This is why Lego costs more.

I have Lego bricks kicking round that i found outdoors in odd places, living in Australia plenty of them were heavily UV exposed. Got bored & did some destructive load testing on one once, the dye may fade the shine may dull and the corners may blunt, but that plastic lasts really really well. I wonder if there's any way to do more advanced stuff like molecular analysis or radiocarbon dating to determine the exact age of the Lego. Shame there's no place i can just mail a chip of the plastic as sample to for it to be analysed and get a report back... well any that don't ask which fortune 500 company/research university pays the bill and charge appropriately.

Economics 104 - Whatever you thought you knew was wrong. a.k.a. Intro to banking & international finance.

Its a bit of a network effect game that makes it harder to see.

You signed up with [legit online vendor/merchant A] the TOS you agreed to here grants them the right to share your information for certain things.
You paid for a purchase online, allowing them to associate a name with your billing address.
They share your info with [info harvesting company B]
You anonymously sign up with [small store C] for a loyalty card.
You buy something with your credit card at [small store C], the legally allowed information they can keep after the CC purchase is tagged matching your loyalty card.
[Small store C] has a deal with [profiling service co D] who has a deal with [info harvester B], [D] uses the info from [B] in order to provide [C] with a nice legally obtained set of personal information that is likely much more detailed than you wish it was possibly including interests harvested online and physically for decades, distilled down into tags & labels associated to your unique personal details like the usual name, address & phone.

That's how we pretty much lost the last of our guns here in Australia.
Three words, "Port Arthur Massacre", I couldn't bloody believe it, now even bloody paintball weapons are heavily regulated here, its pathetic.

That number may be wrong, but did you not notice the insanity of charging someone who used a toy gun to scare off someone attempting to steal from them? Please refute something worth refuting. I find it deplorable that people don't realize just how skewed the world is.

right wing, left wing, conservative, liberal, I dont bloody care what you call yourself and those 'other people' you dont like the opinions of. I want concealed carry with harsher penalties for people breaching the trust granted a person offered the right to carry a concealed weapon on their person. Is that liberal, no, is that conservative, nope. Gee, that would mean I must want to set fire to the entire system and live in anarchy, nope I like my fair taxes (hate corporate tax avoidance, so while Im ranting fuck you larry & sergei, not paying your taxes is evil, fix your company or change the motto) and my heavily subsidized public healthcare, while also thinking not enough of the education system is subsidized.

In short, get off my lawn.

Well that's an interesting detail I hadn't heard before. I always wondered just why recidivism was so grossly disproportionate with the numbers seen in other countries. Criminals in the USA are (based on some cursory averaging of statistics easily available with quality references) pretty much twice as likely to re-offend and wind up back behind bars. I always presumed it was some cultural quirk of the USA, longer sentences creating a sort of Stockholm syndrome or something.

However if they are having their wages garnished post release, yeah pushing someone strait back into the gutter while they try to 'go legit' is likely to just force them to various kinds of illegal activity, from fraud about wages, to less white collar crimes, in order to get by. Either they 'give up' and go back inside by commiting some small crime they know they arent likely to be shot while being arrested for, or they will break the law trying to survive. If you make it hard to go legit, less people will reform.

The way I always saw it was that if you had one person try to intimidate people, coercion, etc, otherwise trying to tip the scales. It would be considered 'just' if that person were to suffer an accident, or someone refuse to be intimidated and while justifiably threatened by the person attempting the intimidation, they would defend themselves to the fullest extent, be that anywhere on the scale from a light bruising through to lethal force.

Person A sells themselves into slavery, person B buys said person, person A gets fed up of the treatment, (typically viewed as breach of contract by person A) and vacates to ignore the rest of the contract. The issue between A and B has no impact on Person C, who when presented with the facts at hand, gets to make up their own mind as to the legitimacy of the deal.

Yes it would be unstable as hell. But it might work for at least a few years before changing from a 'I am lord of my own feifdom" to "i pledged my personal feifdom to Lord X in exchange for safety i was too scared/feeble to secure for myself"

P.S. I dont think its a good idea. Just trying to help explain why it doesnt actually matter about self interest still existing.

Yeah, that might work for radio... where we can accurately filter phase based on electronics. However doing it with optical frequencies is a major pita... I've spent a few years contemplating how it could be achieved let alone building one.
Good idea, its bloody hard to do one rather important part, the 'phase filter'

See above comments. Your completely wrong.
Internode (now iiNet) are on the record as routing direct from Perth to Singapore via SWA-ME-WE

While I still think he did 'a good thing' in principle. Your well elucidated post has left me more certain that while he did the right thing in principle, he clearly could have done it a better way. As to if he would have had the chance to 'work up the chain' without repercussions, I have my doubts. Either way, he could have taken a much better course of action and I cant see how a letter of the type you outlined done the way you suggested, would fail to get a reaction, particularly if leaked outside as 'last resort'.

However, I do feel that the diplomatic cables leaked, provided the kind of window into how the political game is played at the big boy level that the general population sorely needed. This business of all diplomacy being classified is rather appalling, I dont see why no one can ever know "Mr Ambassador from Crap 3rd world country $X requested the USA support his tinpot dictator in an ethnic purge. request politely ignored by state department".

The way I see it, given that its all classified, the people never had a chance to know if the government was classifying stuff the people thought it shouldnt be, and thereby have the chance to affect that via due political process.

I was fairly sure the best performance cross browser wise would be with canvas.

My motives for SVG were more compression & transform speed. Being able to do the Window Manager 'theme' stuff Motif/CDE/twm/etc, farmed out to the browsers CSS/XSLT, and any other tricks that can be performed using the SVG in order to avoid sending image data for performance. SVG is getting better with time, and I'll agree it has a long way to go compared to canvas, but at higher resolutions, it would have distinct advantages. I also wanted to avoid it feeling too much like web based vnc and browser side handling of 'window' objects via floating SVG elements seemed like the best way to approach at least a few aspects with my goal of letting the browser handle as much of the code as I could.

Nice feature list there and Btw... this is a sufficiently awesome thing, that I'm likely to become a paying customer and possibly commit back to the github where I can.

Ok... I dont know how to handle the awesomeness that I just read.

Other than to offer to help. In the very least I can test the hell out of it...

I have been thinking of ways to make a HTML 5 or other web based "X11 server" for a while. The thinking has only gotten as far as a rough map of the most effective ways to do it so far. (Java and Flash are both non-starters in my book)
Chrome + Native Client + websockets or inbuilt ssh tunnel over port 443 = most straitforward but a lot of work just to make an actual X11 server that still required lots of work building XDMP related stuff as well.
Javascript + Canvas + webserver & X11 on the remote 'terminal server' = more web based, probably more doable, definitely more flexible.
or
Javascript + HTML5 & SVG + special web X11 server = best approach in my mind. Probably hardest, definitely wins points for simplicity if done right.

The issue would be going from a crude web page based equivalent of X2VNC to something more advanced like using as much SVG as possible for window borders, etc, while rendering individual window updates to jpeg/png/webp/whatever, and sending them via something like websockets, while sending back keyboard & mouse inputs captured on the page to the server. No small feat.

Which way were you thinking of going with your plans for X11?

I hate replying to myself, but the above comment still stands even if they distribute a binary. I only need to know its dependencies and where it expects files to be (hopefully in standard places unlike some proprietary binaries I've used over the years.) and based on the Mac version, they will compartmentalize the application quite well with per user settings in appropriate folders and such. Valve do seem to respect platform conventions. I just hope they dont ignore the convention of 'openness' that is at the heart of linux...

Otherwise I wont be able to test it on FreeBSD using Linux Binary Compatibility ;-)

Infact the people running other OSes should get a second survey & become 'primary' testers.

Were the ones who will find (and should accept the fact fixes wont be immediate) the bugs and issues.

With my Gentoo box I could batch test the application through at least 12 library versions for whatever libraries they are using, in a couple of hours in a chroot prefix just so valve dont have to worry that the next version will break things when its added from upstream into Ubuntu... because it probably was (or could be) in a Gentoo prefix within a few hours of the upstream devs marking that branch stable.

The biggest reason I keep using Gentoo for development boxes and VMs, is just how easy it is to test library variations... well except for heavily used libraries that lots of other things depend on, but your being naive if your not sufficiently isolate your testing to avoid breaking your entire system when you start trying to play with a new version of things like glibc.

Knowing Disney what they tend to do with The Muppets... Odds are like 95% or better Kermit would get to be Han just because otherwise they wouldnt be able to use Miss Piggy for Leia.
Not much chance they would do anything else.

I mean there is so much potential for a Muppet SW given how well some parody takes treat the material. I adored the Robot Chicken SW shorts and the Muppets past humor treatments of things such as Dickens & Treasure Island shows an appropriate amount of irreverence to do good humor with old subject matter. But its the Kermit & Piggy as Han & Leia that breaks it for me. Everything else I picture is awesome, from Fozzie or Animal as Chewie, to a Gonzo as Han, Penguins as Jawas, Swedish Chef as Akbar, the list is endless as to how awesome they could make it. Pretty much anything other than the utterly predicable & tedious to watch Kermit & Piggy as Han & Leia, with the mandatory side order of Scooter as Luke.