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They do after all emit co2. I wonder if you can smell them?

As long as they don't emit dihydrogen monoxide, I won't worry about it too much.

If you made it through the first season, you generally got hooked in the second if you weren't already. I was hooked in spite of the bad acting because prior to that I had been a star trek (TNG - I loved TOS too but let's put it aside for now) fan and if you really examine it with a critical eye, the acting in that show might have started out slightly better (by a RCH or so) but it really took some time before those characters felt natural to me. Eventually I stopped watching TNG religiously even though the rest of my household at the time always watched it, but I stuck with B5 for quite a while until sometime around season 4 at which point for some reason it became difficult for me to watch for some reason, time slot or something.

http://www.zippynet.com/pages/bandhmo.htm
I believe this is the original.

Bzzt. The original site is:
http://www.circus.com/~no_dhmo/index.html

The joke was originally come up with by two UC Santa Cruz students, Eric Lechner and Lars Norpchen, in the spring of 1988, while they were residents at the Santa Cruz Geek House The House.

The Circus page links to the organization's leadership, who were many of the various people who helped elaborate on it (about half of it is original to Eric and Lars prior to anyone else contributing).

The joke is now roughly old enough to get a drivers license in California.

One of the problems is that this has circulated so widely without attribution that people tend to believe that it has no copyright or attributable origin. But that's not true; Eric and Lars came up with the idea. They're the ones that sat up on campus at UC Santa Cruz handing out fliers with the info on it, to see how people reacted.

-george william herbert
Treasurer, Coalition to Ban DHMO

http://www.zippynet.com/pages/bandhmo.htm
I believe this is the original.

Bzzt. The original site is:
http://www.circus.com/~no_dhmo/index.html

The joke was originally come up with by two UC Santa Cruz students, Eric Lechner and Lars Norpchen, in the spring of 1988, while they were residents at the Santa Cruz Geek House The House.

The Circus page links to the organization's leadership, who were many of the various people who helped elaborate on it (about half of it is original to Eric and Lars prior to anyone else contributing).

The joke is now roughly old enough to get a drivers license in California.

One of the problems is that this has circulated so widely without attribution that people tend to believe that it has no copyright or attributable origin. But that's not true; Eric and Lars came up with the idea. They're the ones that sat up on campus at UC Santa Cruz handing out fliers with the info on it, to see how people reacted.

-george william herbert
Treasurer, Coalition to Ban DHMO

Perhaps you've heard of it: a colorless, odorless liquid; a powerful coolant and solvent; an easily- synthesized compound which is used by industry, the military, commercial operations, and even private individuals.

Yes, we are talking about hydrogen hydroxide, also known as dihydrogen monoxide, and we are here to tell you that what you've heard about DHMO is probably not the whole truth. There are forces out there, such as the Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide, who would seek to legislate its use and availability, placing heavy limitations on it-- and eventually, eradicating it entirely.

In the interest of fairness, we invite you to see their argument, and then we urge you to return here, to learn the truth. Their subversive agenda must not be allowed to prevail.

Hydrogen hydroxide is beneficial!

Support the use and distribution of hydrogen hydroxide in your neighborhood, city, state, and country!

http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/

The Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide has been around a long time. There's even a song about it to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic (aka John Brown's Body).

The DHMO song can also be found at the author's page here, but Google is probably more resistant to the Slashdot effect.

Check out this vintage (last modified aug 15 1997) webpage. AFAIK that page is the first web-based anti-dhmo unit you'll find (waybck archives might say ~no_dhmo, IIRC we went from some variant of Unix that allowed underscores in usernames, to one which didn't.) I haven't lived at the circus in some time though :)

Do you know what's the biggest cause of cancer in humans due to chemicals? Salt.

You forgot to mention the most dangerous chemical of all, dihydro monoxide. Why worry about mercury, when you have all that H2O around ...

No, the biggest environmental threat to humans isn't either radiation or chemicals, it's ignorance, stupidity, and paranoia.

It is a good thing then that we have Bush in the White House, to fight for more arsenic and lead in the water and more mercury in the air. These stupid environmental laws are just in the way when fighting against ignorance and stupidity.

The whole world is eating sodium chloride (NaCl or table salt), its made of sodium which reacts violently with water and explodes and chlorine which is a deadly gas...

Sodium chloride's nothing, compared to the hazards posed by dihydrogen monoxide. :-)

Dihydrogen Monoxide: It really is the invisible killer.

Caution is advised whenever you must make contact with any floor. The recomended uses of a floor now include laying and sitting. The safety of crawling on a floor is being studied at this time.

In other news the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division is recommending that the government Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide.

You saved me from a terrible mistake! I was about to donate my millions to the EFF, but now I see this money MUST go the Coalition to Ban DHMO for sake of my children's futures. Please join me and send whatever you can spare to The Coalition.

every piece of anything chemically processed

You mean like every object you can buy? Last time I checked, everything was a chemical. Better not wash those Oranges off, after all, water is a chemical!!

Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!

Man, you think wood and concrete are bad?

Look at this stuff! DHMO is so dangerous, hell, it can kill a man in mere minutes!

Did you know the majority of people want DHMO banned? The conspiracy of the companies selling this stuff is so obvious it's not even funny!

This substance is so deadly it kills without warning. Strangely enough, there are wacko groups who would support the continued use of DHMO!

Here's some more quality information on DHMO, please read it before you kill yourself with this horrible substance. Just look at the list of people addicted to this substance: The KKK, Hitler, Pedophiles, and Charles Manson. The substance clearly changes one's mood for the worse -- just look at the groups it is linked to.

Please sign the petition to ban this horrible substance now before we all die from it.

Thank you.

>I must admit that being from Norway, Europe
>We're currently strugling with The Sellafield Nuclear plant in England, as they dump their waste directly out in the sea, killing our coastline.

Uhhhh... you do realise that England isn't part of Norway, right? That they aren't even connected in the most remote manner? And that the majority of the radiation leakage ocurred when the plant was called Windscale, eh?

And you would suggest Americans are stupid...

http://www.honeybeerobotics.com/sample.htm

That domain name sure is easy to misinterpret... What's honeybeer anyway?

Mead, perhaps?

More information here.

Dihydrogen monoxide:

* is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
* contributes to the "greenhouse effect."
* may cause severe burns.
* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/

[From the link above:]
Dihydrogen monoxide:

* is also known as hydroxl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
* contributes to the "greenhouse effect."
* may cause severe burns.
* contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
* accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
* may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

See also:

http://www.dhmo.org/

I am not a chemist either, but I think it was dihydrogen monoxide.

Okay, we all hate ads. Animated banner ads are a shameless attempt to burn a little ad-shaped hole in your brain, dumping their talentless, artless ad copy right down your optic nerve and into your delicate brain. But let's face it, a lot of websites which could not ordinarily afford to exist are paid for in this manner.

Also, for those who remember the web before search engines, you know, in that supposed golden age, you couldn't FIND anything. I mean, it usually looked like there wasn't that much content out there, but I doubt that was ever true, at least once the universities started taking it seriously, well ahead of everyone else. You could have a good time browsing around, but if you wanted information on a specific topic you had to get lucky, or follow an awful lot of links.

Let's especially not forget the fact that google caches things, so as long as people put their information in ordinary HTML (A trend which is becoming less and less common these days) google will hang onto the data for some time, making the web more persistent.

Sure, commercialization hurts, but someone has to pay for all this bandwidth, all these sites, the hosting... Suck it up. Enjoy the fact that all you have to pay for is your connection. It's worth remembering that access outside of a university or corporation used to be hellishly expensive. Compu$erve charged by the minute, and didn't even have internet access for the longest time, though there was internet mail.

So it's cheaper and faster today than it's ever been. There's more content, useful and not, and more search engines (though google is the only one I use any more, since they're least offensive and most useful) to find information inside of it. Sure, the fact that any asshole can put together a webpage means there's more useless crap, but it also means you have access to data you wouldn't otherwise see.

And for those who cannot find anything to read on the web: Become involved in a community site. Slashdot is just one example, and perhaps not the best, because it's (ostensibly) news-driven. That, plus a blip on the radar every time Katz squats and squeezes out another pearl. But there are sites like Everything2 which can keep you busy for many hours if you're possessed of the necessary pedanticism. Hell, even livejournal can hold your interest.

In general, whiners need to spend their time developing content. I like E2 because it's a resource which can help people well into the future, and which helps me now. I also develop my own content; I run one of the larger drinking game sites on the internet (hyperlogos.org) which I should really spend more time on, but I'm too busy putting work into E2 :)

More pages, more search engines, more content, faster connections. When I started using webpages, modems were the standard, and MANY MANY sites were on nothing faster than a 28.8k modem, including The Circus where I lived - And we had a Class C from scruz.net at the time. :)

Are you crazy, man? The waste these things put out is none other than dihydrogen monoxide! Thousands of people have been injured or have died from exposure to the stuff every year!!!

nerd n.

1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.
2. [jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare the two senses of computer geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!" in the Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo" (1950). (The spellings `nurd' and `gnurd' also used to be current at MIT.) How it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the mid-1960s it meant roughly "annoying misfit" without the connotation of intelligence).

An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived `nerd' in its variant form `knurd' from the word `drunk' backwards, but this bears all the hallmarks of a bogus folk etymology.

Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years later, and some actually wear "Nerd Pride" buttons, only half as a joke. At MIT one can find not only buttons but (what else?) pocket protectors bearing the slogan and the MIT seal.

computer geek n.

1. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black vs. white-on-black usage of `nigger'. A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in larval stage. Also called `turbo nerd', `turbo geek'. See also propeller head, clustergeeking, geek out, wannabee, terminal junkie, spod, weenie.
2. Some self-described computer geeks use this term in a positive sense and protest sense 1 (this seems to have been a post-1990 development). For one such argument, see http://samsara.circus.com/~omni/geek.html . See also geek code.

http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/
http://www.dhmo.org/ This one is their own domain

Melvin
--
"Situation's changed, Jules...Take my buffalo gun and hand me my mime rifle." -The Far Side

That is, dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO).

Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

For more information, go to http://www.circus.com/~nodhmo/.

Ban DHMO!
--

My personal definition in the Geek vs Nerd nomenclature argument comes from http://www.circus.com/~omni/geek.html

I'm also fond of the ideas represented in the Geek Code. Geeks come in all shapes and sizes, both physically and mentally. Most people I know who I don't consider to be geek/nerds use the term Geek as a form of respect, in a "so that's what you people call yourselves..." manner.

just my 37.52 Lira... (last I checked, US $0.02)