Slashdot Mirror

Satire? Sounds pretty realistic to me.

I don't think we can do satire any more. Avery attempt turns out to be a prophesy... no, history.

I.P. is a blanket term for Copyright, Patent, Trademark, and Trade Secret. It also implies that I can own an idea or thought, and that you have no right to think of that idea without owing me royalties.

When Amazon patents a button on a website, when Microsoft patents sudo, when Apple patents rounded corners - that is theft.

When John Fogerty gets sued for sounding like John Fogerty, when the RIAA sues the dead - that is theft.

When farmers can not fix their tractors - that is theft.

All of this brought to us by lawyers. Remember, corporations are people too!

I always thought that Apple Inc. was more of a fashion retailer than a tech company, i.e. over-priced electronic jewellery, accessories, & tabletop furnishings. Probably, the only thing holding them back from going "full fashion" is the fact that copyright & patents are meaningless in the world of fashion design; The only thing it protects is trademarks. Can anyone name an actually manufactured & retailed Apple "innovation" that wasn't bought or copied from somewhere else? e.g. https://images.mentalfloss.com...

Interesting.

Would you referring to example of where Fogerty was sued for copying his own sound?

* https://mentalfloss.com/articl...

Do you have any other examples of stolen tech?

I think something happened in Hollywood

In fact, There are Giant Clouds of Alcohol Floating in Space.

I hear that stuff in space is more like Vodka than beer.. Vodka pored over ice cubes made of mud.

In fact, There are Giant Clouds of Alcohol Floating in Space.

I am not making this up!

The artificial sweeterner, Saccharin, is made from coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
 
History of Saccharin

http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Nobody reads individual sentences from other books and then takes them (often out of context) as individual snacks of wisdom and truth.

Uh, yes they do. All they time. What is the modern news cycle but a collection of individual sentences (often out of context) from longer speeches or documents, then repackaged as eye catching headlines?

If you want to get more literary, I invite you to read the words of Shakespeare and find out just how many of his individual sentences have passed into common wisdom and truth .

Way back when, when we first had cameras, that was the saying. Because it was really hard to make a convincing "wrong" photo. (Early: One, Two, Three, Four.

And then came along tape, and audio editing, and auto-tune and computerized voice editing. And Hatsune Miku, who not only doesn't exist, her VOICE doesn't even exist: She was created by taking vocal samples [which] all contain a single Japanese phonic that, when strung together, creates full lyrics and phrases. Video. The people with glowing green sticks, though, are real.

And now with movies have placed people's heads on other's bodies, never mind body-doubles. The trick is that's it's becoming better, cheaper and more widespread to create. (And I *SWEAR* that people are more gullible now-a-days than they used to be. Or maybe it's because things just move so much faster.) So we're back to a century or so ago: just because there's an audio/video of it, doesn't mean it's HAS to be true.

No worries though, since you're innocent until proven guilty, which has worked so well with MeToo and everything else in the last few years. We'll all just have to have a 2-way shoulder mounted camera that does a real-time blockchain video feed to verify where we are all of the time and that it's really is US in the video.

Now if blockchain would only run at Visa-level transaction speeds instead of a slow 8mm Movie Motion Picture Camera. Oh, and that's 7 BitCoin transactions system-wide and not just per camera. The limit for Litecoin is 56 TPS and the limit for Bitcoin is 7. Visa: 24,000 TPS (Link. And far be it your mounted camera loses WiFi/Cell connection or runs out of power.

How much is normal? How often would you say this happens?

Severe coral reef bleaching is now ‘five times more frequent’ than 40 years ago, with climate change playing a significant role in the rise.

The longest-lasting recorded global bleaching event began in 2014 and continues to affect coral reefs worldwide. Few areas in the Southern Hemisphere escaped bleaching in the recently ended summer; surveys of the Great Barrier Reef suggest that more than 90 percent of it has been affected by bleaching.

Scientists first recorded a mass coral bleaching, one which affects entire reef systems and not just a few individual corals, in 1979. Sixty recorded events occurred between 1979 and 1990. Global coral bleaching events are mass bleaching across all three tropical ocean basins—the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The first global event took place from 1997 to 1998, with at least 15 percent of global reefs dying, and the second occurred in 2010. Number three, still happening today, looks on track to be the worst ever, affecting 38 percent of the world’s reefs.

General in this case originated as an adjective, it's not a rank. So "Attorney" is pluralized. Mental Floss has a list of similar compound plurals.

but if there's people in the world that can't adopt the metric system, there's no way in hell the calendar could change.

Not to worry, there are only a couple of holdouts who refuse to let go of the 19th century. The majority of the world uses the metric system just fine.

That is high praise. Infocom games were great at foreseeing huge numbers of scenarios and coming up creative and amusing responses.

You are likely to be eaten by a Grueâ¦

http://mentalfloss.com/article...

People don't like change or unexpected tastes. There is a reason that green ketchup died.

A faaar better use would be to make healthy foods slightly more palatable without sacrificing it's high nutritional value. Sadly, I foresee this being used to make fruits far sweeter which would make them very unhealthy.

What we need the government to start doing is evaluating goods based on their heath impact and how addictive they are and then place a tax on the food that will later be used to pay for the healthcare you'll need from consuming them. Humans are bad a long-term decision making therefore turning the long-term decision into a short-term one helps people make better choices.

This part of the scam I didn't know yet. Do you have some sources to read up on the details?

OK, I found it. The first mention I could find of the story was in a Wall Street Journal article from 2009 (behind a paywall).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...

It was referenced again on the Mental Floss blog (written by some writers from This American Life and other places). It seems to be taken from the Wall Street Journal story.

http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Too bad we're generally not as good at it as they were. But give us a few million more years, and maybe we'll get better at it. ;-)

Instead, we learned how to trick them into doing it where we want. No need to get better at it if we just have them do it for us.

• A dollar bill costs about 5 cents to make. and will last a bit more than 5 years (older bills would last less than 2 years). Higher denominations are about 10 cents to make (more anti-counterfeiting measures). If you average them across all denominations, it works out to about 1.5 cents per $1. So the cost of producing the bill amortized per transaction is on the order of hundredths or thousandths of a cent.
• A store owner carrying a bag of the store's receipts for the day to the bank, if he's carrying say $1000 in revenue to a bank 2.5 miles away, that's 5 miles at a IRS-estimated vehicle cost rate of 55 cents/mile, or $2.75 for the round trip. And the cost to carry the bag to the bank is then 0.275 cents per dollar. If that revenue is from 50 transactions ($20 per transaction), that works out to a cost of 5.5 cents per transaction. (I'm deliberately erring on the high side to favor bitcoin. Most businesses I know choose a bank which is much closer. And $1000 revenue per day is about as low as a small business gets.)

How does bitcoin compare?

• Production energy costs are very close to the value of the bitcoin generated. So call it 80 cents per dollar. Nearly two orders of magnitude higher than paper currency.
• Bitcoin deliberately imposes a high energy cost in each transaction. So high that many online stores have stopped accepting bitcoin because the costs have reached several dollars per transaction.

Basically, bitcoin's problem is that it replaced gold's natural scarcity with artificial scarcity produced by imposing a high energy cost to generation and transaction. Consequently, its production and transaction costs are roughly two orders of magnitude higher than traditional currencies. Mathematically, it (blockchain) is a brilliant concept. But it's obvious its developers had little practical knowledge of both monetary economics and day-to-day business economics.

I wouldn't...

http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Ink, paper, people, transporation, etc... that all uses massive amounts of energy. Just the transport of those bills alone probably uses up a considerable amount of energy.

The US Government spends about $1 BILLION per year alone just creating the currency. That's just one government, creating paper money. That doesn't include other governments. That doesn't include all the banks and their server farms, that doesn't include ANYTHING that is required to USE that money... that's just to create the paper money. In one year.

Tell me again how you doubt it?

http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Are we going to get polar bear replant in grab bags?

I have no idea what that means. Is that a US thing?

You'll probably want to keep your distance from any polar bears you may spot. With the whole climate change thing, they're getting hungry and wouldn't be above taking a swipe at you if you came within reach. If they can smell you, you're within reach. If you can see them, they can probably smell you.

Also should we be concerned with crazy speed limits (e.g. 60 on a side streets)?

60 what? Bear in mind that Canada isn't one of the few backwards holdouts that haven't adopted the metric system, so speed limits are in kilometres per hour (that's KILO-metres, not kuh-LAW-mitters), not furlongs per hogshead or whatever it is they use in the US.

Also, I don't speak French, so would I be able to book a hotel?

It depends not on the languages you don't speak, but on the languages you do speak. Outside of Quebec, you should be able to book a hotel if you can speak English. Within Quebec, you can probably manage it with English if you aren't obnoxious and disparaging of the language you don't speak, though you may encounter sticklers who just don't like les maudit anglais. If you are obnoxious and disparaging, you are one of les maudit anglais and only deserving of disdain, you offspring of a hamster.

Also, I heard they put mayo on everything and Canadian Bacon isn't real bacon.

I hear they put mayo on fries (chips to the Brits) in the US. I've never seen anyone do that in Canada. In Canada it's generally ketchup or salt & vinegar -- white or malt, not cooking -- or gravy. Or if you really want to splurge, cheese and gravy, but the quality of the resulting poutine can vary, so you may have to try it several times from multiple places. For science.

As far as Canadian bacon, I suspect that was a joke by someone in the US who attributed the meat's name to Canada. You're right: it's definitely not bacon. If you order bacon with your eggs, you'll get bacon. If you order back bacon, you'll get that other meat you're referring to.

13. Making two pounds of paper requires 793 gallons of water—so think before you print!

15. Making two pounds of beef requires 4068 gallons of water. Feed for the livestock accounts for 99 percent of that massive footprint.

Source

Pair of Jeans
It takes around 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to produce just one pair of regular ol' blue jeans. [2]

Cotton T-Shirt
Not as bad as jeans, it still takes a whopping 400 gallons of water to grow the cotton required for an ordinary cotton shirt.

Single Board of Lumber
5.4 gallons of water are used to grow enough wood for one lumber board. [3]

Barrel of Beer
In order to process a single barrel of beer (32 gallons of booze), 1,500 gallons of water are sucked down. [3]

To-Go Latte
It takes 53 gallons to make every latte, as I've noted before:

That sugar, doesn't that have to be grown as cane first? Hm. And then there's that plastic lid, which has to be created and distributed over hundreds of miles. And doesn't plastic require a pretty vast amount of water and oil to produce? Come to think of it, there's the sleeve and the cup itself too . . .

Gallon of Paint
Takes 13 gallons of water to make.

Individual Bottled Water

This irony shouldn't be lost on anyone: it takes 1.85 gallons of water to manufacture the plastic for the bottle in the average commercial bottle of water.

One Ton of . . .
Steel: 62,000 gallons of water
Cement: 1,360 gallons

One Pound of . . .
Wool: 101 gallons of water
Cotton: 101 gallons
Plastic: 24 gallons
Synthetic Rubber: 55 gallons

Source

Also save Owens Lake in California! (see http://mentalfloss.com/article...)

And if it crashes in Australia they'll get issued a $400 fine for littering.
http://mentalfloss.com/article...

“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners. Contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” “[Technology] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing. They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing” - Socrates

Some more examples: http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Somehow I don't think Che Guevara will mind if he's demonetised.

Revolutionaries constantly need funds — they did and do rob and kill to gain them. For the Greater Good, of course.

And he'd certainly send to a firing squad — or personally executed — anyone, who'd try to suppress his speech...

too late
http://mentalfloss.com/article...

The Russians have a really good record on nuclear safety. Mostly as the places where the accidents occurred did not exist Kyshtym actually Chelyabinsk-65 (which was renamed Ozyorsk in the early 1990s), or is it City 40

Bees are just as good as dogs at sniffing things, including drugs and explosives.

You train the hive ONCE, and they train each other after that.

Unlike dogs, they have much longer working rules. They don't need as much rest or reward.

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/...

http://mentalfloss.com/article...

You know that people pay money to a gym to literally run on a actual treadmill right, because they find the act itself enjoyable[1].
You know that people pay for cosmetic surgery to make it look like they ran on a treadmill when they didn't, because they want the outcome.

If you can't square those actions as eminently human things people might do, then you have a need to expand your mental model of other people.

[1] Possibly for biological reasons.

while in the past it was primarily the responsibility of friends and family to take action if there was a concern [about mental illness]

For the vast majority of people in the past, if you were crazy you lived as a vagrant or a beggar and died in pretty short order afterwards. Nobody gave a shit about your life even if you wanted to stay alive, let alone if you wanted to off yourself. If you came from a moderately wealthy family, you might get to live in a horrific asylum (and that was in the 19th century, not even talking about medieval times, which holy crap they'd probably assume you were possessed by a demon and flay you to save your soul) instead of dying of pneumonia on the streets.

I don't know what sugar coated history books they taught you, but the past is fucking bleak and miserable.

Jesus Christ Burma & Liberia! You're gonna ditch us on this?!!!

Ring around a rosie, is supposed to be an allegory of the black death.

Some more such stuff

So using a typewriter makes one "a hipster, shrug"?

Is that the only problem you have? Your life must be boring, then.

(Pro tip from a metric guy: use the command-line "units". Or Emacs "calc" mode. Or just use your head, if you have one. I guesstimated it to 2300K in my head)

Because it has history of conversion errors, and that caused a lot of money (yours included if you were paying taxes). If you don't take it seriously, the similar loss could happen again (and possibly lives).

Unfortunately, the Mariner I incident wasn’t the last time NASA lost a mission due to an easily-avoidable gaff. In 1999, the $125 million ($172 million in 2014 dollars) Mars Climate Orbiter flew off course and disintegrated after spacecraft engineers forgot to convert from English to metric measurements.

Well, Monty Python objected when CBS removed the naughty bits. http://mentalfloss.com/article/501461/when-monty-python-took-american-television-court They thought it misrepresented their work. The point of that suit is that copyright does not protect artistic or reputational rights in the work apart from the permission to copy or make derivative works. Trying to make money by showing viewers what they want has been a long struggle.

goat.

google is used as a synonym for search. I hear it all the time.

Like Kleenex is for facial tissue. Q-tip for cotton swab. And more.

I think Google saw it coming and hence that name Alphabet - a completely dumb choice but whatever.

Better question: Will any generation not insist their children are going to inevitable ruin for the technology they adopt?

Happens every generation

Modern phones objectively allow folks to do things on the go, that they haven't ever been able to do before. Folks are still learning what NOT to do, but for the most part, they're safe, and much less dangerous than other similar disruptive technologies.

Flamebait article.

Ryan Fenton

You are all missing the forest. Patents originally only covered manufacturing processes. The intent being that superior processes become public information instead of trade secrets.

Love to see the citation on that one, because the USPTO says "invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent". And it's been that way as long as I can remember. In fact, the first 10 patents all cover at least a machine, or a machine and associated process. Seems to me you're 100% backwards.

IANAPL, but I do have 18 issued patents to my name, and another dozen still pending...

I've read Stephen King, and you sir, are no Stephen King.

You read his short stories as they were originally published in the titty magazines? Or did you read them in the short story collection books? Stephen King is well known for re-editing his short stories a dozen times for the reprint market before they're published in "final" book form. He even revised the first four volumes of The Dark Tower to fix all the plot holes he introduced over the decades and later included himself as a character in volumes five and six. Heck, he might even revise himself out of volumes five and six in the future.

Although he's famous for making cameos in movies and TV miniseries based on his novels, King had second thoughts after including himself as a character in the series. The author mentioned in an interview with fellow scribe Neil Gaiman for The Sunday Times that he would consider writing out the author proxy who appears in the fifth and sixth Dark Tower volumes.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/62981/12-things-you-may-not-know-about-dark-tower-series

Can you show where King didn't know what a past participle is, or if he uses run-on sentences?

Read "On Writing," where he confessed his literary sins and giving advice that he doesn't often follow himself.

But that doesn't sink in at all, does it?

That's because you're not looking at Stephen King from the perspective of an indie author.

That's a false premise. The gold standard didn't fail, it worked for millennia.

Yes the gold standard failed. It caused more problems than it solved and it was impossible to maintain for a host of reasons. All the gold standard is fundamentally is a peg of a currency to a commodity - in this case gold but other commodities could be used to more or less the same effect. This does have certain advantages but it also carries some very important disadvantages as well.

We moved off the gold standard as an international currency because it was too hard for the US government to balance its budget.

The actual reasons are multiple but there are a few key ones. For various practical reasons mostly related to international trade it was impossible to move the gold around to perfectly match the money supply in any given country at any given time. "Paper" Currency can change countries faster than it is practical to move the gold around to match where the currency is. And since most money is not actually in the form of coins nor is it practical to exchange it that way we tried a variety of (ultimately futile) means to compensate. There also were issues relating to imbalances in money supply versus labor and capital mobility.

If you want a modern example of the problems caused by a currency peg without the ability to adjust the money supply look at the problems Greece has had in recent years. When they joined the Euro they effectively pegged the drachma to the euro at a fixed rate (similar to a gold standard) and abrogated their right to tinker with the money supply. This has caused a host of difficult problems because the best tools to deal with the issues have been taken away from Greece.

On the other hand, we have seen fiat currencies fail many, many times

We've seen countries on the gold standard experience hyperinflation many times. The Weimar Republic is probably the most notable example and it led more or less directly to a world war. The gold standard is not a viable means to prevent this from happening. Countries on various incarnations of a gold standard defaulted routinely.

The US has only been on fiat currency since 1971

The US left the gold standard effectively in 1933 under FDR. What happened in 1971 is that the US stopped converting dollars to gold at a fixed rate but the US had already de-facto left the gold standard decades earlier.

It remains to be seen if we can manage it or not.

True enough I suppose but we've already proven that the gold standard cannot work in a modern economy so I'm not sure why you seem to favor returning to something that we've already established did not work well enough. Bitcoin does not show any characteristics that eliminate most of the problems with the gold standard aside from the physical transport issues.

Today I found out that cat organs were a real thing.

With Netflix, you're paying for a limited-time license to view the material. Your license immediately expires when you stop paying Netflix.

Try your "I'm entitled to record and play back..." argument in front of a judge after you get kicked out of a movie theater for using a video recorder.
Same thing. You're not going to get very far with that argument.

Not the same thing at all. How dare you compare my usage of a VCR with a person trying to take a camera copy at a paid exhibition at a movie theater? Are you spreading disinformation? Who pays you, coward? http://mentalfloss.com/article...

And if you can't stop live capture, then drm will only stop the truly law-abiding and the moderately lazy.

Live capture is law abiding. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a troll. http://mentalfloss.com/article.... Folks, seriously: never let a statement or implication about recording being illegal slide. Always correct this. It's worth arguing about.

But back in the day, you used to have to go to some third-world country to get your medical quackery like GOAT TESTICLE GRAFTS

Hell, they used to advertise that stuff on Mexican radio "border BLASTER" radio stations, like where Wolfman Jack got his start.

Restore your vitality with GOAT TESTICLE GRAFTS

Much mythology surrounds this topic, and a little googling is always good. Here's one brief rundown on this topic

The idea that Native Americans were always peaceful and had no concept of private property is rooted, and persisted, IMHO, by two things that couldn't be more at odds. First, the idea that they were always peaceful and in harmony with the land is rooted in the myth of the "noble savage", which ties in to the Garden of Eden. Secondly, the more modern mythology that they didn't have any notion of ownership is rooted in leftist ideology, and persisted by the Berkeley demonstrator crowd along with the "harmony with nature" myth, which they work in their efforts to stop projects such as the pipeline because that fits their anti-capitalist agenda.

your brain also gets flooded with cerebrospinal fluid, which cleans a type of "plaque" from between pathways

So, you're saying that cerebrospinal fluid is basically mental floss then?

Seems you don't have a collector's mindset.

Two easy counter-examples, Cheetahmen II and Action 52 for the NES. The cartridges were both unlicensed and "run-of-the-mill" products in that they were among the crappy NES titles of the time. Action-52 contains lots of crappy games that certainly wouldn't be worth the initial asking price for the cartridge. Today you can have one for ~$240, making it the 25th most expensive NES item. Cheetahmen II wasn't mass produced and only 1500 copies exist, but that can go for $1000.

Still not enough? Here's another list of random crap that's worth a lot today. The Super Soaker Monster XL sold for $500.

I couldn't find a list of things that have been recalled that are now collectible, but I seem to remember a baseball card with a profanity hidden on it being recalled/reprinted and the original is worth a hell of a lot more.

After graduating third in his class at West Point in 1951 with a degree in science, Buzz Aldrin flew 66 combat missions as an Air Force pilot in the Korean War. Then he earned a PhD at MIT. Aldrin joined NASA as an astronaut in 1963. In 1966 he flew in the Gemini 12 spacecraft on the final Gemini mission.

Aldrin accompanied Neil Armstrong on the first moon landing in the Apollo 11 mission, becoming the second person, and now the first of the living astronauts, to set foot on the moon. Aldrin had taken a home Communion kit with him, and took Communion on the lunar surface, but did not broadcast the fact. Aldrin retired from NASA in 1971 and from the Air Force in 1972. He later suffered from clinical depression and wrote about the experience, but recovered with treatment. Aldrin has co-authored five books about his experiences and the space program, plus two novels.

The above from mentalfloss. When you do that AND are one of only twelve people to have walked on another world then you can talk about who is "semi-famous".