I can see a market for air travel modesty underwear that include fake genitalia to obscure the fact that your obscuring your own, erm... modest accoutrement.
Given the particulars of the DOS environment, and the capabilities of the displays at the time, I found XTREE much superior to anything prior to Win95.
(Excluding the Macintosh and Amiga GUIs, of course.)
"Net Neutrality" is sort of like "Free Speech" or "Free Markets." It's a laudable in theory, and constantly held high as a virtue, but in practice "Net Neutrality" in any society will eventually reach the same status as Free Speech and Free Markets: the majority of it will wind up under the control of a few, very powerful institutions (Corporations, Governments, or Collectives depending on the political environment), and those who truly want to exercise free Bandwidth/Speech/Trade will be relegated to a "pirate," or "underground" or "black market" format, which will tend to be frowned upon by the big monopolists (and legislators under their control), and must constantly evade predation and persecution.
However it is these same underground forums which will produce true innovations and have the most influence upon new movements, and they are where revolutionary new ideas -- both good and bad -- are born and experience a sort of natural selection. This process will periodically produce a spectacularly good idea, initially received with hostility and derision by those invested in the status quo monopolies but eventually will become a new standard.
In other words, the "neutral" internet's days are numbered as it becomes the exclusive domain of major corporations, much like Publishing and Broadcasting have become. But something else will come along to replace it. The trick is to recognize that something else when it appears.
Looks like they took down their entire news section.
In fact, everything but their front page is 404. It looks like they took it down to prevent a true slashdotting... in a sort of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" sense.
US missiles go over the north pole for targeting and range purposes due to the magnetic fields there.
Um. US missiles have GPS and INS navigation and can travel any damn direction the mission director wants. Generally, suborbital test flights from Vandenberg or San Nicholas go WNW to track off the North coast of Hawaii so that radars there and in Alaska can track and triangulate off of them. But not always; sometimes they place radar ships in the South Pacific. Orbital launches from Vandenberg usually track South, because Vandenberg is a great place from which to launch into sun-synchronous low earth orbit.
If you're gonna pull things outta your ass like that, have the decency to at least wipe them off before flinging them. The smell gives them away.
And you can't tell what direction it's travelling when viewing from a single position, with no fixed celestial references in view, no matter what you think your eyes are telling you.
I'd be modding you up if I hadn't already posted above.
People like ThePhish and DrugCheese are so certain that they can trust their eyes. But they're wrong. Our visual cortex is wired to parse perspective for things on a much smaller scale. Things on the scale of this object confuse the eye, and the mind. You can't trust your eyes in this situation.
For instance, these lines are all parallel lines, but they certainly don't look like it, and if you saw them in person you'd swear they were all originating from a point on the horizon... as if God were standing over there in all his glory. But they aren't.
I'm sorely disappointed that so many smart people on/. are failing to question the assumption that the object is a missile.
As many of us here know who have observed known missile launches, this thing is moving WAAAAAAAAY too slow.
Seconded. As an engineer for various companies that do such things, I've witnessed launches from San Nicholas, from Vandenberg, Kwaj, Alaska and Hawaii. There are several things visually wrong with the snippets of video I've been able to find online:
1: The contrail is too "solid" looking. It lacks the crazy dispersion that a rising plume sees almost immediately as the launch vehicle passes thru different layers of the atmosphere. Winds move at different speeds and at different directions in the different layers, immediately shearing a rocket plume. Contrails, however, generally stay in the same layer, and remain continuous for much longer. Sometimes very long.
2: The lighting is too uniform. An ascending plume from a launch just after sunset shows a "rainbow" of colors from sunlight refracted through the atmosphere and from grazing incidence reflection from the ocean. This plume shows none of that.
3: Its moving far, far too slowly. Even a suborbital missile that will travel only 600 or so miles moves faster on ascent. They move startlingly fast across the sky.
These clues tell me that it was an aircraft moving horizontally, not a missile moving vertically. The perspectives involved with very long objects in the sky can be very deceiving. You can't trust your eyes.
No one is questioning the appellation "missile" -- the first question asked should be, "What was it?" -- not "Whose missile was it?"
I wager that within hours, NOAA or someone will release a satellite picture showing the plume as a lateral contrail originating from the West.
Really? The first two years of Clinton were pretty damn shitty.
Really? And why was that? Was it because his policies and positions were shitty? Or was it because the losers were so petulant and spiteful that they did everything they could to stall legislation, investigate his wife's real estate business, and investigate his dalliances with the office help?
I was no fan of Clinton. When I first saw him in the primaries I thought he was shifty-eyed and a total sociopath. And he is. So I voted Perot. But the behavior of the opposition was so corrupt, petulant and antidemocratic that by the end of his first term, they actually made him look preferable. And eight years of Bush and Cheney made me long for the days of Slick Willie.
Voting for someone who doesn't stand a chance of winning is equivalent to not voting in every practical measure.
False. For several reasons.
First - to illustrate the logical fallacy of your argument, let me test its corollary: e.g., "By voting for the winner, my vote is worth more." By "voting for a winner," one of the following must be true, either your vote is necessary for the winner to win, or it isn't. If your vote isn't necessary for the winner to win, then you are voting for someone who is already going to win, so they don't need your vote, therefore your vote is worthless. If your vote IS necessary for the winner to win, then whoever your vote goes to will win, right? So why then are you letting someone tell you that the other candidate(s) can't win?
This brings me to the second reason
Second -- Who tells you that someone "doesn't stand a chance of winning?" How is this determined? Someone else decides it, that's how. So essentially, you're letting someone else decide who you can or can't vote for. The justification for the determination of "doesn't stand a chance" -- not enough funding, not a member of a major party, not the right skin color -- is irrelevant. The fact is, you are allowing someone else to limit your choices artificially, and often to the exclusion of a candidate whose positions are much closer to your own that the ones who do "stand a chance."
And there are not only logical failures to the argument, but ethical ones.
Third -- Third party candidates don't get invited to debates, and don't get press coverage because they "don't stand a chance." But if they did get exposure, and were allowed to participate in debates, they might have a chance. Therefore, it becomes self-fulfilling, to the point of unfairness... both to the candidates and the people who share their views.
And the most fundamental reason of all... IT MISSES THE POINT.
Fourth -- if you're really concerned about who "stands a chance" and who doesn't, you're basing your vote on the wrong reason... voting is not about "being on the winning team" or "casting the vote for a winner." It's not a competition for the voter. You're supposed to vote for the person who expresses positions you believe in, who you believe will do their job the best -- it's not a bet at a casino. Unfortunately, this fallacy is extremely common in American politics -- people feel like they should cast their vote for the one who will allow them to claim they voted for the winner, as if they were rooting for a team in the world series, so they can go to work the next day and feel affirmed by saying "I voted for the winner, and you voted for the loser. You LOSER."
Gahh - this last one makes my blood pressure rise. Because as a direct result, we get candidates who are perpetually campaigning, who feel as if winning elections is the only purpose to politics, and therefore the policies they enact are juvenile, foolish, and unwise... and as a result we get massive spending, eternal tax cuts, unbalanced budgets, kneejerk prohibitions ("OMG someone died eating a hotdog sideways, ban hot dogs!"), and now as it turns out, Big Lies repeated over and over again with no examination or critical analysis by the media.
If everyone voted their conscience, then we wouldn't be in this fucking mess. Bottom line.
My very first computer game was TREK.BAS, hosted on a city hall computer and played on a DecWriter paper terminal hidden in a janitor's closet at my St. Petersburg, FL middle school.
Why the janitor's closet? Because that's where they could get to a phone line.
This machine could replicate that experience.
(OK, well, you'd have to pour some ammonia and pine sol on it, to really take me back, but I'm talking about the game...)
See - that's the kind of information tidbit, or aggravation quantum, that when taken alone does not trip the rage threshold. But when exposed to thousands of little tidbits like that continually on a daily basis, one is eventually sent over the edge. And the more we're exposed to different forms of media -- radio, TV, email, web, twitters, texts, voicemails, SVN releases, issue tickets, TPS reports, etc.-- the more rapidly we accumulate perceived threat and therefore the sooner the individual crosses that threshold into a state of rage. Statistically, across a population, this is seen as a greater occurrence of "information rage." Pointing to one of the media, say email, is inaccurate. It's a cumulative effect, brought on by the continual addition of new sources of threat.\\
What we need is a new medium that conveys slack, instead of threat. Slack mail, perhaps... or maybe random joke spam. Or perhaps a state-mandated gaming break after lunch? Canasta, WoW, or four square- it doesn't matter as long as you go have 30 minutes of fun.
Or a nap. Now that I'm past half my life expectancy, I find myself thinking more and more frequently that a nap would be nice. How about a national siesta policy?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.bcbin.com/
Awesome. I know some married men who need to wear these daily.
I can see a market for air travel modesty underwear that include fake genitalia to obscure the fact that your obscuring your own, erm... modest accoutrement.
I'll take the Derek Smalls model, please.
Given the particulars of the DOS environment, and the capabilities of the displays at the time, I found XTREE much superior to anything prior to Win95.
(Excluding the Macintosh and Amiga GUIs, of course.)
Seriously.
I'd suggest that he seek asylum on the island nation of Fernando Poo, but that might create an international crisis that leads us to the brink of nuclear war.
"Net Neutrality" is sort of like "Free Speech" or "Free Markets." It's a laudable in theory, and constantly held high as a virtue, but in practice "Net Neutrality" in any society will eventually reach the same status as Free Speech and Free Markets: the majority of it will wind up under the control of a few, very powerful institutions (Corporations, Governments, or Collectives depending on the political environment), and those who truly want to exercise free Bandwidth/Speech/Trade will be relegated to a "pirate," or "underground" or "black market" format, which will tend to be frowned upon by the big monopolists (and legislators under their control), and must constantly evade predation and persecution.
However it is these same underground forums which will produce true innovations and have the most influence upon new movements, and they are where revolutionary new ideas -- both good and bad -- are born and experience a sort of natural selection. This process will periodically produce a spectacularly good idea, initially received with hostility and derision by those invested in the status quo monopolies but eventually will become a new standard.
In other words, the "neutral" internet's days are numbered as it becomes the exclusive domain of major corporations, much like Publishing and Broadcasting have become. But something else will come along to replace it. The trick is to recognize that something else when it appears.
Ingredients: Sand, Aluminum, natural and artificial flavoring.
Looks like they took down their entire news section.
In fact, everything but their front page is 404. It looks like they took it down to prevent a true slashdotting... in a sort of "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" sense.
I remember reading about something this in Aviation Week long, long ago.
[Engage google drive... grognard factor two...]
Aha, here we go. Aerovironment, Inc., actually tested a concept model of a drone glider for use in Martian conditions in 1999.. And according to that link, previous work had been done as early as 1996, but I didn't read it closely enough to note who built that one.
US missiles go over the north pole for targeting and range purposes due to the magnetic fields there.
Um. US missiles have GPS and INS navigation and can travel any damn direction the mission director wants. Generally, suborbital test flights from Vandenberg or San Nicholas go WNW to track off the North coast of Hawaii so that radars there and in Alaska can track and triangulate off of them. But not always; sometimes they place radar ships in the South Pacific. Orbital launches from Vandenberg usually track South, because Vandenberg is a great place from which to launch into sun-synchronous low earth orbit.
If you're gonna pull things outta your ass like that, have the decency to at least wipe them off before flinging them. The smell gives them away.
And you can't tell what direction it's travelling when viewing from a single position, with no fixed celestial references in view, no matter what you think your eyes are telling you.
I'd be modding you up if I hadn't already posted above.
People like ThePhish and DrugCheese are so certain that they can trust their eyes. But they're wrong. Our visual cortex is wired to parse perspective for things on a much smaller scale. Things on the scale of this object confuse the eye, and the mind. You can't trust your eyes in this situation.
For instance, these lines are all parallel lines, but they certainly don't look like it, and if you saw them in person you'd swear they were all originating from a point on the horizon... as if God were standing over there in all his glory. But they aren't.
I'm sorely disappointed that so many smart people on /. are failing to question the assumption that the object is a missile.
Seconded. As an engineer for various companies that do such things, I've witnessed launches from San Nicholas, from Vandenberg, Kwaj, Alaska and Hawaii. There are several things visually wrong with the snippets of video I've been able to find online:
1: The contrail is too "solid" looking. It lacks the crazy dispersion that a rising plume sees almost immediately as the launch vehicle passes thru different layers of the atmosphere. Winds move at different speeds and at different directions in the different layers, immediately shearing a rocket plume. Contrails, however, generally stay in the same layer, and remain continuous for much longer. Sometimes very long.
2: The lighting is too uniform. An ascending plume from a launch just after sunset shows a "rainbow" of colors from sunlight refracted through the atmosphere and from grazing incidence reflection from the ocean. This plume shows none of that.
3: Its moving far, far too slowly. Even a suborbital missile that will travel only 600 or so miles moves faster on ascent. They move startlingly fast across the sky.
These clues tell me that it was an aircraft moving horizontally, not a missile moving vertically. The perspectives involved with very long objects in the sky can be very deceiving. You can't trust your eyes.
No one is questioning the appellation "missile" -- the first question asked should be, "What was it?" -- not "Whose missile was it?"
I wager that within hours, NOAA or someone will release a satellite picture showing the plume as a lateral contrail originating from the West.
The first weird and not specifically predictable combination of erp/cosplay/fanfic/porn using Motus emergent in 3... 2... 1...
my height in rack untits
Associative Freudian slip, or veiled mammary reference?
With a watered-down representation of a niche, minority, or extreme viewpoint, apparently.
Google greater scooch-a-mout ...
Slashdot doesn't have a "+1 Obscure" moderation, probably because nothing is obscure on /., so I'm just gonna drop you a shout and friend you.
Really? The first two years of Clinton were pretty damn shitty.
Really? And why was that? Was it because his policies and positions were shitty? Or was it because the losers were so petulant and spiteful that they did everything they could to stall legislation, investigate his wife's real estate business, and investigate his dalliances with the office help?
I was no fan of Clinton. When I first saw him in the primaries I thought he was shifty-eyed and a total sociopath. And he is. So I voted Perot. But the behavior of the opposition was so corrupt, petulant and antidemocratic that by the end of his first term, they actually made him look preferable. And eight years of Bush and Cheney made me long for the days of Slick Willie.
Voting for someone who doesn't stand a chance of winning is equivalent to not voting in every practical measure.
False. For several reasons.
First - to illustrate the logical fallacy of your argument, let me test its corollary: e.g., "By voting for the winner, my vote is worth more." By "voting for a winner," one of the following must be true, either your vote is necessary for the winner to win, or it isn't. If your vote isn't necessary for the winner to win, then you are voting for someone who is already going to win, so they don't need your vote, therefore your vote is worthless. If your vote IS necessary for the winner to win, then whoever your vote goes to will win, right? So why then are you letting someone tell you that the other candidate(s) can't win?
This brings me to the second reason
Second -- Who tells you that someone "doesn't stand a chance of winning?" How is this determined? Someone else decides it, that's how. So essentially, you're letting someone else decide who you can or can't vote for. The justification for the determination of "doesn't stand a chance" -- not enough funding, not a member of a major party, not the right skin color -- is irrelevant. The fact is, you are allowing someone else to limit your choices artificially, and often to the exclusion of a candidate whose positions are much closer to your own that the ones who do "stand a chance."
And there are not only logical failures to the argument, but ethical ones.
Third -- Third party candidates don't get invited to debates, and don't get press coverage because they "don't stand a chance." But if they did get exposure, and were allowed to participate in debates, they might have a chance. Therefore, it becomes self-fulfilling, to the point of unfairness... both to the candidates and the people who share their views.
And the most fundamental reason of all... IT MISSES THE POINT.
Fourth -- if you're really concerned about who "stands a chance" and who doesn't, you're basing your vote on the wrong reason... voting is not about "being on the winning team" or "casting the vote for a winner." It's not a competition for the voter. You're supposed to vote for the person who expresses positions you believe in, who you believe will do their job the best -- it's not a bet at a casino. Unfortunately, this fallacy is extremely common in American politics -- people feel like they should cast their vote for the one who will allow them to claim they voted for the winner, as if they were rooting for a team in the world series, so they can go to work the next day and feel affirmed by saying "I voted for the winner, and you voted for the loser. You LOSER."
Gahh - this last one makes my blood pressure rise. Because as a direct result, we get candidates who are perpetually campaigning, who feel as if winning elections is the only purpose to politics, and therefore the policies they enact are juvenile, foolish, and unwise... and as a result we get massive spending, eternal tax cuts, unbalanced budgets, kneejerk prohibitions ("OMG someone died eating a hotdog sideways, ban hot dogs!"), and now as it turns out, Big Lies repeated over and over again with no examination or critical analysis by the media.
If everyone voted their conscience, then we wouldn't be in this fucking mess. Bottom line.
Hell, Esmerelda County, NV is probably a lot easier to get to for most /.ers and nearly as remote.
For all you know, the name Kim Dong-cheol may be the American equivalent of John Smith.
Or Heywood Jablome.
My very first computer game was TREK.BAS, hosted on a city hall computer and played on a DecWriter paper terminal hidden in a janitor's closet at my St. Petersburg, FL middle school.
Why the janitor's closet? Because that's where they could get to a phone line.
This machine could replicate that experience.
(OK, well, you'd have to pour some ammonia and pine sol on it, to really take me back, but I'm talking about the game...)
See - that's the kind of information tidbit, or aggravation quantum, that when taken alone does not trip the rage threshold. But when exposed to thousands of little tidbits like that continually on a daily basis, one is eventually sent over the edge. And the more we're exposed to different forms of media -- radio, TV, email, web, twitters, texts, voicemails, SVN releases, issue tickets, TPS reports, etc.-- the more rapidly we accumulate perceived threat and therefore the sooner the individual crosses that threshold into a state of rage. Statistically, across a population, this is seen as a greater occurrence of "information rage." Pointing to one of the media, say email, is inaccurate. It's a cumulative effect, brought on by the continual addition of new sources of threat.\\
What we need is a new medium that conveys slack, instead of threat. Slack mail, perhaps... or maybe random joke spam. Or perhaps a state-mandated gaming break after lunch? Canasta, WoW, or four square- it doesn't matter as long as you go have 30 minutes of fun.
Or a nap. Now that I'm past half my life expectancy, I find myself thinking more and more frequently that a nap would be nice. How about a national siesta policy?
I dunno, but I think it's getting to work and reading the news that is creating the information rage...
It means you are Takashi Murakami, obviously.
terror and bestiality
Hey, leave Anonymous out of this!