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Dude, everybody knows it was 00000000 for the launch code.

No, seriously ...

http://www.damninteresting.com/ive-got-the-same-combination-on-my-luggage

Living with cats can cause problems. http://www.damninteresting.com/parasites-on-the-brain

1. 1. Flog Windscale/Sellafield to Vattenfall in exchange for the entire Swedish electricity grid
2. 2. ???
3. 3. Profit!

On second thought.. No don't d---NO CARRIER

I'm not usually a fan of conspiracy theories, but "signals to turn off radar" seems more like a coverup to protect the Mossad agents who really turned off the radar. You can theoretically only use a kill signal like that once, but Mossad agents are much more versatile.

Its not like the United States didn't do it before.

Well to be fair the KBG was buying the equipment on the blackmarket and should have known better.

http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits

Read what you wrote - "They prime your own immune system to start building up the immunities on its own." Unfortunately, antibodies aren't all that discrete. For example, the same antibody reaction that's been implicated in type one (juvenile) diabetes, where cows milk ends up leaking into the infants' bloodstream and provoking an antibody reaction; later on in life, the same antibodies start destroying the isles of langrahen; once enough are gone, no more insulin production.

Repeatedly injecting foreign substances to provoke immune responses has also been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases later in life.

And no, doctors aren't necessarily up on the latest and greatest. Look how many decades they told people with peptic ulcers to see a shrink to learn to handle stress. The flat-out refused to believe that ulcers were caused by an infection. Ditto with certain forms of cancer and viruses. Heck, they thought they could "cure" gays and lesbians for over a century. Some even wanted to "cure" the "disease" of being left-handed up until a decade ago.

Even now, some doctors are saying thatyou should pick your nose and eat it, despite the fact that the boogers are there FOR YOUR PROTECTION, and picking your nose short-circuits that process, damages tissue (allowing direct access to the blood stream), and helps spread contaminants (stop wiping your snot all over the place - it's like a culture medium for bacteria).

In other words, doctors can also fall victim to simplistic logical fallacies. Or are you going to start picking your nose and chewing it because some doctor mistakenly thinks it's the right thing to do?

It's on Damn Interesting as well: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-extraordinary-dymaxion-automobile

The car flopped because the prototype had a fatal accident in an auto show, so the investors pulled out.

Also, this damn interesting article.

Actually, statistics suggest the odds of someone going postal are better than one in a billion. I would say though that it is just a matter of time.

I just read a story yesterday where someone who got screwed over by his local town council converted a bulldozer into an armor plated "killdozer" and then demolished city hall, the mayor's house, a business owned by a councilman, and part of the business whose owner appears to have made an under the table deal with the council to screw him over. He killed himself before police were able to get inside the armored cab.

That one case would fix the odds at 1 in 6.5 billion for everyone, but I'm fairly sure there have been more than 5 other incidents in the U.S. alone if you count school incidents and of course, the original incidents at the U.S. post office locations. That places the lifetime odds at closer to 1 in 50 million for the general population in the U.S. I have no idea what percentage of the U.S. population never gets provoked seriously enough, so I can't narrow the odds any further.

H.M. seemed to do ok:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05hm.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=861#more-861

Why go to sci-fi when there's real people who have been in that sittuation.

See, now you're asking people to make critical decisions affecting their own security, with the vast majority of them having no way to realistically evaluate the actual security. You're intentionally calling forth the demons of being Unskilled and Unaware of It. People will overestimate their security on their shitware ridden Windows machines, or check their bank accounts from home and work and the library... if the preferences are per-user, that's horribly insecure. If it's per user+IP, it will confuse normal users and anger them. It's better to leave it as secure as possible from any possible login point. You shouldn't ever underestimate the stupidity of the average person, especially when it's a subject they don't care about.

It's called the Tetris effect, believe it or not. Even people with anterograde amnesia experience it, despite not remembering playing the game!

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=864

Being in a blissful, meditative obedient state is a mental illness.

In Africa there once stood what was considered the loneliest tree in the world. People respected it and no one dared to damage it. Until a truck crashed into it and broke it.

The original Tree of Ténéré was replaced by a sculpture made of discarded metal parts, made by an anonymous artist. Perhaps that was much better than a planned monument.

"I honestly hope the blindly ignorant who are unwilling to learn do not receive the world after World War III"

They're the ones most likely to cause WWIII, and most likely to take control afterward because ignorance breeds violence (my assertion) and unwarranted self-assuredness.

The americium problem has already come up.

Let's not forget Clever Hans the horse.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=384

Careful, you're playing with fire: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=715

I can't claim any personal experience with counter-intelligence but everything I've read on the matter makes the feebs out to be completely incompetent jackasses. Potential intelligence assets will walk in the front door and the FBI and CIA couldn't manage to recognize them for what they were. It seems like the operative rules are along the lines of:

1. First, don't fuck up.
2. Doing things increases the chances of fucking up; the less you do, the less likely you fuck up, unless your fuck up was not doing anything.
3. Your primary enemy is other intelligence services competing for your budget and turf. Cut those bastards off at the knees.
4. In your spare time, see if any foreign agents might be up to something.

For a case in point, Operation Pastorius.

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=949

German defectors walk right up to the FBI and the G-men had to be beaten over the head before they realized something was up. And Hoover, ugh, don't even get me started on that bastard. The Brits couldn't stand working with that transvestite media whore in WWII. No sooner would a German agent be sniffed out and the FBI would roll him up and bring in the pressmen so German intel could find out their operation was blown and there would be enough details blabbed to the press so the Germans would know how they were sniffed out. The Brit approach was to figure out who the agents were, then keep a close eye on who they associated with so they could discover the larger spy network. They would also use these agents to unwittingly feed bogus intel back into German hands. That that was all too subtle for the swinging dick approach favored by American intel.

Hodder is fascinated that Gobekli Tepe's pillar carvings are dominated not by edible prey like deer and cattle but by menacing creatures such as lions, spiders, snakes and scorpions. "It's a scary, fantastic world of nasty-looking beasts," he muses. While later cultures were more concerned with farming and fertility, he suggests, perhaps these hunters were trying to master their fears by building this complex, which is a good distance from where they lived.

I was immediately reminded of this article: "This Place Is Not A Place of Honor." If this ancient Turkish civilization were trying to give us a warning for some reason, we're not heeding it. Yet we think a future civilization will heed ours? As Gary Rollefson says in the article, "Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=297#more-297

Another amazing history of WWII era relics trapped under the ice (but they got them back!)

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=964

When Coca-Cola was developing New Coke, they found that only 11% of the people were opposed to the new product. However, it was a vocal 11%, and the dissent spread. EA may be facing a similar situation...

Or, another way of looking at things: If EA truly believes that DRM isn't turning off gamers, why did the CEO feel the need to announce that 98.8% don't care about DRM? They're afraid, and rightly so (I hope).

There's another one in PA that started in 1962.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=479

On another note:
"It's a really exciting experience to drive down into these mines; it's pitch black," the Bristol University research said.

It's funny that they would do research on such simple things as the amount of light available deep underground. Or maybe it was research on the emotions felt when driving into mines. arrg why does the wording have to be so confusing?

All I could find was this article: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=229

It's related - it also discusses a man that they did the same thing to...he "vigorously protested" when they wanted to stop the experiment.

It is just cognitive bias. It's known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

Will it blink?

Without patents licensing wouldn't be needed.

Err... without patent licensing, these cooperative consortiums couldn't exist. The consortium could say, "if you want to use our stuff, you've gotta follow these rules...", but there wouldn't be any force behind it. Non-consortium members could take the ideas and run with them.

-----

...here on /. a bunch of discussions have taken place on how Microsoft has tried to pervert ISO standards bodies...

Yeah, I guess the old days were better - when there was no consortium, when file and data formats were not at all intercompatible and mostly untranslatable, and when everyone just used Microsoft's file and data formats because "everyone else uses it."

-----

Meanwhile open standards work fine such as for electricity, electricity produced by wind farms in Scandinavia is compatible with the electricity produced via wind farms in Spain or the electricity produced in France's nuclear reactors.

:lol: Um.... :snicker: really? You want to talk about the intercompatibility of electricity? :lol:

By the same token - software is freely interchangeable, too, because it's all made of 1s and 0s!! The 1s and 0s produced in Belgium are EXACTLY the same as the 1s and 0s produced in the U.S., or Australia, or on the moon!

Seriously, even electricity has had its share of battles and compatibility problems:

Edison vs. Tesla

International electricity differences today
...etc.

- David Stein

maybe not absolutely needed but it has certanily helped us here

Damn interesting had an article about this a year ago: "This is not a place of honor"

Just wait till something like this happens with Microsoft's upcoming subscription model for Office, and you get locked out of your documents. Fun times ahead. Be sure to save in ODF...

This has actually already happened at least twice. I was going over some old PC Gamers while on the jon and sure enough there was an article about a subscription based gaming company. More akin to Steam then to Gametap. Anyways they went under, but the CEO or what not had a backup plan and simply released some code that would allow the games to be patched to run without a central sever... Ya know I'm sure that could get you into a legal mess with the wrong developers, I never heard more on that ill-fated company... But Microsoft I'm sure will have a backup plan. Probably akin to the Canadian Invasion US military planners thought up. Never gonna need it, but just in case....

Here's something interesting about nuclear launch codes:

America's gaggle of "Minuteman" long-range nuclear missiles went on line for the first time during the Cuban missile crisis in 1960 1962. But the world was supposedly protected from mutual assured destruction by the "Permissive Action Links" (PALs) which required an 8-digit combination in order to launch. Robert McNamara, then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, personally oversaw the installation of these special locks to prevent any unauthorized nuclear missile launches. He considered the safeguards to be essential for strict central control and for preventing nuclear disaster.

But what Secretary McNamara didn't know is that from the very beginning, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha had decided that these locks might interfere with any wartime launch orders; so in order to circumvent this safeguard, they pre-set the launch code on all Minuteman silos to the same eight digits: 00000000.

For seventeen years, during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War, the code remained all zeros, and was even printed in each silo's launch checklist for all to see. The codes remained this way up until 1977, when the service was pressed into activating the McNamara locks with real launch codes in place. Before that time, the the lack of safeguards would have made it relatively easy for a small group of rogue silo officers or visitors to implement an unauthorized nuclear missile launch.

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=167

The Bush Administration's definition of "enemy combatant" was based on Ex Parte Quirin, which dealt with the German sabeteurs who landed on Long Island, New York during World War II. The Quirin case underscores why we need courts even for enemy combatants.

You see, George John Dasch was one of the enemy sabeteurs, but he actually hated the Nazis. He took this to be a chance to defect to the US. Ernst Peter Burger, another one of the sabeteuers, was like-minded. The two of them tried very hard to turn themselves in, but were stopped by an unbelieving FBI. Dasch was only able to turn himself in when he threw $84,000 in mission funds onto the desk of a FBI agent. Under interrogation, he revealed the whole Nazi plan.

But the FBI claimed it was their great work that lead to the capture of the Germans. All the Germans were placed on trial before a military tribunal. The original verdict was a recommendation of death, even for the man who turned the group in. Burger's sentence was commutted to life, and Dasch was sentenced to 30 years in prison. It was only after W.W.II ended that the truth came out, and they were released and deported to Germany.

Without trial, the truth will never go out. As a democratic society, we have to dedicate ourselves to protect civil rights for all.

Unfortunately, though, that's the same combination as my luggage.

Apparently so were these other people: Spaceballs, Diebold Voting Machines, The Virginia Lottery, and Cold War Generals,

Are you referring to this?

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=679

Plants are great at storing carbon, the problem is when the plants die they decay and release it again. But if we start cutting down trees and preserving the wood so that the carbon can't escape, we might be able to solve global warming. Another cheap option for solving global warming is to paint all roofs white or coat them in tin foil. http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=228

People have willingly endured 46.2g 's.

This certainly applies to me. I have no emotional attachment to either of those words. I don't understand why there should be an emotional attachment to them either...

I'm starting to think I possibly qualify...

And, surprise surprise, I am, apparently, a psychopath according to that pseudo-scientific test.

However, I'd argue that it's a fairly weak test - I believe I do have a "moral compass", and consider myself a relatively ethical and moral person. However, many of the questions asked in that test apply equally well to the anti-social geek types that frequent places such as slashdot. How many of us here wouldn't be at least "moderately psychopathic"? - look at the items like "Easily bored, in need of constant stimulation" for example. (I should note that had I answered only one other item as "somewhat" rather than "yes", I'd be "moderately" rather than "pyschopath").

The distinctive brains of psychopaths.

"But for psychopaths, the word 'cancer' and the word 'table' had the same emotional connotations - which is to say, not very many. It's as if they're emotionally color-blind."

Even more staggering were the findings of a study conducted by New York City psychiatrist Joanne Intrator, with Hare's collaboration, at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital in 1993. The investigators employed the same language test, this time injecting the subjects with a radioactive tracer and scanning color images of their brains. As normal subjects processed the emotion-laden words, their brains lit up with activity, particularly in the areas around the ventromedial frontal cortex and amygdala. The former plays a crucial role in controlling impulses and long-term planning, while the amygdala is often described as "the seat of emotion." But in the psychopaths, those parts of the brain appeared to remain inactive while processing the emotion-laden words. That, says Hare, helps explain why a psychopath's conscience is only half-formed. "I showed the scans to several neurologists," recalls Hare. "They said that it did not even look like a human brain. One of them asked, 'Is this person from Mars?' "

According to Scientific American.
Not surprisingly, psychopaths are overrepresented in prisons; studies indicate that about 25 percent of inmates meet diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. Nevertheless, research also suggests that a sizable number of psychopaths may be walking among us in everyday life. Some investigators have even speculated that "successful psychopaths" - those who attain prominent positions in society - may be overrepresented in certain occupations, such as politics, business and entertainment. Yet the scientific evidence for this intriguing conjecture is preliminary.

One in 100.
One person in 100 is a psychopath, meaning that they lack a moral compass, sense of responsibility or empathy (this is a personality disorder, not a mental illness). And although they are overrepresented in the prison system, according to research by American psychologist Dr. Paul Babiak, and his Canadian counterpart Dr. Robert Hare, psychopaths are also well-represented in corporate environments.

here's a story about what I'd say is a very black & white likely case of psychopathy, and one at its worst, at least on a small scale.

The above link being pretty heavy, I thought I'd offer this lighter fare; A pseudo-scientific test to measure yourself on the psychopath-meter.

If you're going to navigate your pathway through reality, (down the river of life), you need to know where the rocks are if you're going to be able to avoid crashing into them. Christianity and the like has programmed all kinds of self-destructive behavior into human-kind. "Turn the other cheek" is an example of social programming which makes us food for the psychopathic human-type, --the type which I would guess is generally in charge of countries and most of the most powerful organizations which shape our lives; the psychopath recognizes its own and shapes the rules of the world to benefit itself, and study of the power structures over the centuries, doesn't really ever let go once the seat of power is attained. --Christ's supposed dying on the cross, (which I am doubtful actually happened for a variety of reasons, not the l

Another link on the same topic, with many links in itself: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=660

I've got an old-old still-sealed 2oz. bottle of radium paint from my Grandfather - still glows pretty well. And yes, it's kept in an appropriately-shielded container.

Damn Interesting has a very, ahem, interesting article on the building of the atmospheric railway under Broadway in New York - imagine a subway car propelled in the same way as the pneumatic telegraph...

A scene from Brazil springs to mind...

Damn Interesting has a very, ahem, interesting article on the building of the atmospheric railway under Broadway in New York - imagine a subway car propelled in the same way as the pneumatic telegraph...

A scene from Brazil springs to mind...

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=853

No, he meant psychopaths.

"BTW, is there anything known about diseases where people don't see tools as an extension of the body?"

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=678

Proprioception Deficit Disorder is a disease where people lose the ability to "feel" their body. People suffering from this rare disease can't do things that seems natural to us without a lot of focus.

The Russians made 6.7km before giving up drilling not only because of the heat (180c), which could have been worked around, but mainly because any further drilling beyond that point the hole had a tendency to close up like molten soft plastic upon retraction of the drill bit.

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=567

I've often used this analogy to techie people when trying to get across the horrors of evolution

Imagine a world with only one start up tech company... where the programmers have all resigned after writing a hello-world script.... Instead of getting in new people the PHB decides he can do it himself and starts randomly diddling (with occasional copy pastes) with the code (and compiler and OS and hardwear) to see what happens and testing it by seeing what sells to a market hungery for applications. If it sells he keeps working on it if it doesn't he stops work.

There is no commenting no version control, each new application is a fork from an existing one... and the horrifying thing is the parent application is also chosen at random. If he wants to make a mailer he may start out with a spread sheet or a web server (or even a webserver evolved from a spread sheet).

You may find this story of evolved hardwear Damn Interesting

It doesn't have to be like that. Let's think of a system for the robots where helping each other would be more appealing than cheating on each other. I read this article once and was really amazed that nature itself has already invented altruism - in a very elegant - and, most important of all robust - manner.

As long as it isn't using fucking HYDROGEN, Sign Me Up!!! R101, Hindengerg -> http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=309

What does this article have to do with the Tulip Bubble?
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=469