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The everything2 node for introvert has some interesting information and mentions Carl Jung, who invented this type of classification.

...it's because Bill Gates has mad warez skillz.

Well of course game rental profits are up. Have you rented a game lately? I rented Wario World last week and paid $7 for the opportunity. Then I beat the game - start to finish - with only five hours of play time. I remember back in the days of the NES paying $4 for a four day rental with extra days costing $0.50. The late fees now at more along the lines of $6 a day. High prices and short games leave a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to rentals.

Sure. Just ask anyone who has been on usenet for more than, oh, let's just say 10 years, give or take.

Don't forget to mention "The September that never ended".

If you think usenet is fine, you weren't there when it was fantastic. Sorry you missed it -- it was really something special.

Microsoft can't do anything to usenet that AOL (or Canter and Siegel) didn't do years ago.

Oh, hell. I'm turning into a bitter old man already.

Sure. Just ask anyone who has been on usenet for more than, oh, let's just say 10 years, give or take.

Don't forget to mention "The September that never ended".

If you think usenet is fine, you weren't there when it was fantastic. Sorry you missed it -- it was really something special.

Microsoft can't do anything to usenet that AOL (or Canter and Siegel) didn't do years ago.

Oh, hell. I'm turning into a bitter old man already.

And then Xerox gives up the technology, somebody else picks it up and makes a bundle.

Let's see... Mouse, GUI, Ethernet, Palm Graffiti, WYSIWYG word processors, and more

I'm sorry, I meant 0.1%. I forgot how accurate that was. Anyway, a 1% error would still be impressive without modern tools. Attempt to measure out 755 feet in 6-foot long blocks, and see how much of an error you end up with. I don't know about you, but I've definitely attempted to cut lengths of rope or fabric to the same length, and then when comparing after, I've had an error of about 1% or more.
Check out Great Pyramid of Giza@Everything2.com for more information.

Clitorides.

And yet, it's such a common practice. This is where the phrase "pour encourager les autres" came from.

"Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un admiral pour encourager les autres." -- Voltaire, Candide (ch. XXIII) (" In this country it is found necessary now and then to put an admiral to death in order to encourage the others.")

Voltaire was commenting on England's execution of Admiral Byng in 1757 for the "heinous crime" of, get this, not attacking hard enough in battle. They executed the man not because he disobeyed an order, but because he didn't obey quite well enough to suit them.

Malarkey? or Effective Way?

You mean like 1MB == 1024b?! Nah that's just too confusing, it'll never catch on.

Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.

Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/03/03

I can see where Taco is coming from: (Score:5, Funny) comments are often unoriginal and unintelligent. But some of them are outstandingly funny, AND Insightful/Informative to boot, so I still think it sucks.

We moderators can, of course, mod up these hybrids as something other than Funny, if they are truly worthy of other positive descriptors and the resultant karma boost. Some of the shallower humor is still dang funny (to me anyway), and it still deserves attention, but a distinct way to reward clever humor would be cool. I doubt that we could convince the powers that be to institute any new descriptors, such as "Insightfully Funny" or "Informatively Funny." I don't know if any of us would want any schema that barbarous (my names are at least outright barbarous. ;-)) Seriously, that plan doesn't sound very appealing to me, but it's the best attempt at a feeble try I can come up with at the moment. Any ideas, Slashdotters?

Of course, maybe I'm just miffed because I found out the day I got modded up as Funny (that particular comment was neither informative nor insightful, and not all that Funny anyway ;-)).

[While we're at it, maybe we can add "Karma Whore" for all those 1337 masters of cut-and-paste ;-) (which is not to say that I don't find them useful).]

?Some of the comments were really positive. People were writing things like, ?I was like him in high school,?? Baio said. ?But a lot of them ? a disturbing number ? were incredibly mean-spirited. It made me mad. All of these people calling him ?fat-ass? or ?loser,? and it's completely hypocritical ? I mean, all the traffic was coming from technology sites, videogame sites, and ?Star Wars? and ?Star Trek? sites.

Good idea, but how about this: Only let the child watch a Disney movie based on a classic novel once he's read the novel. This way, he will learn how Disney writers distort the stories. That way, he won't be like "I don't get it" when he tries out A.I. and Pinocchio's Revenge, both of which refer to events in Carlo Collodi's novel that didn't appear in Disney's 1940 film adaptation.

Works out well and when he gets a good book he'll end up earning more TV time than he uses

Your child will probably see a Cingular commercial and demand that the earned minutes roll over from week to week.

And does he get credit for looking at magazines with pictures in them?

Interestingly, at new year, the chatterbox topic / MOTD at everything2 was "2003: Year of the Lawyer"

I'm not really sure you'd want to fertilize rainforest soil with bottled evil, though :)

stop coddling big business. Vote Libertarian!

"Paedophilia is not a crime, it just means you wanna fuck little kids; it's not the same as actually doing it."

And sometimes not even that. Most 'paedophiles' are entirely capable of having a nonsexual relationship with children, as evidenced by this interview, kindly noded on E2 by SharQ.

Van Eck phreaking applies to CRTs, not LCDs. Unless you really *want* to use a Compaq portable to draft your plans for world domination...

Not all stuff that matter is about "nerds". Have a little respect for acronyms that were around before you were.

BSD Code in Windows

Long story short, something is seriously stinking about those numbers. They defy common sense and just don't mesh at all with current market conditions.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Well of course -- I just s/*BSD/Mozilla/* from a "*BSD is dying" troll.

I was trying for +5 Funny, not +5 Informative...

Long story short, something is seriously stinking about those numbers. They defy common sense and just don't mesh at all with current market conditions.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Well of course -- I just s/*BSD/Mozilla/* from a "*BSD is dying" troll.

I was trying for +5 Funny, not +5 Informative...

Long story short, something is seriously stinking about those numbers. They defy common sense and just don't mesh at all with current market conditions.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Well of course -- I just s/*BSD/Mozilla/* from a "*BSD is dying" troll.

I was trying for +5 Funny, not +5 Informative...

I used to own both an old Indy and an Indigo2, both of which would be the equivilant of an 8086 in PeeCee computing terms..

Actually, no, they aren't. A more accurate comparison would be a P5 series processor at a similar clock rate.

You forget the several previous generations of machines such as the Indigo or the Personal Iris and they were drastically faster than an 8086... To find the first machines produced you have to go waaaaay back to 1983 and the Iris 1X00.

Feature request for Universe 2.0.

If you have a Feature Request for the next version, you can always post it here.

Politicans already overuse Pearl Harbor in situations where it is actually relevant, such as national defence. It's used for a catch phrase to mean if we let down our guard, we will be overwhelmed at any moment. It's a way to not explain exactly what they mean, which serves them well because the situation in intelligence gathering and warfare now is so different than it was in 1941.

So even using it in that context is a bit of a "Bavarian Fire Drill". Using the threat of a hacking attack and associating it with Pearl Harbor is even sillier. If this country faces a bad hacking attack, or major attempt on our internet infrastructure, what will it mean? I'll have to sklp read people's Live Journals for a few days? Some web pages will get defaces? Some banks records will get broken into? e-Mail will get choked with wormed messages? None of these things are very pleasent, but I don't think we will see a cyber attack that leaves thousands dead and billions of property smoking and burnt. In fact, I think comparing the effects of some "lost productivity" to an event like Pearl Harbor is somewhat tasteless.

"Regardless of how you dislike the embattled outcome of the last election it was *orderely*. There was no military coup, there was no mass unrest. It was orderly. A process was followed."

Ah yes. In fact, I think it was Kodos who once said, "I am looking forward to an orderly election tomorrow, which will eliminate the need for a violent blood bath."

I'm no lover of Ronald Reagon. In fact I think he was/is a dirty bastard (either intentionally, through stupidity, or through mental disease).

But I hate logical inconsistencies, so to keep us honest I have to comment:

"All Reagan did was kill MORE civilians by not allowed the Russian government to drop all the military posturing, thus taking even more the little money they had away from the people and putting it into the military (gee, sound a little familiar?)."

What makes you think that if the US *didn't* compete with the USSR, that the USSR *wouldn't* just use this "saved" money to further oppress its own people (for the record I think the "Star Wars" program was a complete waste of time and money, and did indeed make things more dangerous)? Do you think that the USSR would just throw up its hands and say "hey, I guess the americans give up, we win, ok, now let's become democratic?". Very naive. Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because the US is/was/can be wrong, doesn't remove all culpability from the USSR. It may very well be that in order to acheive a longer-term good, a more acute short-term bad must be endured. Of course this is a very dangerous slippery slope (who is to say what the long term good is, or the probability of accomplishing it, or the severity of the short term bad?), and therein lies the moral dilemma. But I think it is rather naive to assume that if we simple did the opposite a better result would occur (personally I think the only rational solution is diplomacy...god forbid the USSR didn't actually collapse economically on its own, then what would have happened?). If I were the USSR I would exploit any weakness I could to bring other countries under my umbrella, seeing as I was hemorrhaging money.

Committing a sexual assault in an online game should be an offence in the real world, because it has real-world effects. It could be dealt with in-game by giving the offender a really bad STD, in addition to in-game police. In a fantasy game, they could take a leaf from the Glorantha game world, and have the rapist transform into a hairy goat-headed monster (this doesn't always happen, but it can happen to repeat offenders).

Why did he do this? For his own personal notes on which pens were good (I guess important if you are frequently writing things).

It was mentioned that these were photocopied and re-photocopied to several generations. During that process it won't be readily apparent what pen he used... but it might show that some pens gave text that withstood the degredation of copying better than others.

Another possibility is that the quality of your thought may vary with the pen you use (seriously). Using a cheap ballpoint is an obvious distraction, but he may have been searching for more subtle correlations.

For my own writing, I have noticed that pens that write easily encourage me to get off topic (since writing seems to involve less effort, it is easy to talk myself into jotting out an extra paragraph or two on some tangent). Pens that are harder to write with get me in the mood to brute-force my way through a problem. Finding a good balance may help you optimize your flow

Article 16 - Right to Petition
Every person shall have the right to peacefully petition for the redress of damage, for the removal of public officials, for the enactment, repeal or amendment of laws, ordinances or regulations, and for other matters; nor shall any person be in any way discriminated against for sponsoring such a petition.

1. well, if you've been there 2 x 9 months, this'd be equivalent :)
   
2. well, I somehow agree with you but as I am French, I could also tell you they have some really valuable other aspects, like irony, self-criticism (what we call "remise en cause"), DIY, charm, good taste, humor and the ability not to feel outraged if somebody shout at them...
   

I think "libraries of congress" and "Voxwagon beetle" are more suitable terms... hey dude.. this HDD can store 0.69865 libraries of congress and that computer goes 1.79 times faster than your Civic :-P

Not as funny as you think: that is likely how the horsepower came to be...

There might be problems with letting US companies code things...

Psychologists who study online behavior say in-game spats and the visceral responses to them aren't surprising. With simulations becoming more lifelike, the line between real and fake is blurred.

Supposing for just a second that this game has managed to shape up and get playable in the past few months, and supposing that any Sims game were an adequate simulation of real life (which it doesn't), then Maxis seems to have involuntarily exposed its captive audience to Baudrillard's ideas from Simulacra and Simulation . Maybe being mean to people in a reality-template is as bad as the real thing--who would've thunk it? What if TSO karma carries over into real life? What if this is all the matrix anyway?!?

Or maybe it was a slow news day and the media is overthinking the situation.

Green means not ripe or spoiled? What do they teach you young people these days?! You obviously have never met the triple breasted whore of Eroticon Six.

I'm still wondering what the makers of the anime Serial Experiments Lain were smoking/sniffing at the time they produced such a bizarre series.

But it must have been similar to the Spice Melange or something close, mostly because S.E. Lain often resembles a dark-in-some-aspects prediction of what is coming for us... - Hadriven

This sort of explains why I was addicted to Everything2 for so long. I don't know if I buy that it's as bad as narcotics addicitons, though.

Actually, Throbbing Gristle was rumored to have used just such subsonic techniques at a few of their shows. Now that is crowd-hostile music.

As the grandparent mentioned, it's a "vibration."

See this e2node and the ones below it for a thorough debunking of the theory.

Tetris was a seperate licensing issue. Two groups thought they had the license. Tengen made a version of Tetris that nintendo later got pulled from the shelves. It's a shame, as Tengen's version was better than Nintendo's.

The Tetris licensing issue popped up again later, but as The Tetris Company's claims of copyright were picked apart by armchair jurists, it was discovered that The Tetris Company had only the trademark on "TETRIS" to protect it. Tengen would probably have won the Tetris case (but not the lockout chip case) had it named its product something dissimilar to TETRIS®.

How is your job important to planet earth?

Congratulations if you know exactly what impact your job is having on the people of Belgium, but most people will never have that luxury - "how is anybody's job important to planet Earth?" If one person isn't doing a job, it doesn't get done. If we didn't have janitors, shit wouldn't get cleaned up. If we didn't have data entry technicians, data would remain unentered. I believe the list goes on. For the sake of a nail, the war was lost, and all that.

PS - Having a college degree (or even two) mean NOTHING about choosing your job. Sometimes the economy is just shite - and if you honestly believe that you will have a career you love because you're qualified for it and competent, then let me be the first to say Happy Birthday from Planet Motherfucker !

>Look me straight in the eye and tell me you've got several dictionaries spanning a significant period of time, and that you've compared the defintions of "theft" in all of them.

Is a few hundred years ok? Seems like a significant period of time, considering it covers the time span of all major revisions of copyright law (including having none for many countries).

[if you're wondering where I got most of these (apart from dictionary.com), check here]

1913's webster (available on www.everything2.com):

Theft (?), n. [OE. thefte, AS. i'ef[eth]e, f[eth]e, eof[eth]e. See Thief.]

1. Law The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.

2. The thing stolen.

[R.] If the theft be certainly found in his hand alive, . . . he shall restore double. Ex. xxii. 4.

There's no need to quote the current webster's -- it hasn't changed.

The American Heritage Dictionary, whose definition sucks and requires a recursive search (ho hum).

theft ( P ) Pronunciation Key (thft) n.
1. The act or an instance of stealing; larceny.
2. Obsolete. Something stolen.

larceny ( P ) Pronunciation Key (lärs-n)
n. pl. larcenies The unlawful taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of permanently depriving the owner; theft.

Merriam Webster (I'd do the OED, but I'm too lazy to type it in from the book, this should satisfy anyone but a kook):

Main Entry: theft
Pronunciation: 'theft
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English thiefthe, from Old English thIefth; akin to Old English thEof thief
Date: before 12th century
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
2 obsolete : something stolen
3 : a stolen base in baseball

1783 webster's American Spelling book (no definition for theft, sorry, this is the closest to it, but it clearly shows in 1783 the definition would have been the same)

Steal, to take away without liberty

Cambridge Dictionary of American English

theft noun [C/U] the act of taking something that belongs to someone else and keeping it; stealing car theft

1891 encyclopedia britannica

THEFT, the act of thieving or stealing. In English legal usage the practice is to call this act by its Norman-French name of "larceny," but properly theft is a wider term including other forms of wrongful deprivation of the property of another (see LARCENY).

[I'm starting to have fun here]

Webster's 1828 Dictionary

THEFT, n. The act of stealing. In law, the private, unlawful, felonious taking of another person's goods or movables, with an intent to steal them. To constitute theft, the taking must be in private or without the owner's knowledge, and it must be unlawful or felonious, that is, it must be with a design to deprive the owner of his property privately and against his will. Theft differs from robbery, as the latter is a violent taking from the person, and of course not private.

1. The thing stolen. Ex.22.

Oxford Paperback Dictionary and Thesauraus

theft /eft/ noun act of stealing.

burglary, larceny, pilfering, robbery, stealing, thievery.

larceny /"l:sn/ noun (plural -ies) theft of personal property. la

Why can't we once in a while have an interesting non-tech article here without getting hundreds of comments that do nothing but expressing their boredom?

Well, typically on a site that offers "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" we expect

Most people have gotten lazy and sloppy and only peruse /. for the cutting-edge (sorta) news, so they forget that it's important to teach geeks to use the language [English] properly. On that note, this discussion isn't exactly new--the linked article focuses heavily on post-01/11/09 misuses, but there's a couple of great writeups at e2 that address this same point quite well. If you're looking to hone verbal skills, lurk and read there for a while -- it's an educational experience.

Why can't we once in a while have an interesting non-tech article here without getting hundreds of comments that do nothing but expressing their boredom?

Well, typically on a site that offers "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" we expect

Most people have gotten lazy and sloppy and only peruse /. for the cutting-edge (sorta) news, so they forget that it's important to teach geeks to use the language [English] properly. On that note, this discussion isn't exactly new--the linked article focuses heavily on post-01/11/09 misuses, but there's a couple of great writeups at e2 that address this same point quite well. If you're looking to hone verbal skills, lurk and read there for a while -- it's an educational experience.

Why can't we once in a while have an interesting non-tech article here without getting hundreds of comments that do nothing but expressing their boredom?

Well, typically on a site that offers "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters" we expect

Most people have gotten lazy and sloppy and only peruse /. for the cutting-edge (sorta) news, so they forget that it's important to teach geeks to use the language [English] properly. On that note, this discussion isn't exactly new--the linked article focuses heavily on post-01/11/09 misuses, but there's a couple of great writeups at e2 that address this same point quite well. If you're looking to hone verbal skills, lurk and read there for a while -- it's an educational experience.

oof, princess superstar doesn't make up for anyone except Lolo Ferrari

- Americans are the fattest people in the world (on average).
- People who are fat tend to have a smaller penis.
- A small penis usually results in low self-esteem.
- Low self-esteem can be repaired by buying big SUVs, guns or fast computers OR by winning contests. An example of a contest is a sports event, a space race or even a war. Winning a war is probably the strongest boost by virtue of smacking down millions of people at once.

It turns out that one of the greatest warmongers of all time, Napoleon Bonaparte, had a very small penis. Measuring only 4.1 cm (1.6"), it's hardly surprising that the penis caused great malcontent among Napoleon's wives who sooner or later decided to break their vow. This certainly explains why Napoleon decided to spend most of his time away from home, far away from his unfaithful wives, in the presence of men begging for his mercy.

Another example is Hitler who is suspected of having a deformed penis. There are also reports that he had only one testicle. The low self-esteem that resulted from these defects might have resulted in Hitler's plan to conquer half the world. Fortunately, Hitler's testy plans faced his soldiers with insurmountable odds. Coupled with the fact that Hitler didn't have the balls to invade England early in the war, we can conclude that Hitler was an absolute nutcase.

Of course, these facts do lead to some inescapable questions:
- Will Viagra reduce the number of wars fought?
- Should we exempt 'Penis enlargement'-spam from anti-spam laws?
- What is wrong with the genitalia of the man who fought two wars during his first term in office (and seems to be hard at work preparing for another war)?
- Do we need a new poll?:

What is the size of your penis?
o Fighting a war already.
o Just planning.
o Gun nut.
o SUV owner.
o My PC rulez.
o I'm not an American, you insensitive clod.

Conker's Bad Fur Day (remember "The Great Mighty Poo"?).

Just a thought.