6/8     Obama backpeadals on his pro-Israel statement
        http://csua.org/u/lq5
        \_ How often do you read the Jpost?
        \_ John Kerry II.
           \_ Like John McCain on waterboarding?
              http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/washington/13cnd-cong.html
              \_ Yeah, almost, except completely different.
                 \_ Yay, it's good for the gander but not the goose!
        \_ That definitely looks like a "clarification" not a backpedal to me,
           but I guess it depends on how you define those terms. He definitely
           should have expected that AIPAC would interpret differently from
           what he intended.

6/9     Hey, motd not getting laid guy, I have a link for you:
        http://preview.tinyurl.com/69wcub -motd married getting laid guy

6/9     new iPhone, 8GB with 3G network for $199
        http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5j-S1NyxLoDuvzCD9_YaYmAhI-Cbw

6/9     Yay, Herpes makes a comeback
        http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D916M4QO0
        \_ A comeback? I didn't know it was ever unpopular..
        \_ Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years.
           \- Ive been around for a long, long year
              Stole many a mans soul and faith
              And I was round when jesus christ
              Had his moment of doubt and pain

6/8     CSUA code guru please help. I need to see my random number
        generator with a good seed (I just need random 18 bit
        identifiers). The usual time(NULL) is OK, except my program
        might be invoked faster than once a second, and seeding using
        time() produced the same result. I tried clock() but it seems
        to return 0. My program needs to be run in Linux/DOS (Watcom
        32bit compiler), so I prefer to stick with standard API.
        What's a good way to get some randomness without using special
        time function that goes into millisecond precision? Poke at
        some random bytes? Allocate a random array? This is in C. If
        I allocate say a 64byte block, and XOR the uninitialized
        memory, is there any guarantee that it will be a different
        64byte block the next time my program is run? Thanks!
        \_ What are you doing this for?  If it's encryption why are
           reimplementing the (really difficult to get right) wheel?
           If it's not encryption what is it that needs high quality
           random numbers?
           \_ I need to assign ID that are unique within a day to
              something 30 bit. I am thinking seconds_since_midnight
              (17 bits) + a random number (13 bits). If I simply seed
              using time(), my rand() will generate the same number if
              invoked within a second. So I am now seeding it using
              the XOR of time() with 64 uninitialized int on the stack
              (again XORed together). This seems to do the trick.
              \_ Huh? You only need to seed once. After that you have a
                 supply of random numbers you can draw on. So just seed by
                 time when you start the program. Or are you thinking you
                 are going to invoke main() many times per second? I don't
                 know what you are doing here so it's hard to give good
                 feedback, but think in terms of "now I have a stream of
                 random numbers and I just need to use them."
                 \_ The program exists after generating one ID.
                    \_ Do you mean "exits"? S/w like SSH uses prngd to
                       get around this problem.
        \_ Use another random number generator to generate the random seed for
           your random number generator!  Oh wait ......
        \_ What is wrong with rand?
        \_ Easiest just to bite the bullet and use non-ANSI C functions.
           The random array allocations are not at all guaranteed.
        \_ seed it with time and getpid.   Expecting unintialized memory
           to have random data runs the risk some chowderhead will take your
           code and comment it out when it generates warnings.
           \_ Does DOS even have PIDs? Wtf is even using DOS these days...
              \_ Embedded applications like digital cameras, I guess.
                 http://www.datalight.com/products/romdos
        \_ you could try opening and reading from a dummy file and then using
           clock to seed.  That way you'll block on IO and the amount of time
           you do that should be relatively random.
           \_ I thought about it again and this wouldn't be a good idea
              especially if you are running the progam often.  What will happen
              is that the file's memory page will be in cache after the first
              read and you won't have good random behavior.  You could try
              file writes, but in general this is not a very strong
              randomness anyways. -pp
        \_ You're not a Debian contributor are you?

6/8     6 Ways You're Wasting Gas - Yahoo! Autos Article Page:
        http://www.csua.org/u/lq7
        \_ Dumbest article evar!  Why does common sense continue to masquerade
           as news articles?
           \_ Because a lot of people don't seem to have much common sense?

6/9     Evolution in E. Coli observed in the lab:
        http://preview.tinyurl.com/4kdx4b [new scientist]
        \- The Finger of God! ... or at least the Middle Finger
           to ID nutjobs.
           \_ You mean God can't change His design on the fly?  PMs in my
              company do it all the time ......  -- grouching engineer
              \_ Creationism holds that all things great and small were
                 created in their current forms without provision for
                 change.
                 \_ Some flavors do.  Most creationists accept
                    micro-evolution, while rejecting macro-evolution. Some
                    accept both.  "Young Earth" creationists believe the Earth
                    is no more than 6,000 years old. -emarkp
                    \_ you mean, "some creationists invented the concept of
                       'macro-evolution' as a way of maintaining the absurd
                       position that there is something fundamental to
                       object to in evolutionary theory."   -tom
                       \_ Roughly, yes.  Strictly they refer to
                          "macro-evolution" to mean speciation arising such
                          that the new species can't breed with another branch
                          of the evolutionary tree.  So called
                          "micro-evolution" just means variations being
                          preferred inside the same species (the peppered moths
                          being the perfect example). -emarkp
                          \_ So do they think that lions and tigers have a
                             common ancestor? They can breed, but the
                             offspring generally can't.
                             \_ I'm not a spokesman of the ID community, and I
                                honestly don't know how they'd respond to that
                                question. -emarkp
        \_ This is news why?  There have been many observed examples
           of evolution, and many observed examples of even speciation,
           and ID-ers and creationists are happily ignoring all that
           evidence.  Why is this story special?
           \_ we thought evolution took millions of years.. not days..
              why did it take so long to create man from single celled
              according to the new findings it should take  at most
              6 thousand years..
              \_ I guess it's because as an organism becomes more complex, the
                 generation span becomes longer (around 25.2yrs in 2004 for US
                 humans ignoring age of fathers (http://www.csua.org/u/lqi
                 vs. minutes or hours or days for bacteria).
           \_ The interesting thing to me is not the ID angle but the
              way the researchers were able to figure out around which
              generation the new mutation occured and how the research
              shows that history dictates what abilities emerge.
           \_ There is a group of ID people that can be reached by stories
              like this.  Some will ignore it, just like the global warming
              believers.

6/9     Money-losing Senate restaurants to go private
        http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gMmFHV249e34tf41zW-VAzylknXgD916O0781
        "A private review commissioned by Feinstein found that the Senate
        operation had no strategy for improvement other than price increases."

6/9     emarkp, defend this:
        http://preview.tinyurl.com/52h59e
        but please don't shoot me.
        \_ Hi anonymous troll! -emarkp
        \_ Defend what?  That torture is or is not punishment? -!emarkp

6/9     http://preview.tinyurl.com/6ymhy5 is pretty amazing.

6/9     aazif mandi is my hero.
        \_ Do you people get all your news from The Daily Show?
           \_ Statistically, no: http://preview.tinyurl.com/4nkuwn

6/9     you know, physically, McCain doesn't look so hot.  I hope he makes
        it to November!
        \_ Nice war hero you got there, I would hate for anything to happen
           to him.
        \_ McCain/Stroke 2008!
           \_ McCain/Stokke 2008
        \_ McCain will pick Byrd as a running mate to make himself look more
           youthful.
        \_ He reminds me a lot of Bob Dole.

6/9     "He's not running for President, he's running for COIN."

6/9     Video RAM question:
        Let's say I need to display a shape model that was ~3 million
        plates that are each 72 bytes (216MB). Do I have to have a video
        card that has more than 216 MB of RAM or can the system dip into
        main RAM in order to display it? As I understand it, the VRAM is
        a buffer but what happens when the buffer fills? In this instance
        my video card has 64 MB of RAM and the image displays fine. Is
        the rest of the image resident in system RAM? Do people get video
        cards with more VRAM for performance reasons (VRAM is faster and
        dual-ported) or because they can display images they never could
        otherwise? Compare a system with 16GB RAM and 64 MB VRAM to one
        with 1 GB RAM and 2 GB VRAM.
        \_ That wildly depends on how the data is presented to your card.
           \_ Please elaborate.
              \_ If you present the data to your card the right way, it can
                 store the vectors directly.  If you don't, it can't.
                 \_ So what if it can't if I have 16 GB of main RAM? Can I
                    use that or not? Why would I not want to? That is,
                    what does storing directly buy me? Can I display my
                    model in either case but with a performance penalty?
                    Excuse my ignorance, but I am not a gamer or anime
                    freak and never had a graphics class. I realize you
                    touched a little bit below, but I've been reading
                    about rendering pipelines all day and there's not been
                    much that talks about the role of the h/w in this or
                    what happens when you run out of video RAM.
                    \_ If you do "immediate" mode then you're limited by the
                       bus speed to the video card.  If you can cram it all
                       onto the card, you're theoretically maximizing the
                       hardware performance. -emarkp
                       \_ Are there any other penalties? Just the penalty
                          of the speed of the VRAM vs. RAM and the
                          offloading of the main CPU in favor of the GPU?
                          I don't see the bus speed as a limiting factor.
                          You have to load it all into VRAM over some bus
                          anyway, right? I realize say AGP might be
                          faster than PCI but I am more concerned by how
                          the size of VRAM impacts the problem than by
                          issues of throughput, which are clear-cut. If I
                          have 256 MB of VRAM and a 1 GB image then what
                          happens? Does the video card swap to main RAM?
                          \_ At this point, you leave generalities and it
                             depends on the card, and the quality of the
                             driver.  If the card runs low on memory, it can
                             dump whatever it needs to render, and then pull it
                             back from main memory when necessary. -emarkp
                 Typically cards do 16 bits of floating point, but that's
                 moving up to 32.  The rendering pipeline today is basically
                 transforming triangles modelspace->worldspace, lighting,
                 worldspace->cameraspace.  This can be done in "immediate"
                 mode, where each triangle is provided from the program running
                 in the CPU to the video system (D3D, OpenGL, etc.=> video
                 card) or in buffered mode (historically "display lists" on
                 OpenGL though that included much more than just geometry)
                 commonly called "vertex buffer objects".  If there's room on
                 the card, you can push a bunch of geometry into the card, then
                 just tweak the input values and do everything very
                 efficiently.  If there isn't room on the card, then the video
                 memory is mostly 1) frame buffer (what you see) and 2) texture
                 memory.
                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_pipeline
                 John Carmack (Id software, etc.) believes he's solved the
                 megatexture problem (imagine a whole world or large
                 environment that can be textured down to tiny detail),
                 with little or no performance issues (implemented in their
                 upcoming game, Rage).  He says his next project is to do the
                 same with geometry.  So things may be changing in the next few
                 years. -emarkp

6/9     i bet this grandma open carries
        http://www.ocnus.net/artman2/publish/Dark_Side_4/The_Rambo_Granny_of_Melbourne_Australia.shtml
        \_ "her granddaughter, Debbie, was car-jacked and raped in broad
           daylight by two knife-wielding creeps in a section of town bordering
           on skid row."
           It's a shame the granddaughter couldn't have killed them when they
           attacked her.  Wait, I thought handguns were outlawed in Australia?
           How'd this granny have one?  And is that why the thugs attacked with
           a knife?  Shouldn't I be safe in the middle of the day?  Indeed, the
           law seems a bit out of touch with the people: "What she did was
           wrong, and she broke the law, but it is difficult to throw an
           81-year-old woman in prison, Det. Delp said -- especially when 3
           million people in the city want to nominate her for Mayor."
           -emarkp
        \_ [my comment deleted, since this story is an urban legend] -emarkp
           \_ It's in the article, She didn't turn in the gun when the law
              changed.
           \_ The rest of the story:
           \_ Welcome to Urban Legends:
              http://www.snopes.com/crime/justice/grambo.asp
        \_ As opposed to this one, who has a concealed carry permit. And
           actually exists:
           http://csua.org/u/lqf (SFgate)