In Berkeley, the "poor homeless" or the "poor" or the "enterprising" do indeed recycle aluminum cans, wine bottles, etc. They poke through garbage cans, they poke through our curbside recycling. This is a marvellous ecosystem. Make recycling profitable, and no arm twisting is needed.
Her lips were rather tilted to begin with, and they became very symmetric, so at least I hope she liked her lips! Mind you, I think she was lovely before the surgery, but it was probably seeing her off-kilter lips in the mirror, that disgruntled her the most!
She looks all right either way, I would not call it a botch, despite her dissatisfaction. Her eyebrows are only uneven to the eye, if you know she considers them so. Something she could even probably fix, by letting her natural eyebrows grow back in, and re-shaping them. Her eyes are much wider, ala what you might see on TV. I would call her look "enthusiastic" rather than "surprised."
All in all, I think the pictures are not shown on the main page, because they're just not dramatic. Afterwards, the worst you can say is that she looks sort of artificial. And isn't that the point?
Sign me, a jealous woman, who thinks someone that pretty should pull herself out of depression by working in a soup kitchen, helping someone else, instead of fixating on her own navel.
gnurfed said, "That said, it's great that we have plastic surgery for patients with actual disfigurements."
My experience is that reconstructive surgery is deteriorating. Plastic surgeons are now learning to do cosmetic procedures, rather than reconstructive. I have a genetic defect with my eyelids, and had three surgeries as a child. Now decades later, I could use additionaladvanced reconstructive surgery to give my eyes a more reasonable appearance.
Eyes are very important to our facial expressions, and although my friends think I look lovely, strangers sometimes do an unpleasant double-take when they see me.
So I wanted to give it another shot, figuring reconstruction has improved since I was a poor child receiving free care.
The Stanford geneticist recommended a Stanford specialist and I went to see him. The waiting room was filled with literature about "eye lifts" for regular, aging people. I consult with the doctor (and I secretly recorded the conversation) and he did his utmost best to talk me out of any surgery at all. I could tell he was floundering.
I provided him records of what had been done, and suggested w2hat could be done, and made clear that I was not expecting miracles, just a slight improvement would be worth it.
He called in his senior, and they spent the next four minutes trying to pass the buck and make the other person do the surgery. The way we left it, was they were going to "contact my insurance" and I never heard back, despite sevferal phone calls.
These were Stanford Medical Center professionals, recommended by the geneticist who deals with birth defects, and THEY only wanted to do normal eyelid lifts. I was so disheartened, I never tried again.
GRR.
IMO way too fscking much money is spent on frivolous surgery.
My story, and I'm too tired to be concise so I'll just... submit it.
From the point of view of the folks who ran myspace, what he did caused untold misery and pain for many people and i think he deserved a heavy punishment.
IMO this is flamebait. Misery applies to human suffering. System instability is bothersome and may require overtime hours. Save "misery and pain" for, say, Gitmo Torture Camp. This was a nuisance to a company, and the people at that company. Nothing more.
THANK YOU for posting the video. I watched it. Please don't bother to watch it yourselves. It's obvious to me, this is basically an advertisement for SecondLife, with slick animation of realistic characters.
Advertising via the legal system.
On the plus side, it has provoked a fascinating discussion on DMCA here at/. (yes, yet another of many) and for that, I am grateful. You see, I have asked several people to remove my copyrighted material from their website. I write a polite but firm letter.
But I never invoked the DMCA.
I think now, that I never will threaten with the DMCA bullystick. I was against its passing, and increasingly that seems like a good decision. (OTOH If one philosphically rejects the DMCA, one therefore should not invoke it, even for egregious examples of copyright infringement...)
I am curious how other copyright holders enforce their copyrights online, and how these efforts are met?
(Save for another day my annoyance at my Publisher for Disallow: Google Books)
My gut response is, "Asswipe! Just becuz you have the mojo to build your own, do you expect every Linux user to build her own?" Good for you, AW, but for Linux to continue to build market share, it needs to be available pre-installed. This may be old news, but it certainly is good news.
You are correct, the bezoar (hairball) story is not worthy of a Darwin Award; that story was written a long time ago, and the rules and my understanding evolved over time.
This deceased woman? NO Darwin. I did not know it was so easy to kill yourself drinking water, particularly as the participants couldn't pee. How much can one drink in that situation? Yeah, yeah, a lot of you in this thread apparently knew, but most people don't, and people who do know are met with disbelief when they say so.
The sad family left behind is not generally a factor in the selection of a Darwin Award, as many families still see the humor, despite their loss; it can become a beloved story of dear departed Donna. "Gosh, Mom really loved us!" "Don't drip tears onto Mom at the funeral, she might explode!" or whatever. Humor helps people cope with loss.
But this one: NO Darwin. She was just ardent and unfortunate. And forget the nurse who called the station. A warning from a random talk-show caller with dubious credentials, is not a warning from trusted-Aunt-Renee-the-nurse.
FallLine says, "our current capitalist system generally incents us to do more: to work harder, smarter, invest, spend on things we want, etc. The greatest danger to our economy is that which threatens to slow it all down by removing the incentive to work hard, to spend, and to invest."
That "greatest danger" will have to be confronted soon, because we cannot continue to plunder the resources of the Earth to provide the massive raw material needed for "working and spending" as it continues to escalate. Sure, it pumps our economy, but the hidden cost is the quality of our air.
I agree with you, that the greatest danger to our current economy is that which threatens to slow (to paraphrase) "consumption." And yet, the greatest danger to our planet is that which threatens to increase consumption. Therefore, our economy is predicated on an unsustainable paradigm, and must evolve to fit reality.
Luckily, humans don't actually gain all that much happiness from their possessions, so our planet will still be full of equally happy people, with a less rapacious economy.
so when my pregnant cat is about to bleed to death, or my wife needs the emergency room, I will risk the short drive to the 24-hour clinic. I am fed up with patronizing rules. In the same vein, Toyota's seat belt warning beep. Wait until I take my foot off the brake, you beeping idiot! Those of us who drive in cold winters turn on the engine first thing, then buckle the belt, adjust the mirrors, stow the purse, etc. Toyoyo insists that we hear a non-disable-able beep every time.
Darwin Awards Condoms: Keep yourself out of the gene pool.
My website has some cruft; however, I do my best to sort truth from fiction. And remember, I've improved over the years, and so has Internet-accessible news.
There was this one time I was fooled "backwards" over a story I KNEW was an Urban Legend. It happened in the ocean off Pee Wee beach, near Darwin, Australia. The woman (a woman!) supposedly drank a case of beer before submerging to give head to her boyfriend... and never came back up. The man's lawyer was supposedly named Ms. Cox, and his last name was Payne. Plus the identical story was submitted hundreds of times. Urban legend for sure!
A few years later... a few people have written to say the story is true, but you know, Pee Wee Beach? Ms. Cox? I still think it's an urban legend, until the Australian court reporter launches himself at me, irate, defamation of his reputation, something like that... Oops!
Who knew?
I have only quite recently started to link to the original submissions. But since late 2001, anyone can search the Slush Pile / Reject Pile and find the original sources. I try my very best to not alter facts, and to incorporate all the relevant facts, but well... sometimes I err on colorful ways of expressing things, or say what he might have been "thinking" which of course no one can know.
I was scooped on my own story! I was so looking forward to submitting the 2006 Darwin Awards to/. But thanks for turning your minds towards the honorable deaths of these men and women... well OK mostly men... whose heroic self-sacrifice improves our gene pool.
We owe the winners a debt of gratitude!
Here's what it looks like to be slashdotted: In the past seventeen hours, my top referers are:
I have also, the last three to six months, seen a skyrocketing of spam (a few per week, to many dozens per day) despite a properly-configured spamassassin. It's almost forcing us to move to gMail, where Those in Power can more easily subpoena ad infinitum records of our our emails... <end theory>
EvilSS you can get StrikeAnywhereMatches in any supermarket, near the BBQ coal section. If you cannot find them in your vicinity, I will be happy to mail you a few boxes. They are, truly, much fun on a tiny stick.
One knows more about honesty if one stole a little as a child. A sense of guilt and growth are strong deterrents to never stealing as an adult. A mistake in the teens or early twenties, is by an immature brain. Our brains literally ahven't yet stopped growing and gathering data. We are childish in our views.
But once your 'record' is blemished (remember high school's dreaded 'permanent record'?) suspicious, cynical police are scrutinizing you way more frequently. Acquaintances view your character in a worse light, and interpret accordingly. It feeds on itself.
There used to be a time limitation after which your record was automatically expunged. That was probably a function of our limited ability to keep records. Nowadays, these records can be kept indefinitely, and *are* used against you.
Have to admit, I'm curious how "repeat offenders" fits into my viewpoint. I speculate people go 100% straight the first time around, or else they iterate through the criminal system until they tangent off onto a straight path.
Hey that's a nice analogy...tangent off onto a straight path.
I had one criminal conviction when I was 18. It has dogged me my entire life. It is so upsetting to hear people say, oh well, as long as it's only *convicted criminals* who go into these insane database searches.
It's wrong to mass-search drivers' license pictures. It's also wrong to mass-search pictures of anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime. Many, many people have a regrettable misdeed in their past. It's wrong to continue to punish people who have, as was once said, "paid their debt to society."
Wow 55 hidden comments at the top, that is a record, AFAIK, for viewing onlhy +2 or greater.
<P>Anyhoo... I recently compiled some lo>g stats <a href="http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot /~3/41073596/article.pl">this thread</S>] and so I wanted to share some stats on the percentage of people who actually use FireFox...
For one month, 150,000 cgi (only) HITS...
Of 150,ooo (CGI only) hits in October...
144,000 grep positive for Mozilla... 130,000 grep positive for Windows... 50,000 grep positive for Firefox...
Well this is pretty scary. My website usage?
Out of 150,000 cgi hits in October... rounded to one sig digit...
126,000 Windows NT
9,000 Mac OS X
2,000 Yahoo! Slurp
3,000 Windows 98 (or Win98)
2,000 Linux
600 Windows CE
400 Mac_PowerPC
200 Windows 95
200 Windows ME
70 Windows CE
40 Blackberry
and approx 162 misc entries.
I had no idea the world was so overwhelmingly Windows! Grrr.
I can do this also for the 7,000,000 monthly "regular" page hits (as opposed to cgi) but I assume I'd get about the same results.
I remember some of the tricks MS did to gain market share, back when, such as beefing up the logs with their bogus 404 requests for favicon.ico... few webmasters weed out these spurious hits when compiling stats.
Uh? Excuse me, I only know one side, from the outside -- but that makes me objective. The choice is clearly positive for Google. Google has a wonderful building, very playful and sunny and nice to work in. Google has free GOURMET food, truly delectable. Potato risotto?!! Google provides buses with wireless access points, and Google lets you work on YOUR project 20% of the time (i.e. Friday spent noodling with your idea.) Google engineers are both brilliant and sociable. And the information flow within the company is quite free, despite the blackout to outside media. It's a great place to work!
I have long been against this, primarily because my Grandmother railed about it, God bless her soul. The older generation does die out, the newer generation forgets the promises Government made. We are not to be assigned ID numbers like in the concentration camp! People were justly afraid of being identified by a permanent number. And they would only vote for Social Security, if they were assured the SSN was limited and private.
They trusted their government. It is quite hopeful, the world was so naiive then.
My Grandmother also railed against the toll on the Bay Bridge being reinstated. They PROMISED that when the bridge was "paid off" in 35 years, they would no longer charge a toll. And then what happened? Suffice it to say, Grandma is rolling in her grave.
So, yes, we used to not be obliged to identify ourselves by permanent number, but now we are obliged. People do what authority tells them. We most of us know it's wrong, but the world does not consult with us... Anyone read They Thought They Were Free lately?
Slashdot Mirror
In Berkeley, the "poor homeless" or the "poor" or the "enterprising" do indeed recycle aluminum cans, wine bottles, etc. They poke through garbage cans, they poke through our curbside recycling. This is a marvellous ecosystem. Make recycling profitable, and no arm twisting is needed.
(ASCII art triggers the Lameness Filter! What a pity.)
(Yikes nothing I try results in a perfect format.)
Her lips were rather tilted to begin with, and they became very symmetric, so at least I hope she liked her lips! Mind you, I think she was lovely before the surgery, but it was probably seeing her off-kilter lips in the mirror, that disgruntled her the most!
She looks all right either way, I would not call it a botch, despite her dissatisfaction. Her eyebrows are only uneven to the eye, if you know she considers them so. Something she could even probably fix, by letting her natural eyebrows grow back in, and re-shaping them. Her eyes are much wider, ala what you might see on TV. I would call her look "enthusiastic" rather than "surprised."
All in all, I think the pictures are not shown on the main page, because they're just not dramatic. Afterwards, the worst you can say is that she looks sort of artificial. And isn't that the point?
Sign me, a jealous woman, who thinks someone that pretty should pull herself out of depression by working in a soup kitchen, helping someone else, instead of fixating on her own navel.
gnurfed said, "That said, it's great that we have plastic surgery for patients with actual disfigurements."
My experience is that reconstructive surgery is deteriorating. Plastic surgeons are now learning to do cosmetic procedures, rather than reconstructive. I have a genetic defect with my eyelids, and had three surgeries as a child. Now decades later, I could use additionaladvanced reconstructive surgery to give my eyes a more reasonable appearance.
Eyes are very important to our facial expressions, and although my friends think I look lovely, strangers sometimes do an unpleasant double-take when they see me.
So I wanted to give it another shot, figuring reconstruction has improved since I was a poor child receiving free care.
The Stanford geneticist recommended a Stanford specialist and I went to see him. The waiting room was filled with literature about "eye lifts" for regular, aging people. I consult with the doctor (and I secretly recorded the conversation) and he did his utmost best to talk me out of any surgery at all. I could tell he was floundering.
I provided him records of what had been done, and suggested w2hat could be done, and made clear that I was not expecting miracles, just a slight improvement would be worth it.
He called in his senior, and they spent the next four minutes trying to pass the buck and make the other person do the surgery. The way we left it, was they were going to "contact my insurance" and I never heard back, despite sevferal phone calls.
These were Stanford Medical Center professionals, recommended by the geneticist who deals with birth defects, and THEY only wanted to do normal eyelid lifts. I was so disheartened, I never tried again.
GRR.
IMO way too fscking much money is spent on frivolous surgery.
My story, and I'm too tired to be concise so I'll just... submit it.
From the point of view of the folks who ran myspace, what he did caused untold misery and pain for many people and i think he deserved a heavy punishment.
IMO this is flamebait. Misery applies to human suffering. System instability is bothersome and may require overtime hours. Save "misery and pain" for, say, Gitmo Torture Camp. This was a nuisance to a company, and the people at that company. Nothing more.
THANK YOU for posting the video. I watched it. Please don't bother to watch it yourselves. It's obvious to me, this is basically an advertisement for SecondLife, with slick animation of realistic characters.
/. (yes, yet another of many) and for that, I am grateful. You see, I have asked several people to remove my copyrighted material from their website. I write a polite but firm letter.
Advertising via the legal system.
On the plus side, it has provoked a fascinating discussion on DMCA here at
But I never invoked the DMCA.
I think now, that I never will threaten with the DMCA bullystick. I was against its passing, and increasingly that seems like a good decision. (OTOH If one philosphically rejects the DMCA, one therefore should not invoke it, even for egregious examples of copyright infringement...)
I am curious how other copyright holders enforce their copyrights online, and how these efforts are met?
(Save for another day my annoyance at my Publisher for
Disallow: Google Books)
My gut response is, "Asswipe! Just becuz you have the mojo to build your own, do you expect every Linux user to build her own?" Good for you, AW, but for Linux to continue to build market share, it needs to be available pre-installed. This may be old news, but it certainly is good news.
You are correct, the bezoar (hairball) story is not worthy of a Darwin Award; that story was written a long time ago, and the rules and my understanding evolved over time.
This deceased woman? NO Darwin. I did not know it was so easy to kill yourself drinking water, particularly as the participants couldn't pee. How much can one drink in that situation? Yeah, yeah, a lot of you in this thread apparently knew, but most people don't, and people who do know are met with disbelief when they say so.
The sad family left behind is not generally a factor in the selection of a Darwin Award, as many families still see the humor, despite their loss; it can become a beloved story of dear departed Donna. "Gosh, Mom really loved us!" "Don't drip tears onto Mom at the funeral, she might explode!" or whatever. Humor helps people cope with loss.
But this one: NO Darwin. She was just ardent and unfortunate. And forget the nurse who called the station. A warning from a random talk-show caller with dubious credentials, is not a warning from trusted-Aunt-Renee-the-nurse.
Best wishes,
Wendy Northcutt
www.DarwinAwards.com
FallLine says,
"our current capitalist system generally incents us to do more: to work harder, smarter, invest, spend on things we want, etc. The greatest danger to our economy is that which threatens to slow it all down by removing the incentive to work hard, to spend, and to invest."
That "greatest danger" will have to be confronted soon, because we cannot continue to plunder the resources of the Earth to provide the massive raw material needed for "working and spending" as it continues to escalate. Sure, it pumps our economy, but the hidden cost is the quality of our air.
I agree with you, that the greatest danger to our current economy is that which threatens to slow (to paraphrase) "consumption." And yet, the greatest danger to our planet is that which threatens to increase consumption. Therefore, our economy is predicated on an unsustainable paradigm, and must evolve to fit reality.
Luckily, humans don't actually gain all that much happiness from their possessions, so our planet will still be full of equally happy people, with a less rapacious economy.
~wendy, your evolution expert~
so when my pregnant cat is about to bleed to death, or my wife needs the emergency room, I will risk the short drive to the 24-hour clinic. I am fed up with patronizing rules. In the same vein, Toyota's seat belt warning beep. Wait until I take my foot off the brake, you beeping idiot! Those of us who drive in cold winters turn on the engine first thing, then buckle the belt, adjust the mirrors, stow the purse, etc. Toyoyo insists that we hear a non-disable-able beep every time.
Darwin Awards Condoms: Keep yourself out of the gene pool.
My website has some cruft; however, I do my best to sort truth from fiction. And remember, I've improved over the years, and so has Internet-accessible news.
There was this one time I was fooled "backwards" over a story I KNEW was an Urban Legend. It happened in the ocean off Pee Wee beach, near Darwin, Australia. The woman (a woman!) supposedly drank a case of beer before submerging to give head to her boyfriend... and never came back up. The man's lawyer was supposedly named Ms. Cox, and his last name was Payne. Plus the identical story was submitted hundreds of times. Urban legend for sure!
A few years later... a few people have written to say the story is true, but you know, Pee Wee Beach? Ms. Cox? I still think it's an urban legend, until the Australian court reporter launches himself at me, irate, defamation of his reputation, something like that... Oops!
Who knew?
I have only quite recently started to link to the original submissions. But since late 2001, anyone can search the Slush Pile / Reject Pile and find the original sources. I try my very best to not alter facts, and to incorporate all the relevant facts, but well... sometimes I err on colorful ways of expressing things, or say what he might have been "thinking" which of course no one can know.
Darwin Awards: The tree of life is self-pruning.
I was scooped on my own story! I was so looking forward to submitting the 2006 Darwin Awards to /. But thanks for turning your minds towards the honorable deaths of these men and women... well OK mostly men... whose heroic self-sacrifice improves our gene pool.
We owe the winners a debt of gratitude!
Here's what it looks like to be slashdotted: In the past seventeen hours, my top referers are:
646 www.bluesnews.com
649 www.fazed.org
659 b2.is
941 www.b2.is
967 fazed.net
1124 www.fark.com
1271 www.g4tv.com
1279 www.uniquepeek.com
1391 reddit.com
1951 www.google.com
2197 www.fazed.net
2244 www.flabber.nl
2487 i-am-bored.com
2594 meneame.net
8009 www.i-am-bored.com
56796 slashdot.org
So far, 1,528,483 total hits, 10x more than my weekend average. The server seems like it's ho0lding up fine (any complaints?) -- THANK YOU, LMI.NET!
Wendy
I have also, the last three to six months, seen a skyrocketing of spam (a few per week, to many dozens per day) despite a properly-configured spamassassin. It's almost forcing us to move to gMail, where Those in Power can more easily subpoena ad infinitum records of our our emails... <end theory>
EvilSS you can get StrikeAnywhereMatches in any supermarket, near the BBQ coal section. If you cannot find them in your vicinity, I will be happy to mail you a few boxes. They are, truly, much
fun on a tiny stick.
There used to be a time limitation after which your record was automatically expunged. That was probably a function of our limited ability to keep records. Nowadays, these records can be kept indefinitely, and *are* used against you.
Have to admit, I'm curious how "repeat offenders" fits into my viewpoint. I speculate people go 100% straight the first time around, or else they iterate through the criminal system until they tangent off onto a straight path.
Hey that's a nice analogy...tangent off onto a straight path.
I had one criminal conviction when I was 18. It has dogged me my entire life. It is so upsetting to hear people say, oh well, as long as it's only *convicted criminals* who go into these insane database searches.
It's wrong to mass-search drivers' license pictures. It's also wrong to mass-search pictures of anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime. Many, many people have a regrettable misdeed in their past. It's wrong to continue to punish people who have, as was once said, "paid their debt to society."
Penitent and paranoid in California.
( a meteorite )
This will get the article on the radar of obsessive-compulsive fact checking editors.
And this is a good thing... how?!
Wikipedia: Like a train wreck, it's hard to just...
Walk [pedia] Away [wiki].
When kittens rule, we become toys.
But it's more fun to create a story together...
Six words building on six words, etc.
Ref: Sluggy Freelance.
Wow 55 hidden comments at the top, that is a record, AFAIK, for viewing onlhy +2 or greater.
t /~3/41073596/article.pl">this thread</S>] and so I wanted to share some stats on the percentage of people who actually use FireFox...
<P>Anyhoo... I recently compiled some lo>g stats <a href="http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdo
For one month, 150,000 cgi (only) HITS...
Of 150,ooo (CGI only) hits in October...
144,000 grep positive for Mozilla...
130,000 grep positive for Windows...
50,000 grep positive for Firefox...
Yes, I know those numbers don't add up.
Wendy
Well this is pretty scary. My website usage? Out of 150,000 cgi hits in October... rounded to one sig digit...
126,000 Windows NT
9,000 Mac OS X
2,000 Yahoo! Slurp
3,000 Windows 98 (or Win98)
2,000 Linux
600 Windows CE
400 Mac_PowerPC
200 Windows 95
200 Windows ME
70 Windows CE
40 Blackberry
and approx 162 misc entries.
I had no idea the world was so overwhelmingly Windows! Grrr.
I can do this also for the 7,000,000 monthly "regular" page hits (as opposed to cgi) but I assume I'd get about the same results.
I remember some of the tricks MS did to gain market share, back when, such as beefing up the logs with their bogus 404 requests for favicon.ico... few webmasters weed out these spurious hits when compiling stats.
You sound like a pedophile. Get away.
Uh? Excuse me, I only know one side, from the outside -- but that makes me objective. The choice is clearly positive for Google. Google has a wonderful building, very playful and sunny and nice to work in. Google has free GOURMET food, truly delectable. Potato risotto?!! Google provides buses with wireless access points, and Google lets you work on YOUR project 20% of the time (i.e. Friday spent noodling with your idea.) Google engineers are both brilliant and sociable. And the information flow within the company is quite free, despite the blackout to outside media. It's a great place to work!
I have long been against this, primarily because my Grandmother railed about it, God bless her soul. The older generation does die out, the newer generation forgets the promises Government made. We are not to be assigned ID numbers like in the concentration camp! People were justly afraid of being identified by a permanent number. And they would only vote for Social Security, if they were assured the SSN was limited and private.
They trusted their government. It is quite hopeful, the world was so naiive then.
My Grandmother also railed against the toll on the Bay Bridge being reinstated. They PROMISED that when the bridge was "paid off" in 35 years, they would no longer charge a toll. And then what happened? Suffice it to say, Grandma is rolling in her grave.
So, yes, we used to not be obliged to identify ourselves by permanent number, but now we are obliged. People do what authority tells them. We most of us know it's wrong, but the world does not consult with us... Anyone read They Thought They Were Free lately?