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Thanks to the Parker Pen Company.

(3.5G + V/2)/4(H2O)^3 + 3(360deg) = M

Viewable with proper formatting in link above.

Two favorite destinations for a flying fuck are a rolling doughnut and the moooooooon!

A trove of this glyph has been found in there. World shortage is solved, writers everywhere should thank the author.

Xavier

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1324427&cid=28936879

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183628&cid=15167528

http://everything2.com/title/%2524rtbl

Actually, I think a restaurant would be a quite acceptable end (or middle) for a retired Space Shuttle. Not-quite-parallel: a restaurant I had the chance to eat at just a few times in my life (too bad) is Haussner's, which dissolved as a business more than a decade ago when the next generation didn't want to run it, and squabbled.

http://everything2.com/title/Haussner%2527s
Hassner's http://www.boomzer.com/dx/haus.html

(The 2nd link also has an amusing list of Bawlmorese words.)

The point is, Haussner's was essentially an art gallery as much as a restaurant; not necessarily all to my taste, but a sort of happy shrine to the art. (And delicious spaetzle, too, and raw cherrystone clams, and and and.)

Also like the Space Needle in Seattle, or the (also now departed) cafeteria deep underground in Carlsbad Caverns; eating is an important thing in our lives, and IMO eating in interesting places helps amplify and deepen the experience. I would really enjoy eating in a space shuttle, with the chance to examine its living spaces and architecture. (At least, far more than eating in the baroque (rococo? - can't keep straight, and might be wrong anyhow) fancy-plasterwork-and-punchwork-ceilinged restaurants that are often held out as beautiful but to me seem like bad dreams, wrt decoration.)

Closer parallel: the 747-as-house http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/02/1057201.shtml -- the engineering is solid, why shouldn't it continue in a new and useful life, rather than only get pickled? (If there were only one, I might favor the pickling approach, it's true.)

Also, I would probably be happy to pay a premium to eat in a Space Shuttle, if I knew that part of the money thus raised was going to various Worthy Causes (in my estimation) related to space exploration, etc. For instance, I'd like to see John Carmack's private space ventures partly underwritten by a revenue stream based on the already-sunk tax-dollar-based engineering effort of the shuttle program ;) Such a restaurant could also go a great business in patches, commemorative pictures, etc.

Also also: http://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966

Cheers,

timothy

Sure it can. It's greatest flaw is that many rationalists believe that rational inquiry can eventually produce the complete truth about the nature of the universe, despite rigorous proof to the contrary (cf Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, etc etc).

Yes of course. And this always backfires too. When something comes up and science cannot (yet) explain it, the religious assholes start crawling out of the woodwork with that magnificent piece of baloney: "If science cannot explain it, it must be our (very-specific-and-he-has-a-name) god and/or our religious viewpoint that MUST explain it." In other words, when you set up the scientific method as the only thing that's valid as a method for discovering objective [i.e. reproducible, non-relative] truth (it probably is but we should try not to harp on that so much), then you run the risk of people actually taking that to mean that if science cannot explain it (yet), it must automatically mean that $your_gods_name$ is responsible for it.

While I agree with your conclusion (that we shouldn't deify the scientific method), I don't agree with your reasons. The theorems you mention above are possibly the most abused mathematical objects ever produced (with the possible exception of the rounded cylinder *cough*). For example, see here. I haven't seen an equivalent book for Heisenberg, but this give a general idea.

Just the fact that unprovable assertions can crop up in systems of logic does not imply that non-scientific proofs become valid. Nor does Heisenberg's principle say anything about scientific theories - it is limited to saying something about the the absolute minimum error in a physical measurement. It's only possible relevance to producing "the complete truth about the nature of the universe" might be that in empirical verifications of scientific theories, there will always be a minimum uncertainty in those measurements and in that sense a tiny ambiguity as to whether the theory is correct. In practice, competing theories differ in predictions by MUCH more than this minimum uncertainty so that while the uncertainty principle is useful (for many many things), it is effectively negligible as far as the question of science being able to explain everything is concerned.

If the scientific method fails (and that happens, nothing's done overnight - it takes time), 'talking out of my ass' (or from some long dead guy's ass - as is usually the case), is not an automatic substitute). This is the fallacy that is born when we make the scientific method (which is good working rule, no more, no less) into some cosmic, mystic gift from the heavens that will always work - the idea that when science fails at something, anything else can immediately take its place with no necessity for further analysis - because after all, only science has standards for truth - no other source of knowledge needs to, right?

Except that the program was a hoax that promised to turn a 386DX-40 into a 486DX/2-66. Read the documentation that came with it for some real laughs.

I especially loved this bit of bullshit here

What this program does, is, it adds a mini TSR program into
a protected memory area and this RESIDENT program acts as a CPU,
it analyses the program being run and takes over the work, does
its own calculations, compresses the program in memory, changes
certain commands, all in realtime! All this frees up your
regular CPU. So your regular CPU does its chores and the
EMULATED CPU does its work too. It's like having a math co-processor,
but in this case it's a CPU co-processor.

I love how in Drupal everything is simply a node, so I can create products to sell, and using views make some decent categories, create a side-bar with top sellers, create an news feed of new products, etc.

Except that in basic drupal, not everything is a node. For example, taxonomy elements are not node objects unless you install the category module, which is beta code. Users are not node objects, and the user node module seems to be gone these days. Themes and modules are not node objects, though they richly deserve to be. If you want everything to be a node, you need to try The Everything Engine. And then you need to suffer with mod_perl.

When i used a store module, I am creating products, not content.

Is that why the default menu options created for adding content are in a menu called "Create Content"?

put enough monkeys on typewriters and you'll get shakespeare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem_in_popular_culture)

And someone started such a simulator : http://everything2.com/title/Monkey+Shakespeare+Simulator That's what you use this for. And Pr0n.

they take what should be an encyclopedia filled with -everything-

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia filled with everything. If you want that, there's always E2. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia ideally filled with everything verifiable to a consensus of scholarly and mainstream media sources.

Also, Dude..."Chinaman" is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.

It's hard to tell which parts of this comments are tongue-in-cheek and which are sincere.

Given this, I'll point out that many- well, actually the vast majority of- "chinamen" (whether that's an acceptable term or not) are not and have never been "American" in any sense.

It reminds me of this article.

Also, while it might be *your* (i.e. Americans') socially accepted term, it's still pretty stupid- such usage of "Asian" is neither accurate nor universal. Asia is a large continent with many different peoples, and I don't see how "Asian" referring specifically to East Asians is helpful. At least the now-disliked term "oriental" was more specific in that respect.

Also, in Britain, "Asian" typically means South Asian ethnicity, i.e. from the Indian subcontinent. No more inclusive, but no less valid than the American usage- while being totally different.

It's not even like the nitpicky discussions over the term "American" that erupt periodically on Slashdot- English usage has standardised on that (cf. "North America"/"North American" and "The Americas"), which just isn't the case with "Asian".

Solids *can* be shut off

I read up on the subject since you mentioned it. And guess what? Those solids can't be turned off. Thrust termination doesn't stop the motor, it merely redirects the thrust so it's no longer producing net thrust. As it turns out, the Shuttle does practice thrust termination when it jettisons the SRBs (turning their residual thrust into net zero for the vehicle)

Having said that, I have heard of a newish technology for solid motors where the propellant is almost a self-sustaining burn. They provide an electrical current to the burn region in order to keep the propellant burning. You cut the current and the motor eventually cuts out.

This is pretty good as Lovecraft fan fiction goes. I'm reminded of a very short piece I wrote a long time ago:

http://www.everything2.com/title/Ye+Old+Lovecraftian+Bake+Shoppe

They already kissed and made up over Dave Cutler making NT a little too similar to VMS. See conclusion at and of article. http://everything2.com/title/The+similarities+between+VMS+and+Windows+NT

http://www.everything2.com/title/Stop+killing+me+now

Requires some knowledge of the many worlds interpretation or the anthropic principle though.

Of course, according to MWI, you are killed all the time even without the LHC. After all, if it can happen, and be it with absurdly low probability, then it will happen in some world. There are worlds where the whole earth collapses into a black hole not because of some LHC experiment, but just due to an unusually large quantum fluctuation. There are worlds where is just happens that no oxygen molecule finds its way into your nose for several minutes, and you suffocate. There are worlds where the nucleons in your body just tunnel into a new configuration, and you turn into a block of lead. Or into a heap of gold dust. There are worlds where an asteroid hits you just now, and others where an earth-destroying asteroid just hits. And there are worlds where all that happens at the same time.

http://www.everything2.com/title/Stop+killing+me+now

Requires some knowledge of the many worlds interpretation or the anthropic principle though.

NESticle == NES emulator. Surely I'm not the only one into classic gaming.

NESticle has been far surpassed by FCEUX and Nestopia. Even FCE Ultra, which is in the Ubuntu repository, is way ahead of NESticle. It takes literally four lines of code for an NES program to determine whether it's running on NESticle.

640x480 == Again, classic gaming.

I imagine that the excuse is that Free games can be ported to run natively in Linux at the native resolution of the LCD panel to which the computer is connected, and that's at least 1024x600 pixels for anything sold within the past couple years. Such a port can even upscale sprite cels algorithmically without making them look too crappy. Non-free games cannot be distributed with Ubuntu.

Dialup == Needed for use in hotels without highspeed connections.

I thought that's what phone tethering or MiFi was for. Even 2G EDGE is faster than dial-up.

A long time ago, some of the people behind Slashdot created Everything2, one of the first massively collaborative writing projects. Some people like myself used to write encyclopedic articles on E2, but they kind of trailed off as Wikipedia picked up steam following this Kuro5hin article, leaving people who wrote more subjective, opinionated articles and even fiction. Should Wikipedia disappear, would people flock back to E2?

Huh, insitefull?

Sark666 can't pick a random number either, he just thinks he can.

Don't believe me, it's easy to tell a list of 'random' numbers generated by a human from a real list of random number.

"OK. The way to distinguish real random sequences from human-generated ones is to look for a place on the list where there are at least six heads or tails entries in a row. Almost everyone who tries to fake the tosses fails to include a run of such length, yet it is almost a statistical certainty that it will occur in a sufficiently large number of tosses. Using 200 flips, roughly 98% of the entries should have such a sequence of at least six consecutive heads or tails."

goggled distinguishing "human generated" random number list from real random number

Yes, apparently so. Still, this is an absolutely mindless level of stupidity on its face. Whatever the reasons are, any reasons that add up to this situation are ridiculous. This level of mindless adherence to the illusions of order can have only one response. He should have not blacked out their phone numbers... because it leaves me calling for a JAKE!

Thinking this shouldn't wait unti Jake day. How about valentine's day, so they know its being done out of love?

These students don't actually know English, Shakespeare did, the comparison is false.

I don't know. At the time of Shakespeare, there really wasn't an exact set of English grammatical rule books.

Or that many books that were in the English vernacular in a sense compared to today (books were rare and almost worth their weight in silver and even then they were usually in Latin or French) in so much that Shakespeare could take quite a liberty in "making up words".

In that regards, he was a master and would have made any modern day grammar nazi cringe.

All we had was sets. And if we complained, von Neumann came and beat us with his curly braces!

One of the first when I investigate an "active content" technology is what kind of game can be implemented with it. For example, Tetris has always needed at least non-blocking input, a fairly reliable timer, and repainting existing screen elements. But due to more recent changes to the Tetris Guideline, it also requires audio support to play sound effects and the "Korobeiniki" song. Racing games need volume and pitch controls to play engine noise, and rhythm games need synchronization among audio, animation, and input.

Ah yes, standing on a mountaintop in northern Siberia under the rapidly descending bulk of asteroid McAlmont with a calculating expression and a baseball bat. It will be a good day to die.

Sega sold them domestically (US) in 1988 for the Master System. That's 22 years ago now, at mass market, for 50 bucks.

http://everything2.com/title/SegaScope+3D+Glasses

Nope. It is impossible, even at the most basic theoretical level, to predict everything. Basic physics theory shows that it is impossible to even just measure everything to an arbitrary degree of precision regardless of what instrumentation you may have. Go back and read your Heisenberg.

Actually, while complete measurement may be impossible, it does not mean that the actual underlying mechanics are not deterministic. In fact, superdeterminism is considered a viable explanation of Bell's inequality that avoids ruling out a completely deterministic universe by abandoning any notion of free will in performing an experiment.

You can read a longer explanation here.

http://everything2.com/title/HTH+HAND

Here is a collection of references. See also Readers Write: How Microsoft got Windows NT, Everything2: The similarities between VMS and Windows NT and Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story (use googlebot useragent to view full story).

DEC did sue Microsoft, but they settled for royalties.

Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem (source)

This may also be a reference to the Star Trek: TNG (and beyond) writers' penchant for basing solutions on creatively-worded technobabble, in contrast to the real-world, personal grounding of most Babylon 5 resolutions.

example:

TNG: "We'll rewire the impulse flux capacitors to create an inverse tachyon pulse which should easily solve this episode's near-lethal problem!"

B5: "We'll bring the two sides to the negotiating table again, and after five episodes worth of assassinations, heated arguments, and military fleets appearing at inopportune moments, we'll reach a resolution that is just barely acceptable to everyone, at least until three episodes down the timeline when it will all fall to pieces."

So a specifically-worded example of this law in practice might be "A quasi-symmetric graviton polarity beam will be ineffective and counterproductive when used in an effort to convince the Centauri Republic to end its collaboration with the Shadows."

Television has any number of tropes.

One of them is the idea that human nature doesn't change over time. You get the same basic plotlines in pro wrestling, daytime soap operas, evening emo teenybopper soaps (buffy, angel, etc), scifi series... the only difference is the trappings of the medium.

Of course, the same has been said about literature. People argue about the number of basic plots, but the theory - that if you look long enough, you'll find something that you are repeating "close enough". The same is also true in music, especially since the nonmusical fools involved in US judicial decisions and copyright law have made decisions that make the number of possible melodies extremely limited (and most of those mathematical possibilities also happen to be atonal shit that would make a Yoko Ono concert sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in comparison).

You want to attack Star Trek for "not focusing on" the technology? TV shows sell themselves on the actors, pure and simple. Without characters, you don't have story, and at best you get rotten shit like Star Wars Episode 1.

This older writeup describes a similar idea:

http://www.everything2.com/title/CERN+and+the+Anthropic+Principle

that no matter how hard they try to 'break' someones ability to do something, those someones will quickly circumvent that 'break' in the system, if they wish to. Makes me flash back to the days of the T-shirts with the DeCSS code written right upon it, and all the controversy about them. Also the tshirts that printed with the PGP (probably also gpg)code that were considered munitions by the US government. Makes me chuckle, makes me sad. It's a mad world, to quote Tears for Fears (though I think I adore Jules version more). There are plenty of other examples, from recording a videotape to another, using analog methods (which to me seems one of the easiest and first methods to break most digital methods of 'breakage', though the quality does suffer, in many peoples opinions.)
I really don't forsee a day when people will quite hacking the 'breaks' in systems. Isn't that what they are there for in the first place? Why not spend all those research dollars into the improvement of the platform itself? Or finding new exciting artists? Etc...

It's not the rate of energy release that is an issue, but rather energy density. There's also no reason why a high density (or high capacity) battery would be any less safe than low density batteries. I mean, most people are perfectly comfortable driving around in their cars, which has far more energy stored in its fuel tank than any fully-charged laptop battery—not to mention being far more volatile as well.

Put it another way: would you be worried walking around with a piece of charcoal in your pocket? The energy density of a li-ion battery is 540 kilojoules per kilogram. The energy density of coal is 24 megajoules per kilogram. Oh, and a kilogram of fat? that's 37.7 megajoules. So batteries have quite a ways to go.

There's no reason why we can't come up with high energy density batteries that are safe, stable, and release their energy in a controlled manner. Perhaps it can't be done with li-ion technology, but I'm sure it can be done. We just need some new breakthroughs in battery technology. But these types of revolutionary technological changes can only be effected by new knowledge gained through basic research. Unfortunately, most government funding seems to go into applied research these days.

Lastly, if you're still worried about carrying "too much energy" around in your pocket in the form of an electricity, just remember that E=mc^2. So a single gram of material of any form carries 89.87 terajoules of energy. So even an uncharged 1 ounce cellphone battery possesses 2.5 petajoules of energy, or about the same amount of energy as 41 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs.

Forget your fantasy world; there is no "fairness scheme" in international politics. There is your National Interest, whoever you are, period.

And my point is that so long as we ignore "fairness", it is in every nation's National Interest to be a nuclear power, because that is the only way to be safe from nuclear attack. As you note "Your National Interest includes being able to defend yourself [and] deter aggressors." Iran, for example, fears -- with legitimate reason -- an attack by the U.S. or Israel. What is the only thing it can do to deter such an attack? Get a nuke. Aggressive action against states that try to obtain nuclear weapons only provides stronger motivation for them and others to want nuclear weapons. It is an example of what Discordians call the Law of Eristic Escalation.

Again, where we can act to prevent proliferation, we should.

The point is that we cannot prevent it under the current scheme.

We cannot prevent proliferation so long as it remains in developing nation's interests to have nukes. So long as the great powers have nukes -- and act aggressively -- it will remain in those nations interests to get them too.

Only if we disarm (again, with possibly a handful of weapons being kept under international control as a final deterrent for lunatics), only if we set an example of reducing our ability to be aggressive, can we make it against the national interest

The non-proliferation strategy we have pursued for decades, of "we can have them but can't", has failed. When the NPT was first signed in 1968, there were five states with nuclear weapons. There are now nine, an 80% increase. Massive fail.

everything squared... it's either post nonsense or do dishes and cook brunch.

Modding me down won't make you right.

And whining about it won't make you right.

Modding me down won't make you right.

As long as it's not Little, Yellow, Different...

ie. You can't contribute knowledge to the Wikipedia... only regurgitated leavings from other websites. It's just a dreary collection of the web predigested by a wasp hivemind mindset hiding behind the mask of NPOV.

So they have just added another layer to enforce that fundamental limitation further. So what. Try everything2 instead.

Or just about any place.

I never write anything down anymore... I just lose the paper on my desk anyway. When I find out something I want to remember, I write it on the web somewhere anywhere and let google index it for me.

Note to self: portablexdr is the name of the lgpl xdr library I want to use.

"Unlike trannies (no offense intended to any TG folk reading this), we intersexed people do not choose to be in the situation we are in."

I'm not sure if you're using those phrases to refer to just cross dressers or to transsexuals as well... but I can tell you for a fact that transsexuals don't choose to be in the situation they're in. (I gather cross dressers don't either, but the main difference here is that with transsexuals, your brian and body actually don't match, so it's to do with your gender and your physical sex, not at all about your sexuality. A better analogy might actually be comparing transsexuals to people who feel they should be amputees. It's all about the brain's genuine self-image.)

I'm probably not that articulate about this right now, but I've written a personal piece about this, Transitioning, and a story about it, Identity.

Why is this on Slashdot, then? This is some obscure blogger/columnist deliberately singling out a movie with a sizely fanbase, using a controversial headline and nitpicking at inconsequential details to draw attention.

You can do that with any single movie out there, including 2001 which was pretty damn near accurate. They just are not made to be accurate. They are made to entertain. And, lo, I was entertained.

It's not even that the guys writes badly, he just writes about nothing of consequence at all. Someone should pull out the cork.

A nice little article on why it's useless to know pi to more than 50 digits in this universe.
http://everything2.com/title/Too%2520small%2520a%2520Universe%2520to%2520memorize%2520Pi

It's not as simple as that, unfortunately. Say you need an estimation of pi for an initial value of a chaotic dynamical system. Depending on how far ahead in time you need to approximate the solution of this dynamical system (and how accurate you want that approximation) you could potentially need pi to arbitrary precision. The problem is that while the initial error may be tiny, it builds over time. I don't have a specific example (or usage scenario), but chaotic systems appear in many applications.

We already tried that. It failed. :-(

How can you know if you're abusing a monopoly position if you don't know whether or not you're a monopoly?

That's easy, if you're requiring OEMs to pay for a license for every PC sold whether your software is installed on it or not, that's abuse. Or if you require railroads to ship only your oil, or charge competitors more to ship their oil. Which is what Rockefeller did with his Standard Oil.

Those are obvious cases though, other cases would be harder to judge. To me it it's anti-competitive then it's abusive. And no, dropping prices is not anti-competitive. There are at least two ways to compeat, on price or on quality. Of course there could be competition on features as well as others.

Falcon

NT was about as much like VMS as Linux is like OS/2 Warp.

The architectures of VMS and NT are very, very similar.

Which is neither surprising nor damning, given the same person was one of the main designers of both.

Throw in the enormous growth in the economy and stronger antitrust laws (I'm pretty sure that Microsoft faced stronger enforcement than Standard Oil)

If Microsoft had faced as strong an enforcement as Standard Oil it would have been broken up, Standard Oil was. Here's a list of some of the companies that came from the breakup of Standard Oil. A few of those companies are some of the largest businesses in the US.

What may amaze some now is that Republican Teddy Roosevelt was known as the Trust Buster and was who led the effort to break up Standard Oil.

Falcon

"In 1992, GRiD released another tablet PC called the GRiD 2260 Convertible. This version now had better software/application support in the form of the Windows for Pen Computing operating system. It used a 386 processor in its base model or a 486 processor in its pricier configuration. The GRiD 2260 also had an attached keyboard that swung on hinges and could be clipped around back. "

(emphasis mine) That's just their first convertable. Their first tablet was the Gridpad 1900 in 1989. http://everything2.com/title/GRiD%2520Computer%2520Systems

An interesting thing I find here so far, though, is that there's so many people decrying the antitrust investigation of Google for being "too successful" but going on about how Microsoft should go under an antitrust investigation for being...too successful.

If that's what you "find", then you're not doing an honest job of looking.

Maps are the presentation of data, not the data itself.

I have put enough front ends on databases to know that it's not much of a distinction. And likely to be less relevant as more maps become software allowing multiple views of the same data, not paper. Also, it's worth noting that the watermarks seem to be added to maps at the database not the presentation.

Are there any purely electric space propulsion systems?

If you're talking about attitude of a spacecraft in orbit, then as a matter of fact, there are purely electric systems: magnetic torquers. Lots of satellites use them, including Hubble.