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It always gives the same insane advice: You need teeny little ice cubes for making teeny little drinks like you need teeny little hands for milking mice. Original: https://people.well.com/user/b...

Can't decide which sounds worse: concrete shoes, concrete coffin or a concrete enema - Enema Man lived... but I bet he now feels hollow inside. (cha-ching)

While there have been several times I have had some cause to wonder at the nature of what I was seeing, there was one extraordinary event that was so in my face I couldn't manage to explain it away. That story is here... https://people.well.com/user/s...

Sorry, I like this kind of discussion at /.

There are many places to go for talk about politics, religion, diet & health, etc. But each has its own polarization and is intended to satisfy those who agree with a particular viewpoint. Slashdot people tend to have certain opinions, but there are always some who differ and make the discussion interesting. Add to that a fairly high level of intelligence and rationality and we have a great place to explore any topic. Yes, this isn't http://www.well.com/ , but it is as close as many of us will ever come.

Last time I checked, internet banner ads were going for about $2.20 per thousand impressions (views). That means your loading a page with ten ads brings the site $0.022. Do that every day for a month and the revenue gained from advertisers for your visits is $0.66. This does not equal your stated $5 per month per site.

Of course, the ad companies consolidate the bills and pay in one check, so collection costs are less than from individuals....

Even so, some ad-free subscription sites (like The Well http://www.well.com/) seem to survive.

One of my favorite quotes from the Jargon Files, on this exact subject, as relevant now as when it was written:

"At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use language that seems to ascribe conciousness to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.

The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are `alive'. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior."

Full text here: http://www.well.com/~lonewolf/...

Stop saying that there is a mass extinction going on. That's not just a lie, but an absurd lie and one that put actual mass extinction events to shame.

Current extinction rates are pretty hard to meassure. We don't even know for sure how many species there are on earth. Our best guess / estimation is that the present rate of extinction is somewhere between 70 and 700 species per year. The fossil records of the 5 previous mass extinctions suggest that this rate ist comparable to these mass extinction (we don't know the extinction rate of these any better than we can guess the current rate).

Extinction happens every day, for one reason or another. Some we caused, and that's right. but do you really think we're the only species to extinguish one, or two, or a hundred species?

Background extinction happens at rate of 1 to 10 species are year; that is at most one species per month, not "every day". More details can be found at http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html. You'd be suprised!

'Cause they don't HAVE any light when the sun's not shining.

... but some people sure tried...

I've always liked these wiggling 3D animated gifs.

News sites are suddenly going to get really diligent about citing sources? What would motivate them to do that, when they can't get basic facts straight or use a fucking grammar checker? I thought Cory Doctorow laid it out pretty clearly in Metacrap.

  -- 77IM

There he is. Everytime theres a story about a developing nation spending on something scientific, atleast one guy has to come up with this sameoldsameold bullshit.

There are problems in the developed world too - problems that could use money that the developed world wants to spend on the ISS or the LHC, to name a few "big science" examples. US doesn't even have universal health care for cryin out loud! Why don't they stop all their space funding and use that to provide universal health care first instead?

The idiots who whip out this argument think that powerty alleviation or slum improvements or food assistance programs somehow have to happen in a vacuum - "you must only do this, not that". You try and do many things - there is no "serialization" requirement.

The logic that every last cent of money must somehow be spent first on powerty alleviation before anything else is done is facetious - the same way you can't make a baby gestate fully in 1 months instead of 9 by "throwing" 9 women at the problem, you cannot "fix" the slums by just throwing money at it. Its a complex problem and it takes coherance in funding, social improvements, labor environment changes, etc to slowly feed on one another before the problem is resolved. The USians know that - they tried to fix their problem by throwing money at it in the form of "the projects" - all that was achieved was just a change of geography of the slums.

You really should go google for "tyranny of the O" - heres something to start you off: http://www.well.com/~bbear/collins.html#RTFToC10

I hope you don't "tyrannize" (is that a word? it should be :-) your own life by this false dichotomy. It would be a pity.

Oh, and a few nitpicks:

-- No, Half the population DOES NOT live in slums - Half the population does not live in cities even, theres no question of half the population living in slums. You KNOW how much their population IS, don't you? You are possibly thinking of Mumbai - surveys say half the population of Mumbai lives in slums, and it could quite possibly be true given what I have seen of that city, but Mumbai holds only about 1% of Indias population.

-- Majority of the population is functionally illiterate? Where did you get this? You must be thinking of the US ;-)

It is said that a major milestone in the development of a human young adults' brain is when he becomes capable of holding two seemingly contradictory thoughts in his head without going all "Angsty" about it.

I counter suggest that its high time you crossed that threshold "Smart Fellow".

Brian Dear, on PLATO: One of the most interesting little-known aspects of Xerox PARC has to do with its relationship to PLATO. What people don't realize is that Kay attended a 1968 symposium sponsored by ARPA, at the Univ of Illinois. Among the presenters was Don Bitzer and company, and what did they present? A 1-inch-by 1-inch prototype of a gas plasma flat-panel display. This was a major "aha" moment for Kay, who told me it was his "big whammy" epiphany. It suddenly occurred to him that computers of the future were not going to have big, bulky CRT screens, but rather, flat-panel displays. It is directly because of his seeing the demo of the PLATO plasma prototype that he got the idea for the Dynabook.

It's like "it's not gay if you're the pitcher" I suppose.

Taken from Motionographer

Greetings all.

I have a few comments about this post:

The Video:

This “making of” video was originally produced for my personal presentations as I was often asked to explain the process (back in the 70s and 80s when it was still obscure). Lucasfilm was vigilant in protecting its copyrighted material but OK’d this video at the time, since i had no intention of distributing it. (although copies apparently escaped) I wonder what they would say, now that the EVL in Chicago has resurrected it (after 30 years!) and posted it on YouTube.

The YouTube link to “Calculated Movements”:

It should be noted that this video is an *excerpt* from the film, posted by the EVL.I also posted my ‘official’ excerpt here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH0MXZ-T4Js

Some day soon, all of my films will be available on DVD. They should be projected large, if possible as scale is important when you’re dealing with visual perception.

Those who are interested, should watch my site for news, or sign my guestbook and I’ll notify you when it’s released.
http://www.well.com/~cuba/

Thanks for the attention.

Regards,

Larry Cuba

This means that only the subscribers the ISPs that agree to pay ESPN360 get to view the content.

Okay, but when ESPN360's audience drops it's only their own fault. They shouldn't be stopped from only allowing visitors from ISPs who pay. At the same tyme ESPN shouldn't be bailed out when their business model fails. Equality of outcome has never worked and never will.

I would hate to be unable to read Slashdot because only customers on certain ISPs were allowed access without an option to pay directly for the content.

I would hate it too but if Slashdot's owner wanted to try it they should be allowed to. Then when Slashdot goes down the tube while competitors' offerings grow it'll be their own fault. And I'll clap for the lesson in economics some people will have. After all why do you think online services AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy are no longer around? They could not compeat with the internet. The WELL however is still online because it offers what people are willing to pay for. Actually The WELL could be one of those competitors of Slashdot. Though technically not strictly for nerds The WELL was founded by and has as members computer pioneers.

Falcon

Yeah maybe so but some of his stories like the The God Thing and other stories he couldn't finish or sell would be found. You will find that many authors get writer's block and if they have less than 50,000 words written on a book, they usually scrap it and start on a new different book. Writer's block is quite common, which I guess is why Roddenberry couldn't finish the God Thing story, but I guess he had enough of it written to keep it and try to pass it on to other writers to finish for him. So any deleted data would be books and movie scripts that got aborted due to writer's block and he had to quit them and give up and work on something different.

Oh yeah IIRC the Mac Plus didn't come with a hard drive, it used 3.5" floppy disks. It has a SCSI1 port to use an external hard drive and if it is not included with the auction you won't be recovering any data. The Mac Plus had no support for an internal hard drive like the Mac SE replacement had. I know as I have both a Mac Plus and Mac SE that I have worked on.

And when the universe reaches maximum entropy?

We can play this game all night. We can dream up completely impractical and ideas with no payoff because it appeals to some sort of childhood dream, or we could make actual practical plans.

Deflecting an astroid or comment isn't necessarily that hard. There are multiple proposals, many of which can be employed today.

The fact is, that even after a Chicxulub like event, Earth still infinitely more habitable than the uninhabitable Moon, or Mars.

I suggest you remember what Bruce Sterling said about this:

I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

Here. Now, be a gentleman and keep your word. By the way, her page looks promising. :)

Here's some simple GIF "wiggle-grams" that illustrate the parallax effect:

http://www.well.com/user/jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html

The "stone gate" is my favorite. (Click the thumbnail for bigger size.) Warning: some "artful" nudity.
   

RFB, lol.

I find stereoscopic "wiggle-grams" more convenient and have almost the same effect:

http://www.well.com/~jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html

(Apologies for the nudity.)
       

Explained better than I could ever do: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

There's a good rant from Corey Doctorow about this. I think the best phrase that summaries people's high hopes for the semantic web is "nerd hubris".

Instead of fretting about the long-gone mammoth, why don't we prevent the extinction of thousands of plant, fish and animal species that is occurring EVERY HOUR OF EVERY DAY OF EVERY YEAR due to HUMAN ACTIVITY?

here you go:
http://www.well.com/~jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html

This link should have a NSFW tag. It's not gross like goatse, but there are pictures of naked people.

In case you want to know what it actually is, from the site: "Experimenting here with a way to present stereo images on the screen by simply putting the right and left images in an animated .gif."

here you go: http://www.well.com/~jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html

Those of you who think INTERCAL or some of the other languages mentioned here are weird have never run across the weirdest OS ever conceived: PutriDOS. Among other things, the Clear Screen command blew all the phosphors off the inside of the CRT so that it could be examined, it had a "pretty printer" for its assembly language that reformatted the output into stars, flowers and other images, and an "upgrade" of FORTRAN called 4.1TRAN. It was supported by three companies, PutriDOS, PutridDOS and Putritech, who tended to forget which company wrote which program and upgrade each other's products in incompatible ways. Generally, your best bet was to find a user's group and request a hex patch.

I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

complete list of questions so far: http://www.well.com/~bcw/list.html

And back then, we talked about trying to implement it. Then I read this:

http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

Put a wet blanket on the whole idea (thankfully).

Depends what you call the "social networking movement". Computer based social networking existed for a long while before LiveJournal, going back to dial-up subscription services such as The Well http://www.well.com/ and CiX http://conferencing.cixonline.com/. It wasn't called social networking then, but that's what it was.

I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

Yeap! A relatively long haired one. I even like The WELL.

When Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created USENET as a system of online collaboration and interaction, they surely beat Web 2.0 to the count by more than two decades (1979 versus 2003).

There seems to be a fair amount of denial going on, not only at the geopolitical level, but here as well.

Cries of "It will hurt the economy!" ... "Those are our jobs you're talking about!" ... "It aids the terrorists!" ... "It's fuzzy math/science/reporting!" fly from both sides.

But the cold, hard fact remains, we *are* changing our environment, as a look at these articles, some of which are decades old, will attest. Taken as a whole many of those changes are not at all beneficial.

So rather than focusing on who-said-what games, maybe it's time to quit clicking the heels of our ruby slippers, and begin cleaning up the mess we've made.

Cuz the world is rapidly running out.

Which also means we're next.

better price.

No, Compuserve, and The Well, were better products. However AOL's marketing beat Compuserve after which AOL bought it and The Well dropped it's access and went to just being an online community instead of also offering access.

Best essay on the topic I have come across: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

Since I first read about the semantic web a few years back I've been hoping that some of it's ideas would take off. I've created my own FOAF file, but it's only recently that a couple of geek friends have created theirs that I can link to. I know a few social network sites generate these, but they may not be able to link to people outside that network. The project site does not seem to have been updated in a couple of years. There's the usual problem of nobody daring to publish an email address for fear of being spammed, although FOAF caters for SHA-1 checksums to reduce the risks.

I've also played with http://geourl.org/. I see a few sites using it, but, again, the homepage is not being updated.

Cory Doctorow wrote about Metacrap in 2001. Has much changed since then? There is the risk/certainty that companies/spammers will create fake metadata to attract the clicks, but perhaps someone can come up with a trust system to avoid that.

This article makes some succinct points about the fallacy of relying too-much on metadata.

I find tags useful for personal collections, but it breaks down because my mental map is different from anyone else's. Heck, I'm often inconsistent from day to day (sometimes I use UPPERCASE_CONSTANTS, sometimes camelCaseConstants, etc)

Firefox even supports it natively. Here's a gopher site you can visit today.

And here's another one. Even The WELL still has its gopher.

When saying "preserve the environment", we say : don't actively wipe out species. Bio-diversity is the crucial term here.
"Human beings are currently causing the greatest mass extinction of species since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If present trends continue one half of all species of life on earth will be extinct in less than 100 years, as a result of habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species, and climate change."
http://www.well.com/~davidu/extinction.html

There is no way to know that those same species wouldn't have died out from an Ice Age, volcano eruptions, meteor strikes, or global warming if man wasn't around.

What do you mean by this comment? Of course there's no way to know. Does that mean that we shouldn't try to stop it? Your argument is like saying we shouldn't swerve to avoid the old lady we are about to hit with our car, because if we weren't there she might have got hit by another car anyway (or had a heart attack). Either way, the fact that it's possible they may have died anyway doesn't absolve us of responsibility to act. Your argument is ludicrous.

In terms of probability, you can definately say that the probability is low that we would have had the same kind of die off without man around. We are currently undergoing a mass extinction, the kind that the world hasn't seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs, which was most likely the result of a meteor. What is the probability that we would have had another such strike if man hadn 't been around, resulting in a similar die off this century? Approximately zero. As far as I know, humans haven't prevented any asteroid or meteor strikes. Since that's the only thing that has caused similar mass extinctions to the one we have now, I can say with definity that you are wrong, that odds are these species wouldn't have died out without man around.

Instead of making up these bogus arguments so you can continue your irresponsible lifestyle, do some research. You might learn something and become a better person.

An additional thing your brain is good at doing is remembering the location of objects whilst you move.
I'm guessing you find it easier to play darts after familiarising yourself by just moving your head around slightly?
it may be subconcious now (and even be part of your normal routine as your walking to the podium) but it should be there.

Its like the flicker images we have seen around (like these)
There is enough information in these images for your brain (and mine) to reconstruct the scene and get depth perception.

Bugrit. Didn't have URLs in those days!

http://www.well.com/

His page is here.

"If you want to tell me about typographical errors in Cryptonomicon, thank you, but don't bother. I am aware that the book has many typos. The publisher and I are trying to fix as many as we can in a subsequent printing."

Here's a testimony of a person suffering from AS http://www.well.com/~jerod23/bp/AspergersSyndrome. htm . From the link:
"An odd fact that has turned up in my brain scan and in studies of other autistic individuals across the spectrum is that our cerebellums are smaller than normal while other parts of our brains, and our total brain sizes, are larger than normal. This helps to explain some of the behavior explained above and to focus on which genes to hunt for abnormalities."

So there IS some proof that Asperger's syndrome is real.
There ya go. The problem with discrimination is that people don't understand those who are different, and reject them.

You know, you seem pretty ignorant - thinking a disease doesn't exist just because YOU can't find any evidence of it. Therefore, you end up thinking that all people with social problems have them because their own fault (reminds me of the guy who wanted to clean a negro and ended up killing him because he couldn't wash his blackness away).

Finally, let me say that while I don't agree with some buzzwords (compulsive eater, for example), that doesn't mean they aren't real. Some might not be, but some ARE real. Trying to generalize all mental diseases as buzzwords describing a normal phenomenon, is just plain nonsense.

I also can't imagine that any of the clicks the advertisers get are legit. It's probably mostly accidental clicks as people are navigating around.

Of course, the best thing would be to encourage people to make their sites a little more user-friendly with more than a few words of text on each page. But barring that, some form of ad blocker that finds and kills these things would be a good idea. Maybe someone can write one for Firefox and Internet Explorer?

Mass Extinction Underway
The Sixth Extinction
The Holocene Extinction Event
The Current Mass Extinction

The earth, it appears, might be better off without us.

Maybe the Sematic Web can work someday, maybe not.

However, anyone who thinks this is a utopia in the making should the infamous MetaCrap essay by Cory Doctorow:

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.

After you are done reading, go to e-bay and pick yourself up a cheap Plam Pilot. :)

1. Introduction
2. The problems
2.1 People lie
2.2 People are lazy
2.3 People are stupid
2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
2.6 Metrics influence results
2.7 There's more than one way to describe something
3. Reliable metadata

-braddock gaskill