Seat of the Revolution

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged."

Noam Chomsky
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"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."

-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense
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"The Revolution evaporates, & leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape."

Franz Kafka
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UPDATE: Ordered from Haper's. Alice says that the friction plate for a 750 Breva will work in my V65c and is a bit cheaper. Parts are on order.

This is the next wave of parts I'm ordering for the V65C project.

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via Wired: Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

I can't say I'm surprised.
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This is a coding problem I was assigned for an interview a couple years ago. I didn't get the job ... and I'm glad for it.

Given an alphanumeric start point and an alphanumeric end point, generate a list of all alphanumeric codes between those two points, inclusive.

Example: Given B4Y and B53, you'll have generated B4Y, B4Z, B50, B51, B52, and B53. The range is 0-9, A-Z.

These sequences will be read from a data file as specified on the command line, each line will contain a mask, start, and end point.
Example: R##2#G B4Y B53

Using the mask, generate new codes by replacing the hash characters from mask with the characters from the previously generated codes.
Example: Given a mask of R##2#G, and a value of B4Y, the new value is RB42YG.

Create SQL calls that will insert them into a table called 'reg_codes', in the column 'code' to a text file which is specified on the command line.

Any codes containing two identical characters in succession is invalid, unless they're followed by an R or a 2.
(\.)\1(?:[^R2]) = bad code.

Print a list of characters that caused invalid codes, and those codes, to a file called "invalid.dat"

Show some sort of status information to keep the user informed of the progress of the tasks.

Read a server name, username, and password from server.dat. Upload the dumped data file as a tarball to the ftp server.

Code must run cleanly under strict & warnings.

input.txt:
Mask, start , End
7##22##8 PF00 PFA9
X#Y#Z 09 16
###R 3Sx 3RL
M##2#Z 09D Xl16

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In response to message #9

There was one problem with the 360 when it was introed there was a camchain adjuster recall, I had an old mechanic from honda point out that if the problem was fixed there would be 2 center punch marks on the engine serial number it wil look like this CB360 : 1234567 the 2 dots will be right in the center of the series, If this problem was fixed the engine will survive the armegeddon with the cockroaches, it only applies to 74 and 75s

FRANK

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The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. -- Thomas Jefferson
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via craigslist

Date: 2007-02-15, 9:08AM PST

Advice to Young Men from an Old Man
1. Dont pick on the weak. Its immoral. Dont antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid.
2. Dont hate women. Its a waste of time
3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self actualized.
4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.
5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Dont join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other peoples economic or political interests.
6. If something has a direct benefit to an individual or a class of people, and a theoretical, abstract, or amorphous benefit to everybody else, realize that the proponents intentions are to benefit the former, not the latter, no matter what bullshit they try to feed you.

Read more

Here's my command line for watching tv with mplayer and my Hauppauge BT878 tv tuner card.

mplayer -tv driver=v4l2:norm=ntsc:width=640:height=480:outfmt=i420:chanlist=us-cable -vc rawi420 -vo xv tv://
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For the past few years I've been using the subtitle of "Life, Liberty, and the Death of the American Dream" for this blog. "Death of the American Dream" is what Hunter S. Thompson referred to as his beat.

I'd like to make a note of the slogan so when someone gets around to stealing it, I'll have this note.

This is how I'm doing two-pass encoding of avi video to flv with mencoder.

pass 1:
mencoder -ffourcc FLV1 -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=200:vqmin=3:vpass=1:acodec=mp3:abitrate=56 -srate 22050 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp3:abitrate=32 -lavfopts i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames -vop scale=360:240 input.avi -o output.flv

pass 2:
mencoder -ffourcc FLV1 -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=200:vqmin=3:vpass=2:acodec=mp3:abitrate=56 -srate 22050 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp3:abitrate=32 -lavfopts i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames -vop scale=360:240 input.avi -o output.flv