When I was in-between residences, and had my cable-modem cut off, the free wireless access points in Austin were lifesavers. I agree with the honor system model--the one time I paid money for wireless access, also in Austin, I regretted it. I paid $5 for an hour, and had to do so with a credit card, and it sucked. The guilt factor is much more effective for getting people to buy coffee or pastries or whatever.
By the way, Little City also had ethernet jacks in the walls, so I generally just plugged in that way. It's great to be able to do homework in a coffee shop and still be able to access the internet. So for anyone in Austin reading this, visit Little City and Schlotsky's (the newer buildings, at least) and hopefully more businesses will offer these kind of perks to draw in customers. Quackenbush's was the place that required payment. Maybe they'll change their policy if the pay system fails.
Oh, and if you have a student ID, the entire University of Texas campus is littered with hot spots.
While I agree with you in general, you are mistaken on that point. Libraries are free carry whatever they want, it's just that most have limited money available and choose to spend it elsewhere. Many libraries do in fact choose to carry Playboy and more.
I guess I was unclear about the distinction between indecent, obscene, and pornographic. Someone else already clarified this point and defined indecent and obscene, so I won't do that again. I didn't mean libraries are forbidden to carry pornography--I just meant you most likely won't find it at your local library. And Playboy is a bad example, since so many authors cut their teeth writing for Playboy (Shel Silverstein and Stephen King, to name a couple). As you pointed out, they have Playboy in Braille!
To restate the argument using more precise terminology (thanks to fellow/.ers): The Supreme Court has found that some materials (Naked Lunch, Playboy, Ulysses, etc.) are indecent yet legitimate art forms. No law can prevent an adult from accessing these items. But the content of those materials would undoubtably be filtered using Net Nanny-style software.
Addendum: the banned-site list is maintained by private organizations, by individuals, and is kept secret. In effect, "this law is purely to enforce censorship on those communities and libraries that choose to use less fitering or no filtering" as you said. But more importantly, it reduces a community's standards to those of a single individual. That's what's so scary.
Have you read the law books lately? Do you know what constitutes a felony? It's not just the drooling insane criminals lurking in dark alleys--you mention drug dealers and traffickers, but what about users? Do you think nonviolent marijuana users (even for medicinal use, in California) should be put in a DNA database?
I know you already conceded this point, but the law would also catalog DNA of those ARRESTED for a felony, guilty or not. There's no reason to think law enforcement wouldn't twist the law to suit their purposes, such as arresting someone with no evidence just to obtain their DNA. Then, with DNA in hand, they might be able to make their case. This might be for the best in certain cases (if the suspect really is guilty of a violent offense), but it's not worth the hit on our civil liberties. Remember what Jefferson said: better to free ten guilty men than convict one innocent.
It's also worth noting law enforcement's history re. search and seizure. Police can seize property they "believe" to be purchased with drug money. But if the suspect is found innocent, the police don't have to return the confiscated property. There are plenty of documented cases of police using this loophole to obtain valuable properties just to augment the department's bank account. There was a blind rancher in California who was actually shot and killed by police raiding his place, with no justification for the raid.
grassroots campaign to end spam
on
The Year In Tech Law
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Besides whitelisting, the only way I can think of to end spam is to get people to stop buying the advertised products. This can't be that hard to do. You could even buy spam-advertised products, as long as you didn't click the link in the email. Ex: rather than clicking the link in a Viagra spam, just find an online drugstore yourself and buy it through them. I know there are plenty of net-stupid people out there, but if everyone takes the time to spread the word, maybe we'll have a reduction in spam. Or, at the very least, keep some money out of the spammers' pockets. Someone second me on this. And for the lazy, it'd be a trivial New Year's resolution to spread the word about not clicking on spam links.
And out of curiosity--there have been plenty of high-profile spammers interviewed in various publications; now that an anti-spam bill has been passed, are those folks all fair game for law enforcement?
libraries and secret site lists
on
The Year In Tech Law
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I find the ruling on libraries, requiring them to install site-blocking software, especially frightening. I know it's been said many times before, but plenty of legitimate sites get blocked--like those discussing reproductive health, or censorship itself. And although outright pornography isn't found in libraries, some books are considered pornography to conservatives. The best example I can think of is "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs, which has some repulsive content, but the Supreme Court ruled it could not be banned as an obscene material. I'm sure an online text of the book would be filtered out.
Of course then there's the software patenting nonsense. At least the patent office has enough sense to realize it needs to reform itself.
My brother tends to like cheesy movies (think "Jean Claude Van Damme"), and in January we went to the theatre with the intention of seeing Eight Crazy Nights, but due to a snafu we got there late, and ended up seeing The Ring. I can't remember another movie I saw in the theatre that scared me like that.
Earlier this month I finally saw Eight Crazy Nights, and have to say it's a stinker. There were two or three funny moments, but for the most part it was a bizarre train wreck. If you have scatalogical tendencies, you might enjoy seeing a bunch of reindeer crapping all over themselves, laughing. I am not kidding.
I did think The Hot Chick was unexpectedly funny (disclaimer: I didn't say it wasn't stupid).
Can't think of anything that particularly blew me away, but plenty of entertaining, throwaway stuff.
Oh--and though it's bound to get Oscar nods, The Hours was the most depressing thing I've ever seen. Just a heads up for those who may see it on the shelf and think, "well, I think I'll pick up this lighthearted fare for a Friday night." You have been warned.
They said the fuel cell produces water and carbon dioxide as products of the reaction. Methanol is much more easily oxidized to CO2 than ethanol. You might end up with acetic acid or other weird stuff that you don't want.
But to make that last step, from oxalic acid (the simplest diacid) to CO2 requires breaking a carbon-carbon bond. Not as easy as stripping hydrogens. Oh, and there are many other oxidative products from ethanol, such as ethylene glycol.
I think the tax on ethanol is less an issue than the chemistry--not that some better catalyst couldn't do the trick.
These devices use 20% methanol. Haven't you ever played with fire? Ever got a mouthful of booze and tried to set it on fire? You have to use something like Bacardi 151 (>75% ethanol) to make a flame, and that's using a lighter (rather than "hot electronics"). No way 20% MeOH could burn. And it's diluted to a mere 6% for the electricity-producing reaction.
Nevertheless, you do have a point about being an early adopter. It's almost always a good idea to let someone else be the guinea pigs.
in Jeff Noon's "Nymphomation."
But the blurbflies mostly served to whisper advertisements into consumers' ears.
Another literary reference that comes to mind is the saboteurs in Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano." Everyone was always suspected of being a saboteur. In the finale there is chaos--people destroying machines everywhere. One guy exclusively destroyed traffic lights. Technology can certainly enslave as easily as it can liberate.
Seriously, though, this kind of intrusive surveillance does justify paranoia and, ironically, the very anti-government sentiments it is meant to address. And people scoff when I complain about GPS in all new cell phones. Not that they couldn't triangulate coordinates anyway, with an older cell phone.
Hell, I'd be happy enough if they'd just get rid of that goddamn registry. One of the biggest problems I've had with Windows is the lack of modularity. If you get a new hard disk, and want to transfer one program from the old drive without making a clone of the whole drive, you can't do it. Even if you copy the whole directory with the desired program, there's always those stupid registry keys that'll muck it up.
The registry is also responsible for the massive slooow dooownnn you experience after installing/uninstalling programs (like when testing out shareware programs).
There are plenty of reasons I hate using Windows (and I haven't, at home, since my Celeron 300a croaked awhile ago, and my Powerbook G4 does everything so much better), but I'll stick with my #1 reason. That evil HKEY\\BUNCH_OF_GIBBERISH.
Jeez, how hard is it to include a closing tag for italics? I mean [less than]/i[greater than] And how do I write html source in a/. posting?
Someone want to write the NY Times and tell them to fix it? I'm too lazy.
On occasion I've experienced a delay when I ssh to a server in Ann Arbor (I'm in Oregon), but that usually happens only when the internet has just been connected (after I've rebooted my flaky DSL router) or after a fresh boot, and sometimes after my Powerbook wakes up from a long nap. But at all other times, no problem. But I'm not running any unusual daemons in the background, and my box is not setup to ssh into.
I'd like to segue from that into asking if anyone knows whether it's possible to set up the ssh daemon so I can remotely login to my box (that seems not an apt term for a notebook--perhaps "tray"?) keeping in mind I'm behind the DSL router. Is having a static IP important? I rarely reboot, so I imagine the IP would stay put until I do. This is an area with which I'm not familiar. Anyone have a FAQ which addresses the router problem?
You make it sound like students don't do real math. Unless you're a mathematician, an electrical engineer or scientist who writes modeling software, there are few occupations that require the level of math of college level classes.
And there are many occasions where the graphing functions of my TI have proved useful in the workplace. To name a few:
- being able to view every key I've entered before evaluating the expression
- being able to revise and edit incorrect expressions
- to determine linear regression fits for data sets
- to perform functions like logarithms and square roots on said data sets, in order to linearize them (linearity being checked, of course, by the R^2 correlation of my fit)
- anything at all to do with linear algebra, especially solving systems of equations or matrix manipulations. RREF is a bitch by hand.
For more "pure" math (like Diff. Eq.), I agree that pencil and paper are generally easier. But any applied math (a.k.a. engineering) requires an insane amount of busy work that could not be handled with a puny scientific calculator. I know you said Engineering and Physics are different stories, but everything I just wrote could certainly apply to all sciences (even the "soft" ones like Psych. and Sociology), or anything at all requiring data collection.
For the record, I use a TI-86 daily at a bio-tech job. It has the stats capabilities of the 83, plus all the good parts of the 85.
This is the cheapo, ghetto version of silly putty, which will likely rot (that's right, as in decompose) because of the materials used.
Real Silly Putty is made by Dow Corning (in my hometown of Greensboro, NC, in fact) from silicone-related starting materials. But if you just want something to impress the youngsters in your school science class, using glue and sodium borate will attract their attention for at least a few minutes.
I'm too lazy to find it myself, but I'm sure the patent on Silly Putty includes the real ingredients and process info. Any Karma Whores out their want to go patent-fishing?
The Volkswagen Jetta and Passat TDIs are great cars, and get mileage comparable to these hybrids. The turbo diesel has plenty of pickup (I drove the Passat), and with no spark plugs is much simpler and less prone to failure than any gasoline engine.
What I'd really like to see is a turbo diesel hybrid, or at least the regenerative braking. It's ridiculous that all cars today don't have that feature, especially for city driving.
Unless you're the type of person who only listens to music played on a six string guitar, "farking up the media" is in many ways equivalent to creating new instruments. In the past, such experiments were usually no more than noise, but there are several notable exceptions.
I personally know Eugene Chadbourne, from Greensboro, NC, who often invents instruments such as the electric rake. Another was rubber super balls (like from a vending machine) with pickups stuck inside them, so the bouncing sound could be output through an amp (or computer, or whatever).
In Brazil, Os Mutantes and Tom Ze, members of the Tropicalia movement, did some really crazy stuff to their instruments/sound systems. David Byrne (Talking Heads) liked Tom Ze so much that he rereleased some of his music on the Luaka Bop label (subsidiary of Warner Bros, I think).
Someone else mentioned Kid Koala, but Aphex Twin, DJ Spooky, and Squarepusher are a few electronic artists who have been especially innovative. Given the capabilities of samplers these days, experimentation like this beer/CD thing can have much broader implications than the mp3s this guy made. I understand that creating new instruments is not exactly playing with the media, but what about a song that samples the crackles and pops of an old LP? Or a vocal track recorded on really low-fi equipment (I'm thinking of "I Can Hear You" by They Might Be Giants, recorded using old wax cylinders ala Thomas Edison).
Yeah, linux is portable--we all know that.
So is BSD, esp. NetBSD (how many platforms does that run on? They pride themselves on
portability.)
But Sony beat everyone to the punch. Their version of linux (Kondara, based on Red Hat, acc. to
this article)
has been out for awhile, over a year.
The code is out there to be tweaked however you want. And since the hard work has been done, it shouldn't be difficult to port any distribution, as long as you have the endurance to add the proper flags to all relevant files. But you don't have to take my word for it. Straight from the linked article:
As for the portability of code from Linux on a PC system to the PS2, most applications written on a PC will compile on the PlayStation 2 with little or no modification. The significant difference is having to pass the --host option to the configure script. The kit supports languages typical to a Linux distribution, like C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. The only one missing is Java, although Kaffe has been ported by others in the Linux PS2 community.
Mod parent down as "Obvious." I don't need anyone to tell me it was inevitable that linux be ported to PS2, because it happened over a year ago. What is news is that a new distribution is available in addition to Sony's.
Um, the magazine's name is in the first sentence below the picture... did you not get past the picture?;)
To use a horrible colloquialism, my bad.
I read the article when it was originally posted on/. and didn't bother reading it again; just posted it for those unfortunate enough to miss it the first time. Occasionally fark.com posts links to FHM nymphettes, and that's how I knew she was a covergirl--I just didn't put two and two together.
There was a lot of inside info from people who work at Virginia Tech or go to school there. Lots of speculation and rumor, too, if you're into that sort of thing.
I knew this article seemed familiar . . .
At the end of June, there was another
article about a consumer in Brazil who sued for the same reason. And won. In contrast to this French case, the guy won about $340. Whether that is in addition to legal fees, I don't know.
The original Brazilian article referenced is
here.
Interestingly, the Brazilian CD which was defective (Tribalistas, featuring Marisa Monte, Arnaldo Antunes, and Carlinhos Brown) was not copy-protected in the US (I was worried after reading this article, but I bought a copy and had no problems reading it on my Mac).
Deleting the terminal.app preferences file did indeed fix the terminal--brought it back to life. However, still no working font or color menus. To clarify, fonts work fine in most applications (MS Word, for example), but NOT the ones that use Cocoa's built-in font manager. Almost all applications that allow customized fonts or colors use the built-in capabilities. So terminal works, but it's default black-on-white with default fonts.
To clarify something else, I didn't think using bash instead of tcsh should break anything, but Apple's help line wouldn't help me because I had used bash. Whether that was the problem or not, they were unwilling (or unable) to help me fix my system once they heard I had changed some Darwin-level settings. Bah. What good is a help line if they can't actually help you?
I guess a reinstall might be in order, but it seems a bit drastic . . . I'd rather pinpoint and fix the specific problems.
As another side note--anyone see flickering screens (this on my laptop's LCD) after moving to jaguar? I'm guessing it's poorly-implemented quartz-extreme, b/c it usually happens on graphics-intensive programs.
The best translation I can give is "to get with it," although it also means apurar (hurry up), and sometimes "wake up" also. "Espabilado" means "on the ball," "street smart," and "brilliant" (like a source of light). Si usted quiere saber por que la palavra parece muy rara, es porque no se usa mucho en mexico o espana--pero es comun en otras partes del mundo latino, especialmente centroamerica.
But I think what you want to know is where that confounded quote came from. It's from a song by Mano Negra (fronted by Manu Chao), called
"La Vida"(sorry about the backdround image). They have songs in Spanish, English, French, and Farsi. Manu Chao has a couple songs in Portuguese, too.
In college, for my chemical engineering plant design class, one group had a project producing dicyclopentadiene (aka DCPD). It's a solid white hydrocarbon that melts at a little over 100F or so (check
www.chemfinder.com for exact numbers). Anyway, our professor said it was used in lava lamps.
In addition, the link mentioned that propylene glycol is one of the chemicals that can be used (for the part that isn't lava), and said it was expensive. Not true. Ethylene glycol (EG) and propylene glycol (PG) are both used in antifreeze. EG will kill animals if ingested (causes kidney failure unless you saturate your system with ethanol, i.e., booze). PG is a nontoxic alternative. It's not always as easy to find, and it might be colored green, but it's cheap.
Good luck out there, and don't start any fires you can't extinguish.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, Little City also had ethernet jacks in the walls, so I generally just plugged in that way. It's great to be able to do homework in a coffee shop and still be able to access the internet. So for anyone in Austin reading this, visit Little City and Schlotsky's (the newer buildings, at least) and hopefully more businesses will offer these kind of perks to draw in customers. Quackenbush's was the place that required payment. Maybe they'll change their policy if the pay system fails.
Oh, and if you have a student ID, the entire University of Texas campus is littered with hot spots.
Ever visit Austin, Texas?
I guess I was unclear about the distinction between indecent, obscene, and pornographic. Someone else already clarified this point and defined indecent and obscene, so I won't do that again. I didn't mean libraries are forbidden to carry pornography--I just meant you most likely won't find it at your local library. And Playboy is a bad example, since so many authors cut their teeth writing for Playboy (Shel Silverstein and Stephen King, to name a couple). As you pointed out, they have Playboy in Braille!
To restate the argument using more precise terminology (thanks to fellow /.ers): The Supreme Court has found that some materials (Naked Lunch, Playboy, Ulysses, etc.) are indecent yet legitimate art forms. No law can prevent an adult from accessing these items. But the content of those materials would undoubtably be filtered using Net Nanny-style software.
Addendum: the banned-site list is maintained by private organizations, by individuals, and is kept secret. In effect, "this law is purely to enforce censorship on those communities and libraries that choose to use less fitering or no filtering" as you said. But more importantly, it reduces a community's standards to those of a single individual. That's what's so scary.
Have you read the law books lately? Do you know what constitutes a felony? It's not just the drooling insane criminals lurking in dark alleys--you mention drug dealers and traffickers, but what about users? Do you think nonviolent marijuana users (even for medicinal use, in California) should be put in a DNA database?
I know you already conceded this point, but the law would also catalog DNA of those ARRESTED for a felony, guilty or not. There's no reason to think law enforcement wouldn't twist the law to suit their purposes, such as arresting someone with no evidence just to obtain their DNA. Then, with DNA in hand, they might be able to make their case. This might be for the best in certain cases (if the suspect really is guilty of a violent offense), but it's not worth the hit on our civil liberties. Remember what Jefferson said: better to free ten guilty men than convict one innocent.
It's also worth noting law enforcement's history re. search and seizure. Police can seize property they "believe" to be purchased with drug money. But if the suspect is found innocent, the police don't have to return the confiscated property. There are plenty of documented cases of police using this loophole to obtain valuable properties just to augment the department's bank account. There was a blind rancher in California who was actually shot and killed by police raiding his place, with no justification for the raid.
And out of curiosity--there have been plenty of high-profile spammers interviewed in various publications; now that an anti-spam bill has been passed, are those folks all fair game for law enforcement?
Of course then there's the software patenting nonsense. At least the patent office has enough sense to realize it needs to reform itself.
Earlier this month I finally saw Eight Crazy Nights, and have to say it's a stinker. There were two or three funny moments, but for the most part it was a bizarre train wreck. If you have scatalogical tendencies, you might enjoy seeing a bunch of reindeer crapping all over themselves, laughing. I am not kidding.
I did think The Hot Chick was unexpectedly funny (disclaimer: I didn't say it wasn't stupid).
Can't think of anything that particularly blew me away, but plenty of entertaining, throwaway stuff.
Oh--and though it's bound to get Oscar nods, The Hours was the most depressing thing I've ever seen. Just a heads up for those who may see it on the shelf and think, "well, I think I'll pick up this lighthearted fare for a Friday night." You have been warned.
For methanol, the oxidation process occurs thus:
CH3OH-->CH2O (formaldehyde)-->CH2O2 (formic acid)-->CO2
For ethanol, the process would be a little different:
C2H6O-->C2H4O (acetaldehyde)-->C2H4O2 (acetic acid)--> . . . oxalic acid --> 2CO2
But to make that last step, from oxalic acid (the simplest diacid) to CO2 requires breaking a carbon-carbon bond. Not as easy as stripping hydrogens. Oh, and there are many other oxidative products from ethanol, such as ethylene glycol.
I think the tax on ethanol is less an issue than the chemistry--not that some better catalyst couldn't do the trick.
Nevertheless, you do have a point about being an early adopter. It's almost always a good idea to let someone else be the guinea pigs.
Another literary reference that comes to mind is the saboteurs in Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano." Everyone was always suspected of being a saboteur. In the finale there is chaos--people destroying machines everywhere. One guy exclusively destroyed traffic lights. Technology can certainly enslave as easily as it can liberate.
Seriously, though, this kind of intrusive surveillance does justify paranoia and, ironically, the very anti-government sentiments it is meant to address. And people scoff when I complain about GPS in all new cell phones. Not that they couldn't triangulate coordinates anyway, with an older cell phone.
The registry is also responsible for the massive slooow dooownnn you experience after installing/uninstalling programs (like when testing out shareware programs).
There are plenty of reasons I hate using Windows (and I haven't, at home, since my Celeron 300a croaked awhile ago, and my Powerbook G4 does everything so much better), but I'll stick with my #1 reason. That evil HKEY\\BUNCH_OF_GIBBERISH.
Jeez, how hard is it to include a closing tag for italics? I mean [less than]/i[greater than] And how do I write html source in a /. posting?
Someone want to write the NY Times and tell them to fix it? I'm too lazy.
I'd like to segue from that into asking if anyone knows whether it's possible to set up the ssh daemon so I can remotely login to my box (that seems not an apt term for a notebook--perhaps "tray"?) keeping in mind I'm behind the DSL router. Is having a static IP important? I rarely reboot, so I imagine the IP would stay put until I do. This is an area with which I'm not familiar. Anyone have a FAQ which addresses the router problem?
And there are many occasions where the graphing functions of my TI have proved useful in the workplace. To name a few:
- being able to view every key I've entered before evaluating the expression
- being able to revise and edit incorrect expressions
- to determine linear regression fits for data sets
- to perform functions like logarithms and square roots on said data sets, in order to linearize them (linearity being checked, of course, by the R^2 correlation of my fit)
- anything at all to do with linear algebra, especially solving systems of equations or matrix manipulations. RREF is a bitch by hand.
For more "pure" math (like Diff. Eq.), I agree that pencil and paper are generally easier. But any applied math (a.k.a. engineering) requires an insane amount of busy work that could not be handled with a puny scientific calculator. I know you said Engineering and Physics are different stories, but everything I just wrote could certainly apply to all sciences (even the "soft" ones like Psych. and Sociology), or anything at all requiring data collection.
For the record, I use a TI-86 daily at a bio-tech job. It has the stats capabilities of the 83, plus all the good parts of the 85.
This is the cheapo, ghetto version of silly putty, which will likely rot (that's right, as in decompose) because of the materials used.
Real Silly Putty is made by Dow Corning (in my hometown of Greensboro, NC, in fact) from silicone-related starting materials. But if you just want something to impress the youngsters in your school science class, using glue and sodium borate will attract their attention for at least a few minutes.
I'm too lazy to find it myself, but I'm sure the patent on Silly Putty includes the real ingredients and process info. Any Karma Whores out their want to go patent-fishing?
What I'd really like to see is a turbo diesel hybrid, or at least the regenerative braking. It's ridiculous that all cars today don't have that feature, especially for city driving.
I personally know Eugene Chadbourne, from Greensboro, NC, who often invents instruments such as the electric rake. Another was rubber super balls (like from a vending machine) with pickups stuck inside them, so the bouncing sound could be output through an amp (or computer, or whatever).
In Brazil, Os Mutantes and Tom Ze, members of the Tropicalia movement, did some really crazy stuff to their instruments/sound systems. David Byrne (Talking Heads) liked Tom Ze so much that he rereleased some of his music on the Luaka Bop label (subsidiary of Warner Bros, I think).
Someone else mentioned Kid Koala, but Aphex Twin, DJ Spooky, and Squarepusher are a few electronic artists who have been especially innovative. Given the capabilities of samplers these days, experimentation like this beer/CD thing can have much broader implications than the mp3s this guy made. I understand that creating new instruments is not exactly playing with the media, but what about a song that samples the crackles and pops of an old LP? Or a vocal track recorded on really low-fi equipment (I'm thinking of "I Can Hear You" by They Might Be Giants, recorded using old wax cylinders ala Thomas Edison).
But Sony beat everyone to the punch. Their version of linux (Kondara, based on Red Hat, acc. to this article) has been out for awhile, over a year. The code is out there to be tweaked however you want. And since the hard work has been done, it shouldn't be difficult to port any distribution, as long as you have the endurance to add the proper flags to all relevant files. But you don't have to take my word for it. Straight from the linked article:
As for the portability of code from Linux on a PC system to the PS2, most applications written on a PC will compile on the PlayStation 2 with little or no modification. The significant difference is having to pass the --host option to the configure script. The kit supports languages typical to a Linux distribution, like C, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl. The only one missing is Java, although Kaffe has been ported by others in the Linux PS2 community.
Mod parent down as "Obvious." I don't need anyone to tell me it was inevitable that linux be ported to PS2, because it happened over a year ago. What is news is that a new distribution is available in addition to Sony's.
To use a horrible colloquialism, my bad.
I read the article when it was originally posted on /. and didn't bother reading it again; just posted it for those unfortunate enough to miss it the first time. Occasionally fark.com posts links to FHM nymphettes, and that's how I knew she was a covergirl--I just didn't put two and two together.
Maybe all you /.ers out there could increase your sex appeal by getting one, too.
Yeah . . . cats like milk, I like milk, therefore I am a cat.
There was a lot of inside info from people who work at Virginia Tech or go to school there. Lots of speculation and rumor, too, if you're into that sort of thing.
Interestingly, the Brazilian CD which was defective (Tribalistas, featuring Marisa Monte, Arnaldo Antunes, and Carlinhos Brown) was not copy-protected in the US (I was worried after reading this article, but I bought a copy and had no problems reading it on my Mac).
To clarify something else, I didn't think using bash instead of tcsh should break anything, but Apple's help line wouldn't help me because I had used bash. Whether that was the problem or not, they were unwilling (or unable) to help me fix my system once they heard I had changed some Darwin-level settings. Bah. What good is a help line if they can't actually help you?
I guess a reinstall might be in order, but it seems a bit drastic . . . I'd rather pinpoint and fix the specific problems.
As another side note--anyone see flickering screens (this on my laptop's LCD) after moving to jaguar? I'm guessing it's poorly-implemented quartz-extreme, b/c it usually happens on graphics-intensive programs.
The best translation I can give is "to get with it," although it also means apurar (hurry up), and sometimes "wake up" also. "Espabilado" means "on the ball," "street smart," and "brilliant" (like a source of light). Si usted quiere saber por que la palavra parece muy rara, es porque no se usa mucho en mexico o espana--pero es comun en otras partes del mundo latino, especialmente centroamerica.
But I think what you want to know is where that confounded quote came from. It's from a song by Mano Negra (fronted by Manu Chao), called "La Vida"(sorry about the backdround image). They have songs in Spanish, English, French, and Farsi. Manu Chao has a couple songs in Portuguese, too.
In college, for my chemical engineering plant design class, one group had a project producing dicyclopentadiene (aka DCPD). It's a solid white hydrocarbon that melts at a little over 100F or so (check www.chemfinder.com for exact numbers). Anyway, our professor said it was used in lava lamps.
In addition, the link mentioned that propylene glycol is one of the chemicals that can be used (for the part that isn't lava), and said it was expensive. Not true. Ethylene glycol (EG) and propylene glycol (PG) are both used in antifreeze. EG will kill animals if ingested (causes kidney failure unless you saturate your system with ethanol, i.e., booze). PG is a nontoxic alternative. It's not always as easy to find, and it might be colored green, but it's cheap.
Good luck out there, and don't start any fires you can't extinguish.