Slashdot Mirror

It's not difficult to be in contact with hundreds of different people every day for months.

There's a huge difference between people inside your MonkeySphere and people inside your chat room.

the monkeysphere!
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
I guess, with twitter and fb, the monkeysphere is expanding, and you cannot cope with it unless the brain is modified :)

Yeah this is hardly ground breaking: 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted

Here's a link to the article. Once, again, Cracked to the rescue!

http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html

#7 They have too many natural predators
#6 They can't take the heat
#5 They can't handle the cold
#4 Biting is a terrible way to spread disease
#3 They can't heal from day to day damage
#2 The landscape is full of zombie-proof barriers
#1 Weapons and the people who use them

Also interesting, (and also from Cracked) "5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen"

uhmm well: http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html [cracked.com]

Eh.... I know it's obviously tongue-in-cheek, but that article doesn't really work on its own terms.

Problem is that they give scientifically-plausible reasons about how their bodies can't heal themselves due to damage, their lack of circulation means the cold would damage them, ditto heat (which would cause putrefaction or mummification), maggots would eat them etc.

Yet it relies on accepting the basic premise of the stereotypical zombie- that something that was already in a "dead" and decomposing state would still (somehow) be capable of supporting life, let alone actually moving about in an animated manner. Problem is that if you accept Cracked's analysis- even as an intellectual joke- you can't really then dismiss very similar reasons why zombies shouldn't exist in the first place!

The article was this Cracked article ("7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)"), specifically page 7 ("Weapons and the People Who Use Them").

The article was this Cracked article ("7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)"), specifically page 7 ("Weapons and the People Who Use Them").

uhmm well: http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html

But can I get an understandable car analogy here?

15 cars tried to transform into Voltron but instead turned into Snarf.

All of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once you go inside the Monkeysphere

http://www.cracked.com/article_19120_6-mistranslations-that-changed-world.html

Though it's not mentioned in this article, I _have_ previously heard of issues as to whether the "Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map" translation was accurate.

For Blu-ray to succeed it would have to be the first new media to succeed without porn since the Guttenberg Bible.

Are you sure porn didn't drive adoption of the printing press? (See number 3.)

Well duh, Donald Duck has invented everything. Check out this cracked article breaking it down for you.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19021_5-amazing-things-invented-by-donald-duck-seriously.html

http://www.cracked.com/article_16335_7-innocent-gestures-that-can-get-you-killed-overseas.html

http://www.cracked.com/article_19007_6-reasons-kittens-suck-learned-while-raising-them.html
instead of obligatory XKCD, obligatory Cracked article. :)

You just like, totally don't understand. If it wasn't for this, I'd be on a plane to Africa looking for tiny giraffes. I could sell thousands of them. For me, I'm very glad he debunked it. Now to start paying down my thousands of dollars in debt to research groups about how much I was going to price the giraffes.

Cooks Source worked because the lady ripped off was nice. This site is boring and horribly written. You know, Rosa Parks wasn't the first one arrested on a bus. The NAACP was looking for someone to defend. They turned down a teenage girl because she was pregnant and the father was married. She was also mouthy. Turned down another teenage girl because her dad was a drunk. Rosa Parks was chosen because she was nice and had light skin. All details from Cracked

farmvile and mmo's are not games. They were not developed as games. They are made as addiction programs to simply drain you of cash like a slot machine.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

http://www.cracked.com/article_18881_5-reasons-greatest-movie-villain-ever-good-witch.html "Right off the bat, the Western Witch wants to know who killed her sister. Fair enough. Glinda smiles blandly while the witch accuses Dorothy, no doubt enjoying the double whammy of a grieving witch's rage and Dorothy's terror."

http://www.cracked.com/video_18254_bill-oreilly-teaches-kids-about-science.html

You might find this article interesting.

The line isn't geographic, like you're asking (district, city, country, etc.) The line gets drawn between the people in our http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.htmlmonkeysphere and the people outside it.

"The UP isn't about your ability to measure something."

At least you prefaced your statement with "wrong". :)

"In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. That is, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured." - WP.

Further reading - Embrace the horror

No, wait, sorry, the damage is way worse than that:

http://www.cracked.com/funny-4003-the-pirate-bay/

We're gonna need a bigger planet.

Here's a really interesting article from Cracked, of all places. It sometimes covers the same areas as the Schadenfreude link. The point I gleaned from this article is that nature makes it easier for us to be "evil" than to be "good". If there is a positive to be gleaned from this, it is that if a "good" entity defeats an "evil" one, then that "good" entity has "evil" in reserve for emergencies.
Our justifications (e.g. "intelligence") are not always needed. Here's another good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan's_Column and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEmIAHNkDOo
Intelligence does not always provide protection from brutality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier

Get back to me when humans develop echolocation senses or become smart enough to stay out of traffic accidents.

As it happens, there are humans with echolocation.

I read this article recently which mentions one explanation for "hauntings":

http://www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-scientific-explanation-behind-ghost-sightings.html

So, one thing to check for would be infrasound. If you find it and can identify the source, you may be able to put a stop to the "hauntings".

with pictures of the stoners
http://www.cracked.com/article_17032_7-species-that-get-high-more-than-we-do.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_17032_7-species-that-get-high-more-than-we-do_p2.html

with pictures of the stoners
http://www.cracked.com/article_17032_7-species-that-get-high-more-than-we-do.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_17032_7-species-that-get-high-more-than-we-do_p2.html

No. David Wong said it best:

The advantage that consoles have over, say, PCs, is that you can play from your comfy sofa. The reason the sofa is considered the pinnacle of furniture technology is because there's room for other people on it.

Yet, here's Grand Theft Auto IV, boasting about its robust multiplayer, and if you think "multiplayer" means inviting the gang over to play, get drunk, laugh and high-five each other until the break of dawn, too bad. You can't do that. Want to play with friends, they must be kept at arm's length, faceless at the other end of a broadband connection. Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer is a world without hugs.

A little further down, the reason:

Sorry, you know damned well that technical limitations aren't the reason everyone is dropping split screen. Every previous generation had it, in times with much less powerful systems and few widescreen TVs.
You're dropping it because four players on a split screen are playing off one $60 copy of the game. Four players playing online need four copies ($240).

This is a potentially useful bit of microbiology. Eventually we're going to have to clean up landfill sites and the like, so what would be more useful than a bug that strips all the iron out of a pile of stuff and deposits it in sediment? Scoop garbage into tanks, let the bugs do their work, collect the sludge at the bottom for processing. If we could engineer these bacteria to eat other stuff like copper or various types of plastic, we could potentially reclaim a lot of what we call "garbage" on the cheap.

For reasons why this might be a horrifically bad idea, I present you with the story of Klebsiella planticola.

The Twilight films went one better - they've got dead actors playing undead vampires with the intelligence of zombies in stories where literally nothing happens.

http://www.cracked.com/article_16878_if-twilight-was-10-times-shorter-100-times-more-honest.html

Is that the same David Wong that wrote the monkeysphere? - I came across it by accident a few years ago, it's one best essays on human nature that I've ever read.

non-obligatory cracked article here

A reasonable fine would be on the order of $50 to $100 per song.

I see where you're getting at but in what world is $50-$100 a reasonable amount to pay for creating more of an infinite resource? Let's say you sell joke books. Now let's say I pick up one of your books in the store and read a joke. Later I repeat the joke to some of my friends and we all laugh. Have I stolen something? Am I a thief? Of course not.
The real issue is that computers and the internet have created a truly unlimited resource. When you think about it, copying an MP3 is similar to matter replication in Star Trek: At your command you can create an exact duplicate of something at no cost! Now many companies stand to lose their entire business if people realize the infinity in computer information replication. The only way they know how to survive is to perpetuate a fake sense of scarcity for their product. This is a comedy article that illustrates what I mean by fake scarcity.

This comic illustrates the subject well

That describes 24 almost perfectly!

This comic illustrates the subject well, I believe. I rarely see a series that goes for more than 3 or 4 seasons and is very good.

There's nothing wrong with the short form! If you write out a series to be 3 seasons, you shouldn't hurriedly try to make a fourth because the producers wanted to drop a ton of money in your pocket. Finish the three seasons and leave it at that. Hey, you could always follow up with a movie!

On the flip side, I think maybe I would rather see a good series go long and have a lot of mediocre episodes than a series go short and not be able to resolve any of its major plotlines.

It's a video, but a very well done post-mortem tutorial on what Google Wave was and why it was (potentially) awesome.

http://www.cracked.com/video_18209_google-wave-pissed-off-tutorial.html

"Google Wave: You Don't Deserve It"

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This article is the one linked to from Drudge. I find it interesting that it reports most people at LaGuardia were willing to go through the TSA security because the 'alternative' is worse (plane blowed up). I queried my friends and acquaintances this past week and not one of them feels these security measures are necessary and many are changing travel plans around which airports have the scanners.

"I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,"— Rafi Sela, leading Israeli airport security expert, referring to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world. source

No, I'm pretty sure it's the fault of the game developers.

Major game developers have an excuse: they think consoles are more profitable for local multiplayer games. They have made the decision based on 1. their size, which can absorb the overhead of developing for locked-down consoles like the Xbox 360, and 2. their observation that PC makers haven't sold enough media center PCs to their audience.

Things like splitscreen support usually aren't added to PC games due to the fact that once you already have multiplayer in the game, it's far easier to rely on that than to code in splitscreen support

If this were true, more PC games would support spawn installation. It appears to me that PC game developers just want to sell two to four copies per household instead of one, as David Wong of Cracked pointed out two years ago. Besides, not all game designs need to split the screen: see Gauntlet series, Bomberman series, and fighting games.

(which not many people will probably use anyway). Not to mention that I suppose it's kind of awkward doing [local multiplayer] on a PC

My point was that it would be significantly less awkward to do local multiplayer if there were more media center PCs.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18513_5-insane-file-sharing-panics-from-before-internet_p2.html
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music

You don't have a choice, for a reason called forced artificial scarcity (F.A.R.T.S.). Not a joke.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

Yeah, I agree with you here. Media can give us a false impression of reality.. which makes it difficult for us to be good to each other. that's all hes saying. What's funny is that if the guy had an Asian accent all these hipsters would be tripping over themselves to add his quotes to their facebook profile.. http://www.cracked.com/article_18821_5-examples-americans-thinking-foreign-people-are-magic.html

OK. That's fine. But when the zombies start marching down your street, don't bother knocking on my door.

Hey, you contradicted yourself! Center mass -- headshot? Man, I expect more from you Lil' Wayne.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18662_im-starting-to-doubt-lil-waynes-research-skills-....html

Cracked had a very informative piece on SyFy.

Quoting:

We'll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we'll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand."- Dave Howe, President of Syfy

"The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular...We spent a lot of time in the '90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it's called Sci Fi."- Tim Brooks, founder of Sci-Fi

So basically, the SyFy channels think their viewers are sub-human geeks. Nice.

It's not at ground zero. I wouldn't normally use Cracked as a reference, but I will today.

And for the conspiracy nuts out there, here are 4 more unexplained broadcasts.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/using-windows-7-may-lead-to-murder/

The "7 scientific reasons a zombie outbreak would fail" is a pretty fun read.

I however believe, given the right circumstances, that a zombie outbreak would succeed. In that spirit of the same fun, here is my rebuttal to those points.

#7. They Have Too Many Natural Predators
Humans are too smart and well armed to be at risk. Maggots will infest zombies, eating out their eyes making them useless.

Reply:
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, as Einstein said. Fear is a primal emotion that we have forgotten how to control with out placid controlled lives. A horrific event like an outbreak would shock many into stupidity, and given guns, would even kill other humans by mistake. So much for being well-armed.
Zombies do rot, they are short-term animals, but don't underestimate their other senses heightening to compensate.

#6/5. They Can't Take the Heat / Cold
Heat promotes bacterial growth in the dead's gut, causing them to bloat and explode

Reply:
No problem here, it's pretty much a given as zombies digestive systems become dead, their gut fills with any meat they can tear from anything that moves, until they burst open. That won't stop them from eating more though. This comes from their brains being shut down, except for the primal need to feed.
I see them freezing, this is a good advantage for the living.

#4. Biting is a Terrible Way to Spread a Disease
Nobody is going to be having sex with a zombie.

Reply:
I wouldn't say nobody... OK back on topic. In medicine, viruses and bacteria can all spread via any of the following means:

* droplet contact (coughing or sneezing)
* direct (bodily fluids)
* indirect (touching soil contamination or a contaminated surface)
* airborne, fecal-oral transmission (contaminated food or water)
* vector borne (via insects or animals)

Biting is not the only means, and we should not discount any of the others just because Hollywood says so, or they didn't focus on those aspects. In reality, any of those transmission vectors are possible.

#3. They Can't Heal from Day to Day Damage
Claims zombies are clumsy, and accumulated damage will be their end.

Reply:
Zombies are not long-term creatures by any means. They rot, they don't heal, they just want to feed. That's why they are horrific and, well... zombies. But since they don't feel pain (from their broken CNS) they just keep on coming, or die trying. They can't be scared off.

#2. The Landscape is Full of Zombie-Proof Barriers

Reply:
Naturally outbreaks will be focused in populated cities, I don't see how a picture of a mountain applies here. Zombies will undoubtedly walk off ledges and fall down stairs, but they are also mindless beasts who will behave unpredictably. Remember that we can't just assume the outbreak will be contained to the streets either, if the undead were shambling in a corporate head office (like they do sometimes), then the living are at risk in a enclosed space. Boundaries work both ways.

#1. Weapons and the People Who Use Them
Claims the total gun owners, private and governmental, is enough to blow an outbreak to hell and back.

Reply:
This is one thing we have going for us, but we have to get the outbreak under control before things get too fucked, ie people panic and start killing the 'wrong ones'. Considering "if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it's killing other things", remember how we learned that fact in the first place. I recommend a melee skill, in case your gun jams, you run out of ammo, or you just feel like taking a steel pipe to that mushy skull and paint the wall with brains. Gaaaaargh!

Links:
original article: http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-r

Link points to page 2 of 2. Here's page 1: 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly) | Cracked.com