Slashdot Mirror

How is this sanguine? peterb writes "Slashdot has previously reported on Eve Andersson's whitewash of Ars Digita. Her screed placed responsibility for all the problems fully on the shoulders of the Venture Capitalists, while ignoring the role of those that asked the VCs for money. Ars Digita's Michael Yoon has a somewhat more sanguine and less hysterical version of the same story."

I wonder if shoulder chips can be recycled as fuel ...

All them perls don't come cheap. dogma01 writes "It's been almost a year since I submitted this story on Slashdot about the Perl Foundation Fund Drive. With a new year there has been a new round of grants. Every dime helps improve the community and bring us one step closer to Perl6. Please donate here."

The largest model is actually the one that's currently in use. joshamania writes "I knew when I saw the first post about the 'largest scale model of the solar system' I should have piped up. The second post has driven me over the edge. I call shenanigans! The Maine model is not the largest, and Peoria, IL, my hometown, has had the largest model for many years now, the Pluto model (in Kewanee, IL) being over 60 miles away from the sun model. In fact, a bicycle tour of the model is organized every summer and reoccurs in August."

Still at maximum. Danta writes "As the QNX site seems to have received an indirect slashdotting, here is a BitTorrent link to the free version of the QNX OS."

And what's in your makefile? JediTrainer writes "Community backlash begins! The author of Nmap has decided to remove all support of the SCO operating system as of version 3.28. Quoting the changelog, 'SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM. Bug reports relating to UnixWare will be ignored, or possibly even laughed at derisively. Note that I have no reason to believe anyone has ever used Nmap on SCO systems. Unixware sucks.'"

Speaking of backlash ... Ransak writes "Speak out! Space-Rockets.com has started a letter/fax campaign to sway political opinion, but needs your help! This hobby enjoyed by thousands of future scientists and astronaunts has been put in serious jeopardy by bad legislation. Senator Herb Kohl was one of the coauthors of the Safe Explosives Act, who not surprisingly, is blocking an amendment to ease restrictions on model rocketry. Wisconson geeks, take note of your Senators actions!"

... and speaking of rockets: BuR4N writes "The x-prize foundation has decided not to accept an application from a Budapest based team called GCT (Gravity Control Technologies) due to their highly questionable proposal. GCT pitched a "propellantless propulsion technology" that quote "is capable of controlling gravity for flight". Here is the full story. It would be very interesting to hear from the scientific community if this is just silliness or something that eventually could lead anywhere.."

I hope these guys don't take up making ham sandwiches. acidblood writes "Following up on yesterday's story concerning ice cream and liquid nitrogen, it appears someone was keen to try it out, and this is the result."

I can't tell from the page when exactly this was made. Whether it was truly in response to Gray's recipe or not, this site certainly provides more amusing visual aids.

The medium is the message, or something like that. LineNoiz writes "There is an interesting article over at MSNBC outlining Metallica's attempt to take advantage of the internet as a music distribution medium. It seems their newest album 'St. Anger' has a code on it which can be used to access their "Audio Vault" where users can download MP3 recordings of live concerts. The site's motto? 'Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass.' Is this just a flagrant attempt to recapture the interest of the thousands of fans they lost in their battle with Napster, or a genuine good idea?"

Readers may recall this interview with Metallica's Lars Ulrich.

Besides which, it's the hidden cameras that matter. An anonymous reader adds this followup to the story posted last month about Wired reporter Noah Shachtman's account of sneaking into classified areas at Los Alamos national Laboratory.

"In an email message to all Los Alamos National Laboratory employees, Pete Nanos, the current Director of LANL, responded with information suggesting that the Wired reporter who thought he had broken in to a 'top secret area' had in fact just crossed a cattle fence:

'The Wired reporter clearly did not enter a Laboratory security area. The Laboratory encompasses more than 40 square miles. The security force protects important assets within those boundaries but cannot -- and does not -- protect every square foot of property. Based on the article, it appears the reporter crossed a barbed-wire cattle fence, not a fence that protects a Los Alamos security area.
There is a small security area with several buildings (roughly 400 feet by 400 feet) near the driveway entrance to TA-33. That area is surrounded by a seven-foot-high chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. A security guard is stationed inside that area seven days a week and 24 hours a day. Clearly, the reporter did not climb that fence.
There are several other buildings outside the security area that are locked for property protection interests. They have no security interests. There are several gates and fenced areas on the TA-33 site, which are there for safety access control, not security.
It's unlikely the reporter would be prosecuted for trespassing; the Laboratory does not have law enforcement authority to prosecute, and none of the proper authorities witnessed the trespass.'"

Perhaps we can have a celebrity deathmatch. hfastedge writes "Ok, now that 2 perl conferences have been mentioned, I've been brought over the edge. Python is a language that is just as old, and arguably better from: most importantly a uniform standard of readability (enforced by using whitespace to delimit blocks (instead of {}), by avoiding overuse of cryptic symbols, and by a culture that strives to keep innovations as "pythonic"), and a rich development community. Anyway, normally, there are Python events in Europe, and a trail at O'Reilly's OSCON. But now, there is a far cheaper event taking place on March 24-28 in Washington DC: http://python.org/pycon/.

Examples of Python in action: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7"

Fly up go phhhhhwwwtttpffffff .... MyNameIsFred writes "Slashdot recently discussed whether anti-terrorism laws would destroy model rocketry. The government has ruled, and the message is clear, "When it comes to the hobby of model rocketry, size does matter. And in this case, the magic number is 62.5 grams. That's the largest amount of propellant a single model rocket engine can have in it and still be exempt from a new set of federal rules that will go into effect May 24." What does this mean for the the big guys in model rocketry, who use engines larger than this?"