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I thought I was the only one! I'll get stuck on Wikipedia, Mathworld and Everything2 for hours on end, using Google as a sidebar for non-linked terms. By the time I'm done, I'll have like 20-25 different browser tabs open, detailing my trek from A to B.

As a full metal construction and 18th century quality work it's hard to blow up with convention explosives. A mini H-bomb might do the trick however.

Ahem. That should be 19th century. Wikipedia entry

First Post!

"Anarchy is not a political ideology. It is the absence of a political ideology. Use a little etymology! The "an" prefix is the prefix meaning "without" or "the absence of.""

By that logic, "Niggardly" would be a reference to a particular race, it isn't of course, but some people believe that it is, just because the word "Niggar" is present. (The word "Niggardly" actually arose some time before the term "nigger" became a racial term)

"Anarchy" the Proper noun, or "Anarchism" is the social belief.
"anarchy" the adjective is the term for chaos.

Use a little http://www.wikipedia.com/!

You should actually write this up in wikipedia. It's quite a good write up on the subject.

Thanks!

Typical Wiki reader, or typical Wikipedia reader?

More of the former, percentage-wise, are likely to be /. readers, I'd think.

The Canadian government resolved in 1919 to not allow Canadians to be granted knighthoods and peerages. See Nickle Resolution on Wikipedia.

But wait, hold on! Did someone write trollish nonsense all over a beatiful how-to? Just roll back the changes.

If this scares you (and it should, it's very powerful, very new), check out wikipedia.com. It's totally self-policing and very well-kempt. You will quickly move from scared to excited.

... obviously you have never seen the wikipedia. To put it in somebody elses' words, "with many eyes, all bugs are shallow". This principle does not apply to software only.

Don't see why you need another whole network to do this. See wikipedia. It may not have the uber xml web service driven aspect oriented paradigm shifting 300 grand per annum buzzword love, but it works fine for me. Besides, we can just graft that shite on later if it turns out to be useful.

The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with -- even using much of the same language.
I declare this thread to be in gross violation of Godwin's law and demand that all subsequent contributors to the discussion be suitably punished.

A big difference between open content and open source is the lack of tools in the former. If I would start a literature encyclopedia based on the content of the Wikipedia I could get started really fast. But once my visitors start adding contents and the Wikipedia changes, there are no real good standards to merge back the content. A fork seems unavoidable.

A good XML specification could help here, but currently open content usually means html files that can be freely copied. Until open content fixes this, the success of open source won't be copied.

Please don't even try to justify the Medeival church. You will have to answer for Galileo, Coppernicus etc. You might also have to Justify the witch-hunts, burning at the stakes, Multiple pope-heresy issues etc.
Can you explain how the church led to the established the modern universities? Wikipedia says no such thing?
Anyway no point trying to correct historical mistakes.Otherwise america will have to hate the British and love the french. Also Native americans will have a lot of reason to hate the hispanics.!!
Let past be, and let us see how the church of today can be made reasonable

It also has the second largest tidal range of any river in the world (Upto 15 meters), giving it Severn Bore

These are in order of priority...

1) Make it work. It's very important to have something to show/sell!

2) Make it work well. Once you have something to show, it's important that it generally behave as expected

3) Make it work right. Finally, once you have something working and doing what's expected, it's important that sound design and engineering principles are used, particularly in maintenance to ensure continued ability to meet the needs as they evolve.

This is where I'm more and more becoming an advocate of Extreme Programming. Primarily the concept of code evolution - that you quickly evolve the code to fit the needs as they evolve.

My most common evolutionary path is to start with a hack, and make it clearly known that it's Q&D, and then when needs overwhelm it, we consider it a "proof of concept" and rebuild/rewrite as needed.

Typically, when the Q&D solution isn't enough, the resources exist to pay for the "right" solution.

Another great reference work is the Big Ball of Mud, covering the various reasons why software develops the way it does, and highlights the various forces at work.

see the wikipedia's entry on slaaahdot trolls

There's a process in compilation here, they don't just enter this into a database and sell it.

Hmm, perhaps what we need is an auto-spoofing service kinda like a combination of a free HTTP proxy and something like a free online encyclopedia. Rather than submitting information that is obviously false (judged by internal consistency it sounds like from your comment), you should be able to submit a request to a server that generates false but plausible personal data.

Pinocchio - Grim

The Adventures of Pinocchio is not by the Grimm Bros. but rather by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini. You can read about Collodi, or read an English translation of Pinocchio .

books in the Public Domain that have been hijacked by Disney, and are aggressively defended by them.

The Walt Disney Company does not own the rights to the novel Pinocchio or to the name "Pinocchio". DisneyCo owns only the copyright on its film adaptation[1], including the likenesses of the characters as drawn by Disney animators, and has no grounds to prevent other publishers' film adaptations of the original novel. DisneyCo most definitely does not own the rights to "Noddy", a character created by Enid Blyton that may have been inspired by Pinocchio.

The Jungle Book - Kipling

Which exemplifies . No less than one year after The Jungle Book went PD in a major market, DisneyCo published a film adaptation. The company was obviously waiting for the copyright to run out. Now DisneyCo has closed the door behind itself by pushing copyright term extensions through Congress.

Peter Pan

NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN WORLDWIDE! The European Union recognizes a monopoly on literary works for the life of the last surviving author, plus the remainder of the calendar year, plus 70 years. Because J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, died in 1937, copyright in Peter Pan does not expire in the European Union until 2007, and DisneyCo has to pay GOSH a royalty for every Peter Pan and Return to Never Land disc sold in the EU. In fact, the United Kingdom has granted a statutory perpetual copyright on the work, with royalties going to a children's hospital.

[1] DisneyCo may lose even that if the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft happens to strike down the 1976 extension along with the Bono Act.

Well, slash is good and I am a slashdot addict. But I prefer wikis to build something together.

In "The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet", Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (c2.com) describe two ways of interacting in a wiki : content pages (as found on wikipedia) and discussion threads (there are many of them on MeatballWiki).

Most wireless communities use wikis. And it is fun! :-)

But, I agree, ...it is another book. ;-)

Here is a real link

Look at SeattleWireless' HowDoesThisWikiLookLike there are few pages with a lot of references to or from other pages, and many pages with few references. It seems to follow a 'power law' too(~ 'scale free').

So, the 'inside' of the web seems to follow the same rules. It is particulary interresting with wikis because of the unplanned, distributed growth (like the Internet).

As the belgian provider, where the pictures are, seems to be down. You can also see the pictures in ReseauCitoyen.be's TopologieDuWiki

I thing it would be a good idea to have a discussion on /. on the Wiki phenomenon (sites everybody can contribute to, like WikiPedia.com ( more than 95,000 pages!).

I know of only one book on the subject : "The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet" by Bo Leuf, Ward Cunningham (of c2.com, creator of the Wiki concept).

If you search Google for 'RecentChanges' (a good marker for wikis (?)), you get a lot of them, more and more (A survey by country domain sept->oct 2002)

There are some scientific papers at GaTech.edu

Linux doesn't compete against other operating systems? Damn, someone's going to have to tell Microsoft and Sun about that. They seem to be under a different impression.

Also, you and the FSF seem to be in a disagreement about the commercial nature of free software. Check out this page. (Scroll down to the paragraph that starts: "Free software" does not mean "non-commercial")

Sorry, I wanted to address this earlier, but in wanting cover the IP issues first, I forgot, but BlueGecko is wrong. First of all, Apple never sued any theme developers. What they did, however is send a cease and desist letter to all of the theme markers who used Apple trademarks. I hope you can at least understand that trademarks are a form of consumer protection, and that allowing people to clone established company's marks is confusing and hurtful to the consumer.

You want a world where one person discovers something useful, and then no one else can use that something without paying them.

Um, yeah that's exactly what I'm saying, and that's also what the Constitution says in Article 1 Section 8:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Now I agree that the most important clause of that section is "for a limited time". I don't think people should have an unlimited monopoly, but in order to encourage people to develop things we have the let them profit off from them.

The end goal is to either eliminate intellectual property all-together, or vastly reduce its duration and scope.

Is that the goal of the FSF? I hardly think so. Again if you can back that up with a link, I'd love it. If that really were the goal, then you'd think they'd be opposed to copyrighting their work, but if you look at the bottom every single page on gnu.org, guess what you'll see? Yep, a copyright notice

As far as who came up with the dock first, that's a nice screen shot of twm, but it's obviously a modern one (Netscape, Realplayer in what I'm guessing is the dock). Looks like NeXTStep and twm came out about the same time. NextStep 1.0 was released in 1986, with early releases as far back as 1989. TWM came with X11R1, and assuming the dock was a part of that it'd place it at about September 1987. So neither predates the other, but I did find an interesting usenet post from 1990 about how to configure your twm to look like NeXTStep. It atleast shows that the NeXTStep dock was significantly different/advanced from than whatever was included at the time in twm.

A resolution WAS passed... Mickey has another 20 years (2019)

Wired Article on it when it was an
act

Wikipedia article on it as a bill

>> Access control mechanisms are a necessary and crucial design element to any application's
security....a web application should protect front-end and back-enddata and system resources by implementing access control restrictions ... Ideally, an access control scheme should protect against the unauthorized viewing, modification, or copying of data.

Yea, whatever.

This document does seem to be pretty good, but documents like this really need to be peer reviewed. Personally, I think a document like this would be better as a wiki than a pdf.

On the other hand consider for example this biography or what the wikipedia has to say. 1996 seems to be the answer.

(On a side note, he has uncovered some evidence that Harvey Ball *did not* invent the familiar yellow-faced smiley.)"

Everyone knows who invented the yellow smiley. :-)

it seems like this would require a change in how processes are handled in hammer mp systems

There may be a need to tune this specifically to Hammer/Opteron though (and even this could have been done already - need to look again at x86-64 port)

X11 was released in 1982? Hardly. I remember the university transitioning our Sun 3 machines from X10 to X11 when I was in school (1985 through 1990). This page says that X11 came out in 1987, though I don't remember clearly enough to be sure.

No account of VMS would be complete without acknowledging that Dave Cutler took VMS from DEC to Microsoft to create Windows NT. He acknowledges the acronym WNT was a pun on VMS++ (add one to each leter of VMS ala HAL++ => IBM in 2001 a Space Odyssey.

Great quote. I just wish we knew who said it. It's a fake.

I like DAT best. It's pure digital, and doesn't do any compression

DAT is lossy. It loses all frequencies above 24 kHz (48 kHz sample rate + Nyquist-Shannon theorem). It loses all signals below -120 dB due to the effective 20-bit performance of 16-bit dithered PCM. It loses the front-and-back dimension.

The question becomes how much loss a fellow can tolerate. For audio engineers, 24-bit 96 kHz WAV works well (AIFF is limited to 65,535 Hz). (Cool Edit Pro supports 32-bit floating-point, which has incredible dynamic range.) For consumers, even audiophiles with high-quality amps and speakers, 192 kbps Ogg is more than enough for stereo audio.

This is a design by Robert Zubrin for a rocket that produces a continous atomic blast using water with a high concentration of Uranium or Plutonium salts.

Nuke Your Way to the Stars

Binary computers actually arrived on the scene over 200 years after Boolean algebra was invented and refined by George Boole and first presented in a paper by him in 1854.

"Boole's system of logic is but one of many proofs of genius and patience combined." was how De Morgan commented. It is not recorded how many whiny teens said "so what".

It's first real practical use was for telephone switching.

You might find this of use:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Logical+fallacy/Stra w+man

1) The equator doesn't run through South Africa. The Tropic of Capricorn does, but only through the northern tip of the country. The equator runs through Gabon, the two Congos, Uganda, Kenya, and the southern tip of Somolia. Here's a map showing specifically where.

2) Who said the elevator had to be stationed along the equator? A geosynchronous location can be had anywhere over the surface of the globe. It just happens that many communication and weather sats happen to be geostationary due to their respective functions, not because an equatorial orbit is the only one that can provide relative imobility. Most of those political considerations suddenly become alot easier to work around when you've got 197,000,000 sq. miles to work with instead of 25,000 linear miles.

If I remember what I've read before correctly, POWER is little-endian. When Apple/IBM/Motorola started working on the PowerPC, one of their goals was to run AIX and MacOS (though not simultaneously). And, as we know, 680x0 processors were big-endian. So, the PowerPC was given an endianness switch, and the firmware was tasked with flipping it into the required position during boot.

There's more detail about the PowerPC's heritage (including its relation to Motorola's 88000 processor) in this Wikipedia page.

• Wikipedia -- a little out of date, but good on history.
• Power PC Architecture: A High-Performance Architecture With a History

Actually, a prime number, or prime for short, is a natural number larger than 1 that has as its only positive divisors (factors?) 1 and itself. (source)

So by definition, 1 is not a prime.

look here.

This is a slippery slippery slope, folks.

. . . an epistolary novel. Look it up.

"I can sense tones up to 21KHz or so ... "

Yeah, right.

This isn't an uncommon claim. Go look, keeping in mind that I said "sense" (which some of the below translate as "feel"):

Dumbed down: http://home.netvigator.com/~ntomyng/dcc900/compare /

More technical: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/psychoacoustics

Etcetera.

Lycoris's Wikipedia article. It doesn't say a whole heap, but you can add more.

If I own a 1980 Zephyr station wagon and the parts are no longer available for me to fix it, does that mean that I can go out, steal somebody else's car, and be legally free from ramifications?

But does it also mean you can't manufacture such parts yourself?

you own the engine and frame of the car, but not the seats. You should therefore be able to go out and steal seats, wheels, a drive shaft, car mats, and every other "accessory" to the car.

Or make them yourself. Get a flash cartridge and copy games onto it, making sure that you possess and own a genuine original copy*. You're protected under 17 USC 117, the law that permits the owner of a copy (e.g. a cartridge) of a copyrighted computer program to make limited copies.

* No, that's not necessarily the situation with the rental outlet described in the present Slashdot article.

Nintendo tries to apply 17 USC chapter 9 (mask work law) to game cartridges in an attempt to get around the backup law. IANAL, but I don't think Nintendo has a case. Apparently, mask work law doesn't apply because it applies to the actual semiconductor masks, not the underlying computer programs. Besides, mask work law doesn't apply to NES or Super NES games because mask work rights last only 10 years (in contrast to perpetual copyright), and the design for NES and Super NES ROM masks was laid down in 1985 and 1991 with the release of the pack-in titles.

Eventually, in several dozen years, they will fall to public domain as the copyrights expire.

Not if you keep voting for Senators and Representatives who continue to extend the term of copyright.

No, no, bombs generally are not filled with shrapnel, that is generated by the explosive bursting the case of the bomb...

I think it is worthwhile at this point to refer to the original history of the word "shrapnel".

The short version is that a Henry Shrapnel invented the style of antipersonnel projectile, filled with extra metal bits, that now bears his name.

If you import DVDs from the states to the UK you still pay the VAT, and hence the tax arguement doesn't really cut it with me.

If Disney sells copies of Return to Never Land in the United States, Disney pays royalties only to the DVD Forum, MPEG LA, and Dolby for use of the patents involved in DVD coding. If, on the other hand, Disney sells copies of that movie in the United Kingdom, Disney must pay additional royalties to Great Ormond Street Hospital, owner of the copyright on James M. Barrie's Peter Pan in the United Kingdom. (Read More...)

This won't work (most likely) in practice ... There are examples ...

I come from a tiny state located at the south-western part of India. Compared to the rest of India, people of this state are highly educated (very high literacy, very high Physical Quality of Life Index, ...) Due to all these we have better minimum wages, laws related to prevention exploitation of workers, other industrial laws, ... somewaht strictly enforced (compared to the other neighboring states in India). The overall result of this is/was in general to move most of the industries located in our state out to other neighboring states where industries can find workers who are ready to accept much lesser wages, work under dangerous/less than acceptable conditions, ...

Due to all these the unemployment rate is very high + A major portion of the income of the state comes from people who work outside the state and outside India like me ... Oh something more - since we don't have much manufacturing industries most of the things we consume are not manufactured/produced in there (is this familiar ?Go to your fav. supermarket in US ...) It is really sad to find industries being moved out of USA ... Often reminds me of something at home :-(

The Hartford, Connecticut area Meetup was very small, but still a good time. No one had a clue who picked Chili's as the venue, but it was a good meal.

Hartford Area's Thoughts:
The general consensus was that posting is not as worthwhile/enjoyable to do anymore on Slashdot for a couple reasons:
- The need to post immediately within a few minutes of a story being posted to have any chance of moderation
- Ambiguous "Lameness" filters when composing messages akin to porno filters: filtering out more stuff than they ought to.

15 people signed up on meetup.
6 people (roughtly) RSVP'd for the first meetup.
3 people actually showed up.

Meetup should allow people who actually show up to have more voting power over the next venue...

Martin Van Buren, a former president and an abolisnist, died 140 years ago today, and you people are discussing the first wind-up phone charger review? GET SOME PRIORITIES, people!

Truman suggested the nuclear bomb to Stalin 57 years ago TODAY, and you nerds are discussing the first wind-up phone charger review? MY GOD, GET SOME FRICKIN' PRIORITIES!!!

The Mormons first settled in Utah and founded Salt Lake City 155 years ago TODAY, and you people are JACKING OVER a wind up phone charger? JESUS H. CHRIST, PEOPLE, GET SOME PRIORITIES!!!

Martin Van Buren died 140 years ago TODAY, and you people are STILL going on about that phone charger? DAMMIT, GET SOME PRIORITIES, YOU SICK FREAKS?!?!?!