Slashdot Mirror
Pirates Thwarted by Sonic Weapon
Kristian Hermansen was one of dozens to submit a story about would be pirates attempting to take control of a cruise ship of the coast of Africa, only to be twarted by some sort of
sonic weapon known as an LRAD, or Long Range Acoustic Device.
...hmm, so why can't you just stuff your ear holes with the same earplugs used for band practice and going to Metallica concerts?
Crunch!
In case wikipedia goes down, here's the article:
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.
Some of the Slashdot trolling phenomena originated on Segfault, whose shutdown of commenting forced trolls to a new host.
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.
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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
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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
Your story highlights one of the biggest problems with this new category of "non-lethal weapons." - Since they are suppossedly "non-lethal" they are much more prone to mis-use by poorly-trained or even untrained operators. The results for many such "non-lethal weapons" can actually range all the way up to lethality when used "out of spec."
If I were you, I'd sue. If the company that actually sells the product can't be relied upon to use it appropriately, how can anyone expect their customers to learn and follow proper procedures?
Eek....remember, the terms rap and music are mutually exclusive terms, and should not be uttered in the same sentence.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........