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I submitted a correction.

In the meantime, enjoy the history of the 'h' in Pittsburgh.

Ahhh... you've stumbled on the mystery of "Go you big red fire engine!!"

Go forth and multiply!!

The Libertarian Party doesn't suck.

Well...I'd want the default subnet mask to be correct, so barring other concerns, I'd choose the IP range that has the subnet mask correct.

Chris Benard

That's precisely the point made by Bob Black in his 1985 essay "The Abolition of Work".

In Soviet Russia - explanation on Everything2.

No, they have good reading comprehension, but a low tolerance for those with poor writing skills (i.e. they were able to figure out what the message regardless of its poor delivery).

Your post shows that your English is not perfect either. E.g. you use certain latin abbreviations incorrectly. :) Anyway, if blunte understood me just fine, why didn't he address my post, but instead simply repeated his original position?

those rules then fall by the wayside

You seem to agree that "languages are organic", but you don't really understand what it means. Rules are not set by the scholars for others to follow. Rules are formulated in order to codify the consensus of language users. In retrospect merging 'then' and 'than' would be perfectly acceptable and today noone has the moral authority to violently oppose this (if this is indeed happening and not, say, emerging of the word 'thon').

If that should happen often enough, we might just eventually be reduced to something akin to grunts, as someone put it earlier. As Preed put it so well, "I weep for the species."

If language is so fragile, how did it emerge in the first place? You aren't trying to insult my intelligence, are you? And don't weep for the species, it will be just fine, I assure you.

the difference between "then" and "than". Do you forget the difference between "+" and "-"?

Your 1337 Inglish skillz are all good and stuff, but when did you last check your logic faculties? :) People mix up 'then' and 'than' not because they don't know the difference between the two concepts, but simply because they forget which concept has which letter. You know difference between "+" and "-", but do you know the difference between WinPaintChar and WinDrawChar? You know that there are two different functions and you even know what kind of function is best for every situation, but can you be sure to always remember which one is called which? Do you want me to IM you every time you fuck up and ridicule you? :)

As for the argument that "languages are organic" and "change is good", I'll agree to an extent. However, "organic" doesn't imply "anarchic". A comedian (Steve Martin?) once jokingly suggested that we teach kids the wrong meanings of words to our kids. I would never teach my daughter that "no" means "yes". Hopefully, neither would you.

As I said above, the rules should be set according to the way language is used (with the intent of teaching young people how the language is spoken by others), but not try to influence this. And in any case, in this whole picture I see no place for grammanazis at all. If you don't like how others speak, STFU or GTFOOH. It is simply extremely impolite, sort of Internet way of saying "you momma is a bitch" or "you freak". People speak the way they do. Especially when they actually type. Moreso when they do it for a quick /. post. And particularly when English is not their first language, like in my case. In my country, when a foreigner makes a mistake we do not tell him "Learn to spell, you idiot". Instead we ignore the error, because we know that practice and comfort are more important than pointless nagging.

BTW, you might enjoy reading this node. :)

If you want to get across an idea or thought, at least learn the basics or deal with forever being misunderstood.

Oh come on! Don't kill the massager, I beg you. :)))

Perhaps it's Something Awful that's doing it?

Fark seems to think so.

(Ever feel like you're writing for memepool or Everything2? I sure do!)

Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?

Actually I think the point is we should only tax things for which there is a negative externality[?] or negative impact on society in general. We probably shouldn't tax income (except maybe a little flat tax to pay for agencies that help keep people employed) but tax stuff like gasoline (creates pollution) vehicle registration (to maintain/plow roads) houses (pay for fire, police services) and so on. I think the things taxed should be directly related to what the govt's going to do with the money. Helps everything form a better balance. Stuff that's expensive to society is expensive to the individual, etc.

-Ansel.

Someone on e2 did a very good job writing short fiction (I hope, anyways) based on that label.

Developing a way to be able to trust the origin of email is the way to end the spam crisis.

In another recent thread, a suggested enhancement is for DNS to publish "allowed sender IP" addresses. The structure for this information is already there.

What is needed is for more people to opt in, in protecting their domains in this way, and for people to unilaterally start using that information. If any one of yahoo, aol or netscape opted into this approach I could well imagine it would cascade to comprehensive success overnight, forcing spammers to more obscure domains (such as my own - currently victim to a 12 month "Joe Job").

Because this is distributed information, it is not easily modifiable by spammers. Ultimately this sort of approach is the only one that can work.

Ultimately, I would be able to set spamassassin to add +5 for any e-mail coming from a domain that didn't publish this information, or -5 for any one that did.

And I would not be receiving 1000's of bounce messages for messages from spammers using my domain name.

Yes please. I want it.

BTW, this is generally known as a Joe Job.

there is a corporation in Boston which is developing ultra-pure diamonds using a vapor disposition techinque

You're thinking of Apollo Diamond, which plans to use revenues from selling vapor deposition gemstones to fund research into diamond semiconductors. There's a nice writeup about synthetic diamonds at E2.

However, in many markets, synthetic diamonds sold as gemstones have to be labeled as synthetic, giving De Beers an out: "A diamond isn't forever if it was grown in a lab five days ago."

It's called Mercaptan. When I was in high school, I used to think it would be cool to get some of this stuff and release it into the school. It would have driven someone crazy trying to find that darned gas leak... I think it's supposed to be pretty safe for the most part -- at least compared with releasing actual natural gas.

Everything, Everything2 ancestor, offered blog facilities before 1999.

Well, I suppose you know about the red shift due to the general expansion of the universe? The most distant objects in the universe are now receeding away from us at such a massive rate that the visible light they emitted has been so far red shifted as to wind up in the infrared region. There's a Doppler effect for light that causes light from an object moving very quickly away from an observer to reach the observer at a lower frequency than what was transmitted (the red shift), just like a car moving away from you makes sounds at a lower pitch than were it standing still or moving towards you. Because of Hubble's law, the farther away an object is, the faster it's moving away from us, and consequently, the greater the Doppler effect. This infrared probe is designed to view objects that have been so far "red shifted" as to apparently be emitting infrared radiation.

Well, I suppose you know about the red shift due to the general expansion of the universe? The most distant objects in the universe are now receeding away from us at such a massive rate that the visible light they emitted has been so far red shifted as to wind up in the infrared region. There's a Doppler effect for light that causes light from an object moving very quickly away from an observer to reach the observer at a lower frequency than what was transmitted (the red shift), just like a car moving away from you makes sounds at a lower pitch than were it standing still or moving towards you. Because of Hubble's law, the farther away an object is, the faster it's moving away from us, and consequently, the greater the Doppler effect. This infrared probe is designed to view objects that have been so far "red shifted" as to apparently be emitting infrared radiation.

In a similar vein, but what might be considered "prior art", the ancient Norse people had a particular type of mead which was supposed to convey wisdom regarding everything. Made of the blood of a man created by all the Norse gods to seal a peace treaty, "Kvasir", some dwarves killed him and mixed his blood with honey, making the "Mead of Poetry".

Probably not as tasty as Earl Grey, but claimed to be even more effective--after all, what's knowing everything if you can't write about it elegantly?

More on this here.

credit to...Pseudo
Intellectual and www.everything2.com

Watching LOTR for 11 hours straight is cool, but you can't have that much fun every day (unless you have a bad case of anteriorgrade amnesia). When all three movies are released, I want to reedit them to fit LOTR trilogy in a more comfortable 1.5 hours. :-)

That might be a ">funny challenge, to compress the movie 10+ times, keeping the story intact and syncing the soundtrack. :)

Watching LOTR for 11 hours straight is cool, but you can't have that much fun every day (unless you have a bad case of anteriorgrade amnesia). When all three movies are released, I want to reedit them to fit LOTR trilogy in a more comfortable 1.5 hours. :-)

That might be a ">funny challenge, to compress the movie 10+ times, keeping the story intact and syncing the soundtrack. :)

Acceptable Use Policy

I am referring to two trailers. The original observation of unoriginality was made after E3 (when some movie footage was recorded at the ROTK game presentation) and now confirmed by what was presented as a leaked trailer. I don't think I saw the preview. Do you have a link handy or could you upload it somewhere?

Anyway, I admit that it's too early to judge ROTK, but frankly, I am bored. FOTR was magestic despite a number of flaws, TTT was different (Jacko says it's intentional), but done much worse. "Creative" editing, butchering the book and many other minor flaws seriously spoiled the impression (BTW, check out this). Now I don't really care anymore. Yes, the ROTK could turn out to be a brilliant film, but there is a relatively high chance that it will be even more fucked up then TTT was. These expectations cancel each other out, so this year I will definitely not see LOTR on the opening day. May be after a week or so.

Matrix, on the other hand, didn't disappoint me as much as TTT did. Yes, it's very different from the first Matrix (which, by the way, is just as rewatchable as the FOTR was), but it's still good. And it was original, you can't deny that. Revolutions seem to be (from the available trailers) another different and original movie. It might be slightly better or worse, but I am sure it will still be slick, cool and enjoyable. I am not so sure about ROTK.

Then again, this is the nature of the business.

They tried several times to do just that, by showing obscure previews that didn't give away anything, and so far most of them resulted in failures. Overwhelming majority of movie-going consumers suffer from ADD. Without giving them something big during the preview, you're running the risk of dooming the box office returns.

In 1995, I remember they started running the ads for Strange Days, which involved few people giving interviews about something no one had a clue about. While it was mysterious and edgy at the time, the movie was punished by not generating enough buzz and consequent revenue, and the advertising method was to blame. The studio tried to switch gears and follow the traditional approach with full blown trailer showing big explosions and major scenes, but it was too late.

In conclusion, don't watch the trailer.

p.s. I find it interesting that all of my favorite movies are the ones which I watched without seeing a trailer in advance. Something to think about.

Since diamonds have a much higher thermal conductivity (ie they can take the heat), they'd make better chips than silicon if only they were more affordable. Industrial diamonds are expected to make the whole industry's prices fall drastically by increasing supply and breaking the De Beers cartel .

More about the De Beers cartel:

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

Everything2 link

Personally I think these are awesome feats of engineering, and a way to give your significant other a stone without feeling morally, and literally, bankrupt.

In other news, scientists plan to officially give Element 115 (Ununpentium) a proper name.

If the Pentagon has enough of a sense of humour to congratulate the leader of the Autobots for joining the army, I'm sure the scientific community can see it's way to naming the 115th element Elerium! ;)

(Everyone knows that's its "real" name, after all...)

In other news, scientists plan to officially give Element 115 (Ununpentium) a proper name.

If the Pentagon has enough of a sense of humour to congratulate the leader of the Autobots for joining the army, I'm sure the scientific community can see it's way to naming the 115th element Elerium! ;)

(Everyone knows that's its "real" name, after all...)

In other news, scientists plan to officially give Element 115 (Ununpentium) a proper name.

If the Pentagon has enough of a sense of humour to congratulate the leader of the Autobots for joining the army, I'm sure the scientific community can see it's way to naming the 115th element Elerium! ;)

(Everyone knows that's its "real" name, after all...)

In other news, scientists plan to officially give Element 115 (Ununpentium) a proper name.

If the Pentagon has enough of a sense of humour to congratulate the leader of the Autobots for joining the army, I'm sure the scientific community can see it's way to naming the 115th element Elerium! ;)

(Everyone knows that's its "real" name, after all...)

If I don't know what I'm talking about, then apparently FOLDOC, everything2, and wikipedia are all equally misled. I'm not picky, though. Call it what you like. Too bad changing the name won't make it better software.

• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

• In Soviet Russia, lazy dog jumps over quick brown fox!

• The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

• In Soviet Russia, lazy dog jumps over quick brown fox!

reminds me of the anime Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind .

When did our definition of "robot" become "Nifty mobile vehicle with some kind of new technology" ? A robot, sort of by definition, is an autonomous machine, capable of acting and reacting on its own without human intervention. Battlebots? They're just souped-up RC cars. ASIMO? His every step is preprogrammed; if you moved the stairs a foot forward he'd trip, because ASIMO is not a robot.

These pictures clearly show humans remotely controlling them. What makes them different than remote controlled cars that you can buy at Toys-R-Us, the fact that they can crawl up walls or have six funky legs? Please, stop referring to these fancy toys as "robots" and diminishing the accomplishments of those who make real autonomous robots.

And yes, I have worked on real robots. Last year I was on the robotics team from the University of Rochester. Our robot Mabel the Mobile Table, an autonomous robotic hors d'ourvres-serving waiter, won the AAAI Robot Host competition. Robotics means artificial intelligence, at least rudimentary AI, not just some new means of locomotion.

Did you see the "?" characters throughout my post? There were 2 of them. They're question marks, and they indicate that the preceding sentence was a question- something you'd have to answer to have any credibility. To hammer it in a little more, here's another question: "If Kinkos rents you a laptop to edit your report, but warns you against putting any software on it, do you accept? Or do you claim that since all data is software, they've forbidden you from making any use at all?"

You obviously just haven't properly considered the meaning of the words before.

Funny, I was going to say the same thing, until I realized you've spent entirely too much time considering it. This is actually a well-documented phenomena: "Your radical ideas about philosophy have already occured to others". It normally occurs in college students forced into aimless musing as they sit up all night watching a roommate cram for finals.

Any list of instructions that can be carried out by a computer is software.

And is "red, red, green, red, blue, green, blue, red, green" a set of instructions? No, it emphatically is not. "drawpixel(red);drawpixel(red);drawpixel(green)... " are instructions. If a person wanted to be useless, he could claim they're equivalent, but they're not. Not every fact is an instruction.

That would be the same as calling any rock or lump of wood a "machine". A silly person can claim "the rock is a machine to describe the shape of a rock", but the world will see him for a fool.

Machines (or "hardware") are a subset of all matter. Software is a subset of all data. (Hardware|Software) is (matter|data) that has been built into a functional machine. There is much matter that clearly is not hardware, and much data which isn't software.

The word software was clearly invented to sepperate the concept of software from hardware.

Yes, that's correct. So why do you refuse to honor the intentional meaning of the word?

In the distant past there were computers which read data from cards and processed it as electrical impulses. When a new computational function was desired, the hardware had to be laboriously rewired. The great insight was that data could act like hardware, and we'd call that software. From the dream of the UTM was born the general-purpose, stored-program computer.

Your position would deny the greatness of that invention, by claiming that since computers had already processed data, "software" had existed all along.

Things worse than Damn Lies, besides statistics: Book back covers, movie trailers, game packaging and game opening videos.

There have been countless cases of box art, screenshots or their captions being in clash with each other.

Blizzard is especially guilty of this; The first game I got from them was Warcraft, and box screenshot captions sure felt goofy if you had actually played the game. (Glad in Warcraft II they at least had something to do with each other...)

Game opening videos are extremely odd also. I wrote this piece about them. My favorite example is Battlezone - While it's more or less like the actual game even to the cockpit controls, there are more odd mistakes than you can count...

Let me help clue some people in here.

Because Me so smart.
come off it dude.

Better than throwing about your half understandings as truth, you could actually look at your notes from first year physics and understand the wonder of Archimedes' principle for yourself, THEN try to explain it.


href="http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Archi me des'+principle

As others have noted, if you melt the north pole, you're probably melting Greenland & co. as well, which does add to sea-level rise++. Also your ice melted becuase the oceans are a little warmer (latent heat of liquification, yea, yea. it still gets warmer after the ice is all gone) thus the oceans are less dense, and expand (ie upwards).

The bit about all the added fresh water being less dense is interesting, but doesn't make up for the "it isn't just the sea ice melting" problem.

The bit that really scares me: Antarctica. The ice in the center is several miles thick. Around the edges along the coast you have sea ice.
The sea ice melts quite fast due to the thermal conductivity of the ocean water around it. That melting is going on now (eg the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed last year to the shock & awe of many ice-ologists). If you remove those buttresses, the center collapses outwards to the sea. This could happen over the course of a few hundred years(!!!). That's where the vast majority of land-locked water is, and that's what'll do the serious 75' rise if it happens.

It is estimated that a 100 year storm on the East Coast of the US (read NYC) will be a 3-5 year storm in 50 years. Add to that the east coast is natuarally sinking (the continental plate), and you really don't want any extra sea level rise if you can help it. And we can help it, we're just being selfish lazy fucks. Don't deny it.

Even if things are warming up naturally, we shouldn't help it along to make it go faster.

We aren't fucking the planet, it'll survive, were fucking ourselves. All but a few of the world's major cities lie along the coast. ALL of the great port cities..

Oh, for crying out loud...

No, and on two counts.

1. Liquid water and ice are not the same density. Therefore, if you melt ice you will end up with a greater volume of water than you had of ice, assuming zero evaporation.

> from the memento-with-two-pistols dept.

Hemos beat you to it, man...but then again, with privilege comes pre-emptive commenting

I gotta disagree here to a point and say its not so black and white whether or not research can be evil. (/me whips out my trusty Nazi argument card) The nazis performed human experiments on the "unfit" in the 30's and 40's, the nature of which I think most people would hesitate to call barbaric and evil. They ran cold water endurance tests, simulated high altitude asphyxiation(sp?) tests and a injections of poisons and diseases to probe the limits of the human body. After the war the allies found some of this data and now they had a huge ethical delimma. What do you do with data from horrible experiments that have already been performed? Does using the data somehow excuse what the Nazis did? Or perhaps even make you an accomplice to genocide if you do use it? On the other hand this data could help mankind. Did those people now die for no reason if you don't use it? I suppose this is just another reahash of "guns don't kill people" argument, but I watch too much history channel and felt like mentioning Nazis. As a small qualifier: I am no luddite who thinks we ought to ban genetic research, I actually think we should do more. When arguments like this pop up I really wish Mary Shelly had never published.

Interestingly, in Canada, they have provisions for this.

In Canada the legal age of (sexual) consent is 14. The minimum age for those appearing in pornography is 18. _However_, it is perfectly okay for a person to possess pornography containing persons younger than 18 _IF_ everyone in the porn is over 14 _and_ the owner appears in the imagery.

Therefore, a person _can_ take pictures of themself in sexual situations (even with others) so long as they are older than age of consent. This still precludes have pictures of just your 14-17 year old girlfriend, I assume.

((likely) highly inaccurrate legal documentation can be found on everything)

Look at how he enjoys to stupidly fr1st ps0ting

on his fellow( or foe)s' web sites...

Look at how he enjoys to stupidly fr1st ps0ting on his fellow( or foe)s' web sites...

First off, it seems somehow a bad idea to use a number which lots of other people know about when your SSN might be used as a unique identifier. (It isn't and shouldn't be, but organizations do it anyway). "Sorry, it looks like you've already registered for classes!"

Besides that, I can't imagine that you'll get much in the way of credit if most of your transactions are conducted under a fake SSN. Goodbye house, goodbye car.

The alternative -- and a much better solution, imo -- is simply to tell the nice representative that you don't want to disclose your SSN because you've had trouble with identity theft in the past, and you'd rather they use another unique identifier. If they refuse, bollocks to their business anyway. Most colleges and large organizations that ask about SSNs are more than willing to provide you with another UIN; ask first, then use Richard Nixon's Social Security number.

American's (I am American) can't even spell aluminium correctly. :)

And here we have the classic Greengrocer's apostrophe. Plurals do not need an apostrophe, ok?

You're an arsole.

Greetings gentlebeings,

Since I recently reinstalled my Debian system, I decided to put some effort into implementing my filesystems right. I decided on XFS for various reasons, mainly that it has always been rock solid for me (I've had some problems with ReiserFS causing heavy data corruption -- it's a long time ago and they've undoubtedly improved the system since, but still I prefer XFS since I've never even once had a problem with it, and know nobody who has), and that its good large-file performance is more useful to me than Reiser's kickass small-file performance. Also EAs and ACLs are neat. What sucks about XFS is poor small-file performance and abysmal delete performance.

Anyways, I made a few bonnie++ runs and messed around with some of the many mkfs and mount options of XFS. In the end, my tweaked XFS filesystems beat ext3 (mode=ordered) for delete performance, which was a substantial improvement over a standard XFS mount.

I made a writeup about the whole procedure at Everything2. Go slashdot the poor bastards. Warning: The language is tailored to the fact that not all E2 users are geek hardcore.

More recently they put 32bit processors in the palm of your hand

Ironic that you use "palm". Palm had a 32-bit handheld before Nintendo did, but you correctly point out that GBA outsells any PDA platform unit-for-unit, if only because the GBA plus a game costs less than the magic $100 psychological price point.

It is a fact Nintendo squashes misfires such as as the virtual boy, superscopre, power pad

Power Pad may have been a misfire, but the idea behind it has rebounded tremendously since then. Had Konami developed for the Power Pad, the revolution might have come much sooner, possibly back when DDR was still a country.

No, it doesn't make you an introvert. Just arrogant.

True, but it's like the geek hierarchy, as far as serious astronomers and authors are concerned, we slashdot posters aren't but a few evolutionary steps from the furries. :P