Slashdot Mirror
Panasonic Forms Embedded Linux Incubator
An anonymous reader writes "Panasonic has opened an embedded Linux incubator in Silicon Valley, where it hopes to host and collaborate with several Linux startups, in exchange for 'first right-of-refusal on up to 10 percent of the startup's next institutional funding round'. From the article: 'Panasonic uses other open sources OSes in addition to Linux, but Linux has become a top choice due to its cost-effectiveness and robust nature,' according to the Center's director. Panasonic is in the same corporate family as Matsushita, which is one of the founding members of the Consumer Electronics Linux Foundation (CELF)."
LOL POST LOL
n/t
LOL POST LOL
Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is a satirical parody religion created to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to allow intelligent design to be taught in science classes alongside evolution.
The "religion" has become an Internet phenomenon that has garnered many "followers" of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (sometimes referring to themselves as "Pastafarians," a pun on Rastafarians) who claim to have been touched by "His Noodly Appendage" and preach the word of their "noodly master" as the one true religion. Their prayers to "Him" are typically ended by "Ramen", instead of "Amen". Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is primarily the invention of Bobby Henderson, a graduate of Oregon State University with a degree in physics.
Developments
In June 2005, Bobby Henderson submitted an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education in response to their decision on giving intelligent design equal time with evolution by natural selection in biology classes. He formally requested that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism be given time in classrooms equal to that given to intelligent design and to "logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence" (evolution), and stated that if this was not done, then "we will be forced to proceed with legal action." Shortly afterwards, he received responses from two sympathetic members of the board. A third response was also received in mid-August.
Over the next two months, traffic on Henderson's FSM website grew steadily. The popularity of the site exploded in August, when the Flying Spaghetti Monster was featured on several blogs and Internet news sites such as Something Awful and Fark.com. Articles in the mainstream media soon followed.
In the "Latest News" section of Henderson's website he notes that U.S. President George W. Bush [1] and U.S. Senator Bill Frist [2] have publicly supported the teaching of "different ideas" (Bush) and "a broad range of fact, of science, including faith" (Frist) on the origin of life, alongside evolutionary theory. Henderson therefore infers that they support the teaching of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. Neither, however, has publicly stated a position specifically on FSM.
Henderson's work sparked the creation of many FSM-related sites, such as Spaghetti & Pulsar Activating Meatballs, a "rival" parody that calls for a holy war against FSM.
Many of the "beliefs" proposed by Henderson were intentionally chosen to parody arguments commonly set forth by proponents of Intelligent Design.
* The Universe was created by an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster. All evidence pointing towards evolution was intentionally planted by this being.
* According to the pastafarians, the monster created the world starting with a mountain, trees and a midget, and continues to guide human affairs with his "noodly appendage." Heaven is depicted as having a stripper factory and a beer volcano.
* Global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct consequence of the decline in numbers of pirates since the 1800s. A graph showing the inverse correlation between the pirates and global temperatures was also provided. This component of the theory highlights the logical fallacy of correlation implying causation.
* Bobby Henderson is the "prophet" of this religion.
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.
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.
Warning, potentially offensive external links:
* An example of crapflooding
* Another crapflood example
Page widening/lengthening
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 discovered, with the use of blockquote tags and the "." character to cause extreme widening on Internet Explorer. These methods were also eventually closed off by the Slashdot editors. Improvements in browser software have also closed many of the loopholes used to widen pages.
Examples of pagewidening include:
* a slashdot page widened
* a rare example of a pagewidening book review (September 2003)
* a pagewidening post using blockquote tags
Offensive trolls
Trolls in this category are those intended to be offensive, or thos
Abusing someone's copyright is inherently illegal in America and hurts the revenue source for Linux Devices. A great way to repay them for having an article that (if you're willing to redistribute and read) you find valuable.
It's Linux Devices! It's not as if it's going to get slashdotted.
Dr. James J. O'Brien is Director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Oceanography.
James Glassman: Dr. O'Brien, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - in fact, within hours after Katrina hit - we heard a good deal of criticism, mostly from supporters of the Kyoto Protocol that the President and others had not done enough to stop global warming and that this hurricane was, in some way, caused by global warming. You are an expert on hurricanes: do you think that global warming has had an affect on the intensity of hurricanes?
Dr. James O'Brien: Absolutely not. All of the people who are hurricane scientists or teach about hurricanes at the graduate level that I've talked to agree with me.
Glassman: So the notion that the global warming advocates have - which is that there's more carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere which warms the surface of the earth, this is a phenomenon that's basically been increasing during the century.
O'Brien: Right.
Glassman: You would expect to have a fairly regular increase in hurricanes.
O'Brien: Well, let me give them some due, OK? Their contention is that the ocean is warming up and if the ocean warms up, we should expect stronger storms, OK? That's a reasonable theory.
Glassman: Right.
O'Brien: The problem is, what I've also looked into, is that if you actually - and they sort of believe that the sea water in the globe has warmed up about a half degree centigrade in the last 50 years or so.
O'Brien: But what's amazing is if you actually looked at the trends in the Atlantic Ocean - the region where hurricanes form from five north to 20 north - from Africa over to the United States, it's actually cooling down. So, I mean yes, there are hotspots in the globe which are warming up, but not in the Atlantic hurricane formation region. So, their theory doesn't really hold water.
Glassman: In fact, is there a cycle of hurricanes?
O'Brien: Yes. There actually is. You know, for the Atlantic region, some scientists have very carefully gone back in time to 1851 and recorded all the hurricanes that hit the United States. Everybody should realize before about 1970, we didn't have adequate satellites. So hurricanes occurred in the Atlantic that nobody knew about and certainly, didn't have measurements on them. But every one that hit the United States, there's certainly newspaper or diaries or other information and so, all of these things have been recorded.
If you take the strength of the hurricanes at landfall from 1851 to 2004 and plot it up, you'll see this remarkable semi-periodic thing come out with about 15 years or so of many storms, strong storms and then 15 years or so with much reduced storms and then 15 years... and it just keeps going like that over the 150 years we have records of. And so if you look at this long record, you'll see that there's absolutely no evidence of any increase in strength. Of course, in the periods when we have a lot of storms, you're likely to have stronger storms; and in the periods where you have less storms, you're likely not to have strong storms.
Glassman: Let me just pursue this as far as Katrina is concerned because we certainly heard lots of reports that the reason that Katrina intensified so much when it got into the Gulf of Mexico was that the Gulf itself was very warm, but is that a consequence of global warming?
O'Brien: No, it's really funny.
Glassman: You're laughing.
O'Brien: Yes, I laugh because the entire Gulf of Mexico in the summertime in August is over 90 degrees, OK. In other words, if I take the records from the last 50 years and average it out to get what people think is the normal temperature.
Glassman: Right.
O'Brien: It's always 90 degrees in the summertime, everywhere. So, it was 90 degrees and its always 90 degrees.
Glassman: So, the real problem here was that Katrina was really timing. I mea
"I felt the slime drip out of my anus. I put my pinky finger up there and gave it a lick. So good, like warm honey and milk. " Err.. like wtf?
Did anyone read the parent post before modding it "Informative"?
I felt the slime drip out of my anus. I put my pinky finger up there and gave it a lick. So good, like warm honey and milk.
I wanna know who found this informative! (Actually, no, I don't think I do.)
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
So, can babies that are put in incubators use linux now?