Slashdot Mirror
Quickies 2:Electric Bugaloo
Let's start this off with
jsewell's truly amazing story about the rocket car urban legend from the man who claims to have invented it.
Did you do your homework last week? Remember that Slashdot was nominated for
a Webby in Community so go do their little login dance and vote for us if you think that our First Posts, Oog, Trolls and 'God Slashdot Really Sucks These Days' messages are cool. Maybe we'll even fly CowboyNeal out to give an acceptance speech if we win ;)
Glowing Spleen sent us an optical illusion that
really bugs me. I had to check if it wasn't an animated GIF.
A few for the do it yourselfers:
Slash T.M.F.D.W.
sent us a real mech and
Ryan J. Evans sent in the
worlds largest playable tetris.
If you don't actually want to build something, but want to play anyway, try SodaPlay and you can mess with these crazy animated 2D springy models. Its surprisingly addictive.
After all that building, you might need
Jeremy's Microbatch Ice Cream
(thanks alangmead) and its "Wired" flavor, a caffinated vanilla ice cream. Between that and the Triple Espresso flavor. Wonder what happens if you keep it in this
Bio-Plastic Wrap that detects contaminated food (sent in by Accipiter)
You can't use plastic wrap to preserve human heads, but
ChunkyGoodness noted that Chet Fleming has US Patent number 4666425 for keeping them alive.
Dugh Daren sent us a hilarious
essay from Space.com on Star War's most annoying characters that I found extremely funny.
brunning pointed us to
perhaps the most pressing bug in all of Microsoft's software.
kwsNI pointed us to an extremely disturbing article about Pandas on Viagra in China.
Blake sent in a filter based on "Being John Malkovitch." Read
Slashdot in Malkovitch Mode.
And finally, we need a stupid lawsuit:
east_bay_pete told us about a commercial that featured a cockroach scampering over the screen ... people are suing because they keep breaking TVs trying to kill the CGI Roach!
OK, sorry to burst your bubbles here, but this is a few years old, and this guy seems to have ripped it from the cDc (Cult of the Dead Cow) now, personally, I think the cDc should get credit for this story, since they are the original 'posters' of this pile of flaming boo-hah. (did I say that?) But I digress.. anyway.. Here's the ORIGINAL text/html http://www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/ cDc-363/ Rock on cDc and all you dead cow lovers out there!
!ooM moo, mo-fuckah Moo!
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Here's another place, probably faster, where you can find the, err... "roach clip".
OK.. i realize complaining about my own post being moderated UP is a little odd, but good LORD!
Where do you get off, moderating my post as "insightful"?? how could you POSSIBLY call that "insightful"?? there isn't one single bit of insight in the damn post! it's just a minor, somewhat interesting anecdote. I have no problem with it being moderated up-- i probably wouldn't have moderated it past score:1 myself had i been the one with the mod access, which is why i didn't put on the score:+1 bonus-- but if you're going to moderate, use ACCURATE moderation!! Don't just assume that because you're pushing the points in the right direction your job is done! The words are there for a _reason_, and "informative", "insightful" and "interesting" are NOT the same thing!!
Moderators just mark everything as "insightful" no matter what it is, and it's starting to irritate me rather heavily. If people aren't going to distinguish between "insightful", "interesting" and "informative" when moderating, then cdmrtaco should just replace them with one single tag instead of three! Or at LEAST add some kind of lesser metamod penalty for "fair in that this should have been modded up, but not as insightful" or "fair in that this should have been modded down, but not as offtopic".. (since NOBODY is ever going to metamod misapplied "insightful" ratings if it's a good post)
and i wouldn't really mind normally.. but the entire POINT of the post i'm complaining about was to complain about moderators not thinking and applying "offtopic" to a post that should have been either "troll", "overrated" or not moderated at all.. and the post itself gets hit by a moderator who doesn't think and applies "insightful" where it should have been either "interesting", "underrated" or not moderated at all..
what is going ON here??
is there no escape from the misapplied moderation?
ok, bitch-time is over. you can all go back to your homes now there's nothing more to see.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Just incase you thought the severed-head patent was weird, have a look at this:
IBM's "Penis Locking And Lacerating Vaginal Insert" Patent.
Yes, IBM.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag
..how long do they plan to research the direction of the Earth's rotation? Are they going to release a Hotfix which will cause it to rotate around a random axis, or more likely not rotate at all? Will they later release a service pack fixing these issues and breaking Lotus Globe Pro(tm)?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
IIRC, back in the early-mid 80s, NBC's spinning globe graphic for their news intro also spun the "wrong" way. Many people complained bitterly; it was later explained that the art director wanted it to look like the earth as seen from the Space Shuttle.
Microsoft has not copped to the same plea.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Look at the headline:Explorapedia Nature: Earth Rotates in Wrong Direction Now, you could take this either way, but if you had to choose one or the other, I'd say "Earth Rotates the Wrong Directon" sounds more like they're blaming the actual planet, not the software.
The "Summary" is the same: When you run Explorapedia and use the Exploratron to look at the Earth spinning, the Earth rotates in the wrong direction. Again, they aren't definitively saying that it's the Earth on your computer screen that's incorrect.
Next, is the "Status" of the problem. Here's where it gets scary: Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Explorapedia, World of Nature, version 1.0. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available. They are "researching" the problem? They know exactly what the problem is and the software solution would be, clearly, to make the earth image rotate the other way. But, it seems to me that they are looking for "other options"
========
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Well, maybe not intentional Larry Niven references, but they are there!
Larry made the same error Microsoft did! (The first edition of Ringworld had the Earth spinning the wrong way. Later versions corrected it. The originals are worth money now.)
And now we find out that Jar Jar Binks is really Teela Brown!
It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
(Either that, or I'm waaaaaayyyy too tired.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
0:00.00 - Cockroach appears
0:00.02 - Eyes register creepy movement
0:01.00 - Brain registers creepy movement, inference engine is started
1:30.00 - Conclusion is reached: "A Cockroach!!"
1:30.05 - Automatical defense system is started: "Let's kill it!"
1:30.37 - Brains register object in right hand
1:30.40 - Arm slings remote control to screen
1:30.85 - TV explodes
1:30.90 - Eyes register exploding thingy
1:31.40 - Brains register explosion, inference engine is started
3:00.00 - Conclusion reached: "I just killed my TV! They made me do it!"
3:00.02 - Search for solution starts - depth first
3:00.05 - Conclustion reached: "Let's sue them!"
As you can see, they need less than two minutes to break their TV. Thanks to the high-availability of solution-data, they only need 0.03 seconds to decide to sue. Experimental data is still gathered to determine how long it takes them before they find out whom to sue.
I think we need more research and then come up with a new set of guidelines, or maybe a law, like the MAOCTVA (The "Maximum amount of creepy thingy visibility act"), to prevent thses kind of things from happening in the future. After all, it's the governments duty to protect US citizens as much as possible.
YDD
~=Keelor
* Results not typical. Please consult your doctor before you begin using Viagra.
~=Keelor
It's similar to the Hermann's grid illusion, the one with the white grid on black background, and you see black dots on the intersections. That one's explained at http://www.illusionworks.com /html/hermann_grid.html... it's due to 'lateral inhibition'.
... you stare at it spinning a while, then look away, and everything you see swirls in a spiral. Definately not one to try after a few drinks...
They've got the illusion posted as well (the Scintillating Grid illusion), but all they say is that 'the underlying mechanism behind it is not yet fully understood.'
Still gives me a headache though. Ouch.
Can anyone find that illusion with the concentric rings that rotate in opposite directions?