4/10    The News We (CNN) Kept To Ourselves
        http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/opinion/11JORD.html
        \_ So this idiot didn't tell these stories because it would've gotten
           people killed or tortured yet his stories are all about people
           getting killed and tortured.  I see appeasement has once again
           worked well to keep people safe from oppression and suffering.

4/10    what are taxes in other countries like?
        \_ Mind narrowing down the choices?
           \_ more or less complicated than the US tax system?
        \_ Try Europe where in several countries you can take outgoing bribes
           off your taxes as a business expense.
        \_ Try Europe where in several countries you can take outgoing
           bribes off your taxes as a business expense.
        \_ In many great Euro-Peon countries the max tax rate is
           approx 70%. Very few people pay that much. The average
           Jacques or Hans usually hides his money from the tax
           man and pays very little. 20% or so don't pay any tax
           because they are unemployed.
                \_ You are misinformed.  First, Switzerland passed a law
                   a year ago forbidding deduction of bribes (paid in foreign
                   countries, of course) as business expenses.  I am serious.
                   Then, Germany and France have _income tax_ rates of ~50%
                   for middle income.  The smaller countries tend to be a lot
                   lower (I pay about ~15% income tax in Switzerland.)  EU
                   countries at large tend to be around 25-40% range.  VAT
                   (sales tax for you baboons) will be around ~15% (8% here)
                   and unlike the US, most Euro countries make the equivalent
                   of an IRA a mandatory part of social security (albeit
                   often privately managed) which gets figured into some
                   tax statistics.  Upshot?  Germany has high taxes, and
                   sucks.  UK has mid-taxes but is expensive and sucks.
                   France and Italy have high taxes but are cheaper and don't
                   suck, the rest of the countries have some variation on
                   those themes.  And n.b. that the US is the only country
                   stupid and arrogant enough to expect its peons to declare
                   income they earn in other countries for life.
                   Mail me for specifics.  -John
                   \- speaking of self-reporting ... does anyone even know of
                      anyone who returned the CA Use Tax thing that came with
                      the CA 540 packet? --psb
                      \_ The what?
                      \_ it's the law, partha.  you are required to report
                         that.  i'd think a philosophy loving guy like you
                         would understand that.
                   \_ when i was working in france, i thought it was amusing
                      that the company paid 100% of my salary in payroll tax.
                      options cashed in within 4 years were treated as salary
                      and subject to the payroll tax also.  regular employees
                      had to sign an agreement to not cash out their options
                      within 4 years.  boy did they get screwed when the
                      telecomm bubble went puff.
        \_ Tax rate is low and tax code simple in Taiwan and Singapore.

4/10    any alternative to xdiff?
        \_ diff
        \_ tkdiff is pretty cool.
           \- emacs
        \_ sdiff

4/10    Is there any x-earth like application that can run on non-root
        windows?
        \_ Yeah, "xearth -noroot"  man xearth
           \_ thanks... sorry about that.  need to upgrade xearth
           \_ ok, I am trying to dump xearth into my desktop's (windowmaker)
                background. -noroot can only open another windows.
                \- hello, does anyone run xrmap? anyone know where to find
                   the glag/national anthem etc files? ok tnx --psb
                   the flag/national anthem etc files? ok tnx --psb

4/10    NOOSE TIGHTENS ON IRAQ-SEPT. 11 CONNECTION
        link:www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/5599583.htm
        \_ Just curious for those who believe there's no connection between
           Iraq and terrorism against the US: if the US comes up with either
           documents or people in post-Saddam Iraq that say otherwise will
           you believe it?  Is there anything that would change your mind?

4/10    YES!  SECOND ROUND INTERVIEW AT MY DREAM JOB!
        \_ Okay, which is it?  Second camera or fluffer?
           \_ Hah!  I'm so happy even reading the motd only makes me happier!
              It's backup fluffer, btw.  Eat your heart out!  I know you
              always wanted to be in the movie industry!

4/10    matrix reloaded trailer
        /csua/tmp/trailer/
        \_ those better not be the best parts cause those were lame with
           all due respect
           \_ looked great to me, troll.
              \_ some of those scenes looked really CG, in a bad way like
                 Spiderman; one of the great things about the first Matrix
                 was you didn't notice this.  This kind of felt like watching
                 Terminator 2 for the next generation of kids.  You can also
                 call it getting my expectations back to earth before watching
                 the movie.
                 \_ T2 still looks great today.  It's T1 that looks dated,
                    especially the scene when Arnie is in front of the mirror
                    and pulling away bits of skin and eyeball.
                    \_ but T1 is still a much better movie.  -tom
                       \_ Tough call: T1 was a little tighter plotwise, but
                          the characterizations were a little more interesting
                          in T2.                  -mice
                          \_ It doesn't get any more interesting than
                             "I'll be back."  -tom
                             \_ Hmm.  I suppose in context, "I'll be back."
                                beats "Hasta la vista, baby" hands down. -mice

4/10    What's the CSUA policy on cron jobs?
        \_ /csua/adm/doc/policies/processes
        \_ Any users running processes for more than 24 hours
           will be terminated.
           \_ The users or the procs?  What about all these shells that are
              open for days on end?
              \_ Can we institute a humour litmus for CSUA membership?
                 \_ "Draw a picture of yer mom"
                    \_ VP, please teminate this individual.  -"yermom"
        \_ yes. If you're friends with politburo members then you can
           do anything you want. Screw the policies. None have been truly
              have you had your ircbot unfairly terminated by w00t?
              get a fukn life.
           enforceable and it's been broken over and over again.
           \_ Um.  get yer head out of yer ass and stick it in a pig.
              have you had your ircbot unfairly terminated by w00t?  is the
              secret cabal of daves out to hose your screen session?
              get a fukn life.  They are totally enforcable, and they are
              enforced when need be.  as they get buffer hardware (thank you
              donating alumni!), the policies have become mildly outdated,
              but geez.
              \_ There is no secret cabal of daves.
                 \_ It's a secret cabal.  How would you know?
                    \_ because I'm in the secret cabal of secret cabals.
                       \_ then you'd be the last person to know.

4/10    Did anyone go to the eng date auction? Who raised the most money?
        http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/dateauction/index.html
        \_ http://www-hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/dateauction/f_auction.html
           I've been looking at the pictures of all the females.  My God!
           Has berkeley women gotten uglier since I left?  Only Herren
           and Gropp is "date-able".  The rest are butt ugly.
           \_ looks pretty much the same as when I was there
           \_ Have you looked at the guys?  Pot.  Kettle. Black. --chris
              \_ Doesn't count.  None of them will get laid for their good
                 looks but for their potential income.
                  \_ BDG, you're back.  WE MISS YOU!  -BDG #1 fan
        \_ some of the story at http://calwatch.blogspot.com - danh
          \_ great link, thanks!  Wish I'd known about this earlier,
             would have tried to auction off some of my (grad student)
             officemates :)
          \_ I think most of them are hot. -old alumnus
          \_ I think most of them are cute. -old alumnus
        http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/dateauction/index.html
        \_ if you must know, bianca herren took in like $220, from some
                             \- i'd give up coffee for sanka,
                                even sanka, bianca, for you.
                                            --psb and the feldherrn
                                            \_ God... bad memories...
                                               and thank you so much for
                                               stirring them up.
                                               --Bill^Wscotsman
           crazy dude sitting a row in front of me. he was heard muttering
           "this sucks" while getting up to pay. she offered to take off her
           shirt for $90 (bra underneath, duh), and then her skirt for $110.
           numbers might be a little off. offen-brown got to $110 eventually.
           amy wu was $80. now you're up to date on csua motd news.
        \_ hmm, herren is prettier than brown, but brown seems better for
                a one night stand. damn, i forgot how slim pickings EECS was.
                Gotta love Southern girls...
                \_ for a sweet-talker like you, the world is going to be
                   slim pickings.
                   \_ You'd be surprised how stupid women can be.  -!not him
        \_ If some girl paid at least $20 for a male engineer, would he
           feel compelled to pop his cherry?
           \_ actually, i think the least anyone ended up at was $25.
           \_ He'd be happy to pay more than $20 for her to pop his cherry.
              Anyway, I always thought that was a weird phrase when applied to
              men.  There must be something else to call it.
              \_ Getting his dick wet?
              \_ Popping his prune?
              \_ No, it's "wetting his willy", silly.
        \_______/
            \_ no wonder none of you get dates.
               \_ heh, you don't get out much, do ya?

4/11    Cringely's got an entertaining column up.  http://pbs.org/cringely

4/11    Why is anything being printed?
        bash-2.05b$ mkdir tmp 2>&1 > /dev/null
        mkdir: tmp: File exists
               \- use this "mkdir tmp  > /dev/null 2>&1" --psb
                  \_ thanks. (mkdir tmp 2>&1) > /dev/null wasnt as purty.
        \_ The order of evaluation is important:
           2>&1         -> dup2(1,2)
           --> 2 is now a copy of 1
           1> /dev/null -> fd = open("/dev/null",O_RDONLY);
                           dup2(fd,1);
           --> 1 is a copy of fd, 2 remains a copy of what 1 was.

4/11    http://desmoinesregister.com/news/stories/c2229999/20980532.html
        Truly amazing.  If we'd gotten butchered they would've said to
        bring the troops home to avoid Vietnam quagmire.  We roll over them
        and they say that proves we didn't need to be there.  Some people
        will twist anything to suit their agenda.
        \_ how many different ways do you listen to bill o'reilly?
           tv?  radio?  car radio?  mp3 player? his stupid "oh
           I'm being oppressed!" newspaper column?  fan fiction?
           truly amazing.
           \_ WTF are you talking about?  I don't listen to BO'R and if I did
              so what?  Ad hominen is not an effective debate tactic.
        \_ Where are those weapons of mass destruction?
           \_ Since there are over 1000 sites and the US/Brit forces don't
              yet have safe control of the country and they've only checked
              out 20 sites and it can take more than a week to test a sample
              and then double check it because in this case they *must* be
              certain, the WMD are either in labs all over the country or
              in some cases being tested right now.  You expected what?  Big
              glowing neon signs that say, "WMD HERE!"?

4/11    I need to delete a method from a bunch of classes.  How do I do
        do a multiline match and delete in perl or sed or whatever?
        Something like 's/int.*::Foo\(\).*\{.*\}//m', but that doesn't
        work.
        \_ It's been a while since I've done this but I *believe* you need to
           futz with the paragraph marker variable.  I'm sure some other perl
           guru who has done this more recently can provide a full answer.

4/11    http://www.fortune.com/fortune/valuedriven/0,15704,439105,00.html
        What's your share of the cost of the war in Iraq?  This says mine
        is about $13,000.  I say it was money well spent and I'd happily
        have checked off the "use $13,000 of this for the war" box if
        there was a choice for it on the tax forms.
        \_ This whole analysis is bogus. It does not include Social Security
           tax.
           \_ Back to reading comp for you:
                That does not quite tell us who's paying how much for the war.
                Washington collects plenty of taxes besides individual income
                tax (though that's the main one), and the D.C. statmeisters
                have compiled figures allocating the burden of those other
                taxes to families. Include all federal taxes, crunch the
                numbers, and here's how the picture looks:
              Anyway, SS taxes are capped so they won't be nearly as high
              as the income tax burden for the higher earners.  Thank you
              for participating.
              \_ Exactly, that is why all of his handwaving about uneven
                 tax burdens is crap. He does not include SS taxes, which
                 as you point out, fall disproportionately on those making
                 less than the cap ($85,000 last I checked). He does not
                 include sales tax or use taxes or any of the other taxes
                 which do not advance his thesis. After all of that
                 lying, I don't believe he crunched all the numbers. If
                 you do, you are naive.
              \_ All right, I did the math, using:
                 http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/overview/current.cfm
                 for total tax burden. And if anything, he understates
                 his point. If the cost per family is $625, the average
                 family in the lowest quintile pays $21, the highest 1%
                 pays $12,500.

4/11    It's open season on Palestinian activists.
        http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=396369

4/11    Life has already gone to hell, but this confirms it:
        http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030407/140/dx5mg.html

4/11    This might sound trollish, but I'm curious about the
        explanation. In cold places people evolved to have more body
        hair.  Northern europe for example.  While people in the
        tropics like hawaii or the amazon have little facial or body
        hair.  Make sense?  So what explanation can there be for
        middle eastern people having a lot of body hair? This goes for
        Jews/Arabs/Persian/etc alike.  How does living in the desert
        evolved into growing so much body hair?
                \_ Most of the people living in Europe, the near East
                   and India are descendents of the same group of
                   Indo-Europeans who left central asia less than 10K
                   yrs ago.
        \_Actually, variations in body height, amount of hair, breast size,
        penis size, etc. has nothing to do with natural selection but more
        to do with founder effects. The human race, once they moved out of
        the central African continent, has not evolved on the genetic level.
        The variations you see in the world are because all "races" of humanity
        (with the possible exception of certain african tribes) were founded
        on an exceedingly small population of humans, somewhere on the order
        of no more than 20-30 individuals. What you see is therefore more of
        an effect of in-breeding than environmental factors. The only exception
        to this is skin color, because the amount of sun one receives can
        not be easily controlled by technology (cold can be controlled by
        wearing clothes, height can be overcome by using certain tools, etc.)
        In fact, the widest variation of genetics occurs in Africa. so that
        populations within africa which are not seperated by more than a couple
        km might exhibit more genetic variation than between an east asian and
        a caucasian from Europe.
        \_ We only have more facial hair than the indolent little brown
           brothers so that we may grow cool goatees and make supervillains
           worthy of our superior genetic heritage, to oppress and enslave
           the lesser hairless or pelted peoples of the world.  After all
           what's a real supervillain without a blond Vandyke.  -John
        \_ Actually, variations in body height, amount of hair, breast
           size, penis size, etc. has nothing to do with natural
           selection but more to do with founder effects. The human
           race, once they moved out of the central African continent,
           has not evolved on the genetic level.  The variations you
           see in the world are because all "races" of humanity (with
           the possible exception of certain african tribes) were
           founded on an exceedingly small population of humans,
           somewhere on the order of no more than 20-30
           individuals. What you see is therefore more of an effect of
           in-breeding than environmental factors. The only exception
           to this is skin color, because the amount of sun one
           receives can not be easily controlled by technology (cold
           can be controlled by wearing clothes, height can be
           overcome by using certain tools, etc.)  In fact, the widest
           variation of genetics occurs in Africa. so that populations
           within africa which are not seperated by more than a couple
           km might exhibit more genetic variation than between an
           east asian and a caucasian from Europe.
           \_ Wow, this is so wrong I'm not even sure where to begin.
                \_ He is not completely wrong. In reality there is
                   very little genetic different between humans on
                   any continent.
        \_ We only have more facial hair than the indolent little
           brown brothers so that we may grow cool goatees and make
           supervillains worthy of our superior genetic heritage, to
           oppress and enslave the lesser hairless or pelted peoples
           of the world.  After all what's a real supervillain without
           a blond Vandyke.  -John
           \_ Ooh... Almost forgot!  Progress report:  Everything is fine.
              Nothing is ruined.  Eagle flies at 0640. --qz42
        \_ your premise is incorrect.
        \_ Maybe it is to protect against sunburns.
        \_ http://www.kithrup.com/brin/neotenyarticle1.html
           \_ I liked this article.
             \_ It's pretty plausible, isn't it?  And it explains a lot
                of things that wouldn't make sense otherwise!
        \_ (east) asians are basically hairless. it gets hot in asia.
                \_ tell that to my bunghole
                \_ and it snows in korea, japan, and parts of china.  makes
                   sense to me.  have you published yet?
        \_ I thought hair acts as an insulant -- cooling in hot environments,
           and heating in cold.
        \_ Swedes don't have a lot of hair. --dim
           \_ neither do eskimos.
        \_ The more evolved you are, the less hair. Japanese are the most
           evolved, followed by other Asians, Amerindians, Northern
           Europeans, then Aficans with Slavs and other Middle Eastern
           people at the bottom.
           \_ are you sure that isn't the smaller the penis, the less hair?
              \_ How do you explain me then?  I am very hairy but has very small
                 penis.
        \_ all of you are wrong. Ask yourself, why are women less hairy?
                \_ because they shave their legs off.
                   \_ but they don't shave their chests and backs, do they?
                \_ smaller penises?
                \_ Because they float like a duck!  Burn her!  Burn her!
                   \_ who are you who, are so wise in the ways of science?
                      \_ It shall be greater than two but less than four!
           \_ Because they are more highly evolved?
        \_ hair is no longer strongly correlated to survival (aka, passing
           on your DNA to children).

4/11    Saw a poll somewhere.  U.S. people think our greatest threat is:
        1) North Korea  (~39%?)
        2) Iraq (20 something percent)
        3) France (7%)
        4) China (5%)
        5) Liechtenstein (17%)
        6) Swaziland (pi%)
        \_ 5) Liechtenstein (17%)
           6) Swaziland (pi%)
        \_ France?  How did it get in this poll?
        \_ Dubya should end every speech with "And France must be destroyed".
        \_ Can you post the source please?
           \_ saw it as a news bulletin at the bottom of screen on fox news.
        \_ Threat may not be purely militaristic.

4/11    Do reimbursements for nonprofit trips (academic seminars) count as
        income?  Are they taxable?  I am not making a lot of money so maybe
        this does not really matter that much, but just curious.
        \_ no.

4/11    <DEAD>162.42.211.226/article2838.htm<DEAD>
        <DEAD>162.42.211.226/article2842.htm<DEAD>
        Saddam's statue pull-down celebration staged?
        \_ I saw a bemused report on ABC examining the events of the day.
           They took a frame of the statue's head being dragged through the
           street, and highlighted the number of people carrying cameras.  I
           think something like 7 out of 15 were journalists.
           \_ yeah, Tom Brokaw was sitting on the head