Slashdot Mirror

• Throbbing Gristle was rumoured to have played around with their harmonics in such a way during one or two shows that their audiences experienced uncontrollable vomiting and presumably a loss of control of other bodily functions (heh).
• A more general overview of "aural warfare" projects that were rumoured to have taken place is available here.

In a list of top business ideas, I'm a little suprised they missed the Black-Scholes Formula. While few outside of the financial have heard of it, this Nobel prize-winning development revolutionised the world of finance. It was (and is) a way of finding the fair price for options contracts, a problem that experts had been trying to solve for most of the century. It was revolutionary because it was the first one that actually worked and as such utterly changed the balance of risks involved with these financial transactions. The model was eventually extended to cover other instruments. Professors Black and Scholes later changed the world in another, less appealing way. They were behind the spectacular failure that was Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), proving, if anything, that their models were not entirely flawless.

Posted by CmdrTaco on 14:51 Friday 12 December 2010
from the watch-out-for-space-junk-dept
Sorry about the downtime and thanks for your patience while we've been getting our new SSS (Slash Satellite Server) [operating code relased under gpl4] back online. Seems that a Microsoft Repair Tool (a 3 meter hammer) collided with the main antenna last Wednesday. Now, I know many of you have claimed sabotage, but as Microsoft has only placed 11 satellites around ours it seems to indicate we are a minor threat and they are probably not trying to drive us out of space. Update: 12/12 17:30 GMT by Hemos: Interesting photos can be found at an undisclosed location(TOS), while we converse about possible legal proceedings against the MS-AOL-TIME-MPAA-SONY-MCDONALD-INTEL corporation.

1. Sleep Less, Live Longer
2. Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity

So if our troops want to live longer and think better, they need to stop sleeping right now. If the sounds of enemy gunfire on the battlefields doesn't keep them awake, I'm not too sure how effective these drugs will be, though...

Maybe they should read this little bit about how to stay awake at work and hope for the best.

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Or Disney's Pinocchio 2.0: Let's See How Bad We Can Screw Up The Plot And/Or Theme Of The Story This Time.

(Interesting tidbit: In the ending of The Adventures of Pinocchio, a novel by Carlo Collodi, it isn't 100% clear that the whole story isn't all a dream, just like that season of TV's "Dallas".)

As far as I know, American McGee's Alice is the closest that EA has come to playing around with classic tales.

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Gimmick Promotions
These centre around some kind of novelty, such as an email attachment game, interactive section to the website, 'special offer' requiring you to 'recommend' the email addresses of friends in order to get a discount. In terms of generating traffic these can be the most productive tactics. Many variations on this exist, and chances are you've received or seen some form of it at some time, athough you may not be aware of it.

This is closer to what I was referring to when I posted the original story. Or to put it another way:-

Eventually the attachments got to some exec in advertising who, instead of worrying about their copyright being ripped off, realised that if they could get people to forward their adverts to each other they could save a hell of a lot on airtime and look cool in the bargain without worrying about the censors. Bingo.

My understanding was that once a sucessful viral campaign was under way, it would become self-sustaining thereby opening up the possibility of exposure to a load more eyeballs...

In short, it's the practice of having people post "reviews" or "opinions" into usenet/forums/irc, that are actually paid adverts by the company.

From that page: This isn't like traditional spam, as it's not repetitive or obvious. Some attempts are made to make the posts appear 'genuine'.

Cheers,
Your Friendly Karma Whore.

Here is a better definition of the term "viral marketing". What are your thoughts on this subject?

Er, you just pointed to the everything2.com homepage. And while that is an example of HOW viral marketing is carried out, I think your primary intent was to point to the everything2 definition, which is here:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=605630

BTW, I think Miyamoto had to be on drugs when he invented Mario.

Were you thinking of this?

In other news, RIAA members secretly disguised as Slashdot editors have discovered that by posting the same message 156 times, it's equivalent to 421 real messages. Seven hundred and twenty slashdot posters posted comments to the story, saying 'Unsubscribe', with fifteen others instead taking the side of 'Unsubscirbe'.

CowboyNeal was quoted as saying, "It's just what we need for a slow news day. I mean, 0.2% of readers won't notice the difference, but when you've got eleven million readers, that's still a sizeable figure."

CmdrTaco|Away was unavailable for comment.

Doesn't "Google" use as a verb dilute its trademark value? (Something like that happened to Xerox).

I beleive it's an allusion to comedian Yakov Smirnoff of 80s fame. Back then he had a one dimensional routine about the absurdities of the failing USSR, where many of the jokes began with what you quote. Why the latest slashdot crazy about it, I don't know, though I seem to remember it being mentioned in some post recently.

See also

1. The "plot dev^H^H^H nexus" was the most contrived thing I have ever seen. It was a construction whose sole purpose, it seems, was to allow the plot to unfold as it did.

HERESY! A plot device used soley to advance the plot? It's almost as if this is the exact definition of a plot device! I am absolutely beside myself with selfrightous indignation.

It's a FSM synchronization problem not a datastructures problem. That means you aren't looking at how to arrange the soldiers or even how they communicate with each other. You are looking for a finite state "program" that each soldier runs that will run starting from the time they receive the message and at whose termination they fire.

Pinocchio - Grim

The Adventures of Pinocchio is not by the Grimm Bros. but rather by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini. You can read about Collodi, or read an English translation of Pinocchio .

books in the Public Domain that have been hijacked by Disney, and are aggressively defended by them.

The Walt Disney Company does not own the rights to the novel Pinocchio or to the name "Pinocchio". DisneyCo owns only the copyright on its film adaptation[1], including the likenesses of the characters as drawn by Disney animators, and has no grounds to prevent other publishers' film adaptations of the original novel. DisneyCo most definitely does not own the rights to "Noddy", a character created by Enid Blyton that may have been inspired by Pinocchio.

The Jungle Book - Kipling

Which exemplifies . No less than one year after The Jungle Book went PD in a major market, DisneyCo published a film adaptation. The company was obviously waiting for the copyright to run out. Now DisneyCo has closed the door behind itself by pushing copyright term extensions through Congress.

Peter Pan

NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN WORLDWIDE! The European Union recognizes a monopoly on literary works for the life of the last surviving author, plus the remainder of the calendar year, plus 70 years. Because J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, died in 1937, copyright in Peter Pan does not expire in the European Union until 2007, and DisneyCo has to pay GOSH a royalty for every Peter Pan and Return to Never Land disc sold in the EU. In fact, the United Kingdom has granted a statutory perpetual copyright on the work, with royalties going to a children's hospital.

[1] DisneyCo may lose even that if the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft happens to strike down the 1976 extension along with the Bono Act.

They programmed Tetris and Space Invaders for their console using a system they call CASM.

In Soviet Russia, Alexey Pajitnov invented Tetris.

In the United States of America, The Tetris Company will sue you if your game's name is too similar to "Tetris".

There's nothing wrong with expecting to make a living off music (or writing code, or books, or whatever), the problem arises when you expect to make millions off it.

Some artists (most of the so-called nu-metal scene spring to mind) seem to be more interested in the money than the music, just like many dotcommers were more interested in the money than the technology. That's when it crosses the line between wanting economic security and petty greed. I would love nothing more than to make a living off playing my bass, writing code or making computer graphics, but I don't need a big mansion or ten cars and a thousand groupies (of course, bass players are cursed by God anyway, and never get groupies, groupies can sense such things).

Some artists just want to make music, and it'd be a bonus if it's enjoyed by lots of people. These tend to be the folks who don't give a flying fuck about their music being traded on P2P networks (although they often release through small labels, who are hit harder by filesharing than Sony and BMG -- let's face it, many filesharing fans don't buy what they've already downloaded). Others want the fame, riches and glory associated with the popular media representation of a musician, and will happily sell their souls to the highest bidder to fulfill that particular dream.

Most of the music I listen to is published by small labels, and I don't use P2P because I want to help keep the small labels alive. Paradoxically, the big ones are the ones most actively combating so-called piracy, but they are also the ones most financially resistant to it. Of course, it may be because they fear obsoletion, and 'piracy' is a good smokescreen to put up while they're destroying online music distribution.

/me removes his tinfoil hat

IMHO It could also be a life insurance policy. Think about it, although Machiavelli's insights onto how to run a kingdom were not widely availible (The Prince wasn't written until 1513 the same year that Da Vinci died) there was enough backstabbing and evil to go around in DaVinci's day. What's to stop the local prince (or would-be prince) from killing or torturing the man himself and stealing all his books and papers. Only the fact that without him the designs are useless. If you want the weapons then you'll need the man, alive, well, and on your side not in your dungeon.

IMHO It could also be a life insurance policy. Think about it, although Machiavelli's insights onto how to run a kingdom were not widely availible (The Prince wasn't written until 1513 the same year that Da Vinci died) there was enough backstabbing and evil to go around in DaVinci's day. What's to stop the local prince (or would-be prince) from killing or torturing the man himself and stealing all his books and papers. Only the fact that without him the designs are useless. If you want the weapons then you'll need the man, alive, well, and on your side not in your dungeon.

Offer prizes.

You're joking, right?

The state-run lottery ALWAYS pays off its winners, and thanks to the fairly transparent nature of its government management, I know that people actually win. I won't play that.

An ad banner telling me I can win if I click is assumed at its most honest to have the odds of a $100M lottery and the payout of the trinket crane at the arcade. At worst, nobody wins anything and the "contest" is just an excuse to harvest marketing info for spammers and to generate leads for fraudulent telemarketing.

TANSTAAFL. I know it and so does everybody else. Offering contests is a great way to cheapen a brand, not enhance it.

what if they want to read it through a brail reader? This method might be faster then text to speach.

According to this page, a blind user behind text-to-speech can read roughly three times as fast (150 wpm) as a blind user can read Braille text (50 wpm).

I discuss the accessibility implications of CAPTCHAs in this writeup on Everything 2.

Arguing about who is right in the daily battles obscures the underlying reality.

We can debate "the underlying reality" if you like, but "the superficial reality" is that on one side you have suicide bombers targeting random families and on the other side you have police and soldiers trying to target the suicide bombers. Religion has nothing to do with it, most people are going to see one side as the bad guys and the other side as the good guys.

The fact is that the land of Israel was populated with Arabs before the Jews came. Arabs were moved off the land to make room for Jews.

If the jewish refugees showed up with guns and shipped people off in trains it's the first I've heard of it.

I'm not an expert on history, so feel free to clear up any errors here: For the most part the current population of Israel was born there. I think that's enough to pretty much end it, but I'll continue. The people who immigrated to the area for the most part did so legally, right? It's not like they showed up with guns and broke in. They mostly bought homes, or bought land and paid to have homes built, right? Possibly some of them settled on unused land? (Even in that case, if it was the US they would gain rightful ownership of the land after some number of years.) At some point the vast majority of the population of the area decided modify their government and call it Israel. Pretty much every nation on earth has recognized that government.

Are you suggesting that Israel shouldn't exist? Maybe several million people should be be "driven into the sea"? All Israelis? Or just the jewish ones? You did say they want you to kill them, right?

Osama bin Laden's main complaint is U.S. support for the House of al Saud.

I don't know much about Saudi government. Did the US overthrow the recognized government and install the current government? Or was the current government already the recognized official government?

He wants Saudis to determine their own fate. Logically, U.S. citizens must support that

Have free elections been blocked by the US? Or are you proposing a violent overthrow of the current government? If you're proposing violent revolution you have a pretty tough hurdle to overcome to persuade me, and you'd better have a pretty solid majority of the population demanding it. And even if I agreed with you that a revolution was appropriate, dealing with the current legitimate government would still fall into a grey area.

Ten years ago a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.

I now want to spark up my interest in music again as I want to broaden my horizons, and I figure the best way to do it is with my PC.

If you reproduce a copyrighted musical work on your computer without authorization, you commit the crime of copyright infringement.

If, when writing a song, you unconsciously copy from an existing copyrighted musical work, you commit copyright infringement.

If, when writing a song, you create a melody similar to that of an existing copyrighted musical work, even by coincidence, a music publisher with billions of dollars in the bank may take legal action against you. If you have no money with which to hire legal counsel to defend you against an allegation of copyright infringement, you're in deep doo-doo.

I'd suggest staying the heck away from music unless you plan only to cover classical pieces first published before January 1, 1923.

The problem here is that ever since Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad corporations have been considered, legally, as a 'natural person'.

This, even though the largest corporations possess monitary power far and above that of the vast, vast majority of the rest of the citizenry and in some cases span hundreds of countries in their global operations.

Laws like the current campaign finance reform attempt wouldn't be necessary if we didn't have to try and stop Smith, Smith and Nobody from donating millions of dollars to pet issues that in many cases don't even directly impact American citizens each and every election cycle.

Until we sit up and realize the danger inherent in assigning 'natural person' status and the rights that go along with that status to entities who's sole reason for existence is profit-making (with zero social responsibility) we'll continue struggling with legal ways in which to make these distinctions and we will always fail.

The current law deserves to be shot down. A citizen should be able to spend as much as he or she wishes to spend and say whatever they wish in the forum of their choice. The problem is that we've given this same power to souless corporate entities who've proven over and over again a bald-faced willingness for abuse.

Meaningful dialog on campaign finance reform is doomed to failure as long as we consider human beings and corporations as equals under the law.
-j

This is the ghost in the machine myth. Many believe that human intelligence is somehow "special" in a way that mechanical devices can't be, as if the brain were made of more than mere matter that follows predictable laws of physics. It's a common view. I would wager that >90% of the population believes it. Virtually every religion embraces and teaches it, either explicitly or implicitly. People want to believe that their identity is somehow transcendent to the universe.

We've seen this before with vitalism: people used to be convinced that living matter was somehow "special" and different than non-living matter in a fundamental way that dips below physics. Now we know that organic life is just a special arrangement of atoms that allows those atoms to be self-replicating.

Obviously, a living cell is a particulary complex arrangements of atoms. The difference between the animate and the inanimate is huge: we relate to grizzly bears much differently than we do to a pile of rocks. Prehaps this is why our intuition is so misinformed... it's not representationally meaningful to think of a grizzly bear as being composed of dirt, air, and water, even though it is.

The same thing applies to intelligence. We have every indication that brains cause minds. We've mapped which areas of the brain correspond to which areas of functionality. Emotions can be altered predictably with drugs. Every aspect of a near death experiences (NDE) can be triggered with chemicals, sensory deprivation (IIRC), a sharp blow to the head, or something mundane and physical. Ultimately, the experience known as self and the sensation of free will boil down to being just a special set of computations that can run on any Turing Machine or x86 with enough memory.

Of course, the complexity difference b/t you and an Unreal bot is several orders of magnitude. It's not representationally meaningful for me to think of you as the same thing... there's just not as much satisfaction in fragging a bot. :-)

This is the ghost in the machine myth. Many believe that human intelligence is somehow "special" in a way that mechanical devices can't be, as if the brain were made of more than mere matter that follows predictable laws of physics. It's a common view. I would wager that >90% of the population believes it. Virtually every religion embraces and teaches it, either explicitly or implicitly. People want to believe that their identity is somehow transcendent to the universe.

We've seen this before with vitalism: people used to be convinced that living matter was somehow "special" and different than non-living matter in a fundamental way that dips below physics. Now we know that organic life is just a special arrangement of atoms that allows those atoms to be self-replicating.

Obviously, a living cell is a particulary complex arrangements of atoms. The difference between the animate and the inanimate is huge: we relate to grizzly bears much differently than we do to a pile of rocks. Prehaps this is why our intuition is so misinformed... it's not representationally meaningful to think of a grizzly bear as being composed of dirt, air, and water, even though it is.

The same thing applies to intelligence. We have every indication that brains cause minds. We've mapped which areas of the brain correspond to which areas of functionality. Emotions can be altered predictably with drugs. Every aspect of a near death experiences (NDE) can be triggered with chemicals, sensory deprivation (IIRC), a sharp blow to the head, or something mundane and physical. Ultimately, the experience known as self and the sensation of free will boil down to being just a special set of computations that can run on any Turing Machine or x86 with enough memory.

Of course, the complexity difference b/t you and an Unreal bot is several orders of magnitude. It's not representationally meaningful for me to think of you as the same thing... there's just not as much satisfaction in fragging a bot. :-)

Actually, it all depends on their reasons - which may be good (hydrinos contradict more than a century of quantum mechanics; the second law of thermodynamics makes perpetual motion impossible) or bad (independent researchers can't possibly make interesting discoveries).

any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.

I have trouble seeing how any Slashdot discussion could possibly have any impact on "the success of [the scientific] method" for good or ill. Meanwhile, we often have a pretty good time...

The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification,

Actually, since they're an independently owned private enterprise, I wouldn't count on it. As long as they can continue to either (a) generate themselves electric power for free; and/or (b) bilk naive investors out of millions of dollars, what incentive do they have to give away their secrets?

Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.

As I said above, it all depends on what arguments those opinions are based upon. Personally, I would urge Slashdot and the wider world generally to carefully and painstakingly ignore Blacklight Power absolutely and categorically.

While the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was cutting-edge research two turns of a century ago, and Niels Bohr triggered a scientific revolution just thinking about it, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and the rest pretty much put the baby to bed. By the time Feynman was done with the hydrogen atom and its associated E&M processes, it had no secrets left before the 13th decimal place. So please, if you want to turn up fundamental new physics, look somewhere else.

-Renard

Actually, it all depends on their reasons - which may be good (hydrinos contradict more than a century of quantum mechanics; the second law of thermodynamics makes perpetual motion impossible) or bad (independent researchers can't possibly make interesting discoveries).

any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.

I have trouble seeing how any Slashdot discussion could possibly have any impact on "the success of [the scientific] method" for good or ill. Meanwhile, we often have a pretty good time...

The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification,

Actually, since they're an independently owned private enterprise, I wouldn't count on it. As long as they can continue to either (a) generate themselves electric power for free; and/or (b) bilk naive investors out of millions of dollars, what incentive do they have to give away their secrets?

Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.

As I said above, it all depends on what arguments those opinions are based upon. Personally, I would urge Slashdot and the wider world generally to carefully and painstakingly ignore Blacklight Power absolutely and categorically.

While the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was cutting-edge research two turns of a century ago, and Niels Bohr triggered a scientific revolution just thinking about it, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and the rest pretty much put the baby to bed. By the time Feynman was done with the hydrogen atom and its associated E&M processes, it had no secrets left before the 13th decimal place. So please, if you want to turn up fundamental new physics, look somewhere else.

-Renard

Actually, it all depends on their reasons - which may be good (hydrinos contradict more than a century of quantum mechanics; the second law of thermodynamics makes perpetual motion impossible) or bad (independent researchers can't possibly make interesting discoveries).

any "opinions" volunteered by experts and lay readers alike are not just irrelevant, but actually harmful to the success of that method.

I have trouble seeing how any Slashdot discussion could possibly have any impact on "the success of [the scientific] method" for good or ill. Meanwhile, we often have a pretty good time...

The company will in due course provide all the info necessary for independent verification,

Actually, since they're an independently owned private enterprise, I wouldn't count on it. As long as they can continue to either (a) generate themselves electric power for free; and/or (b) bilk naive investors out of millions of dollars, what incentive do they have to give away their secrets?

Opinions are, quite literally, just a waste of time.

As I said above, it all depends on what arguments those opinions are based upon. Personally, I would urge Slashdot and the wider world generally to carefully and painstakingly ignore Blacklight Power absolutely and categorically.

While the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was cutting-edge research two turns of a century ago, and Niels Bohr triggered a scientific revolution just thinking about it, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and the rest pretty much put the baby to bed. By the time Feynman was done with the hydrogen atom and its associated E&M processes, it had no secrets left before the 13th decimal place. So please, if you want to turn up fundamental new physics, look somewhere else.

-Renard

I'm amazed that no one has mentioned the link between this article and a book by popular-with-geeks author Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (information on Everything).

If you've never read it, I recommend it, very reality bending and a good read besides.

they didn't mean the dead kennedy's frankenchrist

It's the result of the new 'in' drug - E2. Write your congressman now and have this banned. Still doubtful? What about the children? Won't sombody please think about the children?!