Go to this thread. I updated the joke, and it is now relevant to this story. If you have mod points, please mod it up, as it is much more humorous now.
What I appended to the end, incase you are too lazy to click the link:
A.D. 2001: World slows and starts warming.
A.D. 2050: World is now going so slow its orbit is reversed.
A.D. 2040: World is going backwards in time now because of the reveresal. Time from now on will repeat the past.
A.D. 2030: Repeat of A.D. 2030.
Etc.,etc. After this the World gets real boring, nothing but a cycle of reruns!
A.D./B.C.???(Date Unkown) God after the torture of watching nothing but reruns of the World writes an 11th Commandment, and then kills himself.
11th Commandment
I know my son Commienst has trolled much in the past, and that this post is redundant, [slashdot.org] but he has decided to repost it now that it is rendered more hilarious and ontopic. His karma as of 2/18/01 at 4:55 AM is -4, it is my last commandment that he be rectituded, before my death. Mod this up, ye faithful, IT IS MY FINAL COMMANDMENT.
What to do if you have mod points If you modded the parent down for being offtopic, the amendment makes it on-topic, please go there and mod it, +1 Funny. If you thought the parent History of the World was funny, go to the provided link and Mod the addition, +1 Funny. If you modded the parent down, please do not be a NAZI and go to the new link. If the new thread gets excessively modded down, that means some of you NAZIs did not listen to me, and went to the link just to mod it down. Please leave the parent thread at +1, if you want to mod something up, mod the new thread. If you want to mod something down, please do pick a thread not written by Commienst. If this thread gets modded to -1, that means you did not hear a word of my last sentence, and modded me down.
If you already read the parent thread and are too lazy to follow the link to the new I have pasted the amendment, below:
A.D. 2050: World is now going so slow its orbit is reversed.
A.D. 2040: World is going backwards in time now because of the reveresal. Time from now on will repeat the past.
A.D. 2030: Repeat of A.D. 2030.
Etc.,etc. After this the World gets real boring, nothing but a cycle of reruns!
A.D./B.C.???(Date Unkown) God after the torture of watching nothing but reruns of the World writes an 11th Commandment, and then kills himself.
11th Commandment I know my son Commienst has trolled much in the past, and that this post is redundant, [slashdot.org] but he has decided to repost it now that it is rendered more hilarious and ontopic. His karma as of 2/18/01 at 4:55 AM is -4, it is my last commandment that he be rectituded, before my death. Mod this up, ye faithful, IT IS MY FINAL COMMANDMENT.
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net.
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
A.D. 2001: World slows and starts warming.
A.D. 2050: World is now going so slow its orbit is reversed.
A.D. 2040: World is going backwards in time now because of the reveresal. Time from now on will repeat the past.
A.D. 2030: Repeat of A.D. 2030.
Etc.,etc. After this the World gets real boring, nothing but a cycle of reruns!
A.D./B.C.???(Date Unkown) God after the torture of watching nothing but reruns of the World writes an 11th Commandment, and then kills himself.
11th Commandment I know my son Commienst has trolled much in the past, and that this post is redundant, but he has decided to repost it now that it is rendered more hilarious and ontopic. His karma as of 2/18/01 at 4:55 AM is -4, it is my last commandment that he be rectituded, before my death. Mod this up, ye faithful, IT IS MY FINAL COMMANDMENT.
Well I have been trolling alot lately, so some moderators looking at my history are probably modding me down for posterity. Also according to the slashdot troll investigation, alot of moderators just mod in a groupthink fashion, which is proven time and time again. This post believe it or not made it as high as 3, then in succession, it started getting negative points.
My karma was at -7 for trolling the Russian Airforce Chief thing so much, and I recently decided it would be more effective to troll it at +1.
I am on a karma campaign and like all good politicians, I am cheating! I was searching google for old slashdot stories with the keyword, WORLD, and I read this post and thought it would do the trick. It was doing fine, but lately it has been getting mod down alot.
I am gonna add something to make it relevant to this story and repost since it is only at 1, and most do not read at score 1, so they will not notice! This candidness will probably also hurt my karma campaign 2002, all good politicians lie!
The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one-- even the staunchest supporters of science and technology--had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them, is FORECAST THE WEATHER!--for the next one hundred years.
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
WASHINGTON, DC--A coalition of video-game characters representing the nation's leading systems appeared before Congress Monday to decry "the pointless, deadly presence" of spinning blades in video-game landscapes.
"We are here to demand an end to the shockingly casual placement of dangerous blades in our places of work," said Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, who estimates that she has lost more than 600,000 lives to spinning, falling, swinging, and suddenly appearing blades this year alone. "This kind of thing has been going on since the days of Pitfall Harry, and it has got to stop."
Croft, flanked by Metal Gear's Solid Snake, Super Mario 64's Mario, and both soldiers from Contra, called upon Congress to revise OSHA laws to extend protection to the digitally rendered.
"From Pitfall to Bad Dudes Versus Dragon Ninja to Gauntlet, the deadly spinning blade has been with us so long, we no longer even question it," Croft said. "It's high time it was done away with once and for all."
Exacerbating the situation, Mario said, is the seemingly arbitrary placement of the hazards. "I could see why, if you're in a factory, you might find yourself jumping around on dangerous conveyor belts moving in different directions," he said. "But why would you have conveyor belts in a castle? Or in the middle of a forest? Nintendo and these other companies are always talking about how realistic their graphics are. Well, what's so realistic about killer turtles shooting out of clouds and such?"
Added Mario: "It's-a me, Mario!"
In addition to the standard spinning blade, the coalition is seeking restrictions on random whirling fireball chains, falling blocks, spike-pit traps, and invisible cross-corridor laser arrays.
Legislators listened attentively as the digitized characters told of their near-death encounters.
"Just the other day, I was running through the British Museum's Egyptology exhibit when a bunch of six-foot steel scythes suddenly burst out of a sarcophagus," Croft said. "Fortunately, I managed to leap out of the way at the last possible second. But a situation like that could have easily turned tragic."
"We're not so different from you," the blue-jacketed guy from Double Dragon said. "We just want to be left alone to do our jobs--saving princesses, finding lost treasures, destroying out-of-control nuclear-equipped robots. But it's nearly impossible to go about your daily life when you're living in constant fear of some giant, evil mushroom suddenly lunging at you from out of nowhere."
"I mean, would you put up with a row of whirling knives in the cereal aisle at Safeway?" the Double Dragon guy continued. "Of course not. Why, then, should Duke Nukem have to run through a corridor of them to get the health pack he needs need to survive?"
The characters said they intend to boycott their respective video games until Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and other manufacturers take "significant measures" to improve safety.
"In addition to mandatory warning lights and buzzers at least eight seconds before the appearance of a blade, spike, or other health hazard, we are calling for mapping features in all 3D-rendered environments, large flashing arrows to highlight such hidden objects as health and life bonuses, and, in the case of Sonic Team games, safety guardrails on all loops."
Added Sonic: "And would it kill you to compose better music? I almost didn't finish the jungle part on that last one."
This QuickVote is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Internet users in general, nor the public as a whole. The QuickVote sponsor is not responsible for content, functionality or the opinions expressed therein.
Sponsor? Is this voting some kind of ad, that you can buy?
1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
2. Occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, restart and drive on.
3. Occasionally, executing a manouvre would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this too.
4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive - but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
6. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars go much slower.
7. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.
9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and all auto fluids but the packaging would be supurb.
10. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
11.The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
12. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
13. They wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their engine suppliers. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it.
14. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.
15. Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only be able to listen to Microsoft FM, and play Microsoft Cassettes. Unless of course, you buy the upgrade
to use existingstuff.
16. Microsoft would do so well, because even though they don't own any roads, all of the road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars free, including IBM!
17. If you still ran old versions of car (ie. CarDOS 6.22/CarWIN 3.11), then you would be called old fashioned, but you would be able to drive much faster, and on more roads!
18. If you couldn't afford to buy a new car, then you could just borrow your friends, and then copy it.
19. Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganise the ignition for a few days before it worked.
20. You would need to by an upgrade to run cars on a motorway next to each other.
HONOLULU--In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists at the Hawaii Oceanographic Institute reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins.
"I believe I speak for the entire human race when I say, 'Holy fuck,'" said Oceanographic Institute director Dr. James Aoki, noting that the dolphin has a cranial capacity 40 percent greater than that of humans. "That's it for us monkeys."
Aoki strongly urged humans, especially those living near the sea, to learn to communicate using a system of clicks and whistles in a frequency range of 4 to 150 kHz. He also encouraged humans to "start practicing their echolocation as soon as possible."
Delphinologists have reported more than 7,000 cases of spontaneous opposable-digit manifestation in the past two weeks alone, with "thumbs" observed on the bottle-nosed dolphin, the Atlantic humpback dolphin, and even the rare Ganges River dolphin.
"It appears to be species-wide," said dolphin specialist Clifford Brees of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, speaking from the shark cage he welded shut around himself late Monday. "And it may be even worse: We haven't exactly been eager to check for thumbs on other marine mammals belonging to the order of cetaceans, such as the killer whale. Oh, Christ, we're really in the soup now."
Thus far, all the opposable digits encountered appear to be fully functional, making it possible for dolphins--believed to be capable of faster and more complex cogitation than man--to manipulate objects, fashion tools, and construct rudimentary pulley and lever systems.
"They really seem to be making up for lost time with this thumb thing," said Dr. Jim Kuczaj, a University of California- San Diego biologist who has studied the seasonal behavior of dolphins for more than 30 years. "Last Friday, a crude seaweed-and-shell abacus washed up on the beach near Hilo, Hawaii. The next day, a far more sophisticated abacus, fashioned from some unknown material and capable of calculating equations involving numbers of up to 16 digits, washed up on the same beach. The day after that, the beach was littered with thousands of what turned out to be coral-silicate and kelp-based biomicrocircuitry."
"My God," Kuczaj added. "What are they doing down there?"
It is unknown what precipitated the dolphins' sudden development of opposable thumbs. Some dolphin behaviorists believe that the gentle marine mammal, pushed to the brink by humanity's reckless pollution and exploitation of the sea, tapped into some previously unmined mental powers to spontaneously generate a thumb-like appendage. However, given that 95 percent of the world's dolphin experts have committed suicide since learning of the development, the full story may never be known.
"You must believe, sleek ocean masters, that many of us homo sapiens weep with shame and disgust over the degradation to which our species has subjected our All-Mother, the Great World-Sea," read the suicide note of Dr. Richard Morse, a Brisbane, Australia, delphinologist and regular contributor to Marine Mammal Science. "If you are reading this, I estimate that it is the day we know as August 31, 2000. Please be decent and kind masters to our poor ape-race. Oh, God, I'm so sorry about the tracking collars."
"Scientists once wondered whether dolphins, with their remarkably advanced social and language structures, are actually smarter than we are," said Aoki, ushering reporters out of the laboratory he claimed "will either be a smoking hole or a zoo exhibit in the coming Dolphin Age." "Well, we're not wondering anymore."
WATERLOO, IOWA -- Sixteen-year-old high school sophomore Becky Atherton, believed to be the last remaining American who did not hate Microsoft, announced today that she was "tired of being different" and would now hate Microsoft just like everyone else.
"Okay, I hate 'em too, I guess," Atherton told a cheering crowd at a press conference in the gymnasium at Oak Bluff High School. "I mean, like, God, I'm just so tired of being the only one who doesn't."
Secret Service agents then whisked her away to take a congratulatory phone call from the President. She spoke to Larry Ellison for nearly 10 minutes before returning to the press conference.
Atherton said she has been under relentless pressure from parents, teachers, classmates, and the media to be a "good citizen" and hate Microsoft. However, she said, "I just couldn't. I mean, I didn't know anything about them or antitrust or anti-whatever. Why would I hate them?" In addition, she said, since becoming the last holdout -- a Detroit auto mechanic and his six- month-old son declared their hatred two weeks ago -- Microsoft has plied her with new computers, and promised to name its next operating system "Becky."
But then Atherton, who described herself as deeply religious, said she was visited by her minister. "He explained that you can hate something without knowing a lot about it, and that sometimes you just have to take it on faith," she recalled.
"We are just so proud of our little Becky," said her mother, Marian Atherton, who has hated Microsoft since reading a newspaper article about the company 1998. "We were so worried about her being the last one -- you know how teenagers are; they just want to be so darn different. But we prayed on it, and our prayers were answered."
Mrs. Atherton said she intends to thank Billy Graham personally when the family heads to Dulles, Va., where AOL will hold a ticker-tape parade in Becky's honor.
A Microsoft spokesman said the company was "saddened" by Atherton's decision, and insisted Microsoft hating was "just a fad." He said the company will now focus its attention on Renee Lemaire, believed to be the only Canadian who has yet to hate the company.
Redmond, Wash. -- In a surprise settlement today with nine U.S. states, Microsoft agreed to be split into two independent companies -- one that will continue to make Microsoft operating systems, browsers, and server software, and another, potentially larger company that will make patches for Microsoft operating systems, browsers, and server software.
Critics immediately charged that the settlement -- which overrides a previous agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice -- does nothing to diminish Microsoft's standing as the world's most powerful software company. But industry analysts argued that providing patches for security holes in Microsoft programs is a major, untapped growth industry, and applauded the states for not allowing Redmond to control it.
"Just consider, Microsoft can make an operating system, such as Windows XP, and sell 200 million copies, but each one of those copies is going to need at least five patches to fix security holes, so that's 1 billion patches," said Gartner Group analyst Mitch Fershing. "That is an enormous, undeveloped market."
Microsoft employees seem to agree, as sources in Redmond described a "mad scramble" among staffers to position themselves for spots at the new company, called Patchsoft. Asked why people would want to leave Microsoft for a startup, the source said the answer was "really quite simple."
"Everyone here is asking themselves, 'Do I want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?'" he said.
But J.P. Morgan analyst Sherill Walk suspects another motive. "Considering the sheer number of patches we're talking about, I think the new company will become another monopoly, and I believe the people who've jumped ship very well know that."
"Nonsense. It's really all about consumer choice," responded Patchsoft's new co-CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
But how will Patchsoft make money? Currently, Microsoft issues free patches for problems in Windows XP, SQL Server, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows 2000, Flight Simulator, Front Page, Windows Me, Media Player, Passport, NT Server, Windows 98, LAN Manager (for a complete list of MS software needing patches, see www.support.microsoft.com). Under the agreement, Microsoft will no longer issue patches, which Gates said explains the recent five-day outage at Microsoft's upgrade site. "That was planned," he said. "It was a test of the Microsoft No Patch Access system. Went perfectly. No one was able to download anything."
At a press conference to outline the settlement, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal pledged to keep a close eye on Patchsoft to ensure it would not overcharge for its services. He also expressed hope that other firms would soon become Certified Microsoft Patch Developers (CMPDs) and challenge the spin-off. Asked if Patchsoft, with so many former Microsoft employees, will have an advantage over potential competitors in the Microsoft patch market, Blumenthal said the settlement prohibits collaboration.
"Patchsoft developers will not have any foreknowledge of bugs or security holes before software is released. They'll just have to be surprised," he said.
"So it will be just like it was when they were at Microsoft," he added.
One Reuters reporter, meanwhile, questioned the long-term viability of Patchsoft. "This seems like a logical split right now, but what if Microsoft's products improve to the extent that patches are needed less frequently, or perhaps not at all?" she asked.
"I'm sorry, I can only respond to serious questions," Blumenthal answered.
STRANGELY, MOST WON'T REMEMBER WHERE
THEY WERE DAY LINUX 2.4 RELEASED Long-Awaited Operating System Upgrade Not Up There with JFK Assassination
SANTA CLARA, CAL. (SatireWire.com) -- In a study hardcore computer enthusiasts find "repulsive and unconscionable," at least 99.9 percent of the general population will have no special recollection of Jan. 4, 2001, the day the Linux 2.4 operating system was finally released.
"It's truly pathetic," said Linux evangelist Eric Raymond. "Not knowing where you were on Jan. 4, 2001, is like saying you can't recall exactly what you were doing on January 22, 1998, right?... Am I right?"
For most adherents of Linux -- the open source alternative operating system to Windows and Unix -- life came to a standstill Jan. 4, and thousands scrambled to download the update. However, Stanford University researchers couldn't help but notice the feeling was not universal. "I was driving in my car when I heard on the radio that 2.4 was officially out, and I thought to myself, 'Wow, do I need to pull off the road to regain my composure?'" recalled sociologist and lead researcher Kirsten L. Anders. "And I realized, 'No.'"
That type of reaction galls programmers like Jens Boersk, an IBM system administrator who instantly emailed 75,000 IBM employees worldwide to alert them to the release. "I suggested everybody take the day off, and you know what I got for my trouble? A damn reprimand."
Boersk said he suspects Microsoft bribed people to feign apathy.
Added Raymond: "Oh c'mon... January 22nd...? 1998?... the day Netscape decided to release the source code for its browser? Where the hell have you been?"
Raymond added that people shouldn't be allowed to use computers if they don't care about what has happened in the world since Dec. 28, 1969. "...What?... Dec. 28? oh please... think.... Dec. 28, 1969... Linus Torvald's birthday, for God's sake!... Jesus, is everybody sleepwalking through life?"
KDE 3 Beta 2 is a lot faster than KDE 2. Check it out when it comes out. You are better off using KDE 3(even though it is beta) or maybe KDE 1 on such a sytem.
Let us fill landfills with old computers! Look, old pcs run perfectly fine for many tasks. I am running an ancient 400 mhz Celeron and find no need to upgrade, even if it so cheap.
Russian Air Force Chief Says
Official 9-11 Story Impossible [Posted 13 September 2001]
As one considers the terrible events of Sept. 11 and observes U.S. media reaction, so pervasive and consistently military that it appears choreographed, doubts increase. The following is from pravda.ru, a Russian language Website (politically centrist, nationalist). In some places the English translation is confusing, so we added alternate phrasing in brackets.
- Jared Israel
[Start report from Russia] "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday." This was said by the commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force, Anatoli Kornukov. "We had such facts [i.e., events or incidents] too", - said the general straightforwardly. Kornukov did not specify what happened in Russia and when and to what extent it resembled the events in the US. He did not advise what was the end of air terrorists' attempts either.
But the fact the general said that means a lot. As it turns out the way the terrorists acted in America is not unique. The notification and control system for the air transport in Russia does not allow uncontrolled flights and leads to immediate reaction of the anti-missile defense, Kornukov said. "As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up," - said the general. [End report from Russia.]
Russian Air Force Chief Says
Official 9-11 Story Impossible [Posted 13 September 2001]
As one considers the terrible events of Sept. 11 and observes U.S. media reaction, so pervasive and consistently military that it appears choreographed, doubts increase. The following is from pravda.ru, a Russian language Website (politically centrist, nationalist). In some places the English translation is confusing, so we added alternate phrasing in brackets.
- Jared Israel
[Start report from Russia] "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday." This was said by the commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force, Anatoli Kornukov. "We had such facts [i.e., events or incidents] too", - said the general straightforwardly. Kornukov did not specify what happened in Russia and when and to what extent it resembled the events in the US. He did not advise what was the end of air terrorists' attempts either.
But the fact the general said that means a lot. As it turns out the way the terrorists acted in America is not unique. The notification and control system for the air transport in Russia does not allow uncontrolled flights and leads to immediate reaction of the anti-missile defense, Kornukov said. "As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up," - said the general. [End report from Russia.]
The political controversy of the late 19th century was: whether
socialists (all those who believed in the individual's right to
possess what he or she produced) should engage in the political
process, seize control of the state, and use the state apparatus
to achieve liberation; or, whether a worker's state was inher-
ently contradictory, counter revolutionary, and would only lead
to the creation of a new ruling class whose interests would still
clash with those of the ruled that the state should be abolished
allowing for no transitional stage of any kind during which power
may have the chance to reconsolidate itself.
The situation has recreated itself with amazing similarity
almost exactly a century later.
Non-libertarian parties the world over (those who see authori-
tarian centralization the bulwark of civilization) are bankrupt,
economically and intellectually. The only viable intellectual
current today falls under that ambiguous term~ `libertarian'.
Today there exist beneath this umbrella as many splinter groups
as there were a hundred years ago under the umbrella of social-
ism. Two distinct trends, a right and a left if you will, are
clearly discernible.
One group, clearly the largest with a hierarchical organization
modeled on the other political parties, believes, like most
Marxists, in constitutional parliamentary republican democracy.
They believe that the state is a necessary guarantor of indi-
vidual safety and the product of the individual's labor, and in
gradual progress toward a free society through participation in
the political process.
The other group, much smaller and far more splintered, reject
the state as necessarily a tool of class domination and exploita-
tion.
This group believes that what Bakunin said a hundred years ago
is as true today, ``If you took the most ardent revolutionary,
vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse
than the Czar himself.''
The first group is in all fairness a direct inheritor of the
ideals of the American Revolution. In modern times, however, it
has only two roots: (1) the Austrian school of economics repre-
sented by Ludwig Von Mises; (2) the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Von Mises never considered the libertarians. He answered the
Marxists and the Keynesians and defended laissez-faire capitalism
at a time when no one else would. His justification for capital-
ism was empirical~the greatest good for the greatest number.
Ayn Rand, however, attempted to offer a moral justification of
capitalism by substituting the word `capitalism' for the liber-
tarian meaning of the word `socialism'. She then attributed all
of the ills of capitalism to government interference with the
market and all of the world's wealth to the minds of the men whom
the world considered the robber barons.
The contrast between Ayn Rand's `Objectivism' and libertarian-
ism is deeper than mere substitution of terminology, however.
Several of her propositions or axioms place her clearly outside
of the libertarian tradition.
Her justification of the state is derived from a Hobbesian
state of nature theory:
``...a society without an organized government would be at the
mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipi-
tate it into chaos and gang warfare....'' [The Virtue of Selfish-
ness, 152; pb 112]
``If a society provided no organized protection against force,
it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home
into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door~or
to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other
gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the
degeneration of society into the chaos of gang rule, i.e., rule
by brute force, into perpetual warfare of prehistoric savages.''
[Ibid., 146; pb 108]
Ayn Rand's belief in the inherent depravity of human nature
which renders us forever incapable of living without rulers and
not descending to the level of `savages', clearly places her out-
side of the libertarian tradition which views human nature as es-
sentially good, capable of indefinite improvement through the
experience of freedom and the exercise of reason.
Her knowledge of anthropology is as embarrassing as her under-
standing of history. For example, in regards to her conception of
who are the savages, she describes America as, ``...a superlative
material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness,
against the resistance of savage tribes.'' [For The New Intellec-
tual, 58; pb 50]
To Rand, the essential characteristic of the state is that it
possesses a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force. How does
she justify this monopoly or national sovereignty? She accepts it
as a given, something not requiring a justification, and demands
that an-archy, the negation of the proposition, justify itself.
Her concept of national sovereignty is then something tran-
scendental, existing separate and apart from individuals. and
beyond the right of the individual to accept or reject according
to his or her own reason.
These propositions clearly place Ayn Rand's philosophy closer
to Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx, than to libertarianism.
The state, according to Miss Rand, must hold a monopoly on the
enforcement of contracts and the settling of disputes between
individuals, at least whenever this arbitration is not accepted
by both sides voluntarily. She fails to consider that the en-
forcement of contracts by the state fundamentally alters the
nature of free agreements. Agreements are made on terms which
otherwise might not be, because they are justiciable.
The terms of ``free agreements'' under law are titled in favor
of lenders over debtors, landlords over tenants, employers over
employees, in a way which would not exist in a ``free market.''
This leveraging of power is not `objective' at all. Depending
purely on legal convention, creditors may have debtors impris-
oned, tenants may be evicted without notice and their effects
confiscated, one human being may own another or the land on which
another lives and works, all to varying degrees.
To understand Ayn Rand's psychology it is helpful to know her
background. She was born to a wealthy St. Petersburg family in
1905. The position of her family in Czarist society must have
been considerable. At a time when the lives of most Russians had
changed little since feudalism, her family was wealthy enough to
afford a French Governess and take regular vacations to the Cri-
mea.
It should be noted that wealth in Czarist society was almost
wholly a measure of one's favor with the government. There were
few if any Horatio Alger stories about individuals who lifted
themselves out of serfdom without the patronage of the Czar.
At the age of twelve, she must have been very upset when those
nasty workers took over her father's business. Her family fled
St. Petersburg for the Crimea and the protection of the White
Army.
This experience rendered her forever incapable of seeing land
reform or any struggle of oppressed and exploited people as
anything more than hatred for the good and lust for the unearned.
She shared with Marx the bourgeois ideology that only a few
people were capable of running things. The masses ought to be
happy to have a job working for bosses. Any suggestion that an
enterprise could be run by the employees without having someone
in charge was to her absurd.
She shared with Godwin and Kropotkin the belief that the indi-
vidual is born tabula rasa~a blank slate, and all human knowledge
is derived from sense experience. She then proceeded, however, to
completely dismiss environment and socialization as the determin-
ing factor in the development of character.
People were to her good or evil, brilliant or indolent, depend-
ing solely on their volition. People should be judged by their
actions with equal severity regardless of their condition. Though
she insisted that the United States was not and never had been a
completely free country, she granted no such thing as extenuating
circumstances when judging an individual and had no qualms up-
holding the power of the state to inflict capital punishment.
A far more sinister legacy of Ayn Rand to libertarianism is
that of a moralizing autocrat who gathered about her an inner
circle which she ironically called, ``The collective.''
Outwardly, this collective professed egoism and individuality.
They were to be the vanguard of an intellectual renaissance. The
price of admission to this group, however, was slavish conformity
of one's life and professed philosophy to Ayn Rand's whims and
eccentricities. For example, she did not like men who wore facial
hair or listened to Mozart, and if you didn't give them up you
were unfit for Rand's inner circle.
This is particularly sinister if one considers that Karl Marx,
believed by millions to be the very symbol of liberation, was
also an autocrat who, though professed to be the ultimate champi-
on of democracy, resorted to extraordinary means to maintain
control of the International Workingmen's Association. He even
moved its headquarters to New York to exclude the libertarian
influence.
Today Ayn Rand is gone, but like Marx a century ago, hers is
the primary influence on the largest libertarian organization
existing. Even the pledge which all Libertarian Party members
must sign is taken directly from her admonition, ``I hereby
certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of
force as a means of achieving political or social goals.''
In spite of their pledge to non-violence, many libertarians are
frustrated with election laws and media censorship. An argument
which circulates among libertarians of the right is that, if they
were more threatening, the government may take steps to accommo-
date them as it did the black civil rights movement.
Ayn Rand's writings are not entirely consistent on the point of
non-violence either. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark resorts to
the use of dynamite. In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjold
engages in piracy on the high seas and even shells a factory
which has been nationalized. In a clandestine rescue mission,
Dagny Taggart shoots a guard who stood in the way of her desired
end.
In the event of economic upheaval, ruined by unemployment and
inflation, tenants and home owners may refuse to make rent and
mortgage payments. The unemployed may seize vacant land and begin
to farm, and factory workers may realize they can run things
without stock holders.
It would not be at all surprising if there were to emerge
within the libertarian right, groups committed to direct action
and counter revolutionary violence, even a coup d'etat.
Imagine a charismatic and autocratic personality at the center
of such a group and you have the Objectivist Lenin.
Like the Marxists and right libertarians, Lenin and the Objec-
tivists are professed republican democrats. Lenin and the Bolshe-
viks promised that if given power, they would immediately convoke
a constituent assembly. When they realized, however, they would
not hold a majority in such an assembly they turned against the
idea of such an assembly.
Can anyone doubt that the cultist mentality which characterizes
most of Miss Rand's followers could lead to the creation of a
group of self appointed avengers of the capitalist class? That
they would suppress strikes, demonstrations, and factory take
overs? That they would not execute people for crimes against the
libertarian state?
Ayn Rand believed in a republican form of government with a
cleverly constructed constitution which would deny the majority
of the power to infringe on the rights of a minority as she
conceived them. If the majority supported a general strike
against rents and mortgages and supported the factory takeovers,
would not the clandestinely organized Objectivist libertarian
party be tempted to dispense with democracy in order to enforce
what they conceived of as the rights of the dispossessed bour-
geoisie?
In all fairness it must be admitted that Ayn Rand herself would
never sanction such actions, but the same argument is made
everyday by western Marxists that Marx would probably not have
sanctioned many of Lenin's actions and would certainly not take
credit for the Soviet Union.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks won power by promising, ``Land to the
peasants!'' ``Factories to the workers!'' When they took power,
however, they immediately set about liquidating the factory com-
mittees and nationalizing the land. They crushed work place
democracy by installing armed guards in the factories, and even
returned former owners to their positions as employees of the
worker's state.
Leon Trotsky stopped the practice of soldiers electing their
officers from their ranks and even restored former Czarist
officers to their ranks in the Red Army.
When the Russian Revolution began few people clearly understood
the gulf which separated the state socialists from the libertari-
ans. Many dedicated libertarians like Alexander Berkman, rallied
to the Bolshevik cause, willing to give them the benefit of the
doubt in hopes that seizing state power would only be a transi-
tional stage toward the development of the stateless/classless
society.
Many sincere lovers of liberty now flock to the standard of the
Libertarian Party, as they did the Bolsheviks, completely igno-
rant of the history of the last century. As Santayanna said:
``Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat
them.''
What should be done? It should be obvious that government
enforcement of private contracts is not libertarian any more than
is taking state power to set people free. Libertarianism is and
always will mean socialism~the self emancipation of working
people.
Libertarians must stop courting the Republican right and return
to their intellectual roots. By standing outside of the political
process we deny the state legitimacy, and like the state tortur-
ers in Atlas Shrugged, they will come and beg for libertarians to
take over.
Remembering the experience of the Spanish libertarians, and
heeding the advice of John Galt, libertarians must refuse state
power even when begged. The state can never be a tool of libera-
tion. Only its complete and utter collapse will allow for the
emergence of non-statist institutions, libertarian coops, com-
munes, and free markets, to flourish and displace the political
state once and for all.
Slashdot Mirror
Just be picky about what friends it chooses!
Go to this thread. I updated the joke, and it is now relevant to this story. If you have mod points, please mod it up, as it is much more humorous now.
What I appended to the end, incase you are too lazy to click the link:
A.D. 2001: World slows and starts warming.
A.D. 2050: World is now going so slow its orbit is reversed.
A.D. 2040: World is going backwards in time now because of the reveresal. Time from now on will repeat the past.
A.D. 2030: Repeat of A.D. 2030.
Etc.,etc. After this the World gets real boring, nothing but a cycle of reruns!
A.D./B.C.???(Date Unkown) God after the torture of watching nothing but reruns of the World writes an 11th Commandment, and then kills himself.
11th Commandment
I know my son Commienst has trolled much in the past, and that this post is redundant, [slashdot.org] but he has decided to repost it now that it is rendered more hilarious and ontopic. His karma as of 2/18/01 at 4:55 AM is -4, it is my last commandment that he be rectituded, before my death. Mod this up, ye faithful, IT IS MY FINAL COMMANDMENT.
UPDATE: This post has been updated. Go to this thread, HISTORY OF THE WORLD BEFORE AND AFTER SLOWDOWN.
What to do if you have mod points
If you modded the parent down for being offtopic, the amendment makes it on-topic, please go there and mod it, +1 Funny. If you thought the parent History of the World was funny, go to the provided link and Mod the addition, +1 Funny. If you modded the parent down, please do not be a NAZI and go to the new link. If the new thread gets excessively modded down, that means some of you NAZIs did not listen to me, and went to the link just to mod it down. Please leave the parent thread at +1, if you want to mod something up, mod the new thread. If you want to mod something down, please do pick a thread not written by Commienst. If this thread gets modded to -1, that means you did not hear a word of my last sentence, and modded me down.
If you already read the parent thread and are too lazy to follow the link to the new I have pasted the amendment, below:
HISTORY OF THE WORLD BEFORE AND AFTER SLOWDOWN. (Score:5 Funny)
A.D. 2001: World slows and starts warming.
A.D. 2050: World is now going so slow its orbit is reversed.
A.D. 2040: World is going backwards in time now because of the reveresal. Time from now on will repeat the past.
A.D. 2030: Repeat of A.D. 2030.
Etc.,etc. After this the World gets real boring, nothing but a cycle of reruns!
A.D./B.C.???(Date Unkown) God after the torture of watching nothing but reruns of the World writes an 11th Commandment, and then kills himself.
11th Commandment
I know my son Commienst has trolled much in the past, and that this post is redundant, [slashdot.org] but he has decided to repost it now that it is rendered more hilarious and ontopic. His karma as of 2/18/01 at 4:55 AM is -4, it is my last commandment that he be rectituded, before my death. Mod this up, ye faithful, IT IS MY FINAL COMMANDMENT.
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net.
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
A.D. 2001: World slows and starts warming.
A.D. 2050: World is now going so slow its orbit is reversed.
A.D. 2040: World is going backwards in time now because of the reveresal. Time from now on will repeat the past.
A.D. 2030: Repeat of A.D. 2030.
Etc.,etc. After this the World gets real boring, nothing but a cycle of reruns!
A.D./B.C.???(Date Unkown) God after the torture of watching nothing but reruns of the World writes an 11th Commandment, and then kills himself.
11th Commandment
I know my son Commienst has trolled much in the past, and that this post is redundant, but he has decided to repost it now that it is rendered more hilarious and ontopic. His karma as of 2/18/01 at 4:55 AM is -4, it is my last commandment that he be rectituded, before my death. Mod this up, ye faithful, IT IS MY FINAL COMMANDMENT.
Well I have been trolling alot lately, so some moderators looking at my history are probably modding me down for posterity. Also according to the slashdot troll investigation, alot of moderators just mod in a groupthink fashion, which is proven time and time again. This post believe it or not made it as high as 3, then in succession, it started getting negative points.
My karma was at -7 for trolling the Russian Airforce Chief thing so much, and I recently decided it would be more effective to troll it at +1.
I am on a karma campaign and like all good politicians, I am cheating! I was searching google for old slashdot stories with the keyword, WORLD, and I read this post and thought it would do the trick. It was doing fine, but lately it has been getting mod down alot.
I am gonna add something to make it relevant to this story and repost since it is only at 1, and most do not read at score 1, so they will not notice! This candidness will probably also hurt my karma campaign 2002, all good politicians lie!
The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one-- even the staunchest supporters of science and technology--had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them, is FORECAST THE WEATHER!--for the next one hundred years.
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
In Related news:
WASHINGTON, DC--A coalition of video-game characters representing the nation's leading systems appeared before Congress Monday to decry "the pointless, deadly presence" of spinning blades in video-game landscapes.
"We are here to demand an end to the shockingly casual placement of dangerous blades in our places of work," said Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, who estimates that she has lost more than 600,000 lives to spinning, falling, swinging, and suddenly appearing blades this year alone. "This kind of thing has been going on since the days of Pitfall Harry, and it has got to stop."
Croft, flanked by Metal Gear's Solid Snake, Super Mario 64's Mario, and both soldiers from Contra, called upon Congress to revise OSHA laws to extend protection to the digitally rendered.
"From Pitfall to Bad Dudes Versus Dragon Ninja to Gauntlet, the deadly spinning blade has been with us so long, we no longer even question it," Croft said. "It's high time it was done away with once and for all."
Exacerbating the situation, Mario said, is the seemingly arbitrary placement of the hazards. "I could see why, if you're in a factory, you might find yourself jumping around on dangerous conveyor belts moving in different directions," he said. "But why would you have conveyor belts in a castle? Or in the middle of a forest? Nintendo and these other companies are always talking about how realistic their graphics are. Well, what's so realistic about killer turtles shooting out of clouds and such?"
Added Mario: "It's-a me, Mario!"
In addition to the standard spinning blade, the coalition is seeking restrictions on random whirling fireball chains, falling blocks, spike-pit traps, and invisible cross-corridor laser arrays.
Legislators listened attentively as the digitized characters told of their near-death encounters.
"Just the other day, I was running through the British Museum's Egyptology exhibit when a bunch of six-foot steel scythes suddenly burst out of a sarcophagus," Croft said. "Fortunately, I managed to leap out of the way at the last possible second. But a situation like that could have easily turned tragic."
"We're not so different from you," the blue-jacketed guy from Double Dragon said. "We just want to be left alone to do our jobs--saving princesses, finding lost treasures, destroying out-of-control nuclear-equipped robots. But it's nearly impossible to go about your daily life when you're living in constant fear of some giant, evil mushroom suddenly lunging at you from out of nowhere."
"I mean, would you put up with a row of whirling knives in the cereal aisle at Safeway?" the Double Dragon guy continued. "Of course not. Why, then, should Duke Nukem have to run through a corridor of them to get the health pack he needs need to survive?"
The characters said they intend to boycott their respective video games until Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and other manufacturers take "significant measures" to improve safety.
"In addition to mandatory warning lights and buzzers at least eight seconds before the appearance of a blade, spike, or other health hazard, we are calling for mapping features in all 3D-rendered environments, large flashing arrows to highlight such hidden objects as health and life bonuses, and, in the case of Sonic Team games, safety guardrails on all loops."
Added Sonic: "And would it kill you to compose better music? I almost didn't finish the jungle part on that last one."
If you view the comment at the bottom it reads:
This QuickVote is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Internet users in general, nor the public as a whole. The QuickVote sponsor is not responsible for content, functionality or the opinions expressed therein.
Sponsor? Is this voting some kind of ad, that you can buy?
At the time this comment is posted:
32% YES with 1761 votes
68% NO with 3688 votes
At the time this comment is posted:
32% YES with 1601 votes
68% NO with 3402 votes
Bill Gates making love.
Bill Gates is making the love when his wife says to him:
"Darling, I don't enjoy this!"
He replies:
"Cancel, Retry, Ignore or Quit?"
What if Microsoft made cars?
1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.
2. Occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, restart and drive on.
3. Occasionally, executing a manouvre would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this too.
4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive - but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
6. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars go much slower.
7. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.
8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.
9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and all auto fluids but the packaging would be supurb.
10. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
11.The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
12. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.
13. They wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their engine suppliers. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it.
14. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.
15. Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only be able to listen to Microsoft FM, and play Microsoft Cassettes. Unless of course, you buy the upgrade
to use existingstuff.
16. Microsoft would do so well, because even though they don't own any roads, all of the road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars free, including IBM!
17. If you still ran old versions of car (ie. CarDOS 6.22/CarWIN 3.11), then you would be called old fashioned, but you would be able to drive much faster, and on more roads!
18. If you couldn't afford to buy a new car, then you could just borrow your friends, and then copy it.
19. Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganise the ignition for a few days before it worked.
20. You would need to by an upgrade to run cars on a motorway next to each other.
Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs
HONOLULU--In an announcement with grave implications for the primacy of the species of man, marine biologists at the Hawaii Oceanographic Institute reported Monday that dolphins, or family Delphinidae, have evolved opposable thumbs on their pectoral fins.
"I believe I speak for the entire human race when I say, 'Holy fuck,'" said Oceanographic Institute director Dr. James Aoki, noting that the dolphin has a cranial capacity 40 percent greater than that of humans. "That's it for us monkeys."
Aoki strongly urged humans, especially those living near the sea, to learn to communicate using a system of clicks and whistles in a frequency range of 4 to 150 kHz. He also encouraged humans to "start practicing their echolocation as soon as possible."
Delphinologists have reported more than 7,000 cases of spontaneous opposable-digit manifestation in the past two weeks alone, with "thumbs" observed on the bottle-nosed dolphin, the Atlantic humpback dolphin, and even the rare Ganges River dolphin.
"It appears to be species-wide," said dolphin specialist Clifford Brees of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, speaking from the shark cage he welded shut around himself late Monday. "And it may be even worse: We haven't exactly been eager to check for thumbs on other marine mammals belonging to the order of cetaceans, such as the killer whale. Oh, Christ, we're really in the soup now."
Thus far, all the opposable digits encountered appear to be fully functional, making it possible for dolphins--believed to be capable of faster and more complex cogitation than man--to manipulate objects, fashion tools, and construct rudimentary pulley and lever systems.
"They really seem to be making up for lost time with this thumb thing," said Dr. Jim Kuczaj, a University of California- San Diego biologist who has studied the seasonal behavior of dolphins for more than 30 years. "Last Friday, a crude seaweed-and-shell abacus washed up on the beach near Hilo, Hawaii. The next day, a far more sophisticated abacus, fashioned from some unknown material and capable of calculating equations involving numbers of up to 16 digits, washed up on the same beach. The day after that, the beach was littered with thousands of what turned out to be coral-silicate and kelp-based biomicrocircuitry."
"My God," Kuczaj added. "What are they doing down there?"
It is unknown what precipitated the dolphins' sudden development of opposable thumbs. Some dolphin behaviorists believe that the gentle marine mammal, pushed to the brink by humanity's reckless pollution and exploitation of the sea, tapped into some previously unmined mental powers to spontaneously generate a thumb-like appendage. However, given that 95 percent of the world's dolphin experts have committed suicide since learning of the development, the full story may never be known.
"You must believe, sleek ocean masters, that many of us homo sapiens weep with shame and disgust over the degradation to which our species has subjected our All-Mother, the Great World-Sea," read the suicide note of Dr. Richard Morse, a Brisbane, Australia, delphinologist and regular contributor to Marine Mammal Science. "If you are reading this, I estimate that it is the day we know as August 31, 2000. Please be decent and kind masters to our poor ape-race. Oh, God, I'm so sorry about the tracking collars."
"Scientists once wondered whether dolphins, with their remarkably advanced social and language structures, are actually smarter than we are," said Aoki, ushering reporters out of the laboratory he claimed "will either be a smoking hole or a zoo exhibit in the coming Dolphin Age." "Well, we're not wondering anymore."
It's Official: Everybody Hates Microsoft
WATERLOO, IOWA -- Sixteen-year-old high school sophomore Becky Atherton, believed to be the last remaining American who did not hate Microsoft, announced today that she was "tired of being different" and would now hate Microsoft just like everyone else.
"Okay, I hate 'em too, I guess," Atherton told a cheering crowd at a press conference in the gymnasium at Oak Bluff High School. "I mean, like, God, I'm just so tired of being the only one who doesn't."
Secret Service agents then whisked her away to take a congratulatory phone call from the President. She spoke to Larry Ellison for nearly 10 minutes before returning to the press conference.
Atherton said she has been under relentless pressure from parents, teachers, classmates, and the media to be a "good citizen" and hate Microsoft. However, she said, "I just couldn't. I mean, I didn't know anything about them or antitrust or anti-whatever. Why would I hate them?" In addition, she said, since becoming the last holdout -- a Detroit auto mechanic and his six- month-old son declared their hatred two weeks ago -- Microsoft has plied her with new computers, and promised to name its next operating system "Becky."
But then Atherton, who described herself as deeply religious, said she was visited by her minister. "He explained that you can hate something without knowing a lot about it, and that sometimes you just have to take it on faith," she recalled.
"We are just so proud of our little Becky," said her mother, Marian Atherton, who has hated Microsoft since reading a newspaper article about the company 1998. "We were so worried about her being the last one -- you know how teenagers are; they just want to be so darn different. But we prayed on it, and our prayers were answered."
Mrs. Atherton said she intends to thank Billy Graham personally when the family heads to Dulles, Va., where AOL will hold a ticker-tape parade in Becky's honor.
A Microsoft spokesman said the company was "saddened" by Atherton's decision, and insisted Microsoft hating was "just a fad." He said the company will now focus its attention on Renee Lemaire, believed to be the only Canadian who has yet to hate the company.
Microsoft Splits into Two Companies
Redmond, Wash. -- In a surprise settlement today with nine U.S. states, Microsoft agreed to be split into two independent companies -- one that will continue to make Microsoft operating systems, browsers, and server software, and another, potentially larger company that will make patches for Microsoft operating systems, browsers, and server software.
Critics immediately charged that the settlement -- which overrides a previous agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice -- does nothing to diminish Microsoft's standing as the world's most powerful software company. But industry analysts argued that providing patches for security holes in Microsoft programs is a major, untapped growth industry, and applauded the states for not allowing Redmond to control it.
"Just consider, Microsoft can make an operating system, such as Windows XP, and sell 200 million copies, but each one of those copies is going to need at least five patches to fix security holes, so that's 1 billion patches," said Gartner Group analyst Mitch Fershing. "That is an enormous, undeveloped market."
Microsoft employees seem to agree, as sources in Redmond described a "mad scramble" among staffers to position themselves for spots at the new company, called Patchsoft. Asked why people would want to leave Microsoft for a startup, the source said the answer was "really quite simple."
"Everyone here is asking themselves, 'Do I want to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?'" he said.
But J.P. Morgan analyst Sherill Walk suspects another motive. "Considering the sheer number of patches we're talking about, I think the new company will become another monopoly, and I believe the people who've jumped ship very well know that."
"Nonsense. It's really all about consumer choice," responded Patchsoft's new co-CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
But how will Patchsoft make money? Currently, Microsoft issues free patches for problems in Windows XP, SQL Server, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows 2000, Flight Simulator, Front Page, Windows Me, Media Player, Passport, NT Server, Windows 98, LAN Manager (for a complete list of MS software needing patches, see www.support.microsoft.com). Under the agreement, Microsoft will no longer issue patches, which Gates said explains the recent five-day outage at Microsoft's upgrade site. "That was planned," he said. "It was a test of the Microsoft No Patch Access system. Went perfectly. No one was able to download anything."
At a press conference to outline the settlement, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal pledged to keep a close eye on Patchsoft to ensure it would not overcharge for its services. He also expressed hope that other firms would soon become Certified Microsoft Patch Developers (CMPDs) and challenge the spin-off. Asked if Patchsoft, with so many former Microsoft employees, will have an advantage over potential competitors in the Microsoft patch market, Blumenthal said the settlement prohibits collaboration.
"Patchsoft developers will not have any foreknowledge of bugs or security holes before software is released. They'll just have to be surprised," he said.
"So it will be just like it was when they were at Microsoft," he added.
One Reuters reporter, meanwhile, questioned the long-term viability of Patchsoft. "This seems like a logical split right now, but what if Microsoft's products improve to the extent that patches are needed less frequently, or perhaps not at all?" she asked.
"I'm sorry, I can only respond to serious questions," Blumenthal answered.
STRANGELY, MOST WON'T REMEMBER WHERE
... Am I right?"
... January 22nd ...? 1998? ... the day Netscape decided to release the source code for its browser? Where the hell have you been?"
... Dec. 28? oh please ... think .... Dec. 28, 1969 ... Linus Torvald's birthday, for God's sake! ... Jesus, is everybody sleepwalking through life?"
THEY WERE DAY LINUX 2.4 RELEASED
Long-Awaited Operating System Upgrade Not Up There with JFK Assassination
SANTA CLARA, CAL. (SatireWire.com) -- In a study hardcore computer enthusiasts find "repulsive and unconscionable," at least 99.9 percent of the general population will have no special recollection of Jan. 4, 2001, the day the Linux 2.4 operating system was finally released.
"It's truly pathetic," said Linux evangelist Eric Raymond. "Not knowing where you were on Jan. 4, 2001, is like saying you can't recall exactly what you were doing on January 22, 1998, right?
For most adherents of Linux -- the open source alternative operating system to Windows and Unix -- life came to a standstill Jan. 4, and thousands scrambled to download the update. However, Stanford University researchers couldn't help but notice the feeling was not universal. "I was driving in my car when I heard on the radio that 2.4 was officially out, and I thought to myself, 'Wow, do I need to pull off the road to regain my composure?'" recalled sociologist and lead researcher Kirsten L. Anders. "And I realized, 'No.'"
That type of reaction galls programmers like Jens Boersk, an IBM system administrator who instantly emailed 75,000 IBM employees worldwide to alert them to the release. "I suggested everybody take the day off, and you know what I got for my trouble? A damn reprimand."
Boersk said he suspects Microsoft bribed people to feign apathy.
Added Raymond: "Oh c'mon
Raymond added that people shouldn't be allowed to use computers if they don't care about what has happened in the world since Dec. 28, 1969. "...What?
"Older machines generally run cooler than the newest Athlons and P4's."
Dur. Just underclock the newer Athlons and P4s and they will run cooler!
KDE 3 Beta 2 is a lot faster than KDE 2. Check it out when it comes out. You are better off using KDE 3(even though it is beta) or maybe KDE 1 on such a sytem.
Let us fill landfills with old computers! Look, old pcs run perfectly fine for many tasks. I am running an ancient 400 mhz Celeron and find no need to upgrade, even if it so cheap.
Russian Air Force Chief Says
Official 9-11 Story Impossible
[Posted 13 September 2001]
As one considers the terrible events of Sept. 11 and observes U.S. media reaction, so pervasive and consistently military that it appears choreographed, doubts increase. The following is from pravda.ru, a Russian language Website (politically centrist, nationalist). In some places the English translation is confusing, so we added alternate phrasing in brackets.
- Jared Israel
[Start report from Russia] "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday." This was said by the commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force, Anatoli Kornukov. "We had such facts [i.e., events or incidents] too", - said the general straightforwardly. Kornukov did not specify what happened in Russia and when and to what extent it resembled the events in the US. He did not advise what was the end of air terrorists' attempts either.
But the fact the general said that means a lot. As it turns out the way the terrorists acted in America is not unique. The notification and control system for the air transport in Russia does not allow uncontrolled flights and leads to immediate reaction of the anti-missile defense, Kornukov said. "As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up," - said the general. [End report from Russia.]
Pasted from: The Emperor's New Clothes
It sucks so bad, GNOME has to be a linux project. Linux is dying, BSD thriving!
Russian Air Force Chief Says
Official 9-11 Story Impossible
[Posted 13 September 2001]
As one considers the terrible events of Sept. 11 and observes U.S. media reaction, so pervasive and consistently military that it appears choreographed, doubts increase. The following is from pravda.ru, a Russian language Website (politically centrist, nationalist). In some places the English translation is confusing, so we added alternate phrasing in brackets.
- Jared Israel
[Start report from Russia] "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday." This was said by the commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force, Anatoli Kornukov. "We had such facts [i.e., events or incidents] too", - said the general straightforwardly. Kornukov did not specify what happened in Russia and when and to what extent it resembled the events in the US. He did not advise what was the end of air terrorists' attempts either.
But the fact the general said that means a lot. As it turns out the way the terrorists acted in America is not unique. The notification and control system for the air transport in Russia does not allow uncontrolled flights and leads to immediate reaction of the anti-missile defense, Kornukov said. "As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up," - said the general. [End report from Russia.]
Pasted from: The Emperor's New Clothes
Ayn Rand and the perversion of libertarianism
The political controversy of the late 19th century was: whether
socialists (all those who believed in the individual's right to
possess what he or she produced) should engage in the political
process, seize control of the state, and use the state apparatus
to achieve liberation; or, whether a worker's state was inher-
ently contradictory, counter revolutionary, and would only lead
to the creation of a new ruling class whose interests would still
clash with those of the ruled that the state should be abolished
allowing for no transitional stage of any kind during which power
may have the chance to reconsolidate itself.
The situation has recreated itself with amazing similarity
almost exactly a century later.
Non-libertarian parties the world over (those who see authori-
tarian centralization the bulwark of civilization) are bankrupt,
economically and intellectually. The only viable intellectual
current today falls under that ambiguous term~ `libertarian'.
Today there exist beneath this umbrella as many splinter groups
as there were a hundred years ago under the umbrella of social-
ism. Two distinct trends, a right and a left if you will, are
clearly discernible.
One group, clearly the largest with a hierarchical organization
modeled on the other political parties, believes, like most
Marxists, in constitutional parliamentary republican democracy.
They believe that the state is a necessary guarantor of indi-
vidual safety and the product of the individual's labor, and in
gradual progress toward a free society through participation in
the political process.
The other group, much smaller and far more splintered, reject
the state as necessarily a tool of class domination and exploita-
tion.
This group believes that what Bakunin said a hundred years ago
is as true today, ``If you took the most ardent revolutionary,
vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse
than the Czar himself.''
The first group is in all fairness a direct inheritor of the
ideals of the American Revolution. In modern times, however, it
has only two roots: (1) the Austrian school of economics repre-
sented by Ludwig Von Mises; (2) the philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Von Mises never considered the libertarians. He answered the
Marxists and the Keynesians and defended laissez-faire capitalism
at a time when no one else would. His justification for capital-
ism was empirical~the greatest good for the greatest number.
Ayn Rand, however, attempted to offer a moral justification of
capitalism by substituting the word `capitalism' for the liber-
tarian meaning of the word `socialism'. She then attributed all
of the ills of capitalism to government interference with the
market and all of the world's wealth to the minds of the men whom
the world considered the robber barons.
The contrast between Ayn Rand's `Objectivism' and libertarian-
ism is deeper than mere substitution of terminology, however.
Several of her propositions or axioms place her clearly outside
of the libertarian tradition.
Her justification of the state is derived from a Hobbesian
state of nature theory:
``...a society without an organized government would be at the
mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipi-
tate it into chaos and gang warfare....'' [The Virtue of Selfish-
ness, 152; pb 112]
``If a society provided no organized protection against force,
it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home
into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door~or
to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other
gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the
degeneration of society into the chaos of gang rule, i.e., rule
by brute force, into perpetual warfare of prehistoric savages.''
[Ibid., 146; pb 108]
Ayn Rand's belief in the inherent depravity of human nature
which renders us forever incapable of living without rulers and
not descending to the level of `savages', clearly places her out-
side of the libertarian tradition which views human nature as es-
sentially good, capable of indefinite improvement through the
experience of freedom and the exercise of reason.
Her knowledge of anthropology is as embarrassing as her under-
standing of history. For example, in regards to her conception of
who are the savages, she describes America as, ``...a superlative
material achievement in the midst of an untouched wilderness,
against the resistance of savage tribes.'' [For The New Intellec-
tual, 58; pb 50]
To Rand, the essential characteristic of the state is that it
possesses a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force. How does
she justify this monopoly or national sovereignty? She accepts it
as a given, something not requiring a justification, and demands
that an-archy, the negation of the proposition, justify itself.
Her concept of national sovereignty is then something tran-
scendental, existing separate and apart from individuals. and
beyond the right of the individual to accept or reject according
to his or her own reason.
These propositions clearly place Ayn Rand's philosophy closer
to Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx, than to libertarianism.
The state, according to Miss Rand, must hold a monopoly on the
enforcement of contracts and the settling of disputes between
individuals, at least whenever this arbitration is not accepted
by both sides voluntarily. She fails to consider that the en-
forcement of contracts by the state fundamentally alters the
nature of free agreements. Agreements are made on terms which
otherwise might not be, because they are justiciable.
The terms of ``free agreements'' under law are titled in favor
of lenders over debtors, landlords over tenants, employers over
employees, in a way which would not exist in a ``free market.''
This leveraging of power is not `objective' at all. Depending
purely on legal convention, creditors may have debtors impris-
oned, tenants may be evicted without notice and their effects
confiscated, one human being may own another or the land on which
another lives and works, all to varying degrees.
To understand Ayn Rand's psychology it is helpful to know her
background. She was born to a wealthy St. Petersburg family in
1905. The position of her family in Czarist society must have
been considerable. At a time when the lives of most Russians had
changed little since feudalism, her family was wealthy enough to
afford a French Governess and take regular vacations to the Cri-
mea.
It should be noted that wealth in Czarist society was almost
wholly a measure of one's favor with the government. There were
few if any Horatio Alger stories about individuals who lifted
themselves out of serfdom without the patronage of the Czar.
At the age of twelve, she must have been very upset when those
nasty workers took over her father's business. Her family fled
St. Petersburg for the Crimea and the protection of the White
Army.
This experience rendered her forever incapable of seeing land
reform or any struggle of oppressed and exploited people as
anything more than hatred for the good and lust for the unearned.
She shared with Marx the bourgeois ideology that only a few
people were capable of running things. The masses ought to be
happy to have a job working for bosses. Any suggestion that an
enterprise could be run by the employees without having someone
in charge was to her absurd.
She shared with Godwin and Kropotkin the belief that the indi-
vidual is born tabula rasa~a blank slate, and all human knowledge
is derived from sense experience. She then proceeded, however, to
completely dismiss environment and socialization as the determin-
ing factor in the development of character.
People were to her good or evil, brilliant or indolent, depend-
ing solely on their volition. People should be judged by their
actions with equal severity regardless of their condition. Though
she insisted that the United States was not and never had been a
completely free country, she granted no such thing as extenuating
circumstances when judging an individual and had no qualms up-
holding the power of the state to inflict capital punishment.
A far more sinister legacy of Ayn Rand to libertarianism is
that of a moralizing autocrat who gathered about her an inner
circle which she ironically called, ``The collective.''
Outwardly, this collective professed egoism and individuality.
They were to be the vanguard of an intellectual renaissance. The
price of admission to this group, however, was slavish conformity
of one's life and professed philosophy to Ayn Rand's whims and
eccentricities. For example, she did not like men who wore facial
hair or listened to Mozart, and if you didn't give them up you
were unfit for Rand's inner circle.
This is particularly sinister if one considers that Karl Marx,
believed by millions to be the very symbol of liberation, was
also an autocrat who, though professed to be the ultimate champi-
on of democracy, resorted to extraordinary means to maintain
control of the International Workingmen's Association. He even
moved its headquarters to New York to exclude the libertarian
influence.
Today Ayn Rand is gone, but like Marx a century ago, hers is
the primary influence on the largest libertarian organization
existing. Even the pledge which all Libertarian Party members
must sign is taken directly from her admonition, ``I hereby
certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of
force as a means of achieving political or social goals.''
In spite of their pledge to non-violence, many libertarians are
frustrated with election laws and media censorship. An argument
which circulates among libertarians of the right is that, if they
were more threatening, the government may take steps to accommo-
date them as it did the black civil rights movement.
Ayn Rand's writings are not entirely consistent on the point of
non-violence either. In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark resorts to
the use of dynamite. In Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjold
engages in piracy on the high seas and even shells a factory
which has been nationalized. In a clandestine rescue mission,
Dagny Taggart shoots a guard who stood in the way of her desired
end.
In the event of economic upheaval, ruined by unemployment and
inflation, tenants and home owners may refuse to make rent and
mortgage payments. The unemployed may seize vacant land and begin
to farm, and factory workers may realize they can run things
without stock holders.
It would not be at all surprising if there were to emerge
within the libertarian right, groups committed to direct action
and counter revolutionary violence, even a coup d'etat.
Imagine a charismatic and autocratic personality at the center
of such a group and you have the Objectivist Lenin.
Like the Marxists and right libertarians, Lenin and the Objec-
tivists are professed republican democrats. Lenin and the Bolshe-
viks promised that if given power, they would immediately convoke
a constituent assembly. When they realized, however, they would
not hold a majority in such an assembly they turned against the
idea of such an assembly.
Can anyone doubt that the cultist mentality which characterizes
most of Miss Rand's followers could lead to the creation of a
group of self appointed avengers of the capitalist class? That
they would suppress strikes, demonstrations, and factory take
overs? That they would not execute people for crimes against the
libertarian state?
Ayn Rand believed in a republican form of government with a
cleverly constructed constitution which would deny the majority
of the power to infringe on the rights of a minority as she
conceived them. If the majority supported a general strike
against rents and mortgages and supported the factory takeovers,
would not the clandestinely organized Objectivist libertarian
party be tempted to dispense with democracy in order to enforce
what they conceived of as the rights of the dispossessed bour-
geoisie?
In all fairness it must be admitted that Ayn Rand herself would
never sanction such actions, but the same argument is made
everyday by western Marxists that Marx would probably not have
sanctioned many of Lenin's actions and would certainly not take
credit for the Soviet Union.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks won power by promising, ``Land to the
peasants!'' ``Factories to the workers!'' When they took power,
however, they immediately set about liquidating the factory com-
mittees and nationalizing the land. They crushed work place
democracy by installing armed guards in the factories, and even
returned former owners to their positions as employees of the
worker's state.
Leon Trotsky stopped the practice of soldiers electing their
officers from their ranks and even restored former Czarist
officers to their ranks in the Red Army.
When the Russian Revolution began few people clearly understood
the gulf which separated the state socialists from the libertari-
ans. Many dedicated libertarians like Alexander Berkman, rallied
to the Bolshevik cause, willing to give them the benefit of the
doubt in hopes that seizing state power would only be a transi-
tional stage toward the development of the stateless/classless
society.
Many sincere lovers of liberty now flock to the standard of the
Libertarian Party, as they did the Bolsheviks, completely igno-
rant of the history of the last century. As Santayanna said:
``Those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat
them.''
What should be done? It should be obvious that government
enforcement of private contracts is not libertarian any more than
is taking state power to set people free. Libertarianism is and
always will mean socialism~the self emancipation of working
people.
Libertarians must stop courting the Republican right and return
to their intellectual roots. By standing outside of the political
process we deny the state legitimacy, and like the state tortur-
ers in Atlas Shrugged, they will come and beg for libertarians to
take over.
Remembering the experience of the Spanish libertarians, and
heeding the advice of John Galt, libertarians must refuse state
power even when begged. The state can never be a tool of libera-
tion. Only its complete and utter collapse will allow for the
emergence of non-statist institutions, libertarian coops, com-
munes, and free markets, to flourish and displace the political
state once and for all.