Doctor Steel

If you REALLY need a Windows XP (or earlier) experience, just get ReactOS, or something like Xandros Linux. ReactOS is free, Xandros is cheap, both are easy to use. Just my 2 centavos.

1229

You may recall that, some time ago, typing the word "failure" into a Google search box would return George W. Bush's autobiography as the first result. You may also recall that Google "overhauled their search algorithms to break most Google bombs." Well, not exactly. Try this out. Open Google, and type in "worst president ever". When you hit the search button, you should see a few results for websites that intentionally slander the President. However, look at about the 5th result (this should be just about the last result without scrolling on a monitor at 1024x768 resolution.). It is Wikipedia's page about the President of the United States, George Walker Bush. Nice one, Google and Wikipedia.

Wow, I hadn't thought of that... as bad as it is in the States, I can't believe how bad it must be in other countries (Like Zimbabwe, appearantly). In reply to JcX: Indeed, this is what they are watching for (porn and piracy), but they have to call it "searching for terrorists" so they can use the Patriot Act to hide it from everybody but themselves. If they were really watching for what they said they were, don't you think that piracy and child porn on the internet would be nearly extinct? As it is, we're three steps away from having our own "Great Firewall of China." I can prove we're being spied on. If you're in the United States (or maybe even Canada), open up a console window and type "tracert helionet.org" (tracert on windows, idk on linux/mac) and hit enter. You'll see a few hops through your ISP, then boom - it hits a sprintlink.net server. Lo and behold, this is where Sprint (and AT&T, if you're on their network) records ALL the internet traffic within/outbound from the US, and most inbound traffic from around the world. Try to tracert nsa.gov - you've just been tracked by Sprint AND AT&T. They probably logged your IP too, just in case you ever try to DDOS their server. We may not have a 'Great Firewall' yet, but we sure have cameras on us all the time.

Nature is my church. (Anybody seen that bumper sticker?) I believe that, regardless of which religion you ascribe to (or none at all), you are indeed the sole worshiper of your own religion. For example, if you are a Christian, but also have things (ie family, friends) who are very important to you, do you not also somewhat regard those things as god(s)? Same goes for science being a religion all by itself (so long as you don't get it confused with Scientology). Scientists who really love what they do may indeed regard their science as (a) god. I don't believe in a 'god', just our own wants, needs, and energies summarized into a 'supreme being' that we see as able to do everything that we, ourselves, cannot. One thing is for sure, though: we will never reach the end of this discussion.

If god IS a 10th dimensional being, shouldn't there be slightly different versions of god - thus resulting in an 11th dimension? Maybe I'm just not getting the question, but it seems like if god were 10th-dimensional, following the laws and ideas stated in the explanations of the other 9 dimensions, shouldn't god be another point in the 10th dimension? Also, raise your hand if your brain is melted.

Once, I saw a sign outside a church that said the following: "THE BEST POSITION IS ON YOUR KNEES" Sorry for not having a pic to prove it, I'd wager most people have seen something similar on the internet before though

Hah, I remember that Xkcd strip. I also remember when they used import soul to give their EEE PC in a hamster ball a soul. Good times, good times.

Sorry to bump such a bad topic, but I agree with Wizard. If you're still checking this, Nick, I would recommend FreeWebs as an alternative to HelioHost. Check out my site I have there - the only advertising I'm required to have on my page is a little button that links back to FreeWebs. If you don't want to do that, they put a 20px bar at the top of the screen with exactly the same thing. All free, a few hundred megs of space and bandwidth each month. Clicketh.

I vote PHP. CSS is a good (strike that, great) idea to use for laying out web pages, but I wouldn't call it a programming language. On the other hand, I wouldn't call Python a programming language either, but a scripting language.

Nice. A lot of stuff like this is at The Daily [bleeped!]. I like it, mebe someone else will.

These days, there's really no "Configuring" to Ubuntu that I can recall (as of 8.04 Hardy Heron, that is.) You pick whether you want Gnome, KDE, or X. You burn it to a CD, make a partition (if you're going to dual-boot), install. Run, set up an account, use. That's it. (Then again, I do my Linux-ing from inside Sun's VirtualBox, so a hard install may be different.) I would recommend Ubuntu for a first-time Linux-er. Like others have said, try lots of LiveCDs first to determine which you like. /shrug

I agree with Van on this one. In ten years, it may be possible to order, say, a mug design off the internet for your fabber. Put in a Fabbo-Matic © brand Fabber Material block, and hit the print button. Now, for $11.95, you have a mug. These days (in 2008), you order it... then wait 6 to 8 weeks for delivery. A fabber in every home would do the same thing as a printer in every home would.

This sounds like a great idea (even if it was spawned in the bowels of Redmond). Now, if we could get VMWare / VirtualBox on it, and pop in an Ubuntu image...

iPod Touch = iPhone without (easy) Internet capabilities. I've heard that people jailbreak both of them, to allow the iTouch to do the same types of things as the iPhone. There's even videos on YouTube of groups playing music on jailbroken iTouches and iPhones. So, iPod Touch != old iPhone.. iPod Touch : iPhone :: Vista Basic : Vista Ultimate. EDIT: In response to the "ease of iPhone hacking" concerns, iPhones aren't that easy to hack from, say, an online service. I think they're as secure as a full-blooded Mac (they run OSX embedded.) What people are talking about when they say "a hacked iPhone" is that they have gotten around AT&T and Apple's firmware locks to allow custom (ie: homebrew) code to run on their iPhones.

Anybody heard of satellite broadband before? I think it's a good idea. For like $20 (US) a month, you can get around 2mb broadband no matter where on Earth you live (with a clear line of sight to the satellite, of course.) Way better than having the phone company steal your soul if you're a web designer in Cornfield, Indiana.

I like this idea. While it would make it easier to have lots of stuff open at once (like, say, you happened to do your Google-ing on a supercomputer), it would no doubt take a ton of memory and video resources, if implemented with some flashiness. I think the majority of Linux window managers have it right using multiple 2d desktops. That way, people with an old Pentium-II laptop can have 2 virtual desktops at a time.

Absolute best configuration? Go to Apple's store, and do a price check on a Power Mac with every option installed. All in all, with 16 (!!!) cores and around 3 TB of drive space, it totals around $22,000 (US Dollars.) It's a small fortune (if you can call 22k small), but you won't have to worry about upgrades for about a decade.

1227 (Still holding out for 1337... whoever manages to get that should get a couple Helions)

That's too bad for me. I probably would've seen SOMETHING (I live in Southern Indiana, near Evansville) if I had known to look for it. It flabberghasts me that something exciting happens in Idaho with more regularity than here. Cornfield, Indiana sucks. (Yes, that IS a real place!)

Exactly the same as Wizard, just one year younger. Weird.

The way I see it: People have been hunting for nigh on a million years now. Animals have been hunting for a few billion. So long as we can avoid causing a species to become extinct (which has sadly happened to many creatures, with or without human interference), I believe that hunting is an unavoidable part of life. If we say humans should not hunt, then doesn't it follow that no other animal should be allowed to kill another animal? EDIT: I guess I don't really have an opinion on this, I just don't think that people should be able to say one way or the other, definitively, whether or not hunting is OK. (No offense to those who have/will say so, of course.)

If Vista wasn't a dumbed-down, beaten-until-it-was-crippled OSX rip-off, I would use it. Same with Windows 7 - It appears to be to a desktop PC what the iPhone OS was. Ubuntu FTW

I agree with the Chess becoming more popular thing. In that respect, it's too bad he died - just like Gary Gygax. On the other hand, the whole anti-semitist thing tarnishes his name. At the same time, it did the same thing to Mel Gibson, and we won't dance on his grave for it.

Taken from http://www.thestupidestmanonearth.com/: "Stupid. This site is a chronicle of the life and times of Doug Pederson (aka: SpectateSwamp). Doug is truly the stupidest person in the world. He has no rival, not even close competition. If you are new to the works of Doug Pederson, you might be inclined to think this is a harsh assessment. You would be wrong. Following is a quick summary of some of the things that Doug Pederson has a problem with. I am confident you will be horrifed as you progress through the rest of this site and come to the realization how incredibly stupid this man really is. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- He doesn't understand 3-dimensional space: Doug Pederson repeatedly shows videos and images where his flying specks (see Aliens) appear near a bird or airplane, and insists that they're hovering around the object, despite explanations that this is due to parallax and the specks are probably hundreds or thousands of feet away. Even worse, he also stated that the leaf in his "tobacco leaf flyer" video (again, see Aliens) had a retracting stem, even though in the video the leaf was simply turning so that the stem was no longer visible. Although it seems that Doug Pederson still has not quite figured out how to interpret what he sees or how the 3-dimensional world that he has lived in for over 40 years works, it's also possible that these are last-ditch efforts at rationalizing his "alien" videos. He doesn't understand wind: Doug Pederson thinks it's strange that the specks in his "alien" videos appear to move quickly and rapidly change direction, even though it has been explained to him that this is exactly how objects (especially leaves) blowing in the wind behave. He also seems to think it is strange that the leaf in his "tobacco leaf flyer" video changes direction halfway through, again despite the fact that wind can, and frequently does, actually change direction. Apparently Doug Pederson has never been outside on a windy day, which is surprising considering how many outdoor videos he shoots. His writing style would make an English teacher commit suicide: Doug Pederson's writing style is insane as the man himself. He either uses too much punctuation, splitting his sentences apart into small, incoherent chunks, or too little punctuation, running a few different sentences together, or sometimes even both at the same time. He also personifies everything in sight, referring to "Old Man Copernic" when discussing Copernicus Desktop Search, and talking about "Old Man Neowin" banning him from the Neowin forums. Besides this, he has the annoying habit of inventing childish names for things, referring to a few large rocks he found "Biggie Flatten Em Stones" and calling anyone who uses a simple text search program (such as the classic Unix tool grep) a "Greppler". He can't carry on a coherent discussion: Whenever someone on a forum brings up a problem with any of Doug Pederson's teachings (the alien videos, SSDS, etc.) he either creates the most impossible and obviously unrealistic justifications for the way he does things, or he ignores the criticism completely and replies to random parts of a different post with either more "alien" pictures, more rhetoric on the greatness of SSDS, or a work story designed to show his supposed experience and intelligence, and that has nothing to do with anything else being discussed. Anything which proves his view of the world wrong apparently gets skipped over. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credit: burntfuse -- TDWTF " Anybody seen this before? EDIT: Also click here for some <tags> associated with SwampSpectate at TDWTF.