Slashdot Mirror

...at }.,mbnvnfc`

Okay, sorry for whining, I'll killfile all .us sites, and then get NetWide.

Not only do they have ground troops, but we need to defend ourselves from their navy!

No, in fact here is more information

You never know, it could be true...
Such fabrication is an established government practice and all.

Then again, is that just what they want us to think?

-Slackergod

that should be Global Coincidence

frankly, it's not just a coincidence... it's an incredible coincidence

Hey,

Well, assuming there was global warming (which there hasn't been at least in the last 23 years), the best you could do is try to draw a correlation.

Mind you, a correllation is not proof, not by a longshot.

Absolutely not. I personally favour the Global Co-incidence theory.

And I'm sure all right-thinking armchair scientists would agree with me

Michael

Devices like these are all well and good in individual cicumstances, but the reality is that most families are going to neither *want* nor *need* them. Unfortunately, many more will *want* (at least on the parents side) than *need*. This is just another step in the acclerating move towards technological interference in preference over human ability.
When parents start getting afraid for their kids and start foisting all manner of ridiculous gadgets upon them, they are reducing the learning potential of the child. Children will cease to learn that, if they run away from their mothers or go wandering through unknown territory they will get lost, but rather that they can just push a button and immense effort will be made to find them.
Personally, if I have kids I'm not going to swathe them in cotton wool and keep them on a leash - what's that going to do for them? Rather send them out, let them climb around on trees and scratch their arms and legs.
I broke an arm as a kid trying to jump from my roof to a nearby tree branch, and what did it teach me? Don't jump off trees. If I had been wearing Matel's-Fall-Cushioning-Vest (TM) I probably would have gone right back up and done it again (growing up to become a professional wrestler, but that's a different story)

Anyway, my point is that by replacing the trials of childhood with techno-gadgets we are decreasing the capability of our children to learn about self-reliance, which can have negative effects in the long run if/when these aids are ever lacking.

But hey, if you live in an area where there's lots of churches, buy one of the watches *grin*

Interlinked nature of the web is similar to the interlinked nature of a human brain, where each word holds associations with other words and concepts. Search engines only add 'life' to this structure.

Google is the best troubleshooting engine while programming and fixing obscure error messages.

I think that search engines are the most intelligent things today.

... consider the following partial-prohibition legislations. The Brady Bill and the Clean Air Act. Like them or hate them, their effectiveness is limited because determined manufacterers found loopholes. In the case of fire arms, the manufacterers made some cosemetic and title changes, essentially selling the same weapon under a different name or classification. Same is true with emissions standards, where the auto makers created an entirely new vernacular to get around the law.

Obviously this bill is aimed at MSFT. Like them or hate them, I would think their lawyers might employ similar tactics to get around the letter of the law. They're selling "services" ... perhaphs via an offshore offshoot names PatchSoft ... only they're not kiddng around.

Once again, only penalizing those of us who can't afford big-bad lawyers with even larger price tags.

Let's just say for example if "Australia" comes out tomorrow and announce that the US is a great terrorist nation and a part of the "Axis of Badpeople"

Get with the program. Australia is actually part of the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America

Really, get your facts right!

Interview with a Search Engine

You know, like this.

We've got troops in half the world, so the relative importance to an American of, say, Slovenia, is much higher than to an Aussie.

The flipside of your argument is that our responsibility to be aware of the world is proportional to our influence over it. Living in a democracy, it's no excuse to say "I never approved of this atrocity". So it starts to be pretty important that people know what's going on, say in Uzbekistan. And who we are going to bed with there. Many in the rest of the world are pissed off/amazed at how we allow our government to send military aid to regimes who are conducting mass murder (e.g. Turkey), or train/give loans to security forces in repressive, fanatical regimes (Saudi Arabia). They rightly conclude that popular ignorance lets our govt. get away with murder. So the responsibility to be more informed than everyone else is on our shoulders. In this respect, it doesn't matter how much geography a Canadian knows.

We've got troops in half the world, so the relative importance to an American of, say, Slovenia, is much higher than to an Aussie.

The flipside of your argument is that our responsibility to be aware of the world is proportional to our influence over it. Living in a democracy, it's no excuse to say "I never approved of this atrocity". So it starts to be pretty important that people know what's going on, say in Uzbekistan. And who we are going to bed with there. Many in the rest of the world are pissed off/amazed at how we allow our government to send military aid to regimes who are conducting mass murder (e.g. Turkey), or train/give loans to security forces in repressive, fanatical regimes (Saudi Arabia). They rightly conclude that popular ignorance lets our govt. get away with murder. So the responsibility to be more informed than everyone else is on our shoulders. In this respect, it doesn't matter how much geography a Canadian knows.

...are aware of the seriousness of their acts.
Don't they know that virus making will soon be considered a hate crime?

On another note, I wonder how many victims of the Warhol virus also caught this recent virus.

The translation is right here.

http://www.satirewire.com/news/0103/outlook.shtml

I actually like some of these and think they would make good songs. It'd be one strange song by one strange band, but poems like this is not spam have a kind of 'somber fluidity', if that makes any sense. It didn't make me laugh, but it was good.

Yep, prizes galore!

From the Contest Rules:

PRIZES

• 1st Place, "Strictly Spam": two SatireWire T-shirts, one each SatireWire hat, coffee mug, and mousepad.
• 2nd Place, "Strictly Spam": one T-shirt and a hat.
• 1st Place, "Freestyle": two SatireWire T-shirts, one hat, and a mousepad.
• 2nd Place, "Freestyle": two T-shirts and a hat.
• Third place gets nothing. And fourth place is even worse!

Now don't you wish you'd been paying attention when this thing was announced?

Even the Associated Press and Reuters are unsure of the correct spelling :)

• Spiking Ted Kennedy's lunchtime beverage with gin and vermouth

• Convincing people that there was something special about SHT.
• Setting the maximum file descriptors per process on Solaris 2.5.1 to 1024.
• Writing business plans for dot-coms
• Telling Adobe about DEF-CON's speakers this year
• Convincing Microsoft that C developers would pronounce C# as something other than C-pound.
• And, the number one thing they've done to us - introducing the newsmakers to the cliche, "if we don't ****, the terrorists have won."

Satirewire.com is running a contest for poetry based upon spam mail.

So get over there, recycle your spam, and maybe... er... win a t-shirt or something.

Satirewire.com is running a contest for poetry based upon spam mail.

So get over there, recycle your spam, and maybe... er... win a t-shirt or something.

These report is pure drivel. There is a very interesting report / Rebuttal [umn.edu]from Odlyzko [umn.edu] of University of Minnesota about the growth of the Internet itself. It seems that the numbers banted around is between 400% year and Zero. Second the makers of these reports can't do basic math.

Odlyzko's rebuttal has nothing to do with either the UCLA or Forrester reports. It is a rebuttal of a report by caspian networks which is about traffic/bandwidth, the costs and revenues of IT firms generally, and not about personal usage patterns at all! Caspian networks actually states that interest in the internet is down (UCLA comes to the opposite conclusion) - although I think by this they mean internet shopping, which UCLA agrees is down. Odlyzko doesn't even address that part of the Caspian network's reprot, but is about Caspian's methods of measuring bandwidth usage on internet backbones (I agree with Odlyzko that they're flawed.)

Now, Caspian/Odlyzko are still both fascinating, but the previous post needs to be modded down as offtopic in the worst way.

Which is not to say that I don't have problems with UCLA's report.

The part of their own report which they think is most fascinating (UCLA, pg 18) is total nonsense. Of course people who've been using the internet for less than 1 year are more likely than people who've been using for more than 5 to play games/chat, and less likely to use the internet at work. They're more likely to be children and not have jobs!

Anyway, buried on page 59 of the report is an actually fascinating finding about children's behavior on-line. Children are 30% likely (compared to 10% or so generally) to think that it's easier to meet people on-line than in person. That's a fascinating trend, for those of us interested in how technology impacts human social interactions. It also means that some of those 14 year old girls I've been flirting with on-line probably aren't FBI agents.

I believe these kids are guilty of hate crimes against stupid people.

here's the article ...

SHAKESPAM

To spam, or not to spam: that is the question:
Whether 'tis slimier in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous claims,
Or to respond and create a sea of troubles,
Or, by deleting, end them

Neither a forwarder nor a spammer be;
For spam oft loses both itself and friend

But, soft! what message through yonder inbox comes?
It is the spam, and xfVa45af@yahoo.com is the sender.

The first thing we do let's kill all the spammers.

SHAKESPAM

To spam, or not to spam: that is the question:
Whether 'tis slimier in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous claims,
Or to respond and create a sea of troubles,
Or, by deleting, end them

Neither a forwarder nor a spammer be;
For spam oft loses both itself and friend

But, soft! what message through yonder inbox comes?
It is the spam, and xfVa45af@yahoo.com is the sender.

The first thing we do let's kill all the spammers.

SHAKESPAM

To spam, or not to spam: that is the question:
Whether 'tis slimier in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous claims,
Or to respond and create a sea of troubles,
Or, by deleting, end them

Neither a forwarder nor a spammer be;
For spam oft loses both itself and friend

But, soft! what message through yonder inbox comes?
It is the spam, and xfVa45af@yahoo.com is the sender.

The first thing we do let's kill all the spammers.

The Spam Rap looks more poetic and funny than the last year's winner. But tastes differ :)

SETI turns down alien help

This is getting less and less funny every day. :/

Which Apple partition destroying software would that be? I must have missed that one. I am only aware of two.

Alright. That's it!!! I'm sick of Apple's reckless behavior -- I finally have to agree that there's only one solution for all this!

And in related news, it was announced yesterday that lung cancer is changing it's name to Philip Morris.

>> see our advance in health
>
> I'm surprised you can afford it with all those taxes. Oh, I forgot, most of you frogs don't have the ability to earn anything for yourself, you have to get everything at the taxpayer's expense.

You obviously don't know much about how much of the rest of the world deals with public healthcare. It's usually subsidised, or paid for altogether, by the government.

This might be an acceptable remedy for all parties

apple in the news

Read all about it here hahahaha.

download speeds at low modem speeds, even on a dsl line.

This at 4 am east coast us time. Too bad he didn't mirror it someplace like geocites or some such other free site with bandwidth.

while you are waiting for that to load, check this out:

In other news, Satire wire is reporting that the Anti Terrorist bill just passed will require people to install Windows XP

Totally off topic, but just as weird.

Sure, Alice is a good conversationalist. But what about Jeeves? [satirewire.com]

The previous article [satirewire.com] is much funnier (imho), and probably the best I've read from satirewire in a while.

the foot-and-mouth disease [satirewire.com]

ObSatireWire: NetNarrow, the note at the end is even funnier than the article.

Some stories told by travel agents:

• A client called in inquiring about a package to Hawaii. After going over all the cost info, she asked, "would it be cheaper to fly to California and then take the train to Hawaii?"
• I got a call from a woman who wanted to go to Cape Town. I started to explain the length of the flight and the passport information when she interrupted me with "I'm not trying to make you look stupid, but Cape Town is in Massachusetts." Without trying to make her look like the stupid one, I calmly explained, "Cape Cod is in Massachusetts, Cape Town is in South Africa." her response....click.
• A man called, furious about a Florida package we did. I asked what was wrong with the vacation in Orlando. He said he was expecting an ocean-view room. I tried to explain that is not possible, since Orlando is in the middle of the state. He replied, "Don't lie to me. I looked on the map and Florida is a very thin state."
• I got a call from a man who asked, "is it possible to see England from Canada?" I said, "No." He said "but they look so close on the map."
• A nice lady just called. She needed to know how it was possible that her flight from Detroit left at 8:20am and got into Chicago at 8:33am. I tried to explain that Michigan was an hour ahead of Illinois, but she could not understand the concept of time zones. Finally I told her the plane went very fast, and she bought that!
• A woman called and said, " I need to fly to Pepsi-Cola on one of those computer planes." I asked if she meant to fly to Pensacola on a commuter plane. She said, "Yea, whatever."
• A business man called and had a question about the documents he needed in order to fly to China. After a lengthy discussion about passports, I reminded him he needed a visa. "Oh no I don't, I've been to China many times and never had to have one of those." I double checked, and sure enough, his stay required a visa. When I told him this he said, "Look, I've been to China four times and every time they have accepted my American Express card."

A common answer to folk from the USA saying that we are rude to them is: "We're not rude to people from the USA, we're rude to imbeciles." There's a difference between someone who doesn't know, and someone too stupid to learn.

I think the reason why the "morons from the USA" meme is so prevalent, is because of their president, their political and social conservatism, and the fact that a lot of them can afford to travel abroad, and countless AOLers and WebTVers have access the 'net. If anything I'd say that the USA has some of the most brilliant and amazing people, but the tourists and politicians unfortunately influence thought about USA folk more.

This is hilarious:
The world's 14 remaining users of the Netscape browser exulted this week over the release of Netscape 6, the first new version of the browser in two years, and a product Netscape executives predicted would blow away Microsoft's Internet Explorer "if this were 1997."
More at SatireWire.com.

Unless she's a...

How long until http://www.satirewire.com/news/0103/support_our_sp onsors.shtml isn't be a parody anymore? I give it a week and a half.

--

...it's old and boring. When's the last time you actually read something funny and original in The Onion? Seriously?

Allow me to provide you with the secret formula to The Onion's stories:
[Normal Person] does [Normal Everyday Thing]. [Normal and Expected Consequences]
Example headlines:
Slashdot Troll starts Flamewar, CmdrTaco butt of Jokes
*BSD factions unite stating that their BSD is not Linux
Hemos posts story on Nanotech: First +1 Funny goes to post regarding a Beowolf cluster of the devices

I mean, really, folks. There's no more brains behind The Onion anymore. I suggest you look for edgier, wittier, original humor and satire in the brilliant writing found at SatireWire or BBSpot.


Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

...as Satirewire shows us, this is far superior, morally, to being a dot-com CEO. =P

-Kasreyn

How about filing under Chapter 51? (from Satire Wire) Maybe that's more appropriate because of the overall stupidity involved.

--shr3k