docduke

The origins indeed go back to the distant past. The original Democratic city-states did not survive. That is an indication of problems with it. That perspective has been changing. Most countries that hold elections now have "speech codes", Human Rights Laws or governments that arbitrarily enforce restrictions on free speech. The U.S. has been an exception. If polls are correct, that is about to change. Democracy depends on voting. The vote process in the U.S. has been increasingly corrupted over recent decades. It became more obvious with the passage of the Motor-Voter Law, shortly after the first Democratic President in a decade (Bill Clinton) was elected. The process is now blatant: The Complete Guide to ACORN Voter Fraud. The "authorities" have been notified, and they have no interest in addressing it: Contacting the Justice Department. Basically, the U.S. Federal Government has been taken over by a large number of people who are hostile to democracy. Note that Barak Obama, the candidate whom polls predict will win the Presidency, has been deeply involved in training ACORN personnel. His campaign committee funds ACORN. So does the Democratic Congress, which has inserted "earmarks" for them. Obama is himself a student of Marxists, and is actively supported by them, both from inside the U.S. and from outside (which is illegal, but ignored, like ACORN). There was an attempt to insert another earmark for them in the very recent Financial Bailout Bill. I have read that it was removed. I have not verified this, but it is actually small change compared to previous earmarks. The process is discussed at Public Markup.org. [search on ACORN] The National Affordable Housing Trust Fund [search on "Housing Trust Fund"] sets aside a portion of the expenses on every mortgage financed in the U.S. to pay into this "Trust Fund," whose primary use is to finance ACORN! By the way, if you think the Presidential challenger, John McCain, is against ACORN, read this: McCain and his friends at…ACORN. attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but I believe a similar quote can be found in a Roman Empire document. The U.S. was established as a republic. It was converted to a democracy in stages by politicians who resented the constraints on their power. Its finances were taken over by external (and some internal) forces in 1913 by the establishment of the Federal Reserve. Now it appears that the same financial cabal is engaged in a carefully-planned takeover of the U.S. financial system and its government, quite possibly with the intention of taking over the world economy as well. Prepare for a bumpy ride!

I am one more who finds OpenSuSE my preferred system. It has a very solid installer, with options to allow a very high degree of customization. There are two downsides, however. One is that it is so complex that it is difficult for newcomers. The other is that a recent version of it requires relatively powerful hardware: lots of RAM and a powerful CPU to support all its graphics. I just spent a few days trying to get Linux running on an old (born around 1995) computer with 64 MB RAM. After trying half a dozen flavors of Linux, I found that only Damn Small Linux (DSL) was capable of booting from a CD on it. The problem was that all the other distros I tried had long ago migrated from the Syslinux boot handler to the Isolinux boot handler. I have now learned that Syslinux is better at dealing with really old hardware. I strongly recommend using a "Live CD" of any distro you are considering, and specifically one that is tailored for your CPU. I have a new computer with an AMD64 (Athlon64) CPU. I have recently been testing the Debian distribution. That is the "grandfather" of Ubuntu, Knoppix, Xandros and the variant of Xandros that lives inside Asus Eee PC netbooks. Debian has a very large number of installable support packages, but I learned the hard way that those packages may be difficult or impossible to install on one of the "children," such as Ubuntu or an Eee PC. I'm still not sure exactly what the problem is, but I have chased down a lot of bunny trails finding out what doesn't work! The advantage of the Live CD approach is that you can test lots of things without having anything changed on your computer. This is a major advantage, in contrast to installing a package you are curious about on a Windows machine, then trying to remove it, without leaving undesired dlls, etc, on the machine after the uninstall.

Actually, I "see" a lot of unsatisfied people! They don't like where their surroundings are going (particularly involving economics and crime), but they feel powerless to do anything about it. Indeed, if there is a general consensus I can draw from it, it is that the "elites," those with political and economic power, are acting in ways that are harmful to the majority of people, and are arrogant because they believe the great majority of people can only look on, and perhaps envy them. It is my perception, however, that the global environment is rapidly changing, and not to the advantage of the elites. One advantage they have had for millenia is effective communication among themselves. Now, with cell phones and low-cost computers rapidly penetrating even the lower-middle class, the non-elites are becoming empowered. The raw numbers are very impressive: Sales of cell phones are on pace to reach a billion annually by the end of the decade, when nearly 40 percent of the world's population will own a mobile handset, according to a Gartner report. Similarly, the market for computers (and thus larger and more permanent communication is now very large: Analysts: 1 Billion PCs in use by end of 2008 Another change, which the elites may not yet recognize, is the downsizing of energy as well as communication. One hundred years ago, the means of communication were written, and the majority were handled on a large scale, by book and newspaper publishers. More recently, TV and radio have also used large, capital-intensive methods. With cell phones and the internet, the medium is large-scale, but the message is becoming much smaller-scale -- like people who post here, or bloggers. Now this is happening with energy as well. There is major growth of solar power. But that does not need large facilities. Each house can have its own solar array. The present problem is energy storage. But that problem is being solved with new, more efficient batteries, and even things as simple as more efficient electolysis, which can allow the energy received during the day to be stored for use at night (or on cloudy days) in the form of compressed hydrogen and oxygen. This has the potential to make invidual homeowners independent of the power grid, and the big, expensive systems provided by the elites. It can even provide transportation, either via electric cars or in the case of electrolysis, hydrogen cars refueled at home! With a lot of frustrated people looking for improvements in their lives, and new technologies being developed which allow them to break free of the present large-scale systems, now is the time for some major changes!

You can learn probably more than you want to know about the elements of Microsoft XP activation here: How Microsoft Product Activation (WPA) Works in Windows XP and Windows Vista. Basically, it takes a shapshot of your hardware when you first install it, and checks every time you restart it, to make sure not "too much" has changed. "Too much" is quantitatively measured by the XPInfo executable. I can tell you from personal experience that XPInfo works on XP 32, but does not work on XP 64. However, it makes very clear what Ms is looking for. The items it checks are: Processor model, processor serial number, RAM size, Graphics adapter, IDE controller, SCSI host adapter, Harddrive, CD-ROM drive, Volume serial number and MAC address. I just read those items off my screen. Incidentally, one reason I use AMD CPUs instead of Intel is that they do not have serial numbers! This is some of the information I remember from reading in various places, but can't document at the moment. (1) the MAC address gets multiple votes, so if your Ethernet chip dies, that is almost enough to force reactivation. (2) The Volume serial number counts, so if you use the Linux dd command to backup and clone a copy of the XP partition, both VSNs will look legitimate to XP, but if both are visible in the same machine, the running OS may become confused, since it sees two partitions with the same VSN, which it normally uses to identify a partition. (3) Since RAM size matters, install all the RAM you plan on using before activating. (4) I have read, but haven't verified, that if you have multiple hard drives and multiple Ethernet connectors, the validation software looks at all of them, and only one of each has to remain to get the relevant "vote." The person who recommended that suggested that as a precaution, you should get a cheap Ethernet card, and put it in your computer before activation, so that if the one on the motherboard dies, you still have those multiple votes covered. This may sound nasty. However, it is claimed (again, I have not verified) that you can reactivate the same license up to 10 times essentially automatically. After Ms has seen the same license come through 11 times, it wants to know more about exactly why you need to activate it again.

It is worth spending some time learning cPanel because of the large variety of things it can do: backups, creating subdomains, reporting statistics, changing file permissions, etc. It also lets you get to Xisto by an encrypted link, if you don't like people potentially spying on your passwords, etc. I too had some trouble with it in the beginning, but I am convinced it is well worth the trouble to learn it!

I don't have a direct answer, but I can tell you where to look. I am currently analyzing an Eee PC's return from suspension, to figure out how to make it require a password. One of my kids is in school, and has a nosy roommate. When a Linux system goes into suspension, the one remaining task is (allegedly) init the task with PID 1. I say "allegedly" because I can't run another task to check on it, when the computer is in suspension! Anyway, the when it comes back, the ACPI subsystem looks in /etc/acpi to decide what to do. This location is subject to change in different Linuces. In openSuSE, it is /etc/acpi/events. Anyway, here is a FAQ on how to run a script on wakeup. Good luck!

TavoxPeru supplied a link to gimpshop. Following that link got me to a page that says in part: Buy this domain / Interested in this domainname? Contact ... I'm guessing that "Gimpshop" died since that was posted a little over a month ago. I too have used gimp, but found it difficult. It appears that graphic artists use a mouse in a way that is intuitive to them, but confusing to me...

Do "View | Page Source" in your browser, and see what actually arrived in the web page. If $variable had the value 5 in the database accessed by the PHP script, the page source should have var x=5 when it arrives in your browser. If it does not, then you can localize the cause. For example, if the <?php string is still there, you aren't executing the PHP. If the 5 is there but the browser-side result isn't what you want, then you may be generating a web page with a syntax error, such as a missing semicolon. If necessary, add some print statements in the PHP that generate plain HTML, so you can debug what is actually happening, as opposed to what you intended. Computers have the bad habit of doing what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do!

It is relatively common that attempting to remove Microsoft Windows software leaves a mess behind. Microsoft is aware of this, and has a tool to help with cleanup. It is called msicuu2 (or at least that was the last version I used). It is documented in a knowledge base article the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility. The text says it works back to Win 95, though the "Applies To" list at the bottom of the article only goes back to Win 2000. It can be downloaded from a link in the article. If you have ever had a Windows installer die during the installation process, you will probably need this program when you want to clean up the mess.

Many people don't like vi (or vim) because it isn't "like" more modern screen-oriented editors. However, if you are going to make much use of Linux, vi is the one editor that is always there! For example, the Avira rescue CD is a Live-CD linux distribution with a built-in virus checker, in less than 60 MB. For a Linux distribution, that is very small, but it includes vi! The essential things to remember about vi are (1) a few commands will do most basic editing. They are well covered at the start of this thread. (2) It is a keyboard-oriented editor. While many enhanced versions of vi use a mouse, it was designed, and long in development before mice became widely available. If the Linux disrtro you are using can't find your mouse, you can still use vi! (3) Even though its input emphasis is on the keyboard, not the mouse, its output is screen oriented. In fact that is the reason for its name: vi = VIsual editor. It was one of the first Linux (and Unix) editors that could do screen-oriented (visual) editing instead of line-oriented (text) editing. Actually, it can do both, though very few people now make much use of just its text commands. If you're serious about Linux, take a little time, and learn the essential vi commands. You never know when you'll really need them!

tansqrx, There is a simple and very effective remedy to your credit card problems, if it is less than 30 days since you received the bill containing the ARAX charge, at least in the U.S. Contact your credit card company and put the charge "in contest." They will ask you to put it in writing, and you will have to follow through. However, credit card companies take consumer fraud complaints very seriously. Typically, if a company has more than 5% of its charges flagged as fraudulent, the credit card company will just shut them off -- refuse to allow them to do business with their cards any more. For that reason, even threatening to put the charge in contest is usually enough to get the company to be much more responsive to you. I guess this website is full of big hardware buyers. I just bought two 500GB drives for $79.99 each. I probably went through a decision process similar to yours -- look at the capacity first, then at other features. Hard drives are getting more like computers now, there are lots of "extras" that are advertised, and I for one am unclear whether those options are really necessary or useful. An example is ... Rats! I just spent about 15 minutes looking for it, and not finding it. Anyway, there is a new buzz-phrase that means you can "stack" multiple seek requests in the drive controller hardware, and it will process them in the order that minimizes head travel, instead of the order in which they arrived at the controller. This adds about 15% to 20% to the cost of the drive, but otherwise the performance numbers are identical. It is claimed that this reduces disk latency and wear-and-tear on the drive. I did some digging, and learned that only some very recent Intel motherboards are capable of generating such asynchronous requests, and then only in Vista, so if you're not using the latest hardware and the latest software, the extra money spent on the drive is wasted. Anyway, I found another number which I strongly urge you to look for on each drive you buy: The length of the warranty! The 2 drives I bought were Seagates, and they are warranted for 5 years! The other drives I was considering had 1-year or 2-year warranties. (I did not even consider "refurbished" drives with 60- or 90-day warranties.) I have sent two drives back on warranties after several years, and in both cases the replacement was trouble-free. I believe one of them was a Western Digital, but it was a small laptop drive, and that was probably 6 years ago. Times (and manufacturers) are changing. The last time I had a hard drive corrupt data, I used dd_rescue and dd_rhelp successfully. So far as I know, they are only available in Linux, but they are open-source, and have apparently successfully recovered a lot of data. I believe the pair got the attention of the Gnu honchos, so there has been a name change to ddrescue. I haven't used this latest version, but it is reported to be "less buggy."

I live about 3 hours from the Mexican border, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have been robbed at gunpoint in my garage by someone who could barely speak English -- at least half of his vocabulary was "Geev me ure wallet!" He said it several times, to be sure I could understand it.Needless to say, I didn't ask for his papers, so I can't tell you for certain that he was illegal, but the experience has not inclined me to be more trusting of their "contributions" to our society. Recently, Albuquerque has become a "sanctuary city," and the government is amazed that the crime rate is now rapidly rising.

Arthur C. Clarke long ago said what should have been the final word on this subject. Wikipedia presents it as follows The .. three "laws" of prediction: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [Emphasis added.] I speak as a retired member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

Aside from a paid service (NetIdentity, which is getting greedy), I've only used Gmail. The last time I checked, which was a long time ago, only Gmail let me use a standard email handler (Thunderbird) and download my email to my computer. Does anyone know if any other free online services now offer POP or IMAP service? Thanks!

Again, that keyboard concept is unlikely to have tactile feedback from the keys, though it can have visual, in addition to audible feedback. As I understand it, Microsoft is actually working on something like this, though in a much less portable form.I believe Ms is building (or having a contractor build) desks with multimedia flat surfaces on their tops, usable as both display and keyboard. I saw a press release somewhere indicating that one or two hotel chains had bought it, for their entertainment rooms. This concept has been around a long time for video games, but Ms now wants to get their software into it.Personally, I prefer the "keyboard" envisioned in "Minority Report." When you want to control something, you just grab its image out of the air. A major advantage is that you can have a 3D assembly of objects to control, and your brain is not restricted to interpreting a 2D projection of the world. Over the past decade, I have seen at least a half dozen reports of 3D displays, some of them allegedly able to project the image in the air. I have personally witnessed a demonstration of one that used synchronized-shutter "glasses" and a large video terminal.Unfortunately, none of them has proven commercially viable outside of the military, which is willing to pay a lot more (of our money ) for something it really wants.

Yeah. Funny we all stumbled into this. I expect to take delivery tomorrow of a system that is designed for virtualization, so that this kind of thing can be easily examined. In the meantime, here are some fuzzy impressions I have about these issues: 1. An ISO image is both a data stream and a partition formatting specification. 2. In Linux, the "dd" command is the easy way (but dangerous!) to make an exact copy of a data stream. 3. The reason hard drives, USB drives, etc. have "device drivers" is that the OS wants to know not only what data is on the device, but how is it arranged? The time of only serial data storage (think magnetic tape) is long gone. 4. At least some of the virtualization software in use can boot directly from an ISO image anywhere: on a CD, on a USB or just in a file somewhere on a hard disk. In particular, there are utilities to get from an ISO image to a VMWare transfer image. 5. This stuff is partly black magic. Last night, I followed the directions for installing the System Rescue CD on a USB, and was unable to boot it. Instead, I copied the ISO image onto a CD, and successfully booted this image from a USB CD reader. The images were not the same (the instructions told how to modify the files for the USB boot), so in the future I intend to revisit this project and see exactly what has to be changed to go from a bootable CD image to a bootable USB "image" (more properly: file structure).

I am a retired theoretical physicist. I did numerical modeling of high-pressure physical processes, such is in the interior of the earth and the sun. The physical processes involved are very difficult to model unless some experiments can be done. Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in New Mexico instrumented a lot of nuclear experiments so that the equation of state at very high pressures could be determined for a lot of different materials. Many of the underground nuclear detonations took place in environments that looked more like anthills than plain holes in the ground. As the pressure wave expanded from the detonation, many different materials were tested for their dynamic response to the very high pressures to which they were exposed. With a lot of data points, LANL scientists could construct the "equation of state" [EOS] (pressure-volume-temperature, and other tables) for ranges of pressure and temperature that simply were unreachable any other way. This data then proved very valuable in modeling the physics of the interior of the sun, for example. The EoS tables for lower-atomic-weight atoms were made publicly available (higher-Z ones were classified). The result was the SESAME Tables. That data from a "weapons lab" found its way into many very non-military applications. If you are interested in seeing more of these explosion pictures, I can recommend two DVDs: 1. World's Most Powerful Explosions, which is available via Amazon from third parties starting at $7.98 (plus shipping). Experience the most frightening explosions ever caught on videotape -- from a gas station erupting into a giant mushroom cloud in downtown Seol, Korea... to firefitghters engulfed in a fireball caused by a backdraft. Watch as a Brazilian fireworks show turns into a war zone... and step inside ground zero of a nuclear blast. Learn how experts level a 20-story building using high explosives, and see what happens wihen a billion-dollar rocket detonates mid-air. This episode will show the force, destruction and human drama behind the World's Most... Powerful Explosions. 2. Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie Starring: William Shatner, Edward Teller; Director: Peter Kuran (Director's credits: Star Wars, Star Trek II & V, Robocop, Addams Family), starting at $19.96. Peter Kuran dedicated over three years to the production of this amazing fillm which chronicles the top secret, strange and visually compelling history of the design, production and testing of Atomic and Hydrogen bombs by the United States. In addition to uncovering rare film from top secret government archives, Kuran traveled far and wide to obtain startling footage of nuclear bomb tests conducted by Great Britain, China and the largest atomic explosion ever created by Russia. The quality of the images is remarkable and required the development of a new film restoration system to preserve these haunting images for generations to come. Narrated by William Shatner, this award-winning production features an original score performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and an interview with Dr. Edward Teller, a developer of nuclear weapons and ... This second DVD even has a bonus 3D section (and suitable glasses) plus the Warning! This disk contains Extreme Low Frequency Dynamic Range. That is, the makers of the DVD take no responsibility for the state of your sub-Woofer after you have "listened" to their DVD!

There seems to me to be something missing. I am a touch typist. My thumbs would be hidden from the laser by my fingers. How can it see if my thumb touched the "space" key? Similarly, if I use my little finger for the Alt key, how can it see it? There are also whole classes of specialized software that use the simultaneous pressing of several letter keys to short-cut access to international characters, or complex symbols such as are used in organic chemistry.Especially for a touch typist, there is a natural tendency to rest the idle hand on the keys. That may also cause problems.Interesting idea, but it may prove to have a lot of shortcomings.

I guess what you mean depends on what "all html tags" means. I don't think your regex will find any closing tags. I'm barely fluent in regex, but I suspect you really wanted <[A-Za-z\/][A-Za-z0-9]*>, where I have "quoted" the forward slash, in case it is treated as a special character within the regex. What makes things like this really confusing is that some "ordinary" characters, like period, have special meanings.

The following book has sold a lot of copies on America: Dial 911 and Die. One reviewer says: At least in America, there have been a number of court cases that have declared the police have no duty to "save" someone who is in danger. Personally, I find of discussion of 911 alternatives less interesting than a discussion of 9 mm vs. 357 magnum.

Direct example: If you are on gamma, try the following address: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ You will get "Website Certified by an Unknown Authority." Click OK. You will then get "Authentication Required" Note, this is NOT secure. Click "Cancel." You will now have a secure connection to gamma.xisto.com login screen. Give it your website username and password, and you are into a cPanel session via SSH! The "Unknown Authority" is because the certificate is self-signed. It provides and encrypted connection, but Xisto isn't paying a "signing authority" to bless the connection. By the way, if you have Firefox 3, you will get: Secure Connection Failedgamma.xisto.com:2083 uses an invalid security certificate.The certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.You will have to grant an "exception" to proceed. Hope this helps!

Very timely! I am trying to narrow down the choices for a system right now. The minimum essentials are a muscular CPU and full support of virtualization. First, the CPU, then the motherboard. Intel has a well-organized layout of its CPUs. Pick a processor name, click on it, and go to a table of the processors. Some observations: All Xeons have virtualization (VT). Lots of Pentium D's don't have VT. Ditto Core 2 Duo. Every Core 2 Duo that has VT, also has "Trusted Execution Technology." Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think "Trusted Execution Technology" is hardware copy protection. That concept is about as popular with me as CPU serial numbers were when Intel tried to introduce them. As I recall, that really gave AMD a spurt in sales! I don't intend to violate licensing terms, but neither do I wish my hardware to tell me I can't move a piece of software from one computer to another. It doesn't appear to me that AMD is as well organized. They have a page that shows their main processor lines, but this page links to other pages that describe the processors in generic terms. That said, their muscular CPUs, the Phenom and Opteron both seem to support virtualization fully (with several subfeatures described), and do not seem to have hardware copy protection. Regarding Gigabyte, I haven't used their video cards, but I have had two Gigabyte motherboards, a GA-7ZX-1 and a 7VM400M-RZ. The 7V has died, and the GA is dying. In both cases, Gigabyte used inferior capacitors, and they started leaking not too long after the warranty ran out. The system integrator that sold me those now shuns Gigabyte motherboards and uses MSI and SuperMicro instead. I'll take a look at ASUS. Thanks for the thread, and the comments!

The first computer I ever worked on was an IBM 650 in 1958. (I don't remember the girls being that pretty, then ) The drum was something like 18 inches in diameter, and 2-2.5 feet long. Wikipedia reminds me that it had 2,000 signed 10-digit words of memory. All programming was done in Assembly language. I remember we considered it very advanced, because we didn't have to manually assign numeric addresses for variable locations. Even then, the CPU was much faster than the drum. The drum was so slow that the Assembly language was called SOAP, Symbolic Optimizing Assembly Program, and it actually worked out where to store the data and executable instructions on the drum so that the next instruction and data would be underneath the read head "just in time" for the CPU to use them. Today, that kind of problem is solved with caches.

For your 64 MB system, I suggest you consider buying some more RAM, specifically, 128 MB that is compatible with what you already have. I have upgraded several computers using "old" RAM from others, and I can tell you this much from direct experience. Windows 95, 98 and ME can use a maximum of 192 MB of RAM. Any version of Windows will run faster with more RAM, up to the maximum it can use. You can put in up to 768 MB. If you go to 1 GB, they will think there is 0 MB present, and refuse to boot. Even if Linux will run in 64 MB, it will run much faster in 192 MB, by reducing the use of a swap file. I am running 768 MB in a multi-boot machine which has Win 98, Win 2K Pro and SuSE Linux. The latter two really benefit from the extra RAM, and Win 98 uses what it is able to. I agree with the recommendation of DSL if you want to stay with 64 MB, and even if you upgrade the memory, if the CPU is slow. DSL is Damn Small Linux, for those of you in Rio Linda. For you lurkers, note that DSL does not support some recent hardware. It uses the 2.4 kernel, so many of the latest additions are not in it. This is how it manages to run in limited memory, but it may be the best choice on older systems. To highlight a few things from the DSL Information Page -- Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things: Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run *inside* Windows) Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we call "frugal install" Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at how fast your computer can be!) These options make it very easy to try out, if you're not sure whether you want to get further into it. However, expect that you will need to do some things in a shell (the command-line interface).

Which is the "fastest computer" needs to by qualified by "when." I was physically in the room with several each of the Texas Instruments Advanced Scientific Computer and the Cray-1. Each of these was sold at a price in the range of $6-8 Million in 1976, which would be about $27 Million in 2007 dollars, according to the Inflation Calculator. One of the computers I have at my desk, which I bought for about $600, has a faster CPU, more RAM, and more hard disk than either of those computers.