Most people don't know what a N/m^2 is, sure, but a N/m^2 also has the name Pascal (Pa), which a lot of people do know. Even U.S. high schools are pushing students to use Pa for pressure units instead of atmospheres or Torr or the dreaded inches of Hg. In any case, grams times the standard "g" constant still isn't pressure, it's force, and gram is never an SI unit of pressure or force, nor is gram times g.
In principle, most theories are wrong, but they're accurate enough for the experimental data available. Newtonian mechanics was far from simple, especially when first developed - I mean, a new (complicated) math had to be developed to fully appreciate it. But even it was eventually supplanted. Relativity questioned fundamental aspects of Newtonian mechanics, such as whether space and time are on fixed-scale axes. String theory is questioning one more fundamental aspect - whether there are only 3 spatial dimensions. We may get enough data to show that something like relativity is wrong in that it assumes 3 spatial dimensions. So I would agree that string theory is probably wrong, but only because all theories end up being wrong with enough data.
I suspect that what he means (and I know this'll probably be modded down) is that Vista does have some positive aspects to it, which are totally overwhelmed by the crappy aspects. They're trying to make Windows 7 essentially Vista where they've cut back on the crappiness so that one can (hopefully) appreciate the positive attributes. So they think once we're all happy with Windows 7, we'll look back on Vista and identify all the nice things about it (which are also in Windows 7), magically forgetting that it ever had huge, whopping, enormous problems.
They've tried something like this in the past, but never heard anything more about it. This new version is considerably less intrusive - in the old article from 2002, they had to implant electrodes in the guy's head through a port. And the old way actually bypassed the eye, whereas this new one actually uses what is still useful in the eye.
b) NASA has had spacecraft which have lasted longer than anyone thought they would. The current Mars rovers for example, and Mars Pathfinder, as well as the Galileo spacecraft, which had at least 4 extended missions. Not to mention the Voyagers. The correlation between cost and the lifetime of the craft is not coincidental.
c) Having a mission that lasts a long time is not indicative of a well thought out mission. I think if any agency is going to blow 1 billion on a mission, they're going to think it out pretty damn well. Imagine the public backlash if it weren't thought out (i.e. Mars Polar Lander)...
What exactly are the other venues which provide the same level of peer review that journals do? Things like Slashdot mod points are useful for surfing the web for interesting ideas, but it's far from peer reviewing. Peer reviewing really does work, on a general scale (Sokal aside). One may argue that it hinders truly ground-breaking work from making into the general scientific eye, that is sometimes right. But we need to remember that allowing the one in a million crazy-but-right idea to be published means allowing the other 999,999 crazy-and-wrong articles to be published as well, which is highly detrimental to scientific progress.
This story isn't realistically about Clinton wanting to crack down on game content. She says nothing about game content legislation, and neither does FEPA (according to the story - I haven't read the whole bill, though). She's just saying that she'd like to make it more difficult to sell violent games to kids who shouldn't be seeing such violence, and to fine those people that do so. I don't see why so many folks are taken aback by the notion of not letting a 10-year old play a game that lets them blow a virtual person's head off. We don't let them see that on TV or in movies, why should we let them see it in ever more realistic video games? Societies, in my opinion, should work hard to protect young people from violence until they're old enough to realize what violence in these media really means. And right now there's a huge gaping hole in that protective veil in the form of video games. Just like for movies, this doesn't mean regulating content - as the poster says Clinton wants to do - it's about regulating who gets to see the game, and I don't really see what the problem is with that. If the game makers, in turn, pull violence and sex out of the games to sell to a broader audience, like the movies do, then that's their problem.
That said, I'm an Obama supporter (right now), and I like blowing zombies' heads off while standing in a church as much as anyone else. I just don't want my 10-year-old brother doing so as well. I support a similar regulation of game sales as what we see in movies - no more, no less. The way I see it, it should be the parents' responsibility to watch what their kids are playing, but if we can offer another layer of protection, why wouldn't we?
10 million? What is it with this post? Are people even thinking about whether or not their statistics are reasonable? If all of the 300 million people in the US were married Christians, and 10 million women were killed YEARLY, then we'd be talking about 1 in 15 marriages ending in the husband killing the wife! That's not even reasonable. Don't go on spouting about hard numbers when you haven't even thought about your own "hard numbers"
In the video interview (which makes him sound a lot more reasonable than the written interview), he was going to take a screenshot, but it wasn't finished downloading yet. I don't quite get the 4-bit color thing, though. Even at 56k, the RemoteAnywhere screen updates at a reasonable rate, right? Assuming that the bottleneck was his download rate, why couldn't he open the file on the remote desktop and have the whole image within a few seconds, just at the resolution that his RemoteAnywhere screen offered? Would dropping his RemoteAnywhere color depth or the clients color depth speed things up?
As a side note, he probably wouldn't see things like rivets and seams in an image of something with 4-bit color...
Yes. Technically, everything in science IS wrong. Everything model we have, every iteration, ad hoc addition, and slight modification is getting closer to the truth, but is not the truth. Things that aren't true are wrong. This was my point from the very beginning. Some might say that our models are wrong because we don't have the mind of god, others might say we just don't have the mathematical tools, and some even say that it's because mathematics is simply a crutch, and we have to abandon it if we ever want to find true physical models (e.g. Stephen Wolfram).
"Science is about understanding how nature works..."
Newton's models are intuitive and highly accurate, but certain fundamental concepts behind them (for example, an unchanging time coordinate) are wrong. The point is that nature doesn't work the way Newton said it did.
What you are missing (or what I am failing to say) is the idea that a model doesn't have to be correct to be useful. Even though our scientific models (even our most current ones) are flawed, they are still very useful, and there is still an aspect of truth in them. This aspect of truth is what gives them such predictive powers. The real job of a scientist is to find those aspects of truth in old theories/models and incorporate them into new models that predict and account for phenomena more accurately.
The geocentric model of the cosmos is a great example. Not many people realize that by the time it was really called into question (mid 1500's through the 1600's), it accounted very accurately for the motions of the planets and sun and other stars by placing orbits upon orbits upon orbits ad infinitum. Obviously that model is wrong, but there is one aspect of it that is absolutely right - the concept of orbits. Copernicus (et al) couldn't have come up with a heliocentric model had he not had the idea of an orbit in his mind (as opposed to the idea, say, of a sun god racing across the sky with the sun). He took that concept and made a new theory which incorporated orbits into it.
"If you go into chemistry..."
I have degrees in chemistry, astrophysics, and the history and philosophy of science, and am currently a chemical physicist. I'm well aware of the state of scientific models, and the approximations that they make. I work with quantum theory on a daily basis, and the experiments that I do require a thorough understanding of it. It is a wonderful theory that has awesome predictive powers and surely some truth behind it. But I'm sure that it is just as wrong as the geocentric model and classical mechanics. So why do I still use it? Because it has unparalleled predictive powers, and gives us insight into how atoms and molecules interact. And while it isn't the absolute truth, it's the most accurate thing we have right now.
I do have a degree in philosophy of science, what you are saying is what I was fumbling around trying to say - science isn't about absolute truths, but better ways to describe truth. What you call a model, I call a theory. Theory is not a well defined thing in science, and neither is hypothesis. To get technical, the only absolute that science CAN deal in is falseness (See Karl Popper). A model (or theory in my words) can never be proven correct, but can be proven wrong, and it's in the act of proving something wrong that real good science happens - that's how we develop our concepts of reality and physical models. That said, Newton WAS wrong. Just becase his theory is a good approximation doesn't make it right! You wouldn't say the 100 + 100 = 199, would you? It may be close, but it's not right.
While it is true that the big bang theory is very successful and no doubt has some aspects of truth in it, history has shown us time and time again that theories which appear bullet proof at a certain time somehow fizzle away several centuries later. The fact of the matter is that a theory exists to explain the data we observe. If we were absolutely sure it were true, it wouldn't be called a theory, but rather a truth. The existence of atoms, for example, has been proven - that atoms exist is simply true. We can touch them, manipulate them, interact with them, etc. We may not understand every aspect of them, but their existence is unmistakable. On the other hand, for millenia we believed that the universe was geocentric. All the data we had could fit into that theory, and if it didn't fit, then the theory was changed slightly to account for that data. Obviously that theory has fizzled out. This puts science in a tough position, because much of it rests on theories. For example, physics rests on quantum theory and the standard model. In 1985, the standard model looked absolutely right. Now it appears to have its flaws. Quantum theory is arguably the most tested scientific theory man has ever devised. It predicts strange phenomena, accounts for nearly all the data we see, and is mathematically rigorous. However, it is still a theory. Again, some aspects of it defintiely ring of truth, but I very much doubt that it is absolutely true in all respects. Remember Newtonian physics was absolutely true - until our experimental abilities were sharp enough to find that it had its flaws.
The point is that the big bang probably has some aspects of truth in it, but, just like every other theory that has come across science, our experimental abilities will establish it to have its flaws, and a new theory will take its place which retains some aspects of the big bang theory (possibly even its name!) but accounts for the data even better.
By definition, a moon/satellite doesn't have to be orbiting a planet. Check out Ida and Dactyl, an asteroid/moon combination. Anything out there that's massive can have a moon, it doesn't need to be a planet or even the size of a planet. Ida is only 31 km in diameter (on average), and its moon is only 0.7 km in diameter. By 2002, there were over 30 discovered asteroid/moon systems. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that it has a moon shouldn't have any bearing on whether or not it's a planet. We have planets (Mercury and Venus) which have no moons at all, and we have non-planets which do have moons.
"What the hell are they teaching you kids in physics these days?"
They're teaching us quantum mechanics, which says that any particle has an associated wavelength proportional to the inverse of its momentum. On a NORMAL energy scale (NOT 200GeV), this corresponds to angstrom-sized wavelengths, not attometer-sized wavelengths.
"what would be the point in considering an electron part of an atom if the electron were larger than the entire atom?"
The electron wavelength IS roughly the size of the atom. The reason ions are 0.5-2.5 angstroms across is because that's about the wavelength of the electron in the ion. The electron's wavelength defines the size of the atom - the nuclei are thousands of times smaller...
No need to go calling people fucking morons here....
Yeah when I was in high school our naked egg drop for SO was this fine clay powder that you could mix with water and make whatever consistency you wanted. we were able to drop from 4 meters onto a slab 1.2 cm thick and it wouldnt break...it was very very cool
My interpretation of the whole Dark Matter/Dark Energy thing is that we're not saying anything beyond that there is something out there causing forces that we can't explain. I mean, Ptolemy had a very exact mathematics associated with his spheres, and Aristotle had a very specific description of his elements...
But ambiguity is built into the definition of our Dark Matter/Energy, because we're not making any sort of assertions about its properties other than what we can directly deduce. I have a degree in Philosophy of Science, and from my point of view, the physics community has kept these definitions ambiguous precisely to keep us from falling into a bad or misleading theory/paradigm like we did for Aristotle or Ptolemy. This is closer, in my opinion, to the ether concept at the end of the 19th century, in which we believed that there must be an ether that accounts for the motion of light and other effects. Michelson and Morley and a few others proved this wrong, and if the Dark Stuff is wrong, then people will undoubtedly prove it wrong shortly also...
"What? The rover isn't responding? Well before you do anything rational, we suggest that you first reformat the hard drive, then reinstall the operating system. This should solve your problem. Have I been of assistance to you today?..."
Curiously organic? Have you looked at the other images of Mars? The "swiss cheese" poles and such? The wind on Mars does some pretty crazy stuff, so to see something like a dome (which i would think is either a) a smoothed-over sand dune, or b) a consequence of the impact) or some ridges in a hill (which are obviously artifacts of the wind) isn't all that surprising. You can call them curiously organic if you'd like, but there are curiously organic things all over Mars and Earth that have nothing to do with life and more to do with our desire for them to be organic.
Actually from what I remember reading, it'll collide with us, pass through us, then swing back around a few more times before finally just stays with us
Did anybody read the C&D? It looks like they are not getting on him about finding bugs, but about writing up hacks and cracks, such as programs to crash their servers or to find information on their servers that isn't for public viewing. I like the fact that this guy is trying to find bugs, but from surfing his page and reading Gamespy's complaints, I really can't blame Gamespy. He was publicly posting things that were detrimental to Gamespy. From the looks of the response from Gamespy, and how his "company" disavowed knowing him, I'm wondering how much of martyr he really is.
Granted, I do agree that most of the time companies won't fix bugs unless they're put into the wild, that doesn't make putting them into the wild the right thing to do.
I don't think a third of people clicking a spam link is all that surprising. It's not like 1/3 of all spam links have been clicked - just 1/3 of people have ever followed a link. Hell, I've clicked spam links occasionally if the spam is funny enough.
I got one a few days ago whose subject was "Mongoose Fzcking". I had to follow. Lo and behold it was a broken link.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't know what a N/m^2 is, sure, but a N/m^2 also has the name Pascal (Pa), which a lot of people do know. Even U.S. high schools are pushing students to use Pa for pressure units instead of atmospheres or Torr or the dreaded inches of Hg. In any case, grams times the standard "g" constant still isn't pressure, it's force, and gram is never an SI unit of pressure or force, nor is gram times g.
In principle, most theories are wrong, but they're accurate enough for the experimental data available. Newtonian mechanics was far from simple, especially when first developed - I mean, a new (complicated) math had to be developed to fully appreciate it. But even it was eventually supplanted. Relativity questioned fundamental aspects of Newtonian mechanics, such as whether space and time are on fixed-scale axes. String theory is questioning one more fundamental aspect - whether there are only 3 spatial dimensions. We may get enough data to show that something like relativity is wrong in that it assumes 3 spatial dimensions. So I would agree that string theory is probably wrong, but only because all theories end up being wrong with enough data.
I suspect that what he means (and I know this'll probably be modded down) is that Vista does have some positive aspects to it, which are totally overwhelmed by the crappy aspects. They're trying to make Windows 7 essentially Vista where they've cut back on the crappiness so that one can (hopefully) appreciate the positive attributes. So they think once we're all happy with Windows 7, we'll look back on Vista and identify all the nice things about it (which are also in Windows 7), magically forgetting that it ever had huge, whopping, enormous problems.
They've tried something like this in the past, but never heard anything more about it. This new version is considerably less intrusive - in the old article from 2002, they had to implant electrodes in the guy's head through a port. And the old way actually bypassed the eye, whereas this new one actually uses what is still useful in the eye.
I think the movies captured by the rovers are much cooler:
Sol 1120
Sol 486
a) Ulysses has cost over a billion.
b) NASA has had spacecraft which have lasted longer than anyone thought they would. The current Mars rovers for example, and Mars Pathfinder, as well as the Galileo spacecraft, which had at least 4 extended missions. Not to mention the Voyagers. The correlation between cost and the lifetime of the craft is not coincidental.
c) Having a mission that lasts a long time is not indicative of a well thought out mission. I think if any agency is going to blow 1 billion on a mission, they're going to think it out pretty damn well. Imagine the public backlash if it weren't thought out (i.e. Mars Polar Lander)...
What exactly are the other venues which provide the same level of peer review that journals do? Things like Slashdot mod points are useful for surfing the web for interesting ideas, but it's far from peer reviewing. Peer reviewing really does work, on a general scale (Sokal aside). One may argue that it hinders truly ground-breaking work from making into the general scientific eye, that is sometimes right. But we need to remember that allowing the one in a million crazy-but-right idea to be published means allowing the other 999,999 crazy-and-wrong articles to be published as well, which is highly detrimental to scientific progress.
This story isn't realistically about Clinton wanting to crack down on game content. She says nothing about game content legislation, and neither does FEPA (according to the story - I haven't read the whole bill, though). She's just saying that she'd like to make it more difficult to sell violent games to kids who shouldn't be seeing such violence, and to fine those people that do so. I don't see why so many folks are taken aback by the notion of not letting a 10-year old play a game that lets them blow a virtual person's head off. We don't let them see that on TV or in movies, why should we let them see it in ever more realistic video games? Societies, in my opinion, should work hard to protect young people from violence until they're old enough to realize what violence in these media really means. And right now there's a huge gaping hole in that protective veil in the form of video games. Just like for movies, this doesn't mean regulating content - as the poster says Clinton wants to do - it's about regulating who gets to see the game, and I don't really see what the problem is with that. If the game makers, in turn, pull violence and sex out of the games to sell to a broader audience, like the movies do, then that's their problem. That said, I'm an Obama supporter (right now), and I like blowing zombies' heads off while standing in a church as much as anyone else. I just don't want my 10-year-old brother doing so as well. I support a similar regulation of game sales as what we see in movies - no more, no less. The way I see it, it should be the parents' responsibility to watch what their kids are playing, but if we can offer another layer of protection, why wouldn't we?
10 million? What is it with this post? Are people even thinking about whether or not their statistics are reasonable? If all of the 300 million people in the US were married Christians, and 10 million women were killed YEARLY, then we'd be talking about 1 in 15 marriages ending in the husband killing the wife! That's not even reasonable. Don't go on spouting about hard numbers when you haven't even thought about your own "hard numbers"
In the video interview (which makes him sound a lot more reasonable than the written interview), he was going to take a screenshot, but it wasn't finished downloading yet. I don't quite get the 4-bit color thing, though. Even at 56k, the RemoteAnywhere screen updates at a reasonable rate, right? Assuming that the bottleneck was his download rate, why couldn't he open the file on the remote desktop and have the whole image within a few seconds, just at the resolution that his RemoteAnywhere screen offered? Would dropping his RemoteAnywhere color depth or the clients color depth speed things up?
As a side note, he probably wouldn't see things like rivets and seams in an image of something with 4-bit color...
"No."
Yes. Technically, everything in science IS wrong. Everything model we have, every iteration, ad hoc addition, and slight modification is getting closer to the truth, but is not the truth. Things that aren't true are wrong. This was my point from the very beginning. Some might say that our models are wrong because we don't have the mind of god, others might say we just don't have the mathematical tools, and some even say that it's because mathematics is simply a crutch, and we have to abandon it if we ever want to find true physical models (e.g. Stephen Wolfram).
"Science is about understanding how nature works..."
Newton's models are intuitive and highly accurate, but certain fundamental concepts behind them (for example, an unchanging time coordinate) are wrong. The point is that nature doesn't work the way Newton said it did.
What you are missing (or what I am failing to say) is the idea that a model doesn't have to be correct to be useful. Even though our scientific models (even our most current ones) are flawed, they are still very useful, and there is still an aspect of truth in them. This aspect of truth is what gives them such predictive powers. The real job of a scientist is to find those aspects of truth in old theories/models and incorporate them into new models that predict and account for phenomena more accurately.
The geocentric model of the cosmos is a great example. Not many people realize that by the time it was really called into question (mid 1500's through the 1600's), it accounted very accurately for the motions of the planets and sun and other stars by placing orbits upon orbits upon orbits ad infinitum. Obviously that model is wrong, but there is one aspect of it that is absolutely right - the concept of orbits. Copernicus (et al) couldn't have come up with a heliocentric model had he not had the idea of an orbit in his mind (as opposed to the idea, say, of a sun god racing across the sky with the sun). He took that concept and made a new theory which incorporated orbits into it.
"If you go into chemistry..."
I have degrees in chemistry, astrophysics, and the history and philosophy of science, and am currently a chemical physicist. I'm well aware of the state of scientific models, and the approximations that they make. I work with quantum theory on a daily basis, and the experiments that I do require a thorough understanding of it. It is a wonderful theory that has awesome predictive powers and surely some truth behind it. But I'm sure that it is just as wrong as the geocentric model and classical mechanics. So why do I still use it? Because it has unparalleled predictive powers, and gives us insight into how atoms and molecules interact. And while it isn't the absolute truth, it's the most accurate thing we have right now.
I do have a degree in philosophy of science, what you are saying is what I was fumbling around trying to say - science isn't about absolute truths, but better ways to describe truth. What you call a model, I call a theory. Theory is not a well defined thing in science, and neither is hypothesis. To get technical, the only absolute that science CAN deal in is falseness (See Karl Popper). A model (or theory in my words) can never be proven correct, but can be proven wrong, and it's in the act of proving something wrong that real good science happens - that's how we develop our concepts of reality and physical models. That said, Newton WAS wrong. Just becase his theory is a good approximation doesn't make it right! You wouldn't say the 100 + 100 = 199, would you? It may be close, but it's not right.
While it is true that the big bang theory is very successful and no doubt has some aspects of truth in it, history has shown us time and time again that theories which appear bullet proof at a certain time somehow fizzle away several centuries later. The fact of the matter is that a theory exists to explain the data we observe. If we were absolutely sure it were true, it wouldn't be called a theory, but rather a truth. The existence of atoms, for example, has been proven - that atoms exist is simply true. We can touch them, manipulate them, interact with them, etc. We may not understand every aspect of them, but their existence is unmistakable. On the other hand, for millenia we believed that the universe was geocentric. All the data we had could fit into that theory, and if it didn't fit, then the theory was changed slightly to account for that data. Obviously that theory has fizzled out. This puts science in a tough position, because much of it rests on theories. For example, physics rests on quantum theory and the standard model. In 1985, the standard model looked absolutely right. Now it appears to have its flaws. Quantum theory is arguably the most tested scientific theory man has ever devised. It predicts strange phenomena, accounts for nearly all the data we see, and is mathematically rigorous. However, it is still a theory. Again, some aspects of it defintiely ring of truth, but I very much doubt that it is absolutely true in all respects. Remember Newtonian physics was absolutely true - until our experimental abilities were sharp enough to find that it had its flaws.
The point is that the big bang probably has some aspects of truth in it, but, just like every other theory that has come across science, our experimental abilities will establish it to have its flaws, and a new theory will take its place which retains some aspects of the big bang theory (possibly even its name!) but accounts for the data even better.
By definition, a moon/satellite doesn't have to be orbiting a planet. Check out Ida and Dactyl, an asteroid/moon combination. Anything out there that's massive can have a moon, it doesn't need to be a planet or even the size of a planet. Ida is only 31 km in diameter (on average), and its moon is only 0.7 km in diameter. By 2002, there were over 30 discovered asteroid/moon systems. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that it has a moon shouldn't have any bearing on whether or not it's a planet. We have planets (Mercury and Venus) which have no moons at all, and we have non-planets which do have moons.
"What the hell are they teaching you kids in physics these days?"
They're teaching us quantum mechanics, which says that any particle has an associated wavelength proportional to the inverse of its momentum. On a NORMAL energy scale (NOT 200GeV), this corresponds to angstrom-sized wavelengths, not attometer-sized wavelengths.
"what would be the point in considering an electron part of an atom if the electron were larger than the entire atom?"
The electron wavelength IS roughly the size of the atom. The reason ions are 0.5-2.5 angstroms across is because that's about the wavelength of the electron in the ion. The electron's wavelength defines the size of the atom - the nuclei are thousands of times smaller...
No need to go calling people fucking morons here....
Yeah when I was in high school our naked egg drop for SO was this fine clay powder that you could mix with water and make whatever consistency you wanted. we were able to drop from 4 meters onto a slab 1.2 cm thick and it wouldnt break...it was very very cool
i originally though this said:
HP Humped Napster for Apple
My interpretation of the whole Dark Matter/Dark Energy thing is that we're not saying anything beyond that there is something out there causing forces that we can't explain. I mean, Ptolemy had a very exact mathematics associated with his spheres, and Aristotle had a very specific description of his elements...
But ambiguity is built into the definition of our Dark Matter/Energy, because we're not making any sort of assertions about its properties other than what we can directly deduce. I have a degree in Philosophy of Science, and from my point of view, the physics community has kept these definitions ambiguous precisely to keep us from falling into a bad or misleading theory/paradigm like we did for Aristotle or Ptolemy. This is closer, in my opinion, to the ether concept at the end of the 19th century, in which we believed that there must be an ether that accounts for the motion of light and other effects. Michelson and Morley and a few others proved this wrong, and if the Dark Stuff is wrong, then people will undoubtedly prove it wrong shortly also...
Just call Dell Support!
"What? The rover isn't responding? Well before you do anything rational, we suggest that you first reformat the hard drive, then reinstall the operating system. This should solve your problem. Have I been of assistance to you today?..."
Curiously organic? Have you looked at the other images of Mars? The "swiss cheese" poles and such? The wind on Mars does some pretty crazy stuff, so to see something like a dome (which i would think is either a) a smoothed-over sand dune, or b) a consequence of the impact) or some ridges in a hill (which are obviously artifacts of the wind) isn't all that surprising. You can call them curiously organic if you'd like, but there are curiously organic things all over Mars and Earth that have nothing to do with life and more to do with our desire for them to be organic.
did you go to the mirror?
Actually from what I remember reading, it'll collide with us, pass through us, then swing back around a few more times before finally just stays with us
I'm curious if the lenses ands other glass components will make it through the atmosphere...
Did anybody read the C&D? It looks like they are not getting on him about finding bugs, but about writing up hacks and cracks, such as programs to crash their servers or to find information on their servers that isn't for public viewing. I like the fact that this guy is trying to find bugs, but from surfing his page and reading Gamespy's complaints, I really can't blame Gamespy. He was publicly posting things that were detrimental to Gamespy. From the looks of the response from Gamespy, and how his "company" disavowed knowing him, I'm wondering how much of martyr he really is.
Granted, I do agree that most of the time companies won't fix bugs unless they're put into the wild, that doesn't make putting them into the wild the right thing to do.
I don't think a third of people clicking a spam link is all that surprising. It's not like 1/3 of all spam links have been clicked - just 1/3 of people have ever followed a link. Hell, I've clicked spam links occasionally if the spam is funny enough.
I got one a few days ago whose subject was "Mongoose Fzcking". I had to follow. Lo and behold it was a broken link.