-related bills (funding or de-funding) must originate in the House, but they still have to pass the Senate and the President to take effect. The House cannot unilaterally enact a funding measure, nor can it unilaterally cut funding. If, however, a previous bill has been passed to enact some sort of program, but that bill didn't include any sort of provisions to fund the program, the House could refuse to pass a bill funding that program, effectively killing it all by themselves since the Senate can't originate revenue bills. That's really the only situation I can think of where the House would be able to kill a previously passed initiative all by themselves.
There's no way to get back to running surpluses (and therefore starting to actually pay down the debt) without massive cuts in all of the big three (social security, medicare, and defense). All of these are arguably Constitutionally mandated functions (providing for the common defense and the general welfare), but the Constitution doesn't say anywhere that we have to fund them to the level that we do. The Constitution doesn't say we have to keep the retirement age at 62 or cap SS contributions above a certain income level, and it doesn't say we have to fund a military at more than 6 times the level of China, who has the second highest military expenditure.
Whenever someone talks about cutting defense, the right tries to redirect the conversation over to entitlement programs. Whenever someone talks about entitlement programs, the left tries to redirect the conversation over to defense. Meanwhile, the situation continues to get more dire, and both sides pass tax cuts to placate the masses, and that makes the situation even worse.
The harsh reality is we can no longer afford to provide entitlements at the level we have been in the past, AND we can no longer afford to support such a ludicrous level of military spending. Until our Congresspeople are willing to accept and act on that fact, and until the voters are willing to reward them instead of crucifying them for making the necessary budget cuts, we will continue to slide down into insolvency.
I don't think her ability to teach is compromised, but her ability to play the politics necessary to educate kids while keeping their parents happy definitely is. She actually got off light. One of my kids' old elementary teachers got fired on the spot for having a blog about her kids, and she wasn't saying anything nearly so mean about them. She had just been awarded the district's teacher of the year award the year before, too. Combine privacy concerns with angry parents, and you can pretty much pack your bags.
That said, I can sort of understand why she was doing it. I've known lots of teachers, and they almost universally say the worst part about teaching is dealing with the parents. Some parents try to micromanage the teachers, others won't ever show any interest in their kids' education at all no matter how hard the teacher tries. Plus, kids come in with a variety of emotional, mental, and/or developmental problems that many times the parents simply refuse to acknowledge.
All of this, along with the daily frustrations of shrinking budgets, increasing numbers of kids per classroom, and administrations that don't seem to care about anything but their own political ambitions, means most teachers really need a place to vent. Sometimes they bitch to each other, but schools can be nasty gossip factories, so it doesn't pay to do that too much. Sometimes you see your kid's second grade teacher in a bar. Sometimes, especially recently, they vent on blogs. The problem is, they don't anonymize themselves or the stories they tell sufficiently (or in this case, not at all), someone who has an axe to grind with them anyway (such as a parent) finds out about it, and it's all downhill from there.
This may all be true, but isn't necessarily of a lot of practical value in real-world applications. If an attacker has gained root access, one has to assume they've compromised every part of the system, including changing any number of binaries for their nefarious purposes, and taking the passwd file for later perusal. In this case, whether the hash takes hours or months to crack, the only way to be sure the attacker won't have anything useful is to reinstall everything from media and force everyone to reset their passwords to something other than what they were before.
More computationally expensive password hashing algorithms are a band aid on the real problem, which is the fact that once an attacker has gained access to root, containing the damage becomes orders of magnitude harder.
He made sort of a halfhearted attempt at it toward the beginning of his presidency, but dropped it after a huge public outcry about the possibility of moving any of the prisoners to facilities in the mainland US. It didn't help that very few Congresspeople wanted to openly support the idea of having terrorists (even suspected terrorists) housed in prisons in their districts.
There was also a lot of fear about what would happen if some of these people were given fair trials and actually found innocent. It was felt even the possibility of such a thing was too politically dangerous to take chances with.
It was one of the first of many examples of this president preferring to alienate his base in order to maintain the naive hope that he could bridge the political divide in this country.
If you read the letter, the mayor's primary concern at the time was that the accumulation from the snow piling up all winter and not melting until spring would cause massive flooding when the temperature did finally rise enough to melt it all. So, the solution he was looking for was something that would melt the snow gradually during the winter rather than having to wait for it to all melt at once in the spring.
Given the fact that they're facing similar problems today, we can conclude that MIT failed to come up with anything useful in response to the mayor's query. It would be nice to know what their response was, if they responded at all.
It's interesting to contemplate how much things have changed since then. In 1994 I was a junior in high school and had to give a presentation on some sort of computer-related topic to my CS class. I chose the Internet, which I had been on for about 5 years by then, and nobody else in the class had even heard of it. To assist in my research, my teacher lent me a copy of O'Reilly's "Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" (first edition). That book, at around 420 pages long, told you basically everything you needed to know to use the Internet at that time, including a fairly comprehensive list of the most useful gopher, web, and ftp sites available.
Later that year, I taught a class on building personal web pages to a small group. We covered basically everything there was to know about creating state-of-the-art web pages at the time in a single day.
A year later, the dot com boom happened and everything changed. Prior to 1995, though, the Internet was still largely unknown to the general public.
What a got from his performance is that he's a HUGE nerd. He looks and acts like the kid in middle school that all the other nerds made fun of. I used to doubt the whole myth that he created Facebook to get laid, but after seeing him in action I kind of believe it now. It's not like he was going to be getting a lot of dates based on his suave personality.
When I watched it live, being as young as I was (2nd or 3rd grade IIRC), I was in too much shock to really register what he was saying or how he was saying it. I was just staring at the screen while my space-obsessed brain tried to make sense of what had just happened. I probably sat there just staring for several minutes while they replayed it over and over again.
When I've watched it in later years, though, I'm most struck by his professionalism and commitment to his job. This guy had to know his voice was being broadcast around the world, and that this was the most watched shuttle launch in years (possibly ever). He was probably himself just realizing from the data (I'm not sure he even had the video feed available to him at the time) that something horrible had just happened, and people he probably knew and worked with had likely just died. Through all that, he kept a measured tone and suppressed whatever emotion he might have been feeling. His calm monotone and understated assessment of the situation was the perfect backdrop to the utter shock everyone was feeling at that moment. Having that guy panic or lose his shit would have made the whole thing much much worse.
For sites like these, the more important statistic is how much of a chance I have of searching for some random thing and hitting a fake in the first two or three results. In my experience, anything you search for that's even remotely popular will have at least two high-quality torrents with plenty of seeders available. The fakes are all pushed to the bottom because nobody seeds them.
You know, for most of the last two years I thought the Democrats kept bowing to Republican pressure because they were spineless, but now I'm not so sure. I think now the entire Democratic Party is shifting further to the right and filling the vacuum left by the Republicans, who have been shifting even further to the right. A 1970s (or even 1980s) Republican would be almost indistinguishable from a modern Democrat. The so-called Blue Dog Democrats have taken over the party. Meanwhile, true progressives have no voice in government anymore.
The first one pictured in the year 2000 is just depressing. Batman looks thoroughly depressed to be getting into what appears to be his father's old Pacer.
The link to the second page appears to be completely invisible if you have NoScript on. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it. Then I temporarily allowed the page, and the link appeared. What a terribly designed website.
There is a bundle of all 3 Star Wars movies available on DVD that comes with two disks for each movie: the crap version and the original theatrical release. I picked it up at Costco a couple of weeks ago. It isn't Blu Ray, but it's a lot better quality than an analog Laser Disc copy. Here it is on Amazon (not a referral link).
I think those DVDs were covered here on Slashdot a couple of years ago. Again, not Blu-ray (and hence not high def), but the best quality purists among us are going to get of the original releases for the foreseeable future.
They called it the LEM before they changed the name to LM. IIRC, the name was changed because it was thought the word "excursion" in there made the whole thing seem too fanciful. It's still popularly called LEM though, probably because LEM is easy to pronounce as a one-syllable word, while LM can only really be pronounced "ell em", and doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as nicely. In fact, the page you link to calls it the LEM in several places.
Even if you block out the Facebook API completely, friends' auto-generated wall posts from their various games will still show up on your News Feed. The only way to stop them is to hide each application separately as it comes up. Since companies like Zynga keep coming out with new games (all of which are the same basic game with slightly different graphics) on a seemingly daily basis, and people still blindly post crap from these games on their walls so everyone can see what stupid new game they're playing, this is a tedious solution to the problem.
I'd personally like to see a "Hide all apps from my News Feed" option on FB, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people skilled in a language (yes, even perl) can figure out what a piece of code actually does given enough time to look through it. The comments are to tell us what the code is *supposed* to do and *why*, so when we need to debug it we know what you were thinking when you wrote it and what you were trying to accomplish. When you're trying to figure out why a piece of code doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it's very helpful to know what it was supposed to do first.
It wasn't just because they wouldn't let their slaves go, it was because they wouldn't give up all their gods and worship the God of Israel. Throughout that section of Exodus, God "hardens the heart" of Pharaoh repeatedly specifically so Pharaoh wouldn't give up so easily and God could therefore plague them some more. The idea, apparently, was to try to convince the Egyptians of his (God's) power so they would worship him. Since they still didn't end up worshiping him after all that, God told his people to steal as much gold, silver, and jewelry as they could from their masters and get out of town. If the Bible is to be believed, they ended up stealing so much that much of Egypt ended up impoverished as a result.
So, if you take the Bible as the literal truth, it was less about freeing the Hebrews and more about trying to get the Egyptians to worship God, and then trying to break their backs when they didn't cooperate.
I know, I was using the SunRay more as a means of attempting to illustrate what it would look like to the end user, not how it would really work on the back end. Ideally I would like to see technology get to the point where these things actually *could* move over the wire instantaneously so there would be no need for a central server. That's probably many years away, though.
Java is easy to use and highly portable. There are also legions of very low-cost Java programmers available in any number of countries like India and China. Moving to a different language would be highly painful for most companies, especially in the highly competitive world of mobile software where speed to market and cost are key, and 99.9% of your users don't give a damn what language you're using or what Oracle thinks about it.
I agree that integrating the desktop with the mobile more completely will be key to future success in the industry, and the line will begin to blur more between mobile and desktop operating systems. I think concentrating on the social networking aspect of things is thinking too narrowly, though. Social networks are already pretty well integrated into most smart phones by now, and moving between form factors on them, dependent as they are on centralized servers, is already pretty seamless.
The real interesting thing will be when we can get real productivity apps to seamlessly move from mobile to laptop to desktop and back. Sun had their SunRay systems where you could seamlessly move your entire desktop session, including open apps and work in progress, from one desktop computer to another, and even transfer phone calls seamlessly between phones as you moved, say from your office phone to a conference room phone. Imagine being able to do that, except between your smart phone and your laptop or desktop, even for things like full-featured word processor and spreadsheet programs or Visio or whatever other productivity apps you use. Now imagine being able to do that seamlessly without a central server or even without the little cards the SunRay depends on. You could couple all of your devices together and they could be in constant contact with each other so switching between them would be completely seamless and near-instantaneous.
We can do some of that already of course, but insufficient software and hardware on mobile devices, as well as deficiencies in disk and network speed (especially cellular network speed) make it impossible to really accomplish all of it now. I do think this is where we're headed though, and I can't wait.
$500 is well below the going rate for killing the key witness in a felony trial. Maybe he would have gotten a more positive response if he hadn't been such a cheapskate.
I have to go with the GP on this one. It's not that vim is inherently bad, it's just that it's *unnecessary*. It includes tons of features that an old-school admin has no use for. Sure, most of us use it anyway because modern Linux systems usually don't include our good friend vi (it's usually just a symlink to vim), but we rarely use the features that separate vim from vi. Moving in and out of edit mode is second nature. Hell, even using the arrow keys to move around is a needlessly inefficient waste of motion, since the arrow keys are usually far from any other useful key on the keyboard. The first thing we do in vim is turn off syntax highlighting and silently curse whoever keeps turning it back on.
The comparison to ssh is inaccurate as well. We use ssh because ssh gives us clear security advantages over telnet and rsh, and allows us to use one tool where we previously needed two. Any Unix admin worth his salt, no matter how long and luxurious his neck beard, will gladly upgrade his tools to improve his own efficiency or increase security. SSH does both of those things, while vim does neither.
Jeopardy players aren't permitted to ring in until Alex has finished reading the answer. Actually, the buzzers aren't activated until about half a second after Alex finishes reading. When you can buzz in is signaled by a light that comes on that is not seen on TV, but can be seen by the players. If you buzz in too early, your buzzer is locked out for some period of time (one quarter of a second IIRC).
The best Jeopardy players (and Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings are certainly among the best) will quickly scan the written answer while Alex reads and, if they're reasonably certain they can provide the question, buzz in reflexively as soon as that light comes on. Actually, to be more accurate, often times they'll start the physical motion of buzzing in milliseconds before the light comes on, anticipating that their finger will depress the button right when that light illuminates.
It's likely that Watson's ability to detect when it's okay to ring in, and then quickly do so, is probably superior to most human reflexes. However, that advantage is not related to reading speed when up against the best human players, and is probably measured in milliseconds.
He's a witch! Burn him!
All revenue-related bills (funding or de-funding) must originate in the House, but they still have to pass the Senate and the President to take effect. The House cannot unilaterally enact a funding measure, nor can it unilaterally cut funding. If, however, a previous bill has been passed to enact some sort of program, but that bill didn't include any sort of provisions to fund the program, the House could refuse to pass a bill funding that program, effectively killing it all by themselves since the Senate can't originate revenue bills. That's really the only situation I can think of where the House would be able to kill a previously passed initiative all by themselves.
There's no way to get back to running surpluses (and therefore starting to actually pay down the debt) without massive cuts in all of the big three (social security, medicare, and defense). All of these are arguably Constitutionally mandated functions (providing for the common defense and the general welfare), but the Constitution doesn't say anywhere that we have to fund them to the level that we do. The Constitution doesn't say we have to keep the retirement age at 62 or cap SS contributions above a certain income level, and it doesn't say we have to fund a military at more than 6 times the level of China, who has the second highest military expenditure.
Whenever someone talks about cutting defense, the right tries to redirect the conversation over to entitlement programs. Whenever someone talks about entitlement programs, the left tries to redirect the conversation over to defense. Meanwhile, the situation continues to get more dire, and both sides pass tax cuts to placate the masses, and that makes the situation even worse.
The harsh reality is we can no longer afford to provide entitlements at the level we have been in the past, AND we can no longer afford to support such a ludicrous level of military spending. Until our Congresspeople are willing to accept and act on that fact, and until the voters are willing to reward them instead of crucifying them for making the necessary budget cuts, we will continue to slide down into insolvency.
I don't think her ability to teach is compromised, but her ability to play the politics necessary to educate kids while keeping their parents happy definitely is. She actually got off light. One of my kids' old elementary teachers got fired on the spot for having a blog about her kids, and she wasn't saying anything nearly so mean about them. She had just been awarded the district's teacher of the year award the year before, too. Combine privacy concerns with angry parents, and you can pretty much pack your bags.
That said, I can sort of understand why she was doing it. I've known lots of teachers, and they almost universally say the worst part about teaching is dealing with the parents. Some parents try to micromanage the teachers, others won't ever show any interest in their kids' education at all no matter how hard the teacher tries. Plus, kids come in with a variety of emotional, mental, and/or developmental problems that many times the parents simply refuse to acknowledge.
All of this, along with the daily frustrations of shrinking budgets, increasing numbers of kids per classroom, and administrations that don't seem to care about anything but their own political ambitions, means most teachers really need a place to vent. Sometimes they bitch to each other, but schools can be nasty gossip factories, so it doesn't pay to do that too much. Sometimes you see your kid's second grade teacher in a bar. Sometimes, especially recently, they vent on blogs. The problem is, they don't anonymize themselves or the stories they tell sufficiently (or in this case, not at all), someone who has an axe to grind with them anyway (such as a parent) finds out about it, and it's all downhill from there.
This may all be true, but isn't necessarily of a lot of practical value in real-world applications. If an attacker has gained root access, one has to assume they've compromised every part of the system, including changing any number of binaries for their nefarious purposes, and taking the passwd file for later perusal. In this case, whether the hash takes hours or months to crack, the only way to be sure the attacker won't have anything useful is to reinstall everything from media and force everyone to reset their passwords to something other than what they were before.
More computationally expensive password hashing algorithms are a band aid on the real problem, which is the fact that once an attacker has gained access to root, containing the damage becomes orders of magnitude harder.
He made sort of a halfhearted attempt at it toward the beginning of his presidency, but dropped it after a huge public outcry about the possibility of moving any of the prisoners to facilities in the mainland US. It didn't help that very few Congresspeople wanted to openly support the idea of having terrorists (even suspected terrorists) housed in prisons in their districts.
There was also a lot of fear about what would happen if some of these people were given fair trials and actually found innocent. It was felt even the possibility of such a thing was too politically dangerous to take chances with.
It was one of the first of many examples of this president preferring to alienate his base in order to maintain the naive hope that he could bridge the political divide in this country.
If you read the letter, the mayor's primary concern at the time was that the accumulation from the snow piling up all winter and not melting until spring would cause massive flooding when the temperature did finally rise enough to melt it all. So, the solution he was looking for was something that would melt the snow gradually during the winter rather than having to wait for it to all melt at once in the spring.
Given the fact that they're facing similar problems today, we can conclude that MIT failed to come up with anything useful in response to the mayor's query. It would be nice to know what their response was, if they responded at all.
It's interesting to contemplate how much things have changed since then. In 1994 I was a junior in high school and had to give a presentation on some sort of computer-related topic to my CS class. I chose the Internet, which I had been on for about 5 years by then, and nobody else in the class had even heard of it. To assist in my research, my teacher lent me a copy of O'Reilly's "Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" (first edition). That book, at around 420 pages long, told you basically everything you needed to know to use the Internet at that time, including a fairly comprehensive list of the most useful gopher, web, and ftp sites available.
Later that year, I taught a class on building personal web pages to a small group. We covered basically everything there was to know about creating state-of-the-art web pages at the time in a single day.
A year later, the dot com boom happened and everything changed. Prior to 1995, though, the Internet was still largely unknown to the general public.
What a got from his performance is that he's a HUGE nerd. He looks and acts like the kid in middle school that all the other nerds made fun of. I used to doubt the whole myth that he created Facebook to get laid, but after seeing him in action I kind of believe it now. It's not like he was going to be getting a lot of dates based on his suave personality.
When I watched it live, being as young as I was (2nd or 3rd grade IIRC), I was in too much shock to really register what he was saying or how he was saying it. I was just staring at the screen while my space-obsessed brain tried to make sense of what had just happened. I probably sat there just staring for several minutes while they replayed it over and over again.
When I've watched it in later years, though, I'm most struck by his professionalism and commitment to his job. This guy had to know his voice was being broadcast around the world, and that this was the most watched shuttle launch in years (possibly ever). He was probably himself just realizing from the data (I'm not sure he even had the video feed available to him at the time) that something horrible had just happened, and people he probably knew and worked with had likely just died. Through all that, he kept a measured tone and suppressed whatever emotion he might have been feeling. His calm monotone and understated assessment of the situation was the perfect backdrop to the utter shock everyone was feeling at that moment. Having that guy panic or lose his shit would have made the whole thing much much worse.
For sites like these, the more important statistic is how much of a chance I have of searching for some random thing and hitting a fake in the first two or three results. In my experience, anything you search for that's even remotely popular will have at least two high-quality torrents with plenty of seeders available. The fakes are all pushed to the bottom because nobody seeds them.
You know, for most of the last two years I thought the Democrats kept bowing to Republican pressure because they were spineless, but now I'm not so sure. I think now the entire Democratic Party is shifting further to the right and filling the vacuum left by the Republicans, who have been shifting even further to the right. A 1970s (or even 1980s) Republican would be almost indistinguishable from a modern Democrat. The so-called Blue Dog Democrats have taken over the party. Meanwhile, true progressives have no voice in government anymore.
The first one pictured in the year 2000 is just depressing. Batman looks thoroughly depressed to be getting into what appears to be his father's old Pacer.
The link to the second page appears to be completely invisible if you have NoScript on. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it. Then I temporarily allowed the page, and the link appeared. What a terribly designed website.
There is a bundle of all 3 Star Wars movies available on DVD that comes with two disks for each movie: the crap version and the original theatrical release. I picked it up at Costco a couple of weeks ago. It isn't Blu Ray, but it's a lot better quality than an analog Laser Disc copy. Here it is on Amazon (not a referral link).
I think those DVDs were covered here on Slashdot a couple of years ago. Again, not Blu-ray (and hence not high def), but the best quality purists among us are going to get of the original releases for the foreseeable future.
They called it the LEM before they changed the name to LM. IIRC, the name was changed because it was thought the word "excursion" in there made the whole thing seem too fanciful. It's still popularly called LEM though, probably because LEM is easy to pronounce as a one-syllable word, while LM can only really be pronounced "ell em", and doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as nicely. In fact, the page you link to calls it the LEM in several places.
Even if you block out the Facebook API completely, friends' auto-generated wall posts from their various games will still show up on your News Feed. The only way to stop them is to hide each application separately as it comes up. Since companies like Zynga keep coming out with new games (all of which are the same basic game with slightly different graphics) on a seemingly daily basis, and people still blindly post crap from these games on their walls so everyone can see what stupid new game they're playing, this is a tedious solution to the problem.
I'd personally like to see a "Hide all apps from my News Feed" option on FB, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.