"There's no question over whether an asteroid hit. The roughly 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer) space rock carved out the Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatan Penninsula."
But fairly recently there was another article posted on slashdot, about the alleged impact having occurred in (what is now) Australia. (check, e.g., here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4969840/ for a similar story.)
so what is the consensus *really*, in the scientific community? or is there just none?
whoa! it's been so long since i've seen a screenshot of that classic atari game, "The page you are looking for is currently unavailable." i feel overcome with feelings of nostalgia and wonder at times past.
for the average surfer, much of the bandwidth used (i think) comes from d/l-ing advertising. i wonder if this will push people towards things like junkbuster. skipping all the advertising could save surfers with d/l restrictions real $$.
anybody know what the prize is for the contest? i've skimmed the few pages on the site, and i see no mention of it. maybe everyone who enters the contest shares the prize..?
(hey, as long as everyone is making lousy open source jokes.. )
A summer ago i spent around two months in Nangi, the village mentioned in this article. They were just getting the phone line working back them. Nangi is a amazing place, and Mahabir (the guy in charge) has worked really hard to improve conditions there. They've made tremendous progress. If you're looking for the coolest volunteer opportunity on the planet, this is it. Go to Nangi, a village in the foothills of the annapurna himalaya, and use your mad computer skills to help them get a viable set up going there. Want a totally new set of problems to solve? Try networking in the third world! Go and lend them your knowledge and experience. If you do, they will happily put you up in a guest hut and provide your meals while you stay. Or help in other ways: sent equipment/hardware to Mahabir (he has a US address you can use), or, if you're a head honcho at a big company, sponsor something substantial for the village. Pay for a satilite hook up to the internet. Pay for a teacher (that's easy: the average per cap income in Nepal is less than $250). Pay for a new building--only a few thousand. Hell, sponsor an essay contest. They will appreciate it and let you know it.
if you're interested in Nangi and have questions about what it's like there, how to get there, what to do, etc, please just hit me at the email address above.
i thought the article was interesting, but it seemed to overlook the basic practical necessity of backwards compatibility. it probably wouldnt be too hard at all to start fresh on a new kind of machine for doing the things we (supposedly) have so much trouble getting done with the computers of today--but what about when you need to transport or view standard file formats? who'll write the new driver you need for the network printer? how will this machine talk to all the other machines we already have? practical technologies don't exist in an academic vacuum--they have to be design with real world constraints in mind. and that means making new devices that work with old devices. and that means its very difficult to make a clean start.
I just hit cnn, yahoo news, nytimes, bbc, etc and this story, which apparently has nasa announcing some really compelling evidence for ancient life on mars, is no where to be found. its not on any of the major news sites. and i havent seen it on tv yet. isn't that a little strange? this is really big news, isnt it? why isn't it all over the place??
if you read the article (gasp!) it points out that aussie federal law "treats all internet content as film." wtf? umm, so maybe that's where the aussie gov't is a couple screws short. you don't "watch" the internet, there's no plot, it doesn't end, its free (well, sort of). you don't post messages to a movie for other watchers to respond to. the only thing that the internet is really like is the internet. its a new category of thing. more policy makers need to realize that.
Unfortunately, these Cambodian projects could never succeed without the thousands of dollars they get from contributors, money which consitutes a tremendous budget as far as a 3rd world nation like Cambodia is concerned. Obviously I concur that these stories do represent triumphs for villagers and NGO organizers--but it's naive to suggest that money isn't vitally important--absolutely essential-- to their projects, and doesn't play a key role in actually solving important problems. It always plays an essential role.
The slashdot community is fairly politically active (or at least it seems to be in writing). Maybe it would make sense for CmdrTaco et al to set up some sort of official charitable slashdot fund which we can contribute to and whose benefactors we can vote on as a community somehow. It probably be hard or impossible to impliment, but I wanted to express the desire for such a thing. There are tens of thousands of us slashdotters, and at a buck or two each it'd be really, really easy for us to throw up a Cambodian school if only we could organize funding as effectively as we organize an online community.
it's an interesting point. but there's a real difference between ads that are built into web pages and ads that are built into web browsers.
slashdot is not terribly different from reading a magazine--i don't mind magazine advertising too much, or at least, i'm used to it. but what if there was advertising in absolutely everything i read, on every page? it crosses a line. i can deal with advertising on webpages; i dont like it, but at least i can scroll down and it's gone. i couldn't deal with an omnipresent ad box permanently hogging real estate. it would drive me nuts.
This guy's got the right idea. Why put all your good ideas in one post, when you can distribute them among *three* posts so as to maximize karma harvest? Brilliant!
[Want to read more about why I think this is a good idea? See my next post]
I guess this worry is obvious, but I'll say it anyway. Does this technological "advance" set us back years in terms of coaster technology? First there were the 3.5" floppy discs, which were effective against desk coffee cup ring-marks but could accomodate only a rather small amount of the surface area of a cup (at least, *my* cup). Then came the CD's, which improved coaster surface area at the expense of a condensation-permitting hole. Now where do these skimpy CD's fit in? Not only are they holed, their thinness makes me doubt their viability as an obstruction to coffee cup moisture. Further, I anticipate that the lightness of the floppy CD will make it stick annoyingly to the bottom of a lifted coffee cup--a characteristic universally recognized as the hallmark of a poorly designed coaster.
I mean, for god's sake, wasn't it ridiculously obvious? Are you some kind of freaking idiot, Speed? Jesus Christ, get a clue!
okay okay, i realize i am disgustingly wasting a golden opportunity. here i am, with the fortunate user name "Racer X", and the best i can think up is the predicable tripe above. blast! leave me alone, its 6 am..
Wow, this must be a record for old news on/. Anyone watching tv in the 80's knows that frequency jamming was perfected with the advent of knight rider's car, KITT. And it didn't take a team of U.S. engineers, either; it was single-handedly perfected by Bonnie in that roving semi.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.oreillynet.com/oreilly/make/
Right. Thanks. I should have read that earlier article more carefully--i clearly missed the "pre-dinosaur" claim.
"There's no question over whether an asteroid hit. The roughly 6-mile-wide (10-kilometer) space rock carved out the Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatan Penninsula."
But fairly recently there was another article posted on slashdot, about the alleged impact having occurred in (what is now) Australia. (check, e.g., here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4969840/ for a similar story.)
so what is the consensus *really*, in the scientific community? or is there just none?
eliminates distortive influence, eh? someone should try using these while watching Fox News...
`Political science' verges on oxymoron.
whoa! it's been so long since i've seen a screenshot of that classic atari game, "The page you are looking for is currently unavailable." i feel overcome with feelings of nostalgia and wonder at times past.
just fyi, the new edition is $142.95 on amazon.
for the average surfer, much of the bandwidth used (i think) comes from d/l-ing advertising. i wonder if this will push people towards things like junkbuster. skipping all the advertising could save surfers with d/l restrictions real $$.
anybody know what the prize is for the contest? i've skimmed the few pages on the site, and i see no mention of it. maybe everyone who enters the contest shares the prize..?
(hey, as long as everyone is making lousy open source jokes.. )A summer ago i spent around two months in Nangi, the village mentioned in this article. They were just getting the phone line working back them. Nangi is a amazing place, and Mahabir (the guy in charge) has worked really hard to improve conditions there. They've made tremendous progress. If you're looking for the coolest volunteer opportunity on the planet, this is it. Go to Nangi, a village in the foothills of the annapurna himalaya, and use your mad computer skills to help them get a viable set up going there. Want a totally new set of problems to solve? Try networking in the third world! Go and lend them your knowledge and experience. If you do, they will happily put you up in a guest hut and provide your meals while you stay. Or help in other ways: sent equipment/hardware to Mahabir (he has a US address you can use), or, if you're a head honcho at a big company, sponsor something substantial for the village. Pay for a satilite hook up to the internet. Pay for a teacher (that's easy: the average per cap income in Nepal is less than $250). Pay for a new building--only a few thousand. Hell, sponsor an essay contest. They will appreciate it and let you know it.
if you're interested in Nangi and have questions about what it's like there, how to get there, what to do, etc, please just hit me at the email address above.
Seth
i thought the article was interesting, but it seemed to overlook the basic practical necessity of backwards compatibility. it probably wouldnt be too hard at all to start fresh on a new kind of machine for doing the things we (supposedly) have so much trouble getting done with the computers of today--but what about when you need to transport or view standard file formats? who'll write the new driver you need for the network printer? how will this machine talk to all the other machines we already have? practical technologies don't exist in an academic vacuum--they have to be design with real world constraints in mind. and that means making new devices that work with old devices. and that means its very difficult to make a clean start.
I just hit cnn, yahoo news, nytimes, bbc, etc and this story, which apparently has nasa announcing some really compelling evidence for ancient life on mars, is no where to be found. its not on any of the major news sites. and i havent seen it on tv yet. isn't that a little strange? this is really big news, isnt it? why isn't it all over the place??
just to give the literal answer to this question in australia's case here: police officers decide what's obscene.
if you read the article (gasp!) it points out that aussie federal law "treats all internet content as film." wtf? umm, so maybe that's where the aussie gov't is a couple screws short. you don't "watch" the internet, there's no plot, it doesn't end, its free (well, sort of). you don't post messages to a movie for other watchers to respond to. the only thing that the internet is really like is the internet. its a new category of thing. more policy makers need to realize that.
Unfortunately, these Cambodian projects could never succeed without the thousands of dollars they get from contributors, money which consitutes a tremendous budget as far as a 3rd world nation like Cambodia is concerned. Obviously I concur that these stories do represent triumphs for villagers and NGO organizers--but it's naive to suggest that money isn't vitally important--absolutely essential-- to their projects, and doesn't play a key role in actually solving important problems. It always plays an essential role.
The slashdot community is fairly politically active (or at least it seems to be in writing). Maybe it would make sense for CmdrTaco et al to set up some sort of official charitable slashdot fund which we can contribute to and whose benefactors we can vote on as a community somehow. It probably be hard or impossible to impliment, but I wanted to express the desire for such a thing. There are tens of thousands of us slashdotters, and at a buck or two each it'd be really, really easy for us to throw up a Cambodian school if only we could organize funding as effectively as we organize an online community.
This 'Camobodian model' for getting school funding to rural third world communities is really excellent. I spent last summer teaching in a rural Nepalese village which faced similar obstacles in supporting education, and I wonder if a similar program couldn't be implemented there. Anyway, I'm going to plug my village: visit here to learn more about the school I worked at, the projects going on there in Nepal and how you can help.
slashdot is not terribly different from reading a magazine--i don't mind magazine advertising too much, or at least, i'm used to it. but what if there was advertising in absolutely everything i read, on every page? it crosses a line. i can deal with advertising on webpages; i dont like it, but at least i can scroll down and it's gone. i couldn't deal with an omnipresent ad box permanently hogging real estate. it would drive me nuts.
This guy's got the right idea. Why put all your good ideas in one post, when you can distribute them among *three* posts so as to maximize karma harvest? Brilliant!
[Want to read more about why I think this is a good idea? See my next post]
I guess this worry is obvious, but I'll say it anyway. Does this technological "advance" set us back years in terms of coaster technology? First there were the 3.5" floppy discs, which were effective against desk coffee cup ring-marks but could accomodate only a rather small amount of the surface area of a cup (at least, *my* cup). Then came the CD's, which improved coaster surface area at the expense of a condensation-permitting hole. Now where do these skimpy CD's fit in? Not only are they holed, their thinness makes me doubt their viability as an obstruction to coffee cup moisture. Further, I anticipate that the lightness of the floppy CD will make it stick annoyingly to the bottom of a lifted coffee cup--a characteristic universally recognized as the hallmark of a poorly designed coaster.
Truly this is a sad day for coaster technology.about as interesting as stupid post vs stupid-post.
The research team should contact the Knight Industries or the Foundation for Law and Government, and hire Bonnie as soon as possible.
(Yes, I read this post and thought, "Jesus Christ, make a Knight Rider reference as soon as possible." May others come and do it better.)
If we lose manuals, what do we replace RTFM with? Read The Fucking Online Documentation? Somehow RTFOD just doesnt do it for me..
I AM YOUR BROTHER, SPEED!
I mean, for god's sake, wasn't it ridiculously obvious? Are you some kind of freaking idiot, Speed? Jesus Christ, get a clue!
okay okay, i realize i am disgustingly wasting a golden opportunity. here i am, with the fortunate user name "Racer X", and the best i can think up is the predicable tripe above. blast! leave me alone, its 6 am..
Wow, this must be a record for old news on /. Anyone watching tv in the 80's knows that frequency jamming was perfected with the advent of knight rider's car, KITT. And it didn't take a team of U.S. engineers, either; it was single-handedly perfected by Bonnie in that roving semi.