Slashdot Mirror

or at least virtual flashcrowds - that's what we are. Created by anything with a high-traffic audience and an "interesting" link to a web-site that's the equivalent of a pretty but weak wooden bridge; we're the juggernaut that decides to park on it to catch the view.

that flashcrowd idea - Larry Niven, 1971 (1973?) see:

• Wikipedia definition dating it to 1973
• Word Spy pointing to 1971
• and a link to larryniven.org which points the flash crowd finger back at slashdot...

It seems to be a term created by and for obsessive collectors. Would that make it more suitable for a slang dictionary?

I found this in my original search... I went through the same process as you, though, and discarded it for exactly the same reason: it didn't seem to be defined as a real word by any authoritative source. I think it's interesting that, despite this fact, I pretty much knew what the word meant just by its usage; and that it seems like it ought to be a word.

You would presumably place a copyright trap in your database.

Map makers, form companies, and the like are known to insert intentional errors in their maps in order to prevent somebody who has copied their information from claiming that the information was gathered independently.

I'd rather live forever on air, myself.. Thus far, I sustain myself on air alone for about, oh, 22 hours a day, but I'm slowly working my way up.

google (v.) is at nearly 3 years old (at the very least), for christ's sake.

where did the last few years go?

I was wondering WTF myself.. so I googled for it.. this hit is pretty descriptive.

I learned a new word today!! :)

See also this definition at The Word Spy.

n. A much-hyped software product that currently exists only as a series of slides in a sales or marketing presentation.

Given that now at least two published sources say that slideware is just another way of saying presentation software (and one of them is the NYT), you could almost consider it another acceptable defintion. And the English language chugs on.

The funny thing about that is that they're the same restaurant. In the eastern U.S., it's Hardees, and Carl's Jr. in the west. In high school, I was fired from the New Castle, Indiana Hardees for throwing away a hamburger patty another employee had dropped - "No customer saw it on the floor.".

Oh, and as Dave Barry said "The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S.". However, it is correct to use the apostrophe to indicate possession, except for the pronoun "it". I don't know why. So the western Hardees is the Jr. belonging to Carl. Such names usually come about because a well-known restaurant splits, and the new owners want to differentiate, or someone buys a known restaurant, and wants to indicate their own presence. In this case, it's one of those corporate focus-group names, like the non-word Japanese car names.

Wow, great, I think I'll start becoming a Breatharian right now!

...'inspiriational', totally-irrational Christian-themed stories...

Glurge

I've heard of "marketecture" before but never thought it would be used as a company name (though with different spelling). Given that there is such a company, though, it makes sense that Verisign would use their services.

Also, it's an Internet poll

Sounds more like it's a push poll. That is, a poll designed more to push the "pollee" in a specific direction as opposed to trying to get an unbiased opinion.

here's another example.

If a (dead) tree hits the pavement and no one buys it will it stop being printed?

95% of my information is gleaned from the Net.
Of that 95%, 90% is from free sources and 10% is from commercial databases.
What I enjoy so much about the Net, I can choose from many different sites that concentrate on many different aspect of News (Tech, Gov't, Human Rights, Africa, Wireless, etc).
I've had several arguements settled rather quickly with a minute or two search on the Net (Is the answer "42" or "43"? The average rainfall is greater in the Amazon Basin then the rainforest(s) in Congo. Is it "wrapped up like a douche" or "revved up like a deuce"?).

The non-Net 5% is both from periodicals that I happen to pick up usually while waiting in some Medical Professional's office (MD, Dentist, etc) and from TV.
I probably watch twenty minutes, total time, of TV news or "news" and those five minutes are usually involuntarily (waiting for flight, sports bar, wife and I fighting and I sit and stare stonily at TV, etc) a week.

I have never liked newspapers, except for small small town print (well, they used to have a newspaper) and then only for the editorials and letters to the editor.

I do not really have a preference, book in hand or LCD in hand, for leisure reading. Whichever will get me the story is fine with me.
Having recently re-read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring (.pdf) and Snowcrash (.txt) was as enjoyable this time as reading them in their original pulp form.

If a (dead) tree hits the pavement and no one buys it will it stop being printed?

95% of my information is gleaned from the Net.
Of that 95%, 90% is from free sources and 10% is from commercial databases.
What I enjoy so much about the Net, I can choose from many different sites that concentrate on many different aspect of News (Tech, Gov't, Human Rights, Africa, Wireless, etc).
I've had several arguements settled rather quickly with a minute or two search on the Net (Is the answer "42" or "43"? The average rainfall is greater in the Amazon Basin then the rainforest(s) in Congo. Is it "wrapped up like a douche" or "revved up like a deuce"?).

The non-Net 5% is both from periodicals that I happen to pick up usually while waiting in some Medical Professional's office (MD, Dentist, etc) and from TV.
I probably watch twenty minutes, total time, of TV news or "news" and those five minutes are usually involuntarily (waiting for flight, sports bar, wife and I fighting and I sit and stare stonily at TV, etc) a week.

I have never liked newspapers, except for small small town print (well, they used to have a newspaper) and then only for the editorials and letters to the editor.

I do not really have a preference, book in hand or LCD in hand, for leisure reading. Whichever will get me the story is fine with me.
Having recently re-read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring (.pdf) and Snowcrash (.txt) was as enjoyable this time as reading them in their original pulp form.

If a (dead) tree hits the pavement and no one buys it will it stop being printed?

95% of my information is gleaned from the Net.
Of that 95%, 90% is from free sources and 10% is from commercial databases.
What I enjoy so much about the Net, I can choose from many different sites that concentrate on many different aspect of News (Tech, Gov't, Human Rights, Africa, Wireless, etc).
I've had several arguements settled rather quickly with a minute or two search on the Net (Is the answer "42" or "43"? The average rainfall is greater in the Amazon Basin then the rainforest(s) in Congo. Is it "wrapped up like a douche" or "revved up like a deuce"?).

The non-Net 5% is both from periodicals that I happen to pick up usually while waiting in some Medical Professional's office (MD, Dentist, etc) and from TV.
I probably watch twenty minutes, total time, of TV news or "news" and those five minutes are usually involuntarily (waiting for flight, sports bar, wife and I fighting and I sit and stare stonily at TV, etc) a week.

I have never liked newspapers, except for small small town print (well, they used to have a newspaper) and then only for the editorials and letters to the editor.

I do not really have a preference, book in hand or LCD in hand, for leisure reading. Whichever will get me the story is fine with me.
Having recently re-read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring (.pdf) and Snowcrash (.txt) was as enjoyable this time as reading them in their original pulp form.

Thanks for the link

I saw a news report where they were talking about flash mobs as an 'art'. (note the quotes ;) They had 200 people go into some mall and kneel down and start bowing and praying to this giant statue as if it were a god. Then, after 5 minutes, they all just got up and left. Some were chanting and raving like a bunch of snake handling Penticostals. They were mainly younger people, 18-25, T-shirts, lots of beards and long hair.

Its was pretty weird, and interestingly enough, entertaining.

World's first physical DDoS?

where have you been?

The site is still up for now, but how long will it last?

... who read the above sentence and mentally added:

How -- long -- will -- it -- last?!?

Someone get the Shatner Earworm out of my mind please....

Replace bluetooth? -- Talk about lack of ambition.

You'll probably never know, since economists don't practice whole-cost accounting, don't recognize the triple bottom line, and governments don't consider ecological footprints when doing environmental assessments.

As those grating wacky culture jammers at adbusters say, economists need to learn to subract!

What the hell is a 'grit' anyway?

And what does this have to do with Natalie Portman. The slashdot search function fails me.

While you're at it, what is a "LART"? Is it like a clue stick? Which should be applied first, and when?

if you want to define "Machinima" as using Game Engines and their free (sometimes open source) editors as the "tools," then we're in the realm of reason.

I can confirm that when I coined the term, that was what it meant. People were beginning to make stuff in Unreal, Half-Life, etc. as well as pieces that didn't use the original games as the basis for their plots - but they were still describing such things as "Quake movies".

That term was inaccurate, and likely to put off creative people who wanted to make something other than recammed deathmatches. It seemed we needed a new word and I cobbled one together.

Of course semantics evolve with use, and these days the people claiming to make "machinima" do tend to include stuff made in real-time engines that are not game engines.

But the interesting stuff is not the gradual increase in the use of real-time rendering at some (e.g. previewing) stage in a traditional animation process.

The key aspect to contemporary machinima is that one takes well-established techniques (e.g. live performance recordings later edited together) from traditional real-world film-making, and applies them to work in a virtual (and digital) environment. You also skew said techniques to take advantage of things you can do better in that environment - you are less constrained by real-world physics or expenses during filming, and you have more powerful and expressive representations to work with in post-production.

The result is something substantially different than either traditional film or animation. Their illegitimate offspring is a new production technique, and the groups doing machinima claim it can be significantly cheaper and more flexible.

But then to ship the resulting movies as AVI files? That's the biggest cop out I've ever seen in any art form.

Personally I'd love to see more machinima distributed in a way that allows client-side rendering. It offers exciting quality/file-size ratios (framerate and resolution increase with the client's processing power, think 3D Flash) and also interesting story-telling techniques (e.g. allow the viewer limited control over playback without letting them escape the overall narrative.)

But in practice people have found that "native" machinima is as yet difficult to distribute in an easy-to-run manner. It's simpler for the viewer to play an AVI than to install a new playback engine.

I continue to hope we will see more native machinima, but the form of distribution doesn't need to change for film-making in a virtual digital environment to matter as a production technique.

--Anthony.

Astroturfing is the set up of a fake grassroots movement. This can be in order to undermine or misrepresent a real one or to disguies the efforts of a lobbying group as an political effort by citizenry.

"astroturf
(AS.troh.turf) n. A fake grass-roots movement."

I think you're confusing patents and trademarks. Trademarks MUST be defended vigorously or they can be invalidated or lost-- which is why Google pissed us all off by cease-and-desisting WordSpy for using "google" as a verb. I doubt they really wanted to do that, but because of the way the system works, they had to. To do nothing would have been to risk their trademark (and by extension, their brand).

Patents are a different breed of cat... you can sit back for years and let people infringe on your patents, then spring the legal trap on them and take them for everything they've got-- and they have nobody to blame but themselves, for not doing sufficient due-diligence to make sure there were no pre-existing patents for their product/service/whatever.

Unfortunately, the Patent Office is so fucked up nowadays that they'll award a patent for the most obvious or stupid things, to practically anyone who has the money and the will to go through the patent process.

~Philly

In the latest chapter of Google protecting their trademark, they even asked the dictionary folks at Wordspy to change their definition of the word "google" to prevent it from becoming a generic word. All this has caused mixed reactions and lots of news coverage by microdocs (formerly Google Village), Search Engine Watch, and Internet.com. Their latest target seems to be the Google Web APIs-based automated search service Googlert, who changed their name to "Google Alert" and explain that they were asked "politely" and have been "sympathetic" to Google's concerns. All this recent activity might be in the spirit of shoring up the Google brand and business image before an IPO...

In the latest chapter of Google protecting their trademark, they even asked the dictionary folks at Wordspy to change their definition of the word "google" to prevent it from becoming a generic word. All this has caused mixed reactions and lots of news coverage by microdocs (formerly Google Village), Search Engine Watch, and Internet.com. Their latest target seems to be the Google Web APIs-based automated search service Googlert, who changed their name to "Google Alert" and explain that they were asked "politely" and have been "sympathetic" to Google's concerns. All this recent activity might be in the spirit of shoring up the Google brand and business image before an IPO...

In the latest chapter of Google protecting their trademark, they even asked the dictionary folks at Wordspy to change their definition of the word "google" to prevent it from becoming a generic word. All this has caused mixed reactions and lots of news coverage by microdocs (formerly Google Village), Search Engine Watch, and Internet.com. Their latest target seems to be the Google Web APIs-based automated search service Googlert, who changed their name to "Google Alert" and explain that they were asked "politely" and have been "sympathetic" to Google's concerns. It's nice to see that they let them keep the word 'Google' in the name - I guess Google is trying to keep web developers on its side.

In the latest chapter of Google protecting their trademark, they even asked the dictionary folks at Wordspy to change their definition of the word "google" to prevent it from becoming a generic word. All this has caused mixed reactions and lots of news coverage by microdocs (formerly Google Village), Search Engine Watch, and Internet.com. Their latest target seems to be the Google Web APIs-based automated search service Googlert, who changed their name to "Google Alert" and explain that they were asked "politely" and have been "sympathetic" to Google's concerns. It's nice to see that they let them keep the word 'Google' in the name - I guess Google is trying to keep web developers on its side.

A recent example of SciFi influencing (predicting?) world polity is the concept of Anglosphere , coined by Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age. It refers to a "natural", cultural-political unity amongst Anglo-saxon countries. As the war against Iraq appears to illustrate this concept, the phrase has come into widespread use, serving as the title of a recent book apparently intended to rally Britons against the EU.

Funny that the article didn't mention the fact that Google's lawyers recently asked Paul McFedries to remove the word 'google' from his excellent wordspy lexicon. A company that 'gets it' indeed.

(Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)

(Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)

http://www.wordspy.com/topwords.asp

What the hell is chewable liquor anyway? Oh wait, I can just check the definition...

I did a 'wordspy' for xerox and it didn't come up.

What was in there:

• xeroxlore
• xerocracy

Other corporate verbage /nouns which were not included:

• Photoshop
• ICQ / MSN / Message you...
• Slashdoted / Slashdot effect :-)

Personally I think Word Spy should expand on the meaning so it doesn't simply mean to search out personal information. Also specify the use of the google search engine as being the engine.

-
Rod

I did a 'wordspy' for xerox and it didn't come up.

What was in there:

• xeroxlore
• xerocracy

Other corporate verbage /nouns which were not included:

• Photoshop
• ICQ / MSN / Message you...
• Slashdoted / Slashdot effect :-)

Personally I think Word Spy should expand on the meaning so it doesn't simply mean to search out personal information. Also specify the use of the google search engine as being the engine.

-
Rod

google (GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a trademark of Google Technologies Inc.) -The World Spy - google

No, just no. Google has nothing to do with looking for a potention girlfriend or boyfriend or friendly friend. Not even an adequate definition. To google is NOT to use "a" search engine, it is to use Google. I don't call it "googling" unless I use GOOGLE!

What the hell is wrong with these people?!?! Dating . . . any search engine . . . these people have never GOOGLED!

For those that didn't check it out at WordSpy.com:

(GOO.gul) v. To use an Internet search engine
such as google.com to look for information
related to a new or potential girlfriend or
boyfriend. (Note that Google(TM) is a
trademark of Google Technologies Inc.)
--Googling pp. Emphasis added by me.

My comment about this is pretty straight-forward, it's their trademark, but it's everyones language. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak. For the more obscure references, Typewriter used to be a brand name too.

I don't know if this actually works for anybody trying the spam technique, as I'd hope most people getting these messages would either be too smart to fall for it or too afraid of the stock market to set up and manage their own account.

Jesus, you really *are* one of Bush's Bitches, aren't you?

No, troll. I voted for Gore (and I live in NY, so my vote _did_ count for him.)

The word 'soldier' was good enough for our government for more than two centuries - now Bush shows up and somehow it no longer does the trick?

For more than two centuries, our government fought wars by throwing dumb recruits who were worth less than their rifles against a target en masse. And then we had Vietnam, the possiblity nuclear war, and the sudden shift from beating the pants out of armies to tracking down terrorists and much weaker/smaller armies.

It's almost definitly not Bush's term. The word's been around since at least 1986, and if anyone in Washington is the motive force for picking it, it'd be Donald Rumsfeld.

Please, kiss my ass. Not only is that a crock of shit, but the term 'warfighter' sounds fucking silly. Only a moron would find the term anything less than ludicrous.

You voted Green, didn't you? I mean, anyone who signs their /. posts when they're logged in and equates personal tastes with intelligence has got to be a big enough fool to throw away their vote in the closest election in decades.

What these companies are doing is so different from "traditional cross-breeding" that it's not even comparable. You can cross-breed all you want and you're not going to get corn that produces a specific drug.

The danger here is very real. For example, imagine corn that manufactures a human contraceptive managing to cross-polinate itself into ordinary corn. Imagine that corn being inadvertently used as a seed crop.

Nobody here is against scientific inquiry, so relax the anti-luddite rhetoric already. Are you going to let the 13-year-old next door experiment with radioactive isotopes? No? But just think of the scientific progress he might achieve!

My objection is to companies that run slipshod operations, are discovered by the USDA, and get away with a slap on the wrist. The second article describes how ProdiGene is negotiating for permission to resell the contaiminated soybeans as biodeisel fuel. Clever solution, but IMHO there should have been punitive damages that put ProdiGene out of business.

The Word Spy this week had a term for this phenomenon:

Ghost work
"After a round of layoffs or firings, the work that used to be done by the former employees and that must now be handled by the remaining staff."

In addition, I agree quite strongly with those who recommended MIT's Jargon File, and I direct your attention especially to the entry for "molly guard."

You should also try S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Actio, and you should definitely consult The Word Spy. The first is one of the classics in the field of semantics; the second logs the appearance of new words and phrases (frequently tech-related), and explains the concepts behind them.

Whatever. You'd be tracked down and your ass would be history. The government would have a little talk with your ISP and you would lose access. For some turds, that is worse than getting thrown into jail with Bubba. Then again, you wouldn't have access in jail either. In any event, you'd be hunted as a cyber terrorist and you'd get your ass kicked. It wouldn't be private or secret, although you know that, don't you. So, you'd hand your ass out on a line because you would be part of a collective of terrorists. At least in this climate. This is kind of the same reason Cringley is full of pig shit. You'll never reach the tipping point. Gotta run. Otherwise I'd say other stupid shit that makes sense to most of you. By the way, Slashdot tracks all this crap. They will tell the government and you'll go to jail and meet Bubba and little Bubba and Bubba's friend.

Your version may be correct; I've not read the book.

My source of info is The Word Spy, a fascinating site and one that's usually trustworthy with etymologies.

nice troll.. No troll, Mr Ignorant. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is a book by Tom Wolfe based on the 60's LSD counter-culture. Drinking the Kool Aid refers specifically to the Jonestown cult suicides in 1978. Dropping acid may make you feel like part of a group, but not everyone who does so is a fanatic about it. Everyone who drank the kool aid and Jonestown was a zealot.