Slashdot Mirror

Isn't April Fools Day just the best? =] For a 'full' list of sites pulling pranks today check out this list here

Here is a sample:

kellyosbourne.org - Sanctuary records group shut us down
nukefreezone.net - Making fun of atrios.blogspot.com
weebl.jolt.co.uk - Replaced with Cats-By-Mail
telecom.co.nz - Click 2 Brick
ytmnd.com - (NSFW) hacked by teens for christ
wingus.ampedhost.com - Site converted into Mingus' Gently-Used Furniture store. Oh dear. Why won't he be kind?
homestarrunner.com - Now a pay service.
whirlpool.net.au - Australia's biggest Luddite to head Australia's largest telco
thinkgeek.com - Fake product listings.
theregister.co.uk - Bush twins to join Air Force tech unit in Iraq
creativebits.org - Site purchased by Microsoft
ocremix.org - Now partnered with EA (or something like that). Called EA ReMix.
spacedaily.com - Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
planet.gnome.org - Switched sites with planet.kde.org
planet.kde.org - Switched sites with planet.gnome.org
ietf.org - RFC: Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode
beejaysworld.de - Gentoo dropping livecds for x86
nature.com - Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov - Water On Mars
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) SMEGmail offers 1 terabyte storage
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) Linux looks to Hilton for exposure
thetoque.com - Canada Builds Own Missile Defense Shield
onion.com - U.S. Dog Owners Fear Arrival of Africanized Fleas
chron.com - Bush Twins in Maxim
ask.com - Jeeves has been replaced by a robot
animenewsnetwork.com - Viz Unlicenses Naruto
uninventthewheel.co.uk - New BMW technology to get around the EU ban on right hand drive cars in Europe.
newgrounds.com - changing to numagrounds.com
neopets.com - neopets adds 50 new pets
www.firstloox.org - The Loox is being recalled
packages.gentoo.org - Adobe doesn't sell products for Linux
pc.ign.com - Microsoft World of Wordcraft (Extremely Obvious)
spamusement.com - Page full of spoof banner ads
gentooexperimental.org - Gentoo using the NT kernel
moddb.com

Isn't April Fools Day just the best? =] For a 'full' list of sites pulling pranks today check out this list here

Here is a sample:

kellyosbourne.org - Sanctuary records group shut us down
nukefreezone.net - Making fun of atrios.blogspot.com
weebl.jolt.co.uk - Replaced with Cats-By-Mail
telecom.co.nz - Click 2 Brick
ytmnd.com - (NSFW) hacked by teens for christ
wingus.ampedhost.com - Site converted into Mingus' Gently-Used Furniture store. Oh dear. Why won't he be kind?
homestarrunner.com - Now a pay service.
whirlpool.net.au - Australia's biggest Luddite to head Australia's largest telco
thinkgeek.com - Fake product listings.
theregister.co.uk - Bush twins to join Air Force tech unit in Iraq
creativebits.org - Site purchased by Microsoft
ocremix.org - Now partnered with EA (or something like that). Called EA ReMix.
spacedaily.com - Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
planet.gnome.org - Switched sites with planet.kde.org
planet.kde.org - Switched sites with planet.gnome.org
ietf.org - RFC: Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode
beejaysworld.de - Gentoo dropping livecds for x86
nature.com - Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov - Water On Mars
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) SMEGmail offers 1 terabyte storage
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) Linux looks to Hilton for exposure
thetoque.com - Canada Builds Own Missile Defense Shield
onion.com - U.S. Dog Owners Fear Arrival of Africanized Fleas
chron.com - Bush Twins in Maxim
ask.com - Jeeves has been replaced by a robot
animenewsnetwork.com - Viz Unlicenses Naruto
uninventthewheel.co.uk - New BMW technology to get around the EU ban on right hand drive cars in Europe.
newgrounds.com - changing to numagrounds.com
neopets.com - neopets adds 50 new pets
www.firstloox.org - The Loox is being recalled
packages.gentoo.org - Adobe doesn't sell products for Linux
pc.ign.com - Microsoft World of Wordcraft (Extremely Obvious)
spamusement.com - Page full of spoof banner ads
gentooexperimental.org - Gentoo using the NT kernel
moddb.com

it's a pity when the people checking bags start stashing drugs in them, and forget to take them out...

and banning it.

Links: http://radar.smh.com.au/archives/cover_story_comme nt/000070.html

I'm a sound tech and I do a lot of work with musical theatre. Honestly, auto tuners are not so fantastic for those who know they're there and can hear the difference, they make the music sound deadset fake. A heads up as well for all the teenie boppers who thought their "Idols" and "Popstars" were so amazingly fantasitc.....you guessed it....often they are so "fantastic" due to the use of the auto tuner. Personally, I still think they sound crap, but hey, I just do this for a living....

('There's so many of you', observes singer, Tom Chaplain) the boy is in fine voice throughout. We're reliably informed he used an auto-tuner on his voice,

Except that the Game Cube is doing better everywhere else than the X-Box. The X-Box is 3rd world wide.

Things aren't looking so rosey if you look at the chart in the article. Apparently IE usage has increased from 20 May 2004 to February 2005, and Firefox use has decreased.

If this carries on, IE will have 97% in just a few months...

exactly, smh even managed to put the firefox logo on their frontpage (albeit slightly rotated for some bizzare reason). see it for yourself: jpg version or pdf version

exactly, smh even managed to put the firefox logo on their frontpage (albeit slightly rotated for some bizzare reason). see it for yourself: jpg version or pdf version

... it's in the other Fairfax paper too

Identical article, but shows that the coverage is even bigger than you might initially expect if you weren't familiar with Fairfax.

Here's an editorial from today on this very subject.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Heckler/Lies-damn-lies- and-statistics/2005/03/20/1111253883481.html?

I call every statistic a lie until I see the raw sample figures and how they were gathered. There should be an international standard on how stats are gathered and quoted. I'm sick to fucking death of statistic manipulation. Although in this particular case I don't really care and would not at all be surprised if it was true.

D? Hmm, looks like some US troops are in trouble... (additional 200 or so articles snipped for space reasons). I guess Iraq should start its own version of Guantanamo and start subjecting US soldiers to sleep deprivation, flashing lights, being chained in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time, extensive use of drugs, and keep them in small cages. Right?

BTW, the Geneva Conventions are hardly the only piece of international law :P

From the Sydney Morning Herald article:

The raids were conducted with rarely used search warrants known as Anton Piller orders which are used exclusively in civil proceedings. No police were involved, and the record industry sent its own investigators to carry out the search and seize evidence.

There's a bit of an explanation of an Anton Piller order here:
http://www.mgrewal.com/anton.htm and some information on how the federal court decides if they should make such an order is available here: http://www.fedcourt.gov.au/how/practice_notes_cj10 .htm

- proton

here, which makes some mention of the law this was carried out under.

"The raids were conducted with rarely used search warrants known as Anton Piller orders which are used exclusively in civil proceedings. No police were involved, and the record industry sent its own investigators to carry out the search and seize evidence."

From what I hear, one researcher found something, but another killed him and then ran off with it.

Funnily enough, a group of Indonesian researchers did steal all of the remains from the original Australian team, causing a massive scandal. The Indonesian researchers denied that there was anything special about the remains at all, but refused to let anyone look at them, except a crew from a major TV station.

They have been returned now, but not before a lot of Gollum-like behaviour.

So, this definitely should be "Homo Bagginses".

Yeah, but this is someone reporting this to an ISP, who then need to forward it to the AFP. Why don't people just send it to the AFP? Maybe they won't know to do so.

Hmmmm.... Fridge Magnet time again....

For microsoft to make a statment such as this could only mean one thing, they intend to push for trusted computing. Watch for them to lobby the government(s) for this:

trusted computing

Enjoy,

oooh, burn! Wouldn't it be timbits though? Then you could feed a crowd of 80 with one box...

At least they're not trying to convert people by withholding food and aid...

How does being an esteemed scientist qualify one to speak about scientific integrity and what constitutes threats to same? Gee, I dunno. I'm a scientist. When it comes to scientific integrity, the people I trust most to offer insight on what it is and is not, and what threatens it and what does not, are other scientists. Makes perfect sense to me.

The last time the "Union of Concerned Scientists" trumpted that Nobel Laureates supported something it was a letter to President Bush regarding stem cell research.

Are you so sure about that?

Pointing out the bias in the source is perfectly valid. In fact, it's good science to point out that your data or conclusions may be based on tainted sources.

It's good science to acknowledge that there may be bias in your sources, and to then go on and investigate whether that bias is present in your data and so influences it. It's bad science to assert bias, and conclude without investigation that the data must be bad.

How, exactly, has the original poster shown this supposed bias to have affected this particular study? Thanks in advance.

And your response is like insisting that there is no cosmological constant because hey, Einstein insisted it was the biggest mistake of his life and he's a Nobel Laureate so it must be right!

No, you just didn't get it. I don't trust Nobel Laureates on everything (Leon Lederman and I got into an argument over parking once). But when it comes to matters of scientific integrity, my personal opinion is that the best scientists in the world tend to know what they're talking about.

Well, if he has a shoestring budget, perhaps he can tie shoestrings together and then to an "employee router" which would translate the packets, determine the destination, and send it along the proper shoestring (attached to one of his fingers) to the target employee. TCP/IP over pigeons could be used as a backup system.

That would be a good alternative, there are several similar wired systems in use, but the wireless ones seem to be faster and more reliable because wired repeaters tend to either get confused and try to operate at levels above level 1 or they become uncooperative, thus causing a high packet loss. Not to mention how time consuming wiring the repeaters together can be.

Iraq buried fighter jets. How hard would it be to bury a bomb? Or destroy labs? etc It's obvious to me that Saddam was willing to destroy his equipment rather than let it be found. It's lucky we've found things like jets that are fairly easy to track by satellite and determine last known locations, but its quite another thing to track a vehicle that may or may not be carrying a WMD, and then determine where that weapon went. I would venture that there is equipment buried in the sands that will NEVER be found.

First off, the key doesn't use static from the ignition. Read about this baby that swallowed a key to have that bit set straight.

Secondly, responding to the parent of this post's parent, a neighbor of mine who owned an Integra Type R (that, it just so happens, was exactly like mine) had his car stolen in under two minutes while mall security guards watched. The monkeys smashed the window, opened up the passenger floorboard, snipped the immobilizer lead, shoved a screwdriver into the ignition, and drove off.

The very next morning his car was found, minus its motor and expensive bits, rolled over, several times, into a lake. That he didn't have insurance at the time doesn't make the implementation details of immobilizers more or less important. Improperly implemented, these chips are about as potent as Master locks on chicken-wire fences.

Microsoft has trialled subscriptions services in the past.

Here's a story I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald trumpting the intial success of the project in Australia and a couple of other markets: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/04/20/10192332 87444.html

The trial finished a Microsoft dropped the program, again I wrote about this for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/19/10374 90107674.html

Of course, these weren't online subscriptions.

I finally gave in and registered with them, as a 60+ year old from africa. I used the email address listed as the contact for any questions about the registration process, so it seems they dont verify the email addresses at all.

I truly believe that those amoung us who still shout to "stop wasting money on space, we still have poverty here to cure/we are already messed up enough already on Earth/there is still stuff in our oceans we haven't seen yet" are the most misled and dangerous.

I consider myself pretty strongly green tinged but I have never understood the argument about how if we didn't go into space we could solve problems here. Huh? I beg your rhetorical pardon? What they really mean is that with less money going into space we can spend more money on weapons, or advertising or some shit. Remember the 'peace dividend' from the end of the cold war that would have been huge, much larger than the piddly space program. So I presume that ended all poverty in the US? Fact is if you want to cure poverty etc you need ideas more than you need money. Throwing money at problems with ill conceived solutions doesn't work whereas spending money on a space mission will yield knowledge that will last ... how long I dunno, if we don't go into another dark age then centuries or millenia.

True, most of us long suspected that the WMD claims were all lies. Of course what we couldnt have expected is for the dangerous materials that we did know about to go missing also!

Anyone remember these stories:
Missing Iraqi nuke equipment worries IAEA
The senior adviser to Iraq's Interior Ministry blamed U.S. forces Tuesday for not securing facilities where the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency says equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons has vanished.

High explosives 'missing in Iraq' .
The UN's nuclear watchdog has told the Security Council of the theft of nearly 350 metric tons of high explosives from a military complex in Iraq.

Even if we had found WMD in Iraq. How the hell were we going to control them when we couldnt even control the material that we DID know about. Still seems absurd to me.

Of course, I wouldnt want to suggest an ulterior motive, but it seems odd that the Oil Ministry was well protected.

Which one is it? Free or no? Can't have it both ways.

Bingo. The quarter-to-quarter mentality is a product of this myopia, which has been called the Cult of Shareholder Value.

yeah, show me exclusive homosexuality in other animals i mean like humans do, not like confused dogs humping a tree.

Interesting and true, yet we can not ask animals if they are emotionally attracted to or simply satisfying sexual urges with the same sex. With humans it is pretty clear that homosexuals do both - we can't ask an animal if they love the creature they are having sex with.

At least here in australia. The market here seems to be splitting between "high fashion" and budget markets.

While Mr. Yanukovich accused his pro-Western opponent of being an American stooge, he himself is quite blatantly a Russian stooge.

As for the impending bankruptcy of the US, you obviously don't understand how the trade deficit, the budget deficit, and the exchange rate work. Things won't be pretty, though it'll take longer than ten years for the situation to come to a head, but the US won't declare bankruptcy like Russia did in '98. Read this for a current analysis.

When facts like this keep popping up...
Family trees share roots in 1415BC

Everyone alive today is descended from one person who lived about 3500 years ago, probably in Asia, a study has found.
American researchers created elaborate mathematical models
...
The results are published in the journal Nature.

Too bad they won't be incorporating the jet engine chip for power... Those things are so freaking cool.

Yes, the communist party has a firm grip on all things in China and is totally able to control all people and know what they are up to all the time.

I had already sunk a few moderator points into this discussion, but I really need to put a response on here.

What I continually find is that the Chinese students in particular are very good with memorization and forumlas, but very bad at analysis and application. They can crunch numbers like nothing, but when it comes to applying that knowledge to simple real-world scenarios, they are sunk. For them, being smart is knowing a lot of facts and forulams and being able to mash them together, not being able to synthesize and apply data to the real world.

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

"Asian countries proved their mathematical and scientific dominance, especially Hong Kong/China, Japan and Korea.

Professor Masters said their performance could not be stereotyped as the result of drilling, as PISA was about problem solving, reasoning and application rather than memorising facts."

There have been numerous reports released in Australia recently on how literacy and numeracy standards have been slipping in recent years. There was even an article yesterday commenting on how illeteracy is now being 'diagnosed' as ADHD, with children being taken to emergency rooms for treatment when what they really need is to be taught how to read.

The computer is simply a tool, it has no moral value, if the children are taught how to use it effectively as an educational aid, and are taught to value learning, the unfettered access to a computer will be beneficial. IF the children are taught to treat education as something to be endured and that computers are toys - then that is how they will treat them.

wooo... mind you, all the other concerns that depend upon getting the rights to put the movie on cable/satellite/rental before the DVD hits the shops would be upset...

mind you... I hear some music acts are doing something similar soon by providing CDs of the actual concert you've just attended for sale in the foyer on your way out...

The problem is the killers wouldn't be able to actually do anything if it wasn't for the huge supplies of gullible meat created by who go out and fight their battles for them, and the tacit support of the general populations of much of the middle east. These people generally think something is actually being fought for. The locals from Al-Zarqawi's hometown who talk of Al-Zarqawi as "local boy made good" don't want the worldwide medieval state Al-Zarqawi wants. But they've been fooled into thinking that in some way Al-Zarqawi fights for them.

As long as a significant portion of the middle east has been fooled into thinking that the killers are fighting, at least in some small way, for them, it will not be possible for the killers to be defeated.

The problem comes in in that when the murderous, fascist islamic jihadists come around trying to get meat, or trying to get locals to look the other way while terrorist cells are hiding out in some area, they don't say "we are trying to set up a brutal feudal theocracy based on fear which we rule with an iron fist, enforcing our mysogenic, xenophobic, and highly arbitrary will on all, will you help us?". They come and say "the American imperialists are responsible for all your problems, and they are coming to enslave and oppress our subcontinent". And the problem is that while this is largely bullshit-- the people's problems have more to do with the corrupt kleptocrats who hold political power throughout the middle east-- when it can be demonstrated that America did cause a lot of the problems that currently plague the middle east, and America's army is frequently doing things like invading countries without provocation, then it gets really easy for a hungry, disenfranchised person to believe soothing little lies like the ones the killers peddle.

There is no "science" that predicts people will "devastate the Earth's climate". Some science predicts small to medium climate changes, nothing more.

Get your head out of the sand! Here's an article entitled Global warming 'threatens Earth with mass extinction'. It's about a scientific study from Bristol University. Try reading it.

So you're lying about science in order to scare people. You want to scare them to control them and make them subservient to you.

Yes! All shall bow before me because I have posted links to studies on global warming. None shall dare oppose me, for, if they did, I would smite them by ridiculing them on Slashdot. I shall command countless throngs to build monuments to me and to create a great pyramid for my ascension into the afterlife, filling it with riches and servants to tend to my every need. You have figured out my evil plan, but it is too late for you, as I have already posted the links. I must go and prepare for the arrival of my followers.

How's that crow?

Wow man, seriously. Put down the hate. It'll eat ya.

"BBC World said yesterday it was duped in an "elaborate deception" by a man who claimed to be a Dow Chemical Co spokesman and said the US company accepted responsibility for India's Bhopal disaster."

The story

Sadly, the Reuters story of Dow paying $12Billion is false.

For example:

The Federal Court heard yesterday that the major record labels are also engaged in a program of actively disrupting the file-sharing network by bombarding it with billions of decoys and spoofs that pose as song files.

On the bright side, the article also contains the following quote from the judge:

The judge said it was important that any legal remedy did not trespass on freedom of communication. "You are entitled to protect copyright. You are not entitled to control the internet," he said.

johnhoward@federal.gov.au
Thanks for the full inbox johnny

Woops: URL Should be: Patently yours - Sydney Morning Herald

Sounds like Telstra.

Is this what happens to all government run companies that go private?

Somebody in the Sydney morning herald gave them an earful here.

A much more informative piece can be found on the Syndey Morning Herald web page at http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Internet-con-m an-gets-five-years-jail/2004/11/08/1099781322257.h tml

Blame G.W. Bush all you want. Kyoto is just a bunch of leftist drivel that lets the EU and China off the hook while punishing the U.S. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/09/10311159 75127.html

When will bush start eating them?

I will only be a matter of time before G.W.Bush will start eating them straight from the field.