Yes, but on Yahoo, anybody and everybody can and does chat. About the only prerequisite there is that they likely are not (!) aol subscribers (as aol subscribers are more likely to be attracted to aol communities).
Slashdot - by sharp contrast, is "News for Nerds."
People who consider themselves nerds, or consider the topics covered on/. interesting, are the primary constituents of/.. So the community itself is not by nature, exclusive (like aol; pay $, be our friend.), it does not contain people from all walks of life - it's a subculture.
About the only people not welcomed on/. are posers (script kiddies, MS shills), pretty much everything else is welcome, but mainly, you really only find a bunch of nerds here. Like-minded people. Though a diverse bunch.
It's too bad that Transmeta's VCs had to spend so many million$ to get Intel off of it's fat lazy ass. Of course, Transmeta will probably be forced out of business, not because Intel's solution is any better, but because it looks better on paper, and is from Intel.
Then once Transmeta is safely in Chapter 11, Intel can stop revving these low power CPUs, and go back to 60-watts-in-a-laptop-set-specs-for-drive-and-displ ay-manufacturers-to-produce-low-power-components. Don't you just LOVE the free market?
Um, I just waited 90 seconds on my PIII 600MHz with 256 meg RAM running Win2k for MS Office to translate a 1 MB document from.rtf. This document was a saved Outlook message. Don't tell me that 300MHz is fast enough. Fucking 600MHz isn't fast enough. When I have to wait these long times just to open a fucking document, even a relatively small file, there's just no excuse. The CPU's too slow, the software too bloated, and file formats too proprietary.
Don't be silly, you can't make the MPAA change their tune. Not with market forces, when the market consists of many billions of sheep willing to spend their money on products despite your lunatic ranting.
The only way to fix this problem is to remove the undue influence moneyed parties have on the lawmaking process. In other words, we need real Campaign Finance Reform NOW.
The way to bring this issue to "normal" people (Joe 6Pack), is to tell it like it really is. What is this issue about? It's about undue influence of government by well-funded special interest groups.
There is only one cure for this.
Campaign Finance Reform.
Again, I blame all the morons who did not vote for Bill McCain in the primaries. Until we get real Campaign Finance Reform that has teeth, nothing will change. The moneyed interests will do what they have to to ensure that the legal environment favors them.
Sci Fi/Cinema:
I think the deal is, a lot of us sci fi fans have had a hope that sci fi would become mainstream in our culture, so that WE would be perceived as the cool ones ("I am Darth Vader, from the planet Vulcan. . . "). In the 50s and 60s, Sci Fi fans were geeks. In the 70s, the huge potential of Sci Fi to become popular happened, thru Star Wars, but was it really Sci Fi, or Science Fantasy? In any case, it came, and suffered the same fate as every genre that has come into mainstream culture. It gets watered down by the money-making machine, because in a purely Darwinian sense, a money-making machine exists to make money, the more money it makes, the more that particular business model survives. Kissing-up to the artist has never been the money-making machine's strong point. And never will. So while we're all now able to enjoy some Sci Fi along with everyone else, it is watered down, and there isn't much hard Science anymore, nor is there a whole lot of sociological exploration going on (which, I believe was the whole point of Sci Fi in the first place, ever since Shelley's Frankenstien).
AI:
I think there are three kinds of opinions where it comes to AI.
First (I belong to this category), AI is a weakly defined term, machine intelligence is inevitable, machine "consciousness" is probably impossible, how can we replicate that which we cannot even define ourselves?
The Second group is more naturalist about it, there is noting special about human consciousness, that it just emerges from the physical properties of movind data the way the human brain moves data, so building a sufficiently powerful and properly designed computer ought to do the trick.
The third group (most people) hasn't really thought about it, just assumes the someday science will come through, and we'll all be doomed to be destroyed by a race of killer robots. Though it's neat to see it happen on the silver screen, worth $8 every time.
In either of the first two cases, I think that the Turing goal of creating something that will be indistinguishable, upon personal interaction, from another human being. That's certainly possible. People are stupid, and easily fooled. Cinema proves that; static images played in rapid succession become moving images. Two channels of sound can adequately simulate full environmental stereo. So what would be so hard about creating an AI that people can't tell the difference? Watch a Bot on IRC lately? Most people can tell the difference, some people will actually argue with them for hours before they figure out something strange is going on. Is this AI? IMHO, yes. But is it "good enough"? Good enough for what? What's the goal? Human interaction is simply an interface problem. How complex and advanced does a program have to be before it's actually considered AI? Does it need to emulate the way a human thinks? Are there other ways of thinking? Is human logic akin to Euclidian geometry? Are we going to discover non-Euclidian thinking? We'll never be able to prove it's conscious - we'll never be able to prove it has a soul. But long, long, long before we reach that point, I'm sure we'll have machines that are smart enough to self-replicate, and learn to survive on their own, (which may or may not lead to conflict with our survival) and possibly be able to evolve into higher intelligence.
These squishy touchy-feely questions about whether an AI will "love" or have rights as an individual, or whether they'll be considered a "new species", and whether it will attempt to compete with other species for survival, etc. are all bullshit in my opinion. They may still have a bit of milage left for film audiences, and hip pseudoscience authors, but that's about it. At the end of the day, it's a computer program, and the code will be owned by the author, or corporation that creates it. As will all the works it creates (if the AI is "good enough" to do things like write sonnets or engineer space stations, or invent a better battery). There's always the issue of the "tool" getting up and walking away, and you know, that's probably inevitable too. But in the end - boring.
(one of my favorite "AI" stories was Frank Miller's Ronin, and I think that would make a fucking Excellent, money-making movie, because although Virgo did do the whole "Frankenstein thing", it did it in a totally original, and very fun way).
Veritas also uses Java for it's VMSA console. Microsoft may want to piss off Sun, and they may want to piss off Oracle, but they sure as hell don't want to piss off Veritas. If MS wants to play in the High Availability server market, they sure as hell don't.
I don't know, I started out this Jafac identity as "Just Another Fucking Anonymous Coward". After a while (150 karma points later), I decided I wanted to stick with this persona.
I recently took a tour of California's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.
The on site security force was quite impressive.
Armed guards, background checks, metal detectors and xrays.
The guards were armed with AR-15's, pistols, MP-5's, and they even had a shooting range on site.
Hybrids are a stopgap. They do not solve the problem, (global warming) longterm. They introduce needless mechanical complexity which is good for the automotive and automotive repair industry, but bad for the consumer. They still don't improve the crappy weight and aerodynamic trade-offs that have to be made to create an efficient vehicle. Long term, full-on electric (or fuel-cell) is the only answer. Hybrids only get us closer until real batteries are available.
electric cars are not necessarily a stupid idea ; according to Bill Nye. I watch his show, and he elucidated, to my 6 year old son, how electric cars are good because if you have a bunch of fossil-fuel burners spread out all over a city, generating smog, you can't easily do anything about it except ask people to curtail their driving.
But if those are electric cars, the polution is produced at a big plant, instead of spread out, so you can do things, like filter it, or improve the generation technology (using nuclear instead of coal, etc). Electricity is electricity, and eventually, I believe that is the way cars are going to go, but definately NOT with today's battery and generation technology. The trade-offs that have to be made for weight and aerodynamics make for a very undesireable car.
That makes me wonder why there isn't a market for "old movies" in theaters.
They're saying that there are too many theaters for the amount of movies being released (and public willing to go see them) - so why wouldn't it be a great idea to retrieve copies of some older classics and replay them at some theaters. You could go back 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, 50 years, and play some awesome movies that people still want to see on the big screen. Why not digitize them (so the originals aren't destroyed in the copying process), and project them digitally?
I'm sure there are a lot of retired people with no kids to take care of that would LOVE to revisit these movies again.
The movie industry's zeal to saturate the market with new movies is preventing a lot of good things from happening.
I too am another chronic desktop abuser. I know that sometimes my desktop gets too messy, but that's because the computer is there to help me get my work done, and it's my tool to use in the most optimal fasion for how I work.
While I know and understand that data needs to be put away into folders, there sometimes isn't a happy medium between a well-sorted and organized hierarchy, and timeliness of access. That is, when you derive a system for organizing your data, (for example: pr0n: \Redheds, \Lesbians, \Blowjobs, \Threesomes, \Blonds, \Asians, \TrailerPark etc.) sometimes you develop some convolutedly deep structures, especially if your interests and projects are very broad and diverse (pr0n\Redheads\Fetish\Peeing\OnCelery\. ..) and your favorite files take several minutes to find, drilling down into the hierarchy, you want quick access to them, but maybe you can't remember if it's Redheads\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery, or Teenager\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery or Lesbians\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery (which raises another issue about file-systems, in some cases, a relational way of organizing would help) - and by the time you've explored the other possibilities, you're too distracted, and you forget what you were looking for in the first place. Desktop shortcuts are great for that kind of thing.
Also, sometimes, your system may be doing some crunching in the background (TraciLords\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery\TraciPee5.mov ), and your GUI gets sluggish, so drilling down through all of these directories gets to be a pain.
If you go through a period where your "work"load is high, and you don't have time to get rid of obsolete or lesser used links on your desktop, it starts to impede workflow.
This is what COMPUTERS are for - the flexibility of features. People can organize data that is not only more appropriate for how they work, but also how they think. For some users, this even changes from day to day - thank God the computers allow for that flexibility. To sit up there in your ivory tower of Computer Science and tell a user how they "should" and "shouldn't" use a tool, is kind of \pr0n\Redheads\Fetishes\Anal.
5,000,000 BC
An alien race has evolved intelligence, develops technology and decides to attemtp to contact other intelligent beings using broadcast radio signals.
4,000,000 BC
Another alien race contacts the first race.
2,000,000 BC
These two races have build a huge trade confederation, and have discovered several other races. Humanity is not beyond their frontier, but has not been physically detected. At this point, humans are still spearing wooly mammoths. Several other pre-technological races have been discovered and were nurtured until maturity, when they could join the confederation.
1,000,000 BC
Huge interstallar war wipes out most civilization.
100 BC
On one planet where civilization survives, a new, conservative, isolationist government comes into power. They cease all contact with alien planets, they cease broadcasting.
1900 AD
Humanity has developed into an intelligent, industrialized society on the verge of technological advancement.
2000 AD
Humanity has been listening to the heavens and broadcasting signals, in hopes of contacting an alien race.
2100 AD
A violent civil war on Earth resulted from a combination of depletion of natural resources, destruction of the environment, and massive copy-protection schemes. Humanity is nuked back to the stone age. Both consumers AND business loses. Global warming melts the ice caps, and floods the continents killing all surviors.
2501 AD
A violent civil war on the alien planet unseats the traditionally conservative isolationist government. The new regime soon resumes broadcasting and listening for signals.
2,000,000 AD
Alien archeologists find evidence of a past civilization on a small planet, which was located just a few light years away from one of the main trade arteries of the old confederation. The surface is covered with ice, beneath the crust lie ruined cities, and craters, evidence of a massive nuclear conflict. Scientists are still unable to decode the contents of data disks recovered from one of the sites; almost as if the data were purposely scrambled. No big loss, since it was a copy of Titanic on DVD.
Anyone remember a comic book from the late '80's called "Stray Toasters"? It was about a demon that took a vacation from Hell in New York, and started messing with some really deranged people, lawyers, etc. "Toasters" were demons. (well, it's what they do, right? stick ya with a pitchfork, and hold you over the flames. . . )
The individual child will think "The only way to get ice-cream is to do my homework right. Therefor I
must shut off the tv and concentrate on homework."
Obviously, you have zero parenting experience. because this is how it works:
"man, mom and dad are lame, fuck ice cream, fuck them, fuck homework - that'll show them. When i'm 18, I'll get all the ice cream I fucking want."
I propose that slashdot add the following features:
For stories that are recurring topics, a page with links to all the previous stories on this topic. (reposts too), and links provided by commentators containing relevant information.
I know that the last time this came up, somebody linked a great article on how some guy was going to write a book about deceased russian astronaut rumors, and he worked on it for 10 years, gathering information, researching, and found out that the guy had been drummed-out for insubordination or something like that, and sent back to his fighter squadron in Siberia, and the Soviet government covered it up - and the cover up was what made people think that the guy died in the line of duty.
I was 19, just starting college. Still a virgin, but ever eager.
I was certain, when I was told, that it was a joke. My "gang" was all pretty used to sick humor, no holes barred. We were pretty desensitized. Someone would say just about anything to "get" someone else. So it was, in my mind, not outside the realm of possibility that Chuck was making a sick joke. But it was outside the realm of taste, in my mind. I made a comment, and we went down to the library to watch. Not a joke.
Deep inside, I was kind of relieved. Kind of happy. I had been thinking that I was majorly dissatisfied with the progress of the US Space program. We should have had daily launches by then. We should have had hundreds of shuttles. 2000 was approaching, where was my flying car?
I thought - damn, NOW people will start taking this space stuff seriously. NOW NASA will get some decent funding to make sure things get done right. This was just akin to Henry Ford losing his best friend in an accident during testing of the Model T prototype. We'll buckle down, we'll redouble our efforts, improve our design, set our commitment, and dammit, we'll make space our bitch.
I mean, tradgedy, in one sense. True. 7 people died. In the time it took for me to type this message, a lot more than 7 people in this world have died, starvation, war, disease, car accidents, Pokemon episodes. Death happens. See what I mean about being desensitiezed? Space is a dangerous thing. Life is a dangerous thing. You sit on a thousand tons of liquid hydrogen, you better damn well understand that you could die. Hell, I could have a brain hemmorage and die this instant, before I even get to hit the submit button. Wasting all this effort to type - so I can contribute to the lameness that is Slashdot. Those astronauts were attempting something noble. Maybe not on par with the Apollo or Mercury astronauts - but they weren't sitting on their asses like I'm doing now. But they knew the risks. Their families knew the risks. The managers knew the risks. Congress knew the risks. And you and I, when we send off our tax returns to the IRS to fund these things, know the risks. Let's get over the crybaby shit, and start sending more of these motherfuckers up there already!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but on Yahoo, anybody and everybody can and does chat. About the only prerequisite there is that they likely are not (!) aol subscribers (as aol subscribers are more likely to be attracted to aol communities).
/. interesting, are the primary constituents of /.. So the community itself is not by nature, exclusive (like aol; pay $, be our friend.), it does not contain people from all walks of life - it's a subculture.
/. are posers (script kiddies, MS shills), pretty much everything else is welcome, but mainly, you really only find a bunch of nerds here. Like-minded people. Though a diverse bunch.
Slashdot - by sharp contrast, is "News for Nerds."
People who consider themselves nerds, or consider the topics covered on
About the only people not welcomed on
It's too bad that Transmeta's VCs had to spend so many million$ to get Intel off of it's fat lazy ass. Of course, Transmeta will probably be forced out of business, not because Intel's solution is any better, but because it looks better on paper, and is from Intel.
l ay-manufacturers-to-produce-low-power-components. Don't you just LOVE the free market?
Then once Transmeta is safely in Chapter 11, Intel can stop revving these low power CPUs, and go back to 60-watts-in-a-laptop-set-specs-for-drive-and-disp
Um, I just waited 90 seconds on my PIII 600MHz with 256 meg RAM running Win2k for MS Office to translate a 1 MB document from .rtf. This document was a saved Outlook message. Don't tell me that 300MHz is fast enough. Fucking 600MHz isn't fast enough. When I have to wait these long times just to open a fucking document, even a relatively small file, there's just no excuse. The CPU's too slow, the software too bloated, and file formats too proprietary.
Don't be silly, you can't make the MPAA change their tune. Not with market forces, when the market consists of many billions of sheep willing to spend their money on products despite your lunatic ranting. The only way to fix this problem is to remove the undue influence moneyed parties have on the lawmaking process. In other words, we need real Campaign Finance Reform NOW.
The Elements of Style
No.
The way to bring this issue to "normal" people (Joe 6Pack), is to tell it like it really is. What is this issue about? It's about undue influence of government by well-funded special interest groups.
There is only one cure for this.
Campaign Finance Reform.
Again, I blame all the morons who did not vote for Bill McCain in the primaries. Until we get real Campaign Finance Reform that has teeth, nothing will change. The moneyed interests will do what they have to to ensure that the legal environment favors them.
End of story.
Sci Fi/Cinema:
I think the deal is, a lot of us sci fi fans have had a hope that sci fi would become mainstream in our culture, so that WE would be perceived as the cool ones ("I am Darth Vader, from the planet Vulcan. . . "). In the 50s and 60s, Sci Fi fans were geeks. In the 70s, the huge potential of Sci Fi to become popular happened, thru Star Wars, but was it really Sci Fi, or Science Fantasy? In any case, it came, and suffered the same fate as every genre that has come into mainstream culture. It gets watered down by the money-making machine, because in a purely Darwinian sense, a money-making machine exists to make money, the more money it makes, the more that particular business model survives. Kissing-up to the artist has never been the money-making machine's strong point. And never will. So while we're all now able to enjoy some Sci Fi along with everyone else, it is watered down, and there isn't much hard Science anymore, nor is there a whole lot of sociological exploration going on (which, I believe was the whole point of Sci Fi in the first place, ever since Shelley's Frankenstien).
AI:
I think there are three kinds of opinions where it comes to AI.
First (I belong to this category), AI is a weakly defined term, machine intelligence is inevitable, machine "consciousness" is probably impossible, how can we replicate that which we cannot even define ourselves?
The Second group is more naturalist about it, there is noting special about human consciousness, that it just emerges from the physical properties of movind data the way the human brain moves data, so building a sufficiently powerful and properly designed computer ought to do the trick.
The third group (most people) hasn't really thought about it, just assumes the someday science will come through, and we'll all be doomed to be destroyed by a race of killer robots. Though it's neat to see it happen on the silver screen, worth $8 every time.
In either of the first two cases, I think that the Turing goal of creating something that will be indistinguishable, upon personal interaction, from another human being. That's certainly possible. People are stupid, and easily fooled. Cinema proves that; static images played in rapid succession become moving images. Two channels of sound can adequately simulate full environmental stereo. So what would be so hard about creating an AI that people can't tell the difference? Watch a Bot on IRC lately? Most people can tell the difference, some people will actually argue with them for hours before they figure out something strange is going on. Is this AI? IMHO, yes. But is it "good enough"? Good enough for what? What's the goal? Human interaction is simply an interface problem. How complex and advanced does a program have to be before it's actually considered AI? Does it need to emulate the way a human thinks? Are there other ways of thinking? Is human logic akin to Euclidian geometry? Are we going to discover non-Euclidian thinking? We'll never be able to prove it's conscious - we'll never be able to prove it has a soul. But long, long, long before we reach that point, I'm sure we'll have machines that are smart enough to self-replicate, and learn to survive on their own, (which may or may not lead to conflict with our survival) and possibly be able to evolve into higher intelligence.
These squishy touchy-feely questions about whether an AI will "love" or have rights as an individual, or whether they'll be considered a "new species", and whether it will attempt to compete with other species for survival, etc. are all bullshit in my opinion. They may still have a bit of milage left for film audiences, and hip pseudoscience authors, but that's about it. At the end of the day, it's a computer program, and the code will be owned by the author, or corporation that creates it. As will all the works it creates (if the AI is "good enough" to do things like write sonnets or engineer space stations, or invent a better battery). There's always the issue of the "tool" getting up and walking away, and you know, that's probably inevitable too. But in the end - boring.
(one of my favorite "AI" stories was Frank Miller's Ronin, and I think that would make a fucking Excellent, money-making movie, because although Virgo did do the whole "Frankenstein thing", it did it in a totally original, and very fun way).
This would have been GREAT news for Java, two years ago. . .
What was that other poster's sig about the courts running the clock out?
hm - installation of VC++ 6.0 *requires* that the MS JVM be installed in IE. . .
Veritas also uses Java for it's VMSA console. Microsoft may want to piss off Sun, and they may want to piss off Oracle, but they sure as hell don't want to piss off Veritas. If MS wants to play in the High Availability server market, they sure as hell don't.
Kernel Hacking for Dummies.
I don't know, I started out this Jafac identity as "Just Another Fucking Anonymous Coward". After a while (150 karma points later), I decided I wanted to stick with this persona.
I don't read Jafac's spam.
hm. cancer? or starvation and loss of standard of living?
:(
i'll take the cancer, I guess.
I recently took a tour of California's Diablo Canyon nuclear plant.
The on site security force was quite impressive.
Armed guards, background checks, metal detectors and xrays.
The guards were armed with AR-15's, pistols, MP-5's, and they even had a shooting range on site.
Hybrids are a stopgap. They do not solve the problem, (global warming) longterm. They introduce needless mechanical complexity which is good for the automotive and automotive repair industry, but bad for the consumer. They still don't improve the crappy weight and aerodynamic trade-offs that have to be made to create an efficient vehicle. Long term, full-on electric (or fuel-cell) is the only answer. Hybrids only get us closer until real batteries are available.
electric cars are not necessarily a stupid idea ; according to Bill Nye. I watch his show, and he elucidated, to my 6 year old son, how electric cars are good because if you have a bunch of fossil-fuel burners spread out all over a city, generating smog, you can't easily do anything about it except ask people to curtail their driving.
But if those are electric cars, the polution is produced at a big plant, instead of spread out, so you can do things, like filter it, or improve the generation technology (using nuclear instead of coal, etc). Electricity is electricity, and eventually, I believe that is the way cars are going to go, but definately NOT with today's battery and generation technology. The trade-offs that have to be made for weight and aerodynamics make for a very undesireable car.
That makes me wonder why there isn't a market for "old movies" in theaters.
They're saying that there are too many theaters for the amount of movies being released (and public willing to go see them) - so why wouldn't it be a great idea to retrieve copies of some older classics and replay them at some theaters. You could go back 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, 50 years, and play some awesome movies that people still want to see on the big screen. Why not digitize them (so the originals aren't destroyed in the copying process), and project them digitally?
I'm sure there are a lot of retired people with no kids to take care of that would LOVE to revisit these movies again.
The movie industry's zeal to saturate the market with new movies is preventing a lot of good things from happening.
I too am another chronic desktop abuser. I know that sometimes my desktop gets too messy, but that's because the computer is there to help me get my work done, and it's my tool to use in the most optimal fasion for how I work.
.) and your favorite files take several minutes to find, drilling down into the hierarchy, you want quick access to them, but maybe you can't remember if it's Redheads\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery, or Teenager\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery or Lesbians\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery (which raises another issue about file-systems, in some cases, a relational way of organizing would help) - and by the time you've explored the other possibilities, you're too distracted, and you forget what you were looking for in the first place. Desktop shortcuts are great for that kind of thing.
v ), and your GUI gets sluggish, so drilling down through all of these directories gets to be a pain.
While I know and understand that data needs to be put away into folders, there sometimes isn't a happy medium between a well-sorted and organized hierarchy, and timeliness of access. That is, when you derive a system for organizing your data, (for example: pr0n: \Redheds, \Lesbians, \Blowjobs, \Threesomes, \Blonds, \Asians, \TrailerPark etc.) sometimes you develop some convolutedly deep structures, especially if your interests and projects are very broad and diverse (pr0n\Redheads\Fetish\Peeing\OnCelery\. .
Also, sometimes, your system may be doing some crunching in the background (TraciLords\Fetishes\Peeing\OnCelery\TraciPee5.mo
If you go through a period where your "work"load is high, and you don't have time to get rid of obsolete or lesser used links on your desktop, it starts to impede workflow.
This is what COMPUTERS are for - the flexibility of features. People can organize data that is not only more appropriate for how they work, but also how they think. For some users, this even changes from day to day - thank God the computers allow for that flexibility. To sit up there in your ivory tower of Computer Science and tell a user how they "should" and "shouldn't" use a tool, is kind of \pr0n\Redheads\Fetishes\Anal.
In human years:
5,000,000 BC
An alien race has evolved intelligence, develops technology and decides to attemtp to contact other intelligent beings using broadcast radio signals.
4,000,000 BC
Another alien race contacts the first race.
2,000,000 BC
These two races have build a huge trade confederation, and have discovered several other races. Humanity is not beyond their frontier, but has not been physically detected. At this point, humans are still spearing wooly mammoths. Several other pre-technological races have been discovered and were nurtured until maturity, when they could join the confederation.
1,000,000 BC
Huge interstallar war wipes out most civilization.
100 BC
On one planet where civilization survives, a new, conservative, isolationist government comes into power. They cease all contact with alien planets, they cease broadcasting.
1900 AD
Humanity has developed into an intelligent, industrialized society on the verge of technological advancement.
2000 AD
Humanity has been listening to the heavens and broadcasting signals, in hopes of contacting an alien race.
2100 AD
A violent civil war on Earth resulted from a combination of depletion of natural resources, destruction of the environment, and massive copy-protection schemes. Humanity is nuked back to the stone age. Both consumers AND business loses. Global warming melts the ice caps, and floods the continents killing all surviors.
2501 AD
A violent civil war on the alien planet unseats the traditionally conservative isolationist government. The new regime soon resumes broadcasting and listening for signals.
2,000,000 AD
Alien archeologists find evidence of a past civilization on a small planet, which was located just a few light years away from one of the main trade arteries of the old confederation. The surface is covered with ice, beneath the crust lie ruined cities, and craters, evidence of a massive nuclear conflict. Scientists are still unable to decode the contents of data disks recovered from one of the sites; almost as if the data were purposely scrambled. No big loss, since it was a copy of Titanic on DVD.
Anyone remember a comic book from the late '80's called "Stray Toasters"? It was about a demon that took a vacation from Hell in New York, and started messing with some really deranged people, lawyers, etc. "Toasters" were demons. (well, it's what they do, right? stick ya with a pitchfork, and hold you over the flames. . . )
The individual child will think "The only way to get ice-cream is to do my homework right. Therefor I
must shut off the tv and concentrate on homework."
Obviously, you have zero parenting experience. because this is how it works:
"man, mom and dad are lame, fuck ice cream, fuck them, fuck homework - that'll show them. When i'm 18, I'll get all the ice cream I fucking want."
I propose that slashdot add the following features:
For stories that are recurring topics, a page with links to all the previous stories on this topic. (reposts too), and links provided by commentators containing relevant information.
I know that the last time this came up, somebody linked a great article on how some guy was going to write a book about deceased russian astronaut rumors, and he worked on it for 10 years, gathering information, researching, and found out that the guy had been drummed-out for insubordination or something like that, and sent back to his fighter squadron in Siberia, and the Soviet government covered it up - and the cover up was what made people think that the guy died in the line of duty.
we'll make great pets.
hey man, I didn't try to figure out my mom and dad, and learn how to live with them in peace. I got the hell out and got my own apartment.
You get out into the REAL world, and THEN you grow up.
Do you want to be thought of as "the race who lives in their parents' basement" for the rest of cosmic eternity?
I was 19, just starting college. Still a virgin, but ever eager.
I was certain, when I was told, that it was a joke. My "gang" was all pretty used to sick humor, no holes barred. We were pretty desensitized. Someone would say just about anything to "get" someone else. So it was, in my mind, not outside the realm of possibility that Chuck was making a sick joke. But it was outside the realm of taste, in my mind. I made a comment, and we went down to the library to watch. Not a joke.
Deep inside, I was kind of relieved. Kind of happy. I had been thinking that I was majorly dissatisfied with the progress of the US Space program. We should have had daily launches by then. We should have had hundreds of shuttles. 2000 was approaching, where was my flying car?
I thought - damn, NOW people will start taking this space stuff seriously. NOW NASA will get some decent funding to make sure things get done right. This was just akin to Henry Ford losing his best friend in an accident during testing of the Model T prototype. We'll buckle down, we'll redouble our efforts, improve our design, set our commitment, and dammit, we'll make space our bitch.
I mean, tradgedy, in one sense. True. 7 people died. In the time it took for me to type this message, a lot more than 7 people in this world have died, starvation, war, disease, car accidents, Pokemon episodes. Death happens. See what I mean about being desensitiezed? Space is a dangerous thing. Life is a dangerous thing. You sit on a thousand tons of liquid hydrogen, you better damn well understand that you could die. Hell, I could have a brain hemmorage and die this instant, before I even get to hit the submit button. Wasting all this effort to type - so I can contribute to the lameness that is Slashdot. Those astronauts were attempting something noble. Maybe not on par with the Apollo or Mercury astronauts - but they weren't sitting on their asses like I'm doing now. But they knew the risks. Their families knew the risks. The managers knew the risks. Congress knew the risks. And you and I, when we send off our tax returns to the IRS to fund these things, know the risks. Let's get over the crybaby shit, and start sending more of these motherfuckers up there already!