While we here at Slashdot are thinking, "Wow!! This could supply the US with energy for a full year!!", you can bet your ass that there's someone over at the Pentagon thinking, "Wow!! A bomb made of this stuff could wipe out the entire country of China!!"
Well! This is certainly the most impressive article in the history of humanity... in case you couldn't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
After reading the article, I can sum it up as follows: whoever runs space.com called four universities and talked to four scientists. The first one said, "Yeah, you could probably get a lot of power out of H3." The other three echoed the same sentiment: "Mine the moon for H3? Uhhhh... I'm not going to... rule it out... maybe... 300 years from now, if we haven't got any other ideas... but boy, that's problematic."
So why was this <sarcasm>amazingly insightful</sarcasm> article written in the first place?
My guess is that it has something to do with the two banner ads and two other assorted ads on space.com's front page. As nice as a good, scientific discussion of helium 3 would have been, it doesn't exactly bring home the bacon.
Keep in mind, Roundeye, that my threshold is set to 2, so I see your comment, which reads...
"Yep. Why would it not be considered one? My threshold is set to 1. Post accordingly."
...completely out of context. In fact, of the Score: 2 posts, it is the absolute worst. It should be moderated to 0 so not even you have to read it.
I mean, that post SUCKS!
I could post this reply at Score: 2, but I won't, because I don't want people who care about the article to have to read it. Maybe you could extend us the same courtesy.
My three cents (you get an extra cent at 25 Karma):
While we've all read statistics about the "glass ceiling" until we could barely stand it (women fill less technical, executive, skilled jobs than men), few people have ever heard of the "glass floor".
But as it turns out, 9 of the 10 ranked "worst jobs" (and, no, I'm not sure who ranks them, but they include garbage collector, etc.) are held almost exclusively by men.
And while I read all sorts of articles like "Why aren't more women in high-power programming jobs??", I've never seen an article entitled "Why aren't more women taking out the trash??".
It's my opinion--well, it seems obvious to me--that women go to jobs that they feel suited for, and that the reason is a combination of biology and society. Many women, for one reason or another, feel more comfortable in middle-management than in programming. I don't think this is discriminatory. If a girl who could program Linux walked through our door, we'd pounce on her. Man, we're desperate for those. Some of us are trying to invoke ancient witchcraft to bring Ki to life.
Mong's post, to me, is representative of the idiocy of Slashback.
How does one make a coherent response to this?? Anything that deserves to be a story also deserves discussion that doesn't have to be broken into tiny two-sentence chunks.
If Slashdot wants to be better than the average news media, it should try to shy away from "sound bite" type stories. Sound bites are for politicians - not intelligent private citizens who want something to discuss.
In conclusion, the lack of a centralized topic is only good if you're a troll. With no topic, it's harder to get hit with "Offtopic" flags.
I've actually heard from guys who have pinups of Miranda (User Friendly) and Ki (GPF Comics) on their walls. In fact, many of us would like nothing more than a girlfriend who could actually code. Sadly, I know of only two females who can write anything more impressive than basic HTML. (Before I get angry responses, I openly acknowledge that I do not know everyone in the world.)
I wonder why it is that girls don't go for guys in IT. Sure, the occasional one of us is a fat slob or turbo-nerd, but I don't think those subsets are in the majority. And, we tend to have more money than the average Joe Six Pack, which is supposed to be attractive (according to the Discovery Channel, because it signals the women that we're more apt to provide for their young).
So, what's up? Why do the women keep flocking to the high-power lawyers (which is just as non-physical, academic a job as programmer), while neglecting us? What the hell is going on?
One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
If we actually want to leave an indicator of our culture, WHY, WHY would we leave the text of a book that's thousands of years old?? Why would we want to leave a book specific only to Western religions? Why would we want to leave it in several different Romance languages? Do you think future civilations and/or space aliens are really going to have an easier time with French than Spanish, or Italian? Why give them 300 ciphers when we could give them, say, 3 or 4?
And, I know I might be offending peoples' religious sensibilities here, but WHY THE HELL do we want to look like our society had never discovered the scientific method and instead based all its dogma and beliefs on guesswork???
I suppose we could stick the chip in the middle of a gigantic obelisk.. and then stick turrets around the obelisk.. and have them open fire on anybody who didn't sent a radio signal representing the last chromosone of man's DNA.
Alternatively, we could stick it in the middle of a giant packet of silica gel, and paint "Delicious with Spaghetti!" on the top.
Anyway, the point is, they probably didn't have "dropping a 10,000 year Rosetta Disk in Joe Six Pack's backyard and hoping somebody finds it" in mind. My guess is, yes, it will be conspicuous.
Personally, I think the best way to preserve our culture for the future is to take the entire Slashdot archives and stick them on the Rosetta Disk.
That way, future cultures (or space aliens sifting through the ruins of our society) would be informed that there was once a great evil empire called "Microsoft", but that we performed rituals to a goddess called "Natalie Portman" in the hopes that she would deliver us from oppression.
Of course, halfway through one of Jon Katz's articles, one of them would collapse and die from boredom, and they'd think the Disk was some kind of booby trap, and destroy it.
In conclusion, Microsoft is destroying our culture in the present, and Jon Katz will destroy any possibility of its preservation.
With exceptions, most of us do like the idea of encryped music. Obviously, it won't cause MP3 format to stop working, and it might be a step toward that elusive "way that an artist can distribute his music without being raped by either the RIAA or piracy".
What we don't like is how easy this appears to be to circumvent. It seems that someone would only have to buy the song once, record the audio stream, and distribute it as a bootleg.
Crypto is a useful security tool, but when it's nothing more than a hurdle and a formality, it's not a lot better than annoyware.
The article here states explicitly that the Celeron pretty much "smoked" the Cyrix--and, probably not coincidentally, so does the page the benchmarks are posted on. Looking at the actual benchmarks, on the other hand, doesn't exactly tell the same story.
In fact, while the Celeron humiliated the Cyrix in graphic-intensive trials, the Cyrix really held its own or surpassed the Celeron's performance in the majority of those operations which did not involve a lot of pixel-crunching.
So, despite what the text of this Slashdot article says, the Cyrix may be a very useful tool, even if it won't make your frags look cooler.
Do Slashdot authors actually look at the pages they report??
Come back when you've actually used MS/Office and are knowledgeable about everything it can do
Conversely, have you ever used Corel WordPerfect 9?? As a former legal secretary, I can say with some authority that it is the most sophisticated word processor ever built for the Windows platform.
I haven't done extensive comparison of Quattro Pro/Excel or the schedulers, but the Corel versions always functioned flawlessly.
And, let me tell you, Corel is a lot nicer about converting between formats than M$. I am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise.
In conclusion, I like Corel. They offer user-friendly, hand-holding GUI stuff with no exploitable paperclips and fewer glitches in general.
Yes, that's true. If my boss told me I was fired, I would still be leaving "voluntarily", unless he hit me over the back of the head with a sap and dragged my twitching body into the bushes.
I predict that this sort of thing is another perfect example of what Linux needs.
Corel's software isn't beautiful (their Office package is a hell of a lot better than M$, but could be improved), but where they really excel is that my mom has no problem installing and using their products. They're intuitive, they're pretty, there's a lot of hand-holding involved.
And, strangely, people like my parents--and all the business execs and fat cats their age--prefer to pay for their software. "You get what you pay for," they say. "That's the way I was raised, and that's what I think."
In conclusion, paying for software is only good if you somehow can't figure out how to use free software--but anything that brings Linux more mainstream is also good.
Sony has voluntarily taken back the patent infringement
The article at the link sure didn't read that way to me. It sounded like after losing seven out of their nine issues at court, Sony decided the cost of the lawsuit didn't justify the chance of winning. After all, their executives refused to comment; if they had been doing this out of a sense of "right", naturally they would have hyped it up into a big PR thing.
In conclusion, Sony remains evil, but at least the forces of evil have been held at bay... for now.
This is an excellent post, and I would moderate it up in a heartbeat.
I think the problems people have with genetic engineering boil down to exactly three categories:
1. Dogma - You can't do much about this. There are always going to be people who insist that something is against their religion, whether it's drinking coffee, showing women's faces in public, playing football, having sex, or even speaking out loud. Why should this be any different?
2. Association - I believe that the majority of the population is extremely susceptible to associative prejudice, and David Keirsey's findings seem to support this. For example, ever since Hitler's reign, the proportion of world leaders with moustaches has significantly decreased (U.S. News ran an article about this a couple years ago.) I swear, if Hitler had given a speech on how much he liked orange juice, we'd consider orange juice evil.
3. FUD. In general, people fear anything they don't understand, and I'd be willing to bet money that none of us, or at least, less than 1% of us, in this discussion, have a very solid grasp on the ins and outs of genetic engineering. We've read some theory, so we can speculate about genetic mutants and eugenics, but ask someone about procedure and they lock up. Movies like Jurassic Park and Gattaca both reflect and fuel the FUD. (This doesn't mean I object to their existence).
See that little User Info link under my name? You can read all of someone's posts. I hope this has been informative.
Re:One Point - Anyone else suspicious??
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
you would have discovered that "jonkatz" resolves to user number 7654, which is the same as "JonKatz."
I'm genuinely curious about three things: 1. Where can I find the User Info page for JonKatz? 2. Would cmdrtaco and CmdrTaco share the same id # and user info? 3. If so, *why* would Slashdot strip out the capitals? You look like Zak3056 to me - not zak3056.
This is a fascinating article. I had never considered the issue of the "bandwidth" of the atmosphere - i.e. whether it could only handle a certain number of wireless transmissions.
I'm also a little skeptical that increasing these transmissions exponentially is a Good Thing. I mean, we have to live in this stuff. I'm fully aware that right now waves are bombarding--and passing through--my body, transmitting Joe Blow's phone call to his grandmother, the new Britney Spears "song", and pictures of Natalie Portman. But I wonder if there's a critical mass issue somewhere. I've read that in areas inundated with too much sonar, dolphins become confused and may change their hunting, mating, and migratory patterns.
We know our brains put out electrical waves. Are they restricted to transmission--or do they also receive information on some subconscious level?
Slashdot Mirror
search and replace tools? um... s///; there ya go. =)
I do agree that it is always quicker to write a PERL script than to press Alt-F.
I'm pretty sure there are conditions, such as specific species of sharks, and unusually oxygenated water.
While we here at Slashdot are thinking, "Wow!! This could supply the US with energy for a full year!!", you can bet your ass that there's someone over at the Pentagon thinking, "Wow!! A bomb made of this stuff could wipe out the entire country of China!!"
Well! This is certainly the most impressive article in the history of humanity... in case you couldn't tell, I'm being sarcastic.
After reading the article, I can sum it up as follows: whoever runs space.com called four universities and talked to four scientists. The first one said, "Yeah, you could probably get a lot of power out of H3." The other three echoed the same sentiment: "Mine the moon for H3? Uhhhh... I'm not going to... rule it out... maybe... 300 years from now, if we haven't got any other ideas... but boy, that's problematic."
So why was this <sarcasm>amazingly insightful</sarcasm> article written in the first place?
My guess is that it has something to do with the two banner ads and two other assorted ads on space.com's front page. As nice as a good, scientific discussion of helium 3 would have been, it doesn't exactly bring home the bacon.
Sigh.
Keep in mind, Roundeye, that my threshold is set to 2, so I see your comment, which reads...
...completely out of context. In fact, of the Score: 2 posts, it is the absolute worst. It should be moderated to 0 so not even you have to read it.
"Yep. Why would it not be considered one? My threshold is set to 1. Post accordingly."
I mean, that post SUCKS!
I could post this reply at Score: 2, but I won't, because I don't want people who care about the article to have to read it. Maybe you could extend us the same courtesy.
My three cents (you get an extra cent at 25 Karma):
While we've all read statistics about the "glass ceiling" until we could barely stand it (women fill less technical, executive, skilled jobs than men), few people have ever heard of the "glass floor".
But as it turns out, 9 of the 10 ranked "worst jobs" (and, no, I'm not sure who ranks them, but they include garbage collector, etc.) are held almost exclusively by men.
And while I read all sorts of articles like "Why aren't more women in high-power programming jobs??", I've never seen an article entitled "Why aren't more women taking out the trash??".
It's my opinion--well, it seems obvious to me--that women go to jobs that they feel suited for, and that the reason is a combination of biology and society. Many women, for one reason or another, feel more comfortable in middle-management than in programming. I don't think this is discriminatory. If a girl who could program Linux walked through our door, we'd pounce on her. Man, we're desperate for those. Some of us are trying to invoke ancient witchcraft to bring Ki to life.
Mong's post, to me, is representative of the idiocy of Slashback.
How does one make a coherent response to this?? Anything that deserves to be a story also deserves discussion that doesn't have to be broken into tiny two-sentence chunks.
If Slashdot wants to be better than the average news media, it should try to shy away from "sound bite" type stories. Sound bites are for politicians - not intelligent private citizens who want something to discuss.
In conclusion, the lack of a centralized topic is only good if you're a troll. With no topic, it's harder to get hit with "Offtopic" flags.
Sharks have to constantly keep in motion, even while sleeping, in order to pass enough water over their gills to breathe.
Therefore, a Microsoft Shark would last about three minutes until it had to pause while it rebooted.
I've actually heard from guys who have pinups of Miranda (User Friendly) and Ki (GPF Comics) on their walls. In fact, many of us would like nothing more than a girlfriend who could actually code. Sadly, I know of only two females who can write anything more impressive than basic HTML. (Before I get angry responses, I openly acknowledge that I do not know everyone in the world.)
I wonder why it is that girls don't go for guys in IT. Sure, the occasional one of us is a fat slob or turbo-nerd, but I don't think those subsets are in the majority. And, we tend to have more money than the average Joe Six Pack, which is supposed to be attractive (according to the Discovery Channel, because it signals the women that we're more apt to provide for their young).
So, what's up? Why do the women keep flocking to the high-power lawyers (which is just as non-physical, academic a job as programmer), while neglecting us? What the hell is going on?
One thing I can honestly say is - why the fuck would we want to put Genesis on this thing, in 300 languages???
If we actually want to leave an indicator of our culture, WHY, WHY would we leave the text of a book that's thousands of years old?? Why would we want to leave a book specific only to Western religions? Why would we want to leave it in several different Romance languages? Do you think future civilations and/or space aliens are really going to have an easier time with French than Spanish, or Italian? Why give them 300 ciphers when we could give them, say, 3 or 4?
And, I know I might be offending peoples' religious sensibilities here, but WHY THE HELL do we want to look like our society had never discovered the scientific method and instead based all its dogma and beliefs on guesswork???
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!
I suppose we could stick the chip in the middle of a gigantic obelisk.. and then stick turrets around the obelisk.. and have them open fire on anybody who didn't sent a radio signal representing the last chromosone of man's DNA.
Alternatively, we could stick it in the middle of a giant packet of silica gel, and paint "Delicious with Spaghetti!" on the top.
Anyway, the point is, they probably didn't have "dropping a 10,000 year Rosetta Disk in Joe Six Pack's backyard and hoping somebody finds it" in mind. My guess is, yes, it will be conspicuous.
Personally, I think the best way to preserve our culture for the future is to take the entire Slashdot archives and stick them on the Rosetta Disk.
That way, future cultures (or space aliens sifting through the ruins of our society) would be informed that there was once a great evil empire called "Microsoft", but that we performed rituals to a goddess called "Natalie Portman" in the hopes that she would deliver us from oppression.
Of course, halfway through one of Jon Katz's articles, one of them would collapse and die from boredom, and they'd think the Disk was some kind of booby trap, and destroy it.
In conclusion, Microsoft is destroying our culture in the present, and Jon Katz will destroy any possibility of its preservation.
You are an idiot. Have you ever heard of LinuxPPC or Yellow Dog Linux?
Posts that begin with
"You are an idiot" don't
Win you many friends.
This is simple.
With exceptions, most of us do like the idea of encryped music. Obviously, it won't cause MP3 format to stop working, and it might be a step toward that elusive "way that an artist can distribute his music without being raped by either the RIAA or piracy".
What we don't like is how easy this appears to be to circumvent. It seems that someone would only have to buy the song once, record the audio stream, and distribute it as a bootleg.
Crypto is a useful security tool, but when it's nothing more than a hurdle and a formality, it's not a lot better than annoyware.
Anybody who puts the sentence "Period." after a legal statement doesn't know shit about the law.
Once again, Rei tries to apply gender to every single Slashdot article she stumbles across.
Is this really any better than responding to every article with a post about, say, Beowulf clusters? Or Natalie Portman?
I'm still at a complete loss as to what testosterone levels have to do with.. anything.
The article here states explicitly that the Celeron pretty much "smoked" the Cyrix--and, probably not coincidentally, so does the page the benchmarks are posted on. Looking at the actual benchmarks, on the other hand, doesn't exactly tell the same story.
In fact, while the Celeron humiliated the Cyrix in graphic-intensive trials, the Cyrix really held its own or surpassed the Celeron's performance in the majority of those operations which did not involve a lot of pixel-crunching.
So, despite what the text of this Slashdot article says, the Cyrix may be a very useful tool, even if it won't make your frags look cooler.
Do Slashdot authors actually look at the pages they report??
Come back when you've actually used MS/Office and are knowledgeable about everything it can do
Conversely, have you ever used Corel WordPerfect 9?? As a former legal secretary, I can say with some authority that it is the most sophisticated word processor ever built for the Windows platform.
I haven't done extensive comparison of Quattro Pro/Excel or the schedulers, but the Corel versions always functioned flawlessly.
And, let me tell you, Corel is a lot nicer about converting between formats than M$. I am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise.
In conclusion, I like Corel. They offer user-friendly, hand-holding GUI stuff with no exploitable paperclips and fewer glitches in general.
Yes, that's true. If my boss told me I was fired, I would still be leaving "voluntarily", unless he hit me over the back of the head with a sap and dragged my twitching body into the bushes.
But, come on.
I predict that this sort of thing is another perfect example of what Linux needs.
Corel's software isn't beautiful (their Office package is a hell of a lot better than M$, but could be improved), but where they really excel is that my mom has no problem installing and using their products. They're intuitive, they're pretty, there's a lot of hand-holding involved.
And, strangely, people like my parents--and all the business execs and fat cats their age--prefer to pay for their software. "You get what you pay for," they say. "That's the way I was raised, and that's what I think."
In conclusion, paying for software is only good if you somehow can't figure out how to use free software--but anything that brings Linux more mainstream is also good.
Sony has voluntarily taken back the patent infringement
The article at the link sure didn't read that way to me. It sounded like after losing seven out of their nine issues at court, Sony decided the cost of the lawsuit didn't justify the chance of winning. After all, their executives refused to comment; if they had been doing this out of a sense of "right", naturally they would have hyped it up into a big PR thing.
In conclusion, Sony remains evil, but at least the forces of evil have been held at bay... for now.
This is an excellent post, and I would moderate it up in a heartbeat.
I think the problems people have with genetic engineering boil down to exactly three categories:
1. Dogma - You can't do much about this. There are always going to be people who insist that something is against their religion, whether it's drinking coffee, showing women's faces in public, playing football, having sex, or even speaking out loud. Why should this be any different?
2. Association - I believe that the majority of the population is extremely susceptible to associative prejudice, and David Keirsey's findings seem to support this. For example, ever since Hitler's reign, the proportion of world leaders with moustaches has significantly decreased (U.S. News ran an article about this a couple years ago.) I swear, if Hitler had given a speech on how much he liked orange juice, we'd consider orange juice evil.
3. FUD. In general, people fear anything they don't understand, and I'd be willing to bet money that none of us, or at least, less than 1% of us, in this discussion, have a very solid grasp on the ins and outs of genetic engineering. We've read some theory, so we can speculate about genetic mutants and eugenics, but ask someone about procedure and they lock up. Movies like Jurassic Park and Gattaca both reflect and fuel the FUD. (This doesn't mean I object to their existence).
P.S. - since when have you read 60% of my posts?
See that little User Info link under my name? You can read all of someone's posts. I hope this has been informative.
you would have discovered that "jonkatz" resolves to user number 7654, which is the same as "JonKatz."
I'm genuinely curious about three things:
1. Where can I find the User Info page for JonKatz?
2. Would cmdrtaco and CmdrTaco share the same id # and user info?
3. If so, *why* would Slashdot strip out the capitals? You look like Zak3056 to me - not zak3056.
This is a fascinating article. I had never considered the issue of the "bandwidth" of the atmosphere - i.e. whether it could only handle a certain number of wireless transmissions.
I'm also a little skeptical that increasing these transmissions exponentially is a Good Thing. I mean, we have to live in this stuff. I'm fully aware that right now waves are bombarding--and passing through--my body, transmitting Joe Blow's phone call to his grandmother, the new Britney Spears "song", and pictures of Natalie Portman. But I wonder if there's a critical mass issue somewhere. I've read that in areas inundated with too much sonar, dolphins become confused and may change their hunting, mating, and migratory patterns.
We know our brains put out electrical waves. Are they restricted to transmission--or do they also receive information on some subconscious level?