As long as the borders with Mexico remain open to millions of illegal immigrants welcomed in by big business (GOP) to drive down wages as well as welfare pimps (democrats) for votes, this whole fingerprinting and homeland security nazi bullshit is a fucking JOKE.
Someone really should have asked him about any plans to make DNS more peer-to-peer oriented, like the recent project to make BitTorrent.torrents part of DNS, found here:
1) The colors of the Viking lander, especially in the US flag on it, are mismatched and discolored. When the hues are remapped in a paint program to the correct colors of the flag, the sky turns blue.
2) The atmosphere seen at an angle from the Hubble is almost always blue.
This latest landing only makes it the conspiracies flourish, because in 1997 and even in the 1970s when Viking landed, they immediately had color photos. Why was the color being hidden?
When Yahoo switched to Google as its primary search engine, it made Yahoo into nothing more than a Google frontend with a lot of wasted bandwidth on its pages. It was just google with a bloated site loaded to bear with ads, as if it was an MSN with a google search bar. Its only real difference in searching was those old directories with all the outdated pages from the 1990s.
Now that Yahoo will be using another search technology, there might be a reason for using Yahoo again. Some useful things that may never show up on Google might show up on Yahoo, so it might make for a useful alternate search engine now, especially if Google continues to slide as it's doing. Then again, we still have old Astalavista for that, as well.
They're also blocking out blogs in favor of commercial sites, not to mention the spamvertising, blatant manipulation of searches, and the introduction of the google toolbar spyware.
But that's just the beginning. When a significant portion of the company is no longer controlled by the founders and their vision, and is co-opted by a greedy, profit-driven board of directors, things are going to get much worse. Instead of being a fair and useful tool for the community, all the creators will care about is monopoly and money.
Google, welcome to the wonderful world of turbo-capitalism.
If the x86 is emulated through dynamic recompilation, does that mean you can compile Gentoo Linux on a transmeta and get the speed boost of native code?
In 1997, at least, I recall everyone with internet access rushing to the Mars Pathfinder site when it landed on Mars, and the rest going to people's houses with internet access to watch large images load up slowly on 14.4 (or, if you were lucky, 28.8) modems. We were fascinated to see that little robot go and take pictures of a rusty planet.
Now, there's little talk of it, relatively little media coverage, and so on. People just shrug it off when they hear of it, and most laughingly hope it will fail because NASA didn't use significant figures in their calculations or something. It's not a big event anymore, and it's certainly not a moment like the moon landing.
Only a few people seem to be following this, unfortunately. Interest in space has either dissipated or become extremely pessimistic. Kids now want to be members of G-UNIT, not astronauts. Hopefully, Spirit will find signs of life or at least water and change those perceptions around and re-ignite interest in the final frontier.
The first posters here don't have a clue as to the effects and circumstances of this. The purpose is not Autonomous Kill Vehicles though it might occur. Cruise Missiles etc already do this as does the Predator to one degree or another. The purpose here is to reduce the overhead cost on the army dramatically in hauling supplies etc over long distances with or without roads. To do this you need vehicles than can bypass disabled vehicles and overcome obstacles. They need to be free of drivers who get tired and eat up supplies.
The real effect here will be civilian. The project which like it or not will happen regardless of DARPA someday soon, is going to very nearly completely alter how we live.
To illustrate: suppose you are old blind and unable to drive. (It happens to the best of us) Now you will be able to go where you want without somebody driving you. Suppose you want to go to work but don't want to own a car? Mass Transit? No! you just get on your cell phone and call for a car. It arrives shortly and takes you where you want to go and without a driver. Freight? No more Truck Drivers and the wreaks from them being too tired. No more Taxi Drivers. Close most of the Hospitals because wreaks are not filling them up. Kids will not need parents to drive them somewhere.
There is very nearly nothing more profound than this race! It will reorganize our world. The issue here is how will we adapt. This isn't an esoteric question. We had better face it now.
For the Luddites amung us, give it up. Stopping DARPA will only give the technological edge to China. They will do the work. This is a very high amplification Technology. It Amplifies People a LOT. The issue as always will be the morals of those being Amplified, and will we allow this to cause others to be lost in the "noise."
You're all asking what the point of this is. Talking about how you could build a cheaper, better, faster one with a bigger pen^H^H^H hard drive in it, but you've missed the point.
This isn't for YOU, it's for your neighbor. Or your uncle, your Mom, or anyone else who DOESN'T have a closet full of overclocked Celeron 366 motherboards, and a working knowledge of Linux.
It's also for the people who don't have static IP addresses at home, but want to access their backed up files from anywhere:
Mirra's installation assumes that its location has an "always on" broadband connection, and uses it to reach out and touch the Ispiri corporate service. Most of the time, this is a simple "ping" every couple of seconds, although it also provides an opportunity for unattended software updates and fixes.
If an off-site user has properly authenticated to the Mirra service at the Ispiri host, and requests a file, the service makes the request when the Mirra next touches base. The advantage of this approach is that the connection is initiated by the Mirra server inside the user's router or firewall.
Sounds like a handy little box to me if it does all it says: Automatic background backups Automatic background file synchronization Remote access that works behind a NAT-box Expandable
I'm not gonna buy one, mostly because I don't need one, but when my Dad asks me about backing up his important info I just might tell him to get one....
If this were a socialist country, or Micron was a monopoly like Microsoft, then such a thing would be possible. However, this is a free market, and any company who wants to sell a lot of RAM would not join a price fixing collusion, but exclude themselves from it. If Micron was doing such a thing, why wouldn't Crucial, Buffalo, Geil, Kingston, and so forth lower their prices and blow the competition away? Most of what happened was because Rambus RAM was attempting to become an overpriced proprietary monopoly (and fortunately failed), plus that huge RAM factory burned down in 2001.
Obviously, a rival is bribing -- I mean, influencing through political contributions -- high-ranking officials to target Micron alone. Perhaps RAMBUS wants to be like SCO and take honest people to the grave with them? Micron deserves amnesty.
India is well aware that the stability of Pakistan's dictator Musharraf could collapse any day to the surge of Islamic fundamentalism in the country due to the exodus of the Taliban. In fact, he was almost assassinated last week.
Most of this is obviously meant for military technology. With a hypersonic scramjet, their military could not only call airstrike missile attacks within minutes, they would also have a de-facto ICBM on their hands that could travel so fast through space it would bypass the early warning systems. With it, they could launch a nuclear first strike on Pakistan and cripple their nuclear capabilities.
The Concorde was grounded because it was too dangerous, and a space plane would be infinitely moreso. This technology will be mostly for military use.
For all the thousands of albums released this year, this list only includes not even a hundred, the vast majority of it pop or rap music, and a little bit of soporific alt-rock. They even call it a "A Not-Very-Scientific Analysis". Attempts at objective criticism are bad enough, but this is a joke. Whoever submitted it is probably trying to DoS this guy's personal webpage via slashdotting.
It's a crime there was no mention of the releases from Vital Remains, Black Dahlia Murder, Wehrewolf, Destroyer 666, Iron Maiden, Blut Aus Nord, Aborym, or Iced Earth.
Two of the biggest culprits behind outsourcing are Accenture and Mackenzie. I like one of Accenture's services "Human Performance" and of course they also list "Outsourcing". They are making a lucrative business out of going from company to company telling them which parts of the company to offshore and how to do it. Unfortunately HR consulting can't be easily offshored so they can't get a taste of their own medicine. If you see these snakes...errr...people coming in the door, get your resume and unemployment insurance paperwork in order.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of the overpaid executives the argument is unavoidably compelling. Labor costs are so integral to profit margin that there has always been constant pressure to reduce labor costs. American labor made a lot of gains in the 20th century which started out with conditions about as dismal as most of the third world has now. Unfortunately with the development of free trade, cheap telecommunications and a very efficient air and sea freight expensive American labor has become largely a liability unless you're in a service business that requires you're body be in the U.S. Of course there is also a solution for service, immigrants legal or illegal. Its no secret why there is so little enforcement of immigration law in the U.S and why H1B visas are so popular. It provides a vast pool of ultra cheap labor for service jobs, labor that by definition can't compain about poor working conditions. If you work for a living in the U.S. the good times are over.
Dell's action is commendable until you read that they apparently didn't sack anybody in India so presumably they just shifted all of their inferior customer service in India to individuals who haven't got the clout to effectively complain.
I was going to post, but there's currently a national tragedy -- TV cameras on CNN and other major news networks are showing a huge cloud of smoke rising from Times Square [b]RIGHT NOW[/b].
What this article really doens't say much about is that NIMS isn't just an open source program for controlling robots, it's a program developed by grants given to UCLA to develop AI, or Ambient Intelligence in this isntance. This robot isn't entirely remote controlled, and though the article touches on continual monitoring, it doesn't say that it's using open source robot AI developed by UCLA.
Your tax dollars at work, folks.
on
Bill Nye's Marsdial
·
· Score: -1, Troll
It costs roughly $100,000 per pound to send an object up into space, and your tax dollars just paid to send a sundial, of all things, to Mars. Not only that, it required costly custom precision machining, and even fancy laser engraving, according to the article. The main goal of it wasn't a backup plan, and as with the earthdial, it was simply part of Bill Nye's bizarre plan to show kids how the sun illuminates a planet.
As usual software solution could have been done for far less than a bulky hardware solution.
If the parts work, there's quite a few organizations that would like to ship your old components to places like West Africa for all the GN's there and so on. The trick, however, is to use it to write off some REALLY hefty tax deductions -- your old 386 is still worth the $3000 you paid for it in the eyes of the IRS:)
But if they're broken, and you don't feel like giving away dead parts to cheat taxes either, recycle them and make a few bucks. Here's a list of places:
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.
This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance-this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
The Akosa PlugLan(TM) Network Jack -- imagine how much time, effort, and money stringing up CAT5 network cables could be saved if we simply just used these instead to use our existing electrical wires to transmit data.
Motorola IMfree Personal Instant Messenger -- kick the middle school girls off of the computers, and give them these little keypads. $1500 machines being hogged for using AIM is ridiculous. Plus it's Linux-based.
"Air Flo" Hand Cooling Controllers -- When playing Xbox for hours on end, your controllers will become slicker than a greased yoda, but these have air conditioning built in to prevent that. Now, if they could do this for mice, it would be great.
Microsoft didn't invent the operating system, didn't invent the GUI, nor did they invent the word processor, or the spreadsheet or the database. They didn't even invent the idea of an "integrated" package. Almost none of Microsoft's products have ever had even a tiny shred of originality or innovation, not even their first product, their BASIC interpreter for the Altair.
This may come as a surprise to many Microsoft fanboys, but Bill Gates didn't invent BASIC, that was invented by two Dartmouth professors about 10 years before Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their interpreter for the Altair. For that matter, Bill Gates had worked on a similar BASIC interpreter for the DEC minicomputers while he was an intern at Digital before he wrote Altair BASIC, and Altair BASIC was quite similar to DEC BASIC.
Many of the products which Microsoft is famous for weren't even originally written by Microsoft, they were purchased from other companies or Microsoft absorbed other companies to get them. Examples would be MS-DOS and Visual BASIC. That's right, Visual BASIC was purchased, not developed originally within Microsoft Furthermore, for example, MS-DOS's direct predecessor QDOS was a direct clone of CP/M. Windows certainly wasn't the first GUI (see Apple), in fact it wasn't even the first GUI shell that ran on top of MS-DOS.
That, plus the whole Internet Explorer fiasco we all can remember.
It's no surprise they can't even invent original RPGs. I hope they get sued into the ground this time around, especially considering their past history of getting away with stealing everyone else's work through strongarm tactics.
We have all these movies now where CG-generated characters are used to fight and kill each other in every gory fashion imaginable, but why don't we have any movies where thousands of people get together and make love, not war? A massive orgy comprising of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, CG-generated characters in the scope and scale of Lord of the Rings would be an unforgettable moment in moviemaking history. Perhaps it would inspire the nations of Europe to solve their rapid depopulation problem -- we could have a summer of love all over again.
I was quite disappointed when that scene in the Matrix 2 turned out to be a mere scantily clad rave in a cave, all done with paid actors.
We all know Mitnick is in quite a bit of trouble, but the fact that he's a good social engineer still persists. He was traumatized in jail, and most of what he was severely punished for was probably due to non-cooperation, in that "hacker" attitude, with very influential people. Most likely, he got out of such things by giving in and cutting deals.
Before you send in any good stories, be they fact or fiction, think of this: what if FBI / Homeland Security agents are on the case working with Mitnick, reading those letters that will supposedly go into the book and tracing who sent them? They've been known to do similar things to get people to brag before, which is the easiest way to catch people, or at least make it seem that way. With John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge in the government, they will stoop to any low to put hackers, whom they view as terrorists, behind bars.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean works of art like this?
B1FF#S K3WL H0M3 PAG3!!!
As long as the borders with Mexico remain open to millions of illegal immigrants welcomed in by big business (GOP) to drive down wages as well as welfare pimps (democrats) for votes, this whole fingerprinting and homeland security nazi bullshit is a fucking JOKE.
Someone really should have asked him about any plans to make DNS more peer-to-peer oriented, like the recent project to make BitTorrent .torrents part of DNS, found here:
http://www.netrogenic.com/dnstorrent/
There's some color-corrected photos here that show this:
http://mars-news.de/life/
Basically, the theory behind it is that:
1) The colors of the Viking lander, especially in the US flag on it, are mismatched and discolored. When the hues are remapped in a paint program to the correct colors of the flag, the sky turns blue.
2) The atmosphere seen at an angle from the Hubble is almost always blue.
This latest landing only makes it the conspiracies flourish, because in 1997 and even in the 1970s when Viking landed, they immediately had color photos. Why was the color being hidden?
At least they didn't compare Linus to Karl Marx.
When Yahoo switched to Google as its primary search engine, it made Yahoo into nothing more than a Google frontend with a lot of wasted bandwidth on its pages. It was just google with a bloated site loaded to bear with ads, as if it was an MSN with a google search bar. Its only real difference in searching was those old directories with all the outdated pages from the 1990s.
Now that Yahoo will be using another search technology, there might be a reason for using Yahoo again. Some useful things that may never show up on Google might show up on Yahoo, so it might make for a useful alternate search engine now, especially if Google continues to slide as it's doing. Then again, we still have old Astalavista for that, as well.
Google is already employing many unscrupulous tactics -- just see how they ruined this guy's website here, for example:
http://www.google-sucks.org/
They're also blocking out blogs in favor of commercial sites, not to mention the spamvertising, blatant manipulation of searches, and the introduction of the google toolbar spyware.
But that's just the beginning. When a significant portion of the company is no longer controlled by the founders and their vision, and is co-opted by a greedy, profit-driven board of directors, things are going to get much worse. Instead of being a fair and useful tool for the community, all the creators will care about is monopoly and money.
Google, welcome to the wonderful world of turbo-capitalism.
If the x86 is emulated through dynamic recompilation, does that mean you can compile Gentoo Linux on a transmeta and get the speed boost of native code?
In 1997, at least, I recall everyone with internet access rushing to the Mars Pathfinder site when it landed on Mars, and the rest going to people's houses with internet access to watch large images load up slowly on 14.4 (or, if you were lucky, 28.8) modems. We were fascinated to see that little robot go and take pictures of a rusty planet.
Now, there's little talk of it, relatively little media coverage, and so on. People just shrug it off when they hear of it, and most laughingly hope it will fail because NASA didn't use significant figures in their calculations or something. It's not a big event anymore, and it's certainly not a moment like the moon landing.
Only a few people seem to be following this, unfortunately. Interest in space has either dissipated or become extremely pessimistic. Kids now want to be members of G-UNIT, not astronauts. Hopefully, Spirit will find signs of life or at least water and change those perceptions around and re-ignite interest in the final frontier.
You're welcome. :)
: http://rejo.zenger.nl/abuse/emailcd.php&hl=en&ie=U TF-8
http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:oPRZttcq9icJ
The first posters here don't have a clue as to the effects and circumstances of this. The purpose is not Autonomous Kill Vehicles though it might occur. Cruise Missiles etc already do this as does the Predator to one degree or another. The purpose here is to reduce the overhead cost on the army dramatically in hauling supplies etc over long distances with or without roads. To do this you need vehicles than can bypass disabled vehicles and overcome obstacles. They need to be free of drivers who get tired and eat up supplies.
The real effect here will be civilian. The project which like it or not will happen regardless of DARPA someday soon, is going to very nearly completely alter how we live.
To illustrate: suppose you are old blind and unable to drive. (It happens to the best of us) Now you will be able to go where you want without somebody driving you. Suppose you want to go to work but don't want to own a car? Mass Transit? No! you just get on your cell phone and call for a car. It arrives shortly and takes you where you want to go and without a driver. Freight? No more Truck Drivers and the wreaks from them being too tired. No more Taxi Drivers. Close most of the Hospitals because wreaks are not filling them up. Kids will not need parents to drive them somewhere.
There is very nearly nothing more profound than this race! It will reorganize our world. The issue here is how will we adapt. This isn't an esoteric question. We had better face it now.
For the Luddites amung us, give it up. Stopping DARPA will only give the technological edge to China. They will do the work. This is a very high amplification Technology. It Amplifies People a LOT. The issue as always will be the morals of those being Amplified, and will we allow this to cause others to be lost in the "noise."
This isn't for YOU, it's for your neighbor. Or your uncle, your Mom, or anyone else who DOESN'T have a closet full of overclocked Celeron 366 motherboards, and a working knowledge of Linux.
It's also for the people who don't have static IP addresses at home, but want to access their backed up files from anywhere:
Sounds like a handy little box to me if it does all it says:
Automatic background backups
Automatic background file synchronization
Remote access that works behind a NAT-box
Expandable
I'm not gonna buy one, mostly because I don't need one, but when my Dad asks me about backing up his important info I just might tell him to get one....
If this were a socialist country, or Micron was a monopoly like Microsoft, then such a thing would be possible. However, this is a free market, and any company who wants to sell a lot of RAM would not join a price fixing collusion, but exclude themselves from it. If Micron was doing such a thing, why wouldn't Crucial, Buffalo, Geil, Kingston, and so forth lower their prices and blow the competition away? Most of what happened was because Rambus RAM was attempting to become an overpriced proprietary monopoly (and fortunately failed), plus that huge RAM factory burned down in 2001.
Obviously, a rival is bribing -- I mean, influencing through political contributions -- high-ranking officials to target Micron alone. Perhaps RAMBUS wants to be like SCO and take honest people to the grave with them? Micron deserves amnesty.
India is well aware that the stability of Pakistan's dictator Musharraf could collapse any day to the surge of Islamic fundamentalism in the country due to the exodus of the Taliban. In fact, he was almost assassinated last week.
Most of this is obviously meant for military technology. With a hypersonic scramjet, their military could not only call airstrike missile attacks within minutes, they would also have a de-facto ICBM on their hands that could travel so fast through space it would bypass the early warning systems. With it, they could launch a nuclear first strike on Pakistan and cripple their nuclear capabilities.
The Concorde was grounded because it was too dangerous, and a space plane would be infinitely moreso. This technology will be mostly for military use.
This is all the data they used:
http://www.rocketjump.org/top2003.txt
For all the thousands of albums released this year, this list only includes not even a hundred, the vast majority of it pop or rap music, and a little bit of soporific alt-rock. They even call it a "A Not-Very-Scientific Analysis". Attempts at objective criticism are bad enough, but this is a joke. Whoever submitted it is probably trying to DoS this guy's personal webpage via slashdotting.
It's a crime there was no mention of the releases from Vital Remains, Black Dahlia Murder, Wehrewolf, Destroyer 666, Iron Maiden, Blut Aus Nord, Aborym, or Iced Earth.
Two of the biggest culprits behind outsourcing are Accenture and Mackenzie. I like one of Accenture's services "Human Performance" and of course they also list "Outsourcing". They are making a lucrative business out of going from company to company telling them which parts of the company to offshore and how to do it. Unfortunately HR consulting can't be easily offshored so they can't get a taste of their own medicine. If you see these snakes...errr...people coming in the door, get your resume and unemployment insurance paperwork in order.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of the overpaid executives the argument is unavoidably compelling. Labor costs are so integral to profit margin that there has always been constant pressure to reduce labor costs. American labor made a lot of gains in the 20th century which started out with conditions about as dismal as most of the third world has now. Unfortunately with the development of free trade, cheap telecommunications and a very efficient air and sea freight expensive American labor has become largely a liability unless you're in a service business that requires you're body be in the U.S. Of course there is also a solution for service, immigrants legal or illegal. Its no secret why there is so little enforcement of immigration law in the U.S and why H1B visas are so popular. It provides a vast pool of ultra cheap labor for service jobs, labor that by definition can't compain about poor working conditions. If you work for a living in the U.S. the good times are over.
Dell's action is commendable until you read that they apparently didn't sack anybody in India so presumably they just shifted all of their inferior customer service in India to individuals who haven't got the clout to effectively complain.
I was going to post, but there's currently a national tragedy -- TV cameras on CNN and other major news networks are showing a huge cloud of smoke rising from Times Square [b]RIGHT NOW[/b].
What this article really doens't say much about is that NIMS isn't just an open source program for controlling robots, it's a program developed by grants given to UCLA to develop AI, or Ambient Intelligence in this isntance. This robot isn't entirely remote controlled, and though the article touches on continual monitoring, it doesn't say that it's using open source robot AI developed by UCLA.
For more info about NIMS:
UCLA doc in PDF
Google HTML Cache
It costs roughly $100,000 per pound to send an object up into space, and your tax dollars just paid to send a sundial, of all things, to Mars. Not only that, it required costly custom precision machining, and even fancy laser engraving, according to the article. The main goal of it wasn't a backup plan, and as with the earthdial, it was simply part of Bill Nye's bizarre plan to show kids how the sun illuminates a planet.
As usual software solution could have been done for far less than a bulky hardware solution.
You have two options: donation and recycling.
:)
u ters/compdonations.htm
n dex.html
If the parts work, there's quite a few organizations that would like to ship your old components to places like West Africa for all the GN's there and so on. The trick, however, is to use it to write off some REALLY hefty tax deductions -- your old 386 is still worth the $3000 you paid for it in the eyes of the IRS
Links to donation places can be found here:
http://www.wastecap.org/wastecap/commodities/comp
But if they're broken, and you don't feel like giving away dead parts to cheat taxes either, recycle them and make a few bucks. Here's a list of places:
http://www.microweb.com/pepsite/Recycle/recycle_i
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.
.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.
This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance-this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in
Have a Merry Christmas!
The Akosa PlugLan(TM) Network Jack -- imagine how much time, effort, and money stringing up CAT5 network cables could be saved if we simply just used these instead to use our existing electrical wires to transmit data.
Motorola IMfree Personal Instant Messenger -- kick the middle school girls off of the computers, and give them these little keypads. $1500 machines being hogged for using AIM is ridiculous. Plus it's Linux-based.
"Air Flo" Hand Cooling Controllers -- When playing Xbox for hours on end, your controllers will become slicker than a greased yoda, but these have air conditioning built in to prevent that. Now, if they could do this for mice, it would be great.
Cool stuff. I look forward to it.
Microsoft didn't invent the operating system, didn't invent the GUI, nor did they invent the word processor, or the spreadsheet or the database. They didn't even invent the idea of an "integrated" package. Almost none of Microsoft's products have ever had even a tiny shred of originality or innovation, not even their first product, their BASIC interpreter for the Altair.
This may come as a surprise to many Microsoft fanboys, but Bill Gates didn't invent BASIC, that was invented by two Dartmouth professors about 10 years before Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote their interpreter for the Altair. For that matter, Bill Gates had worked on a similar BASIC interpreter for the DEC minicomputers while he was an intern at Digital before he wrote Altair BASIC, and Altair BASIC was quite similar to DEC BASIC.
Many of the products which Microsoft is famous for weren't even originally written by Microsoft, they were purchased from other companies or Microsoft absorbed other companies to get them. Examples would be MS-DOS and Visual BASIC. That's right, Visual BASIC was purchased, not developed originally within Microsoft Furthermore, for example, MS-DOS's direct predecessor QDOS was a direct clone of CP/M. Windows certainly wasn't the first GUI (see Apple), in fact it wasn't even the first GUI shell that ran on top of MS-DOS.
That, plus the whole Internet Explorer fiasco we all can remember.
It's no surprise they can't even invent original RPGs. I hope they get sued into the ground this time around, especially considering their past history of getting away with stealing everyone else's work through strongarm tactics.
We have all these movies now where CG-generated characters are used to fight and kill each other in every gory fashion imaginable, but why don't we have any movies where thousands of people get together and make love, not war? A massive orgy comprising of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, CG-generated characters in the scope and scale of Lord of the Rings would be an unforgettable moment in moviemaking history. Perhaps it would inspire the nations of Europe to solve their rapid depopulation problem -- we could have a summer of love all over again.
I was quite disappointed when that scene in the Matrix 2 turned out to be a mere scantily clad rave in a cave, all done with paid actors.
We all know Mitnick is in quite a bit of trouble, but the fact that he's a good social engineer still persists. He was traumatized in jail, and most of what he was severely punished for was probably due to non-cooperation, in that "hacker" attitude, with very influential people. Most likely, he got out of such things by giving in and cutting deals.
Before you send in any good stories, be they fact or fiction, think of this: what if FBI / Homeland Security agents are on the case working with Mitnick, reading those letters that will supposedly go into the book and tracing who sent them? They've been known to do similar things to get people to brag before, which is the easiest way to catch people, or at least make it seem that way. With John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge in the government, they will stoop to any low to put hackers, whom they view as terrorists, behind bars.