Slashdot Mirror

Despite the fact that the USA, Russia and China are not even in the southern hemisphere!

True, all of the "mother lands" listed there are in the northern hemisphere. At least as far as the USA is concerned, there is no actual claim to any part of Antarctica. Any statements of claim made after 1960 are moot and ignored (by treaty) and anything before that would need to go hand in hand with a presence down there. While we do have some scientists at some stations (or at least one station), I don't really know who owns them. I would guess not the USA however.

The antarctic is divided up in pie slices out from the pole. Each slice called a territory, and most of the major countries making claim to their slice are in the southern hemisphere and do have activity down by the ice (Even if only fishing.)

Warning: 1124x1400 400kb jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Antarctica.jpg

As you can see from the map, the Australian claim is one of the largest.
You will also notice that neither the USA nor Russia have any claim what so ever under the most recent treaty, which is probably why the USA does not recognize anyone else having claim either (Yes, I am assuming arrogance and stupidity, at least where the USA is concerned. I live here and have to deal with them, so I'm allowed ;P )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Antarctic_territorial_claims

Lots more information, and all the nitty gritty details.

But one interpretation (a legal one) is that the US did not, and now is too late to, make any claim to the land.
Another interpretation (a bitter one) is that claims to land only matter if you have the gun power and will to back up your claims. For the USA, we do have the former. The latter however, well, let me put it this way. There is science to be had, but no oil to be found. Extrapolate each items importance to the country from there ;)

I can't guess for China or Russia.

EMC, Amazon etc are a ripoff and I have no idea why there are so many apologists here.

They're customers.

Being that this is slashdot, I'd like to amend a flowchart to my comment: Legislative Process in Australia.

Note that the Queen only gets involved in the last step, and the last time her representitive tried (1975) he was hung out to dry.

Which is why you should look at the Bagger 288 instead.

Then mentally transport it, and tear down the little contemptible hill.

Does anybody know what does it mean?
And can I use vi on it?

I'm not sure your "stubborn idiot" is wrong. Of course, it's all semantics, but if Wikipedia is to be believed, the operating system is distinct from applications (sorry there's no clearer-cut reference). Personally, I'd argue that an application is something that is visible to the user (as opposed to a process, which may or may not be visible to the user) - it either takes input or gives output, or more frequently, both. Then there's the related argument - what comprises an operating system - the kernel, or the whole package including the OOTB software (web browser, music player, text editor, etc)?

Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?

That's a french Minitel terminal (their videotex system, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). The telephone company gave people free terminals if they would forgo printed telephone books. Remeber, this was the early 80:s so there must have been enough people with less than stellar keyboard skills who'd rather peck away on a ABC-keyboard than hunt around on a AZERTY-keyboard if given the choice. But I'm pretty certain that most terminals had the french standard AZERTY keyboard (here's the Minitel 1 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Minitel_1.JPG )

I've seen pretty much every Minitel deployed including a number of those used in restricted releases prior to nationwide deployment and I don't remember ever seeing one with a non standard French keyboard.

Those things were rather kludgy with their using an X25 network at a snail's pace (1200/75) which was more or less sufficient for "enriched" text, although watching pages being drawn was still painful.

A number of people created BBS systems for them through the POTS, avoiding the (expensive) Minitel network altogether.

Oddly enough, there apparently are some people that still use them. The train ticketing, phone book, and a number of other services are still up and in use.

Alphabetical keyboards are evil. People who can't type will still hunt for keys, and people who can type no longer can. It's a stupid idea.

Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?

That's a french Minitel terminal (their videotex system, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). The telephone company gave people free terminals if they would forgo printed telephone books. Remeber, this was the early 80:s so there must have been enough people with less than stellar keyboard skills who'd rather peck away on a ABC-keyboard than hunt around on a AZERTY-keyboard if given the choice. But I'm pretty certain that most terminals had the french standard AZERTY keyboard (here's the Minitel 1 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Minitel_1.JPG )

Um, we HAVE been seeing this cooling trend for a few years now, which is why misanthropic environmental hate groups have been trying to scrub the phrase "Global Warming" from the public lexicon and replace it with "Global Climate Change."

What the fuck are you talking about?

It's the same stupid bullshit I heard in 1999. Every time year X is cooler than year X-1, the same idiots come out claiming we're 'through the peak' and global warming is over. Do they know that regular global cycles act on top of global warming? Do they understand that two data points is not a trend?

Honestly, the fact that stupid shit like this gets +5 informative just shows how ignorant this community is when it comes to climate science.

For example, right now (since 2000) we have global cooling (around 0.5 degrees).

That is extremely misleading. If you take the look at the chart of local temperature average and then tell me "The temperature is decreasing, actually"... Technically you aren't actually lying but either you are very close to that or very stupid.

We are also heading towards a small ice age, our eliptical orbiting around the sun is about to change as it does "frequently" leading to us being further away from the sun in the coming millennias.

Yes, in 10 000 years from now, here is supposed to be 100 meters thick ice. But when it comes to climate change, we care about what happens a century or two from now.

The IPCC still refuses to provide either the data from which they created their apocalyptic graphs from, or the models they used to do the predictions. This goes massively against the scientific standpoint of providing an open view into research to allow valid verification or falsification.

At this point it is difficult to take anything you say very seriously. However, scientists all around the world are getting to the same conclusions. With IPCC data or not. So that kind of destroys the point.

And what most people are forgetting: There is a climate change going on, it has always been going on and it will always do so. The question is how we are to adopt to it, not if we are disillusioned enough to think we can stop the planets natural processes and freeze it in something that we right now think is a global optima.

We disturb the climate a lot with pollution. We want to take an action to fix that. And you argue against that action with the "We shouldn't disturb the nature!" argument?

This is why the majority of people thinks that these "climate sceptics" are idiots. Hell, there might be someone intelligent among them, someone with good, scientific arguments that aren't intentionally misleading. I just haven't seen any so far.

It doesn't have to come from Asia to be an anime, you racist clod.

Apparently you do.

Which is understandable, since obviously you are not getting any. Which explains all that pent up rage.
So I guess that you have to give it then. Don't let the big boys treat you like a bitch just because you do, though.
Remember. You are fulfilling a VERY important social role in your community. Just think of all those marriages that will be saved through YOUR... umm... "involvement".

And don't let anyone mock you just because you live under a bridge. That is your heritage and your RIGHT!
You guys have fought for those places for centuries and no puny human is going to chase you out of there just like that. Volkswagens be damned.

True, if you're prepared to prove to a judge that what you made is entirely new and not a derivative of the plaintiff's work.

Don't have to.

Until the day you get sued. I take it you have no contingency plan for how to defend yourself from claims of plagiarism, and without a plan, the first claim will likely bankrupt you.

besides how about you cite how taking a picture of something else that is copyrighted makes the image not yours

Citations can be found in the derivative works policy on Wikimedia Commons.

Not all of [Yahoo! Games] are [delivered through HTTP], some are for download, next time read the list

How are downloadable games downloaded, if not through HTTP?

xvid

Patented

They still offer it for free

Such an offer is illegal to make to United States residents or to residents of European countries that recognize software patents controlled by MPEG-LA.

[Pidgin violates TOS] but the software is free

Again, free, but illegal to use on the server owners' private property, at least on paper.

And what about the site with the 14,000 free apps on it, didn't say anything about that

I didn't read that site because I didn't have time to review it this morning. Because Slashdot is not a wiki, I have to make each post in one piece.

Huh?

How do you define "speed"? How would you increase the "speed" of producing offspring?

And I'm not talking about lat, I'm talking about using it

Waiting 30 seconds for a web page to even start to load is latency, and it negatively affects the experience of "using it".

and yes you can use ssh for file transfer which would require speed.

What makes SCP (file transfer over SSH) superior to HTTPS POST uploads?

Slots cost money

Please explain how "slots", which I took to mean simultaneous incoming connections to a server, cost money.

besides the more slots you have the more load you put on the server

If a protocol uses two "slots", one for map downloads and one for game state, how does this use more resources than a protocol that uses one "slot" for both?

How do you know it's not been registered? Have you heard of a keygen?

If the key is 16 digits and 10 million copies are sold, there's a 1 out of a billion chance of generating a key that activates.

Or maybe they say it's new in box and they just re-shrink wrapped it.

To avoid unscrupulous sellers, buy from a seller with a high positive feedback percentage, such as Amazon.com itself.

They have over 90% of the market?

90%? What? That's a bit odd. Really, it's <70% and dropping like a rock.

See for yourself here. (Requires SVG-capable browser.)

As much as I like the *idea* of SVG, it doesn't seem to work particularly well, even in browsers where it is "officially" supported.

Indeed. Of all the browsers that support SVG, for example, Opera is the only one that accepts SVG images from background-image CSS attributes. See this for example.

Safari tends to choke on complicated images, and cannot zoom in on full-size SVG images, making it quite useless for reading maps and the like. Additionally, I've noticed that most current platforms do not include any sort of utility to view/edit/rasterize SVG images outside of the web browser. Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine, but I seem to recall older versions having issues. Here's a reasonably complex image to try for yourself.

The image renders perfectly in Opera, and also in FF 3.0.12 (Iceweasel branding). The rendering is very slow, and faulty, on Konqueror.

Should we just focus on the Canvas element instead? Many browsers already have partial support, with a better/standardized specification on the way in HTML5. Some Javascript trickery should be able to add full support to older browsers.

There are many possible employments of SVG that have absolutely nothing to do with Canvas, so no. Fix SVG. (This is not to say that Canvas shouldn't be properly implemented too.)

As much as I like the *idea* of SVG, it doesn't seem to work particularly well, even in browsers where it is "officially" supported.

Safari tends to choke on complicated images, and cannot zoom in on full-size SVG images, making it quite useless for reading maps and the like. Additionally, I've noticed that most current platforms do not include any sort of utility to view/edit/rasterize SVG images outside of the web browser. Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine, but I seem to recall older versions having issues. Here's a reasonably complex image to try for yourself.

Should we just focus on the Canvas element instead? Many browsers already have partial support, with a better/standardized specification on the way in HTML5. Some Javascript trickery should be able to add full support to older browsers.

Use a trackball: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trackball

Specifically, I use this Logitech trackball: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logitech-trackball.jpg

After using that, using a mouse feels like my response time and accuracy is that of the old-style slow and stupid zombies.

Use a trackball: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trackball

Specifically, I use this Logitech trackball: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logitech-trackball.jpg

After using that, using a mouse feels like my response time and accuracy is that of the old-style slow and stupid zombies.

This should have been modded informative, not off-topic or funny; it is correct.

But exactly how do you make a url out of this?

TAFKAP.com, if we go by what my local newspaper's entertainment page used to use. Got so bad that they wouldn't expand out the acronym the first time, and I was starting to think he'd re-changed his name to TAFKAP.

But if I had to render that as a URL? my-harpoon-caught-a-horn.com

I'm sorry, that's what it always looked like to me. Like a bunch of musical whalers saw the hammer and sickle and said "Hey, we need something like that!"

Hmmm. Is themusicalwhalers.com taken?

Specifically you mean the United States world... Other developed nations do not have our problem for one reason or another.

Some do, although not quite to the same extent. Yet anyway.

But exactly how do you make a url out of this?

What? There were computers before 1985?

Yes, but they were disguised as mere keyboards to fool you toddlers.
   

Obligatory

A similar issue was brought up in one of the stories linked in 'previously' - conference rooms named after peaks higher than 14,000 (apparently, the "fourteeners"). Well...I have one example that's worse in implementation - PLANETS. At an office site in Malaysia, one of the floors has meeting rooms named after planets...in our solar system...
.
So when someone told me, we had a meeting in 2 minutes at Neptune, which I hadn't come across, I grabbed my lappy, power cable, charger, writing pad, lan cable and rushed off in the opposite direction as Mercury, assuming they were NOT next to each other. Right? Wrong!! Some retard decided that shouldn't be the sequence of rooms, coz we'd apparently not remember the goddamn order: mercury, venus, shithole, mars, jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, pluto (even to an approximation if required).
.
I turn around and run with all this crap in my hand, to the other side of the floor next to Mercury! Neptune was next to Mercury! Pluto they decided should be next to Jupiter. Later on, I realised it was related to SIZE. Mercury & Venus were both 4 seaters, Neptune was an 8 seater, Pluto was 2 and Jupiter was 10+. Yeah, real clever! google reference1 & reference2.
.
So we're not expected to know the order but the designer wanted to educate us/others on size? How very useful. Mercury & Venus are not the same size and there is no 'Mars' or 'Saturn' room. I can understand skipping this one and Uranus.
.
I'm sure the designer has it scratched down somewhere, on which date the planets would be aligned to rooms' order when looking at the solar ecliptic. Fucktard.

Extra bonus points if you scrub the platters with fluorine trichloride before putting it through the thermite reaction.

That would be chlorine trifluoride.

here you are.

The official version: Wikimedia Founding Principles

The shouting-in-your-face version: WIKIPEDIA IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA

Very Billy Elliot.

Plus, the last time I was there, they had a decommissioned SR-71 Blackbird (wikimedia image) hanging from the ceiling just inside the front door, with the tip of the nose just out of reach as you walk in.

They're not going to get rid of it anytime soon. The current entrance lobby was built specifically for the SR-71. The space craft restoration exhibits are still there, including the restored Liberty Bell Mercury capsule. (It had been on a national tour for the first year or so after restoration, but as far as I know, it's now staying in the Cosmosphere).

Their exhibit crew really is top notch - I love their exhibits on the cold war space-race. I was initially confused when I heard that a space museum was getting a piece of the Berlin Wall, but they did a masterful job with the display and you can't help but feel the cold war tension when walking through.

Plus, the last time I was there, they had a decommissioned SR-71 Blackbird (wikimedia image) hanging from the ceiling just inside the front door, with the tip of the nose just out of reach as you walk in. A really beautiful airplane, and awesome to see that close up. They used to have some first-rate space craft restoration exhibits there, as their museum crew were the ones responsible for getting the re-entry capsules ready for showing by the Smithsonian and others. They've specialized in the "space" part of "air and space museum" for many years.

Since Wichita is not likely to be on the road travel map (not if I had anything so say about it, anyway), it's probably worth mentioning that Hutchinson, Kansas is about 4 hours from Kansas City's airport.

Actually, I find it troubling that many people seem to believe that paper ballots cannot be compromised at all.

Paper ballots are not sufficient to prevent fraud. But with the proper procedures in place they can make it really really hard. Some of the points that are missing in the US (and many other places) are:

1. Transparent ballot boxes
2. Counting done right away in the very room used as the polling place
3. Counting done by volunteers selected randomly throughout election day (note that it scales with the number of voters)
4. Representatives from all parties watching all the proceedings (again it scales with the number of voters)

That's not all there is to it, but these are the key points that everyone seems to be missing.

They could have gone back even further, VM/370 had a logo starting in about 1975 ... http://kristof.willen.be/images/vm.png and later VM/SP (1983) ... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/34/VM_mascot_-_teddy_bear.png

Small nitpick but they aren't 'murderers' when they were found innocent by a jury of their peers.

Oh, don't be stupid. A murderer is defined as someone who committed a murder; whether they were found guilty or not guilty or outright innocent, or even nothing at all (e.g. if there was no trial yet) doesn't matter as far as the facts are concerned.

Take the case of Emmett Till, for example. The defendants charged with his murder were acquitted, yet - quoting Wikipedia - [f]ollowing the trial, Look magazine paid J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant $4,000 to tell their story. Safe from any further charges for their crime due to double jeopardy protection, Bryant admitted to Huie that he and his brother had killed Till.

Using your logic, it would be wrong to call Milam and Bryant murderers, as they were acquitted. Using my logic, it would be wrong to not do so, as they DID murder him - a fact they didn't even dispute anymore after the trial.

Also, he has a supervillain-style name. And, hmm.

What I want to know is: who is whipping out their credit card numbers at the pay porn sites? Because I know somebody is doing that, despite the ubiquity of free porn.

Fetishists/paraphiliacs are unlikely to be interested in anything the general public would consider "porn." I would imagine sites that aggregate the content they seek are able to carve a niche with a loyal, repeat user-base.

What I want to know is: who is whipping out their credit card numbers at the pay porn sites? Because I know somebody is doing that, despite the ubiquity of free porn.

Fetishists/paraphiliacs are unlikely to be interested in anything the general public would consider "porn." I would imagine sites that aggregate the content they seek are able to carve a niche with a loyal, repeat user-base.

Chrome 3 will include a Theora decoder ... a known broken and crappy one from an old FFmpeg build that can't cope with Thusnelda-encoded files, i.e. the close-to-H.264-quality encoder that Xiph and Mozilla have been working on.

They know about the bug ... but can't be bothered fixing it.

So sites with lots of Theora video will have to browser-sniff and suggest Firefox 3.5 to those with Chrome.

How to snatch defeat from the jaws of cluefulness ...

(note also that Chris DiBona mysteriously vanished from the WHATWG list after his FUD was refuted. It would be interesting to hear why.)

The problem with Gerrymandering or redistricting is that the basic concepts behind it is real and needed. It's just that it appears to have been hijacked and given a bad name. Populations grow, people move, and so on. This presents a problem every ten years when we count the population in which one congressional district will end up disproportionally representing people over another. It's back to the old taxation without representation ordeal. If district A now has 10 times as many people and district B now has less people, then the people in A are under represented and the people in B are over represented. Changing district borders around is the way to deal with it but there is no way to do so without appearing to be acting in self interests.

Oh, I know that it's needed and that you could never precisely follow existing political lines. I would just follow them as closely as possible so that the resulting districts were drawn with the intent of keeping communities together and making sure that each district is roughly the same size in population.

When districts wind up looking like this something is wrong. That's my Congressional district. My home town (Binghamton) has nothing in common with the downstate cities that we are lumped in with. My own county winds up being divided to suit a partisan agenda because we lack the political capital to keep our community intact and you wind up seeing stupid nonsense like the thin "corridor" that stretches up to Ithaca solely so they can throw more Democrats into the district to make it impossible for Hinchey to lose re-election.

There's just something wrong when the politician gets to pick his voters. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?

Wait ... 10 as in ten lumens?! Isn't that output inferior to this device? Are the Luis XIV style whigs coming back into fashion too?

There were only two people in the world who ever looked good in round glasses: John Lennon and Mahatma Gandhi.

You forgot Corporal Walter "RADAR" O'Reilly

There are a number of statistical analyses that you can run against the output of a pRNG to determine how much entropy it will generate under various usage conditions.

NIST's Randomness Test Kit

ENT

Obligatory Wikipedia entry

...and periodically sends its cachehold of data to the remnants of the Third Reich in hiding?

/me dives

How can you compare xserver(a sold product) to googles server farms that are completely in house

It isn't too hard. One just needs to realize that googles server farms are not completely in house and are also a sold product.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) provides fast, relevant search for your website or intranet. An on-premise, easy-to-deploy solution, the GSA provides your organization with high relevancy right out of the box, can be customized to meet your specific needs, and scales easily as your content grows.

Not exactly as sexy compared to an xserve, but it is a sold product none the less.

Google Appliance Pict
Xserve Pict

How can you compare xserver(a sold product) to googles server farms that are completely in house

It isn't too hard. One just needs to realize that googles server farms are not completely in house and are also a sold product.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/gsa.html

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) provides fast, relevant search for your website or intranet. An on-premise, easy-to-deploy solution, the GSA provides your organization with high relevancy right out of the box, can be customized to meet your specific needs, and scales easily as your content grows.

Not exactly as sexy compared to an xserve, but it is a sold product none the less.

Google Appliance Pict
Xserve Pict

I think if they just cast Giger himself as the alien, the movie will scare the shit out of anyone.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/H._R._Giger.jpg

Overbreeding is rampant everywhere.

Except for the vast majority of Western countries. Which, I believe, was GP's point.

It's not the CRT that makes the noise, it's the flyback transformer, which is being driven by the horizontal sweep oscillator, which is oscillating 15750Hz.

Flybacks are fun. Especially when you accidentally zap yourself with one!

Am I the only one that thought of This when you spoke of mental manipulation and nuclear silos?

It's not the CRT that makes the noise, it's the flyback transformer, which is being driven by the horizontal sweep oscillator, which is oscillating 15750Hz.

Why yes, yes they have.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/DavyJones400px.jpg