Text 40378, 136 rader
Skriven 2006-10-02 03:58:13 av FidoNews Robot (2:2/2.0)
Ärende: FidoNews 23:40 [02/06]: General Articles
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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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An open letter from Björn Forsström 2:203/614.61 to everyone under the
age of 15 and those of you who are older can stop read here since you
will never get it anyway.

When you grow up I hope that Fido has since long gone been put to
sleep because I wouldn't want you to read about how so called adults
in the year 2006 are behaving towards each other like I will mention
below but with the present situation I don't think you have to be too
much worried. Rabies is a lethal disease and it's spreading like a
wildfire in here.

It's free to call anyone you like for a thief without proving a thing.

It's free to call anyone you like for a liar, also without proving a
thing.

It's free to have the worst man ever lived (Adolf Hitler) as your
Hero. (I hope you are familiar whit the history, otherwise I can
personally recommend a visit at Dachau or Bergen-Belsen in Germany or
Stutthof in Poland).

It's free to talk shit behind everyone's back and the more patronizing
you is the better.

Misunderstand everything and everyone, deliberately or not doesn't
matter.

Do to others what you don't want them to do to you.

Show all the disrespect you can towards everyone that doesn't agree
with you.

Let someone else do the thinking for you, no matter if it makes sense
or not.

Pretend to be a peace-maker in a conflict until you have earned some
respect and then stab your opponent in the back.

The older you get the more childish you will be (sad but true).

When you leave the sandbox, be sure to bring some sand with you,
preferably full of dogs shit. It's much more fun to toss it then.

Set as many traps as you can. It' SO fun to watch people walk right
into them, thinking you was serious.

Blame everyone else for your own shortcomings.

Accuse everyone else for everything you don't like and then do exactly
the same yourself.

Have an agenda but never agree to anyone that you have one.

Don't ever listen to anyone else, you might actually learn something.

Claim to have a medical education and toss diagnoses around you as you
see fit without even having met the patient.

Disagree with everyone just because you can. It's really nice to stir
things up.

Don't ever help anyone, even if his clothes have caught fire.

Don't worry if you break existing rules, those who sees you as their
Hero will back you up whatever you have done.

When you run out of arguments you are entitled to sink as low as you
see fit to discredit your opponent.

I could go on for hours but I think that you kids understand what I'm
trying to say.

If you all follow some or all of those rules you will become a person
in FidoNet that's respected and the one that others will listen to
because they will look up to you as their Great Leader and they will
worship you for coming up with new abuses in every post.

And there is no copyright or anything attached to this, instead I urge
you all to make copies of this or better, make posters and put those
at every kindergarten, every school you know of so that the next
generation can learn from our mistakes and eventually make a better
world with respect for others and their opinions.


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                  The missing copyright character
                By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555

Lately there has been a bit of an uproar in the FidoNews echo about a
copyright notice. Which made me wonder why we have to make do with the
three letter string consisting of a letter 'c' encased in parenthesis
when we write articles for the Snooze and other 7 bit text only media.
The ASCII character set is the first widely accepted standard for
character encoding, but like its predecessors it lacks a copyright
character. It has provisions for the 26 letters of the alphabet -
upper and lower case -, ten digits, 32 control characters, a space and
32 special printable characters. Among these we find mathematical
operators, punctuation marks and the Dollar sign.

What is missing is a copyright character. As far I have been able to
tell the first character set to include a copyright character is
codepage 850.

Why? Did the designers of the ASCII character set (ca 1960) consider
it less important than the Dollar sign? Did the mid seventy designers
of the original extended IBM PC character set - now generally known as
codepage 437 - think a copyright character was not important enough to
include?

One might be tempted to believe so. I forward a more technical
explanation. When the ASCII character set was designed, we also saw
the advent of dot matrix based displays. The first generation of these
displays had a 5x7 matrix. And there is no way that you can cram a
recognisable copyright character in a 5x7 matrix. The best you can do
with a 5 dots wide matrix is to resolve four changes in intensity on a
horizontal cross section. That will accommodate a Dollar sign if one
compromises by having it only one vertical bar instead of the
classical two that one usually sees in print, but a copyright sign
requires at least six intensity changes. And so the copyright sign did
not emerge until the next generation of dot matrix displays came in
wide spread use: the 7x9.

(C) 2006, Michiel van der Vlist, All rights reserved. Permission to
distribute via the FidoNews file echo and the Fidonews echomail
conference.


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