You've just stumbled into a significant flaw in *nix generally.
Everything you've said here is correct, and I agree with you, but you haven't mentioned the fact that in general, dealing with transient filesystems is an enormously hard problem on any real OS. There is no quick fix for this.
The problem is that you have to make sure that the filesystem on disk is consistent when the media is removed --- but by the time you know that the media is being removed, it's too late to do anything!
Unix deals with this problem by simply refusing to deal with it: it requires you to dismount all filesystems before disconnecting the media. Which is fine if you're dealing with hard disks, but less fine on USB devices and floppies. (There's a good reason why most serious Unix hardware have software floppy drive eject mechanisms.)
(Unix has the particularly unpleasant issue of the unified VM and I/O system; what do you do if you want to page in a block from a file system that's gone away? Seg fault? Block until it comes back again? Wave your arms in the air and run around in small circles? Different implementations do all three...)
Windows and DOS attempt to deal with the problem by using write-through cacheing on anything it thinks is transient. This kills performance. (Try switching off write-through cacheing on your floppy disk sometime.) But even Windows wants you to dismount USB devices before removing them.
Even CP/M had a variation of this problem --- there were specific system calls to detect disk changes and discard its caches. You were supposed to call this every time your program stopped for user input. Not all programs did, which meant that if you changed disks at the wrong time, you could end up with a corrupted disk...
Does that make it lighter or heavier than existing oxygen tanks?
Actually, weight isn't an issue --- humans float, even with heavy steel tanks strapped to them, and you need lead weights to make yourself neutrally bouyant. You can get plastic air tanks, but nobody wants them: steel is more reliable and cheaper, and having lighter tanks means you have to wear more weights. Which are uncomfortable.
Oh, and divers very rarely breathe oxygen. (Unless you're counting the weird mixtures you use for very deep diving.) It's strictly compressed air, and is usually very dry compressed air to prevent rust in the tanks --- diving is one of the few activities where you can be under ten metres of water and still have a dry throat.
Alas, ramjets don't work in Sol's part of the galaxy --- the interstellar medium's not right. (I don't know the details, but I believe that you can't get enough thrust from a certain collector area to overcome the drag needed by your collector.)
And you're quite right, it takes about a year's worth of 1g acceleration to reach relativistic velocities. Which is why Starwisp, the closest thing we've got to a decent design for an interstellar probe, will accelerate at 115g.
The entire probe only weighs 16 grams. It is, in effect, a microwave-frequency light sail, a kilometre across, powered by a 10 gigawatt maser based in Earth orbit; the maser provides both propulsion and power for the probe to return data once it reaches its target.
Starwisps should be mass producable, and only require a few days of thrust to launch, so you could use one maser to power practically any number of them. Since they cruise at 0.2c, we might also end up getting data back within our lifetimes...
For instance, there was a dungeon full of lava. I'm sure this would look awesome if they had done the realistic graphcs. However, seeing cell-shaded flames through a heat-induced haze was gorgeous. If you were to present the same environment using "realistic graphics", I'd probably prefer the cell-shaded.
Hell, yeah. That level was beautiful... those twisted columns of fire. The open sea was amazingly cool, as well.
I only had two real problems with the game: (a) too short! I was expecting another round of dungeons to pick up each Triforce piece; and (b) they'd fucked around with the autotargeting and it consistently kept homing in on the wrong creature, compared with Ocarina and Majora's Mask. In particular, on the N64 if you released the trigger momentarily it would focus on the next target. In Wind Waker, it would refocus on the closest target.
(This made certain levels, such as the sandworm boss, an exercise in frustration. What I wanted to do was to face the boss, ignore the little sandworms, target its tongue and shoot. However, every time I tried the game would focus on one of the little sandworms behind me, and Link would spin 180 degrees... standing with your back to a boss who's slowly sucking you in is not a good idea, let me tell you.)
Oh, yeah, and the backports of the N64 games are 60Hz only, and my TV only does 50Hz. Which was a bummer.
Was this the first Star Wars movie you've seen? The acting was as good or better than any of the other 5 movies, and every Star Wars movie has the same battle in space\battle on land\battle between individuals thing happening all at once. It happens, with the same jump cuts, in EVERY episode.
I know the films quite well, thank-you. (I don't like to think about episodes 1 and 2.)
And no, the choreography in 3, 4 and 5 doesn't work like that. It's a completely different style. The camera-work is far more static and tends to focus on single characters far more; and there's usually only one plot thread --- the only example of multiple plot threads I can think of off-hand is Luke and Vader vs the Rebel attack on Death Star II at the end of RotJ, and even then, the two strands were related.
I think one major difference is that RotS was rushed. There's just too much stuff happening, which meant that they couldn't devote enough screen time to any particular plot thread to do it justice... I mean, what actually happened to the battle on Kashyyk?
You know, given that RotS is the only prequel in which anything actually interesting happens, they'd have done much better to chuck the first two episodes and expand RotS into a trilogy in its own right. But don't let George Lucas write it, for gods' sake...
...but more power wasted by beaming it into the air across a 6"x8" area.
No power is wasted. This is actually an induction antenna; think of it as a transformer where one coil is in the mouse pad and the other is in the mouse. If there's nothing to pick up the power, no current flows (or at least, very little). The technique is used all over the place.
The only thing I'm wondering about is what happens about stray bits of metal placed on the mouse mat. If you're not careful, power will get transmitted to them; not only does this waste energy, it can be potentially dangerous... you wouldn't want to discover your wedding ring getting hot after using the mouse for a short while...
...the force being transferred from person to person via mitochondria...
Uh, midichlorians. Nothing to do with mitochondria.
I saw it last night, in a mostly empty cinema. The main thing I had against the film was quite simply that it wasn't much good. Oh, it was pretty, but that's about all I can say for it --- the acting was awful (although Senator Palpatine was fun in a giggling, frothing-at-the-mouth kind of way and Obi-Wan was doing a workmanlike job); the pacing was rubbish (it kept jumping from scene to scene without actually letting anything resolve itself); the choreography was incoherent (the big space combat at the beginning of the film was practically unfollowable; the battle on Kashyyk was largely non-existant); and, most damning of all, it was clumsy.
For example: on (mumble), the volcano planet at the end. Anakin flies in and we get a nice panoramic shot of the facility. Hey, cool, I think, noticing the blue glow around the base of all the structures. Force shields! Fifteen seconds later, during a long, lingering pan past some more of these force shields, I realise that the only reason that Lucas is putting so much emphasis on them is because at some point they're going to fail and the facility is going to fall into the lava. I was right.
Another example: the whole business with Anakin and the Younglings (hey. Sounds like a 60s band name). Yeah, thinks Lucas. Lets show how eeeeevil Anakin has become by letting him slaughter a whole bunch of innocent children! Muhahaha! And just to ram it home, lets have some doe-eyed kid lisp an unconvincing line to tell us just how much they trust him! That's such blatant, clumsy emotional manipulation that it's almost worthy of Spielberg.
Meh. I'm not even going to go into the Fall of Anakin Skywalker. ("Anakin! Be evil!" "No." "Sure?" "Well... all right, then.")
Incidentally, I don't agree with you in what you're reading into Episodes 4-6. The main thing about these films is that they're not SF; they're epic fantasy wrapped up with science and spaceships. (Luke == the unknown prince who grew up on a farm; Leia == the feisty princess; Han == the rogue with a heart of gold; Darth Vader == the Black Knight; the Emperor (who is never referred to by name) == the evil sorceror...) The original Star Wars films have nothing to do with egalitarianism. They're set in a simpler world of fairy tales where kings and queens rule with absolute power, and where hard work means nothing and destiny means everything.
The Force is magic, plain and simple. It's not something learnt, it's innate. Most of the Force-sensitive people in the Empire have been killed; apart from Obi-Wan, Yoda and the Emperor, the only Force-sensitive people we meet are the Skywalker family --- and the fact that they're family is crucial to the plot. Han does not have it, and never learns it. He simply doesn't have the ability.
(Interestingly, it's canon that R2D2 has some Force sensitivity. Not a lot, but he's the only droid ever to feel the Force --- it's not supposed to be possible.)
I have an NC200; it's fabulous. Amazing keyboard, decent screen (80x16 characters), ten-hour battery life, instant on... the word processor is a bit poor, since it can only cope with 38kB files, but I can live with that. They would appear to have solved the stability issues; it's never crashed on me.
It's also a great hacking machine. It's pretty much all documented using standard components. The built-in BBC Basic has a built-in assembler... someone's done a CP/M port, which will let you run standard software such as Wordstar.
I keep meaning some day to do a proper review of this machine, from a modern perspective; we could learn a lot.
(BTW, I have some software that will let you read the files off an NC-formatted SRAM card.)
It doesn't *have* to be competitive. I used to play a lot of (very) competitive sport at school, but I've since grown out of it. Now I play sport for fun, and while being "in the zone" on the field can result in some otherwise out-of-character single-mindedness, it all just drops away at the end of the game - I no longer care whether or not I'm on the winning or losing side, merely that it was a good game.
Unfortunately, what you're describing is a competitive sport. It's a zero-sum game, where if you have a winner, you have to have a loser. In order to play the game correctly, you have to try to win, otherwise there's no point.
What's more, you're also describing the very behaviour that I react badly to: the players of the game become aggressive and their behaviour changes. It doesn't matter that it's within the socially acceptable bounds of the game, it still makes me cringe.
(It might illuminate matters if I told you that during those formative years of compulsory sports, I never, ever won anything. I was, in fact, conditioned to believe that even attempting to compete at anything would lead to failure, so there was no point even trying. I'm now 30, and still trying to recover for this.)
I do, however, get on well with board games. I suspect that these are sufficiently abstract and complex that I can lose myself in manipulating the rules.
Hmm --- actually, now I think of it, this applies to the computer game world as well... PvP games like Halo and Quake bore me stiff --- I'd much rather go and explore the maps instead. I worked my way through Doom treating each level as a puzzle to be solved rather than a competition to be won.
Sounds like you need sport, not exercise (I'm the same - hate exercising, love playing sport).
Oh, god, no. Competitive sport is something that I will run screaming from. (Relic of a childhood spent at a school with compulsory intensive sports --- they systematically, but quite unintentionally, tought me to associate all forms of sport and exercise with being jumped on by thugs, seen through a short-sighted blur, while being told repeatedly how useless I was. I don't want to go there, ever again.)
I know what you're saying about having some kind of structure, though --- I'm working on it.
If you must exercise in a gym, take a book or laptop and jump on one of the cycles.
Alas, I'm pretty much happy with my lower body. (As I said originally, I cycle to work and back.) It's my upper body that needs work...
I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in the UK all phones that require an external power supply have a large warning label telling you that you should not use it as your primary telephone.
The problem is that if there's a power cut, all the mains-powered phones stop working. However, dumb phones are powered from the phone line, and remain operative. (I once spent some time in a holiday house with no electricity at all, except for the telephone.)
You probably don't want to train people to rely on unreliable devices like computers for emergencies --- you want to train them than when they need to call emergency services, get a real phone.
...exercise as in you're in the zone for a solid 15 minutes at least.
What is this 'zone' thing of which you speak?
No, I'm not being facetious. Some of us don't have one. I don't, for example; no matter how much I do, no matter how I do it, I find exercise very uncomfortable and utterly boring. I don't phase out, I have to keep concentrating every moment.
I'm not unfit; I'm about 75kg or so, right at the median for my body size, I cycle to work and back each day, but the simple fact is that continued anaerobic exercise is hideously uncomfortable and remains so. I used to go to the gym and doing things like running a kilometre without any practice before hand isn't a problem. I just hate it. I gave up going to the gym because I really wasn't enjoying it and I kept finding myself making excuses not to go, and frankly, life's too short.
(I have experienced the endorphin rush that I think you're talking about a few times --- but it's never been with anaerobic exercise; always aerobic. Hill walking, actually, which is at least interesting, unlike running on a treadmill. Alas, there are no hills near where I live.)
The Star Wars franchise becomes bigger than Microsoft and IBM combined!
It is a period of civil war. Rebel actors, being filmed in a hidden studio, have won their first great Oscar for a film that is not part of the evil Star Wars franchise.
During the ceremony, Rebel spies managed to steal the script for the franchise's ultimate weapon, JEDI XXX, a pornographic film with enough power to destroy entire genres...
This looks almost exactly like any other window manager... only its not complete. I assume when it IS complete, it will look completely the same as another one? Isnt this what makes Linux so hard to work with some times, is that code has to be 'ported' to different window managers? Why dont these projects just work together and make one really good window manager instead of several 'pretty' good ones?
This isn't Linux. Haiku's a BeOS reimplementation. Having a working window manager is a major milestone towards having a usable system, which is why this is news.
There was program on the BBC the showed how potentially dangerous eating at your desk is. They took samples from the journalists desk, and a toilet from Glastonbury Festivals after it had been used/abused for three days (think steaming pile of shit and piss). There was nearly 100x more dangerous bacteria on the desk than on the toilet seat.
Yeah, people's bums are actually quite clean...
Modern hygiene is actually quite counterintuitive: for example, the whole business about washing your hands after urinating. These days, it'd probably be better to wash your hands beforehand --- your penis is clean, but your hands aren't, and your penis has some sensitive mucous membranes in it that you probably want to keep clean.
(Of course, I will admit that if I were going to shake hands with you I'd rather you washed your hands afterwards, as well. Genital oil may be relatively hygienic, but still, ew.)
(Did you know that urine is sterile? Barring any urinary tract infections, of course. In emergencies you can wash your own wounds out with your own urine. It's got to be fresh, because it goes bad really quickly, and it'll hurt like hell, but it'll work. Don't try this with anyone else's urine, however --- your own urine is loaded with antibodies tailored for your body.)
In other news, a team of NASA's best psychologists is scheduled to hold a meeting where they will determine how to best break the news to Spirit that her brother may be nearing the end of his life.
There's no mention of this on Spirit's livejournal --- but then, she never did get on terribly well with her sister (not brother, BTW). Opportunity seems to be mildly worried, but is in no way panicking yet...
Of course, you can't buy them in paranoically advantaged countries like the US, but a couple of years ago I bought a bunch as Christmas presents for all the members of my family --- they're surprisingly useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything you've said here is correct, and I agree with you, but you haven't mentioned the fact that in general, dealing with transient filesystems is an enormously hard problem on any real OS. There is no quick fix for this.
The problem is that you have to make sure that the filesystem on disk is consistent when the media is removed --- but by the time you know that the media is being removed, it's too late to do anything!
Unix deals with this problem by simply refusing to deal with it: it requires you to dismount all filesystems before disconnecting the media. Which is fine if you're dealing with hard disks, but less fine on USB devices and floppies. (There's a good reason why most serious Unix hardware have software floppy drive eject mechanisms.)
(Unix has the particularly unpleasant issue of the unified VM and I/O system; what do you do if you want to page in a block from a file system that's gone away? Seg fault? Block until it comes back again? Wave your arms in the air and run around in small circles? Different implementations do all three...)
Windows and DOS attempt to deal with the problem by using write-through cacheing on anything it thinks is transient. This kills performance. (Try switching off write-through cacheing on your floppy disk sometime.) But even Windows wants you to dismount USB devices before removing them.
Even CP/M had a variation of this problem --- there were specific system calls to detect disk changes and discard its caches. You were supposed to call this every time your program stopped for user input. Not all programs did, which meant that if you changed disks at the wrong time, you could end up with a corrupted disk...
Actually, weight isn't an issue --- humans float, even with heavy steel tanks strapped to them, and you need lead weights to make yourself neutrally bouyant. You can get plastic air tanks, but nobody wants them: steel is more reliable and cheaper, and having lighter tanks means you have to wear more weights. Which are uncomfortable.
Oh, and divers very rarely breathe oxygen. (Unless you're counting the weird mixtures you use for very deep diving.) It's strictly compressed air, and is usually very dry compressed air to prevent rust in the tanks --- diving is one of the few activities where you can be under ten metres of water and still have a dry throat.
Alas, ramjets don't work in Sol's part of the galaxy --- the interstellar medium's not right. (I don't know the details, but I believe that you can't get enough thrust from a certain collector area to overcome the drag needed by your collector.)
And you're quite right, it takes about a year's worth of 1g acceleration to reach relativistic velocities. Which is why Starwisp, the closest thing we've got to a decent design for an interstellar probe, will accelerate at 115g.
The entire probe only weighs 16 grams. It is, in effect, a microwave-frequency light sail, a kilometre across, powered by a 10 gigawatt maser based in Earth orbit; the maser provides both propulsion and power for the probe to return data once it reaches its target.
Starwisps should be mass producable, and only require a few days of thrust to launch, so you could use one maser to power practically any number of them. Since they cruise at 0.2c, we might also end up getting data back within our lifetimes...
Hell, yeah. That level was beautiful... those twisted columns of fire. The open sea was amazingly cool, as well.
I only had two real problems with the game: (a) too short! I was expecting another round of dungeons to pick up each Triforce piece; and (b) they'd fucked around with the autotargeting and it consistently kept homing in on the wrong creature, compared with Ocarina and Majora's Mask. In particular, on the N64 if you released the trigger momentarily it would focus on the next target. In Wind Waker, it would refocus on the closest target.
(This made certain levels, such as the sandworm boss, an exercise in frustration. What I wanted to do was to face the boss, ignore the little sandworms, target its tongue and shoot. However, every time I tried the game would focus on one of the little sandworms behind me, and Link would spin 180 degrees... standing with your back to a boss who's slowly sucking you in is not a good idea, let me tell you.)
Oh, yeah, and the backports of the N64 games are 60Hz only, and my TV only does 50Hz. Which was a bummer.
I know the films quite well, thank-you. (I don't like to think about episodes 1 and 2.)
And no, the choreography in 3, 4 and 5 doesn't work like that. It's a completely different style. The camera-work is far more static and tends to focus on single characters far more; and there's usually only one plot thread --- the only example of multiple plot threads I can think of off-hand is Luke and Vader vs the Rebel attack on Death Star II at the end of RotJ, and even then, the two strands were related.
I think one major difference is that RotS was rushed. There's just too much stuff happening, which meant that they couldn't devote enough screen time to any particular plot thread to do it justice... I mean, what actually happened to the battle on Kashyyk?
You know, given that RotS is the only prequel in which anything actually interesting happens, they'd have done much better to chuck the first two episodes and expand RotS into a trilogy in its own right. But don't let George Lucas write it, for gods' sake...
No power is wasted. This is actually an induction antenna; think of it as a transformer where one coil is in the mouse pad and the other is in the mouse. If there's nothing to pick up the power, no current flows (or at least, very little). The technique is used all over the place.
The only thing I'm wondering about is what happens about stray bits of metal placed on the mouse mat. If you're not careful, power will get transmitted to them; not only does this waste energy, it can be potentially dangerous... you wouldn't want to discover your wedding ring getting hot after using the mouse for a short while...
Uh, midichlorians. Nothing to do with mitochondria.
I saw it last night, in a mostly empty cinema. The main thing I had against the film was quite simply that it wasn't much good. Oh, it was pretty, but that's about all I can say for it --- the acting was awful (although Senator Palpatine was fun in a giggling, frothing-at-the-mouth kind of way and Obi-Wan was doing a workmanlike job); the pacing was rubbish (it kept jumping from scene to scene without actually letting anything resolve itself); the choreography was incoherent (the big space combat at the beginning of the film was practically unfollowable; the battle on Kashyyk was largely non-existant); and, most damning of all, it was clumsy.
For example: on (mumble), the volcano planet at the end. Anakin flies in and we get a nice panoramic shot of the facility. Hey, cool, I think, noticing the blue glow around the base of all the structures. Force shields! Fifteen seconds later, during a long, lingering pan past some more of these force shields, I realise that the only reason that Lucas is putting so much emphasis on them is because at some point they're going to fail and the facility is going to fall into the lava. I was right.
Another example: the whole business with Anakin and the Younglings (hey. Sounds like a 60s band name). Yeah, thinks Lucas. Lets show how eeeeevil Anakin has become by letting him slaughter a whole bunch of innocent children! Muhahaha! And just to ram it home, lets have some doe-eyed kid lisp an unconvincing line to tell us just how much they trust him! That's such blatant, clumsy emotional manipulation that it's almost worthy of Spielberg.
Meh. I'm not even going to go into the Fall of Anakin Skywalker. ("Anakin! Be evil!" "No." "Sure?" "Well... all right, then.")
Incidentally, I don't agree with you in what you're reading into Episodes 4-6. The main thing about these films is that they're not SF; they're epic fantasy wrapped up with science and spaceships. (Luke == the unknown prince who grew up on a farm; Leia == the feisty princess; Han == the rogue with a heart of gold; Darth Vader == the Black Knight; the Emperor (who is never referred to by name) == the evil sorceror...) The original Star Wars films have nothing to do with egalitarianism. They're set in a simpler world of fairy tales where kings and queens rule with absolute power, and where hard work means nothing and destiny means everything.
The Force is magic, plain and simple. It's not something learnt, it's innate. Most of the Force-sensitive people in the Empire have been killed; apart from Obi-Wan, Yoda and the Emperor, the only Force-sensitive people we meet are the Skywalker family --- and the fact that they're family is crucial to the plot. Han does not have it, and never learns it. He simply doesn't have the ability.
(Interestingly, it's canon that R2D2 has some Force sensitivity. Not a lot, but he's the only droid ever to feel the Force --- it's not supposed to be possible.)
I have an NC200; it's fabulous. Amazing keyboard, decent screen (80x16 characters), ten-hour battery life, instant on... the word processor is a bit poor, since it can only cope with 38kB files, but I can live with that. They would appear to have solved the stability issues; it's never crashed on me.
It's also a great hacking machine. It's pretty much all documented using standard components. The built-in BBC Basic has a built-in assembler... someone's done a CP/M port, which will let you run standard software such as Wordstar.
I keep meaning some day to do a proper review of this machine, from a modern perspective; we could learn a lot.
(BTW, I have some software that will let you read the files off an NC-formatted SRAM card.)
Alas, it's completely unknown here in the UK; I think UF needs, fundamentally, more sunshine than we usually get here...
Unfortunately, what you're describing is a competitive sport. It's a zero-sum game, where if you have a winner, you have to have a loser. In order to play the game correctly, you have to try to win, otherwise there's no point.
What's more, you're also describing the very behaviour that I react badly to: the players of the game become aggressive and their behaviour changes. It doesn't matter that it's within the socially acceptable bounds of the game, it still makes me cringe.
(It might illuminate matters if I told you that during those formative years of compulsory sports, I never, ever won anything. I was, in fact, conditioned to believe that even attempting to compete at anything would lead to failure, so there was no point even trying. I'm now 30, and still trying to recover for this.)
I do, however, get on well with board games. I suspect that these are sufficiently abstract and complex that I can lose myself in manipulating the rules.
Hmm --- actually, now I think of it, this applies to the computer game world as well... PvP games like Halo and Quake bore me stiff --- I'd much rather go and explore the maps instead. I worked my way through Doom treating each level as a puzzle to be solved rather than a competition to be won.
Do you get positive-sum sports?
*nods*
Actually I'm thinking of Tai Chi, as it's considerably less martial than most of the others (at least in the common form).
But as you say, that's less about fitness and more about moving to a healthier lifestyle.
A driving game, surely?
Oh, god, no. Competitive sport is something that I will run screaming from. (Relic of a childhood spent at a school with compulsory intensive sports --- they systematically, but quite unintentionally, tought me to associate all forms of sport and exercise with being jumped on by thugs, seen through a short-sighted blur, while being told repeatedly how useless I was. I don't want to go there, ever again.)
I know what you're saying about having some kind of structure, though --- I'm working on it.
If you must exercise in a gym, take a book or laptop and jump on one of the cycles.
Alas, I'm pretty much happy with my lower body. (As I said originally, I cycle to work and back.) It's my upper body that needs work...
The problem is that if there's a power cut, all the mains-powered phones stop working. However, dumb phones are powered from the phone line, and remain operative. (I once spent some time in a holiday house with no electricity at all, except for the telephone.)
You probably don't want to train people to rely on unreliable devices like computers for emergencies --- you want to train them than when they need to call emergency services, get a real phone.
What is this 'zone' thing of which you speak?
No, I'm not being facetious. Some of us don't have one. I don't, for example; no matter how much I do, no matter how I do it, I find exercise very uncomfortable and utterly boring. I don't phase out, I have to keep concentrating every moment.
I'm not unfit; I'm about 75kg or so, right at the median for my body size, I cycle to work and back each day, but the simple fact is that continued anaerobic exercise is hideously uncomfortable and remains so. I used to go to the gym and doing things like running a kilometre without any practice before hand isn't a problem. I just hate it. I gave up going to the gym because I really wasn't enjoying it and I kept finding myself making excuses not to go, and frankly, life's too short.
(I have experienced the endorphin rush that I think you're talking about a few times --- but it's never been with anaerobic exercise; always aerobic. Hill walking, actually, which is at least interesting, unlike running on a treadmill. Alas, there are no hills near where I live.)
It is a period of civil war. Rebel actors, being filmed in a hidden studio, have won their first great Oscar for a film that is not part of the evil Star Wars franchise.
During the ceremony, Rebel spies managed to steal the script for the franchise's ultimate weapon, JEDI XXX, a pornographic film with enough power to destroy entire genres...
This isn't Linux. Haiku's a BeOS reimplementation. Having a working window manager is a major milestone towards having a usable system, which is why this is news.
Yeah, people's bums are actually quite clean...
Modern hygiene is actually quite counterintuitive: for example, the whole business about washing your hands after urinating. These days, it'd probably be better to wash your hands beforehand --- your penis is clean, but your hands aren't, and your penis has some sensitive mucous membranes in it that you probably want to keep clean.
(Of course, I will admit that if I were going to shake hands with you I'd rather you washed your hands afterwards, as well. Genital oil may be relatively hygienic, but still, ew.)
(Did you know that urine is sterile? Barring any urinary tract infections, of course. In emergencies you can wash your own wounds out with your own urine. It's got to be fresh, because it goes bad really quickly, and it'll hurt like hell, but it'll work. Don't try this with anyone else's urine, however --- your own urine is loaded with antibodies tailored for your body.)
There's no mention of this on Spirit's livejournal --- but then, she never did get on terribly well with her sister (not brother, BTW). Opportunity seems to be mildly worried, but is in no way panicking yet...
Damn. I've just realised that that's just a two-minute clip. Sorry about that.
But the album's definitely worth getting --- you may want to check out a preview on a P2P somewhere, but if you like it, do buy it...
Mr. Worf (buy the album! It's great!)
The Comforts of Home
Of course, you can't buy them in paranoically advantaged countries like the US, but a couple of years ago I bought a bunch as Christmas presents for all the members of my family --- they're surprisingly useful.
You know, this explains a lot of things...
Fiendishly clever? Obviously, those Martians aren't nearly as smart as they think they are...
Does anyone have a link to the images?