Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Games, Goats, Galileo
Make sure you slip this into the fine print of your consulting contracts. Adn writes "Newsbytes is reporting in a story that David McOwen, who was facing some pretty serious charges will be let go with a fine as against a much harsher fate. If utilizing so called "unused cycles" for the greater good is a crime (I know he was not charged for that per se... but bear with me here) then makes you consider uninstalling all those SETI@Home Screensavers doesnt it? Also a larger question...If the law (in these kinds of cases) operates on the 'intent' of the accused, what is the justification for even considering it a crime?"
Playing games builds your mind and your hand-eye coordination. Bill Kendrick writes: "The results are in for the SDL Game Contest held by No Starch Press, Linux Journal and Loki Games.
First place was awarded to LBreakout by Michael Speck. Second place went to Tower Toppler by Andreas Roever. My own game, Vectoroids just barely made third place over another asteroids-style game, Rock Dodgers by Paul Holt.
Congratulations! The full list of games is listed on No Starch's results page."
Guaranteed not to be your average Slashdot book review! Alex Chiu writes "Hello. This is alex chiu. I have written an online book at http://superiching.com Teaching people how to communicate with God using I-Ching. This online book is free for everyone to read. It's at least 5 times bigger than alexchiu.com. If interested, please release this news."
You may remember Alex from the interview we did with him a little while ago -- truly a unique individual.
Flying blind and a long way from home. Vertigo01 writes: "According to this article on CNN.com, galileo has encountered some technical problems on its flyby of Io and "for unknown reasons, went into safe mode" ... (sounds like my last Win98 install) ... flight engineers hope to restore normal operation for the duration of Galileo's life, but it looks like we won't get any more pictures of Io out of her."
Victoria's Secret probably won't put this on the box. FortKnox writes "Spider Silk is long known to be one of the strongest biological structure made (5 times stronger than steel by weight). Biologists have already genetically engineered goats to produce spider silk in their milk. Now, they have successfully extracted the protein and "spun" the silk. The next, and final step, is to mass produce the silk to be available commercially. Move over kevlar, here comes something better! I want to have the first biologically built house! I wonder how insulated spider silk is...."
They'll sue you for installing WindowsXP on company hardware. It wastes far more "unused" cycles than a mere distributed.net challange...
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Why should this guy's community service be "not related to computers"? If thats what he's best at, then shouldn't he be allowed to use his talents to benefit the community? What, is he going to hack the pentagon while streamlining the city hall databases? Or would this all make way too much sense to be in an american court?
Shift happens. Fire it up.
``The spiders unfortunately are territorial carnivores. They eat each other, and this has caused them to resist all forms of domestication,'' Turner said.
I can see it now, "Heel boy, now sit, stand. Now spin some silk into a shirt for me!"
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
I think the prosecution of McOwen went overboard. However, if you don't own machines, you shouldn't run software on them without permission. Increasing system load means the system spends less time in power saving modes. It does consume bandwith. Also, and I don't know if this was the case here, it can be damned annoying when not set up properly. When I was working to help administer the computers at a Math department at my college, the sysadmin for general computing stayed logged in and run Seti@home through scripts. Problem was, he didn't do a very good job, and sometimes two or more copies would run at once. They also seemed to take a perceptible amount of time to get off the CPU.
I want climbing ropes made out of spider silk! I think the smallest-diameter climbing rope is currently 9.5mm. Spider silk would be much lighter even at the same diameter; you could probably trust your life to a 3mm diameter (just guessing) spider silk rope, at dramatically lighter weight than is currently possible.
OTOH, can you imagine how freaky it would be to suspend your body weight from a rope so thin that you might not even be able to see the end of it?
I don't care if the latest breaking news is "Scientist clone new super species of hybrid shark/goat" or "Apple releases latest PC: the iGoat", know this, and know it well:
An article on slashdot with "GOAT" in the headline is inviting trouble
:)
Not quite... The law makes a distinction between 2 different classes of crime: malum prohibitum and malum in se. Malum prohibitum crimes are crimes that are (literally) "Evil because it's prohibited". There is no need to have intent to break malum prohibitum laws. Speeding on the interstate, for example, is malum prohibitum. Even if you didn't intend to speed, you still broke the law. Malum in se crimes are crimes that are (literally) "Evil in and of themselves". These are crimes like murder... To murder someone requires an intent to murder. To be guilty of the crime requires that the prosecution prove you intended to commit the crime. And I'm sure the "stealing computer time" thing is malum prohibitum.
McOwen used resources without permission. Ideally that gets you a talking-to from a supervisor, at worst it gets you fired.
Taking legal action against an employee for it is way overboard, and even 80 hour community service and $2100 is too much, considering he was fired from a subsequent job, and probably has had his life turned upside down for a few months (I believe he and his wife had a newborn at the time). The reason we should have a fair legal system is so you don't have to go through this kind of thing. What on earth was the attorney general thinking? Where they trying to meet some quota or something? Testing out a new law?
Anyway, glad to see things turned out all right, and he didn't have to go to court, where he probably wouldn't have had enough money to win the case.
You mean, as opposed to all the wooden houses that we currently live in, all produced from 100% inorganic trees?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"I have written an online book at http://superiching.com Teaching people how to communicate with God using I-Ching. "
Great, now God's going to get slashdotted.
A great thing about using steel as a construction material is that not much eats it. You can leave steel on it's own for a while, and count on it to stay pretty much in the same condition you left it. On the other hand, I'm sure there's been a nice little biological niche carved out by insects/bacteria/whatever that eat old abandoned cobwebs. I'd hate to see what would happen when they discover your bridge :)
Living better through chemicals
I can see it now. There's going to be some horrible accident, and the genetic alterations will get out of control, and then we'll have eight-limbed goats clambering all over our metropolisesisesesises. Massive got-webs woven from one building to another! Enormous throbbing goat egg-sacks, from whence come countless tiny goat-spiders which will invade everything and everywhere!
There will be all kinds, just like with spiders! We'll have daedly black-widow goats, which kill with a single bite! Wolf-goats (there's an irony!) that stalk about on their massive hairy legs! Jumping goats! Goats that, you know, dig those little holes with the fake top thingies and jumpout at their prey... maybe they'll use sewers.
The web-spinning goats will feast on large birds - the raptor population will be decimated. Mexico and Canada would dig massive moats to keep them in the States, and Britain will patrol our waters and airspace to preserve the quarantine, but the goats will weave parachute thingies and fly across the waters on the winds.
The goatspiders will soon cover the entire planet. They will adapt to every environment, forcing humanity into underground fortresses. The goatspiders will improve upon our technology and colonize the solar system, being contacted by the Culture, who don't even notice humanity. Soon our kind will be nothing more than few highly isolated communities deep beneath the planet's surface. At that point, it's only a matter of time before humanity's flame is exitnguished entirely.
But we'll have lots of really comfortable lingerie!
Karma: T-rexcellent.