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  /_/_/  |_|__/|__/_/ |_/http://www.acronymchile.com/yawn.html
                         2003-02-02
                         "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro..."
                         -- Hunter S. Thompson

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Open Source Cookbook, Does exactly what it says on the label. Written in a manner designed not to alienate computer geeks, and with quite a lot of useful detail about general principles of cooking (as well as recipes, which are very much Tex-Mex focused): http://ibiblio.org/oscookbook/ free download (810k), in glorious Technicolour PDF: http://ibiblio.org/oscookbook/downloads/OSCOOKBOOK.pdf Also, interestingly (?), there is actually a unit for measuring the "heat" of chili peppers. It is known as the scoville: http://jfaser.tripod.com/facts.htm
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German special agents have published a cookbook of secret recipes.Top Secret - Schnitzel for Spies, is a new book by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) - the German equivalent of MI6. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_742414.html?menu=news.quirkies
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Interesting article, on ideas that are as unoriginal as they are compelling and unfamiliar: http://www.monbiot.org/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=556 "At present, the world produces enough food for its people and its livestock, though (largely because they are so poor) some 800 million are permanently malnourished. But as the population rises, structural global famine will be avoided only if the rich start to eat less meat. The number of farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially." Unrelated, apart from in a culinary sense: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2882 I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house in the suburbs of Amman this week, stuffing into my mouth vast heaps of lamb and boiled rice soaked in melted butter. -- Robert Fisk The rest of the article is very readable.
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Dell laptop was involved in South African exploding laptop burns incident http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/28913.html
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Though Dell has drivers to allow NT4 to be used on its new servers, MS regulations mean that they cannot supply them to customers. The aim is to force upgrades to newer product (even though NT4 is still supported): http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29108.html
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Lots of info on old computer hardware, jumper settings and the like. http://helpdesk.usu.edu:8080/Help/Total%20Hardware/index.htm
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Microsoft times its first every payment of a dividend to shareholders to coincide with the announcement of Bush plan to abolish tax on dividends. Such a tax "reform" would only significantly benefit the wealthy, as most low to mid income humans hold shares through mechanisms like pension funds and already don't pay any tax on the dividends (though they will pay tax when they draw down the payments some day, but that's not going to go away). http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/28914.html Ashcroft had declined to excuse himself from the case: despite having taken $20,000 in campaign contributions for his Senate campaign from Microsoft and refused to disclose contacts with the company. That said, the contribution hadn't done him much good: he still lost the race to a dead man. -- figures Paul Street has also written about the Bush policy on dividends: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=2876 a measure that “could cost the government $300 billion over 10 years" and will "create much bigger budget deficits for the future," according to the New York Times. “More than half the benefit of eliminating dividend taxes,” the Times reported, “would flow to the wealthiest 5 percent of taxpayers." As has Mark Weisbrot: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=2884
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On The Register four MS alerts: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/28998.html
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I never heard about this one. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20021118/temple.html Nov. 21 — An enormous temple that was once surrounded by 300 towering oak posts lies directly underneath the Hill of Tara in County Meath, Irish archaeologists recently announced.
############## MEDIA ###############################(IB)######
RSS and news http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000752.shtml#000752 http://www.ojr.org/ojr/lasica/1043362624.php http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/news.cfm?id=832 http://www.incunabula.org/blog/archive/2003_01_24_index.html#90229207
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Donald Rumsfeld says draftees who served and died in the Vietnam war "added no value": http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/20/column.shields.opinion.rumsfeld/index.html And although he claims there is currently no draft: "Two days after these unequivocal words, the United States Marine Corps -- which reports to the secretary of defence -- froze for the next 12 months every one of its 174,312 members currently on active duty. Marines who had completed their voluntary enlistments or their 20 years and had chosen to return to civilian life or retirement will instead remain, involuntarily, in the service." He backtracked rapidly later on: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2003/b01212003_bt029-03.html There is a good analysis here: http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/012403E.rumsf.vets.htm There are 58,229 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Many of those names belong to men who were without the choices afforded to Bush, Cheney, Perle, Card, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Ashcroft and Rove. In all likelihood, there are names on that wall representing men who went, served and died in Vietnam in place of these administration officials. That the man immediately in charge of our armed services stated that these lost soldiers added "no value, no advantage" to the country they served is a profound insult not only to the honored dead, but to those who died so Bush and the members of his administration could hide from duty when it came calling. Indeed, Mr. Rumsfeld, these men are gone, and never to return.
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"Steal this book": http://www.tenant.net/Community/steal/steal.html and they did
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Clever: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993273 By simply feeding roundworms genetically-modified bacteria, UK scientists have conducted an extraordinary one-by-one analysis of the function of nearly 86 per cent of the worms 20,000 genes.
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John le Carré says: The United States of America Has Gone Mad "A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election." ... "What is at stake is America’s need to demonstrate its military power to all of us — to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad." http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0115-01.htm These ideas are gaining more and more currency. People sniff at use of the word "imperialism", but I believe it will be used by even "respectable" folk in the future to describe what's going on at the moment.
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INS (Immigration and Naturalisation Service) detainees are on hunger strike, which is a common reaction to internment: http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000841.php#000841
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Data Mining Used Hard Drives Two MIT grad students bought used drives from eBay and secondhand computer stores. Among the data found on the 158 drives were 5,000 credit-card numbers, porn, love-letters and medical information. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/15/2345217&mode=nested&tid=158 http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/01/15/national1617EST0765.DTL
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Banana to be Sequenced, and hopefully kept open source: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991037 http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/16/028227&mode=nested&tid=134 'One rule of joining the consortium is that any invention developed through the project and protected [by patent] will be made available to smallholders through a royalty-free license,'
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flu costs more lives in US than AIDS: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,74884,00.html "...and inspite of vaccination programs, deatrates have increased since 1970's"
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A recent Wall Street Journal editorial has drawn attention to a group of people in the US who have been fleecing the nation for years: those on low incomes. These individuals pay less tax than their better paid colleagues, which can't be fair. These "lucky duckies" may find their luck is about to run out. Earning $12,000 or less will be no excuse not to pay your way. Two comics on the topic, first one is particularly good: http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2002/12/19/boll/index.html http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2002/12/09/tomo/index.html Plenty in the mainstream media too, just google search for "lucky duckies" This Washington Post article highlights some of the broken thinking in the original WSJ editorial. For example, it does not take sales taxes and FICA (?) taxes into account http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A39211-2002Nov25¬Found=true
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New York Times Venezuela reporter, Francisco Toro, has resigned due to conflicts of interest: http://www.narconews.com/Issue27/article584.html Also interesting is Canada's lean toward decriminalising (or at least substantially reducing the criminality of) marijuana: http://www.narconews.com/Issue27/article585.html
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Australia's position gets little coverage on this side of the world so this article by John Pilger may be of interest: Asked if he thought it better that Muslim women made themselves "less conspicuous at this time" by not wearing their traditional headdress, Howard replied: "Obviously." ... Howard's is the only government in the world willing and eager to join the Bush/Blair assault on Iraq ... Some years ago, I interviewed an Australian warrant officer who had served on a CIA-run assassination team in Vietnam, and ruefully recalled to me the words of his American commander. "We really like using you guys," said the American. "It's like this: the British have the Gurkhas; we've got the Australians." http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=2879 I generally enjoy John Pilger's writing on Australia. It is clear he has a deep attachment to his home country, and an understanding of it that is quite uncommon in the media in US and Europe.
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Problems with playing CDs in Australia (and rest of southern hemisphere). The suggestions here should be helpful though: http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_AussieCD.html
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The Register are now selling yo-yo's, complete with instructional book and "leather holster". STG£15.00 inc VAT http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/31/28830.html
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little business-card guide you can print out to help in estimating distances and angles: http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/anglecard/
############## SPAM ################################(##)######
I have been using spam filtering for a while. Originally I used spamassassin, which uses a rules-based system to classify mail as spam or non-spam. What it does is look for things that typically appear in spam (like lines of ALL CAPS), and assign points. If the mail scores over a certain threshold, it gets flagged as spam, and you can automatically filter it into a special folder. Problem with systems like that is they need to be kept up to date, and it takes a lot of effort to formulate the patterns. Also, it is quite slow if you put a large volume of mail through it. Lately, I've been impressed with Bayesian spam filtering, which is a more automatic solution. http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html One program implementing this system is bogofilter. http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/bogofilter/ Assuming you have a large stock of spam (you can find spam on the net too, but it is better to have the exact kind of spam YOU get), you pipe this into bogofilter, which builds up a database of words that tend to appear in such mails. Then you take a folder of non-spam mails, and pipe that into bogofilter so that it can catalogue what words tend to appear in legitimate emails. Then later on, when bogofilter is asked to classify an email, it looks at the contents of the mail and classifies the mail as spam or non-spam based on statistical analysis. The beauty of the system, is that if the spam evolves over time, and some messages start to slip through, you just pipe them into bogofilter later on, and they get added to the database. This can be automated from some mail clients. Equally, you can arrange so that every mail you save into another folder gets classified as non-spam (on the principle that if you wanted to save it, it must be worth keeping). A particularly elegant solution I came across was implemented with iFile http://www.nongnu.org/ifile/ (another statistics-based email filtering program). iFile can be used to classify mails into many different categories. http://www.jbertram.net/projects/ifile/ifile.html The author of the above article set up his system so that iFile would add a header to each mail indicating the folder it thought the mail should be saved to. Then procmail (a mail processor) would save the mail into various folders according to this header. When the user reads his mail, he will come across mails which have been mis-filed. These can be saved to the correct folder without much difficulty. The nicest part of the set up, though, is that a periodic program is run each night, which looks through the mail folders and finds mails whose headers do not tally with the folders they have been stored in. These mails were obviously misfiled originally, and then corrected by the user, so the script runs iFile to add the misfiled mails to the appropriate databases. This way, the system essentially keeps itself up to date, with only occasional input from the user. I am currently only using bogofilter in a very basic way, but it is still very useful and correctly identifies the vast majority of spam. The longer it is used, the better it should get. I would very much recommend anybody who receives more spam than they like to investigate similar programs.
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Don't have a clue what this is: http://www.00.gs/
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