Sometimes, I wonder if some people's dislike of fat chicks is just something that has been imposed on us by society. Howmany of us secretly fancy them, but are too afraid to admit it to anyone? Does this percieved dislike end up giving the lasses of greater proportions a lower self-esteem, making them less pleasant, and re-inforcing the stereotype? According to this article, a 'plain' looking girl was entered into an online russian beauty contest as a prank, but ended up getting most of the votes, but was disqualified because of her age.
In the days of old, fat women used to be considered the most attractive, and often appeared in classical art. Perhaps being fat was a symbol of fertility, and to maximise your chances of passing on your genes, you tended to look for a more fertile woman. Nowardays, people just want to get laid, so maybe they subconciously look for women who are un-fertile.
>and don't even think about coding while drunk, all you get is code riddled with errors and a headache.
I've tried coding when drunk a few times, and I've noticed I take a more 'gung-ho' approach to coding. While the code itself does it's function, I find the next day when I look at the code, that it misses out a lot of checks for return values from functions likely to fail, and generally, I leave out robustness-tests. Come to think of it, when drunk, I am of the philosophy that debugging can wait until I've sobered up.
I just installed all the latest patches on two Windows 2000 Pro machines, and don't notice any slowdown. The installation history said that 'KB835732' was installed, and I even checked for additional critical updates after a reboot. I also checked the processes with task-manager, and the stsyem-idle process was at 99%.
Perhaps the patches interfere with some other software that's installed on your machine.
>Right now if you use Visual Studio (and any windows library) you are suposudly prevented by the EULA from creating GPL'd code. So, in the windows world, if there were a good alternative that allowed for GPL code creation/distribution I think it would be used.
GCC has been ported to Windows. If you just want a minimalistic setup, try MinGW (Minimalist GNU For Windows). This just installs things like GCC and 'make' and a few GCC-related tools. If you want GCC with an entire unix-like environment running under Windows where you can do builds that rely a lot on unix-tools, and build programs that assume a unix-environment, I suggest you install Cygwin.
As for the Windows libraries, I'm not sure if the EULA that applies to Visual studio that prevents you from writing GPL'd code also applies to using the Windows librasries with GCC-based compilers as well.
The 'badgers' cartoon is actually part of a collection from the Weebl's stuff Toon Collection (they also have games and other stuff - just select the headings at the top).
>What the *hell* is wrong with the human psyche?
>Maybe it's just an exhaustion with polished, glitzy, perfect, tweaked-by-marketroids stuff.
The nature of the Internet means that it's possible for people to publish things themselves without any interference from the cultural equivalent of the powers that be. When writing a book, TV programme or a film, the authour does not have the means to get it out into the world, and they do that through publishers/producers. These publishers are very picky about what goes out, and if they don't see mass appeal, they reject the submission. This has the result that they also end up dictating culture, because we're so used to seeing what does not get rejected that we end up thinking of it as normal, and in extreme circumstances, we actually like this mass-produced entertainment.
When publishing a web-page, all you have to do is upload your material to a web-server, and spread the URL around. There is nobody to dictate what can or cannot be published. All of a sudden, authours get into te habit of going straight from brain to output without the interference of the cultural police. This results in things that look very un-orthodox, but appeal to some people in ways that mainstream culture could not possibly appeal. As the Internet grows, people's minds will be expanded by the greater variety of art out there, and finally be free, and who knows, these free minds may someday overthrow our cultural overlords.
Does anyone else find having entire Cybercafes blacklisted by anti-spam filters a bit worrying?
I do a lot of travelling, and about a year ago, I noticed that in a lot of Cybercafes, when I tried to e-mail a particlar person, I got an automated response from their mail-server to say it had rejected the e-mail because it was spam. I usually use my Freeserve account (via a web-mail interface). I wondered how my e-mail address could have become blacklisted, and tried my Hotmail account which I hardly use (I only got one could use MSN messanger). The Hotmail e-mail got through (I got no automated rejection, and even a reply). This at first led me to the conclusion that my Freeserve e-mail address had been blacklisted. Later, I found that sometimes, e-mails from my Freeserve account would get through, and at other-times, they would be rejected.
Eventually, I figured out that it was the IP address of the place I was sending it from that triggered the spam-filter. This has lead me to two conclusions.
E-mails sent from Hotmail accounts are immune to spam-filters, but not from Freeserve accounts.
Just about half of the Cybercafes or Internet-Kiosks I have been to have been abused by spammers.
Do all spam-rejecting filters give out an automated rejection-reply? If not, then I won't know that my e-mail has been rejected by an anti-spam filter, and I won't try to mail it again from my Hotmail account or another place with Internet access.
Thanks to the Internet - a medium where anyone can publish anything, people are learning more about what really interests them, and are less likely to be interested in the pre-packaged entertainment that is television.
Unlike television, where only the shows that get the go-ahead to be produced are broadcast. The broadcasting companies are usualy only interested in producing something based on something else with a proven track-record and are less likely to innovate. They try to make it to appeal to as many viewers as possible. Whereas web-pages are just made by someone wanting to share their own brand of 'entertainment' with like-minded people.
In other words, the Internet is helping people break out of the tyranny of popular culture being shoved down our throats by the TV. Once people have tasted this freedom to like what they want to like, they are less likely to go back to the TV.
With all the attention Sedna has been taking away from Mars lately, I thought I'd re-write the words to the song in this Flash-animation. Come and visit sunny Sedna.
Where can see aliens?
Only in Sedna.
Going to Sedna we've got aliens.
Where can see spacemen?
Only in Sedna.
Got aliens and spacemen only in Sedna.
Forget Mars!
[Mars?
Population: 'fossil'
No. Of aliens = 0
No. Of spacemen = 0
Main Export : Rock
Rock < Alien = Sedna wins More like Schmars!
]
Sedna,
oh Sedna, [If Sedna was to physically urinate all over Mars(*) as well as metaphorically then the orange dotted line on the right would indicate the most probable trajectory to ensure a good coverage. (*)This is a fairly rare ocurance though.]
where the Grey's are,
and the Green's are.
Sedna, Sedna Sedna Sedna.
Sedna, we're going to Sedna.
Can you believe it? [free space-suit with every visit.]
IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), but if one of these air-submarines is built that is large enough to carry a spacecraft, it could be lifted to a height where the atmosphere is a lot thinner, and gravity weaker.
Considering that the vast majority of the mass of a spacecraft at launch is it's fuel (most of which is used to launch more fuel), the payload of the spacecraft that can be launched from an air-submarine would be considerably lighter than that of a conventional spacecraft at launch. Once the air-submarine has reached it's maximum height, the spacecraft could then take off (a horizontal launch would be preferable, as vertical thrust may not be as effective on a floating air-submarine than it would be on the ground, not to mention the air-submarine would have to be designed to survive a rocket thrusting against it's top). Thanks to the height it's already gained, it is closer to the altitude at which it is to orbit. Also, the lower gravity and the thinner atmosphere (less drag) would mean that the velocity to reach the desired orbit would be lower.
However, even with less fuel, spacecraft still tend to be massive. The air-submarine would have to have extremely large buoyancy chambers to be able to lift a payload the mass of the spacecraft (I'm not even sure if such large buoyancy chambers are feasable).
Anyway, speaking of launching spacecraft at an altitude. Does anyone know why NASA chose a launchpad in Florida that is more or less at sea-level? If they had built it high up in the Rockies, they could have saved some fuel. The difference in gravity and drag may not be much, but beacuse rockets as we know them are mostly fuel, then surely the ammount of fuel to accelerate it into orbit would be less.
>The program is 16-bit DOS.
>[...]
>> If a C compiler was written that knew of the trick you mentioned, it would have to be able to tell which integers are 32-bits and which ones are 16-bits
>No, that's not really necessary. Shorts are 16-bit integers.
Oops - I assumed you were writing 32-bit protected mode code. My bad.
>The bswap idea sounds good, but I'd rather if the program worked on all i386+ chips.
Now that I think about it, the bswap idea may not be such a good idea after all. IIRC, on 80486's and above, there is an execution pipeline that executes instructions while others further back in the pipeline are being decoded. For some reason, an opcode with less than two operands creates a stall (although I'm not so sure about 1 operand opcodes - it's been a while...). I'm not sure if bswap is one of those operands, but I remember one trick for optimising pairs of nop's that are used for padding is to replace two nop's with a mov eax, eax. This prevents a pipeline stall, and even decreases pipeline congestion, as this is a single instruction, and not two. So basically, you're getting the processor to do nothing faster. Even GCC uses that trick to generate faster code.
>Actually, I had a 433Mhz Celeron, and I believe it was faster to do the overwrite (I only changed the immediates on O(1)).
IIRC, Celerons were basically Pentiums without the cache, so Celerons would not experience the cache-miss issues caused by self-modifying code, but I could be wrong...
>Eventually, I switched away from doing this to use 32-bit registered to behave like 2 16-bit registered to avoid doing lots of pushes. Just had to do rol 16 at appropriate times.
Thanks to the convolutedness of the x86 architecture, if you're running the CPU in 32-bit protected mode, you would have to add a prefix to each instruction to turn it into a 16-bit instruction. Not only does the prefix make the code longer, but this prefix also stalls the CPU. On 80486's and above, there's a bswap instruction (can't remember the exact name). This swaps the endian-ness of the dword in the register. bswap could be used instead of rol 16, and again instead of doing a ror 16 to get the value back. The only difference is that the bytes in the high-word of the dword will have their endian-ness changed, but if you're only doing this to shove a 16-bit value aside while you work on another 16-bit value, this should be no problem.
>I'm sort of surprised there isn't a compiler optimization to do this, as the results were nearly as fast as self-modifying code.
x86 assembler is a complete mess, and with somany processors and cache-configurations available - each with their own quirks, writing the most optimised code has become an artform and is something best done by hand. Of course, caches, virtual memory, multi-tasking and multi-processors make life that bit harder. If a C compiler was written that knew of the trick you mentioned, it would have to be able to tell which integers are 32-bits and which ones are 16-bits (when programming for an x86 architecture in C, it is adviasble to use 32-bit integers wherever possible regardless of the range of values it will store (except for when size is an issue). This is because there is no instruction-prefix for 32-bit instructions). The compiler has no means of knowing at compile-time whether or not a 32-bit integer is going to store values outside of the range of a 16-bit value, so it would not be able to apply this trick. If the programmer were to specify which values are 16-bit when writing the C code, they have no way of knowing if the compiler is going to use that particular trick or not, or if it would have come up with something faster if the values were 32-bit. And if you're that inclined to try and give hints to the compiler, you may as well be programming in assembly. So this optimisation is best left to writing assembly code by hand. However in C99, it is possible to specify that a data-type should be the fastest type that can store N bits (ie. not necessarily the smallest type), so a C99 compiler might just be able to handle that optimisation without the programmer giving hints to the compiler.
> I would entertain listening to cases where self-mod'ing code has its place.
The Intel x86 architecture has few registers, so if you want to keep lots of values handy, you're going to have to keep swapping values in and out of memory. Alternatively, immediate-value constants can be hard-coded in the code that do not change during a long loop or a loop with many layers of nestedness. Just before the loop is executed, these hard-coded constants will be modified by re-writing the immediate-values in the code. An example of this is some code that draws a scaled translucent sprite. Throughout the code, the scale will remain constant, and if the translucency is uniform, that will remain constant too. The code that does the translucent blitting will use the registers only for values that change during the sprite-drawing.
On an 80386, using this technique will cause a significant speed-increase in the code, but on 80486's and above where there are on-board L1 caches on the CPUs, the code-modification may cause cache-misses that may slow down the system - espcecially if it is run on an even newer x86 CPU that has a seperate program and data cache in the L1 cache. To make things worse, nowardays, most code runs in a multi-tasking environment, so trying to figure out if self-modifying code causes a slowdown or a speed-increase is almost impossible to predict.
Of course, nowardays, most drawing is done by hardware accellerated graphics cards so this isn't a good example, but there could still be some use for hard-coding values that do not change in a loop.
>God help us if Christians and Muslims ever found out that humans weren't the only highly-evolved beings in the universe.
Now here's a thought. If extra-terrestrial life was found, would Christians believe that Jesus died for their sins too? Would the Muslims believe that the Jihad to convert everyone to Islam would extend beyond the bounds of this planet?
> The planet is thought to have been completely resurfaced around 500 million years ago, with relatively little geological activity since then. Why?
According to this article, there is a theory that the re-surfacing of Venus was caused by a collision with an escaped moon of a planet that used to exist where Mars now orbits. The article is mostly about Mars, but several paragraphs after the heading "Implications for Martian Life", it briefly mentions this idea about the collision with Venus 500 million years ago.
>But the language won't fundamentally limit their thoughts.
Have you read George Orwell's 1984? It describes a tyranical world that goes to great lengths to prevent any form of dissent. One of the things that is happening in the world is that a new language called 'Newspeak' is being developped. The idea is that 'Newspeak' is a language that is designed to prevent the expression of ideas that go contrary to the system. It's basically a simplified form of English, but if you think in 'Newspeak', you are less likely to form a rebelious idea. Of course, 'Newspeak' is only a hurdle to those peole who don't think abstractly enough.
> (Can you tell? I'm extremely tempted to install realplayer, just to be able to listen to BBC worldservice broadcasts-- even though I know it'll slow my computer down, violate my privacy, and open my computer up to attacks...)
You can use an old version of RealPlayer downloaded from
http://www.oldversion.com that does not mess around with your PC.
Realplayer 8 is the last version of RealPlayer released before RealPlayer One which is the first version to use devious tricks to hide the checked no-spam/adware/malware checkboxes. Although RealPlayer 8 also has some opt-out ad thingies, at least in RealPlayer 8, they are easy to find and disabling them is straightforward. The only annoying thing about my version of Reallayer 8 is that occasionally, it asks me to upgrade to RealPlayer One, but this is easy to ignore.
As you can see from the front-page of oldversion.com, RealPlayer 8 is one of the most popular downloads on that site.
Slashdot Mirror
In the days of old, fat women used to be considered the most attractive, and often appeared in classical art. Perhaps being fat was a symbol of fertility, and to maximise your chances of passing on your genes, you tended to look for a more fertile woman. Nowardays, people just want to get laid, so maybe they subconciously look for women who are un-fertile.
I've tried coding when drunk a few times, and I've noticed I take a more 'gung-ho' approach to coding. While the code itself does it's function, I find the next day when I look at the code, that it misses out a lot of checks for return values from functions likely to fail, and generally, I leave out robustness-tests. Come to think of it, when drunk, I am of the philosophy that debugging can wait until I've sobered up.
I just installed all the latest patches on two Windows 2000 Pro machines, and don't notice any slowdown. The installation history said that 'KB835732' was installed, and I even checked for additional critical updates after a reboot. I also checked the processes with task-manager, and the stsyem-idle process was at 99%.
Perhaps the patches interfere with some other software that's installed on your machine.
GCC has been ported to Windows. If you just want a minimalistic setup, try MinGW (Minimalist GNU For Windows). This just installs things like GCC and 'make' and a few GCC-related tools. If you want GCC with an entire unix-like environment running under Windows where you can do builds that rely a lot on unix-tools, and build programs that assume a unix-environment, I suggest you install Cygwin.
As for the Windows libraries, I'm not sure if the EULA that applies to Visual studio that prevents you from writing GPL'd code also applies to using the Windows librasries with GCC-based compilers as well.
Another site with silly Flash cartoons worth looking at is http://www.rathergood.com/. I like the one where they turn Destiny's child into a bunch of kittens from Northern England.
>What the *hell* is wrong with the human psyche?
>Maybe it's just an exhaustion with polished, glitzy, perfect, tweaked-by-marketroids stuff.
The nature of the Internet means that it's possible for people to publish things themselves without any interference from the cultural equivalent of the powers that be. When writing a book, TV programme or a film, the authour does not have the means to get it out into the world, and they do that through publishers/producers. These publishers are very picky about what goes out, and if they don't see mass appeal, they reject the submission. This has the result that they also end up dictating culture, because we're so used to seeing what does not get rejected that we end up thinking of it as normal, and in extreme circumstances, we actually like this mass-produced entertainment.
When publishing a web-page, all you have to do is upload your material to a web-server, and spread the URL around. There is nobody to dictate what can or cannot be published. All of a sudden, authours get into te habit of going straight from brain to output without the interference of the cultural police. This results in things that look very un-orthodox, but appeal to some people in ways that mainstream culture could not possibly appeal. As the Internet grows, people's minds will be expanded by the greater variety of art out there, and finally be free, and who knows, these free minds may someday overthrow our cultural overlords.
http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song/
Installing Linux on a Badger is tricky 'coz there's not much room inside, but it's possible to sneak it inside.
If only you could moderate a post "-1, Badum Tisch", or "+1, Badum Tisch" depending on how you were feeling at the time.
Does anyone else find having entire Cybercafes blacklisted by anti-spam filters a bit worrying?
I do a lot of travelling, and about a year ago, I noticed that in a lot of Cybercafes, when I tried to e-mail a particlar person, I got an automated response from their mail-server to say it had rejected the e-mail because it was spam. I usually use my Freeserve account (via a web-mail interface). I wondered how my e-mail address could have become blacklisted, and tried my Hotmail account which I hardly use (I only got one could use MSN messanger). The Hotmail e-mail got through (I got no automated rejection, and even a reply). This at first led me to the conclusion that my Freeserve e-mail address had been blacklisted. Later, I found that sometimes, e-mails from my Freeserve account would get through, and at other-times, they would be rejected.
Eventually, I figured out that it was the IP address of the place I was sending it from that triggered the spam-filter. This has lead me to two conclusions.
Do all spam-rejecting filters give out an automated rejection-reply? If not, then I won't know that my e-mail has been rejected by an anti-spam filter, and I won't try to mail it again from my Hotmail account or another place with Internet access.
Thanks to the Internet - a medium where anyone can publish anything, people are learning more about what really interests them, and are less likely to be interested in the pre-packaged entertainment that is television.
Unlike television, where only the shows that get the go-ahead to be produced are broadcast. The broadcasting companies are usualy only interested in producing something based on something else with a proven track-record and are less likely to innovate. They try to make it to appeal to as many viewers as possible. Whereas web-pages are just made by someone wanting to share their own brand of 'entertainment' with like-minded people.
In other words, the Internet is helping people break out of the tyranny of popular culture being shoved down our throats by the TV. Once people have tasted this freedom to like what they want to like, they are less likely to go back to the TV.
Where can see aliens?
Only in Sedna.
Going to Sedna we've got aliens.
Where can see spacemen?
Only in Sedna.
Got aliens and spacemen only in Sedna.
Forget Mars!
[Mars?
Population: 'fossil'
No. Of aliens = 0
No. Of spacemen = 0
Main Export : Rock
Rock < Alien = Sedna wins
More like Schmars! ]
Sedna,
oh Sedna,
[If Sedna was to physically urinate all over Mars(*) as well as metaphorically then the orange dotted line on the right would indicate the most probable trajectory to ensure a good coverage. (*)This is a fairly rare ocurance though.]
where the Grey's are,
and the Green's are.
Sedna, Sedna Sedna Sedna.
Sedna, we're going to Sedna.
Can you believe it?
[free space-suit with every visit.]
For more details on Low Saxon, see this page. There's even a link to a map of the areas where it is spoken.
The article says it's got a kitchen sink. Just turn on the tap, and - voila - a water-cooled cooling system.
In the UK where text-messages (SMS's) are old-hat, this has happened previously. See these articles on BBC news:0 .stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2949578.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/204361
Considering that the vast majority of the mass of a spacecraft at launch is it's fuel (most of which is used to launch more fuel), the payload of the spacecraft that can be launched from an air-submarine would be considerably lighter than that of a conventional spacecraft at launch. Once the air-submarine has reached it's maximum height, the spacecraft could then take off (a horizontal launch would be preferable, as vertical thrust may not be as effective on a floating air-submarine than it would be on the ground, not to mention the air-submarine would have to be designed to survive a rocket thrusting against it's top). Thanks to the height it's already gained, it is closer to the altitude at which it is to orbit. Also, the lower gravity and the thinner atmosphere (less drag) would mean that the velocity to reach the desired orbit would be lower.
However, even with less fuel, spacecraft still tend to be massive. The air-submarine would have to have extremely large buoyancy chambers to be able to lift a payload the mass of the spacecraft (I'm not even sure if such large buoyancy chambers are feasable).
Anyway, speaking of launching spacecraft at an altitude. Does anyone know why NASA chose a launchpad in Florida that is more or less at sea-level? If they had built it high up in the Rockies, they could have saved some fuel. The difference in gravity and drag may not be much, but beacuse rockets as we know them are mostly fuel, then surely the ammount of fuel to accelerate it into orbit would be less.
>[...]
>> If a C compiler was written that knew of the trick you mentioned, it would have to be able to tell which integers are 32-bits and which ones are 16-bits
>No, that's not really necessary. Shorts are 16-bit integers.
Oops - I assumed you were writing 32-bit protected mode code. My bad.
>The bswap idea sounds good, but I'd rather if the program worked on all i386+ chips.
Now that I think about it, the bswap idea may not be such a good idea after all. IIRC, on 80486's and above, there is an execution pipeline that executes instructions while others further back in the pipeline are being decoded. For some reason, an opcode with less than two operands creates a stall (although I'm not so sure about 1 operand opcodes - it's been a while...). I'm not sure if bswap is one of those operands, but I remember one trick for optimising pairs of nop's that are used for padding is to replace two nop's with a mov eax, eax. This prevents a pipeline stall, and even decreases pipeline congestion, as this is a single instruction, and not two. So basically, you're getting the processor to do nothing faster. Even GCC uses that trick to generate faster code.
IIRC, Celerons were basically Pentiums without the cache, so Celerons would not experience the cache-miss issues caused by self-modifying code, but I could be wrong...
>Eventually, I switched away from doing this to use 32-bit registered to behave like 2 16-bit registered to avoid doing lots of pushes. Just had to do rol 16 at appropriate times.
Thanks to the convolutedness of the x86 architecture, if you're running the CPU in 32-bit protected mode, you would have to add a prefix to each instruction to turn it into a 16-bit instruction. Not only does the prefix make the code longer, but this prefix also stalls the CPU. On 80486's and above, there's a bswap instruction (can't remember the exact name). This swaps the endian-ness of the dword in the register. bswap could be used instead of rol 16, and again instead of doing a ror 16 to get the value back. The only difference is that the bytes in the high-word of the dword will have their endian-ness changed, but if you're only doing this to shove a 16-bit value aside while you work on another 16-bit value, this should be no problem.
>I'm sort of surprised there isn't a compiler optimization to do this, as the results were nearly as fast as self-modifying code.
x86 assembler is a complete mess, and with somany processors and cache-configurations available - each with their own quirks, writing the most optimised code has become an artform and is something best done by hand. Of course, caches, virtual memory, multi-tasking and multi-processors make life that bit harder. If a C compiler was written that knew of the trick you mentioned, it would have to be able to tell which integers are 32-bits and which ones are 16-bits (when programming for an x86 architecture in C, it is adviasble to use 32-bit integers wherever possible regardless of the range of values it will store (except for when size is an issue). This is because there is no instruction-prefix for 32-bit instructions). The compiler has no means of knowing at compile-time whether or not a 32-bit integer is going to store values outside of the range of a 16-bit value, so it would not be able to apply this trick. If the programmer were to specify which values are 16-bit when writing the C code, they have no way of knowing if the compiler is going to use that particular trick or not, or if it would have come up with something faster if the values were 32-bit. And if you're that inclined to try and give hints to the compiler, you may as well be programming in assembly. So this optimisation is best left to writing assembly code by hand. However in C99, it is possible to specify that a data-type should be the fastest type that can store N bits (ie. not necessarily the smallest type), so a C99 compiler might just be able to handle that optimisation without the programmer giving hints to the compiler.
The Intel x86 architecture has few registers, so if you want to keep lots of values handy, you're going to have to keep swapping values in and out of memory. Alternatively, immediate-value constants can be hard-coded in the code that do not change during a long loop or a loop with many layers of nestedness. Just before the loop is executed, these hard-coded constants will be modified by re-writing the immediate-values in the code. An example of this is some code that draws a scaled translucent sprite. Throughout the code, the scale will remain constant, and if the translucency is uniform, that will remain constant too. The code that does the translucent blitting will use the registers only for values that change during the sprite-drawing.
On an 80386, using this technique will cause a significant speed-increase in the code, but on 80486's and above where there are on-board L1 caches on the CPUs, the code-modification may cause cache-misses that may slow down the system - espcecially if it is run on an even newer x86 CPU that has a seperate program and data cache in the L1 cache. To make things worse, nowardays, most code runs in a multi-tasking environment, so trying to figure out if self-modifying code causes a slowdown or a speed-increase is almost impossible to predict.
Of course, nowardays, most drawing is done by hardware accellerated graphics cards so this isn't a good example, but there could still be some use for hard-coding values that do not change in a loop.
Now here's a thought. If extra-terrestrial life was found, would Christians believe that Jesus died for their sins too? Would the Muslims believe that the Jihad to convert everyone to Islam would extend beyond the bounds of this planet?
According to this article, there is a theory that the re-surfacing of Venus was caused by a collision with an escaped moon of a planet that used to exist where Mars now orbits. The article is mostly about Mars, but several paragraphs after the heading "Implications for Martian Life", it briefly mentions this idea about the collision with Venus 500 million years ago.
Have you read George Orwell's 1984? It describes a tyranical world that goes to great lengths to prevent any form of dissent. One of the things that is happening in the world is that a new language called 'Newspeak' is being developped. The idea is that 'Newspeak' is a language that is designed to prevent the expression of ideas that go contrary to the system. It's basically a simplified form of English, but if you think in 'Newspeak', you are less likely to form a rebelious idea. Of course, 'Newspeak' is only a hurdle to those peole who don't think abstractly enough.
There is a web-tool for finding out what words you can make with a phone-number using the letters that appear next to each number - http://mmm.mbhs.edu/~bconnell/phoneagrams.html
You can use an old version of RealPlayer downloaded from http://www.oldversion.com that does not mess around with your PC.
Realplayer 8 is the last version of RealPlayer released before RealPlayer One which is the first version to use devious tricks to hide the checked no-spam/adware/malware checkboxes. Although RealPlayer 8 also has some opt-out ad thingies, at least in RealPlayer 8, they are easy to find and disabling them is straightforward. The only annoying thing about my version of Reallayer 8 is that occasionally, it asks me to upgrade to RealPlayer One, but this is easy to ignore.
As you can see from the front-page of oldversion.com, RealPlayer 8 is one of the most popular downloads on that site.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3418017.stm
Other sound-sample sites include: http://www.synthzone.com/sampling.htmo /
http://www.ilovewavs.com/
http://www.thewavplace.com
http://www.tintagel.net/resources/Multimedia/Audi
http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/
http://www.modarchive.com/ also has some assorted samples.