8/6     Why are you deleting your own post mice? This one:
                                           \_ BWWWAHAHAHAHAHA!        -mice

8/7     Whatthehack photos
        http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/whatthehack/?page=1     -John
        \_ Huh?  Are they supposed to be funny?

8/7     Pancake Rabbit!  http://www.syberpunk.com/cgi-bin/index.pl?page=oolong
        \_ KAWAII!!!
        \_ Um, how come Japanese people are so weird?
           \_ http://www.stuffonmycat.com  -John
        \_ Oolong tea?

8/7     My grandmother has an original iMac that she is donating. She
        wants to erase the hard drive before it leaves her
        house. What's the best/easiest software for doing this?
        (she just upgraded to a iMac G5).
        \_ Get a firewire cable and plug the old iMac into the new one.
           Place the old iMac in firewire target-mode by holding the
           Place the old iMac into firewire target-mode by holding the
           letter "T" during boot. Then you can reformat the drive
           by using Disk Util on the new iMac. On Tiger, there's an
           option of wiping the disk with zeros several times over
           but this will take a while.
           \_ Original iMac doesn't have Firewire and can't run tiger.
              I'm thinking maybe she can boot the debian installer CD
              and run dd. Any ideas?
              \_ You only need tiger on the host computer, not the
                 target. You could always just yank out the disk
                 and put it in another computer where you can run
                 a disk zeroing (or randomization) util on it.
           \_ Wouldn't random bits be better than zeros?
        \_ Can't she use the MacOS install boot disk and run disk utility?
           \_ Does OS 8 Disk Utility have a way to zero the drive?
           \_ I found knoppix for powerpc. It is a couple years old
              but should be okay:  http://debian.tu-bs.de/knoppix/powerPC
        \_ if you can boot a linux, *bsd, etc. off live CD, the "shred"
           command is pretty convenient.  it make sup to 25 passes, so
           most likely you'd only let it go once or twice unless you
           have extreme security concerns.  works on block devices or
           on regular files.

8/7     Mel Gibson asked to stage live snuff film!
        http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050807/ap_en_mo/people_gibson

8/7     Do you say "soda" or "pop"?
        http://www.popvssoda.com
        \_ That's fucking awesome!  Thanks for the link!  I'd like to see one
           with sub/hoagie/grinder/hero
           \_http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/maps.html
             You want #64.
        \_ I say soda because I was stuck in fucking soda hell while my
           bisadm friends were partying and getting straight A's and
           screwing up hot chicks and now they already have MBAs and making
           tons of money while I'm now stuck being in a fucking code
           monkey with my job ready to be outsourced by foreign monkeys
           ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG I HATE SODA
        \_ I lived in the Bay Area for the first 23 years of my life, so
           I say "soda". 4 years ago I moved to Eastern Washington where
           everyone calls it "pop". I just can't make myself switch. -bz
           \_ Then there's the fucked up south.
              customer: I'd like a coke please.
              waitress: What kind?
              customer: How about a Sprite...no make that a Coke.
              waitress: Got it. A Coke coke.
              \_ Have you actually observed this?
                 \- you know the CocaCola Corporation has people to go out an
                 \- you know the CocaCola Corporation has people to go out and
                    test for this as evidence they are defending their
                    trademark and not "letting" it become a generic term,
                    like say "escalator" or "aspirin".
                 \_ I haven't observed this very exchange, but it is true that
                    "coke" can mean "Dr. Pepper", "Sprite", or other soda.

8/7     RIP, Peter Jennings:
        http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050808/ap_on_en_tv/obit_jennings
        \_ He was killed by lawyers from the tobacco lobby.  Doctors say
           lung cancer...yeah, right.  -whako conspiracy
        \_ and on freerepugnant, people are celebrating, 'This man has done
           great harm to our country under the guise of "freedom of
           the press" and I will not forget that.'

8/7     The Space Shuttle still uses floppy disks. Would somebody please
        tell them how unreliable floppies are. Buy them USB flash drives!
        http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/124685main_s114e7139_hires.jpg
        \- high density electronics and media may be more suspectible
           to instability due to thermal noise or radiation. lbl has/had
           one of the faciltiies for "space certifications" for electronics.
        \_ Another question is: why is anything on removable media when
           everything happens within the shuttle and there is nowhere else to
           go?
           \_ networks can go down, they have multiple points of failure
              - what do you do then?
              \_ I see.
        \_ NASA is intentionally slow to adopt new technology for use on
           the orbiters.  In addition to testing the living hell out of
           particular systems themselves, they also want the general
           technology to have seen widespread use enough to have flushed
           out any problems.  Note that other thread in the motd at the
           moment about motherboards with bad capacitors, and consider that
           it's probably a good thing that the orbiters' avionics are ugraded
           less frequently than the average sodan's computer.  Remember that
           the shuttle program started in the seventies, and that floppies
           actually represent an *upgrade*.  For the poster who asked why
           anything is on removable media, what else would you suggest?
           Hard drives don't perform well under a lot of acceleration, and
           can be damaged easily by vibration (such as during launch and
           reentry).  Many nonvolatile memory technologies have come and gone
           over the life of the shuttle program without being adopted.  When
           they started, the computers available simply didn't have enough
           memory and they had to load things in from tapes over the course
           of a mission.  In a system as complex as the shuttle, there's
           a tremendous ripple effect to changing the flight computers, both
           to the physical systems and the procedures and training for all
           personnel involved.  Given the risks, there's a lot to be said for
           not fixing it if that aspect of the shuttle isn't broken.