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I made a shorter url for this post: http://sam.ai.ki/mofo

I suggest to try Aikido, Tai Chi, or Wing Chun Kung Fu. Aikido has by far the best philosophy of any martial art in my opinon, and it's worth learning for that reason alone. I like Yoshinkan Aikido.

by the way, there's a plain text version of the page here if that would be easier for you to read / edit. http://sam.ai.ki/co2-and-forests.txt

Hey this is great, is there something I can do for you in return? I'd really appreciate it if you would proofread a short article I wrote about global warming. It's only 3 columns / one page. I can do coding, hosting or payment if you'd be willing to accept something in return. The article is here http://sam.ai.ki/co2-and-forests.html and my email address is on it.

I'm not sure if you mean very short text like headlines when you say 'copy'; if so, no problemo!

I was going to buy the microsoft version, but BASIC is not Basic without PRINT! (They use TextWindow.WriteLine() or some nonsense. Who would type that 500 times to write a game?) And their substitute for DATA is hideous. Compare:

http://computerscienceforkids.com/DavidAhlsSmallBasicCompute...

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=49 http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/showpage.php?page=46

I do have some similar books targetting BBC Basic, with graphics and sound, etc., from the 80s. It's a pity that computing books these days are much more dull! because the languages are so much harder to use. I'm very interested to correct this problem by making good language/s and writing some books! a fun thing to do.

sounds interesting, what is the difference between a clone and an emulator? do you mean it looks like a Vic20, but does not actually emulate 6502 (or whatever) machine code?

This is awesome, looks like a great book. Some really good ideas for games, which I could use to illustrate my own language. It would be fun to add graphics or sound functions to some of these games, while keeping the code simple.

The first version of this book was published in 1973, and Microsoft has published a new version this year (2010)! I prefer the simpler style of BASIC used in the originals.

A couple examples of how such a universal surveillance system might be used:

big brother could identify the people who meet with known peace activists or political rivals, find their meeting places, and disrupt meetings or capture participants. They could track a target user until he might travel to a less populated area, then dispatch someone or something to capture or kill him.

I updated and expanded my article based on your feedback, and removed the wording 'forced'. Thanks very much.

Yes, perhaps free, community-operated p2p wifi networks could replace the monolithic paid cellular networks. It might take a long time before this would happen though.

Can't we have a 'this is spam' button? I guess it's not much bother if each spam is only read by one or two people before it's trashed / moved to the 'spam' section. Perhaps there could be a karma threshold before you're allowed to mark something as spam. This would solve the problem for all types of spam rather than just for RMS spam.

I provide ssh accounts on 2 VPSs (and growing), free of charge. http://nipl.net/ http://ai.ki/

I think if committing has decreased over the past couple of years it's probably due to the so-called 'global financial crisis', I guess people have to work more and don't have so much free time to hack on open source.

that's amusing, considering that every wireless access point is insecure

I can see there will be a market for edible micro SD cards.

"Sir, we see from your blood sample that you have recently digested some silicon wafer..."

Giving up my passwords would compromise the security of other people, so I wouldn't do it.

I suspect that the improvement is not good enough that this image format would be adopted, when jpeg is already established.

The Jpeg shown is of a higher fidelity than the WebP image; look around the top edge of the red quadrilateral. In the Jpeg image, the edge is sharp, in the WebP image it looks a bit like the coloured sprinkles you might put on ice-cream. It would be better to show two versions of an image, having the same file size, so that we can look for any difference in quality.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8618-30685_3-20018146.html?communityId=...

I don't care much about software patents. If people sue me for violating some patent, I'll publish on bittorrent and move to Sweden or some free country!

I used plan 9 for a while, and I really like it; but when I was looking to use a network filesystem I tried a 9p remote mount between two Linux servers over the internet. I was disappointed to find that it was much much slower and generally performed worse than sshfs, perhaps due to lack of caching and readahead. Perhaps there is some way to use 9fs more effectively with a caching / readahead layer, I guess it would be simple enough to implement such an intermediate server in plan 9.

I don't want to encourage terrorism, but if someone wanted to destroy an airplane, they could bring onboard a more dangerous device disguised as a phone or other everyday 'black box' object such as a laptop. The dangerous device might emit serious levels of radiation, it might contain a powerful laser, it might contain explosives. The best defense against 'terrorism' is to be nice to other countries, help them and don't oppress them.

Usury (national debt), bombing, invasion and economic sanctions (aka starvation) are not nice. The countries and groups that commit crimes like those are likely to be attacked. Don't be bad, and no one will want to kill you.

that's not going to bring back the copies of my contacts, private photos, passwords and banking details which have been broadcast to the internet

I think they should have separated permissions that could compromise privacy / security from less important permissions, and grouped them by potential impact. Also the user should me able to say "um, no I won't allow you to read the phone state". As it is, the apps are in control, not the user. It is extremely difficult to effectively change the range of permissions now, with such a large body of existing apps.

I absolutely agree. The current warnings are inadequate because the average phone user does not bother to read them and cannot understand them.

The average user does not think up malware exploit-cases to convince himself that full internet access combined with the universal implicit 'read anything off the SD card' permission is not a good thing. He just clicks the funny rubber cow and listens to the moo sounds!

If games want to display ads, that would be okay, but they need a more limited permission which gives them internet access to their home server only (like java applets) and no access to local filesystems except a little space for their own settings and files. I think there should also be a declaration of ad-spamminess in the manifest so that people can avoid such games. I really don't trust random closed-source freeware games with my filesystems.

I think it's better to have the option, enabled by default, so that people see a warning pop-up the first time an app attempts internet access: "Freecell wants to access the internet. This could compromise your privacy or security. Press 'block' or 'allow' to continue." or whatever. Perhaps for the first time the message appears, the system could explain the risks in more detail, with a biohazard symbol or something. People could also choose 'block all' and allow an app only if it otherwise breaks. If you don't want a firewall, turn it off: simple. Otherwise, you are likely to be saddled with a large variety of malware. I'd rather have the firewall.

No, unless i am mistaken they are not sandboxed with respect to the SD card, and apps with write permission (comes for free with API 1.4) can also modify or delete any SD card content - to install a windows virus for example.

I did mention that Maemo's practical security is much weaker than Android's, but it's actual security may be better - like Debian's - because most apps are open source.

Fair enough, but I only know about Android and Maemo! As for apple, I have different reasons for disliking Apple: http://sam.ai.ki/apple.html

apps without permission to access it could be run in a chroot, for example.