Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Creating Life From Scratch
Rubberbando writes "MSNBC is running a story about bioengineering organisms to do specific tasks such as produce hydrogen or ethenol. It also goes into the risks and ethical issues of playing with this sort of science. Some of the scientists involved are saying it's more of an art instead of a science due to its 'biohacking' style of experimentation."
While I probably shouldn't feed the troll, wouldn't this be evidence for intelligent design? I mean, if we can create an organism, why couldn't some higher being? After all, I believe scientists still don't have a good explanation for how the first organism was created. Why couldn't a higher being have created it?
Slashdot trolling phenomena make up a large subset of the bizarre and complex subculture found on the popular technology website Slashdot. They are a mixture of juvenilia, sarcasm, deliberately bad jokes, tasteless nonsense and highly developed and artistic attempts to provoke outraged responses from other forum users, or amuse them. Slashdot trolling is a subset and a microcosm of Internet trolling in general. Some of these behaviours are usually considered to be more offensive or insightful than others. On Slashdot, many of these phenomena have become the object of parody.
Slashdot trolls can generally be divided into four categories: disruptive, offensive, deceptive, and idiosyncratic. Disruptive trolls are those which intend to disrupt the normal flow of things on Slashdot, either by decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio or by causing the pages to render incorrectly. Offensive trolls exist for the sole purpose of offending as many people as possible. The purpose of deceptive trolls is to trick people into either following a link or reading a comment which seems legitimate but is actually a troll. Idiosyncratic trolls are those which are specific to Slashdot and have elements of Slashdot culture and history in them creating, in effect, an inside joke.
Contents
* 1 Disruptive trolls
o 1.1 Crapflooding
o 1.2 Page widening/lengthening
* 2 Offensive trolls
o 2.1 Homosexuality and racism
o 2.2 Anti-semitism
o 2.3 Nationalistic insults
* 3 Deceptive trolls
o 3.1 Karma Whores
o 3.2 Comment Plagiarism
o 3.3 Article text alteration trolls
o 3.4 Web vendor referral trolls
o 3.5 Signature trolls
o 3.6 Movie spoiler
o 3.7 300 Dead in Sri Lanka Tsunami
* 4 Idiosyncratic trolls
o 4.1 First post
o 4.2 Netcraft confirms it
o 4.3 Stephen King is dead
o 4.4 First Obituary
o 4.5 Hot grits/Natalie Portman
o 4.6 Reigniting flamewars
* 5 Minor trolls
* 6 See also
Disruptive trolls
The purpose of disruptive trolls is to cause the pages of Slashdot to display in an undesirable way or to otherwise bring attention to themselves. The two major categories of disruptive trolls are crapflooding and page-widening.
Crapflooding
Crapflooding is the posting of many nonsensical or gratuitously offensive messages in order to disrupt the normal functioning of Slashdot and annoy its users and editors.
Later versions of the software behind the Slashdot website had an updated lameness filter to prevent posting of the same message more than once. However, crapflooders began avoiding this restriction by varying the content of the message after each post. Crapfloods can be performed manually with a dedicated user repeatedly clicking through the posting options each time, or automated by a piece of software. Automated crapfloods are -- not surprisingly -- larger, more effective and more frequent. The subject of crapflooded messages varies. Some examples include:
* Offtopic stories
* Pornographic/Homoerotic sex scenes with the names replaced with those of the slashdot editors or open source celebrities.
* Incoherent nonsense that contains the correct letter frequencies so the lameness filter recognises it as vaguely English.
* Offensive Base64 encoded images or text.
The original page widening posts were simple messages consisting of one long stream of characters with no spaces. This caused browsers to render a very wide page with horizontal scroll bars, making it nearly impossible to read the comments page. Slashdot began inserting spaces into any long run of characters to prevent this and so began the evolutionary battle between Slashcode and the page widening trolls. Newer and more inventive ways of causing page widening were dis
Definetly Intelligent Design.. The other "method" (Theory) has yet to be proven AND seems too slow (if it was to work)...
"So a new breed of biologists is attempting to bring order to the hit-and-miss chaos of genetic engineering by bringing to biotechnology the same engineering strategies used to build computers, bridges and buildings."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
And that's a particularly good exercise of the ID method: miss the point, ignore the facts, and instead make a snide ad hominem attack.
Good for you! Keep that mind closed up tight!
-Styopa