MARY SUE (n.): 1. A variety of story, first identified in the fan fiction community, but quickly recognized as occurring elsewhere, in which normal story values are grossly subordinated to inadequately transformed personal wish-fulfillment fantasies, often involving heroic or romantic interactions with the cast of characters of some popular entertainment. 2. A distinctive type of character appearing in these stories who represents an idealized version of the author. 3. A cluster of tendencies and characteristics commonly found in Mary Sue-type stories. 4. A body of literary theory, originally generated by the fanfic community, which has since spread to other fields (f.i., professional SF publishing) because it’s so darn useful. The act of committing Mary Sue-ism is sometimes referred to as “self-insertion.”

MOOREWATCH is dedicated to unearthing the truth behind the doublespeak and falsehood that spews from the mouth (and keyboard) of Michael Moore on a regular basis.

It's somewhat depressing the impact that blogging has had on the java world. Allowing the masses to express themselves freely and loudly has done terrible things to the signal to noise ratio of java articles.

Here are some of the economic promises on which Zapatero's Socialist Workers Party campaigned: lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 30 percent, cutting income taxes, and reducing the value-added tax. Oh, and they're going to balance the budget and control inflation. The man expected to be the Socialist finance minister, Miguel Sebastian, is a U.S.-educated economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He's promising to put his faith in the Invisible Hand. "There will be a strict separation between politics and business," he told the Financial Times. "We will be a market-friendly government." These are socialists?

Here are some ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools.

Oh yeah, baby!
Don't you know you're mine?
Just sit back, relax,
let all the noise pour in,
and let all your brains pour out!

There's a reason why you can still see a motion picture a century after they hit the scene, but Vaudeville shows are extinct. There's a reason why people still go to operas while live gladiator contests and public witch burnings are both rare and poorly-attended. In the entertainment world there are wives and then there are mistresses, long-term relationships and drunken one-night stands.

Our culture is married to the cinema. Gaming is a series of flings with continually younger, prettier partners.

American Patriots,
How can we serve you better?

Win a laptop computer?
Win a trip to Florida?
Win a NEW LEXUS?
We give you more of what you want.

American Patriots,
How can we serve you better?
Want free movies?
Want to date a supermodel?
Want a bigger penis and stronger erections?
You will love it!

American Patriots,
How can we serve you better?
We have decided to increase your credit,
Increase your penis size, now
Give you free money.

Just Vote Bush. Your wife will never know.

Blame India Watch is concerned with the increasing anti-Indian/anti-India sentiment among tech workers, as well as media coverage that focuses disproportionately on Indian workers or propigates anti-India(n) sentiment.

Bridging the worlds of NNTP clients and RSS feeds, nntp//rss is an application that will enable you to use your existing favorite NNTP newsreader to read your information channels.

We learn again and again that it's not possible to prevent people from doing something bad with your programming system no matter how safe you attempt to make it. And there's a boundary beyond which all the "directing" guidance will fail -- a programmer must have a certain level of understanding and be able to buy into a particular language, environment, framework, etc., up to a certain level in order to use those tools properly. Less than that, and they need training, not type-checking.

• say bye-bye to browsers like Opera and Safari that really are just web browsers, not XML engines like Mozilla
• Google will continue insert their HTML ads into the RSS feed, which will most likely make the XML invalid.
• Do I really have time to be messing with this?

There were many examples of animals all around. Just tell me your answer, even if it sucks. We're going to regret this, my friend said. Don't do that, the cat pointed out.

It was cold and sweet. Love, and hate, are powerful emotions. But this was a long road, and should I walk down it, I might never come back. I'd seen many of the same things I've seen before.

But under the circumstances, I'd do it again. Suddenly, she wasn't there. (I'd seen something really weird. :) This was a place without the internet, without email, without the rush of business meetings and untapped desires.

That could well be the answer. And for ten minutes, he was a hero. We're going to regret this, my friend said. (I'd seen something really weird. :) I can never describe the walk back to my truck.
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When I say youth culture, I do not mean merely that the young today are transcendent, the group most admired among the various age groups in American society, but that youth is no longer viewed as a transitory state, through which one passes on the way from childhood to adulthood, but an aspiration, a vaunted condition in which, if one can only arrange it, to settle in perpetuity.

The fundamental horror of this anti-pattern is that it's so contrary to the basic idea of object-oriented design; which is to combine data and process together. The anemic domain model is really just a procedural style design, exactly the kind of thing that object bigots like me (and Eric) have been fighting since our early days in Smalltalk. What's worse, many people think that anemic objects are real objects, and thus completely miss the point of what object-oriented design is all about.

Be sure and check with WASAW before making your next snack investment. Our reports are easy to print out and read, and hopefully a bit entertaining, too. If all goes well, you'll learn from our mistakes and reward yourself with our triumphs... all in the name of snacks.

Heck, I'd even go see Lilith Faer for a free HOHO.

"Considered harmful" essays are most harmful to their own causes. The publication of a "considered harmful" essay has a strong tendency to alienate neutral parties, thus weakening support for the point of view the essay puts forth. A sufficiently dogmatic "considered harmful" essay can end a debate in favor of the viewpoint the essay considers harmful.

The idea of escaping markup goes against the fundamental grain of XML. If this hack spreads to other vocabularies, we'll very quickly find ourselves mired in the same bugward-compatible tag soup from which we have struggled so hard to escape.

This document elaborates on my ideas about XSLT in response to Kevin Davis’s experiments with Movable Type at Alazanto. (It also gave me a chance to play around with RDF and metadata that nobody will ever see.)

Bill Watterson quit producing the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” at the height of it’s popularity. He was somewhat of a recluse when it came publicity and mass marketing. As a result, every Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt that you’ve ever seen has been a bootleg. The characters of Calvin and Hobbes have been co-opted by by popular culture to a degree that surpasses any other phenomenon, with the possible exception of the smiley face. Only time will tell if Watterson’s characters have as long of a shelf life as the smiley face. Calvin and Hobbes have been transformed from wholesome, Dennis-the-Menace type characters (with a better imagination) to frat boys drinking beer, smoking pot and most recently, peeing on every known auto manufacturer logo.

perl -MHTML::Entities -p -e "encode_entities($_); s/ / /g; s/\\/\/g"

• This relies on outside HTML or CSS to set the font to something suitablly monospace.
• Hard spaces are used instead of relying on <pre>. In order to use <pre> you would have to turn off Blogger's normal newline-to-<br> conversion, and I don't want to turn it off just so I can occasionally post ASCII art.
• Backslashes are escaped because of the strange way Blogger seems to deal with lines that end with backslashes; it thinks they are continuation characters like in a C macro or something.

audacity.org is a research company for construction industry professionals questioning the assumptions and limitations of British development. Today that means challenging the platitudes of sustainability before they are established in debilitating codes of practice, or as new liabilities actionable in courts of law. The morality of sustainable development suggests a professional duty of care to the environment, which may lead to unfortunate legal innovation and further inertia in the construction industry. This will encourage caution rather than bold experimentation, and is clearly restraining development.

I recently hit a brick wall when attempting to repair my Windows XP installation. I couldn't install the drivers for my video card - a VisionTek Xtasy 9100 128Mb. When I visited the Device Manager, the usual "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" that you would expect to see was not present, and when going in through the display properties, a "vgasave" service was running in it's place, which could not be removed or stopped. Strange. How was I to get the standard VGA controller back in there so I could install the Catalyst drivers? To clarify, said drivers (and quite a few others) require the video card to be listed and identified as a standard VGA graphics adapter to install from scratch.