Mister P-Mosh

I do think that the natural way is the best means of prevention. I don't really believe in all the "shark eyeball, dandylion and poke berry" pills as a cure to cancer, the common cold, and depression. However, there is no question that getting enough vitamins and certain chemicals will help you be healthier.

I use the Firebird version of Mozilla. It's the best in my opinion because it's just the browser, not the email client/IRC client/etc all combined.

Way back in the early 80's my parents and I lived there until about 85 or so I think.

I've been pricing entertainment systems and it looks like it's going to be difficult to stay under $10,000 to get what I want. I do like the TV you got though, but it's still too thick for me, considering the place I'm about to move in to. I need a thin screen of some sort that can be mounted on a wall. Anyway, congratulations and I hope you enjoy it. Something else I would look into if I were you would be a wireless mic and Dragon Natural Speaking. I've used that on my PC and can successfully surf control my computer fairly well (browsing the internet is the most difficult, but it works ok) by voice. It could be like Star Trek if you say something like, "Open www.gscafe.com" and your computer does it.

From what I've read, the movie doesn't end on the somber note that the book does, which is a huge shame because that sort of defeats the point. It's Hollywood though, and they have to give the moron majority at the theatres a happy ending.

Oh great, all we need is a bunch of non-religious "cult-rosexuals" running around.

Well, I've been getting too much spam lately, so I'm going to drop my cable modem ISP when I move, and I've already moved my personal email to my own server, which uses a few spam filtering programs. I have SpamAssasin, as well as some filters I set up myself, and I'm thinking of implementing a whitelist so that only people send me email that I allow to send it to me. That way, only my friends and family can send me email directly, plus any random people that visit my site can use the forms I set up to send me email rather than exposing an email address.

Also, for those that may be interested in anti-bot scripts and such, I've written some in PHP that work well. If you have root on your own server you can even block them with whatever firewall you run on the server (it's trivial to update the /etc/hosts.deny file) or set up your .htaccess file (if you're using mod_rewrite with apache) to block bad people. I've taken the protection of my visitors pretty seriously, as well as come up with ways to foil those bots that look for email addresses to spam. The latest version of my script looks for the ISP of the spambot (which is blocked in robots.txt) and then sets up a honeypot that creates a list of 1000 fake email addresses that will go back to the ISP they are using, so they end up harassing their own ISP. At the same time, I block them from visiting my site ever again, and then redirect them to a vulgar site.

aI am a big fan of vi. I don't know what you all think is wrong with it^ESC:wq

Heh, that makes me very happy. I would have normally said a more vulgar one though, so it's good that I was stuck using words like "crap."

Speaking of which, you're using the communist software Linux and Apache, comrade. :P--> As far as web hosts go, if you were to want to have a group of people go in together and set up a web hosting business, I would suggest John Companies. http://www.johncompanies.com/ They're really good and I know a lot of people that use them. They're expensive, but they are specifically for high traffic sites and web hosting businesses. They also run FreeBSD, which comes from the same great organization as LSD.

If you've not watched "The Animatrix" I would suggest doing so. Although it's mostly a tangent (except the flight of the Osirus which was a teaser out in theaters before the 2nd Matrix) there were a few explanations, such as the machine city. There were two parts that discussed the rise of the machines. Basically, humans had built robots and machines, and eventually a machine became intelligent enough that it killed a human (or maybe two, I forgot) in self-defense because they were going to shut it off. That was an event that started a robot holocaust, and the machines that survived escaped to the middle east and created a machine city. They built up their own society and advanced much further than when they were under the control of humans, and eventually went to mankind to try to make peace. This failed, and eventually the war started and the machines won. Mankind had set off bombs in the sky in order to kill the solar power that the robots used, which is what lead to the machines needing to use humans as a power source, as well as to deal with the problem of humans. It's been a while since I've watched it, so I'd suggest you watch it for yourself and see what's there.

It was unnecessary in that the Mexican military was not wanting to kill the people there. The history as I understand it is this: In the 1820's, Mexico was offering some of it's land (in Texas) for settlers, and allowed Americans to move in as well as long as they obeyed the laws and such. A large portion of these Americans that moved there didn't want to obey the Mexican laws, particularly that of slavery. Mexico had freed their slaves (which were primarily native american) and many of the Americans that moved from the U.S. to Mexico refused to do so because they wanted to grow cotton while using the slaves. They also refused to put the Mexicans on the same level as them, since the majority of them were dark skinned people. In the 1830's, there were quite a few American expatriots, and Stephen Austin went to the Mexican president to ask Texas to seperate from Mexico. Mexico had shrugged off previous attempts by the U.S. to purchase Texas, and this was just another in a long line of such things. This angered Santa Anna, and he jailed Stephen Austin, then announced a unified constitution for Mexico (including Texas.) After this, some of the American Texans seceeded and Santa Anna took his troops up to San Antonio and fought the Texans. Of course, those at the Alamo were not a large force, and Santa Anna was going to go past them and take on Sam Houston. However, the people in the Alamo felt it necessary to fight and took on Santa Anna's army. I'm sure you know what happened after that, with the burning of the bodies, as well as the battle of San Jacinto, the refusal of the U.S. to add Texas as a state because it could cause further tensions with Mexico (plus the slavery issue) and other stuff. The thing is, if the Americans that moved to Texas had simply freed their slaves and respected the people of the nation they immigrated to, none of that would have happened. From what I have read, Santa Anna was a bastard, but he's not the one that started the fight either. I could compare the Alamo to a bunch of communists from the U.S.S.R. being invited to live in Alaska, and then eventually they take over and try to force the state of Alaska into an independent communist state (as well as trying to become a part of the U.S.S.R.) The U.S. military would be sent up there if the police were unsuccessful or turned, and there would be a lot of fighting to keep Alaska as an American state that follows American laws. The war was an escalation of problems that had been going on for years before it happened. The men who fought at the Alamo were brave, but they were also wrong because they were fighting against human rights, and they were fighting to steal land from another nation.

He was a sentient computer program, which designed the Matrix (although I think only in part, because the Oracle had a big part in it too. I forgot what was mentioned at the end of the 2nd movie.)

Personally I prefer the death scenes on Cowboy Bebop. The end of the last episode, Spike's death speech is simply pointing his finger at all of the mafia guys like it's a gun and saying, "bang" before he collapses. I don't know if you noticed, but Smith had also taken on characteristics of the Oracle in the last scene. It confused him but he had "prophesy" of some sort relating to what would happen that was very much like the Oracle and confused him when he said it. Also, I think what happened in the end was hinted at. Neo and Smith were like the yin and yang of each other, so when Smith tried to absorb Neo, Neo in turn absorbed the Smith that was in him and somehow caused a chain reaction destroying both.

Ah, I understand now. That makes better sense and makes it different. I do still wonder about the details of how it would work, but that's just the overly curious nature I have kicking in.

I was participating in NaNoWriMo, but I will be in transit to a new job this weekend and other things going on mean that I had to drop out for now. As far as what the architect said, I'll have to ask my wife because that's what I thought he said. The thing is, either everyone is free, or people are still slaves. I don't see how the issue could have really been resolved otherwise. As far as alien vs. predator goes, I know it would be a dumb movie, but I'd still really like to see it. I like B movies when I expect them to be so.

Although I don't remember it happening to me, there were some psycho parents with wooden spoons that would spank anyone's kids at any time and leave bruises on them. I'm not against spanking when it's really necessary, but some of these people were very abusive and would spank kids for so much as having their shoe fall off in a fellowship. There were some TWI parents who were the most vicious people towards their kids that I've ever seen. As far as verbal abuse goes, I'd think that anyone in TWI long enough would put up with it at some point. I had a HFC threaten to shoot me at one point if I dated a girl outside of TWI (with this guy, it was hard to tell if he was joking or not.)

Also, another good article that discusses many of the flaws in the film can be found on CBS.

OK Zixar, I'll tell you the biggest problem I have with what happened at the end. These are spoilers, so if someone else doesn't want to know them then skip the area that I am putting in quotes. Anyway, I think the reason I didn't like how this is, and thought it felt contrived, is because they had to explain everything. In The Matrix, there was a lot of stuff that didn't have answers that was just cool and you didn't care about most of the stuff. Also, I think the action in this latest movie wasn't all that great when compared to the first two. This movie was the end, but they didn't have a big cool fight scene like the other Matrix films.

I went there a few months ago myself. I don't know if you found it, but I accidentally stumbled upon a church that has the remains of Davie Crocket, Jim Bowie, and that other guy I never remember the name of. I didn't find it in any of the tourist stuff, but it was really near the old spanish governor's palace. If there's some way to upload an image here rather than simply linking back to it on my site, I'll show you what it looked like. The Alamo is an interesting place, but I find it amusing that very few realize that it was an unnecessary battle.

Heh...well, I have to confess that it wasn't exactly that bad, but there were quite a few plot holes that don't fit in with the first one at all. One thing I have to mention though, is that they handled changing the actress for the Oracle very well. I would say more but I don't know of a good way to hide spoilers, because the end was extremely dissapointing and made no sense. For those that have seen the movie and wonder what I am talking about, consider what happened at the end, and also consider the reason that people were trapped by the machines in the first place. The resolution made absolutely no sense. Also, I have to mention the special effects, because while they were good, the big Zion fight scene was a little too drab. I understand though, there's only so much you can do when you have grey metal robots fighting people in grey metal robot suits in a grey metal environment. Other than the occasional pictures of bullets, you could watch that scene in black and white and lose nothing. I'll let others watch the movie and comment here before I mention what I really think, which requires spoilers.

I have a feeling that this movie is going to be horribly innacurate historically. The previews show these guys as being ordinary Americans "defending their homes" or some other nonsense, when they actually were immigrants to Mexico that refused to give up their slaves (slavery was abolished in the U.S. and in Mexico by that time), so they rebelled against the Mexican government and tried to seceed. I have a feeling this movie is just going to be a "poor us for not being allowed to screw over brown people" movie. I'm not a fan of Tom Cruise, but I think it should be a decent movie as well. I hope he's the "Mission Impossible" Tom Cruise rather than the "Eyes Wide Shut" Tom Cruise. It should be interesting. I have a feeling that this movie will be great in the theatres, but not so good when it comes out on rental. For some reason these types of films get boring when they're not on a large screen. This is the one movie I'm looking forward to seeing, the others I will just go to see if I am dragged there by my wife.

I don't want to give away any secrets, but this is the "Phantom Menace" of Matrix films. The Matrix Reloaded was bad because of all of it's psychology 101 crap, but I expected it to pay off in the third of the series. It doesn't, and the movie is really stupid. The stuff you "discover" at the end of the second Matrix film is pretty much forgotten in the third, and doesn't serve any purpose. The ending is a huge let down that doesn't resolve anything, even though some main characters die for pretty much nothing. This movie is a craptacular crapfest of crappy crap. I know many people are going to see it anyway, so just lower your expectations to somewhere just below Howard the Duck and Hudson Hawk. The Wachowski brothers should never make a another movie, after how bad they've botched up a simple scifi plot like The Matrix.

Realplayer is utter dange too, so you may want him to update Windows Media Player and be done with it.