10/22   Stupid question.  We've dropped 150 billions on the War on Terror.
        Where are these 150 billion (in 2 years) come from?
        \_ Start with 260 million Americans.  Figure number of taxpayers,
           average annual income, average tax rate, ...
           \_ Good thing you dont run the country because it doesnt work like
              that at all.
              \_ sure
           \_ much of the budget is fixed. There isn't exactly an emergency
              "trust fund" that I am aware of, and that is why I am confused.
              \_ I think Bush might have thought the same thing.
           \_ 300 billion in 4 years -> about $4500 per family of 4.
              For Berkeley grads, probably like $7000 per family of 4 given
              that they usually earn above average income.
              \_ It would be except most Berkeley grads don't earn that much
                 above the average if at all.  Not everyone got an eecs degree
                 and went on to found a company.
                 \_ hmmm. i'd like to see the actual numbers.  the people
                    i know from cal all have some kind of middle class
                    job at least.  the people i know from highschool
                    mostly went to college, then came home to live
                    with their parrents and work in retail making
                    barely over minimum wage.
        \_ Treasury bonds and Social Security. The Feds prints up promissory
           notes which people (countries, corps, etc.) buy with a bit of
           interest. However, it takes a long time to sell $150B, so the Feds
           loan themselves the money from SS, and slowly pay back SS with the
           money trickling in from selling T-bonds. Oh, and yes, taxpayers are
           on the hook for paying off the T-bonds plus interest.
            \_ Yet, 70% of you stupid Americans approved of this.
               \_ You really think the Federal government runs on nothing but
                  personal income taxes?  What do you think they did before
                  we had income taxes?  And who is paying most of those income
                  taxes in raw $$$ terms anyway?  Hint: it isn't 70% of
                  Americans.  Carry on.
                  \_ Income taxes contribute 49.2% of the fed revenues.
                     And SS, 33.1%.
                     \_ Yes, and what percentage of people pays the bulk of
                        that 49.2% or that 33.1% due to the way income taxes
                        are distributed?
                  \_ no. but the people are taking most of burden.
                     \_ Yeah, you know who oughta be taking the burden?
                        Those OTHER people.
                        \_ Yeah!  Let's fuck those *other* people instead!
        \_ In short, a fucking huge, taxpayer support ponzi scheme.

10/22   Do the Pentium 4's (2GHz+) these days run so hot that you need a huge
        fan on it?  My Athlon does, and it's waaay too noisy, so I'm thinking of
        switching to Intel.  Good or bad idea?
        \_ i vaguely remember only CPU taht doesn't require huge fans
           are those transmeta chip.  You would have better luck check out
           the latest Pentium-M, as it has much lower power consumption than
           P-4
        \_ Consider underclocking.  Seriously.  And formatting in 80 columns.
           \_ Do PCs these days still have the "Turbo" switch which we can turn
              off?
        \_ Yes, they run hot, just like the Athlons.
           When are they going to put a Pentium M on an ATX board?
           \_ I agree! I want a fanless CPU on an ATX board.
              Let me know if you find something. -brett
        \_ There's nothing wrong with a huge fan.  Huge fans are good.  That
           means they spin slower to move the same air as a smaller fan.  That
           means they're quieter.
        \_ http://www.thermaltake.com/products/heatsink/silentBoost.htm
           http://www.zalman.co.kr/usa/product/cnps7000a-alcu.htm
        \_ The main thing that's obscene about current processors (AMD and Intel
           both) is how much wattage they consume - the 3ghz P4 can eat upwards
           of 80 watts, and I've heard reports that Prescott may be in the 125
           watt range.  And people leave these things on 24/7, and then wonder
           why there's a power crisis.
           \_ there's a power crisis because of several reasons. 1) monopoly
              abuse in the power market, 2) lack of effort being put into
              developing alternative energy sources, 3) waste, 4) mismanagement
              and 5) well, there's more but I've gotta go grab the new seti
              client so I can cure cancer.
              \_ I run seti on my desktop machines at work, but I power off
                 those machines when I leave work.  My priorities are 1)
                 conserve power, then 2) put to good use the power that I can't
                 conserve (ie. all idle CPU cycles).  For this reason, I don't
                 run seti on my laptop at work, since my laptop is smart enough
                 to turn off the CPU clock when it hits the idle loop.  Running
                 seti on this laptop will increase power consumption, defeating
                 the original intent of seti.

10/22   What are some applications or general set of problems that are most
        suited to be solved on server farms?  I know of stuff like SETI.
        But I was thinking along the lines of problems that are specially
        suited for large number of machines interconnected to massive
        storage in one centralized place (little network latency).  Thanks.
        \_ hosting large web sites.
        \_ lots of bioinformatics problems
        \_ http://www.fightaidsathome.org  BTW I vaguely remember that its number of
           participants is much lower than SETI@home, even though fighting AIDS
           seems more important.  Anyone knows why?
           \_ because if we find aliens it'll change the course of human
              history dramatically, but if we stop aids, it just means one
              less way out of thousands to die.  death is common, aliens are
              not.  others understand that fighting aids is not more important
              when most aids carriers got it through voluntary activities.  the
              only true aids victims are hemophiliacs and surgey patients who
              got tainted blood and similar situations.
              \_ bad troll--the true nutcase AIDS troll is Duesberg's
                 "AIDS doesn't exist" position.
                 \_ it's not a troll.  it's the truth.  i expressed my opinion.
                    if you disagree, say why.  if you take it up the ass a few
                    times a week from strangers you're going to get aids and
                    that's no one's fault but your own.  i've got no sympathy
                    for any new cases that have come along in the last 10 years
                    from people engaging in known risky activity.  the same
                    goes for iv drug users, or anyone else engaging in high
                    risk activity that has been *known* to be high risk and a
                    near guarantee of a death sentence since the early 90s. at
                    this point no adult has the excuse of not knowing what
                    causes aids or how to avoid it.
                    \_ seti@home was first, and had great publicity.
                       I'm guessing if the roles of the two projects
                       were reversed in terms of publicity and timing,
                       it would be the other way round.
                    \_ What about the third world?
              \_ I agree on the true victim part.
        \_ I guess the class of problems are those which the ratio of CPU time
           to data size is high, and the data can be divided into independent
           sets.
        \_ molecular biology, specifically for studying protein folding.
        \_ Oceanography, meteorology, and lots of other Earth sciences. We
           use supercomputers for gravity modeling. The best problems are
           those where the next operation does not involve the result from the
           previous operation (e.g. Monte Carlo sims). --dim
           \_ Yes. a variety of statistical analyses and modeling is most
              common.  MCMC, especially, since you can run 100 independent
              threads, and then merge them all together for analysis. -nivra
        \_ Neuroimaging.  Structural MRI comparisons across subjects and
           through populations using volumetric tensor fields.  Functional
           studies making comparisons across groups for 4D scans.  Check out
           http://www.loni.ucla.edu  -drex

10/22   I'm on TV this weekend - Showtime at the Apollo #202.  It was a fun
        little gig.  -chaos
        \_ what did you do?  Showtime Cable station?  I don't get it.
           \_ "Showtime at the Apollo" is the name of the show.
              \_ channel, time, act description?
        \_ a sodan who's down with vocal percussion _and_ has played the
           Apollo?  I'm sorry, Elaine, but we're revoking your membership.
           your life point totals are too intimidating.  (which is to say:
           congrats!  nicely done! now get some movies up on your site!)

10/22   Sockets again (WinSock): select() on my socket descriptor fails with
        error 10038 (http://www.sockets.com/err_lst1.htm#WSAENOTSOCK which
        means the socket is not valid.  But I just created the f**ing thing.
        Any ideas?  This happens on both server & client.
        Update: I can select() without errors until I try to send(), then it
        fails.
        \_ Server or client?
           \_ Ok, this is screwier than I thought.  Thanks for your help,
              but I'm going to sleep on it-- when I simplified it a bit,
              select() started returning data ready, but recv() kept
              returning 0 bytes.  Again, thanks.

10/22   Hey, (other) anonymous motd guy.  To answer your deleted question:
        Yes, i was (and often am) feeling pedantic.  That being said,
        you never answered my question:  Do you classify Viagra as a
        "Recreational Drug"?  -crebbs
        \_ Do classify sex as recreational?
           \_ yep. -crebbs
               \_ Sex is for procreation, not recreation.
                  \_ HEYYYYAAAA!  ITSA DA POPAAA!
        \_ Yes, I believe viagra is a recreational drug for the most part.
           Like many many many other drugs it can have valid medical uses
           but shtupping your secretary isn't one of them.  The question was
           gone or I would've been happy to answer it earlier.  -other anon guy
        \_ Who was asking about whether it makes you horny, in addition to
           making you hard? I say, who cares? If you have morning wood, is
           the tool not functional? It becomes a moot question.
            \_ damn it, h0zer, this ain't the viagra thread, this is the
                "drugs are bad, mmmkay" thread.  Get off my thread. -crebbs

10/22   OMG
        http://audendi.com/stormtrooper.jpg
        \_ Rebel propaganda?

10/23   "you know what's going to kick ass? when you can have muscles
         put into your dick instead of erectile tissue.  then you could
         operate the mouse with your dick while you type with both hands,
         like Zimbu the monkey."
        Once again I envy a response like this.  Are you the anonymous
        motd comic?  Hilarious stuff like this is one of the few reasons
        why I log into soda.  :-)  Keep up the good work and thanks for
        making motd the fun place that it is.  -your #1 fan
        \_ He's a dorky guy ripping off dilbert.
           \_ you're both right.  and thanks. i've seen my posts labelled
              by others as being the anon motd comic, but they're probably
              less than half of the posts that recieve that label, and less
              than 0.5 % of the funny posts on the motd.
        \_ Zimbu the Monkey is significantly less funny than Penny Arcade.
           \_ you're both right.  and thanks.

10/23   I'm looking to rent a parking space for the next month.  -jones
           \_ berkeley
        \_ park it in front of my house for 2 years. - danh
        \_ What city?
           \_ implicitly, berkeley, duh.

10/23   For all you Firebird enthusiasts out there.  Has anyone tried
        Thunderbird?   Is it worth switching to over Mozilla?
        \_ I personally don't like windows mail clients, I prefer pine.
           but my dad seems to like Mozilla's client the best.
        \_ 0.3 is a huge improvement, but is still a little frustrating
           in some ways (previously used OE, trying it out, tempted to
           go back...).  Compaction is annoying (as in Mozilla), esp.
           when you sometimes use unix to check mail as well; a shortcut
           to compact all folders would help.  Lots of minor issues (why
           can't you list the "to" field in the pane? ...)  But the
           customizable tools bars are a huge win over Mozilla...
           \_ err... v 0.3 is out?  I couldn't customize tool bar on
              version 2.
        \_ Speaking of which.  is there anyway for any of those windoze
           mail client that has 1. regular expression filters for email/
           USENET newsgroups, and 2. synch with Palm ?

10/23   Why does IE 6 for Windows still not support transluent PNG's?
        \_ Because it was developed by those weirdola commie freeware guys.
           \_ freware == commie ? Then why you are using FreeBSD?
        \_ Why does IE6 still have a nearly useless history system?  Why does
           it have noncompliant CSS support?  Microsoft just doesn't care
           anymore; they've already won the browser war as far as they're
           concerned.
           \_ They'll slack until the world catches up and passes them by and
              then they'll turn it on and get ugly again.

10/23   Fuck is fucked
        http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,844116,00.html
        \_ Is "Eton" in the article the #1 high school in Britain?
        \_ Oh fuck.
        \_ So this guy needed to pay his rent and couldn't think of anything
           else to write about?

10/23   I just heard that you get $300/week if you picket 40 hours a week.
        Now I know why they're so active in front of Albertsons/Ralphs
        \_ no shit. in the meantime, I can't go shopping for food because
           of those overly needy bastards.
           \_ I can't wait till your job gets outsourced to India.
                \_ sorry. I'm still in school and will never
                   work in the hitech industry.
                   \_ how about medical transcribing?  how about finance?
                      how about manufacturing?  exactly what skills do you
                      have and what makes you immune to outsourcing?
                        \_ He'll make a fine collector of the dole.
          Hi troll. Immigrants wouldn't do well in finance _/
          or any other job that requires fluency in English. Even with fluency,
          you still don't have the same grasp of the language and the PEOPLE.
          Can't you see??? I have people skills! I'm a people person!!!
          \_ DIE!
          \_ who said immigrants?  we were talking outsourcing and they've
             been outsourcing all sorts of finance jobs to india for quite a
             while now.
          \_ I know many Chinese immigrant friends in accounting.
        \_ This is a ripe opportunity to bring our immigrants into the
           economic system.  We can kill two birds with one stone by replacing
           the Americans who are unwilling to do this mostly unskilled labor
           at the going rate with lower paid immigrants.  Everyone wins.
           \_ Alberston's outside my complex was offering up to $19.98/hr
              for scabs.
           \_ agree, agree.
              \_ so you want to put americans out of work and scab them off
                 with illegal aliens?  that's a good thing?  i didn't know
                 there was anyone on the motd *that* far to the right.
        \_ Do they pay for 40 hours picketing per week?  Also, union workers
           have been contributing an extra $2 per week to the strike fund for
           the last year or so, to prepare for this.
        \_ Just go shopping. I didn't want to, but I had to have a particular
           item and no other stores had it. So I went. It was no big deal.
           I'm going to go again, too.
           \_ No big deal until some striker follows you back to your car and
              beats you with a bat.
              \_ Yeah, right. I'm so scared.
              \_ The guy was a scab, and he tried to run over some picketers.

10/23   Brilliant!
        http://www.theonion.com/3941/top_story.html
        \_ Um, someone said "nice" here, and you deleted it.  Why?
        \_ Just to make things fair, I'll censor your "This is pure crap"
           comment.  Wasn't that fun?
           \_ not really.  I'm not the one who took out "nice".  You
              are all simple-minded troll bait.
              \_ agreed. -- guy who wrote (and deleted) "nice"
        \_ exactly what qualifies someone to be a politician?  WHat skills
           did Davis have that made him so effective.  Seems to me politics
                \_ he was treasurer?  do you even know who he is?
                   \_ what qualified him to be treasurer then?
                   \_ alot of good it did towards that pesky 38 billion
                      deficit.  Not to forget his stellar achievement
                      with the energy contracts.
           requires 1) common sense 2) vision 3) people skills 4) ethics.
           Regrettably most politicians (including Davis) lack this.
           \_ Nope.  It's 1) electability, 2) re-electability.  Anything else
              is bonus.  Davis got elected because he could raise money like
              a one-eyed hooker in a blind-man's brothel.

10/23   So I've been having a lot of sex lately and I'm pretty happy
        except I've been getting a lot of unwanted calls too (girls who
        don't wanna acknowledge that we simply had a 1 nighter). My solution
        is to get Anonymous Call Block ($1) and Selective Call Block ($3).
        Works well. You guys should get it too.  -happy ucla student
        \_ Maybe you should answer these calls.  One
           of these women might be calling you to tell you she has an STD.
           \_ or maybe you're a daddy. not so happy now, eh?
        \_ Of course, you're assuming our dicks get as much action as yours.
        \_ is it just me, or it seems to me that ucla students have a lot
           more fun than us? why is that?
           \_ speak for yourself.  i never had a problem keeping my bed warm.
        \_ Any herpes yet?  Remember, 1 in 5!
           \_ And AIDS?
              \_ Herpes is much much much much much much [...] much easier
                 to get, especially for heterosexuals.
                 \_ and condoms don't prevent.
                        \_ oh they help a little bit
                           \_ not enough.  tell your dick it only has a little
                              bit of herpes during your first outbreak.
                              \_ do you have it?
                                 \_ ask your girl if you want to know.
                                    \_ You mean yermom knows?
        \_ UCLA students do have a lot more fun... --ucla guy
           Cal students can still have fun, it's just way less common. And the
           girls are of a different... variety.
           \_ dumber, put out more, less bitchy, more attractive?
              \_ Yes!
                 \_ Yes!! Except bitchy in a different sort of way (soriority
                    bitchy vs. vegan bitchy).
        \_ UCLA students do have a lot more fun... --ucla cs grad guy #2