Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Riftiness, Ixianism, Eclipse
I want you to hear my side of the story. R. Benjamin Shapiro writes "Hi There, After reading the reactionary (and slanted) Salon story (of which I am a subscriber) and the responses to it, I thought I'd point the /. community to a paper describing what we are actually doing. Many of the suggestions posted on /. are things we have been doing for some time now. Thanks very much for your feedback!"
A minor but nice victory. Werner Heuser writes "In the hearing from June 12th the court has rejected the arguments of 'Lés Editions Albert René.' The court says the words 'MobiliX' and 'Obelix' can hardly be mixed up with each other. Also the work of MobiliX is dedicated to another audience. This is a great success for the Free Software Community.
MobiliX is a very well-known site dedicated to Linux and BSD on mobile devices (like laptops, PDAs, cell phones and more). In November 2001 Werner Heuser, owner of the Open Source project MobiliX - UniX on Mobile Computers was charged by 'Lés Editions Albert René,' which is owner of the trademark 'Obelix.' In their opinion the names Obelix and MobiliX are very similar. The charge aimed for a deletion of the trademark 'MobiliX' and a compensation fee. The charge has been discussed in many newsgroups and mailing lists. It seems to be a very important case for the Free Software Community, because there are many projects, which names are also ending on 'iX.' Some other projects have even silently withdrawn their names, because the financial risk of losing a trademark case is high. The documentation of the case is available online. It includes the letters from MobiliX lawyers Jaschinski Biere Brexl - JBB."
In 10,000 years, these plates will be mandatory. An Anonymous Coward writes "The director of the Nevada DMV has denied the application for a custom plate depicting a mushroom-shaped cloud. The plates where apparently 'insensitive' and otherwise politically incorrect. .. "
Truer than you know. Zeekamotay writes "Referring to this previously reported story, The Beijing Evening News has now apologized to its readers for printing a story that originated from The Onion. They don't quite seem to grasp the concept of satire though: 'Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money,' the paper said. 'This is what the Onion does.'"
One more item for your bazillion-hour PVR. Stalke writes "This is a little old, but Tripping the Rift, first mentioned in a previous slashdot article, has been picked up by the SCI FI channel as their first ever animated series. For those of you that don't know, this is a parody of Starwars and Star Trek that takes place on the "Free Enterprise" and includes Chode, a purple alien, Six, a half-naked android, and a dark clown named Bobo. A higher res version of the original movie linked by the previous article is also available on their website."
Some of the "Sun" projectors were just down for scheduled maintenance. leananglemorgan writes "Just in case anyone missed the ol' Solar Eclipse on the 10th, here is a link to quick snaps I took ... Not the greatest, but reasonable enough to get some 'Hey that's cool!' remarks. Enjoy! I thought a couple came out good enough to share!" Another reader submits: "Thought everyone would enjoy this eclipse video I found."
Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money,' the paper said. 'This is what the Onion does.
At one issue a week, I sometimes wish it were more frequent!
And I could do without all the shitting jokes.
I have been pwned because my
Dear China,
Learning how to mock your government is an essential step towards democracy. Sorry you miss the point. Odds are, you'll 'get' democracy around the time the former Soviet Onion does...
R,
C
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Great now I have a glowing dot in my field of vision.
Warning: Don't look directly at the pictures. Use a pinhole camera. Once you burn out those rods and cones, they are gone forever. Be careful, please. It's too late for me, but maybe this warning can prevent someone else succumbing to the same fate.
I have been pwned because my
"Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes"
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
It seems like they are right on target for understanding what The Onion does: Fabricate offbeat news to make money. I'm glad they have reached the wisdom and recognition levels my 7-year-old niece possesses.
/.!
We'll know if they've really figured out that The Onion is NOT a news source if they stop accusing Bill Gates of poisoning the water supply, although they might get the same impression from certain other web sites. Oh dear, I can see it now: Yu Bin not only quoting Joe Klein from The Onion, but getting his substantiation from
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Next the Onion should run a story about planning to file suit against the Beijing Evening News for stealing their story.
Oh, but they don't know what copyright means, either... so they won't get the joke.
But surely they've had a chance to examine our historical documents?
</SpaceQuest>
Sure the Beijing newspaper has a bit of a slant explaining the source of the story but honestly what did you expect them to write.
"The story we published was copied word for word from an American on-line newspaper that is notorious for making up blatantly obviously fake stories for the purpose of humor."
I stole this Sig
Oh yeah I am sure they make lots of money. I am sure people ripping of their stories without payment much less credit helps a ton. Piracy capital of the world - what a surprise. :P
I live in Nevada, and we're pretty pissed we didn't get the plates. That's our history, it's who we are, and for someone to say it won't happen because it's offensive is like taking every test site worker that has ever put in an honest days work and pimp-slapping him.
We put in 50 years+ with that site in our back yard. The U.S. winning WW2 started in Nevada at the test site. Hundreds of older workers now have cancer, others never made it this far.
And for all the heart ache they tell us they're ashamed of what those workers accomplished. It's bullshit. For a massive final insult, they decide to store high level nuclear waste in our backyard. Their isn't a nuclear power plant in the entire state, yet we get to store it. None of our tests, mind you, have produced waste in more than 10 years, they're all subcritical(they stop just before achieving fusion).
I don't work at the test site, either, but I do work in Las Vegas at a support site in the IT department.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Heh, it seems Nevada officials would like to leave the bad 'ol days of nuclear testing behind them and focus instead on their illustrious(sp?) history of gambling, prostitution, and racketeering ;-)
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I have been reading The Onion for about five years. It was funny at first, but then they started repeating stories!
cpeterso
let you see through the crowds and undistinguished buildings to reveal nearby friends, potential colleagues, departments, labs, and interesting events. By making the clutter transparent and highlighting otherwise invisible things, the confusing bustle of the campus becomes more sensible and within reach.
Wow, so instead of conversing with all those icky people(clutter) who aren't like me, I can ignore them and be instantly in touch with a community of like-minded(close minded?) people just like me.
So, like the internet, this is a new way for subcultures to reinforce their ties to each other and keep people apart.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I should point out that, even thought most people would've already guessed/knew, Chinese media, even if privately owned etc., are under strict government regulation and what not. It's not like the editors of the newspaper or readers in China don't know that making fun of the government is a democratic step and that satire is fun, but it's that if they say so in a national newspaper heads will start rolling, literally, even if in the end that single sentence doesn't get publiched.
read the bunni comic
That's the correct way to write it in French, even though I've noticed a tendancy in American products to put more accents on French words than there are in reality. Ah those Americans, always overdoing things. ;)
Since we're all sharing eclipse photos, here's mine.
:)
The photo was taken using my great Canon PowerShot A40. The bluish shadow is due to a reflection inside the Slackware CD I was using as a filter.
Is it just me, or does this picture look very similar to one of the opening shots from the X-Files, where what seems to be a spirit or alien form with arms outstretched depicts the "X".
The same could be said for this picture but the lines are too narrow.
-kidlinux.
Dude, use a browser that doesn't suck. Mr. AC's accents are fine. I don't know what Redmondlian crap you're talking about--"é" is ISO standard.
I saw the original short on Sci-Fi's Exposure series. Of the various shorts featured in that episode, Tripping the Rift was easily the most puerile, insulting, and just plain stupid segment. It was a lot like the kinds of coarse, inept parody stories my friends and I would devise as 12-year-old geeks back in junior high, only much worse. It's pathetic and sad that this, of all things, would get picked up for a series when there are surely many far more deserving shows.
Some of the math and physics teachers at my school got together and took some pictures through telescopes with real solar filters of the eclipse. They are pretty good, you can see sunspots and stuff.
------
Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
Okay, so maybe 1 million in circulation is not a 'small newspaper.' Then again, china has how many people in it?
And we *should* cut these people some slack. After all, they live in a country where supporters of a religion can be executed, and where criminals serve as involuntary organ donors.
is it just me or were any other of you expecting to see something about Dune?
Following on my translation of the original beijing evening news article, I now translate the apology:
On June 3rd, we reported that members of the US Congress were pressing for construction of a brand-new Capitol, complete with a retractable dome and luxury boxes, in order to stay competitive.
Our reporter in Washington checked out the story, he discovered that some of its contents were identical to the Onion's joke article.
Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money. This is what the Onion does. According to congressional workers, the Onion is a publication that never ceases making up false reports.
This is a practice that we, fortunately, do not suffer from China. In China, newspapers are not allowed to make up all sorts of wild stories about our dear leaders. We were therefore caught off guard.
We are open to our readers' criticism, and we apologize.
Actually, in this case it is MySQL not grokking Unicode correctly.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
As the documents show at http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/war.term/093_03.html, the Japanese were NOT willing to surrender prior to the atomic explosions. While they were half-heartedly persuing peace through Soviet negotiations, it was known that Americans were accepting surrenders through the Swiss, as is customary is wars of such scale. The Japanese correspondance with the Soviets was for a seperate peace, thereby ensuring that they would only face a war from the Pacific side of their country. Remember, the Soviets only declared war on the Japanese on August 7th, 1945 -- ONE day before the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and days AFTER the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Prior to that date, Americans had been unable to use Soviet territory for aerial bombing of Japan, and instead used carriers and captured islands as their primary Japanese staging areas.
The Japanese never surrendered unconditionally. They were <i>still</i> allowed to keep their Emperor as a figurehead leader, much like the British Constitutional Monarchy, <i>as a condition of their final surrender</i>!. Prior to August 6th, the Japanese had said they would never surrender; a long and drawn-out invasion of the Japanese mainland was called for, probably resulting in heavy casulties on both sides. As it was, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the prime navy/army (forget which is which) bases left in Japan that had not been firebombed out of existance. Thus, they were valid military targets. Less lives were lost in both the atomic explosions then in the firebombing of Tokyo.
So, yes, victory in Japan was dependant upon those two nukes, or perhaps an invasion of Japanese territory. Did you know there were still Japanese who had not surrendered in the Philipeans until sometime after 1960? A Japanese officer had continued raids on Americans in the Philipeans until sometime during the Kennedy administration. Once the Japanese start a war, they try <b>very</b> hard to finish it in their favor.
It's true - South Park was originally titled "The Spirit of Christmas" and was an electronic Christmas card - actually a 51 meg video (which was huge back in the day) transferred from VHS. Some high-up executive from Fox asked those two guys to create an animated Christmas card, and he gave them a big chunk of money - they were as cheap as possible on production and blew the rest on beer (and probably pot, but that's just my speculation). The construction-paper animation, constant profanity by eight-year-olds, combined with the epic Jesus v. Santa fight made it a huge hit on the web. I remember getting it off the network at RPI back in early 97. There was a version with Frosty in it too, but that one was the first draft and they got rid of him - guess it wasn't offensive enough.
I tried to find it on ifilm but the link was broken. Still, a search for "soxmas" should pull something up.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Hear Hear, this is more real history than the post this guy was responding to.
May I add that nobody wanted to use a nuke, least of all Truman, but allied analysts recognized that there was no way the war was going to end for good without displacement of the Emperor, that before the atom bomb strikes the Japanese were adamant about not displacing the Emperor they revered as a god in any way, and even if a halt to hostilities was mediated they'd strike back again soon to recover lands & honor. In the classic 1970's miniseries "The World At War" Japanese ex-military leaders from the time explain in exact terms that they and the Emperor's government were trying to get a pause in the fighting from Russia and/or the US in order to regroup & counterattack. It was only after the Hiroshima hit that the Emperor met with his subordinates and started to talk about stepping down from supreme leadership. The historical record shows that it WAS the bomb that ended that war right then & there.
We had to alter the regime in Japan to insure a lasting peace with the country. Leaving the Emperor with power would have been too dangerous and could have resulted in a pacific war redux. It was war dammit, a dirty business and a far cry from what we're calling "war" today. I'm a pretty liberal guy, but pretending we commited some damned atrocity by dropping that bomb is an insult to the multitudes of men killed by the Japanese in that war. You think dropping the bomb was beyond the pale? Try beheading men en-masse who fucking surrendered to you because your culture tells you men who surrender don't deserve their lives. Try working men to death. Try torture for kicks. Try dragging out every single battle needlessly by fighting to the last fucking man even when you know you're beat. All these things the Japanese did, and each one is as horrendous as dropping those bombs.
BTW, there's no better source of WWII history on film than the miniseries The World at War. 24 hour-long episodes that kick anything on the History Channel's ass.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Look on the plus side - if you DID get those nuke plates, I can guarantee you wouldn't have them for long before some activist pulled them off your car, or some kid stole it to put on his wall.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
In China, people are also free to mock the U.S. government without being shot . .
:)
hawk
hawk, Nevadan in exile
They have a "Boozehound of the Week" now. It's apparently a joint thing between The Onion, Riverwest Brewery (they make some rocking beers), Foundation Milwaukee, and Cream City Culture. Don't know if they have this kind of thing in other cities.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?