Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Lapses, Maps, Ludwig Van
Beethoven rules the downloads charts! jd writes "At 1.4 million downloads, Beethoven has beaten the Beatles in online downloads, according to The Guardian. iTunes sales of 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' comes in at a mere 20,000. The BBC, who put the symphonies on their download site, are delighted. The music industry, which thought classical music was all but dead, is in shock. About the only question remaining is how much did the Slashdot Effect contribute?"
And if the Beatles are "more popular than Jesus," this Beethoven guy must be really popular!
Now you can think of it as Rupert'sSpace. applextrent writes with a few thoughts on the recent acquisition of MySpace by Fox: "MySpace's privacy policy and company filings including all users' information lists, databases, text, files and documents are explicitly documented as an asset of MySpace. The agreement also states MySpace can sell the site and all user information to a third party that might not necessarily follow the same privacy policy as MySpace. To put it simply, MySpace owns everything a user provides them with. This is not entirely an uncommon thing for many free services such as AOL's Instant Messenger have similar privacy policies. Now all of this user information is in the hands of News Corp. and they can pretty much do whatever they want with it.
Not to say anything bad will come of this, in fact this could mean better protection for users privacy, or it may not. This is possible reason for concern especially considering MySpace's blog population for a MySpace run blog is technically owned by the same people who bring you Fox News."
This is much worse than losing the car keys, son. An anonymous reader writes "In the wake of the large-scale credit card compromise of Card Systems, the NYTimes is reporting that Visa has decided to stop allowing transactions from the processor. Visa says 'CardSystems has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, the failure to provide proper data security for those accounts.' Visa has informed member banks that they have until Oct. 31 to switch from using CardSystems to process card transactions. The decision sends a strong message to the industry about Visa's stance on cardholder security with respect to enforcing the PCI Data Security Standard. We'll see how MasterCard and American Express react. Also the long term viability of CardSystems itself is now in question."
Another visit to the Abandonware Orphanage. chill writes "Aladdin 4D, the venerable Amiga 3D design and rendering program, is yearning to be free. If the owners, Nova Designs, can raise $37,579.83 to pay off old debts they will release the trademarks, source code, tutorials, rights, and all as LGPL. So, if having this tool available to the FOSS pool of code is something that interests you, donate!"
This approach worked for Blender; it would be great to see it happen more.
Google keeps stealing my best ideas before I have them. Chmarr writes "Right on the heels of Google Moon, Google Maps now includes very detailed maps of our favorite animation source Japan. Here's hoping you can read Japanese."But you only need to read Alien for this one: Oreo 51 writes "It was only a matter of time before someone did this. Barry Snyder used Google Maps to take shots of the infamous high-security Area 51 in the Nevada desert. I can't wait to see what /.ers think of all the craters and interesting sand geometry there."
Now taking donations of one nickel per cool use of Google Maps, to go toward the James Ellroy Crime Scene Map Project Fund.
Now with more nutritious Darkness! Simian Farmer writes "For the tens of thousands of Star Wars fans who visited The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster on a daily basis just before the release of Sith, the same author has begun penning his own blog-novel called Simon of Space.
The style of writing that lured so many to read Darth Side so avidly this past April/May is present in spades in his new fiction, updated almost daily. According to the author, it has, '...romance, action, humour and all the whiz-bang special effects you can get without actually making a movie.'"
Blue Frog Claims to be Legit justy writes "I noticed that Blue Security, the company behind the Blue Frog anti-spam initiative, have issued a statement on their blog as a result of "feedback we have received from the community". They say that "the total number of complaints posted by the community is exactly equal to the number of spam messages received", which seems more fair in my opinion. Perhaps this development is a result of the heated discussion here on Slashdot."
Well that's not Orwellian or anything, Nooo .... An anonymous reader writes "The fallout from the recent Canadian Harry Potter court order continues [Harry Potter and the Right to Read] as a national newspaper was threatened with a lawsuit if they published a book review based on an 'unlawful reading.' The case, along with similar copyright abuses, has Canadians wondering what became of a kinder, gentler legal approach."Well, keep looking then. According to this NY Times story, the recently described spotting of an ivory-billed woodpecker may be based on evidence too weak to rely on; this is the same bird that Cornell researches have been looking for with automated means to detect its distinctive voice.
Now you can think of it as Rupert'sSpace.
It's somewhat ironic that a medium designed to share information has become one infested with what are essentially data and demographic mining sites like MySpace.
The purchase price of $580 million reminded me instantly of the original dot-com bubble. Perhaps we're seeing a slight resurrection of that, however finite. Some of the data collected by MySpace would be an absolute gold mine to third party advertisers.
Do you like German cars?
The fury of a slashdotting is truly an impressive thing.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
NO! You can't use your money to buy the life-saving care you need! We'll fine the doctor that gives it to you $20,000. Get in line with everyone else. We'll decide how bad you need it. We provide free healthcare. Now, shut up and wait!
NO! We don't care if the court ruled that unconstitutional. We'll use the Notwithstanding Clause to overrule the Supreme Court of Canada. Now, shut up and pay your taxes for the free health care we give you!
If that isn't a physical threat (i.e. a threat to one's physical well-being), I don't know what is.
Investigative reporters this side of the border have started to call the Canadian government's treatment of its citizens, "Naziism", Godwin's law not withstanding.
When we back were in Canada for a short while (thankfully, a very short while, but still too long for my liking), and my son needed health care, I just trotted him to the head of the line, presented his American passport, paid, got him taken care of, and that was that. Funny how they let Canadians willing to pay die waiting, yet wouldn't dream of turning down a paying foreigner.
Commie bastards.
You could've hired me.
What next? Drive-by readings? Reading while under the influence? Reading with intent to edumacate?
I can't even imagine the extent of brain damage the lawyers must have to invent "unlawful reading".
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=34.602792,-118.0860 22&spn=0.007186,0.010050&t=k&hl=en
0 5&spn=0.007451,0.010050&t=k&hl=en
See the pretty SR-71s and U-2?
(Actually, one SR-71 and one A-12, #17973 and #06924, respectively.)
How about A-12 #06925 on the deck(!) of the USS Intrepid?
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=40.764384,-74.0002
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
To be fair you need more detail with a map in Japan. In a map of the US or Europe the street names and a few street numbers are all you need to find a particular building or house. Japan, on the other hand, has their own particularly weird system where buildings are numbered by blocks (roughly speaking) based on when they were built, and the majority of streets don't have names. Given the general lack of street names and building numbers (well, the kind we're used to) any map in Japan is only really useful if it provides some landmarks to navigate by - which is I presume why they include all the building details and traffic light symbols etc.
My personal irk after spending some time backpacking around Japan: they are kind enough to post maps around the place to help you find things, but the orientation of the map is can often be pretty much random - no "North is up", no aligning with the street layout as it is in front of you, just general "however they felt like" orientation.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The 'crop cirles' are most likely some kind of sewage or water treatment plant.
the "VeryOdd.JPG" looks to be maybe some kind of mine.
Many of the craters, 'glowing spots' and 'crosshairs' appear to be aerial bombing practice/testing areas. The "Triangles" is just a variation on that theme - probably for very high altitude bomb drops.
Given that "Area 51" is used to military aircraft development, no real mystery or surprise there. The larger and deeper craters may be nuclear in nature - 'Area 51' shares a border with the Yucca Flats nuclear testing area.
I am guessing that "the/StrangeLookingArea.JPG" may be storage for munitions, maybe NBC munitions.
The "CirclesAndAntenneas.JPG" could be various antenna layouts for a listening station - maybe ELS and/or ELF (they often have huge circular arrays and very tall towers).
Some formations in the desert may be simply to help pilots orient themselves (no - not alien pilots from another world) as the desert can look very nondescript from altitude.
Having flown a lot over areas I later visited on ground level or much lower altitude, including at high altitude over desert areas, I can say that what often looks interesting and weird from altitude is usually quite explainable and ordinary closer up.
"Um, don't you think it would have been nice to mention that the Beethoven downloads were free, while Sgt. Pepper's on iTunes obviously isn't? The comparison is worthless."
Well people still compare Apache to IIS, even though one of them is free. All it means is that the popularity can be either because people like free stuff, or because people like the item itself, or both.
The craters pictured (Google Maps link is http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.108040,-116.0454 94&spn=0.146118,0.240704&t=k&hl=en ) are NOT in Area 51. It's the Nevada Test Site, where we did aboveground and underground nuclear testing for decades. There is a museum for the site in Las Vegas, where I live. It's website is here: http://www.ntshf.org/ .
a s&ll=39.037964,-96.763169&spn=0.004566,0.007522&t= k&hl=en . It's the small black blot in the center of the image. More on it can be found at Roadside America: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/KSJUNatomic .html .
By the way, the large crater at the north end of the site is from the biggest underground test ever done by the US, code-named Sedan.
Also, if you want to see an atomic cannon (only fired once, at the Nevada Site), there's one outside Junction City, Kansas. The Google Maps URL is http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Junction+City,+Kans
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
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If anyone has version 3.1 of AvantSlash (ideally the full archive, but the script and config file would be a start), I would really appreciate it if they could drop me an email to silver (at) ewtoo (dot) org.
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Thanks!
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