You just need to know where to draw the line. This is well short of the line, folks
I agree, but where exactly is that line? And more importantly, is a company going to tell me when they have an itch to cross it? Almost certainly not, which is why we need to nip this kind of behavior in the bud.
In a revelation that could rock the foundations of science, a researcher in Pennsylvania has discovered that the digits of the transcendental constant PI encode a version of the Linux kernel. "I can't believe it," the researcher, Neil Hoffman, exclaimed. "And yet, here I am staring at what appears to be the source code for Linux kernel 5.0.0. Needless to say, my whole world-view has changed..."
Hoffman made the discovery accidentally. "I was trying to write a more efficient algorithm in C to calculate individual digits of PI. However, my relative lack of programming experience, combined with C's highly obfuscated syntax, led me to the discovery. Instead of calculating each digit and returning it as an int, my program was (for some reason I still haven't been able to figure out) converting it to its ASCII equivalent and returning it as a char."
"Then it hit me. What if some kind of secret messages, encoded in ASCII, was stored in the digits of PI? I set to work on the problem, and after several months of toil, have discovered the awesome truth. My algorithm, which applies several dozen conversions and manipulations of each digit of PI, spits out plain vanilla ASCII characters that happen to form the source code for the Linux kernel."
"I tried to compile the source code, but gcc choked on it. Apparently a later version of gcc is needed to compile the Linux 5.0.0 source code. It's too bad the code for gcc isn't encoded in another transcendental constant. Or is it? I wonder what would happen if I fed e through my algorithm..."
Many scientists are skeptical about Hoffman's discovery. One mathematician who has memorized the digits of PI to 10,000 places said, "This is the kind of nonsense one would expect to find in a tabloid such as the National Mathematics Enquirer. Or a nerd humor site. Hoffman's discovery' is obviously a hoax designed to secure government research grants."
Another scientist Segfault contacted said, "Hoffman's claim is filled with holes large enough to push Windows 95 through. Apply a little critical thinking and look at all the inconsistencies and problems with Hoffman's discovery'. ASCII is an arbitrary code. Why not EBCDIC? Also, the base 10 number system, which his PI-to-ASCII scheme is based on, is arbitrary. Why not binary numbers? Oh, and then there's the biggie: PI is infinitely long. The Linux source code is not (Windows NT, on the other hand...). Explain that, PI Boy!"
Hoffman will formally present his findings to the scientific community on March 14th at the Annual PI Day Conference and Exposition in Chicago. One conference attendee said, "Usually the PI Day expo is pretty boring, with some asinine workshops about 'The History of PI' and Teaching Techniques to Make Learning About PI More Fun for Remedial High School Students'. However, with the unfolding brouhaha surrounding the Linux-PI connection, this could be a very interesting convention. Then again, there's going to be several hundred mathematicians from around the world in attendance. It might not be that exciting after all."
In a related matter, Segfault has received an unconfirmed report that a region of the standard Mandelbrot fractal contains what appear to be the words "LINUS TORVALDS WAS HERE". In addition, the words "TRANSMETA: THIS SECRET MESSAGE IS NOT HERE YET" supposedly appear within the depths of the Julia Set.
Linus Torvalds and Benoit Mandelbrot were unavailable for comment at press time.
Well, Hydrogen has 3 times as much energy per unit weight as gasoline. But you can't get it as dense as gasoline, even in liquid form (1/10th), so it has less power than gas per unit volume. Thus you need the 140 liter H2-tank featured here.
Come up with a way to compress it further, and you're golden.
Why do you think gasoline, yes, gasoline, the stuff you can easily make napalm out of, so much safer than hydrogen? Never mind the fact that the Hindenburg blew up becuase it was coated with fscking rocket fuel. Never mind the fact that if the fuel tank ruptures, hydrogen will float upwards and disperse quite nicely, while gasoline will pool around and burn slightly less nicely. Never mind that while gasoline prices are constantly rising, LO2 is one of the cheapest fluids out there, and along with other gasses can only get cheaper as usage increases.
Did you read the article? That hydrogen fuel tank is armored, man! If you you are involved in something that breaks it, you've got bigger problems than crummy H2.
And as a bonus, we wouldn't be dependent on nutty middle eastern dictatorships with delusions of mediocrity to run our cars. Air, last I checked, was fairly commonplace.
I would buy one of these in a heartbeat, if I could get H2 easily.
The MPAA has been pretty successful in repressing the distribution of DeCSS, viewing it as a threat to movie industry copyright - and movie industry profits.
In what way have they been pretty successful? Short of "Hello World", it's probably the most widely distributed short piece of code on the entire net. And this new version just goes to show how amazingly ineffective they've been.
Two men can keep a secret if both of them are dead.
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Re:Will people go for this? Doubtful.
on
CPRM Smokescreen
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· Score: 2
If they ever ship these disk drives, everyone should buy lots of them, take them home, break them, and return them for a full refund, until they're all used up.
3 lb rubber mallets. Mash the drive, but don't leave a mark. I could do that all day...
There's the "Island in the Sea of Time" trilogy written by S.M. Stirling. Basically, he takes the island of Nantucket and plops it down in the 13th century BC. In 10 years, they go from almost starving to death to producing breech-loading rifles, using old Cesna engines to build airships, starting colonies all over the place (Madagascar, Long Island, Argentina, even a penal colony in the caribbean), etc. Basically an early 20th century level of technology.
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Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
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· Score: 2
Explain to me how your average geek is more specialized than, say, our arch-nemeses: lawyers. What about accountants? Or a physicist or history professor? Why should computer experts be less able to survive an infocalypse than any other expert?
Well, you gotta admit, to anyone not knowledgable about this sort of thing, "flux penetration" sounds like a "Back to the Future" porno. But hey, thanks for the nifty info about superconductors.
I would say making the claim "Napster made our CD sales drop 39%!", when in fact sales of CD's (albums AND singles) increased 2% a pretty bald lie. I mean, just listen to the bitch: "Napster hurt record sales" [Hilary Rosen]. Pure, blatant bullshit.
Changing it to "Oh my dear god, Napster made our CD Single sales drop 39%! We're ruined!!!", when that massive loss occured in only 1% of their products is yet another blatant attempt at lying. I'm really curious about the conversations at Salon, CNN, etc that led to the rapid changing of the articles.
Yes, claiming that Napster is helping sales is just as bad as claiming it hurts, which is why I don't claim it. Nor do a lot of other people here. But bear in mind that the RIAA repeatedly states that there is a direct causal relationship between Napster and CD sales. If that were provably true, then Napster would indeed be helping sales, since sales are going up, despite the press releases. Given that these guys are not capable of reading their own financial reports, however, I'm not about to put any faith in their apparently whimsical statistical analysis.
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Re:I just wanted to point out...
on
The DeCSS Haiku
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· Score: 1
Do you think that if these dipshits had the option of shutting the internet down they wouldn't take it? They would jump at the idea so fast it'd make your head spin. It would instantly put them back in charge of mass music/movie distribution.
Also, the real problem isn't the government trying to shut stuff down. What congress and the DoJ are doing is giving companies unprecedented control over its customers and the ability to have our law enforcement agencies to do their bidding. These companies don't have our best interests at heart, which is fine, that's the way it's always been, but they are quickly aquiring the power to make our lives miserable.
And the correct Spock quote is, "If I were human, I believe my response would be..."
Don't base any big money winning shots on these equations. These only hold true until.1c or so -- then they kinda start to fall apart.
Damn, and here I thought my relativistic linear accelerator pool cue was gonna revolutionize the game. Guess I'll have to crank it down to some paltry hypersonic speed...
Several of my friends and I have just started playing X-Com again
That game, along with a bunch of other classics, are real wierd like that. Couple times a year I get an urge to pull some ancient game out of the archives and play it to death all over again.
Some of us like to play games that make you think about what you'll be doing several minutes or hours into the game. Careful planning and foresight is the hallmark of many turn based games. I'm as big a fan of shoot-em-up games as anyone, but I like slower paced games too.
Furthermore, you won't get score many points on the credibility meter by calling Civilization and Alpha Centauri 'worthless'. If you don't like them, fine, but kindly accept that they are not automatically a 'banal form of entertainment' simply because you play no game other than mindless 1st-person shooters.
I'd like to think that even ancient Hebrew had a word for a sphere and a separate word for a circle.
Of course, it might not, and the original may have simply said "round", which a later translator took to mean "circle-shaped". It's also entirely possible that someone who translated it took a few creative liberties in doing so.
In either case, I'd be hesitant to take anything written down in the bible at face value. On the other hand, a lot of papers on evolution are written in english, or if not, at least have the originals still available.
Huh? No, it says in one place that it is a polygon (ie, 4 corners of the earth), and in another it says that the earth is disc shaped. No polyhedrons here.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, but where exactly is that line? And more importantly, is a company going to tell me when they have an itch to cross it? Almost certainly not, which is why we need to nip this kind of behavior in the bud.
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Please, send me back to the moon. I'ts much more hospitable up there!
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Open Source Transcendental Constant
In a revelation that could rock the foundations of science, a researcher in Pennsylvania has discovered that the digits of the transcendental constant PI encode a version of the Linux kernel. "I can't believe it," the researcher, Neil Hoffman, exclaimed. "And yet, here I am staring at what appears to be the source code for Linux kernel 5.0.0. Needless to say, my whole world-view has changed..."
Hoffman made the discovery accidentally. "I was trying to write a more efficient algorithm in C to calculate individual digits of PI. However, my relative lack of programming experience, combined with C's highly obfuscated syntax, led me to the discovery. Instead of calculating each digit and returning it as an int, my program was (for some reason I still haven't been able to figure out) converting it to its ASCII equivalent and returning it as a char."
"Then it hit me. What if some kind of secret messages, encoded in ASCII, was stored in the digits of PI? I set to work on the problem, and after several months of toil, have discovered the awesome truth. My algorithm, which applies several dozen conversions and manipulations of each digit of PI, spits out plain vanilla ASCII characters that happen to form the source code for the Linux kernel."
"I tried to compile the source code, but gcc choked on it. Apparently a later version of gcc is needed to compile the Linux 5.0.0 source code. It's too bad the code for gcc isn't encoded in another transcendental constant. Or is it? I wonder what would happen if I fed e through my algorithm..."
Many scientists are skeptical about Hoffman's discovery. One mathematician who has memorized the digits of PI to 10,000 places said, "This is the kind of nonsense one would expect to find in a tabloid such as the National Mathematics Enquirer. Or a nerd humor site. Hoffman's discovery' is obviously a hoax designed to secure government research grants."
Another scientist Segfault contacted said, "Hoffman's claim is filled with holes large enough to push Windows 95 through. Apply a little critical thinking and look at all the inconsistencies and problems with Hoffman's discovery'. ASCII is an arbitrary code. Why not EBCDIC? Also, the base 10 number system, which his PI-to-ASCII scheme is based on, is arbitrary. Why not binary numbers? Oh, and then there's the biggie: PI is infinitely long. The Linux source code is not (Windows NT, on the other hand...). Explain that, PI Boy!"
Hoffman will formally present his findings to the scientific community on March 14th at the Annual PI Day Conference and Exposition in Chicago. One conference attendee said, "Usually the PI Day expo is pretty boring, with some asinine workshops about 'The History of PI' and Teaching Techniques to Make Learning About PI More Fun for Remedial High School Students'. However, with the unfolding brouhaha surrounding the Linux-PI connection, this could be a very interesting convention. Then again, there's going to be several hundred mathematicians from around the world in attendance. It might not be that exciting after all."
In a related matter, Segfault has received an unconfirmed report that a region of the standard Mandelbrot fractal contains what appear to be the words "LINUS TORVALDS WAS HERE". In addition, the words "TRANSMETA: THIS SECRET MESSAGE IS NOT HERE YET" supposedly appear within the depths of the Julia Set.
Linus Torvalds and Benoit Mandelbrot were unavailable for comment at press time.
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Come up with a way to compress it further, and you're golden.
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Why do you think gasoline, yes, gasoline, the stuff you can easily make napalm out of, so much safer than hydrogen? Never mind the fact that the Hindenburg blew up becuase it was coated with fscking rocket fuel. Never mind the fact that if the fuel tank ruptures, hydrogen will float upwards and disperse quite nicely, while gasoline will pool around and burn slightly less nicely. Never mind that while gasoline prices are constantly rising, LO2 is one of the cheapest fluids out there, and along with other gasses can only get cheaper as usage increases.
Did you read the article? That hydrogen fuel tank is armored, man! If you you are involved in something that breaks it, you've got bigger problems than crummy H2.
And as a bonus, we wouldn't be dependent on nutty middle eastern dictatorships with delusions of mediocrity to run our cars. Air, last I checked, was fairly commonplace.
I would buy one of these in a heartbeat, if I could get H2 easily.
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Then find some congressmen with webpages and sue them. See how fast they try and make the PTO to get their act together.
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The MPAA has been pretty successful in repressing the distribution of DeCSS, viewing it as a threat to movie industry copyright - and movie industry profits.
In what way have they been pretty successful? Short of "Hello World", it's probably the most widely distributed short piece of code on the entire net. And this new version just goes to show how amazingly ineffective they've been.
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Two men can keep a secret if both of them are dead.
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3 lb rubber mallets. Mash the drive, but don't leave a mark. I could do that all day...
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That's what all the DeCSS t-shirts are for.
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There's the "Island in the Sea of Time" trilogy written by S.M. Stirling. Basically, he takes the island of Nantucket and plops it down in the 13th century BC. In 10 years, they go from almost starving to death to producing breech-loading rifles, using old Cesna engines to build airships, starting colonies all over the place (Madagascar, Long Island, Argentina, even a penal colony in the caribbean), etc. Basically an early 20th century level of technology.
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Explain to me how your average geek is more specialized than, say, our arch-nemeses: lawyers. What about accountants? Or a physicist or history professor? Why should computer experts be less able to survive an infocalypse than any other expert?
--
Well, you gotta admit, to anyone not knowledgable about this sort of thing, "flux penetration" sounds like a "Back to the Future" porno. But hey, thanks for the nifty info about superconductors.
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I would say making the claim "Napster made our CD sales drop 39%!", when in fact sales of CD's (albums AND singles) increased 2% a pretty bald lie. I mean, just listen to the bitch: "Napster hurt record sales" [Hilary Rosen]. Pure, blatant bullshit.
Changing it to "Oh my dear god, Napster made our CD Single sales drop 39%! We're ruined!!!", when that massive loss occured in only 1% of their products is yet another blatant attempt at lying. I'm really curious about the conversations at Salon, CNN, etc that led to the rapid changing of the articles.
Yes, claiming that Napster is helping sales is just as bad as claiming it hurts, which is why I don't claim it. Nor do a lot of other people here. But bear in mind that the RIAA repeatedly states that there is a direct causal relationship between Napster and CD sales. If that were provably true, then Napster would indeed be helping sales, since sales are going up, despite the press releases. Given that these guys are not capable of reading their own financial reports, however, I'm not about to put any faith in their apparently whimsical statistical analysis.
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Also, the real problem isn't the government trying to shut stuff down. What congress and the DoJ are doing is giving companies unprecedented control over its customers and the ability to have our law enforcement agencies to do their bidding. These companies don't have our best interests at heart, which is fine, that's the way it's always been, but they are quickly aquiring the power to make our lives miserable.
And the correct Spock quote is, "If I were human, I believe my response would be ..."
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Capitalism's greatest enemies are successful capitalists.
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Damn, and here I thought my relativistic linear accelerator pool cue was gonna revolutionize the game. Guess I'll have to crank it down to some paltry hypersonic speed...
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That game, along with a bunch of other classics, are real wierd like that. Couple times a year I get an urge to pull some ancient game out of the archives and play it to death all over again.
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So you only play games that test your reflexes and bladder control and don't offer a 'Pause' functionality?
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Furthermore, you won't get score many points on the credibility meter by calling Civilization and Alpha Centauri 'worthless'. If you don't like them, fine, but kindly accept that they are not automatically a 'banal form of entertainment' simply because you play no game other than mindless 1st-person shooters.
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Indeed. On the Civ3 development forums, half of the items on the wishlist revolve around increasing the realism of it. A SimHistory, as it were.
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Someone call my name, or a variation thereof?
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That's awfully insulting, don't you think? You shouldn't say such rude things about the apes.
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Of course, it might not, and the original may have simply said "round", which a later translator took to mean "circle-shaped". It's also entirely possible that someone who translated it took a few creative liberties in doing so.
In either case, I'd be hesitant to take anything written down in the bible at face value. On the other hand, a lot of papers on evolution are written in english, or if not, at least have the originals still available.
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Huh? No, it says in one place that it is a polygon (ie, 4 corners of the earth), and in another it says that the earth is disc shaped. No polyhedrons here.
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