Five years ago I couldn't drink green tea. However, I persisted, and can now, if not enjoy, accept, the taste.
Five months ago, I couldn't eat natto. However, I persisted, and can now eat, and indeed enjoy the taste.

You have to eat a small amount every now and again until you get used to it. Similar food experiences can be had with yeast extract based spreads such as vegemite and marmite.

Exactly unlike the sun then. Which was rather my point.

Burning wood or crop waste is a renewable option.
Tidal power is a perfectly good energy source as well.

I personally agree with one of the commentators above, all (or most) of the above should be an option. It depends on local conditions to a large degree. In the northern and southern most parts of the globe, solar power is not feasible for much of the year. In deserts hydro is unlikely to provide enough power. And I don't think I've ever even seen a hamster.

I'm currently in Japan, and the government is going on about increasing the use of solar and wind and other such. But I've never heard mention of geothermal power. Japan is in an excellent location for this, what with being on the border of three different continental plates and all. You'd think that in a country that has so many hot springs, the government would realize that it's possible to get power from the same source.

(Also, don't you love the misuse of words. Renewable, meaning it can be replaced (Wikipedia says "naturally replenished"), right? Except when it comes to energy, apparently. Because I can't see us replacing the sun when it runs out. I also have the same problem with the word "reclaimed" in relation to "reclaiming" swamps and other wetlands. The term really should just be "claimed".)

The first thought that came to mind was "fucking hard". The next was RPG (that standa for "role playing game", not a term from a FPS that starts with "rocket").

Someone asked if Diablo is a "roguelike". Well, Yes? No.

The "roguelike" that I've played the most of is Nethack. Even when cheating outrageously (save scumming, fiddling with bones files, all the tricks in the book), I still can't win. It's just too fucking hard! But, I've played a lot of other RPGs (e.g. Exile and Avernum from Spiderweb Software), which are winnable.

Then again, Dwarf Fortress isn't exactly an RPG.

Maybe we need to stop putting everything into little boxes?

I hope you told them to bugger off (politely of course). "Am I under-arrest?" "Am I free to go?" (if no, to the second question, you are under arrest no matter what they say). "I do not consent to any search" "I have the right to remain silent and I wish to exercise that right" "I want to speak to a lawyer".

You did nothing wrong, and therefore have no reason to speak to the police. Even if you did do something wrong, you shouldn't speak to the police because that will just give them evidence to use against you.

It's not your job to make the police's job easier, but it is your job to defend your rights, which include not giving the police the time of day.

Apparently I'm not the only one who dislikes the design. from here:

When Gawker Media launched a big redesign in February 2011, its traffic halved. That can happen because even when you do good things, people don’t like change. It can take them a while to adapt to the new environment. So, assuming for a moment the Gawker redesign was a good thing, have things picked up again?

“Turns out, according to Gawker’s public statistics, things are much, much worse than was originally reported,” The Atlantic Online states. “Yes, the redesign cut traffic in half almost instantly, but instead of coming back, even more readers left the site behind.”

I think it's more that Gawker uses a moronic JavaScript method of making pages, with no non-JavaScript fallback. I use NoScript, therefore, I'm not going to see the article. That's fine, as I'm sure that someone else will post all the interesting bits in the discussion thread.

I really wanted to see those animated gifs that take ages to make though. They must be awesome. But not enough to potentially open up my browser to an attack. If Gawker are too incompetent to make a non-JavaScript fallback,I don't thin they'd be able to protect themselves against someone taking over their site and inserting malicious JavaScript in it...

(Also, MNG and APNG, neither of which has any real support. Have the GIF patents expired yet?)

China is in no way communist. It's as capitalist as they come. They only thing "communist" about them is the name of the party in power. What's the similarity between the economic and political systems of the former USSR (along its 70 odd year life), Cuba (over the last 50 odd years), Vietnam since 1975, PRC since '49, North Korea since the '50s, and Romania, East Germany, and other Eastern European "Warsaw Bloc" countries when they were "communist"?

Oh wait, fuck all. Apart from, most of the time, the party in power having the word "communist" in its name.

Sure, there are many companies that are owned by the government in China. There are also a lot more that aren't. That's part of the reason you hear all these cases of people dying from contaminated milk products and the like. Capitalists making a killing. Saving money at any cost.

Wikipedia (not a great source for most political ideas) says:

The only communist state which still traditionally follows Marxist-Leninist doctrine and maintains a largely planned economy is Cuba, which describes itself as "a socialist state guided by ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin and in transition to a communist society".

When they say ban, they mean IP ban presumably. As in, the robot doesn't follow robots.txt, and because of this, they get their ass kicked, and banned. That makes a lot more sense I think.

I don't know either (the site is "Watching the Watchers"), but considering the licence, they have every right as far as I can tell to republish the article in the way they did. The link you provide is linked to from the bottom of the article.
The licence is Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). I cannot see anywhere on the Wikimedia blog how attribution should be given. My understanding is that in such cases how the WtW site referenced the original is sufficient. The relevant section of the licence is 4.b

If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all ...

---

And for the delitionists out there,

“I’ve written articles in many areas, and in many cases I could show my colleagues what I had done in their field,” Michel says. “I’d like to think that by now most of them have a favorable opinion of Wikipedia. Let’s face it: Guillaume de Dole, now a Good Article, there’s no database entry or encyclopedic article anywhere that compares to the Wikipedia article on that poem (and I realize that that says as much about Wikipedia as about the anywhere else).”

How do you do that? I've looked at automatically encrypting folders for cloud computing based backup services (such as Ubuntu One), but I couldn't work it out.
Currently I have a two gig Truecrypt folder, which I have to manually rsync, and it's too big to quickly load to the 'net.
--
Other than that, I have an external HD which I have the entire device as a Truecrypt partition, and I use rysnc to do a backup whenever I remember.
Command is (assuming /media/truecrypt1 is the external HD):
rsync --delete -a /home/no /media/truecrypt1

That tells rsync to archive everything in my home directory, and to delete anything on the HD that has been deleted.

This setup has a few flaws, not least of which is that if I do delete a bunch o' stuff, run my backup script, and then realise I shouldn't have deleted it..., too bad.

1.0 normally means feature complete for such projects. The programs will often be perfectly valid, bug-free, stable etc. However, because they don't yet implement all the features that the developers want, they aren't yet called 1.0. I believe with Inkscape that they want to have support for the full SVG 1.1 standard before they put the version number at 1.0. See the Inkscape Roadmap.

Also, numbers are the easiest way to distinguish between two different versions of a program. Unless you would rather switch to version control hashes?

Sooo, an adequate demonstration of the need for redundancy when it comes to telecommunication networks. Honestly, the only reason this is news is because it cut of 3.2 million people, and it was caused by an old lady. But telecommunication cables are cut all the time, both by people and accidents.

Yet, if I cut the phone line near my parents place, they'll still have Internet access (satellite). Indeed, I suspect they would still have phone access, because the cable would need to be cut on either side of their house to completely kill it.

I wonder what the Armenian response to this is going to be? Maybe make sure to get another outside link? (Perhaps via a country to the south, such as Iran or Turkey.)

Anyway, the article has very little to add to the summary, so I wouldn't bother reading it. (Or, so I was told by a neighbour who I get to read the articles so I don't have to.)

I read this story a few days ago. What strikes me is that I had invented better a encryption scheme when I was 16. See, I had read somewhere that certain letters (such as 'e') show up more times in English than other letters (such as 'x'). I also read that using frequency analysis is one way you can break single letter cipers. So, I did something that I was (was) rather proud of.

I found out the most frequent letters, and instead instead of having single letter ciper, I replaced each one with more than one other character. So, 'e' might have been '6', 'j' and 'q', while 's' in this scheme might have been '3', 'f' and 'o' (or whatever). I was attempting to foil any frequency analysis that someone (who I don't know) might have done on my secret messages.

Only trouble was, the first version of the program had a bug. I think it was underscore was replaced with the wrong character in the decryption phase. Once I caught that though, it was all good.

Of course, a couple of years latter I learnt about PGP and GPG and RSA and all that good stuff. I no longer rely on home-built faulty encryption that requires both parties to have the code to decrypted the message.

I use my own mail. I have a domain (or two) and I normally get my mail down via either POP or IMAP. I used to use Yahoo a lot, back in the day, but it seems the only people who email me there now are corporations I haven't given an email at one of my domains.

Yeah baby.