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User: forkazoo

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  1. Re:even easier on NASA Tackles Ethics of Deep-Space Exploration · · Score: 1

    Send geeks into space, everyone knows geeks are too interested in other things to bother about having sex.


    Yeah, that's pretty much my answer, too. I mean, if somebody said I could go to Mars if I agreed not to have sex for a few years... Well, I'm a slashdotter, so it would be damn near a non-issue. I mean, I just don't understand why so many people seem to think of sex as some sort of uncontrollable urge. I have two room mates, both female, and both quite intelligent and attractive. I see them every day, we often cook/eat dinner at the same time in the kitchen, etc. But, I know that hitting on my room mate would be a plan, so I don't. It really isn't that hard if you have a modicum of self control and years of training to know that you will be shot down if you try anyway.
  2. Re:Understood... on Student Arrested for Making Videogame Map of School · · Score: 1

    This royally pisses me off. I always wanted to build Quake levels for my high school, because it would have been the perfect multiplayer map. Two or more routes to any given place, wide halways, two floors, balconies, stairs at the end of every hallway...it would have been awesome.


    I know what you mean -- my school would have beena perfect one floor, 3 team capture the Flag scenario. One team gets the Gym, one team gets the Theater, one team gets the Library. I never made mine either, but it would have been great. Columbine happened my sophomore year, so I never built mine either.
  3. Re:Poetry Contest on Censoring a Number · · Score: 1

    Okay, here is my entry...

    It's about a man called Dee who is trying to proposition several prositutes, but insists that that he has won the services of one or two in a previous competition. The german madam disagrees and insists that the rate will be seven (hundred Euros) for the three women, "If I have (a) [body guard]" - and the refers idiomatically to her body guard as if he were a bumble bee, given his ability to "sting" the stingy patron.

    -Oh, "nein?" F--- "nein." Won one o' two!
    -Nein, Dee. Seven for 'e three, 'f I've bee.

    I'll finish it later...

  4. Re:Oops - my bad on How Google Earth Images Are Made · · Score: 5, Funny

    We collect it via airplane and satellite, but also just about any way you can imagine getting a camera above the Earth's surface: hot air balloons, model airplanes - even kites.

      So THAT'S what the creepy guy in front of the elementary school near my house was doing with the kite and camera. They need some uniforms. I called the cops on that guy. Boy, I bet he had a great time trying to explain himself.

    My bad.


    Hey, don't worry about it, dude. I'm used to it at this point. It was just nice to get out of the house and fly the kite, even if I did get hassled by the cops. By the way, you should really have that mole looked at. And, tell your wife to go with the blue one.
  5. Re:You know what this means? on India To Offer Free Broadband by 2009 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The amount of Indian porn is going to increase exponentially.

    How can a country that has infrastructure and famine problems in some areas (a recent study suggested 47% of Indian children suffered from malnutrition) manage to provide this?


    Well, first off, America has decent connectivity. Not the best, but decent. I have something 4 Mbps to my current house, and 8 Mbps is an inexpensive upgrade. Some regions have fiber to the home at substantially greater rates.

    Yet, when I walk around downtown Denver, I am constantly walking past homeless people who are asking me for spare change so that they can eat/buy booze that night to consume while sleeping on a sidewalk. Whenever some new technology intiative is announced here in the US, I never see hoardes of posters complaining about American priorities. I never see people in large numbers saying how we need to make sure that absolutely everybody in the country has food and shelter before we allow anybody to do anything else. Yet, whenever India has some technology initiative, it seems like a very substantial percentage of the comments are nothing but comments about how India needs to feed the hungry.

    So, no country has no hungry people. No country has no homeless people. It's impossible to "solve" the problem 100% before doing anything else.

    Second, how the fuck do you think India will be able to feed their hungry? They just magically decide it's a good idea, and everybody gets fed, and then everybody gets on with their lives all happy and dandy? No. They need to create an infrastructure where more people are more educated, and can do better jobs in order to grow their economy so that all those hungry people can get jobs and feed themselves. Internet access for everybody is potentially a huge step forward in this aspect. you know the old "teach a man to fish" wisdom, of course. Well, give a man efficient internet access and he can post fishing tutorials on You-Tube and teach everybody to fish. Not into fishing? Fine. Give a man high speed internet access and he can easily set up an online store to sell his rugs or hats or novelty oversized fingernails overseas. Anything you can sell overseas means money coming into the economy, the tax base growing off of foreign money, and more leftover money for homeless shelters.

    See how this works?
  6. Re:DAMN IT, SLASHDOT!!! on $100 Laptop Repriced at $175 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Jack Valenti just fucking DIED of a stroke and all you can think about are $175 laptops?????

    GET SOME PRIORITIES!!!


    A million school children with an ability to appreciate freedom of information, and the open source ideals that are the antithesis of Valenti's anti-copying propaganda... I just think of it as Jack's ideas being dead along with him.

    On a more serious note, as for the priorities, should I stock up on beer or snacks for the Jack Valenti is Dead party?
  7. Re:C'mon on Jack Valenti, Dead at 85 · · Score: 1, Troll

    There's no point in acting like most of us liked him, even a little. We don't have to celebrate his death, but we also don't have to pretend he wasn't a douche.


    We don't have to celebrate his death... But I would certainly go to a party celebrating it if there was one to attend! Seriously, I would love to see a bunch of parties in really poor taste spring up all over the country this weekend. It'd be a nice way to let the people who want to follow in his footsteps know what we are willing to think of them. If anybody thows a Jack Valenti is Dead party in Boulder/Denver this weekend, be sure to email me.
  8. Really simple... on A Succinct Definition of the Internet? · · Score: 1

    I will assume that the person understands what a computer is. If not, you will need to explain that, which is not included in this explanation.

    A network is when a bunch of computers talk to each other. Like, when you have a bunch of computers in a computer lab classroom, and they are all plugged into each other so that you can work on a file on any of the computers.

    An internet is when you gang together a couple of networks so they talk to each other.

    The Internet is what you get when all the networks talk to each other.

    The particulars are largely unimportant, frankly. A basic definition doesn't need to go into the particulars of routing or TCP/IP or the difference between host and network byte order. It doesn't matter that some networks use ethernet and others use wireless and some used to use token ring. Just explain what a network is. Just a regular old LAN. Then, explain that you can get networks to talk to each other just like you can get computers to talk to each other, and that is an internet.

    Now, once you have the technical definition out of the way, you get to, "why gang a bunch of networks together?" Well, that's because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  9. Re:Apple Bigots : get real on AT&T to Target iPhone to Enterprise · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The iPhone is geared up to be Apple's biggest flop since the Newton.

    One of the many reasons that Newton failed is the fact that it started out as a way to reinvent how we interact with computers, and then Apple decided to panic when they realised that the project could interfere with Mac sales, so they turned it into a Mac peripheral.

    For iPhone, OTOH, Jobs took "Computer" out of the name of the company, so I don't think they are too worried about giving iPhone the room it needs to succeed...
  10. Re:that's not all folks.. on Intel's Penryn Benchmarked · · Score: 1

    The Penryn core is just the first. Wait for the Teller core to come out. It's slight of hand techniques tricks you into thinking it has actually out performed other chips.


    It's important to note that Intel's chipset for the Teller core isn't going to have audio support. OEM's will need to add additional audio output hardware if you want to hear anything from a Teller based system.
  11. Interesting project idea... on Building a Video Wall out of Old Laptops? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, you will need to mount the whole laptop to the wall, and run power and network to each laptop. Each laptop will look a bit different, and laptop displays really aren't meant to be running 24/7, so plan on replacing the laptops with some frequency. That means that the physical build aspect of a project like this won't be insignificant to make it all work smoothly, look nice, be easy to maintain, etc.

    Another poster has mentioned a projector. This is certainly the more sensible option, but for a funky project for its own sake, I'll assume that you just want to go with the laptop wall anyway.

    First off, don't try to do this with Windows. It'll work very poorly. As for playing videos, you can ssh into each laptop and run mplayer locally to get any gioven laptop playing a video. For multilaptop video playback, you will need to make yourself some scripts that will log into each laptop and run mplayer using appropriate cropping options on the video so that only a portion of it is played full screen on any given laptop. You may also want to check out VLC's network streaming options. You will need quite a bit of bandwidth. I sometimes have issues playing high bit rate video files over my 100 Mb network with just a switch between the client and server, and no other significant traffic. You will also want to avoid any HD. If you are going to build something for playing serious high bit rate HD across 9 or 12 different systems, you don't need to ask slashdot how to do it.

    Past that, you probably want to write some additional scripts to do things like randomly show your favorite online scenic web cams, give weather reports, show traffic conditions. But, you are creating custom hardware, so don't look off the shelf for that sort of thing. You pretty much have to roll your own, because there isn't any standard plug and play interface for video walls.

    Good luck.

  12. Re:a predictable and short, bounded delay on DoD to Put Internet Router in Space · · Score: 1

    Whether 250ms qualifies as real-time depends on your application. For a game of speed chess, maybe. For FPS, probably not.


    No, not really. Real Time is an actual technical piece of jargon with a specific definition. It just means that the amount of time something takes is very deterministic and predictible. A Real Time CPU, for example, can be shockingly slow because it takes out all the stuff which can potentially (but not consistently) speed things up.
  13. Zoiks! on Bad Math Causes Explosion at CERN Collider · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Forgot to carry the one. Sorry.

  14. This is a horrible idea. on An iPod For Every Kid In Michigan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or, at least, it is a horrible idea unless I can manage to be declared eligible.

    Seriously, how about spending the millions of dollars on teachers? I just can't see any real requirement for a DAP for educational purposes. Want the students to be able to listen to lectures as home? Put MP3's on the school website and let students listen to them at the computer or put them on their own DAP. Need students to be able to listen to audio on their own while in class? 30 million dollars buys a lot of blank CD-R's, and CD players are a hell of a lot less expensive than iPods.

    30 million dollars also buys a hell of a lot of teacher bonuses. IMNSHO, Investing in teachers will have more of a benefit than whatever hair brained scheme they have cooked up for the iPods.

  15. My very useful sites to stay informed: on What's Your Site Rotation? · · Score: 1

    XKCD - It is the best comics ever.
    Slashdot - News for nerds.
    The Daily WTF - What not to do.
    Slashdot - WTF, did I just let a dupe on my list?
    Random Page On Wikipedia - It's days of fun, and hundreds of tabs.
    Slashdot - It's this new news site I found for nerds.
    Fleshbot - This is the one I visit most. ;)
    news.google.com - You know, for actual news and stuff. Sometimes I leave an NPR stream on.

  16. Re:All copyrighted works should be held on Linux and OSS to Aid the Library of Congress · · Score: 2, Funny

    At the same time, unless congress wants to hold and distribute material of questionable moral quality, the copyright law could be amended to limit the protections of copyright to those works that do actually further the arts and the sciences as defined in the constitution.


    Sir, you pre-suppose that morally questionable articles do not serve to further the arts or the sciences. I protest most heartily. Every modern technology is served by serving pornography, as we all know. Let us firstly ponder the case of VHS and BetaMax to settle that matter in a stroke. As for the arts, I think it is clear to say that such works as the Seduction of Misty Mundae served to elevate the erotic art form in any manner of ways, at least so much as any diserotic work served to also further the diserotic arts. Or, should you feel a need for some further example, I might offer up the Lord of the G Strings as an additional point. Rather than endevouring the hold the plot to a dramatic study of youthful exploration, as in the case of Seduction, Lord served to offer up comedic commentary and parody against the institions of our society. In so doing it clearly also furthered the arts.

    Fie apon you sir, that youw ould so readily dismiss Misty Mundae's films on mere moral grounds. Fie, indeed.

    Now, I just need to torrent me a copy of Spiderbabe. I heard that shit is hot.
  17. Re:Non-Issue on Is Flixster Using Deceptive Viral Practices? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you look at the lousy screen shots it is painfully obvious they are being up front and quite clear what they intend to do and how to skip the invitation process.

    I'm not saying I'm a fan of their scheme, but it's not like they're scamming anyone. You even get to select who you want to invite.

    I guess some people feel they have to produce content, even if they have to dress a non-story up in inflammatory language and ignore the facts of the situation. Gotta drive those Adsense impressions.


    I recently signed up with Facebook to get in touch with some old friends and generally pretend to be one of the cool kids. They have a similar feature where I was able to provide my login information for gmail or yahoo, and it would automatically dend friend requests to folks in my address books. Sure, it's a bit stupid to provide your login information to a third party. If that information is stored, then yes it could be breached. But, ultimately the facebook feature and the one in this article are apparently very straightforward. A user can choose to share the login information with a third party. As long as that third party does what they say they will, I'm not sure where the issue is.

    Ideally, webmail providers would get together with the folks who impliment these sorts of features, and make some sort of easy way to generate a one time use password that can only be used by an IP assigned to the domain that is supposed to use it. Then, you could impliment this sort of thing without needing as much trust. Then, the next time you login to your webmail, it pops up a message saying that "XYZ domain used the one time key you generated on X date to attempt the following actions. Please look over this log and make sure it is what you wanted them to do and click approve or deny."

    But, the security issue doesn't even seem to be the main complaint of the article. It's just all huffy about them doing what they say they will, and declaring it deceptive.
  18. Re:Question on Apple and LG plan Flash Laptops · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does the flash inside these things die after however-many thousands of writes?

    It sounds to me like the life expentancy of one of these would be greatly diminished over a conventional HDD.


    Yes, they do eventually die. No, they won't die dramatically younger than a hard drive. Modern flash uses wear-levelling algorithms, so that no particular bad block will kill the whole flash drive. It'll just make a small block inaccessible when it finally dies, which won't happen very often. OTOH, when a head decides to dig into your constantly spinning mechanical platter and make a noise that makes you feel sick... Well, there just isn't any algorithm fix for that.
  19. Re:my two cents on Demystifying Salary Information · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mentioning a number doesn't have to be to your disadvantage. I usually shy away from it, but in this current position I named a number -- about 5% more than what I actually wanted -- as the bottom of my range, and that's what I ended up getting offered (plus a 10% annual bonus). You just have to be liberal.

    (And this is for work for a major staffing company).


    Ummm... I'm not sure why you suggest that this worked to your advantage. You named a number which was obviously well within their comfort zone or they would have had to decline it or negotiate it. If they had named the first number, it might have been higher since you don't know the full range of their comfort zone. It's also possible that their initial offer would have been lower, but you could still negotiate past your goal. Once you have named a number, then they know that they won't need to offer anything higher. You will never be able to negotiate higher than your first offer. Likewise, if you are offering a job, when you go first, you can never negotiate lower than your initial offer because the candidate knows you can do better.
  20. Re:Off topic :: Firehose on Google Ads Are a Free Speech Issue · · Score: 1

    To descend even further offtopic, I'd like to publically apologise to the Slashdot Editor for all the flack they've gotten from me over the quality of stories on the front page. The submissions are as a rule really quite bad. Not awful, though there are the occassional moronic posts and even a few spam ads. The majority of submissions just, aren't very good.


    Indeed, I have been drinking from the firehose for a while now. I really like the idea, but now that I have seen how bad it is in there, I wish there was some way for me to edit or fix up a submission, wiki-style. I mean, occasionally, there will be an interesting submission that's just poorly done. It'd be nice if the users could say, this writeup is terrible, but the subject is interesting to me. For example, when the iPhone was first announced, I voted down the majority of iPhone related submissions, despite considering it an interesting subject.

    I'd also like to see a way to link submissions together as being related to the same topic. It would help avoid dups, if the firehosers had already marked submission XYZ as being on the same topic as ABC.
  21. Re:American Idol? on Schneier On the US Crypto Competition · · Score: 2, Funny

    Please, oh please oh please don't let there be a William Hung to spring from this.


    Maybe this guy should submit his work. He'd be right about on William Hung's level of competetiveness....
    http://xkcd.com/c153.html
  22. Re:It's already been solved on $25M Bounty Offered for Global Warming Fix · · Score: 1

    It's called an air-conditioner. Duh.

    Yes, Martha, I'm fully aware that the Carnot cycle shows that air conditioners cause a net heating of the environment when the heat dump and the cold reservoir are summed. That is to say the above is a joke.


    Goodness. You've just shown me the path. I know how to solve global warming. Since refrigerators and air conditioners cause net heating... Does anybody know where I can get a bulk order of about a million space heaters?
  23. Re:Avian Flu on Indonesia Stops Sharing Avian Virus Samples · · Score: 1

    I live near where a recent 'outbreak' of Avian Flu has occurred in England. Forgive me for perhaps not seeing the bigger picture, but what's the big deal? regular flu kills more people every winter in the UK alone than Avian Flu has the world over - ever. AFAIK anyway.


    Ummm... 1918 Influenza was avian. (Or, at least, probably avian.) It probably killed more people than regular flu does in one country in a single winter. Of course, population density is much higher now, so 1918 would probably have a much higher effect if it were running amok today. Estimates run a pretty broad range, but there were certainly about 25 million dead in sixth months, and something like 50-100 million over the course of the whole 18 monthe pandemic. Great Britain has about 57 million people living there. So, 1918 Influenza / Spanish flu probably not only killed more pople than regular flu does in a year in England, it probably killed more than the entire population. That's just one particular strain, of course. Not "Avian Flu" as a whole.
  24. Re:Just like VCRs on To Media Companies, BitTorrent Implies Guilt · · Score: 1

    Anyone who buys a VCR is CLEARLY only interested in pirating as many movies as they get their hands on, camcorder owners are only interested in filming screeners, people who run spyware scanners and firewalls obviously have something to hide, and anyone who asserts their rights is obviously doing something illegal...


    Except of course that the media companies need the camcorders to tape people doing dastardly things like buying camcorders, and they need VCR's to copy those tapes so that they can show people you bought a camcorder. Seriously, it's certainly unexpected behavior to connect to a tracker and then not participate, but that's *exactly what the media companies* (and their shill investigators) do in order to know that you connected. It's strange days when you get locked up for trying to be as upstanding a citizen as the sherriff...
  25. Re:Of Course! on DNS Root Servers Attacked · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm sorry, I think you got that wrong.

    Try this MILF,G.
    Mom's I'd like to fuck, Giggidy giggidy giggidy.
    This attack was clearly perpetrated by none other than Glen Quagmire.
    Oh. I was wondering why the hacker was pointing out
    I Like Milking Grand Fathers...