Slashback: Bots, Time Travel, Turing

More on the Battlebots trademark dispute, proof that some of your are listening to Dr. Who on the Beeb, and a memorial -- finally -- for Alan Turing, in tonight's round of updates, corrections, and further info.

That eerie, eerie theme music will get in your head all day. sideshow-voxx writes: "The BBC has announced that there will be more installments of the Audio Adventure Dr Who - Death Comes to Time available on the web in the New Year."

This is cool news (the accompanying art is a nice touch with this Dr. Who presentation), but it would be nice if they would put the episodes into more audio formats as well.

Things always seem to get more complicated. Eric Molitor, ("Linux hacker and Builder of Violator - Linux powered BattleBot that competed in May") wrote about the BattleBots vs. Battlebots story of the other day, saying:

"As a BattleBot competitor I was horrified when I noticed your article but here are some corrections... BattleBots INC != BattleBots the show.

BattleBots INC is suing and not the TV show. (Comedy Central tapes the tournaments and airs portions of the finals on a TV show. But thats just like showing NFL games mostly. The TV company just pays a licensing fee to broadcast the event.)

Do a little research and the guy registered his domain at least a year after the first BattleBots competition in Long Beach. (Early 1998) In fact the battlebots.org domain was registered after BattleBots.com, and after BattleBots applied for their TM.

So this kid (running a script kiddie hosting service no less) registers a domain after somebody applies for the TM and then asks for $5K to give it up. Sounds like cyber-squatting to me. Also take a look at the dates on the website for the replies, etc. Things don't look right ....

Still BattleBots is dumb not to have registered the .org domain.

For a little history on BattleBots and the law suits, etc. that RobotWars got into that nearly destroyed this sport take a look at http://www.robotcombat.com/history.html.

Greg and Tray gave up a lot and everybody got together to dodge RobotWars/Profile records lawsuits to prevent the sport from happening. I'd hate to see them unfairly get a bad name."

Thanks, Eric.

Something to see in England. slathering wrote with news that the Alan Turing memorial written about in this Slashdot story has finally materialized. He writes: "I read about this in this months IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (who doesn't have a website). But I found the website for the memorial itself. Apparently funding was found for the Alan Turing Memorial since it was unveiled June 23, 2001 in Manchester, England. It was funded without any donations from the computing industry."

Comments

Dear North American Slashdot Readers

[exa]

With your disrespectful posts about Alan Turing, you have once again proved how lowly you are. As a computer scientist, I am ashamed to see that people who are acquainted with computers, and even idiots like you, cannot recognize the greatness of Turing.

To the operators of this terrible site called slashdot: We come here to read the news in the technology world, but the amount of stupidity is extremely repulsive.

It is apparent that you have written of the memorial with good intentions, and it is a warm news item for the mathematicians and computer scientists here. But perhaps you could have written an article about Turing's life and work to prevent this kind of imbecile responses from your rude and ignorant readers.

Or perhaps considering the standard of discussion here, you should just shut down this site, and lie down on the floor until you give your last breath.

I still wonder, is the average north american computer user really this stupid, or are you all pretending to be morons?

Bzzzzt

[kimihia]

Homosexuality and gender identity are conditions of birth, and affect something like 11% of the population, to some degree.

Ah, lets think about this for a second ... no.

The "homosexuality gene" turned out to be a fraud. The person who thought up that piece of "research" was himself a homosexual. Didn't mention that in the full disclosure section did they now?

In the main, you can not change it.

Absolute nonsense. With Turing the government thought a few hormone injections could solve it. Well, no. Maybe they should have applied leaches in the hope they'd extract the homosexuality from the blood? Quack medical science ...

Homosexuality is a conscious decision. People's tastes are conditioned by what they are told.

People like you spout that homosexuality is this, its that, etc, then people believe it. You know horoscopes? How vague and predictable can you get! But no, humans look for some sign of order and come up with the wrong conclusions. Exactly the same with homosexuality.

The same people that are somehow homosexual because of their genes are the exact same people who are being told from the street corners that you could be homosexual, go try it out to make sure.

What a stupid perverse society. If we were really meant to be homosexual then we would be hermaphrodites. Are you surprised that men don't have vaginas, and women don't have penises? Perhaps homosexuality is peversion. Ever think of that?

So no, stop spouting lies about homosexuality. Instead actually try and help people who have been fooled into that lie. They don't need your criticism, they just need some tender cult deprogramming and some real considerate love like anyone else.