If the economics of robot fry cooks were really that good, there would be a world full of robot fry cooks. In some cities, McD's and Starbucks are already offering three and four times minimum wage, and still can't find workers.
I wouldn't doubt that in labor-tight markets, robotic chefs will become more common, but the employers will be doing it because labor has become scarce, not to be "saving quite a bit of money," which was your original point.
There's no reason that humans -- big, dexterous, highly adaptable creatures with a one and a half kilo universe in their crania -- should be reduced to burger-flipping automata.
Well, there is a reason, and you addressed it when you used the word 'adaptable.' You see, we could design a robot that flips burgers and also detects when a burger has fallen apart, when the raw burger bin is empty, fetches more patties, detects when the griddle has quit and turns it back on again, senses the proper doneness of the meat, and deals with the other 101 things that Murphy throws at it during the course of the day. But that robot would be so expensive that it would be unattractive to McBurger Inc.
So unfortunately, we must still employ an adaptable, general purpose wage slave to do the most mundane tasks, like flipping burgers and putting little cotton balls into medicine bottles, because although 99% of the job is mindless repetition, we still have to deal with the other 1% of the task that requires observation, deduction, and problem solving abilities.
Besides, I had a burger assembly job for six weeks when I was a teenager. And although I hated it, it was the only (legal) way for me to make enough money to buy my first car. Ironically, the worst part of the job wasn't the mundane task of slinging patties - it was dealing with the 455h013 shift manager who compensated for his miserable, futureless life by treating us like dirt. That, and cleaning the grease traps.
So thats a salary savings of about 50k-60k a year.
That's if you can find people to work at minimum wage in your labor market. A large part of the Trib article talked about the rising costs of restaurant labor.
And after 20+ years of robots in the manufacturing business, it's clear that you can't just fire your short order cook. You have to train him into a robot short order cook operator. And then, since he's now a trained technical professional, you have to pay him more, even though 90% of the time he's standing there picking his nose, and the rest of the time he's scraping burgers off the floor.
It's these realities which have kept robots out of the kitchen so far... these robots have been around for decades. This is just a marketing gimmick.
Read the article to understand his "Flintstone shoe company" analogy.
Why should we assign any merit to an idea promoted by a man who can't even apply his own analogy accurately? To properly represent the DOJ proposal, the government of Bedrock would order the shoe company divided into a shoe company and a sock company, not brown shoe and black shoe companies.
Oy Carumba! That's so obvious.
I still like Stallman's idea of forcing MS to open their file formats and interface protocols.
You can buy a multi-button mouse, but the only way to use it is to bind the buttons to things like modifier-clicks
And this is a flaw because?
The default function for the right button of most n-button mice for Macs is the ctrl-click combination, which in Mac OS9 activates a context-sensitive pop-up menu in the Finder and other Mac OS9-savvy applications. It works much better than Windows' right click, is more responsive to the user, and it's configurable to boot. (I could do without multilevel pop-up menus, but both OSes fail me there.) Your only criticism is that it can also be accessed by single-button mouse users by the ctrl-click combination?
Funny, the ctrl-leftclick and ctrl-rightclick combinations don't seem to do a thing on my NT4.0 Workstation here at the office. Holding down the modifier keys and clicking doesn't change the pop-up menus at all in Windows NT explorer, on the desktop, or in Navigator 4.7. Once within NT Explorer I got the ctrl-rightclick combo to bring up the desktop's rightclick menu, but I couldn't get it to repeat once I leftclicked on an explorer pane... that kind of inconsistency is actually more damning than anything I've seen under MacOS9.
So your criticism is based entirely on the fact that the right button's functions are availble to the left button with the use of a modifier key? I fail to see anything negative therein...
because the OS still has no concept of additional buttons
This argument is entirely semantic. The Mac OS offers contextual pop-up menus in the file management and most productivity applications. Game Sprockets allows multibutton devices to be configured for specific applications. The OS is in fact very multibutton savvy. It just doesn't work the same way as does Windows.
The multibutton argument against the MacOS died as of OS 8.1 or thereabouts. Find something else to pick on... there are plenty of valid things.
After two weeks, an article is placed into the archive, where it becomes a static page, and all the comments (including the bootleg complete spec) are stored along with it.
Well, before posting that comment, I searched 'older stuff' for all articles (blank keyword field) under two categories: Science and Space. No articles older than Jan00 were listed in Space (I forget the cutoff date for Science). Plus I read a comment under today's Slashdot's New Setup article where one reader inferred that mySQL's performance limitations was the reason why Slashdot removes old articles from the server.
So I surmised that for technical reasons, stories and their comments eventually are removed from the active site... or 'fall off.' If the really old stuff is available somewhere else, it's certainly not obvious where.
Gratuitous OT: Hey - Rose-Hulman! I attended a 6-week engineering-oriented summer camp for High School seniors there almost 20 years ago. It was great, but damn is Terre Haute a humid hell during the summer... fog actually condensed at sunset when the temperature dropped below 90F. (Go Elephants!)
or does it seem that Slashdot is evading the issue?
It's not evasion. It's just a request for more information. At most, it could be seen as a delaying tactic.
And in my opinion, delaying is the best thing for Andover to do. In a few more months, the alleged infringing post will "fall off" Slashdot's servers, along with the rest of the article and its responses. Thus, Andover will be complying with Microsoft's request by default, and in accordance with Slashdot's own standard practices. Problem solved.
Well, that's traditionally called a plutarchy, government by the wealthy. The earliest "democracies" in ancient Greece were actually plutarchies... you had to be a landowner in order to cast a vote.
But this situation is somewhat different; power doesn't lie in the hands of wealthy individuals or families. It lies in the hands of abstract entities called "corporations" led by individuals who are shielded from accountability for their decisions and actions on behalf of the corporate entity. And yet all individuals still have, at least in name, the power to elect their government officials.
I've been convinced for years that the rights and liberties (and liabilities) reserved for individuals in the Constitution and Bill of Rights has been diluted by the courts over the past century, by assigning those rights and liberties to Corporations, but without assigning any accountability to the individuals who make the corporate decisions.
And it's getting worse... individuals' rights have become so diluted by corporate rights that this beverage we call a Democracy is beginning to taste like a Plutocracy instead.
I don't think you can much about it except for quitting (or threatening to quit over pervasive monitoring).
There's always one more option, though their effectiveness may be questionable... for example:
In the wake of the spy scandal last year, the DOE implemented a mandatory random polygraph policy for all of their Los Alamos employees. Every one. Needless to say, the affected employees were rather annoyed, and they organized and threatened action (wish I could be more specific). Anyway, the DOE just recently backed down and decided to only require random polygraphs for employees who work with sensitive information. They did something about it.
And also, if you have enough money to contribute to your senator's campaign, you could always go the Congressional route. It works for contractors.
(Sorry if this appears twice, but if/. hadn't timed out, I wouldn't be pressing the submit button again.)
The state court also said Prodigy could not be treated as publisher of the electronic bulletin board message.
This point deserved a lot more atttention. The liability of a bulletin board operator for its content is much less clear cut. Assuming that this ruling was also being challenged, then the Supreme Court has upheld the privileges of bulletin board operators (like CmdrTaco) as carriers, not publishers.
That's an interesting observation. But Moore saw that trend, too. The January issue of Physics Today had an interesting article titled "Physics and the Information Revolution" that described Moore's Second Law. This corrollary to the more famous Moore's Law applys a geometric progression to the cost of successive generations of IC foundries. The Physics Today article even postulated that one day, the cost of the tooling to make the next successive generation of ICs will exceed the GNP of the entire world economy, thus setting a practical upper limit on the technology.
So it's a matter of which wall we hit first: the physical or the economic.
Also, it's silly to compare a subject's propensity to sound an air horn with "aggressiveness" or "violence." That's not aggressive, just annoying. If they had given the subjects 9mm semiautomatics instead of air horns, they would not have seen any differences... These players know that an air horn is not a gun, just like they know a joystick is not a gun, and a pig-cop is not a real person... come ON - these aren't lab rats, people. They're college freshmen, which from a lofty doctoral candidate perspective must appear to be a lower form of life or something, given the logic being applied.
Just because people who have just played "Deathorgy 2000" for an hour are statistically more likely to be annoying does not mean they are statistically more likely to be violent. Once again, this seems like a study where the conclusion was designed before the procedure.
What scares me more than the monopoly idea (which I don't really buy) is the fact that AOL's overall mediocrity (spelling?) inures the newcomers of netizenry to universally bad design and crappy service. I mean, if Windows and AOL are what 90% of newbies are "trained" on, then how the hell are they supposed to know any better, or believe one of us when they are told about Linux or BSD or even Macintosh?
AOL's software design habits are especially scary. Their programmers seem to intentionally ignore previous art, to the point where they reinvent every wheel, and seem to have a preference for square ones at that. Every new feature is hard to use, learns no lessons from existing public domain designs, and then they just leave it there, and don't fix it until it becomes a marketing tactic again. Mon dieu, their 1993 newsreader was the worst, and they left it that way for years before updating it, and it's still nowhere near as useable as any newsreader you or I would tolerate.
Reminds me of an anecdote related to my by a venerable old EE I worked with long ago...
While performing field tests out of Nellis AFB for an onboard ECCM system for fighter jets, the engineers noticed that intermittently, there was another jamming source, in addition to the one they were using to test their countermeasure. In fact, this source was so much better than the jammer they were using for the test that the countermeasure under test was completely ineffective.
So they got the USAF to send out planes to locate this mystery source, and it turned out to be in a small town outside Nellis. When investigators went to the town, they discovered the jamming signal eminated from an old auto garage. Inside was a weathered old man using a pre-WWI DC arc welder. It turned out to be the arc welder that was radiating like a banshee from DC to light.
When the Air Force and engineers learned this, they offered to buy the welder from the mechanic, but he refused every offer, citing his preference of the old DC welders, and his dislike of anything he would be able to find to replace it.
So. Moral is, if you want a cheap, low-tech jammer, pump a few dozen amps DC across an air gap.
What does Heroically Resistant mean? Well, IANA ECCM expert, but there are a number of tricks used by modern satellite comm systems to overcome jamming and inteference. Most of them have been around a while, too:
Frequency Modulation
Spread spectrum and frequency hopping
Encoding and Compression
Error correction
Contingency Link Margin
Active Channel Seeking
And those are just the ones that come spontaneously to mind...
Also, I would say that, if we're gonna pick on colorful adjectives, we should at least give credit to the engineers who designed the comm equiment on "the latest generation of global communications satellites" for their "heroic" efforts to create a robust system, before we start calling people "naive."
MIT's hacks pages discuss a lot of technically "criminal" activity: trespassing, breaking and entering, etc. Unlike most other anti-authoritarian groups, however, MIT hackers have a well-developed sense of libertarian ethics that extends to their web presesnce. Also, they were the original home to the "MIT Lockpicking Handbook" that you'll find mirrored all over the net - a pretty darn good homebrew guide on defeating keyed tumbler locks. I think MIT has taken it down by now, and they especially don't like the attribution to MIT in the title, but that was already enough to get them included on filtering databases.
I'm sure there's actual MITers out there that can do the facts more justice than I have, but they haven't spoken up yet...
if you are in high school, grab a list of all the jocks and football players
Please don't do that. It's no less biased than Pinkerton's own scheme Besides, all you'll succeed in doing is making it "cool" to be on the reporting list...
On further reflection, that's at least as good an idea as spamming WAVE: Report enough jocks and "popular" people, and being on the list will become a status symbol instead of a scarlet letter...
It's the second major-market title in the MMORPG genre started by Ultima Online.
I know this is tangential to the topic at hand, but neither Ultima Online nor Everquest "started" the MMORPG genre. They aren't even the first graphical MMORPGs.
Between 1993 and 1997, subscribers to online giant CIS and a little online system called AOL could play a text based, for profit, fantasy MMORPG called Gemstone III. After going flat-rate, AOL dumped it because far too many users connected for far too long to play Gemstone. Now Gemstone III players get along quite happily connecting directly via the internet. As far as I know, these were the first for-fee MMORPGs employing "gamemasters" to maintain the code, servers, and portray NPCs for the players. But there could have been even earlier ones, considering all the MU*s and MO*s out there... However, it was definitely the first to hit 1,000 simultaneously connected players. I was there. (And I was disgusted... I started playing when 30 players online was a huge crowd.)
Simutronics, the company who ran Gemstone, also offered several other games, all connected via gateways to several major online services. They're all still up and running, and quite fun, if you can harness enough of your imagination to abandon all the pretty graphics.
Then there was AOL's Neverwinter Nights. (Okay, it wasn't AOL's - they just hosted it.) I know little about this game, except it looked very similar to SSI's old Pools of Radiance series of single-player games, and it was multiplayer, and graphical... and offered no client for my platform at the time. (If someone knows more about the old NWN, please chime in.) Of course, if you've been paying attention at all for the past 10 months, you know that NWN will soon be reborn as the first networked virtual tabletop-style roleplaying environment.
Although I'm sure most players of EverQuest and Ultima Online have never heard of Gemstone or DragonRealms, and believe Neverwinter Nights is a brand-new title, the only innovations in these games are the pretty graphics, and perhaps some interesting server-side hacks... but the genre is an old one.
Re:Dihydrogen Monoxide - DHMO
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
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· Score: 1
The word you are looking for to describe the DHMO page is satire.
I caution you, friend: The assumption of innocence (e.g. falsehood) until proven guilty (e.g. truthful) does not serve one well when dealing with experimental science.
The same goes for vice versa.
The whole point is to eschew assumptions, to identify our assumptions and challenge them. The process shares this feature with the practice of debugging your own code. Without the ability to challenge our assumptions and beliefs, we might as well let theologans and politicians do our science.
Yes, but sometimes you have to sort thru a thousand Bozos to find a Newton. Props to BAe for rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands in the grease paint.
The other important thing to remember is that a lot of electromagnetism discoveries we take for granted were made by people chasing "crackpot" ideas and finding something real. Who knows what kind of neat phenomena one might find by spinning a superconductor?
To say ahead of time that there's nothing to find is the same flavor of hubris that led late 19th century physicists to declare that there was nothing left to discover. ("Now if only that poxy git Michelson would shut up about his interferometer...")
I refuse to use on-line bill paying until such time as the cost of paying the bill goes below the price of a postage stamp.
That's a good point. But one thing that I haven't seen addressed at all yet is liability. When I was given CheckFree software as a gift one year, I looked into the agreement carefully. I threw the software away when I got to the part that released CheckFree from any liability whatsoever should a bill not be paid on time.
Now I can understand there are many ways the liability would fall on me. But if I am relying on another service to pay my bills, and they introduce a delay, or send payment to the wrong party, or [god forbid] get cracked, I don't want to be the one that gets stung.
So... sorry, but no thanks. It only takes me an hour or so each month to manage my finances, so until a time comes that a bill paying service will stand behind their service and admit their fault when they screw up, I'd rather just do it myself. I retain all liability, but then, I'm the one in control.
Slashdot Mirror
If the economics of robot fry cooks were really that good, there would be a world full of robot fry cooks. In some cities, McD's and Starbucks are already offering three and four times minimum wage, and still can't find workers.
I wouldn't doubt that in labor-tight markets, robotic chefs will become more common, but the employers will be doing it because labor has become scarce, not to be "saving quite a bit of money," which was your original point.
- Klaatu...
- Barada...
- Necktie!
What? I said it!Well, there is a reason, and you addressed it when you used the word 'adaptable.' You see, we could design a robot that flips burgers and also detects when a burger has fallen apart, when the raw burger bin is empty, fetches more patties, detects when the griddle has quit and turns it back on again, senses the proper doneness of the meat, and deals with the other 101 things that Murphy throws at it during the course of the day. But that robot would be so expensive that it would be unattractive to McBurger Inc.
So unfortunately, we must still employ an adaptable, general purpose wage slave to do the most mundane tasks, like flipping burgers and putting little cotton balls into medicine bottles, because although 99% of the job is mindless repetition, we still have to deal with the other 1% of the task that requires observation, deduction, and problem solving abilities.
Besides, I had a burger assembly job for six weeks when I was a teenager. And although I hated it, it was the only (legal) way for me to make enough money to buy my first car. Ironically, the worst part of the job wasn't the mundane task of slinging patties - it was dealing with the 455h013 shift manager who compensated for his miserable, futureless life by treating us like dirt. That, and cleaning the grease traps.
That's if you can find people to work at minimum wage in your labor market. A large part of the Trib article talked about the rising costs of restaurant labor.
And after 20+ years of robots in the manufacturing business, it's clear that you can't just fire your short order cook. You have to train him into a robot short order cook operator. And then, since he's now a trained technical professional, you have to pay him more, even though 90% of the time he's standing there picking his nose, and the rest of the time he's scraping burgers off the floor.
It's these realities which have kept robots out of the kitchen so far... these robots have been around for decades. This is just a marketing gimmick.
Why should we assign any merit to an idea promoted by a man who can't even apply his own analogy accurately? To properly represent the DOJ proposal, the government of Bedrock would order the shoe company divided into a shoe company and a sock company, not brown shoe and black shoe companies.
Oy Carumba! That's so obvious.
I still like Stallman's idea of forcing MS to open their file formats and interface protocols.
And this is a flaw because?
The default function for the right button of most n-button mice for Macs is the ctrl-click combination, which in Mac OS9 activates a context-sensitive pop-up menu in the Finder and other Mac OS9-savvy applications. It works much better than Windows' right click, is more responsive to the user, and it's configurable to boot. (I could do without multilevel pop-up menus, but both OSes fail me there.) Your only criticism is that it can also be accessed by single-button mouse users by the ctrl-click combination?
Funny, the ctrl-leftclick and ctrl-rightclick combinations don't seem to do a thing on my NT4.0 Workstation here at the office. Holding down the modifier keys and clicking doesn't change the pop-up menus at all in Windows NT explorer, on the desktop, or in Navigator 4.7. Once within NT Explorer I got the ctrl-rightclick combo to bring up the desktop's rightclick menu, but I couldn't get it to repeat once I leftclicked on an explorer pane... that kind of inconsistency is actually more damning than anything I've seen under MacOS9.
So your criticism is based entirely on the fact that the right button's functions are availble to the left button with the use of a modifier key? I fail to see anything negative therein...
because the OS still has no concept of additional buttons
This argument is entirely semantic. The Mac OS offers contextual pop-up menus in the file management and most productivity applications. Game Sprockets allows multibutton devices to be configured for specific applications. The OS is in fact very multibutton savvy. It just doesn't work the same way as does Windows.
The multibutton argument against the MacOS died as of OS 8.1 or thereabouts. Find something else to pick on... there are plenty of valid things.
Well, before posting that comment, I searched 'older stuff' for all articles (blank keyword field) under two categories: Science and Space. No articles older than Jan00 were listed in Space (I forget the cutoff date for Science). Plus I read a comment under today's Slashdot's New Setup article where one reader inferred that mySQL's performance limitations was the reason why Slashdot removes old articles from the server.
So I surmised that for technical reasons, stories and their comments eventually are removed from the active site... or 'fall off.' If the really old stuff is available somewhere else, it's certainly not obvious where.
Gratuitous OT: Hey - Rose-Hulman! I attended a 6-week engineering-oriented summer camp for High School seniors there almost 20 years ago. It was great, but damn is Terre Haute a humid hell during the summer... fog actually condensed at sunset when the temperature dropped below 90F. (Go Elephants!)
(Does that scream "nerd!" or what?)
It's not evasion. It's just a request for more information. At most, it could be seen as a delaying tactic.
And in my opinion, delaying is the best thing for Andover to do. In a few more months, the alleged infringing post will "fall off" Slashdot's servers, along with the rest of the article and its responses. Thus, Andover will be complying with Microsoft's request by default, and in accordance with Slashdot's own standard practices. Problem solved.
Cool. That means we're not stuck in this dinky galaxy anymore... we can take our Bussards to Andromeda and exploit the native populations there, too.
But this situation is somewhat different; power doesn't lie in the hands of wealthy individuals or families. It lies in the hands of abstract entities called "corporations" led by individuals who are shielded from accountability for their decisions and actions on behalf of the corporate entity. And yet all individuals still have, at least in name, the power to elect their government officials.
I've been convinced for years that the rights and liberties (and liabilities) reserved for individuals in the Constitution and Bill of Rights has been diluted by the courts over the past century, by assigning those rights and liberties to Corporations, but without assigning any accountability to the individuals who make the corporate decisions.
And it's getting worse... individuals' rights have become so diluted by corporate rights that this beverage we call a Democracy is beginning to taste like a Plutocracy instead.
There's always one more option, though their effectiveness may be questionable... for example:
In the wake of the spy scandal last year, the DOE implemented a mandatory random polygraph policy for all of their Los Alamos employees. Every one. Needless to say, the affected employees were rather annoyed, and they organized and threatened action (wish I could be more specific). Anyway, the DOE just recently backed down and decided to only require random polygraphs for employees who work with sensitive information. They did something about it.
And also, if you have enough money to contribute to your senator's campaign, you could always go the Congressional route. It works for contractors.
(Sorry if this appears twice, but if /. hadn't timed out, I wouldn't be pressing the submit button again.)
This point deserved a lot more atttention. The liability of a bulletin board operator for its content is much less clear cut. Assuming that this ruling was also being challenged, then the Supreme Court has upheld the privileges of bulletin board operators (like CmdrTaco) as carriers, not publishers.
Now that's news!
While reading the article, I was imagining using an empty Penguin Mints tin for the case. I've got a ton of 'em lying around.
So it's a matter of which wall we hit first: the physical or the economic.
Just because people who have just played "Deathorgy 2000" for an hour are statistically more likely to be annoying does not mean they are statistically more likely to be violent. Once again, this seems like a study where the conclusion was designed before the procedure.
- Poor Customer Service (especially by telephone)
- Mediocre software (don't get me started!)
- Spam (spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam and spam...)
What scares me more than the monopoly idea (which I don't really buy) is the fact that AOL's overall mediocrity (spelling?) inures the newcomers of netizenry to universally bad design and crappy service. I mean, if Windows and AOL are what 90% of newbies are "trained" on, then how the hell are they supposed to know any better, or believe one of us when they are told about Linux or BSD or even Macintosh?AOL's software design habits are especially scary. Their programmers seem to intentionally ignore previous art, to the point where they reinvent every wheel, and seem to have a preference for square ones at that. Every new feature is hard to use, learns no lessons from existing public domain designs, and then they just leave it there, and don't fix it until it becomes a marketing tactic again. Mon dieu, their 1993 newsreader was the worst, and they left it that way for years before updating it, and it's still nowhere near as useable as any newsreader you or I would tolerate.
OK, ok... rant mode off.
While performing field tests out of Nellis AFB for an onboard ECCM system for fighter jets, the engineers noticed that intermittently, there was another jamming source, in addition to the one they were using to test their countermeasure. In fact, this source was so much better than the jammer they were using for the test that the countermeasure under test was completely ineffective.
So they got the USAF to send out planes to locate this mystery source, and it turned out to be in a small town outside Nellis. When investigators went to the town, they discovered the jamming signal eminated from an old auto garage. Inside was a weathered old man using a pre-WWI DC arc welder. It turned out to be the arc welder that was radiating like a banshee from DC to light.
When the Air Force and engineers learned this, they offered to buy the welder from the mechanic, but he refused every offer, citing his preference of the old DC welders, and his dislike of anything he would be able to find to replace it.
So. Moral is, if you want a cheap, low-tech jammer, pump a few dozen amps DC across an air gap.
- Frequency Modulation
- Spread spectrum and frequency hopping
- Encoding and Compression
- Error correction
- Contingency Link Margin
- Active Channel Seeking
And those are just the ones that come spontaneously to mind...Also, I would say that, if we're gonna pick on colorful adjectives, we should at least give credit to the engineers who designed the comm equiment on "the latest generation of global communications satellites" for their "heroic" efforts to create a robust system, before we start calling people "naive."
I'm sure there's actual MITers out there that can do the facts more justice than I have, but they haven't spoken up yet...
Please don't do that. It's no less biased than Pinkerton's own scheme Besides, all you'll succeed in doing is making it "cool" to be on the reporting list...
On further reflection, that's at least as good an idea as spamming WAVE: Report enough jocks and "popular" people, and being on the list will become a status symbol instead of a scarlet letter...
I know this is tangential to the topic at hand, but neither Ultima Online nor Everquest "started" the MMORPG genre. They aren't even the first graphical MMORPGs.
Between 1993 and 1997, subscribers to online giant CIS and a little online system called AOL could play a text based, for profit, fantasy MMORPG called Gemstone III. After going flat-rate, AOL dumped it because far too many users connected for far too long to play Gemstone. Now Gemstone III players get along quite happily connecting directly via the internet. As far as I know, these were the first for-fee MMORPGs employing "gamemasters" to maintain the code, servers, and portray NPCs for the players. But there could have been even earlier ones, considering all the MU*s and MO*s out there... However, it was definitely the first to hit 1,000 simultaneously connected players. I was there. (And I was disgusted... I started playing when 30 players online was a huge crowd.)
Simutronics, the company who ran Gemstone, also offered several other games, all connected via gateways to several major online services. They're all still up and running, and quite fun, if you can harness enough of your imagination to abandon all the pretty graphics.
Then there was AOL's Neverwinter Nights. (Okay, it wasn't AOL's - they just hosted it.) I know little about this game, except it looked very similar to SSI's old Pools of Radiance series of single-player games, and it was multiplayer, and graphical... and offered no client for my platform at the time. (If someone knows more about the old NWN, please chime in.) Of course, if you've been paying attention at all for the past 10 months, you know that NWN will soon be reborn as the first networked virtual tabletop-style roleplaying environment.
Although I'm sure most players of EverQuest and Ultima Online have never heard of Gemstone or DragonRealms, and believe Neverwinter Nights is a brand-new title, the only innovations in these games are the pretty graphics, and perhaps some interesting server-side hacks... but the genre is an old one.
The word you are looking for to describe the DHMO page is satire.
The same goes for vice versa.
The whole point is to eschew assumptions, to identify our assumptions and challenge them. The process shares this feature with the practice of debugging your own code. Without the ability to challenge our assumptions and beliefs, we might as well let theologans and politicians do our science.
The other important thing to remember is that a lot of electromagnetism discoveries we take for granted were made by people chasing "crackpot" ideas and finding something real. Who knows what kind of neat phenomena one might find by spinning a superconductor?
To say ahead of time that there's nothing to find is the same flavor of hubris that led late 19th century physicists to declare that there was nothing left to discover. ("Now if only that poxy git Michelson would shut up about his interferometer...")
That's a good point. But one thing that I haven't seen addressed at all yet is liability. When I was given CheckFree software as a gift one year, I looked into the agreement carefully. I threw the software away when I got to the part that released CheckFree from any liability whatsoever should a bill not be paid on time.
Now I can understand there are many ways the liability would fall on me. But if I am relying on another service to pay my bills, and they introduce a delay, or send payment to the wrong party, or [god forbid] get cracked, I don't want to be the one that gets stung.
So... sorry, but no thanks. It only takes me an hour or so each month to manage my finances, so until a time comes that a bill paying service will stand behind their service and admit their fault when they screw up, I'd rather just do it myself. I retain all liability, but then, I'm the one in control.