Could someone PLEASE give a guess as to why this simple little program
causes a BadPixmap error on the FOURTH (bizarre???) call to XtRelaizeWidget()?

Here is the code:

int stoploop = 0;

static void Callback(Widget, XtPointer, XtPointer);

main()
{
        XtToolkitInitialize();
        XtAppContext app = XtCreateApplicationContext();
        while (1)
        {
                int junk = 0;
                Display *dis = XtOpenDisplay(app, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, 0,
                                                &junk, NULL);

                Widget top = XtAppCreateShell(NULL, NULL,
                                applicationShellWidgetClass, dis, NULL, 0);

                Widget box = XtVaCreateManagedWidget("x",
                                                        xmPushButtonWidgetClass,
                                                        top,
                                                        XmNheight, 25,
                                                        XmNwidth, 25, NULL);

                XtAddCallback(box, XmNactivateCallback, Callback, NULL);

                XtRealizeWidget(top);
                while (!stoploop)
                {
                        XEvent event;
                        XtAppNextEvent(app, &event);
                        XtDispatchEvent(&event);
                }
                stoploop = 0;
                XtReleaseGC(top, XDefaultGCOfScreen(XtScreen(top))); // needed?
                XtDestroyWidget(top);
                XtCloseDisplay(dis);
        }
}

static void Callback(Widget, XtPointer, XtPointer)
{
        stoploop = 1;
}

The error I get (yes, the 4TH time I try to show the box) is:

X Error of failed request:  BadPixmap (invalid Pixmap parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  55 (X_CreateGC)
  Resource id in failed request:  0xd0000d
  Serial number of failed request:  71
  Current serial number in output stream:  85

Please respond via email.  Thanks very, very much!

(NOTE: I realize this program does nothing useful, its an ultra-trivialized
version fo a real library routine)
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Rex Wood -- davewood@cs.colorado.edu -- University of Colorado at Boulder


       I've read about more than a few of these programs that ran into
problems in convincing parents to get their children immunized even
when they were delivered to their doorstep.  (I don't know, maybe
that sheet they have to be informed of about possible risks, side-
effects, and bad reactions scares them.)


JOB OPPORTUNITY
		      ---------------

SERI(Systems Engineering Research Institute), of KIST(Korea
Institute of Science and Technology) is looking for the resumes
for the following position and need them by the end of June (6/30).
If you are interested, send resumes to:

	CAD/CAE lab (6th floor)
	Systems Engineering Research Institute
	Korea Institute of Science and Technology
	Yousung-Gu, Eoeun-Dong,
	Daejon. Korea
	305-600

	COMPANY: Systems Engineering Research Institute

	TITLE  : Senior Research Scientist

	JOB DESCRIPTION : In depth knowledge of C.
	Working knowledge of Computer Aided Design.
	Working knowledge of Computer Graphics.
	Working knowledge of Virtual Reality.
	Skills not required but desirable : knowledge of
	data modeling, virtual reality experience,
	understanding of client/server architecture.

	REQUIREMENT : Ph.D

	JOB LOCATION : Daejon, Korea

	Contact Info : Chul-Ho, Lim
		       CAD/CAE lab (6th floor)
		       Systems Engineering Research Institute
		       Korea Institute of Science and Technology
	       	       Yousung-Gu, Eoeun-Dong,
		       Daejon. Korea
		       305-600


Recently I posted two oscilliscopes for sale. One has sold, the other is
still available:
 Used, good condition:
 Hitachi V-422 40MHz Dual-Channel Portable Analog Oscilliscope
   o 1mV/div
   o DC offset
   o alternate magnification (10x magnified & non-magnified
     waveform)
   o VERT mode trigger
   o TV sync separation circuit
 List price      $910.00 (...and the price Fry's electronics just
                         quoted!) :-(
 Sells for       $699.99 (JDR MicroDevices current price)
                 $745.95 (Products International)
 Your price used $425.00 obo
...I haven't gotten an offer at the asking price, so 'obo' applies...

I also have a 'broken' version of the scope which sold:
 JDR 2000 20MHz Dual-Channel Portable Analog Oscilliscope
   o 5mV/div
   o Component Tester (resistors/caps/diodes/coils)
   o TV video sync filter
   o z-axis input (intensity modulation)

'Broken' means: The CRT produces a nice, bright trace, but the trace does
not correspond to the input signal. My guess is it's repairable but more
than a simple calibration problem...but I honestly have not tried to
calibrate the scope or otherwise fix it. It's 'as-is'.
I paid $60 for it in its current state (I bought it thinking I'd repair it,
using the 'good' scope for side-by-side comparison...since I've sold the
'good' scope, the 'bad' one doesn't do me much good) and I'd like to recoup
that amount. As above, I'll accept offers and take the best one.

I'd prefer a local (Bay Area, California) buyer, so (a) I don't have to
ship it and (b) she or he can examine the scope prior to purchase.


: Hi,

: I am new to this newsgroup, and also fairly new to christianity.
: ... I realize I am very ignorant about much of the Bible and
: quite possibly about what Christians should hold as true. This I am trying
: to rectify (by reading the Bible of course), but it would be helpful
: to also read a good interpretation/commentary on the Bible or other
: relevant aspects of the Christian faith. One of my questions I would
: like to ask is - Can anyone recommend a good reading list of theological
: works intended for a lay person?

I'd recommend McDowell's "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" books (3 I
think) and  Manfred Brauch's "Hard Sayings of Paul".  He also may have
done "Hard Sayings of Jesus".  My focus would be for a new Christian to
struggle with his faith and be encouraged by the historical evidence,
especially one who comes from a background which emphasizes knowable faith.


I've been following discussions about the Delta Clipper program, and I
have one small question.  As I understand it, the DC-X derived orbital
vehicle (DC-Y & 1) is to reenter the atmosphere sort of sideways, not
completely nose-first.  So why is the DC-Y look symmetric in every drawing
I've seen?  I would think that an asymmetric design, sort of like
wingless Orbiter, may work better, since less shielding is required on the
top side.  Can anybody explain?

- Ken Kobayashi
kkobayas@husc.harvard.edu

--


So what's your local hospital's favorite curse?


Hello,

I have a 92 Toyota 4X4 and in the last few weeks I have been getting quite
a few "dings" :( in the paint on the hood from rocks and debris off of the
road. I have never had any major problems with other car/trucks in the past
(maybe a ding once in a while). I went to the dealer and he said that it
happens all of the time and he recomended putting a bug deflector on the
hood. He said that the trucks, for some unknown reason, seem to have this
problem more than some cars.?

It seems to me that either my luck is really bad or there might be a problem
with the paint (painted on a monday morning perhaps?).

How well do these bug deflectors work for small road debris on trucks?

If anyone has any experiences/suggestions please let me know, thanks.

--Greg


Hello.

I have these items for sale.

Terms are UPS COD or prepayment by money order.

2 101 keyboards for IBM compatibles

1 Mitsumi 1.2 MB 5 1/4 floppy disk drive

1 Sony SRF-M30 digital AM/FM Stereo Walkman

The drive cost me $65, the keyboards were $40 each, and the Sony
radio cost $45.

I will sell for the best offers.

Thank You.


As we don't get a newsfeed I was wondering whether there was such a
thing as a Xt mailing list (other than xpert@expo.lcs.mit.edu).  I
would appreciate any info on this, (or X related mailing lists.)

        Thanks in advance,

        Leon


So, your opinion is truth.  I see...  :-)

You can believe that if you wish.  It is undeniable, however, that people
have left the compound unharmed and alive earier in the standoff.

And since their leader was preaching that they would have an apocalypse, you
can not say undeniably that there wouldn't have been a mass suicide if the
FBI had simply stayed outside and waited another 51 days.

I am the heartless bleeding heart?  You are not making sense.
You seem to have no concern that someone would keep children inside this
compound when they had 51 days to let them out.  That sounds pretty heartless
to me.

I just heard on the news that some of the survivors regret they hadn't
stayed in the inferno to prove their loyalty to Koresh.  This makes me
sad and sick.

Have you ever heard of Jonestown?
The sad thing is the people inside the compound were the authority
worshipers and their only authority was Koresh/Howell.   If these
people were able to think for themselves, there would likely be a lot
more survivors today.  Koresh preached a fiery apocalypse as early as
last year.

By all means, the FBI should be investigated, too.
BTW, I thought the second ammendment was God.  :-)


The 68070 _does_ exist. It's number was licensed to Philips to make their
own variant. This chip includes extra featurfes such as more I/O ports,
I2C bus... making it more microcontroller like.


   Here's a simple way to convert the Clipper proposal to an unexceptionable
   one: Make it voluntary.

   That is--you get high quality secure NSA classified technology if you agree
   to escrow your key. Otherwise you are on your own.

That's the disturbing part - use of other products IS voluntary, for now,
and the press releases talk about the White House's unwillingness to
decide that citizens have a right to good commercial crypto gear,
and about how commercial alternatives will be permitted as long as
they provide key escrow services.  That's a clear implication that
they're considering banning alternatives.

Additionally, use of real alternatives ISN'T totally legal -
you're not allowed to export really good crypto equipment except to
the government's friends (e.g. the Australian government)
you can only export even BAD crypto equipment with their permission,
and the regulators who control the cellular telephone companies make
sure there are only two competitors, so Joe's Garage Cellular can't
start offering a secure service.


The ATF agent interviewed on "Street Stories" reported that the raid was
ill planned, and went ahead even when they (the BD's) knew the ATF was
coming. WHY?

I believe this raid was ill planned because they only had 2 days to plan it,
and it was continued when failure was obvious because it had a bit part
in the much larger political agenda of President Clinton. I would even
suggest that the loss of 4 ATF agents is inconsequential in this the
context of his political agenda. It MIGHT even be beneficial to his agenda,
as it helps point up just how evil these assualt weapons are. Further proof
might be that the ATF denied their agents (Street Stories report) requests
for sufficient fire power.

Important dates:
Feb 25th - NJ assembly votes to overturn assault weapon ban.
Feb 28th - Compound in Waco attacked.

On Feb. 25th the New Jersey assembly voted to overturn the assault weapon
ban in that state. It looked like it might be a tight vote, but the Senate
in N.J. was going to vote to overturn the ban. It would not sit well to have
an Eastern state overturn an assault weapon ban, given Clintons stated
agenda on gun control. I suspect Clinton gave the order to get someone or some
group with assualt weapons and have the press present (they were initially
at the incident in Waco) to record the event for the TV audience. The agent
on "Street Stories" reported that a supervisor was urging them all to "get
ready fast", as "they know we are coming". I believe this attack continued,
even tho the probablility of failure was high,  because it came from the top
down. After the N.J. assembly vote, the ATF had a limited amount of time to
come up with something, and the Wackos in Waco fit the bill nicely.


For those of you who are thinking about fiamms, you might also want to think
about airhorns. I just installed a set of Bosch air horns ordered from
Dennis Kirk (pg. 282 of the latest catalog) on my '85 FJ1100. They are rated
at 93db at 7 meters. I installed them using 10 gage wire from the battery to
the relay to the compressor to ground. My stock horn connectors fit the relay
pins just fine. I soldered the connections to the relay and compressor, and used
a crimp type battery connector and an inline 10amp fuse/connector from NAPA.
	I installed the compressor just forward of the fuse box in the front
fairing by tie wrapping between the steering head frame and the black steel tube
frame used to support the front fairing. You have to remove the front fairing to
do this, but it fits outside of the frame but inside the fairing on the two
vertical supports just in front of the fuses. Depending how tight your fairing
follows the frame, you should be able to fit it somewhere in the fairing.
The compressor is about 2" in diameter and about 5" long.
	The relay mounted on the front of the steering head frame (it is small
so there should be plenty of good places for it.
	I found a perfect place for the horns that required only tie wraps to
mount. The horns fit inside the front fairing/frame and stick out on either side
just in front of the air scoops, but behind the turn signals. The back of the
horns point back towards the center of the bike and come real close to where
the gas tank connects to the front part of the frame. There is just enough
room to the outside to allow full lock to lock clearance, and there are nice
cut outs in the frame for the back of the horn to go into.
	The short horn is even with the fairing, and the long one sticks out
about an inch or so, but it is really not that noticable unless you look
closely. They end up pointing down slightly and maybe 30 degrees from straight
ahead (perfect for those cagers trying to change lanes into you).
	If you have any other questions about the mounting, email, and I can try
to explain better. If your bike is not red, then you may want to paint them
first.
	How do they work you ask? They are very, very, very *LOUD*. They sound
more like a european sports car than a truck, but a vast improvement over stock.
I have used them at least daily since installing them, and the 10 amp fuse has
not blown yet (although, the duration of the horn blasts have been short).
	I've repeatedly scared the shit out of my friends with them, even though
they know that I have the horns, they still jump. They are perfect for keeping
the pedestrians on the sidewalk.
The bottom line is they work, are loud enough to cause pain and suffering to
those stupid lane changing cages (as well as take a few years off their lives)
and are relatively easy to install on the FJ. YMMV.


OY] Henrik (?),
OY] Your ignorance manifests itself in an awkward form of intransigence. I'm not
OY] going to spend time to review with you the recent history of Cyprus.

	Good !! Go back to your references and read it over and over ...

OY] If you are really interested, I can provide you with a number of references
OY] on the issue.  Just send me EMail for that.

	You think I am that STUPID to ask you for REFERENCES !  NOT !
	I have many GREEK friends that I could ask for the INFO if I
	needed. I have already read many articles and DO NOT need
	your help. Boy, how generous !!

OY] Relax! You're swinging fists into open air... I was *agreeing* with you,
OY] assuming that would be one of your points that you did not state! You may
OY] not be very much used to it, to be agreed with - that is, but take it more
OY] easily.  !:-)

	Believe me, I am so relaxed ...

henrik]     However, I hope that the Armenians WILL force a TURKISH airplane
henrik]     to LAND for purposes of SEARCHING for ARMS similar to the one

[OY] 	No, Henrik, believe me: You don't hope that.

	  IF Armenia is goint to do that, then so be it.

henrik]         that happened last SUMMER. Turkey searched an AMERICAN plane
henrik]         (carrying humanitarian aid) bound to ARMENIA.

OY] Was that after or before one French plane changed its route to avoid
OY] inspection???


Welcome to the conservative judiciary.

I think Scalia's point was that you get one chance.  If new information
comes out later, tough.  If the conviced want justice, they have to hope
the governor is feeling charitable.

There's a guy on death row in Texas that was denied a new trial, dispite
evidence of his inocents.

It got swept away in the Reagan Revolution...


Sure I'll give you 10 bucks for all of them


Car Audio Products for Sale...

Kicker (Stillwater Designs) - SS10x2: 2 10" Kickers in a sealed box. The box
       is manufactured direct from Kicker. (Instructions).
*******Asking $175 + Shipping

Kicker (Stillwater Designs) - 2 Kicker 12" Subwoofers. (Instructions).
*******Asking $175 + Shipping (Sold as a pair only!)

Kenwood KAC923 Amp - 220 Watts X 2. 2 ohm stable (Box & Instruction Included).
*******Asking $375 + Shipping

Im selling the above item for a friend without Internet access... You can
either E-Mail me or call him (Mike Metalios) at (410)665-5773.


Sounds as though his heart's in the right place, but he is not adept at
expressing it.  What you received was _meant_ to be a profound apology.
Apologies delivered by overworked shy people often come out like that...


But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds."
    Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what
I do.


I am selling a USR HST 14.4k baud modem with v42bis compression upgrades.
THere is no manual, as it was lost going from one side of the U.S. to the other at some point.  THe modem is setup for max throughput, and it has built in help, but a quick reference guide on the bottom of it, so its use it not difficult by any means.
Any offers?


Referring to notes from the personal diary of Russian General L.
Odishe Liyetze on the Turkish front, he wrote,

"On the nights 11-12 March, 1918 alone Armenian butchers
 bayoneted and axed to death 3000 Muslims in areas surrounding
 Erzincan. These barbars threw their victims into pits, most
 likely dug according to their sinister plans to extinguish
 Muslims, in groups of 80. My adjutant counted and unearthed
 200 such pits. This is an act against our world of civilization."

On March 12, 1918 Lieut-colonel Griyaznof wrote (from an official
Russian account of the Turkish genocide),

"Roads leading to villages were littered with bayoneted torsos,
 dismembered joints and carved out organs of Muslim peasants...
 alas! mainly of women and children."

Source: Doc. Dr. Azmi Suslu, "Russian View on the Atrocities Committed
        by the Armenians Against the Turks," Ankara Universitesi, Ankara,
        1987, pp. 45-53.
        "Document No: 77," Archive No: 1-2, Cabin No: 10, Drawer
        No: 4, File No: 410, Section No: 1578, Contents No: 1-12, 1-18.
        (Acting Commander of Erzurum and Deveboynu regions and Commander
        of the Second Erzurum Artillery Regiment Prisoner of War,
        Lieutenant Colonel Toverdodleyov)

"The things I have heard and seen during the two months, until the
 liberation of Erzurum by the Turks, have surpassed all the
 allegations concerning the vicious, degenerate characteristic of
 the Armenians. During the Russian occupation of Erzurum, no Armenian
 was permitted to approach the city and its environs.

 While the Commander of the First Army Corps, General Kaltiyin remained
 in power, troops including Armenian enlisted men, were not sent to the
 area. When the security measures were lifted, the Armenians began to
 attack Erzurum and its surroundings. Following the attacks came the
 plundering of the houses in the city and the villages and the murder
 of the owners of these houses...Plundering was widely committed by
 the soldiers. This plunder was mainly committed by Armenian soldiers
 who had remained in the rear during the war.

 One day, while passing through the streets on horseback, a group of
 soldiers including an Armenian soldier began to drag two old men of
 seventy years in a certain direction. The roads were covered with mud,
 and these people were dragging the two helpless Turks through the mud
 and dirt...

 It was understood later that all these were nothing but tricks and
 traps. The Turks who joined the gendarmarie soon changed their minds
 and withdrew. The reason was that most of the Turks who were on night
 patrol did not return, and no one knew what had happened to them. The
 Turks who had been sent outside the city for labour began to disappear
 also. Finally, the Court Martial which had been established for the
 trials of murderers and plunderers, began to liquidate itself for
 fear that they themselves would be punished. The incidents of murder
 and rape, which had decreased, began to occur more frequently.

 Sometime in January and February, a leading Turkish citizen Haci Bekir
 Efendi from Erzurum, was killed one night at his home. The Commander
 in Chief (Odiselidge) gave orders to find murderers within three days.
 The Commander in Chief has bitterly reminded the Armenian intellectuals
 that disobedience among the Armenian enlisted men had reached its
 highest point, that they had insulted and robbed the people and half
 of the Turks sent outside the city had not returned.

 ...We learnt the details this incident from the Commander-in-Chief,
 Odishelidge. They were as follows:

 The killings were organized by the doctors and the employers, and the
 act of killing was committed solely by the Armenian renegades...
 More than eight hundred unarmed and defenceless Turks have been
 killed in Erzincan. Large holes were dug and the defenceless
 Turks were slaughtered like animals next to the holes. Later, the
 murdered Turks were thrown into the holes. The Armenian who stood
 near the hole would say when the hole was filled with the corpses:
 'Seventy dead bodies, well, this hole can take ten more.' Thus ten
 more Turks would be cut into pieces, thrown into the hole, and when
 the hole was full it would be covered over with soil.

 The Armenians responsible for the act of murdering would frequently
 fill a house with eighty Turks, and cut their heads off one by one.
 Following the Erzincan massacre, the Armenians began to withdraw
 towards Erzurum... The Armenian renegades among those who withdrew
 to Erzurum from Erzincan raided the Moslem villages on the road, and
 destroyed the entire population, together with the villages.

 During the transportation of the cannons, ammunition and the carriages
 that were outside the war area, certain people were hired among the
 Kurdish population to conduct the horse carriages. While the travellers
 were passing through Erzurum, the Armenians took advantage of the time
 when the Russian soldiers were in their dwellings and began to kill
 the Kurds they had hired. When the Russian soldiers heard the cries
 of the dying Kurds, they attempted to help them. However, the
 Armenians threatened the Russian soldiers by vowing that they would
 have the same fate if they intervened, and thus prevented them from
 acting. All these terrifying acts of slaughter were committed with
 hatred and loathing.

 Lieutenant Medivani from the Russian Army described an incident that
 he witnessed in Erzurum as follows: An Armenian had shot a Kurd. The
 Kurd fell down but did not die. The Armenian attempted to force the
 stick in his hand into the mouth of the dying Kurd. However, since
 the Kurd had firmly closed his jaws in his agony, the Armenian failed
 in his attempt. Having seen this, the Armenian ripped open the abdomen
 of the Kurd, disembowelled him, and finally killed him by stamping
 him with the iron heel of his boot.

 Odishelidge himself told us that all the Turks who could not escape
 from the village of Ilica were killed. Their heads had been cut off
 by axes. He also told us that he had seen thousands of murdered
 children. Lieutenant Colonel Gryaznov, who passed through the village
 of Ilica, three weeks after the massacre told us the following:

 There were thousands of dead bodies hacked to pieces, on the roads.
 Every Armenian who happened to pass through these roads, cursed and
 spat on the corpses. In the courtyard of a mosque which was about
 25x30 meter square, dead bodies were piled to a height of 140
 centimeters. Among these corpses were men and women of every age,
 children and old people. The women's bodies had obvious marks of
 rape. The genitals of many girls were filled with gun-powder.

 A few educated Armenian girls, who worked as telephone operators
 for the Armenian troops were called by Lieutenant Colonel Gryaznov
 to the courtyard of the mosque and he bitterly told them to be
 proud of what the Armenians had done. To the lieutenant colonel's
 disgusted amazement, the Armenian girls started to laugh and giggle,
 instead of being horrified. The lieutenant colonel had severely
 reprimanded those girls for their indecent behaviour. When he told
 the girls that the Armenians, including women, were generally more
 licentious than even the wildest animals, and that their indecent
 and shameful laughter was the most obvious evidence of their inhumanity
 and barbarity, before a scene that appalled even veteran soldiers,
 the Armenian girls finally remembered their sense of shame and
 claimed they had laughed because they were nervous.

 An Armenian contractor at the Alaca Communication zone command
 narrated the following incident which took place on February 20:

 The Armenians had nailed a Turkish women to the wall. They had cut
 out the women's heart and placed the heart on top of her head.
 The great massacre in Erzurum began on February 7... The enlisted men
 of the artillery division caught and stripped 270 people. Then they
 took these people into the bath to satisfy their lusts. 100 people
 among this group were able to save their lives as the result of
 my decisive attempts. The others, the Armenians claimed, were
 released when they learnt that I understood what was going on.
 Among those who organized this treacherous act was the envoy to the
 Armenian officers, Karagodaviev. Today, some Turks were murdered
 on the streets.

 On February 12, some Armenians have shot more than ten innocent
 Moslems. The Russian soldiers who attempted to save these people were
 threatened with death. Meanwhile I imprisoned an Armenian for
 murdering an innocent Turk.

 When an Armenian officer told an Armenian murderer that he would
 be hanged for his crime, the killer shouted furiously: 'How dare
 you hang an Armenian for killing a Turk?' In Erzurum, the
 Armenians burned down the Turkish market. On February 17, I heard
 that the entire population of Tepekoy village, situated within
 the artillery area, had been totally annihilated. On the same
 day when Antranik entered Erzurum, I reported the massacre to
 him, and asked him to track down the perpetrators of this horrible
 act. However no result was achieved.

 In the villages whose inhabitants had been massacred, there was a
 natural silence. On the night of 26/27 February, the Armenians deceived
 the Russians, perpetrated a massacre and escaped for fear of the
 Turkish soldiers. Later, it was understood that this massacre had
 been based upon a method organized and planned in a circular.
 The population had been herded in a certain place and then killed
 one by one. The number of murders committed on that night reached
 three thousand. It was the Armenians who bragged to about the details
 of the massacre. The Armenians fighting against the Turkish soldiers
 were so few in number and so cowardly that they could not even
 withstand the Turkish soldiers who consisted of only five hundred
 people and two cannons, for one night, and ran away. The leading
 Armenians of the community could have prevented this massacre.
 However, the Armenian intellectuals had shared the same ideas with
 the renegades in this massacre, just as in all the others. The lower
 classes within the Armenian community have always obeyed the orders
 of the leading Armenian figures and commanders.

 I do not like to give the impression that all Armenian intellectuals
 were accessories to these murders. No, for there were people who
 opposed the Armenians for such actions, since they understood that
 it would yield no result. However, such people were only a minority.
 Furthermore, such people were considered as traitors to the Armenian
 cause. Some have seemingly opposed the Armenian murders but have
 supported the massacres secretly. Some, on the other hand, preferred
 to remain silent. There were certain others, who, when accused by
 the Russians of infamy, would say the following: 'You are Russians.
 You can never understand the Armenian cause.' The Armenians had a
 conscience. They would commit massacres and then would flee in fear
 of the Turkish soldiers."

Serdar Argic


I have posted a DOS MPEG decoder/player to alt.binaries.pictures.utilities.

Here is a short description and some technical information, taken from the
accompanying documentation:

                              DMPEG V1.0

                       Public Domain MPEG decoder

                           by Stefan Eckart

0. Features
===========

DMPEG/DMPLAY is another MPEG decoder/player for the PC:

 - decodes (nearly) the full MPEG video standard
   (I,P,B frames, frame size up to at least 352x240 supported)

 - saves decoded sequence in 8 or 24bit raw file for later display

 - optional on-screen display during decoding (requires VGA)

 - several dithering options: ordered dither, Floyd-Steinberg, grayscale

 - color-space selection

 - runs under DOS, 640KB RAM, no MS-Windows required

 - very compact (small code / small data models, 16 bit arithmetic)

 - real time display of the raw file by a separate player for
   VGA and many Super-VGAs

...

4. Technical information
========================

The player is a rather straightforward implementation of the MPEG spec [1].
The IDCT is based on the Chen-Wang 13 multiplication algorithm [2]
(not quite the optimum, I know). Blocks with not more than eight non-zero
coefficients use a non-separated direct multiply-accumulate 2D-IDCT
(sounds great, doesn't it?), which turned out to be faster than a 'fast'
algorithm in this (quite common) case. Dithering is pretty standard. Main
difference to the Berkeley decoder (except for the fewer number of supported
algorithms) is the use of 256 instead of 128 colors, the (default) option to
use a restricted color-space and the implementation of a color saturation
dominant ordered dither. This leads to a significantly superior quality of
the dithered image (I claim, judge yourself).

Restricted color-space means that the U and V components are clipped to
+/-0.25 (instead of +/-0.5) and the display color-space points are distributed
over this restricted space. Since the distance between color-space points
is thus reduced by a factor of two, the color resolution is doubled at the
expense of not being able to represent fully saturated colors.

Saturation dominant ordered dither is a method by which a color, lying
somewhere between the points of the display color space, is approximated
by primarily alternating between two points of constant hue instead of
constant saturation. This yields subjectivly better quality due to the
lower sensitivity of the human viewing system to saturation changes than
to hue changes (the same reasoning as used by the PAL TV standard to improve
on NTSC). The improvement is particularly visible in dark brown or redish
areas.

...


The FLYERS team that can beat any team on any night showed up at the Spectrum
Sunday night, and dominated the Maple Leafs thoroughly en route to a 4-0
shutout. Tommy Soderstrom will get credit for the shutout, but he barely broke
a sweat until the third period as the FLYERS defense kept the Leafs from
mounting any serious attack.

Injuries:

Pelle Eklund is day-to-day with a bruised thigh.

Roster Moves:

Jason Bowen was added to the lineup for his first NHL game. Jason was the FLYERS
second pick in the first round (15th overall) of the 1992 entry draft. 19 years
old, 6'4", 210 lbs. In 62 games with the tri-city Americans he had 10 goals,
12 assists and 219 PIM. He plays left wing and defense, he played defense in
this game although Bobby Taylor said that Bill Dineen was planning to use him
up front as well.

Andre Faust was returned to Hershey. He actually left after the second period
of the Kings game, flew to Albany, got the game tying goal in a Bears OT win,
and played again for Hershey Sunday night.

Lines:

Fedyk-Lindros-Recchi
Beranek-Brind'Amour-Dineen
Lomakin-Butsayev-Conroy
Acton-Brown

Galley-McGill
Yushkevich-Cronin
Carkner-Hawgood
Bowen

Tommy Soderstrom in goal.

Acton replaced Lomakin in the 3rd period.

Game Summary:

If the FLYERS played like this every night, they'd be in the playoffs this
year. The FLYERS hit everything that moved. They created scoring chance after
scoring chance. They snuffed out everything that the Leafs tried to do.

Jason Bowen made a good play on his first NHL shift that almost created a goal.
He had the puck in the top of the left offensive circle all alone, but instead
of taking the shot he found Brind'Amour crashing the net on the other side.
A perfect pass and a good shot across Daren Puppa's body should have been a
goal, but Puppa made a great save reading the play.

Garry Galley gave the Maple Leafs 7th ranked power play the first chance when
he hooked Doug Gilmour at 4:25. The FLYERS lowly 21st ranked penalty killing
unit was almost flawless the entire game, and set the tone on this kill. The
Maple Leafs got almost nothing but long unscreened shots, and the defense swept
away every rebound.

After the power play, the FLYERS got a goal on an ugly play. Rod Brind'Amour
gave the puck to Greg Hawgood at the right point, and he sent a drive at the
net. Puppa made the save and kicked the rebound right into the feet of Josef
Beranek and Bob Rouse, who were wrestling in the slot. Beranek was able to
get his stick on the puck and push it out to Dineen who was skating into
the slot from the right circle, and he lifted a backhander over Puppa for
a 1-0 FLYERS lead at 8:10.

The FLYERS kept the pressure on, and Puppa was the only Leaf keeping the FLYERS
from building on their lead for a while. Eventually things settled down and
defense prevailed. Each team got an occasional scoring chance, but the goalies
were strong. Bowen started giving some Lindros-like checks in his own corners.
Then Lindros, who was looking to avenge a hit Foligno gave him, thought he had
a chance to even the score. He had Foligno lined up at center ice, leaned into
him, and rode him into the center ice boards. The only problem was that Foligno
was a little far from the boards, and Mike "Mister" McGeough felt that it
warranted a boarding call at 15:38

The Leafs couldn't get anything going on the power play as the FLYERS were
very aggressive (for a change) on the kill.

With time running out in the period, Recchi carried through the neutral zone
and handed to Lindros as they approached the Leaf's blue line. They were in
a crowd with Wendell Clark and Jamie Macoun, Lindros tried a backhand pass
to Recchi through the feet of Macoun that connected to Recchi, but then Clark
checked Recchi off the puck. Macoun then tried to clear, but it was weak and
went right to McGill who had manned the point. He drove it from just inside
the blue line. Macoun got his stick on it and deflected it past his own
goalie at 19:55.1. Shots were 13-8 FLYERS in the period.

The FLYERS finally got their first chance on the power play when Dave Andreychuk
tripped up Rod Brind'Amour in his offensive zone. During the power play, the
FLYERS got cheated a little when the puck popped up into the air and Eric
gloved it down, but McGeough thought it hit his stick above his head. We
could see from our seats at the other end of the ice that it only hit his glove
and the replay confirmed, but the faceoff went to the other end. As time was
running out in the advantage, Lindros found Galley with a pass across the goal
mouth but Puppa made the save. The rebound kicked back to the right corner where
Recchi picked it up, passed it out to Eric crashing through the right circle,
and Eric one-timed past Puppa at 7:55. With the assist, Recchi moves past
Bobby Clarke's 74-75 season, the second best one season total for a FLYER at
117.  Eric moves up to 4th all time in FLYERS rookie scoring with 67 points.

Mike Eastwood took down Al Conroy at 8:30 to give the FLYERS another chance on
the power play. Not much pressure before Garry Galley ended the power play with
a slash at 9:19. Not much happened on the 4 on 4, although the Leafs had most
of the possession. The FLYERS smothered the Leafs short power play. Tempers
flared a little at 13:14. Bowen and Pearson got roughing minors, Keith Acton
got a bloody face. Dave McLlwain then took a dive and got Greg Hawgood a
hooking minor at 13:46 to set up a 4 on 3. The replay showed that Hawgood's
stick stopped making contact with McLlwain long before he spun around and fell.
Again the FLYERS smothered the Leafs power play, led by Dimitri Yushkevich.
Bowen made a thundering hit when he came out of the box on Pearson. Berehowski
tried to perplex everybody with his sloooowball. He had the puck at the point,
and just trickled a pass down the slot. He made all the FLYERS look silly as
nobody could get a stick on it, and it got to Gilmour at the side of the net,
but Soderstrom stoned him.

The FLYERS picked things up offensively after the kill was over, but didn't
get anything home. Shots were 13-10 FLYERS.

The FLYERS were content with the 3 goal lead in the third period, and they
decided that if Tommy wanted a shutout, he was going to have to work for it a
little.

The FLYERS got most of the scoring chances in the first 7 or so minutes of the
period, but couldn't get past Puppa. Then the Leafs got tired of Lindros making
road kill out of them, and tempers flared. 2 each for Doug Gilmour and Lindros
(unsportsmanlike conduct) and 2 each for Glenn Anderson and McGill (roughing)
all at 7:02. Terry Carkner then took a kneeing penalty at 7:51 on Gilmour.

Again the FLYERS smothered the Leafs power play.

At about the 12 minute mark, Dave Andreychuk got a shot away from his left
circle that got through Soderstrom. The puck was rolling on it's side, and
as luck would have it it turned away from the net instead of turning towards
it (think of how a rolling quarter inevitably starts to lean one way or the
other). Seconds later Rod Brind'Amour tripped up Gilmour at 12:24 to give the
Leafs another chance on the power play. On the advantage, after Soderstrom
stoned Andreychuk while lying down, Andreychuk got the rebound through
Soderstrom, but from behind the net and it went straight through and was swept
away by one of his defensemen. They kept the pressure on, but Soderstrom was
equal and preserved the shutout.

Recchi cross checked Ken Baumgartner to get tempers hot and start a brawl
at 16:01. No punches thrown, Recchi got the initial minor, Krushelnyski
Baumgartner and Lindros each got roughing minors. At 17:02 Rouse and Beranek
expressed their mutual dislike for each other and got 2 each for slashing to
set up another 4 on 4. Mike Eastwood shoved down Ryan McGill in the FLYERS
zone as they were battling for the puck, and while McGill was down he ran
his stick across McGill's face. The FLYERS were not happy with that at all.
5-8 Al Conroy paired up with 6-1 Berehowski, and started throwing punches.
Upward. Well, Al held his own, much to the delight of the crowd. Each got
a couple punches in before going down in a head, and Al got a standing O!
Penalties: Eastwood 5 (cross check) + game, Clark, Carkner 10 each. Berehowski
and Conroy 5 each (fighting) at 17:49.

So a major penalty for the rest of the game for the FLYERS. The had no interest
in stting on the lead. Hawgood, Galley and Brind'Amour played catch until
Hawgood found Dineen all alone in the left circle, he controlled the puck and
blasted it past Puppa at 18:39.

That was all the fireworks, Tommy Soderstrom would not face another shot. Puppa
did, but kept the FLYERS off the board. 4-0 FLYERS, shots were 9-8 FLYERS in the
3rd. Probably the strongest game I've seen from the FLYERS since the All Star
break. Shutout number 4 for Soderstrom, all since 1/10. Tied for 2nd most in
the NHL, but he's played fewer games than Belfour (6) or the goalie I can't
remember that he's tied with.

Next up it's the Winnipeg Selannes Tuesday night in Winnipeg. The FLYERS cannot
be eliminated if they win, but a loss coupled with an Islander win that night
in Washington would be the official end.

FLYERS up to 71 points on the season in 78 games. Last year they had 75 points
in 80 games (5 under .500), so they need at least 8 points in their last 6
games to improve on that only by percentage points (5 under in 84 is better
than 5 under in 80).

Tragic number holds at 3 points with 6 games left. The tragic number for 5th
is 5 points, I watched the Rangers blow a 4-2 third period lead at home to
lose 5-4 before I finished this up. Why 5 points instead of 4? Well, the FLYERS
will win the tie-breaker if they catch them, whereas the Islanders win tie
breakers against the FLYERS and so need only a tie. The Rangers could crumble
down the stretch as they play the Devils, the Pens twice, the FLYERS, and
finish up with 2 games against the Caps. So I guess 5th place could be the
goal for the team to focus on.

FLYERS team record watch:

Eric Lindros:

38 goals, 29 assists, 67 points

(rookie records)
club record goals:			club record points:
Eric Lindros	38 1992-93		Dave Poulin	76 1983-84
Brian Propp	34 1979-80		Brian Propp	75 1979-80
Ron Flockhart	33 1981-82		Ron Flockhart	72 1981-82
Dave Poulin	31 1983-84		Eric Lindros	67 1992-93
Bill Barber	30 1972-73		Pelle Eklund	66 1985-86

Mark Recchi:

51 goals, 66 assists, 117 points.

club record goals:			club record points:
Reggie Leach	61 1975-76		Bobby Clarke	119 1975-76
Tim Kerr	58 1985-86,86-87	Mark Recchi	117 1992-93
Tim Kerr	54 1983-84,84-85	Bobby Clarke	116 1974-75
Mark Recchi	51 1992-93		Bill Barber	112 1975-76
Rick Macliesh	50 1972-73		Bobby Clarke	104 1972-73
Bill Barber	50 1975-76		Rick Macliesh	100 1972-73
Reggie Leach	50 1979-80

FLYERS career years:

Player		Points	Best Prior Season
Mark Recchi	117	113 (90-91 Penguins)
Rod Brind'Amour	79	77 (91-92 FLYERS)
Garry Galley	58	38 (84-85 Kings)
Brent Fedyk	58	35 (90-91 Red Wings)

That's all for now...


Could someone please send me the postal and email address of
Congruent Corporation (and any competitors they may have).

Thank you.
--
snail@lsl.co.uk


      Just a question.
      As a provider of a public BBS service - aren't you bound by law to gurantee
      intelligble access to the data of the users on the BBS, if police comes
      with sufficent authorisation ? I guessed this would be  a basic condition
      for such systems. (I did run a bbs some time ago, but that was in Switzerland)

The US doesn't yet have many laws covering BBSs - they're not common carriers,
they're not phone companies, they're just private machines or services
operated by businesses.  There's no obligation to keep records.
As Perry Metzger points out, if the police come with a search warrant,
you have to let them see what the warrant demands, if it exists,
and they generally can confiscate the equipment as "evidence"
(which is not Constitutionally valid, but we're only beginning to
develop court cases supporting us).  A court MAY be able to compel
you to tell them information you know, such as the encryption password
for the disk - there aren't any definitive cases yet, since it's a new
situation, and there probably aren't laws specifically covering it.
But the court can't force you to *know* the keys, and there are no
laws preventing you from allowing your users to have their own keys
for their own files without giving them to you.

Even in areas that do have established law, there is uncertainty.
There was a guy in Idaho a few years ago who had his business records
subpoenaed as evidence for taxes or some other business-restriction law,
so he gave the court the records.  Which were in Hebrew.
The US doesn't have laws forcing you to keep your records in English,
and these were the originals of the records.  HE didn't speak Hebrew,
and neither did anybody in the court organization.  Don't think they
were able to do much about it.

It might be illegal for your BBS to deny access to potential customers
based on race, religion, national origin, gender, or sexual preference;
it probably hasn't been tested in court, but it seems like a plausible
extension of anti-discrimination laws affecting other businesses.


I have one complaint for the cameramen doing the Jersey-Pitt series:  Show
the shots, not the hits.  On more than one occassion the camera zoomed in
on a check along the boards while the puck was in the slot.  They panned
back to show the rebound.  Maybe Mom's camera people were a little more
experienced.


[again, poseted for a friend]

Okay, I got such great response from my last question (thanks, everyone),
lets try again:

How can I tell if a colorcell is read-only?

I want to use any read-only cells that are already in my colormap
once I start running out of allocatable cells, using some arbitrary
nearest color matching scheme to get those cells that come closest to
a requested color.

Once I determine if a cell is read-only, I assume I can then just request
an XAllocColor() with the exact same color specifications and it will
then be flagged as 'used' by my application so that it doesn't later get
freed by someone else and allocated again as read-write to another
application.

So far, the only way I've figured out to do this is to write my own
error handler and just go ahead and request the cells colors, once my
colormap is all full up.  It should error out if the cell is non-shareable.
But life would be much easier if I could just detect the
read-only/shareable stuff directly...

Any ideas?


I wouldn't bother with the copy protection, if I were you.  If you program
is any good, the pirates will have stripped the protection and will be
distributing the stripped version is well under a week.

Hardware methods prevent J. Random Loser from using his Copy II PC to pirate
your software, but doesn't stop anyone who knows a few people with enough
connections to "real" pirates who _will_ be able to defeat your "check for the
hole" code.

You may want to price your software (depending on what it is) a tad
higher... a price change from $15 to $25 probably would turn off very few
potentials buyers, and that way you could tolerate more pirates (whose
numbers don't change with the price).

As for the 20% pirating figure... ha, ha.  Of course, a lot of pirates just
have this "thing" about having pirated software, even if they never use it,
so perhaps that really wouldn't count towards 20%.  Even so, 20% is awfully
low.

					---Joel Kolstad


Does this organization have an official e-mail address these
days? (an address for any of the SF Bay Area Lodges, e.g. Thelema
would do.)
                                      93...
                                       A.Lizard


To start with, no methodology or form of reasoning is infallible.  So
there's a question of how much certainty we are willing to pay for in a
given context.  Insistence on too much rigor bogs science down completely
and makes progress impossible.  (Expenditure of sufficiently large sums
of money and amounts of time can sometimes overcome this.)  On the other
hand, with too little rigor much is lost by basing work on results which
eventually turn out to be false.  There is a morass of studies
contradicting other studies and outsiders start saying  "You people call
THIS science?"   (My opinion, for what it's worth, is that one sees both
these phenomena happening simultaneously in some parts of psychology.)

Some subjective judgement is required to decide on the level of rigor
appropriate for a particular investigation.  I don't believe it is
ever possible to banish subjective judgement from science.

My second point, though, is that highly capable people can often make
extremely reliable judgements about scientific validity even when using
methodology considered inadequate by the usual standards.  I think this
is true of many scientists and I think it is true of many who approach
their discipline in a way that is not generally recognized as scientific.

Within mathematics, I think there are several examples, especially before
the twentieth century.  One conspicuous case is that of Riemann, who is
famous for many theorems he stated but did not prove.  (Later
mathematicians did prove them, of course.)

I think that for a good scientist, empirical investigation is often not
so much a matter of determining what is true and what's not  as it is a
matter of convincing other people.  (People have proposed lots of
incompatible definitions of science here, but I think the ability to
objectively convince others of the validity of one's results is an
essential element.  Not that one can necessarily do that at every step
of the scientific process, but I think that if one is not moving toward
that goal then one is not doing science.)

When a person other than a scientist is quite good at what he does and
seems to be very successful at it, I think that his judgements are also
worthy of respect and that his assertions are well worth further
investigation.

Admittedly, my question was not at all well posed.  A considerable
amount of effort in a "serious scholarly investigation" such as I
suggested would be required simply to formulate an appropriately
specific question to try and answer.

The "science" I was thinking of in my question is the actual science
currently practiced now in the last decade of the twentieth century.
I certainly wasn't thinking of some idealized science or the mere use
of "reason and observation."

One thing I had in mind in my suggestion was the question as to whether
in many cases the subjective judgements of skilled and experienced
practitioners might be more reliable than statistical studies.

Since Russell Turpin seems to be much more familiar than I am with
the study of scientific methodology, perhaps he can tell us if there
is any existing research related to this question.

--
In the arguments between behaviorists and cognitivists, psychology seems
less like a science than a collection of competing religious sects.


little.

I know what you mean!  I glow everytime Ronnie's out on the ice.
In fact, one of the neatest things about seeing the Pens in person
is that I can key in on him instead of watching what I'd probably
be seeing on tv.  He does so many subtle things behind the play.

He said in an interview recently that when he was a kid his dad
stressed the importance of playing two-way hockey; that you have to
learn how to play defense as well as offense and he obviously took
that advice to heart.  He was a breath of fresh air when he arrived
in Pittsburgh to the team whose forwards, for the most part, couldn't
and wouldn't play a lick of defense.

It's really difficult to assess what the key trades were that brought
all of this success to the Pens.  You mention Rick Tocchet and he has
certainly helped, and even ol' Kjell has been steady.  But looking at
this team you could almost take any one of them out of the line-up
permanently and replace them with an extremely mediocre player and it
wouldn't matter.

If I had to pick the top three acquisitions in recent years they would
be 1) Tom Barrasso; 2) Ron Francis; 3) Larry Murphy.  (I'd love to put
Francis first but I do think the only thing that could really damage
the Pens right now would be to lose Barrasso.)


The sightings were apparently spurious.  There is no planet inside of
the orbit of Mercury.

The idea of Vulcan came from the differences between Mercury's observed
perihelion precession and the value it should have had according to
Newtonian physics.  Leverrier made an extensive set of observations
and calculations during the mid 19th century, and Simon Newcombe later
improved on the observations and re-calculated using Leverrier's system
of equations.  Now Leverrier was one of the co-discoverers of Neptune
and since he had predicted its existence based on anomalies in the orbit
of Uranus his inclination was to believe the same sort of thing was
afoot with Mercury.

But alas, 'twere not so.  Mercury's perihelion precesses at the rate
it does because the space where it resides near the sun is significantly
curved due to the sun's mass.  This explanation had to wait until 1915
and Albert Einstein's synthesis of his earlier theory of the electrodynamics
of moving bodies (commonly called Special Relativity) with Reimanian
geometry.  The result was the General Theory of Relativity, and one of
it's most noteworthy strengths is that it accounts for the precession
of Mercury's perihelion almost exactly.  (Exactly if you use Newcomb's
numbers rather than Leverrier's.)

Of course not everybody believes Einstein, and that's fine.  But subsequent
efforts to find any planets closer to the sun than Mercury using radar
have been fruitless.

-Bill Gawne

 "Forgive him, he is a barbarian, who thinks the customs of his tribe
  are the laws of the universe."                       - G. J. Caesar


    Lets carry this one step further. Suppose the text of the key is
in itself conclusive evidence of the SAME CRIME for which the
encrypted material is further evidence. I find myself envisaging a
scenario like this:

You have made some scans of Peanuts strips. You encrypt them. The key
is a phrase.

The Comic Police haul you in. They seize your system. They find the
encrypted file.

CP:    "Whats that file?"

You:   "I take the fifth."

CP:    "What's the keyphrase to that file?"

You:   "I take the fifth."

Judge: "You have to reveal the keyphrase" [I disagree, but I'm not a judge.]

You:   "Your Honor, revealing the keyphrase, in it's own right, would
	tend to incriminate me of breaking laws, independent of what
	may or may not be in the encrypted file."

Judge: "I grant you immunity from whatever may be learned from the key
	itself"

You:    "The keyphrase is: "I confess to deliberately evading copyright;
	the file encoded with this keyphrase contains illegal scans of
        copyrighted Peanuts strips.""

Judge and CP: "Oh."

     How will they get you now? I'm not saying that they won't, or
can't (or even that they shouldn't :-), but what legal mechanism will
they use? Should we be crossposting this to misc.legal?


I don't think speed has been determined, since it has never run on Intel chips.
But on the Amiga's Motorola Chips, it was one of the fastest true 'Ray Tracers'

I don't think Impulse would port it over and not take speed into consideration.

In terms of features, and learning curve... ALL that you stated for 3DS is also
true for Imagine, and lots more... But I'll have to admit that after 3 years of
use on the Amiga, the learning curve is very steep. This is due ONLY to the
manual. It is realy BAD. However, there is a lot of after market support for
this product, including regular 'Tips' articles in many magazines such as "AVID
and a great book by Steve Worley called "Understanding Imagine 2.0" This book i
is not just recommened, IT IS A MUST!


You are so correct - Clinton did not initiate it.  He just cast it in
GRANITE by implimenting, NOT stopping the DECISION.  I also stated in another
post I don't give a damn what administration does it, I still find it
totally unacceptable, and whoever impliments it or rams it down our throats
ought to be run out of office.

Also, Bush was not trying to deprive us of our Second Amendment rights.
Clinton is BUSTING HIS BUTT in that regard.  That reveals a total difference
in philosophy.  Clinton appears to support the idea of TOTAL people
control.  Eavesdropping whenever they feel like it, no real security
for the common person, and no ability to defend oneself against illegal
attack, from whatever source.  "Trust us, we will protect (and control)
you... if we don't find it inconvenient..."

Clinton has also shown his utter contempt for public disclosure and
accountability, as well.  He had plenty of time to change the policy.

HE DIDN'T.  HE EXPANDED ON IT.

I bet had Bush been in office, you would be in there howling louder
than I.


The tater that Jack Morris served to Griffey the Younger in his first
at-bat this year went 394 feet, if I remember right (I'll have to check
my scorecard at home).  I think that's the longest so far in the Kingdome
through the first stand (five games) there.  A weak showing, despite some
promising taterball candidates ... Ben McDonald, Rich DeLucia, and the
rest of the Mariner bullpen ... making appearances.

Anyone have the tape-measure value for Omar Vizquel's grand slam in the
Skydome?


Again, from my alcohol server's class:
The absolute *most* that eating before drinking can do is slow the absorption
down by 15 minutes.  That gives me time to eat, slam one beer, and ride like
hell to try to make it home in the 10 minutes left after paying, donning
helmet & gloves, starting bike...


Subject line says it all. Thanks in advance. Please email
chuck@cygnus.eid.anl.gov
Go Cubs!


I'm planning on buying a joystick (first time since I sold
	my Amiga five years ago :) for a PC. I have no idea what
	kind of stick I should buy. Many people have recommended
	variety of Gravis'es models. Are they any good/the best?

	-- Willy


It's not what they did that matters.  It's what *you* do and
what *I* do and what *we* do in response that matters.  Do we
lessen ourselves by killing in response to killing?  It's
vengeance.  That's all.  It's no deterrent.  It serves no
purpose but to slake somebody's blood lust.

Yeah yeah yeah... and sure would be nice if we didn't apply the
death penalty disproportionately to minorities.  I'll revisit my
opinion on the death penalty when there are more whites up for
it than blacks.  I.e., when hell freezes over.


In Windows I created a permanent Swap-file of 7771Kb as win3.1
recommended me to do that (32bit access).
If I use EMM386.EXE, after win3.1 startup I have 6689K of memory
free, if I leave EMM386.EXE out of my config.sys I have 9935K
of memory free, and windows recommends me a swap file of 11769K.

I use DOS6, with memmaker, have 4MB of internal Memory and a 486DX,

Does anybody knows why this is happening (possibly win needs
some UMB's to manage virtual memory?, If true, which UMB's, those
that EMM386 can find without including suspicious parts?)

I need an optimized DOS-environment, because i develop applications for
DOS using a windows programming environment.


I saw in the newspaper last night that Dr. Mae Jemison, the first
black woman in space (she's a physician and chemical engineer who flew
on Endeavour last year) will appear as a transporter operator on the
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode that airs the week of May 31.
It's hardly space science, I know, but it's interesting.


Help!
  I'm trying to configure NCSA Telnet v2.3.05 to work with a 3C503 ethernet
board.  I can use FTP fine, but whenever I attempt to use Telnet, the
machine hangs with a blank screen and a blinking green cursor.  Any ideas?


%
% I was just wondering if there were any law officers that read this.  I have
% several questions I would like to ask pertaining to motorcycles and cops.
%

   What happened to Charlie Lear??  He used to have "connections",  didn't
   he?

   (Hey, this is cyberspace mister...  you wanna 'stateside cop, ya gotta'
   specify!)

--
   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  | John Little  - gaijin@Japan.Sun.COM  - Sun Microsystems. Atsugi, Japan |


Reply address: mark.prado@permanet.org

If anyone knows anyone else who would like to get sci.space,
but doesn't have an Internet feed (or has a cryptic Internet
feed), I would be willing to feed it to them.  I have a nice
offline message reader/editor, an automated modem "mailer"
program which will pick up mail bundles (quickly and easily),
and an INSTALL.EXE to set them up painlessly.  No charge for
the sci.space feed, though you have to dial Washington, D.C.
This is NOT a BBS -- it's a store & forward system for mail
bundles, with minimum connect times.  (I'm used to overseas
calls.)  (This is not an offer for a free feed for any other
particular newsgroups.)  Speeds of up to 14400 (v32bis) are
supported.  VIP's might be offered other free services, such
as Internet address and other functionality.

I get my feed from UUNET and run a 4-line hub.  I've been
hubbing for years -- I have an extremely reliable hub.

The software I provide runs under MS-DOS (and OS/2 and Windows
as a DOS box).  Other, compatible software packages exist for
the MacIntosh and Unix.

Any responses should be private and go to:
mark.prado@permanet.org

(By the way, to all, my apologies for the public traffic on my
glib question.  I really didn't expect public replys.  But thanks
to Bill Higgins for the interesting statistics and the lead.)


  ( in <1993Apr16.163729.867@batman.bmd.trw.com> )
  ( responding to Dave "First With Official A.A Nickname" Fuller )

[ ... ]

That means that it is an effective anti-recidivism measure.  It does
not say that it deters an individual from committing a capital crime
in the first place.

The true question is whether the threat of death is likely to actually
stop one from murdering.  (Or commiting treason -- are there any other
capital crimes anywhere in the USA?)  That is, if there were no death
penalty, would its introduction deter a would-be criminal from
committing her/his crime?  I doubt it.

This is only the first step.  Even if it were a strong deterrent
(short of being a complete deterrent) I would reject it.  For what
about the case of the innocent executed?

And even if we could eliminate this possibility, I would reject the
death penalty as immoral. This makes me something of a radical on
the issue, although I think there are many opponents of captial
punishment who agree with me, but who find the innocent executed the
strongest argument to make.

I would, if magically placed in charge, facilitate state-aided suicide
for criminals who have life-sentences.  This could be a replacement
for capital punishment.  Those who don't want to live the rest of
their lives in jail would always have this option.


Thanks to all who replied to my initial question.  I've been away in
New Jersey all week and was surprised to see all the responses
when I got back.

To the person asking about nicotine patches, there are four on the
market:


Minolta FD 50 mm lens for sale. Good condition. Asking $30.


Just how much power does the House of Lords have now?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who said anything about panicking?" snapped Authur.           Garrett Johnson
"This is still just culture shock. You wait till I've       Garrett@Ingres.com
settled into the situation and found my bearings.
THEN I'll start panicking!" - Douglas Adams


I have a 486sx25 computer with a 105 Mg Seagate IDE drive and a controler
built into the motherboard. I want to add a SCSI drive (a quantum prodrive
425F 425 MG formatted). I have no documentation at all and I need your
help!

As I understand it, here is the process of adding such a drive.  Could you
please tell me if I'm right..

1- Buy a SCSI contoler.  Which one? I know Adaptec is good, but they are
kind of expensive.  Are there any good boards in the $100 region? I want
it to be compatible with OS2 and Unix if possible.  Also, I have seen on
the net that there are SCSI and SCSI2 drives. Is this true? Does the
adapter need to be the same as the drive? What type of drive is the
quantum?

2- connect the drive to the adapter via a SCSI cable and the power cable.
Do i have to worry about the power supply? I think I have 200 watts and
all I'm powering are two floppies and the seagate drive.

3- Setup the BIOS to recognize the drive as the second drive.  What type
of drive is this? I don't have the numbers for this drive.

4- Format and create partitions on the drive. Do I use format or fdisk? I
think that IDE drives can't be low-level formatted. Is it the same with
SCSI? How exactly does fdisk work? I have a reduced msdos 5.0 manual
(clone obliges) and there is no mention of fdisk.  Ideally, I would want
the drive partitioned in to two partitions D: and E: how do I do this?

Well that seems to be all. Is there anythiing I'm forgetting?
Any help is *really* appreciated, I'm lost...

-Eric


At least we got somebody the Flyers wanted ;-)

Is this really true?  I have not been keeping up with any news.  If it is,
what's the deal with Neil Smith?  Is he gone, too?

--
    Keith Keller				LET'S GO RANGERS!!!!!
						LET'S GO QUAKERS!!!!!
	kkeller@mail.sas.upenn.edu		IVY LEAGUE CHAMPS!!!!


I was at an interesting seminar at work (UK's R.A.L. Space Science
Dept.) on this subject, specifically on a small-scale Solar Sail
proposed as a student space project. The guy giving the talk was keen to
generate interest in the project. I'll typein the handout he gave out at
the meeting. Here goes :

			The Microlight Solar Sail
			-------------------------

1. Introduction
The solar sail is a well-established concept. Harnessing the pressure of
sunlight, a spacecraft would have unlimited range. In principle, such a
vehicle could explore the whole Solar System with zero fuel consumption.

However it is more difficult to design a practical solar sail than most
people realize. The pressure of sunlight is only about one kilogram per
square kilometer. Deploying and controlling the large area of aluminized
fabric which would be necessary to transport a 'conventional' type
spacecraft is a daunting task. This is why, despite the potential of hte
idea, no such craft has actually been launched to date.

2.Design
Recent advances in microelectronics make possible a different concept: a
tiny sail just a few metres in diameter which could be controlled purely
be electronics, with no mechanical parts. Several attitude control
methods are feasible: for example the pressure sunlight exerts on a
panel of solar cells varies according to whether power is being drawn.

The key components of the craft will be a minute CCD camera developed at
Edinburgh University which can act as both attitude sensor and data
gathering device; solar cells providing ~1 watt power for control and
communication; and a directional radio antenna etched onto the surface
of the sail itself. Launched as a piggyback payload, the total cost of
the mission can be limited to a few tens of thousands of dollars.

3.Missions
The craft would be capable of some ambitious missions. For example:
a) It could rendezvous with a nearby asteroid from the Apollo or Amor
groups. Closeup pictures could be transmitted back to Earth at a low bit
rate.
b) It could be steered into a lunar polar orbit. Previously unobserved
areas around the lunar poles could be viewed. By angling the sail to
reflect sunlight downwards, polar craters whose bases never receive
sunlight could be imaged. Bright reflections would confirm that
volatiles such as water ice have become trapped in these
locations.[Immensely valuable information for setting up a manned lunar
base, BTW]
c) It could be sent to rendezvous with a small asteroid or comet
nucleus. Impacting at low speed, a thin wire probe attached to the craft
causes it to rebound while capturing a tiny sample is a sharp-edged
tube, like performing a biopsy. Returning to Earth, the sail acts as an
ideal re-entry parachute: load per unit area 20 gm/m2 ensures that heat
is reradiated so efectively that the sail temperature cannot exceed ~300
deg C. The material sample is recovered, enclosed in a small insulating
container.

Contact: Colin Jack                              Tel. 0865-200447
Oxford Mathematical Designs, 131 High Street, Oxford OX1 4DH, England

--------------------------------

This guy would love to hear from anyone interested in this project or
seeking details or anything, and would be most happy to send you more
information.

	Andy

--


Your statement is a common misconception, but it just isn't true. In the
German Weimar system, the Chancellor was not necessarily the leader of the
largest Reichstag party; the Chancellor was appointed by the President and
generally was the leader of a coalition of parties who could form an effective
majority in the Reichstag. Beyond that, the implication that Hitler rose to
the Chancellorship because a majority of Germans wanted Nazi rule is false
as well. Before President Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor in January
1933, the German people did not show a particular desire to be led either by
Hitler or by the Nazi party. These are the results of the March 1932 election
for President, the closest Hitler ever came to direct election: Hindenburg
49.6%, Hitler 30.1%, Thaelmann 13.2%, Duesterberg 6.8%. In the runoff election
in April the results were: Hindenburg 53%, Hitler 36.8%, Thaelmann 10.2%.
So we can see that Hitler personally was supported by only about a third of
German voters.

Similarly, the Nazi party never received more than 37% of the vote in
Reichstag elections. That occurred in July 1932. In the November 1932 election
the Nazis *lost* two million votes and 34 seats, down from 230 to 196 out of
the 608 in the Reichstag. Comparitively, the Socialists had 121 and the
Communists 100. The Communists had gained 11 seats, and the German National
party, which had supported the previous government, had picked up a million
of the Nazis' lost votes to gain 15 seats (up to 52). I think the other large
party was the Catholic Center party (I don't know how many seats they had but
I think they were declining), and there were numerous other small parties.
Thus the Nazi vote was on the decline at the time Hitler was appointed
Chancellor.

What brought Hitler to power was *not* the demand of the German people for
Hitler or the Nazis to run things, but the inability of the other parties to
put their differences behind them in favor of forming an effective government
for the country. Germany did not have an enduring democratic tradition, and
their parliamentary system lacked effective center parties that favored the
interests of the majority of the population. Instead what they had was a
number of small parties who were unable to put aside their own specific
objectives in order to combine against the Nazis, who were out to end the
democratic process. In fact, part of the problem was that some of the other
parties with substantial representation, like the Communists, were also
out to end the democratic process, but with different results in mind, and
generally didn't mind seeing parliamentary democracy go under.

Germany had already had a non-Nazi Chancellor with a majority coalition
for five months while the Nazis had been the largest Reichstag party, and
there certainly was no danger of a revolution in favor of the Nazis.
If anything the Nazis were starting to get desperate because they had failed
to get enough support to make Hitler President and their popular vote had
begun to decline.

Hitler was not Hindenburg's first choice to be Chancellor, not even his
second choice. First, von Papen had been Chancellor since June 1932. After
the November election when the Nazis *lost* seats, Hindenburg first prevailed
on von Papen to remain as Chancellor. But there were intrigues behind his back
and support for him was lacking. So then Hindenburg turned to von Schleicher,
who became Chancellor for two months. Eventually he too was unable to hold
together a working coalition of parties to oppose the Nazis, who refused to
participate in any government that was not led by a Nazi Chancellor. Some of
the Nazi leadership, particularly Gregor Strasser who was the #2 man in the
party at the time, wanted to participate in a coalition government. But others,
knowing the party's support was waning, figured that their best hope to gain
power lay in undermining the democratic process. Nevertheless, the country
was governed for seven months by Chancellors who were not Nazis, even though
the Nazis were the largest Reichstag party. The failure of these men to
achieve a working coalition was due to the inability of their coalition
parties to work together.

Here's how William Shirer puts it in _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_:

   The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their
   failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength,
   in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 percent of
   the vote. But the 63 percent of the German people who expressed their
   opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine
   against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm
   them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out.

True, the German people supported Hitler after he became Chancellor. But
that doesn't change the fact that there was not overwhelming support for him
*before* he was in power. The German people were not crying out for Hitler to
take over, no matter how bad economic conditions were. The leftist parties
(Socialists/Communists) probably had more support in total than the Nazis.
Hitler used the fact that others were passively or actively willing to see
the government paralyzed as a means to taking it over.


	You have only shown that a vast majority ( if not all ) would
agree to this. However, there is nothing against a subjective majority.

	In any event, I must challenge your assertion. I know many
societies- heck, many US citizens- willing to trade freedom for "security".

---

        " Whatever promises that have been made can than be broken. "


Ditto,


This isn't true.  Many people are forced to use the "automobile system."
I certainly don't use it by choice.  If there were other ways of getting
around, I'd do it.

But I think that the Court system has been refined--over hundreds of
years in the US, Britain, and other countries.  We have tried to make
it as fair as possible.  Can it be made better (without removing the
death penalty)?  Besides, life imprisonment sounds like a fatal punishment
to me.


Which provided the basis for the denoument of the film which
introduced Errol Flynn to the world.  (Love interest was Olivia de
Havilland, who went on to appear with Flynn in 7 more films.)

[Exercise for non-old-movie buffs: what film was this?]
[Exercise for old movie buffs: what were the 7 more films?]


What you have is one of the LD players from a video game (Dragon's Lair,
Space Ace, etc). Call Pioneer Technicial Support 213-498-0300 (at least
that's the number I called them at) and ask for the LD-V1000 Interface
Guide. It shows how the parallel interface should be wired and the codes
for the commands (play, pause, reject, etc). The guide is mainly for hooking
the player to a computer, but with a little work, you could build a wired
controller.


George.

	It's called a democracy.  The majority rules.  sorry.
If ytou don't like it, I suggest you modify the constitution to include
a constitutional right to Dark Skies.   The theory of government
here is that the majority rules,  except in the nature of fundamental
civil rights.   If you really are annoyed,   get some legislation
to create a dark sky zone,  where in all light emissions are protected
in the zone.  Kind of like the national radio quiet zone.  Did you
know about that?  near teh Radio telescope  observatory in West virginia,
they have a 90?????? mile EMCON zone.  Theoretically they can prevent
you from running light AC motors, like air conditioners and Vacuums.
In practice, they use it mostly to  control  large radio users.


Any truth to the rumor of an AWD 3-series for '94?  I believe
this info was published in either Popular Science or AutoWeek
a couple of months ago.

  Also, a friend told me that BMW used to make an AWD 325 called
the 325ix.  I'd appreciate any info about this car too.  Thanks..

  Thanks.


The people on usenet are clearly a special bunch.  We live the net, which
is the future of our culture.  Usenetters have rapid electronic access to
information.  Society in general must depend on CNN.

I can only hope we can make this information accessable by the public before
the radical fringe, which _is_ the majority, destroys the fabric of
this country.  Freedom is never easily won.


Watch your language ASSHOLE!!!!


sandvik@newton.apple.com (Kent Sandvik) writes...

KS, I see you're wanting Malcolm's response. Allow me one last inter-
jection then please:

Distinguishing among the religious Jews, you've excepted the Messianic
for obvious reasons. Specifically, are you saying it's these religious
Jews, who trace their lineage back to Abraham by blood and orthodoxy,
rather than by faith, who won't agree?  Orthodox Jews?

As to the a/a (if I understand your direction), the issue remains
unproven I suspect, considering how atheists and agnostics so often
look to reason. Atheist, it is reasonable to conclude will not agree.
For agnostics, a poll seems in order. Who knows?  Myself, I'm not so
sure the atheists can be counted out.

For the orthodox, I wonder how many would follow Moses, or Abraham,
or David in accepting God's Word? Is the particular covenant to which
one adheres, more important than God promisimg? I reckon for many it
depends on the ongoing dialogue. Under these considerations, you might
understand why I think it's premature to assert who will and won't agree.


Pardon me for interrupting, but why doesn't anyone ever bring up other
possibilities besides more government, less government, or no government
and stop there? It seems to me that the problems with society go MUCH
deeper than government. Democracies seem to reflective of the majority
of society, both the good and the bad. If you take away the government,
you still have the structural flaws in society, except this time, with
no restraints. Yes? No?
	Why doesn't anybody ever discuss communal society, like a
kibbutz? I never studied it on depth, but from what I've heard, the kibbutz
in Isreal was very successful. It is also very close to what Aristotle
and Socrates believed was the best.
	Sorry to detract from the discussion.

But what good is change if there is no tracable improvement in the human
condition? Who would ever support the change if you tell them it won't
improve their lives? I know that there are, and will be, libertarians
who will jump in now and say that it WILL improve our lives. I can deal
with that. All I'm saying is that improving the human condition must
be the PRIMARY goal of any organization.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Who said anything about panicking?" snapped Authur.           Garrett Johnson
"This is still just culture shock. You wait till I've       Garrett@Ingres.com
settled into the situation and found my bearings.
THEN I'll start panicking!" - Douglas Adams


  Gosh, Gregg.  I'm pretty good a reading between the lines, but
  you've given me precious little to work with in this refutation.
  Could you maybe flesh it out just a bit?  Or did I miss the full
  grandeur of it's content by virtue of my blinding atheism?

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

Bob Beauchaine bobbe@vice.ICO.TEK.COM

They said that Queens could stay, they blew the Bronx away,
and sank Manhattan out at sea.


Gordon Banks quoted and added...

gb> In article <C50M5p.Eoz@acsu.buffalo.edu>
gb>
gb> >
gb> >  Christians have professed for more than 1660 years the Nicene
gb> >Creed, a statement of beliefs drawn from the truths of Scripture
gb> >that was officially accepted by a council of church bishops
gb> >and leaders at Nicea in 325 A.D. Christians still recite
gb> >this creed regularly in public worship.
gb> >
gb>
gb> So prior to 325 AD there were no Christians?  Or all of them really
gb> believed the Nicean creed even before it was formulated?  Do you
gb> really believe such an absurdity?  I'm afraid you do.

     No.
     I really don't. Honest.

     The Nicene Creed, as I mentioned above, is a brief statement of
     beliefs that are derived from Scripture. That this certain list
     did not exist earlier does not indicate that the beliefs summarized
     in in did not exist before the formula was derived.


: Clipper Chip is a response to the fact that there is no business
: or professional body in a position to establish a standard and
: provide chipsets to implement it for analog or digial transmission
: systems.
:
: RSA might be in position to do it, if they had active cooperation of
: a couple of manufacturers of cellular phones or desktop phones.
.......
: Is RSA independt of the gov enough to spearhead this?  I, for one,
: would *gladly* pay royalties via purchasing secure phones.

Hear hear! I completely agree that we need to work quickly to
establish alternatives to the government's Clinton Clipper. As Brad
Templeton and others have noted, once the Clipper becomes ensconced in
enough phones there will be enormous pressure to make it the *legal*
standard, and it will become the "market* standard as well. (There is
a lot of confusion in the proposal about whether the use of Clipper is
mandated, about whether non-escrow alternatives will be allowed, etc.)

(There are also unclear issues about how hard, or how illegal, it will
be to make "workalikes" which meet the standard but which generate
phony or untappable keys...I'm sure the next several weeks will see
these issues thrashed out in this and other groups.)

Meanwhile, I'd be interested to hear RSA Data Security's reaction.
Often criticized in this group for their licensing policies (the usual
complaints about MailSafe costing too much, at $125 or so, and the
general issue of software patents...), we may find that *allying*
ourselves with RSA is the best thing we can do. What's a mere
licensing fee when our liberty may be at stake? (If everyone who
wanted true security paid, say, $100 for a lifetime use of all of
RSA's patents--which expire in the period 1998-2002, or so--then RSA
would make tons of money and be happy, I'm sure. A small price to pay.
For those to whom $100 sounds like too much, I'm sure the actual terms
could be different, spread out over several years, whatever. To me,
it's a small price to pay.)

Strong crypto means strong privacy. Escrowing keys, sending copies of
keys to large databases, and splitting keys into two 40-bit pieces,
all done with secret and non-analyzable protocols and algorithms, is
*NOT* strong crypto!

Whatever some of us may think about the abstract principles of
patenting number theory applications, this minor issue pales in
comparison with the potential dangers of the Clipper proposal (note
that I said "potential"...we'll presumably learn more in the coming
months).

The RSA algorithms are at least public, have been analyzed and
attacked for years, and source code is available (to better ensure no
deliberate weakenesses or trapdoors).

I know of a number of groups putting together voice encryption systems
using off-the-shelf hardware (like Soundblaster boards for the PC) and
CELP-type software. The new generations of PCs, using fast 486s and
Pentiums are fast enough to do real-time voice encryption. Combined
with Diffie-Hellman key exchange, this should provide an alternative
to the Clipper system.

Of course, we don't really know if the Administration proposes to
outlaw competing systems. (It seems to me that their goal of tapping
terrorists, child pornographers, and Hilary bashers would be thwarted
if low-cost alternatives to Clipper proliferated. Not to defend child
pornographers or terrorists, but limiting basic freedoms to catch a
few criminals is not the American way of doing things. End of soapbox
mode.)

I suggest we in these groups set aside any differences we may have had
with RSA (and don't look at me....I have both MacPGP *and* a fully
legal copy of "MailSafe"!) and instead work with them as quickly as we can.

RSA?, Jim?, are you listening?

-Tim May

P.S. I reserve the right to retract these opinions if it should turn
out that RSA Data Security was involved in the Clipper proposal.


I don't know if this is the sort of thing you guys like
to discuss.  I guess it falls into the area of apologetics.

This is a question that seems to pop up now and again in
conversations with non-christians.  It usually appears in
the following sort of unqualified statement:
"Well you know that religion has caused more wars than
anything else"
It bothers me that I cannot seem to find a satisfactory
response to this. After all if our religion is all about
peace and love why have there been so many religious wars?
  Personally I am of the view that religion has often been
used as an excuse to instigate wars often to disguise
national ambitions but I would love to hear what anyone
else has to say about this subject.
  Thanks in advance
  Andrew J Fraser

(If we're thinking in terms of history, the Crusades,
Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia(?) come immediately to mind)

northern Ireland, Yugoslavia (?

--
=========================================================================


Do you recall which issue this was in? I posted a message related to this a
while back to provoke an argument so that I could get the straight dope on
this. This article would probably give me all the definitive answers that I
want.


	I disagree: every proposition needs a certain amount of evidence
and support, before one can believe it. There are a miriad of factors for
each individual. As we are all different, we quite obviously require
different levels of evidence.

	As one pointed out, one's history is important. While in FUSSR, one
may not believe a comrade who states that he owns five pairs of blue jeans.
One would need more evidence, than if one lived in the United States. The
only time such a statement here would raise an eyebrow in the US, is if the
individual always wear business suits, etc.

	The degree of the effect upon the world, and the strength of the
claim also determine the amount of evidence necessary. When determining the
level of evidence one needs, it is most certainly relevent what the
consequences of the proposition are.

	If the consequences of a proposition is irrelvent, please explain
why one would not accept: The electro-magnetic force of attraction between
two charged particles is inversely proportional to the cube of their
distance apart.

	Remember, if the consequences of the law are not relevent, then
we can not use experimental evidence as a disproof. If one of the
consequences of the law is an incongruency between the law and the state of
affairs, or an incongruency between this law and any other natural law,
they are irrelevent when theorizing about the "Truth" of the law.

	Given that any consequences of a proposition is irrelvent, including
the consequence of self-contradiction or contradiction with the state of
affiars, how are we ever able to  judge what is true or not; let alone find
"The Truth"?

	By the way, what is "Truth"? Please define before inserting it in
the conversation. Please explain what "Truth" or "TRUTH" is. I do think that
anything is ever known for certain. Even if there IS a "Truth", we could
never possibly know if it were. I find the concept to be meaningless.

--

       "Satan and the Angels do not have freewill.
        They do what god tells them to do. "