McGroarty

Does anyone know if the government has a working definition of "terrorist?" I'm not so upset by the law as I am by confusion over what the government thinks a terrorist is.

What Gates code have you seen? So far as what he did with MS, he only had designing role in BASIC with Paul Allen doing the majority of the work and a third party doing the rest. Past that, there was always a team of people working with Bill Gates as a manager, unless I've missed something. I know he did some programming in college, but I don't know of any of those projects being made public.

I run a busy talker elsewhere. While we try to keep everything in the open, when it comes to IP banning or deciding whether two troublemakers are actually the same user, some of these discussions are better handled in private. Back when we discussed these things in the open, the people causing trouble loved the extra attention it bought them and often linked to these discussions from elsewhere. There's also merit to deciding rules publicly but discussing their application in private. A moderator should be able to ask "Would it be appropriate to take this action?" without a dozen people chiming in who don't know the complete history behind a problem user. Here though, on the talker I require the staff to keep it strictly professional - pretend everybody's listening. I ask that nobody use a private administration forum for joking and venting so there's no risk of personal biases spreading among the staff.

Actually, Apple and MS both lifted the idea from Xerox. Xerox was responsible for the mouse, windowing, ethernet, and many other technologies. They never capitalized on these early on, as they didn't believe there would be a significant market. I think people admire Bill Gates for many reasons, although you're correct that he isn't much of a programmer. That's also a bit of legend. But he has been able to find and direct good programmers, enabling them to create products that have changed the world. For a long time now, he's directed his company in offering the best product available at the most competitive price. Better still, when he's had competition he's taken them head on. Unlike too many other tech companies, MS beats competitors in the marketplace rather than asking for government protectionism or playing expensive court games. What's not to like? Regarding the rest of your post, I think you need to finish reading. Nobody here would be upset by the idea of making money hand over fist. We love producers and the creation of wealth.

That's great news! I'm glad to find the missing book in your archive. I had created a mirror of the pieces I recovered at www.certaintyplus.com - I now have that forwarding directly to your page.

I took to drinking a large amount of water before every cigarette, without exception, whether I wanted it or not. My theory at the time was that I might be getting the nicotine out of my system more quickly by doing this. I suspect my success had more to do with interrupting what used to be a quick and easy habit. Either way, this was what worked after a few failed cold turkey attempts. My urges subsided until I was only smoking a few each day, and by that point the things start to taste pretty bad again; I'd take just a couple puffs and end up not wanting the rest of the cigarette.

I'm sorry to hear this. So far, I have found him to be a very clear writer. I am enjoying what I've found of his writings and would like to have seen more from him. I spent some time scraping his site from archive.org and found most of the pieces I was missing in Google's cache. Apparently his site was still active earlier this year, and so Google hasn't yet purged its copies. What I recovered was the full content for 5 of his 6 online books and all of the essays he had on the site. I only have fragments of Freedom in Mind, the sixth book. If anyone knows how to find the text for this, I would appreciate hearing from you. What I have, I've mirrored at: http://www.mcgroarty.net/js/overview.htm

James Sedgwick is one of the posters in the OSG mailing list archives. In his 2002 posts, he's got a link to his website in the sig, but the site is no longer there: http://home1.gte.net/cpq1szzy/ Archive.org has some of the site archived. The Certainty Site tour is a concise and very accessible review of Objectivist epistemology, and archive.org has it mirrored in full. Unfortunately, while the rest of the site looks promising, much of it isn't in the archives. In particular, I'd like to be able to reach the missing book content. Googling for some of the phrases on the archived pages isn't turning up a copy of the site elsewhere. Does anyone know of a new location, or a way to contact Mr. Sedgwick?

A few letters letting the movie owners know about Miss Rand's connection to the work and highlighting her coming centenniel could move them to publish. It's possible they don't know of the opportunity ahead.

I'm very happy with the quality of the posts so far. I recognize Betsy Speicher and Burgess Laughlin from the boards here, and I'm impressed by many of the new names as well. The list is like a less formal version of Harry Binswanger's list. I haven't seen the moderator step in to steer discussion, which is nice in that some conversations have evolved into unrelated but interesting explorations, but unfortunate in that I see a lot of short essays and proposed ideas that go without response.

The first outage with the SQL error pages came when GC's old host changed something about the software they were running and neglected to tell him what was going on. I'm not clear on what happened there, but that's what precipitated the move. The blank pages and constant log-in problems on the new site were a result of a difference between the old site's script engine and that of the new site. The forum code relies on a trick that allows it to generate parts of the page out of order and rearrange them before sending. Neither of us had seen this before so it took some time to diagnose. The long outage yesterday morning came when GC brought the non-forum parts of the site online. We had both expected the forum to be the most resource hungry part of the site, but it turned out to be very minor compared to the rest. It took some time for us to isolate a part of the site that was holding onto all available server connections whenever a lot of requests were made of specific pages. The email alerts were down owing to a typo when activating some of the non-forum domains. This caused the mail server to silently fail. Apart from that, brief outages have come from taking the server down to bring non-forum parts of the site online, to move some parts of the site between servers, and to implement changes where performance bottlenecks were found.

The material is protected by copyright, so I can't post it here. But so far some of the more enjoyable posts covered: - Tactics for conversation when you're disagreeing with a party who's stubbornly evading reason; intentionally or due to sloppy thinking. One fun example was given where Miss Rand made a radio appearance and a caller reacted irrationally to one or more of her statements. She offered to clarify and the caller ranted anew. She patiently waited for him to finish, repeated the offer verbatim, waited through another rant, offered, waited, again offered verbatim, and in the end the caller could only listen to reason or hang up. - The difference between generalization and abstraction (Burgess sighting!) - The history of Israeli/Pakistani relations and arab interference - Disintegrators versus Misintegrators in the '04 election The archives go back to early 2002, about 1500 posts in all. I wrote a script to scrape them from the Yahoo group and was going to print a booklet, but it comes out to about 400 pages of very small print, so I've imported them into a GMail folder instead.

Because I know I'd be wondering what's going on -- Objectivism Online moved from a powerful shared server to a much smaller system that's dedicated to Objectivism Online exclusively. The upsides are that there is more bandwidth and space available now, that GC has complete control of the server and can install whatever tools he likes, and that it's a cheap arrangement. The big downside has been the performance of the smaller server when there are bursts of heavy traffic. On a high-end shared server supporting hundreds of sites, sites can take turns gobbling spare resources when each has a burst of traffic. The small server has a lower fixed performance ceiling; when the site gets busy, there's no shared resource pool from which to borrow and everything's drawn to a halt. This means that we've had to go through a tuning phase. The process is that we observe what eats the most resources when the system isn't keeping up, make changes to lower the cost of those operations, then return to observing again. It's an iterative process. You don't see all the challenges up front and sometimes you're hit by a surprise like yesterday's crushing load when the wiki and blogs were brought over; we'd only worried that the forum would be a resource hog. But it's also a process where the surprises get progressively smaller.

I'm guessing the maintainer's been very busy. My memebership was approved yesterday. Even if the list traffic is low at present, the archives are well worth the price of admission.

I don't have access to the forum administration tools. GC, can you verify? Edit: Checked with GC on AIM. She has a photo configured on her profile page, but if she had an avatar for comments she must have removed it.

I don't believe Burgess has a picture configured. Dagny seems to have a picture uploaded for the profile page, but no avatar picture.

Have you tried in the last minute or two? I use Mozilla, which is FireFox's twin. It works for me now.

I let GC know about that one via AIM. He knew the answer and fixed it straight away. I like dealing with people who know their stuff.

Skype offers outbound VoIP to land lines. They will be offering inbound access early next year. Voice quality is good, however in my tests I found it adds about a quarter of a second delay, as compared to a land line. I have ordered an adapter that will let me plug my regular phones into my computer and use VoIP to dial out as though it were a regular phone. Apart from not accepting incoming calls until next year, it should be just like a regular phone. The adapter works as a standard USB audio device with an extended interface to let the computer make the phone ring. The hack value is excellent -- it should be possible to turn my cordless phone into a remote control when I'm not making calls, or even to make the home phones ring briefly for important email.

Even if so, I'd love to see what you had to own up to in order to get 100% Kant.

I believe I have found the problem. Greedy Capitalist is off AIM, so I've taken the liberty of making a change myself. Please revisit the site, log in one last time, and let me know if the problem persists or if anything looks newly broken.

Last month, I sent payment and the requested information to sign up for the OSG mailing list, having seen it mentioned positively in the past. To date, I haven't received any list messages or confirmation. A couple follow-up requests to Mr. Stubblefield have gone unanswered. Is the list still alive? Does anyone know how to contact Mr. Stubblefield, apart from his exit109 address?

Have you thought about using blogging software? Packages like MovableType and WordPress are easy to customize if you have a basic knowledge of html, and you can find free templates that arrange the presentation in any number of ways. There's also TypePad, which provides hosting and support for a derivative of MovableType. And then there's Blogger, which is free, but lacks some of TypePad's features and support.

I wonder if it's possible that some were affected by Wesley Mouch and Lillian Rearden. If somebody is already very far gone, they might believe they've figured out these characters' mistakes; these people might actually think they know how the characters could have won.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through State of Fear. I won't lay out any spoilers, but the book can be very difficult at times. The main character in the book - the one who the reader is most often following, the one who's developing conflicting love interests, the one who is going through self-discoveries - is a bumbling idiot. He whines and pleads with the same voice you want to give to Jim Taggart, is generally impotent when things go wrong, and seems to survive by stumbling along and getting lucky a lot. What's really strange is that the book does have a hero, however he's a side character that Crichton drags out whenever it's time to get the story moving again. He's powerful and intelligent, periodically lectures the reader and the main character about the difference between consensus and reality, and is a more believable character to boot. However, every time this side character gets things moving again, he steps off the page and leaves the story to slow down again. What's stranger still, is that Crichton seems to think the bumbling fellow is the better of the two. I haven't finished yet, but the most interesting female in the book expresses some passing fancy for the side hero, then seems to be growing more attached to the main character. Unless something swift happens in the last chapters, it's going to be like reading a version of The Fountainhead where Keating gets the girl.