IM systems die fast if people stop using them, your friends aren't online and you won't be able to make any new ones, just take this example: I haven't got an message over ICQ for about 3 years, and now I got a message saying: "slm nasylsyn", I've got no idea what it is, or who it's from:/ Scary, eh?
Somehow it seems as if MSN is the 'in' IM protocol right now, everyone's using it, and hotmail of course. I don't see why, but I'm using it as well, so I guess you'll have to blame me too. As long as it's 'open' I'll continue using it, I'm using Trillian(probably handles Gopher, otherwise just write a plugin) or Gaim to access it, never a Microsoft product >:)
I use the Slackware scripts(some hacks here and there).
I have never felt the need to control whatever service is started at init, I never have many services either. And the ones I don't need I might as well start manually. Just a simple/etc/rc.d/rc.goatd start to start my goat daemon(I don't think there's such a thing, better check Google to make sure), for example.
I totally dislike the way the scipts are handled in RedHat and such popular distrubutions. I hate INODE spam, that's why I use devfs(yes, I know that it is deprecated, I'm also using a deprecated kernel(2.6.2-pre2, maybe), but as long as there are no problems I will not really care.).
FAGGOT! That link does not contain anything very offensive at all, I just saw a (little)(posted by same user) more offensive picture a few minutes ago.
We here on Slashdot do not support capitalist terrorist tactics such as CENSORING! Free speech 0wnz j00. And don't say anything bad about the FSF or you will never again be able to use the interweb. Script kiddies will write worms ten times more effective than the sucky MyDoom targeted just at you and anything you approach!
Gay niggers would hunt you down and rape your boyfriend, possibly in a way that involves a mare.
Using DEPRECATED compilers is just as stupid as using DEPRECATED kernels(2.4, just to name one), use GCC-CVS if you want some real performance. Just check out the current changes towards 3.4.
Usability of the profile feedback and coverage testing has been improved.
I'm quite interested in this profiling optimization, it's already in 3.3.2, ne?
I should check it out some time, it does seem very interesting, especially for benchmarks where you can optimize the executable just for the current test.
Another reason they should have used the current version is this:
Experiments made on i386 hardware showed an 11% speedup on -O0 and a 7.5% speedup on -O2
Noone cares about these so called 'heroes'. America's lousy space administration is responsible for their lives, do something, rest of the world!
Let us all rise up and destroy America, let's reform society and finally evolve into communism, Russia is on it's way. They might very well succeed after their current capitalism rush.
Umm... Excuse me, but is Goatse down or what? I can connect to Trollse, Analse and Man without any problems. Did they actually take it down, those damn nazi santas.
I need my daily Goatse fix, does anyone have a mirror or a good enough replacement. No scat please, I just read the guide on Dolphinsex.
Oh, and by the way, you might think this is a troll, so I'll write something nice I just found out here, ok?:
You can see your user id in the random textstring in the top of the page!: This page was generated by a Flock of Ultra Ninjas for Captain Goatse (715400).
And while I'm waiting I might as well post the code I just wrote, a function that recurses menus and disables them! Yes, it's for Windows only:| No, the obfuscation is no good either.
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?
And that, I think, is the root of the problem. If we treat data structures as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.
But I think the worst danger of committees is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books, or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be able to solve the wrong problem, and taking forever to do it.
Good programmers often want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to bias the probabilities slightly to avoid false positives, and by trial and error I've found that a good way to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think, how hard can it be to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.
So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to use some implementation-specific hacks as well, and in practice these tend not to give you everything you want. Hackers would think a lot of parentheses. Fritz Kunze's official biography carefully avoids mentioning the L-word. But my guess is that it is not unpleasant). Young fillys have no objection to someone playing with their pussy's. I have walked up on a pen full of strange fillys at night and they came right up to me and I petted them and felt up their pussys and they just lifted their tales and seemed to enjoy it. These fillys didn't even know me but they were young, inexperienced and bored...also since they were penned they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.
The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. Based on this I made up an etymology for it. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tactile," an
McLEAN, Va. (AP) -- When the CIA's secret gadget-makers invented a listening device for the Asian jungles, they disguised it so the enemy wouldn't be tempted to pick it up and examine it: The device looked like tiger droppings.
The guise worked. Who would touch such a thing? The fist-sized, brown transmitter detected troop movements along the trails during fighting in Vietnam, a quiet success for a little-known group of researchers inside the world's premier intelligence agency.
The CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology is celebrating its 40th anniversary by revealing a few dozen of its secrets for a new museum inside its headquarters near Washington.
Keith Melton, a leading historian of intelligence, calls it "the finest spy museum you'll never see." It is accessible only to CIA employees and guests admitted to those closed quarters.
Besides the jungle transmitter, the exhibits include a robotic catfish, a remote-controlled dragonfly and a camera strapped to the chests of pigeons and released over enemy targets in the 1970s. The secret gadgets currently used by CIA are left to the imagination of visitors.
The pigeons' missions remain classified, made possible only after the CIA secretly developed a camera weighing only as much as a few coins. An earlier test with a heavier camera in the skies over Washington failed after two days when the overburdened pigeon was forced to walk home.
"People don't think of a pigeon as being anything more than a rodent on top of a building," said Pat Avery of Newalla, Okla., who runs the National Pigeon Association and loves to recount decades-old exploits by famous military pigeons such as "Spike" and "Big Tom."
But as surveillance technology improved, the need for CIA pigeons diminished. "They're pretty passe now," she said.
Agency lore holds that a pistol on display was so quiet that William "Wild Bill" Donovan, founder of the agency that became the CIA, pulled the trigger inside the White House to demonstrate for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never heard a shot. For years, the.22-caliber was standard issue among CIA employees.
"The president was on the phone at the time, so Donovan proceeded to fire the entire magazine, 10 rounds, into the bag of sand in the Oval Office, then placed the smoking-hot weapon on the desk and told him what he had done," said Toni Hiley, the curator for the CIA museum.
In 2000, the CIA built a catfish it calls "Charlie," a remarkably realistic swimming robot. The spy agency still won't disclose much about its mission, but experts speculated it collects water samples near suspected chemical or nuclear plants.
One outside scientist consulted by The Associated Press said the catfish robot was so realistic - except for pectoral fins made slightly too large - that it might be eaten by predators while on its cloak-and-dagger missions. The AP obtained a videotape from CIA of the catfish swimming during one test.
"A lot of things in the wild like to eat those," said Jimmy Avery, an aquaculture professor at Mississippi State University who watched the video at AP's request. He said Charlie was apparently made to resemble a channel catfish commonly found in rivers worldwide. "When you look at it from above, it would be difficult to pick that out from any kind of real catfish."
The CIA isn't showing off just its successes. It invented a remote-controlled dragonfly for delivering tiny listening devices outside windows: a bug carrying a bug. But the so-called "insectothopter," with a miniature engine, built by a watchmaker, couldn't fly
Robert J. Chassell was a
founding Director and Treasurer of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF was
founded to support the GNU Project which restarted the movement
towards free software and open sources. The GNU/Linux operating
system and associated applications are the outcome of these efforts by
the Foundation. Chassell writes and edits. He is the author of
An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, co-author of
the "Texinfo" manual, and an editor of more than a dozen other books.
He graduated from Cambridge University, in England. He flies his own
airplane, enjoys astronomy, and has an abiding interest in social and
economic history.
Topics
Chassell is especially good at introducing the concepts of free software to
audiences who have little or no previous experience with the technology.
Chassell can address the following topics:
He can explain how your legal rights to copy, study, modify, and
redistribute software encourage people to work collaboratively and
profitably.
He can describe the way freedom shapes the technology of software to
make it accessible and empowering for both programmers and users.
He can discuss the various business models used by companies to make
profits with free software, both in rich and poor countries.
He can speak on the ethical implications of free and restricted
software, and how to arrange matters such that acting in a cooperative
and law abiding manner is without doubt the best action, for legal,
moral, and practical reasons.
He can walk an audience of lawyers, and others who enjoy legal
discussion, through the GNU General Public License paragraph by
paragraph, and compare that license with other, somewhat different
licenses.
From his own experience, he can describe the history of free software
from its beginning in the GNU Project through the rise of the phrase "open source" to
the present flowering of GNU/Linux.
Languages
Chassell speaks English, and has experience speaking to crowds for whom
English is a second language.
TrollKore PenisBird Poser: HHA I CAN STILL TAKL U FAGGOT NIGGER JEW LOL!!
Uhh... why did I write this anyway... oh, yeah: There's a problem with the story posted by Mr. (FAG)Max: Why didn't the TK gay group just kill the SlashBots? Is SlashDot superior? Yes.
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW SLASHDOT FLEET OVERLORDS!
NOTE: I did not finish it yet, I'll do that when I get home.
Captain Goatse The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor -- of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one -- more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.
It begins with a house. Chapter 1
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village. It stood on its own and looked over a broad spread of West Country farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means -- it was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happ
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't include my first NetHack ascension :(
Oh my, I can see/hear why no one uses Macs for music.
Time for another update to RFC1149 ;)?
CLICKY!
:)
I submitted a bugreport to mozilla
Is that an IM protocol/system/whatever?
:/ Scary, eh?
IM systems die fast if people stop using them, your friends aren't online and you won't be able to make any new ones, just take this example: I haven't got an message over ICQ for about 3 years, and now I got a message saying: "slm nasylsyn", I've got no idea what it is, or who it's from
Somehow it seems as if MSN is the 'in' IM protocol right now, everyone's using it, and hotmail of course. I don't see why, but I'm using it as well, so I guess you'll have to blame me too. As long as it's 'open' I'll continue using it, I'm using Trillian(probably handles Gopher, otherwise just write a plugin) or Gaim to access it, never a Microsoft product >:)
I use the Slackware scripts(some hacks here and there).
/etc/rc.d/rc.goatd start to start my goat daemon(I don't think there's such a thing, better check Goo gle to make sure), for example.
I have never felt the need to control whatever service is started at init, I never have many services either. And the ones I don't need I might as well start manually. Just a simple
I totally dislike the way the scipts are handled in RedHat and such popular distrubutions. I hate INODE spam, that's why I use devfs(yes, I know that it is deprecated, I'm also using a deprecated kernel(2.6.2-pre2, maybe), but as long as there are no problems I will not really care.).
FAGGOT! That link does not contain anything very offensive at all, I just saw a (little)(posted by same user) more offensive picture a few minutes ago.
;)
We here on Slashdot do not support capitalist terrorist tactics such as CENSORING! Free speech 0wnz j00. And don't say anything bad about the FSF or you will never again be able to use the interweb. Script kiddies will write worms ten times more effective than the sucky MyDoom targeted just at you and anything you approach!
Gay niggers would hunt you down and rape your boyfriend, possibly in a way that involves a mare.
Anyway, BSD is dying
There, happy now?
www.goatse.cx, a very bad choice by the Chistmas Island's NIC.
This would easily make it to the top of the list! Just think of the millions that are depraved of their daily goatse needs.
And think about Bob Goatse, what will he do now that his workplace has been shut down?
Using DEPRECATED compilers is just as stupid as using DEPRECATED kernels(2.4, just to name one), use GCC-CVS if you want some real performance. Just check out the current changes towards 3.4.
Usability of the profile feedback and coverage testing has been improved.
I'm quite interested in this profiling optimization, it's already in 3.3.2, ne?
I should check it out some time, it does seem very interesting, especially for benchmarks where you can optimize the executable just for the current test.
Another reason they should have used the current version is this:
Experiments made on i386 hardware showed an 11% speedup on -O0 and a 7.5% speedup on -O2
Eat that, GCC-deprecated and child-labor SUN!
SEGA(tm) making games for Nintendo(tm) consoles? Blasphemy!
That's like using Wine in Linux.
Noone cares about these so called 'heroes'. America's lousy space administration is responsible for their lives, do something, rest of the world!
Let us all rise up and destroy America, let's reform society and finally evolve into communism, Russia is on it's way. They might very well succeed after their current capitalism rush.
Please give up, not even the most mean and lean trolls care about your crapflooding.
And people will stop using e-mail in a few months time anyway, spam does not matter.
Umm... Excuse me, but is Goatse down or what? I can connect to Trollse, Analse and Man without any problems. Did they actually take it down, those damn nazi santas.
:| No, the obfuscation is no good either.
;mii.fMask=MIIM_STATE;mii.fState=MFS_DISABLED;if
(hMenu==NULL){return;}count=GetMenuItemCount(e nu);for(i=0;i<count;i++){uid=GetMenuItemID(u ,i);if(uid==-1){RecurseMenu(GetSubMenu(hMenu ,i));}EnableMenuItem(hMenu, uid, MFS_DISABLED);m ii);}}
I need my daily Goatse fix, does anyone have a mirror or a good enough replacement. No scat please, I just read the guide on Dolphinsex.
Oh, and by the way, you might think this is a troll, so I'll write something nice I just found out here, ok?:
You can see your user id in the random textstring in the top of the page!:
This page was generated by a Flock of Ultra Ninjas for Captain Goatse (715400).
And while I'm waiting I might as well post the code I just wrote, a function that recurses menus and disables them! Yes, it's for Windows only
void RecurseMenu(HMENU hMenu){int count,i,uid,j;
MENUITEMINFO mii;mii.cbSize=sizeof(MENUITEMINFO)
hM
hMen
SetMenuItemInfo(hMenu,uid,FALSE,&
OH, AND IS GOATSE.CX UP FOR REGISTRATION NOW? I MIGHT AS WELL STEAL IT AND REDIRECT IT TO SLASHDOT.ORG!
Your troll rocks, may I be your student!?
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?
And that, I think, is the root of the problem. If we treat data structures as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.
But I think the worst danger of committees is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books, or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be able to solve the wrong problem, and taking forever to do it.
Good programmers often want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to bias the probabilities slightly to avoid false positives, and by trial and error I've found that a good way to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think, how hard can it be to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.
So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to use some implementation-specific hacks as well, and in practice these tend not to give you everything you want. Hackers would think a lot of parentheses. Fritz Kunze's official biography carefully avoids mentioning the L-word. But my guess is that it is not unpleasant). Young fillys have no objection to someone playing with their pussy's. I have walked up on a pen full of strange fillys at night and they came right up to me and I petted
them and felt up their pussys and they just lifted their tales and seemed to enjoy it. These fillys didn't even know me but they were young, inexperienced and bored...also since they were penned they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.
The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. Based on this I made up an etymology for it. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tactile," an
Google Search
AP story:
Robert J. Chassell was a founding Director and Treasurer of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF was founded to support the GNU Project which restarted the movement towards free software and open sources. The GNU/Linux operating system and associated applications are the outcome of these efforts by the Foundation. Chassell writes and edits. He is the author of An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, co-author of the "Texinfo" manual, and an editor of more than a dozen other books. He graduated from Cambridge University, in England. He flies his own airplane, enjoys astronomy, and has an abiding interest in social and economic history.
TopicsChassell is especially good at introducing the concepts of free software to audiences who have little or no previous experience with the technology.
Chassell can address the following topics:
- He can explain how your legal rights to copy, study, modify, and
redistribute software encourage people to work collaboratively and
profitably.
- He can describe the way freedom shapes the technology of software to
make it accessible and empowering for both programmers and users.
- He can discuss the various business models used by companies to make
profits with free software, both in rich and poor countries.
- He can speak on the ethical implications of free and restricted
software, and how to arrange matters such that acting in a cooperative
and law abiding manner is without doubt the best action, for legal,
moral, and practical reasons.
- He can walk an audience of lawyers, and others who enjoy legal
discussion, through the GNU General Public License paragraph by
paragraph, and compare that license with other, somewhat different
licenses.
- From his own experience, he can describe the history of free software
from its beginning in the GNU Project through the rise of the phrase "open source" to
the present flowering of GNU/Linux.
LanguagesChassell speaks English, and has experience speaking to crowds for whom English is a second language.
Here's a Direct Download link, rightclick and choose save as, if you are using iexplore. Save linnk to disk if you are using Mozilla/Firebird.
CHMMRTACO: PHAZERZ ON GAY NIGGER REMOVAL!
TrollKore GNAA: PLZ NO KILL U GET FREE GOATSE XXX!!1
COMMANDERTACKO: HMM GOATSE EH? +5 TROLL! 24H BAN! 2 POSTS PER DAY!
TrollKore PenisBird Poser: U FAG!
TrollKore PenisBird Poser: HHA I CAN STILL TAKL U FAGGOT NIGGER JEW LOL!!
Uhh... why did I write this anyway... oh, yeah: There's a problem with the story posted by Mr. (FAG)Max: Why didn't the TK gay group just kill the SlashBots? Is SlashDot superior? Yes.
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW SLASHDOT FLEET OVERLORDS!
NOTE: I did not finish it yet, I'll do that when I get home.
Captain Goatse
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor -- of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one -- more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.
It begins with a house.
Chapter 1
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village. It stood on its own and looked over a broad spread of West Country farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means -- it was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happ
Your ideas are intriguing, may I subscribe to your newsletter?
With a name like 'ringbarer' you must surely be an insider, do you have any information on the IBM/SCOX DEC109.x2 chipset?
[Quote from urbandictionary.com]
And also, Java sucks because SUN uses child labor to get Java up to an acceptable speed. It's horrible.
Obviously subscribing is not worth it if your posting time is incremented a few minutes.