Autodesk offers students free versions of their software, no piracy necessary. The only difference between the regular version and the student version is that any printout from a student version will say "Created By an Autodesk Educational Product" along the borders.
Don't worry, Peter Jackson wants to make it two films, with the first film being the Hobbit we know and the second film being an entirely brand new piece of fiction not written by Tolkien. I'm sure it'll be chock full of bullshit that looks cool.
You see, this is the problem. When "Friends" was on the air, each star (there were 6 of them) wanted $1,000,000 an episode. So based on your model, at $.25 an episode, and only downloads, and everybody pays, you would need 24 million people downloading just to cover the main actors' salaries.
Friends is hardly a normal example. The cast of Friends had more leverage than just about any other group of actors in history because 1. They were on a very popular show on a network that had been #1 but was sinking fast, and 2. They were an ensemble cast that showed complete solidarity in their wage demands.
(see Suzane Sommers and Valerie Harper for what happens when just one actor makes obscene demands)
(see The Dukes of Hazard for what happens when actors stick together but the show just isn't successful enough to warrant their demands)
Bill Watterson didn't quit because he wanted to go out on top, he quit because he became increasingly frustrated with the format forced upon him. He would have likely quit even sooner than he did but that his publisher won him some freedom with regards to the Sunday strips - though many newspapers never carried the later C&H sunday strips precisely because it didn't follow standard formating.
However, one of my friends has been working out fairly seriously for years and is in what must be considered to be spectacularly good shape. When Wii-fit told him he was obese, he just laughed (muscle being heavier than fat, for those who didn't already know).
Though clearly it is not what BMI is designed to detect, but if your friend has so much muscle mass he is rated obese there is a good chance he is opening himself up to a whole slew of other health problems; losing some of that weight might actually be good advice.
I don't live in the US, so maybe what I am about to say is irrelevent, but I can't imagine that prescribing legitemite medications as a placeobo would ever work here.
I buy pretty much all the medications for my household and with every purchase comes a long conversation with the pharmacist where he explains what the med is, what it does, how to take it and what the side effets are. Also, often when I first drop the presciption off there is a short conversation about what the ailment is (as a verification step I am sure). And finally with every bottle of pills comes a crapload of paperwork that explains everything there is to know about them.
Does all this not happen in the US or are doctors just assuming that their patients are idiots?
It will fall hard just like it has on the Wii.
when will they get it through their heads that they can not win that war?
They are winning that war; its just that their notion of win is different than yours. Nintendo's goal isn't to stop the people who are homebrewing from homebrewing, its to stop the masses from engaging in piracy (make it hard enough that most people either won't understand how to do it, or won't care to spend the time); that their actions give homebrewers some small challenges is just a side effect.
The homebrew community laughs when Nintendo releases an update that breaks homebrew, but then the community has a fix within hours. What the community seems to be missing is that Nintendo hugely stops the proliferation of the explotation of the system every time such an event occurs. Sure your system barely misses a beat, but how many non-tech friends/relatives are you going to set up their system to run homebrew when you know that every month or so they are going to be calling you for help? More to the point, how many non-tech people are going to keep using pirated games when for reasons they can't understand the games stop working every time the system updates?
A virus hangs around for a hundred years and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness.
How about, a virus hangs around for a hundred years, killing off people silently, in a way no one would ever think to investigate, then BLAMMO - we develop the technology to discover and investigate this virus?
I don't know where the truth lies on this issue, but I do know this, if you say that boys are stronger than girls in math, you will get huge numbers of people to tell you are wrong and why, but if you say that girls are stronger than boys in language, very few will venture to disagree.
(On a purely anecdotal and personal level, my wife has a degree in math, which by her own admission, she did out of spite; several high school teachers told her that girls can't do math, so she made it her mission to prove them wrong. But when I mention to her that I don't think our son's language skills are as developed as some of his peers, her answer is always not to worry because boys aren't as capable as girls in language skills.)
I can't tell if you are joking or are serious, but since there are people who actually think the way you do, I will respond to your points for their sake and hope you aren't too offended if this was just sarcasm.
What I wonder is why the free market isn't able to meet Wii console demand. Under the normal conditions the price would rise to reduce the demand until there are some units sitting on the shelves because they are too expensive, after which the manufacturer would increase the supply and lower the prices while still keeping supply-demand in equillibrium.
There are numerous examples of products throughout the years that were both cheap and sold out. The reason the companys making them didn't raise the prices as you descibe is because this would create ill will with their customer base and likely cost them in the long run. This isn't to say however that the free market doesn't respond as you describe its just not Nintendo or the retailers who have binding agreements with Nintendo that are letting the market find the price - its places like ebay; anyone who wants a wii could have one immediately if they are willing to pay the current going rate on auction sites.
Since none of this is happening, I suspect the monopolist manufacturer manipulates the prices and supply such that there is an artificial shortage
While Nintendo has a "monopoly" on manufacturing wii's, its makes as much sense to call it a monopoly as it would to call Apple a monopoly for being the only one making Macs; they both are products in a larger marketplace, and customers have plenty of other choices.
either to 1) undercut the competitors by keeping the prices too low,
All evidence is that Nintendo is the only game manufacturer unwilling to sell hardware at a loss. This is completely contradictory to your statement. Further it is not illegal or unethical to sell a product that everyone knows has cheaper components (than its competitors) for a cheaper price.
2) to generate hype by the perceived scarcity of the resource: "hey, if these consoles are so popular I gotta get me some" (which counts as false advertizing)
While its not impossible that Nintendo has done this, don't you think its a bit idiotic to accuse Nintendo of purposefully creating shortages in a discussion that began with the title "Wii is the New US Console Leader". (doubly so when that now make the wii the leader in every region)
Monopolists need to be fined or broken up!
Sure, but what does that have to do with Nintendo?
Either Diebold is a 1-person company, or the CEO prefers a "hands-on" approach to doing business
Purely hypothetical answer...
Let's say you have a master plan to make it possible for you to rig elections. Your plan involves your company becoming a major supplier of voting machines; machines which you can manipulate. How many people do you share your plans with?
Clearly your best chance for success is for as few people as possible to know about your plans; the ideal situation would be if your whole company were run as a legitimate enterprise and just you knew what was really going on.
If the CEO in fact did go where he was said to go (and that should be verifiable), then it should be brutally obvious he was up to something. Of course CEOs don't go out in the field to apply patches. But he might be the one to do it if he were rigging an election and trusted no one else to do it.
On an unrelated note, there is something very strange I find about the US election process. Your founding fathers went to so much trouble to create "cheques and balances", yet it never seemed to occur to them to make a completely seperate body for running elections. It blows me away the amount of power your politicians have over the elections they have to run in. In my country the house of commons, especially the PM, runs the country with no real counter point, but neither have any direct say in how elections are run - there is a separte body for that.
The cartoon Arthur takes this concept to really disturbing levels.
I have come to believe that the characters in Arthur are actually meant to be humans and that their representation as various anthromorphic animals is just artistic. After all, unlike other childrens' shows with anthromorphic animals, Arthur never once makes refrence to the species of any of the characters. (except for pets and characters that are fictional in their world too - like Pal and Bionic Bunny)
Seeing all of the aversion in this thread to using a scanner (and I agree with all the reasons people say its not pratical), reminded me of a situation I was in a couple of years ago. My wife and I were visiting an aging relative of hers who had all kinds of pictures my wife dearly wanted. Said relative had no computer, we didn't have the time to take the pictures elsewhere, and expecting her to make duplicates to pass on to us at a later date was unrealistic.
So, we used what we had available - our digital camera. I cranked it up to the highest res and took a picture of every picture. It certainly wasn't the best way to do things, but the results were acceptable, and the time it took was far less than it would have been if a scanner had been available with no risk of damaging the photos.
The funny thing is that a lot of young people talk this way. And yet when they get older, they don't start offing themselves. Turns out that while a lot of people talk about how they'd rather die than be decrepit, when they're actually faced with the choice nearly all of them choose life.
"I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-five. "
Mick Jagger
Gun Control only serves to take guns out of the hands of people that give a shit about the law.
The problem with any discussion of US gun laws is that the two sides talk about completely different realities.
Those is favour of gun control cite countries with strict gun control, and how few the gun death are; even the criminals tend not to use guns, and when they do they use guns that are quite tame compared to those commonly used by criminals in the US. (its not that the criminal "give a shit about the law" that stops them, its because its enough of a pain for the criminals to get a hold of a gun that most are willing to do without; and with none of their victims being armed, there is almost no incentive for criminals to seek guns)
Those against gun control tend to cite area of the US that have imposed some sort of limits on gun ownership, and how those limits always fail.
Both are flawed arguements. US is a country with hundreds of millions of guns, and no change in law will instantly make it otherwise. But the attempts that have been made to control guns in the US have been incredibly underwhelming, and to call their failure proof that gun control does not work is to not understand what gun control actually is.
Any attempt at real gun control in the US would require a great amount of time, effort, and a political will that certainly is not in sight right now; but if those conditions were met, then it could be done, and fewer Americans would die as a result.
How about when will the modder/homebrewers get it?
This isn't about you. Nintendo isn't breaking your mod to screw you. Nintendo knows that you are going to have a new release to counter theirs within days (the very nature of what this patch did screamed, go create a work around, we don't care), but what Nintendo is achieving by constantly breaking your mod, requiring you to fix it, is limiting who will use such mods.
By constantly requiring modders to overcome new patches Nintendo is providing a barrier to entry. Two huge groups of people that represent the majority of Wii users will either never mod their units, or will give up on modding it because of these types of patches. The first group are those who don't have the technical skills; in a world without these updates many of them would have units that (with or without their understanding) would be modded by those with the skills, but few modders would want their phone ringing off the hook as the numerous units they modded for other people stop working as expected (I include kids who would/have caught from their parents for modding when this happens in this group too). The other group are those who have the skills, but just don't care enough about modding to stay on the treadmill; I certainly fall in here, I just wouldn't do enough with it to be worth my time.
So go on patting yourself on the back, and laughing at Nintendo and other companies that use this strategy; the reality is that they are getting exactly what they want out of this.
I've had that speech from women far too often "you're so nice, why can't the guys I date be more like you?
I suspect many of the guys here have heard that, and I am no exception. I used to joke that I was the most attractive guy in the world to women who weren't looking for a relationship because of how frequently married women had wonderful things to say about me. (the most painful was when they implied I must be fighting off the women because I was so wonderful; that certainly never matched my experience)
Since I have gotten married I these comments haven't stopped, though they are now made to my wife instead of me. My wife is constantly being bombarded with "You're so lucky!", "How on earth did you find him?", "Where was he hiding?" and the like. Like others here, not only was I not hiding, but couldn't get a date for the life of me (I can count the women I dated on my thumbs, and interestingly they both asked me out, meaning that exactly 0% of the women I ever asked out said yes).
I don't know why it should be so shocking that if the criteria you use to choose your dates doesn't have anything to do with what you are looking for that the chances of getting what you are looking for are slim. However, it seems that for most people (women and men) the idea of screening candidates by qualities that actually match the things you want is alien.
Only if you separate the oxygen from the hydrogen first. That takes energy. Since the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide you might as well plan to split it into carbon and oxygen.
I'm pretty sure the poster (and anyone else who would be browsing slashdot) knew that; the quote is from Dan Quayle, he's the one who needs help.
You must not have researched this very hard, or even looked carefully at that site, because this is a very well known case of outright fraud that was debunked years ago. People can add their names over the Internet without any fact checking. So how is anyone going to find the person who lied on a website form?
I will readily admit that the grand total of my research was ten mintues, two google searches and clicking on about twenty links. That's not especially in depth, but you had said that it was widely discredited, so I expected the information to be easy to find. Instead, I found websites that claimed the petition was fake, without really saying why.
While the links you provided were far better than anything I found myself, even they didn't really show it to be "thoroughly debunked as a fake". The first link only really attacks the petition directly in its critisms of the qualification of many of its signers. While I think that is a very valid critism, considering the website with the petition openly admits this, it hardly seems to be debunking to me. The second was somewhat more useful in that it brought into question some of the techniques used to gather the names, but the accusation both you and others make against it is that it is fake; nothing in this article comes close to saying the signers of this petition aren't who they say they are, didn't really sign it, or don't actually believe what the petition imples they do.
Anyways, everything I've read about this petition today, including the comments in this thread, just seems like a perfect microcosm of this issue in general. Take a point that has a small but measurable meaning, and watch as one side claims it completely proves their side right and the other claims that its less than nothing. There is no sanity in a global warming discussion.
Including Edward Teller and other dead scientists? This site has been thoroughly debunked as a fake. Sorry, anyone can claim anything on the Internet. For instance, did you know that eighty bajillion scientists believe in global warming? It's true, and I can show you their signatures, which all look suspiciously like mine, but that's just a coincidence. I also have similar proof that I have had sex with every hot chick on the planet.
Having just read about this website in this thread I have no reason to believe its real, but in doing google searches to back up your claim that it is a fake has lead me only to sites that have arguments against with even less detail than yours. Do you know of any sites that try to discredit this list in more than one sentence? If it truely is fake, shouldn't there be mass outrage from those whose names are on it unwillingly? (and considering how being on it could affect their academic positions, one would expect lawsuits)
(also, since according to its FAQ the petition was started in 1998, five years before Teller died, I don't see how his name being on it means anything)
Slashdot Mirror
Autodesk offers students free versions of their software, no piracy necessary. The only difference between the regular version and the student version is that any printout from a student version will say "Created By an Autodesk Educational Product" along the borders.
Don't worry, Peter Jackson wants to make it two films, with the first film being the Hobbit we know and the second film being an entirely brand new piece of fiction not written by Tolkien. I'm sure it'll be chock full of bullshit that looks cool.
Doesn't that pretty much sum up LotR.
You can say to your friends, but you could get into trouble if you broadcast it, published it, or if you gathered an audience to tell them it.
You see, this is the problem. When "Friends" was on the air, each star (there were 6 of them) wanted $1,000,000 an episode. So based on your model, at $.25 an episode, and only downloads, and everybody pays, you would need 24 million people downloading just to cover the main actors' salaries.
Friends is hardly a normal example. The cast of Friends had more leverage than just about any other group of actors in history because 1. They were on a very popular show on a network that had been #1 but was sinking fast, and 2. They were an ensemble cast that showed complete solidarity in their wage demands. (see Suzane Sommers and Valerie Harper for what happens when just one actor makes obscene demands) (see The Dukes of Hazard for what happens when actors stick together but the show just isn't successful enough to warrant their demands)
Bill Watterson didn't quit because he wanted to go out on top, he quit because he became increasingly frustrated with the format forced upon him. He would have likely quit even sooner than he did but that his publisher won him some freedom with regards to the Sunday strips - though many newspapers never carried the later C&H sunday strips precisely because it didn't follow standard formating.
However, one of my friends has been working out fairly seriously for years and is in what must be considered to be spectacularly good shape. When Wii-fit told him he was obese, he just laughed (muscle being heavier than fat, for those who didn't already know).
Though clearly it is not what BMI is designed to detect, but if your friend has so much muscle mass he is rated obese there is a good chance he is opening himself up to a whole slew of other health problems; losing some of that weight might actually be good advice.
I am sure Scott Adams is gloating over this one.
I don't live in the US, so maybe what I am about to say is irrelevent, but I can't imagine that prescribing legitemite medications as a placeobo would ever work here.
I buy pretty much all the medications for my household and with every purchase comes a long conversation with the pharmacist where he explains what the med is, what it does, how to take it and what the side effets are. Also, often when I first drop the presciption off there is a short conversation about what the ailment is (as a verification step I am sure). And finally with every bottle of pills comes a crapload of paperwork that explains everything there is to know about them.
Does all this not happen in the US or are doctors just assuming that their patients are idiots?
What I want to know, is how did the universe expand beyond its own swartzchild radius?
Depending on what you take the mass of the universe to be (and age too), we may not have hit it yet.
It will fall hard just like it has on the Wii. when will they get it through their heads that they can not win that war?
They are winning that war; its just that their notion of win is different than yours. Nintendo's goal isn't to stop the people who are homebrewing from homebrewing, its to stop the masses from engaging in piracy (make it hard enough that most people either won't understand how to do it, or won't care to spend the time); that their actions give homebrewers some small challenges is just a side effect.
The homebrew community laughs when Nintendo releases an update that breaks homebrew, but then the community has a fix within hours. What the community seems to be missing is that Nintendo hugely stops the proliferation of the explotation of the system every time such an event occurs. Sure your system barely misses a beat, but how many non-tech friends/relatives are you going to set up their system to run homebrew when you know that every month or so they are going to be calling you for help? More to the point, how many non-tech people are going to keep using pirated games when for reasons they can't understand the games stop working every time the system updates?
I don't think those are Miis. I think they are in-game creations loosely based on Miis. That's probably why they look so funky, (Blue hair and all.)
The fact the word Mii is written right on top of them makes me suspicious that at least one is a Mii.
A virus hangs around for a hundred years and then BLAMMO - instant deadliness.
How about, a virus hangs around for a hundred years, killing off people silently, in a way no one would ever think to investigate, then BLAMMO - we develop the technology to discover and investigate this virus?
I don't know where the truth lies on this issue, but I do know this, if you say that boys are stronger than girls in math, you will get huge numbers of people to tell you are wrong and why, but if you say that girls are stronger than boys in language, very few will venture to disagree.
(On a purely anecdotal and personal level, my wife has a degree in math, which by her own admission, she did out of spite; several high school teachers told her that girls can't do math, so she made it her mission to prove them wrong. But when I mention to her that I don't think our son's language skills are as developed as some of his peers, her answer is always not to worry because boys aren't as capable as girls in language skills.)
My country doesn't have an entertainment industry actively advertising the existence of its spy agency, frankly. I'm Canadian.
There, fixed it for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Security_Intelligence_Service
I can't tell if you are joking or are serious, but since there are people who actually think the way you do, I will respond to your points for their sake and hope you aren't too offended if this was just sarcasm.
What I wonder is why the free market isn't able to meet Wii console demand. Under the normal conditions the price would rise to reduce the demand until there are some units sitting on the shelves because they are too expensive, after which the manufacturer would increase the supply and lower the prices while still keeping supply-demand in equillibrium.
There are numerous examples of products throughout the years that were both cheap and sold out. The reason the companys making them didn't raise the prices as you descibe is because this would create ill will with their customer base and likely cost them in the long run. This isn't to say however that the free market doesn't respond as you describe its just not Nintendo or the retailers who have binding agreements with Nintendo that are letting the market find the price - its places like ebay; anyone who wants a wii could have one immediately if they are willing to pay the current going rate on auction sites.
Since none of this is happening, I suspect the monopolist manufacturer manipulates the prices and supply such that there is an artificial shortage
While Nintendo has a "monopoly" on manufacturing wii's, its makes as much sense to call it a monopoly as it would to call Apple a monopoly for being the only one making Macs; they both are products in a larger marketplace, and customers have plenty of other choices.
either to 1) undercut the competitors by keeping the prices too low,
All evidence is that Nintendo is the only game manufacturer unwilling to sell hardware at a loss. This is completely contradictory to your statement. Further it is not illegal or unethical to sell a product that everyone knows has cheaper components (than its competitors) for a cheaper price.
2) to generate hype by the perceived scarcity of the resource: "hey, if these consoles are so popular I gotta get me some" (which counts as false advertizing)
While its not impossible that Nintendo has done this, don't you think its a bit idiotic to accuse Nintendo of purposefully creating shortages in a discussion that began with the title "Wii is the New US Console Leader". (doubly so when that now make the wii the leader in every region)
Monopolists need to be fined or broken up!
Sure, but what does that have to do with Nintendo?
Either Diebold is a 1-person company, or the CEO prefers a "hands-on" approach to doing business
Purely hypothetical answer...
Let's say you have a master plan to make it possible for you to rig elections. Your plan involves your company becoming a major supplier of voting machines; machines which you can manipulate. How many people do you share your plans with?
Clearly your best chance for success is for as few people as possible to know about your plans; the ideal situation would be if your whole company were run as a legitimate enterprise and just you knew what was really going on.
If the CEO in fact did go where he was said to go (and that should be verifiable), then it should be brutally obvious he was up to something. Of course CEOs don't go out in the field to apply patches. But he might be the one to do it if he were rigging an election and trusted no one else to do it.
On an unrelated note, there is something very strange I find about the US election process. Your founding fathers went to so much trouble to create "cheques and balances", yet it never seemed to occur to them to make a completely seperate body for running elections. It blows me away the amount of power your politicians have over the elections they have to run in. In my country the house of commons, especially the PM, runs the country with no real counter point, but neither have any direct say in how elections are run - there is a separte body for that.
The cartoon Arthur takes this concept to really disturbing levels.
I have come to believe that the characters in Arthur are actually meant to be humans and that their representation as various anthromorphic animals is just artistic. After all, unlike other childrens' shows with anthromorphic animals, Arthur never once makes refrence to the species of any of the characters. (except for pets and characters that are fictional in their world too - like Pal and Bionic Bunny)
Seeing all of the aversion in this thread to using a scanner (and I agree with all the reasons people say its not pratical), reminded me of a situation I was in a couple of years ago. My wife and I were visiting an aging relative of hers who had all kinds of pictures my wife dearly wanted. Said relative had no computer, we didn't have the time to take the pictures elsewhere, and expecting her to make duplicates to pass on to us at a later date was unrealistic.
So, we used what we had available - our digital camera. I cranked it up to the highest res and took a picture of every picture. It certainly wasn't the best way to do things, but the results were acceptable, and the time it took was far less than it would have been if a scanner had been available with no risk of damaging the photos.
The funny thing is that a lot of young people talk this way. And yet when they get older, they don't start offing themselves. Turns out that while a lot of people talk about how they'd rather die than be decrepit, when they're actually faced with the choice nearly all of them choose life.
"I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-five. "
Mick Jagger
The problem with any discussion of US gun laws is that the two sides talk about completely different realities.
Those is favour of gun control cite countries with strict gun control, and how few the gun death are; even the criminals tend not to use guns, and when they do they use guns that are quite tame compared to those commonly used by criminals in the US. (its not that the criminal "give a shit about the law" that stops them, its because its enough of a pain for the criminals to get a hold of a gun that most are willing to do without; and with none of their victims being armed, there is almost no incentive for criminals to seek guns)
Those against gun control tend to cite area of the US that have imposed some sort of limits on gun ownership, and how those limits always fail.
Both are flawed arguements. US is a country with hundreds of millions of guns, and no change in law will instantly make it otherwise. But the attempts that have been made to control guns in the US have been incredibly underwhelming, and to call their failure proof that gun control does not work is to not understand what gun control actually is.
Any attempt at real gun control in the US would require a great amount of time, effort, and a political will that certainly is not in sight right now; but if those conditions were met, then it could be done, and fewer Americans would die as a result.
How about when will the modder/homebrewers get it?
This isn't about you. Nintendo isn't breaking your mod to screw you. Nintendo knows that you are going to have a new release to counter theirs within days (the very nature of what this patch did screamed, go create a work around, we don't care), but what Nintendo is achieving by constantly breaking your mod, requiring you to fix it, is limiting who will use such mods.
By constantly requiring modders to overcome new patches Nintendo is providing a barrier to entry. Two huge groups of people that represent the majority of Wii users will either never mod their units, or will give up on modding it because of these types of patches. The first group are those who don't have the technical skills; in a world without these updates many of them would have units that (with or without their understanding) would be modded by those with the skills, but few modders would want their phone ringing off the hook as the numerous units they modded for other people stop working as expected (I include kids who would/have caught from their parents for modding when this happens in this group too). The other group are those who have the skills, but just don't care enough about modding to stay on the treadmill; I certainly fall in here, I just wouldn't do enough with it to be worth my time.
So go on patting yourself on the back, and laughing at Nintendo and other companies that use this strategy; the reality is that they are getting exactly what they want out of this.
I suspect many of the guys here have heard that, and I am no exception. I used to joke that I was the most attractive guy in the world to women who weren't looking for a relationship because of how frequently married women had wonderful things to say about me. (the most painful was when they implied I must be fighting off the women because I was so wonderful; that certainly never matched my experience)
Since I have gotten married I these comments haven't stopped, though they are now made to my wife instead of me. My wife is constantly being bombarded with "You're so lucky!", "How on earth did you find him?", "Where was he hiding?" and the like. Like others here, not only was I not hiding, but couldn't get a date for the life of me (I can count the women I dated on my thumbs, and interestingly they both asked me out, meaning that exactly 0% of the women I ever asked out said yes).
I don't know why it should be so shocking that if the criteria you use to choose your dates doesn't have anything to do with what you are looking for that the chances of getting what you are looking for are slim. However, it seems that for most people (women and men) the idea of screening candidates by qualities that actually match the things you want is alien.
I'm pretty sure the poster (and anyone else who would be browsing slashdot) knew that; the quote is from Dan Quayle, he's the one who needs help.
I will readily admit that the grand total of my research was ten mintues, two google searches and clicking on about twenty links. That's not especially in depth, but you had said that it was widely discredited, so I expected the information to be easy to find. Instead, I found websites that claimed the petition was fake, without really saying why.
While the links you provided were far better than anything I found myself, even they didn't really show it to be "thoroughly debunked as a fake". The first link only really attacks the petition directly in its critisms of the qualification of many of its signers. While I think that is a very valid critism, considering the website with the petition openly admits this, it hardly seems to be debunking to me. The second was somewhat more useful in that it brought into question some of the techniques used to gather the names, but the accusation both you and others make against it is that it is fake; nothing in this article comes close to saying the signers of this petition aren't who they say they are, didn't really sign it, or don't actually believe what the petition imples they do.
Anyways, everything I've read about this petition today, including the comments in this thread, just seems like a perfect microcosm of this issue in general. Take a point that has a small but measurable meaning, and watch as one side claims it completely proves their side right and the other claims that its less than nothing. There is no sanity in a global warming discussion.
Having just read about this website in this thread I have no reason to believe its real, but in doing google searches to back up your claim that it is a fake has lead me only to sites that have arguments against with even less detail than yours. Do you know of any sites that try to discredit this list in more than one sentence? If it truely is fake, shouldn't there be mass outrage from those whose names are on it unwillingly? (and considering how being on it could affect their academic positions, one would expect lawsuits)
(also, since according to its FAQ the petition was started in 1998, five years before Teller died, I don't see how his name being on it means anything)