Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Retroaction, Breakeven, Kansas
Pardon me sir, are you going to finish that Apple? Marco van de Voort writes: "MkLinux now has official support for these much sold first Nubus based PowerMac generation, that is rotting away in basements. These machines make excellent X-Terms." And the same models can naturally run NetBSD, too. [Updated 6:26GMT by timothy] Reader vkulkarn corrects me here. Mea culpa, you're right -- only some of the old Nubus PowerMac models actually run NetBSD. But I bet someone, somewhere is plotting to change that.
Garage sales can now support Linux.GigsVT writes "Coollogic has released a new set-top box, this one with Linux already installed. Sounds like ripe hacking material to me. Blurb: The Internet Ready 7200 uses a National Semiconductor MediaGX processor, 16MB of flash memory instead of a hard disk, 32MB of RAM and has the ability to connect to the Internet via DSL, Ethernet or a modem. It uses a TV instead of a monitor and comes with Netscape's Web browser." And MrRobahtsu writes "Want a 64MB diskless 200MHz Linux box cheap? Try egghead. With IDE, USB, 10/100 ethernet, and Linux and Netscape in flash ram, it looks pretty cool. Even says "can be upgraded to a pc." Not bad for $129."
Toto, I don't think we're in the Pleistocene anymore! Claudius writes: "This cnn.com article reports that Kansas voters now support the teaching of evolution in their public schools, as evidenced by recent election results. They have voted to remove two incumbents to the Kansas Board of Education who have supported standards diminishing the importance of evolution, and a third, anti-evolution candidate was unable to defeat an opponent who opposes the current standards. The issue is still far from settled, however, since five of the ten seats on the board remain to be filled in November." For a refresher on the sticky state of evolution in Kansas education, see Hemos' story on it from a while ago.
Ha ha fooled ya good. TeacherReviews.com writes "Gervase just got voted off the Survivor island, meaning that RealWorldBlows discussed in a past story produced a false result and the actual winner of Survivor is still unknown." True enough. What was going through the collective CBS head when they failed to follow the directive of their own Web site?!
Still horrifying after all these days. chaidawg writes: "According to this article in the New York Times (free registration req.), author Stephen King's experiment with payment for e-publishing seems to be working. After the first of three promised chapters he has made back all but $10,000 of the more than $100,000 he spent on advertising." This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
You said: "The Theory of Evolution is not fact. That is why we say theory of evolution" When will people stop spouting this drivel ? The word theory does not mean something is unproven, for example, I spent 2 years at university studying "Number Theory", including large slabs of mathematical proofs that what we were studying was _known_to_be_true_, and you don't get anyone more finicky about 'proof' than a pure mathematician. In fact, when mathematicians want to make it clear that something is unproven, they usually call it a conjecture. In general, most things in science are called theories, including such well established and uncontroversial things as "the earth revolves around the sun" (Copernican Theory). I went to a debate between a Scientist and Creationist on Evolution, and when the Creationist said "evolution is only a theory" the scientist produced a car-battery and set of jumper leads and said "wanna test the theory of electricity ?"
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I think that Stephen King should have voted for the set-top PowerMac to stay on the island, despite its theological heresay.
and I'm leaning toward the latter. They didn't just let everyone get misled by their website (which they went as far as to take down for a few days after the story broke), they also intentionally mislead the public in at least two other ways. Someone leaked that Gervase would win to MSNBC even before the website thing. Furthurmore, a scene in the introduction shows four people sitting at the tribal council, Gervase among them. CBS now claims that was intentional. So either CBS lucked out and had a number of coincidences fall perfectly into place, or they are master con-artists. They fooled us, didn't they?
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Timothy wrote:
:)
This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
Jamie wrote:
I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.
Looks to me like Jamie *was* wrong. See Monday's news on Stephen King's site, in which he reports 76.38% payment. Now, 19.8% of the 116,200 that he counts as having paid have actually just promised to pay, but haven't actually paid. 80.2% of them paid via credit card. That means that at least 61.3% of downloads have been paid for, which is more than twice Jamie's most optimistic estimate.
King goes on. In response to the question "Are you go for Part 3 in September?", he replies, simply, "Yes."
Sorry, Jamie.
-Waldo
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