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Online Voters Name British Vessel 'Boaty McBoatface' (telegraph.co.uk)
Britain's Natural Environment Research Council conducted an online poll to select the name for their new advanced polar research vessel. Though it cost more than 200 million pounds and represents their fleet's largest and most advanced research vessel, when the voting closed yesterday the clear winner, was the name 'Boaty McBoatface'. The name received over 124,000 votes, while the nearest runner-up -- Poppy-Mai -- received just 34,371, and the fourth-most popular suggestion, "RRS It's Bloody Cold Here," received just 10,679 votes. "I am grateful to everyone who has participated in the competition," Britain's science minister told The Daily Telegraph, though he added "You won't be surprised to know that we want something that fits the mission and captures the spirit of scientific endeavor." The Telegraph takes this as a signal that the ministers "were unlikely to endorse the result."
Oh, Internet...
I think Boaty McBoatface is the best name they could have received. Do they understand how many kids will be attracted to that name? I could see this being a great way to get kids interested in polar science. It will always be Boaty McBoatface to me!
Stephen Colbert won a vote to name a bridge after him in Hungary...naturally, the govt said no.
The boat people will pick a name that had some votes AND is respectable.
Yes but the poll just officially closed and the people in charge just commented that it probably will not be named this after all.
Can I say the RRS It's Bloody Cold Here has the ring of a Culture ship and would make a nice epitaph for one of the finest science fiction authors of the last fifty years. Given the poll options though, I'd like to suggest the GCU Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall instead.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
And you wonder why the American primary votes are only taken under advisement.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Hey, if "Of Course I Still Love You" and "Just Read the Instructions" can be valid boat names (they're the names of SpaceX's landing/recovery ships), then the "It's Bloody Cold Here" is perfectly cromulent.
Bureaucrats, no f*cking imagination or sense of humour.
-- Alastair
But sometimes the results are rather amusing.
Boaty McBoatface is hardly the worst that the internet could have put forward. If you don't want to accept the possibility of a silly name winning, why bother to have the poll at all?
Well, in a previous era, they named the formerly known planet Pluto after a cartoon dog.
See these other trollish hits... http://imgur.com/gallery/gaJxp
Silence is a state of mime.
Learn to have some fun. Go with it, and enjoy the laughs.
Reminds me of the dwarf planet and its moon originally named "Xena" and "Gabrielle". Great names relevant to current culture. But nooooo... the old sticks-in-the-mud decided they had to use long dead Greek gos names. So officially they became "Eris" and "Dysnomia". How many people do you think know those names today? -- I know about them and still I had to look the names up *again*.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Let's vote to rename slashdot.
Table-ized A.I.
Why can't scientists have any damn fun these days?
Giving it such a silly name would actually likely attract attention to what it does, purely because it is such a silly name.
Even the "It's bloody cold here" would go a treat.
Silly names attract attention. Some of it will be interested attention.
They'd read up on it, and maybe a small number of those people would have some interest in it.
It might even inspire some of those people to get interested in the industry(-ies) on some level.
So just go for it.
Give it a silly name! FOR SCIENCE!
I hate this prudish boring country.
Everything is PC, everything is tame, everything is boring, everything is non-excitable and PROFESHUNHUL, sterile and emotionless.
FUCK professional. I'd rather off myself than be such a boring twat.
Everyone know the correct name should be Shippy McShipface.
For a non native speaker, it is not obvious why this name is wrong. Is there a pun, or a reference to a cultural item unknown to me?
A wild guess is that it looks like child talk. Is that all?
They may go with the number three pick, Henry Worsley (Recently deceased South Polar explorer) and name one of the lifeboats Boaty McBoatface.
But, that would be the intelligent thing rather than the bureaucratic thing, so who knows?
It's real, but it happened several years ago. That particular entry was only sold online through eBay, but apparently the people who had pushed for it actually bought up all of the run so it was sort of successful. Shit, I'd probably buy it if it were on the store shelves for no other reason that it makes much chuckle.
Hey they want "You won't be surprised to know that we want something that fits the mission"
It's an arctic mission and one of the suggestions was "RRS It's bloody cold here"
Done and Done.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
1998, and People Magazine wanted to make it's presence known on the newfangled internet.
Leonardo Dicaprio was supposed to win. But 230,169 of us nerds bitchslapped them, and voted Hank in.
People Magazine, being the ethical rag that it is, declared DiCaprio the winner, even though he came in 3rd.
Nerds FTW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sad to say, Hank is no longer with us.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
NASA discovered the hard way after the ISS / Stephen Colbert fiasco that the way to do this is make up a dozen or so of your own, reasonable suggestions, and allow public voting on just those.
At least NASA had a sense of humor and sent the Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill to the ISS.
Whatever they name the ship it will suffer the same fate as the Thunderbolt II. What's that? Oh the Warthog...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Noooot really sure Americans ought to be lecturing anyone else about the quality of democracy. :)
Then it would be all Reich ?
:P
Before anyone spazzes out, I truly despise those scum, but I have no problems making fun of them, and neither did Monty Python.
The RSS SS!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
OK, his title should have been "My Kingdom for Slashdot unicode support".
The easiest way to have both public involvement and keep the idiots from hijacking the poll is probably to have a first round of _submissions_ which are handled privately, winnow out the stupid ones and allow public voting on the subset remaining.
A better response for these AC posts complaining about how old the news is, might be to just respond:
"Where was your submission a month ago?"
Slashdot doesn't generate news, Slashdot reports news that other's have submitted (most of the time...).
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?