The NYT has a set of automated tools that generate the stories that they will print.
Basically as a monkey turns a crank, text is pulled out of drudgereport.com and sent through various filters to remove the ALL CAPS and the sirens and the less compelling rumors. Then the content management system takes over and this is where a bunch of geeks apply hand-coded styling to the result so that you have all the distortions in one document and the markup cleanly separated in another. Then they run the result through a bunch of shell scripts to generate the Bill Kristol and David Brooks columns which get their own styles applied with their portraits included as inline images.
this administration believes itself above law Lay off the kool-aid, dude. At least this administration hasn't had the FBI files of the opposing party "somehow" appear in the White House.
Are you seriously comparing the stupid Clinton "Filegate" scandal to the Bush Administration's abuses of the justice system, which includes selective prosecution and actual imprisonment of people based on their political alignments? Even as Bush listens to your phone calls, monitors your financial activity, and records every web page you visit, with your open acquiescence?
I personally dislike the Clintons but the Whitewater Independent Counsel found in 2000 that there was no evidence of criminal activity or impropriety in "Filegate", nor was there evidence that anyone in the White House had actually requested any of the files. There was no hit on Vince Foster either.
Huh? It's the government! Do you really expect gov't to be efficient or do things correctly?
I guess we should just shut the government down if you idiots are too ideologically handicapped to run it.
True but not really relevant. Unless the readership of Slashdot is wider than I'm aware of the only frame of reference of relevance is that of the Earth. Hence that is the only frame you need to concern yourself with is that one.
Remember that the Earth frame is arbitrary. Although relativity stipulates that there is no privileged frame, strictly speaking there is only one intertial frame which is at rest with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation; if the Earth were at rest in it then we would see a sky with a uniform temperature in all directions. Instead we can observe a dipole moment in the sky's CMB spectrum consistent with motion at 380 km/s toward the direction of Virgo. The inertial frame of the black hole would also be worthy of consideration. But of course this is all just Slashdot nitpicking, you do your calculations in the Earth's frame because you want your result to come out in Earth proper time, and realistically this means you don't do anything different.
Not actually true: they are larger at those relative speeds but are certainly present and noticeable at far lower velocities e.g. atomic clocks on Concord, GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks etc.
Those effects are negligible with this level of approximation. Basically everything can be considered to be at rest; you guys are making this way harder than it is. This is a simple problem of geometric optics. We're seeing this glowing cloud, with a region 10 light years across, brightening and darkening within the space of 5 light years. That's very hard to explain as anything other than a light echo from a source nearby that must have been bright, and small, and rapidly varying in brightness. And look, there's this supermassive black hole sitting here 300 light years away. You don't have to be Einstein to figure this one out.
The star V838 Mon is a good example of a light echo. This star emitted a huge flash in 2002 that made it the brightest star in the galaxy for a couple months. Then it dimmed to a normal brightness. Once it did, starting in mid-late 2002, we started to see a huge reflection of the flash begin to expand out from the star as it lit up the gas and dust in the vicinity. At any given time we see a glowing sheet of gas shaped like a paraboloid open towards us with the star at its focus, and every year this paraboloid gets bigger. Now that it's 2008 this thing has become a Firefox logo 12 light years wide that continues to expand outward in all directions at the speed of light.
The country that invents most cures for diseases in the world can hardly be claimed to have the worst health care system.
Um, yes it can. "Inventing most cures for diseases in the world" isn't the same as having a good health care system. But it is ironic that a country that can invent cures for diseases still manages to have such an embarrassing health care system.
"People LIED on their applications (or just couldn't handle the loan) and as a result, lost their house. The only boneheads not doing their job are the moron ex-homeowners that tried to cheat the system."
Millions of people across the country suddenly turned into cheating morons, all at the same time? Doesn't that seem a little strange to you?
It's a typical response from the left: blame the faceless corporation or government rather than getting to the root of the problem.
Millions of people were the root of the problem? What was preventing all these people from causing so much trouble even just a few years before?
and why is this? millions of people took on a loan they couldn't handle. It has to do with the fact that many banks were forced to give out loans (by the government) to people that they knew were not making enough to pay it back. What the fuck did you expect would happen?
Trying to blame everybody is an attempt to blame nobody. There are a few people who more than anyone else share culpability for this disaster, conspicuously including Alan Greenspan, and the purpose of the talking point that you are parroting is to help them escape culpability and-as usual- shift blame onto the public at large. We saw this same pattern during Katrina and during the initial looting in Baghdad. Whenever a few boneheads fail to do their job and exert proper influence on everyone's behavior, they want to collectively blame everyone for their millions of individual decisions. It's like blaming the horses for leaving after a barn door was left open.
This was caused by deregulation of credit markets, a lack of transparency, "innovative" new financial instruments built on top of opaque derivatives, and a massive flood of fake cash that hit the housing and mortgage industry as a result. Because surprise, surprise, bankers don't know how to valuate their paper holdings in exotic investments which were designed by physics PhDs who incorporated the heat equation and fluid dynamics equations into their finance models. They figured their bullshit paper was worth real money. All this was made possible by aggressive deregulation of the banking industry motivated by ideological fervor in the ability of free markets to self-regulate.
Yes I saw the housing bubble unfold, and I rented through the whole thing. I scowled at people who bought houses. A good fraction were flippers, who are no better than scammers. But I can't blame the homeowners because there are too many of them. Given their exposure to an inflated credit market, a distorted housing market, a lack of good information, and an irresponsible financial industry that had become unconcerned with risk, homeowners were making the best economic decisions as rational actors that they were equipped to make with a normal IQ. But if they believed what their mortgage brokers told them, they made bad decisions. (The correct decision was renting.) Housing was going up. Interest rates were then very low. People often thought they were signing fixed-rate mortgages. They thought they were making safe, prudent investments because that's how houses were portrayed everywhere. Not everybody was trying to make a fast buck like the flippers were doing. Most were just trying to act responsibly, but in the face of bad information they made irresponsible decisions as a result.
The mortgage brokers- since there were fewer of them involved- are more to blame. But they weren't too clear on what was going on either. People were even signing up their local family members with exploding mortgages, claiming to be "helping the community". But they in turn got their marching orders from an even smaller, more culpable set of people above them, and they did what they had to do to score their bonuses. The whole deck was stacked. A very small number of people could have easily prevented this disaster, in fact, had the duty to stop it, and failed to do so.
I have no idea what you mean by bankers being "forced to give out loans by the government". I suppose, if the government dismantles financial regulation, it becomes a banker's fiduciary duty to take advantage of questionable opportunities that are also being opened up for competitors. But I think you are making a sillier point- trying to blame some welfare state for forcing bankers to give huge loans to pink-cadillac-driving home buyers. This attack makes a lot of sense because in this case you can't simply blame illegal aliens.
That's a bit of a generalization to just say "engineers make good terrorists". Maybe the engineers Raphael Perl has met are a little disgruntled but that's a sweeping statement to make about all engineers.
A more accurate statement would be "engineers who know Perl make good terrorists."
So, we've now discovered the biggest and smallest black holes known to exist within about a week of each other. Not the "biggest". Scientists are excited because this is the most intermediate black hole mass ever found. You just can't get any more medium-sized than this. It is the blackest and most densest form that intermediateness can take on- no other massive compact object has been found to have quite this level of intermediacy.
Shouldn't just "being full of shit" count for anything? Why not just rate stories on their frequencies of lies, distortions, unsupported assertions, and factual inaccuracies?
That's what gives the impression of "bias" to a reader in the first place.
I hope somebody tells those scientists building the new type of photon gun, because if that thing fires magenta photons T-Mobile is going to be pissed.
Too bad I like him MORE before the whole Wright crap.
Why?
IANABP, but there's nothing wrong or outrageous about what Wright said, even if the entire media decided one day that he's "crazy" and "despicable". He was bitching about the way black people are treated in this country, like you'd imagine a black preacher might do, and said something that can look bad taken out of context. It's kind of hard not to given the setting and the subject. Even if Wright IS "crazy", a microsecond of thought should be all it takes to realize Obama is not responsible for the opinions of every single one of his supporters. I just can't imagine what sort of thought process would allow something like that to influence one's vote.
"But he did claim to have invented in the Internet. It's just that later he clarified his misstatement and spoke about his real accomplishment, which was to provide the funding for the transition from the old Internet infrastructure, centered around NSFNet and Milnet to the new consumer- and ebusiness-centric Internet infrastructure centered around commercial networks. Which is very laudable, but the oringal misstatement is so obviously humorous that it gets repeated."
Can you actually quote his original misstatement, then? Because from what I remember he never said he "invented the Internet".
For some, seizures do have a small risk of sudden death.
Actually I seem to remember there were two women posting on that message board who got killed by status seizures within weeks of each other, just a few months ago.
boards for epileptic support shouldn't be written with javascript and image upload ability in the first place? Just a thought.
I almost bitchslapped you down as Overrated but decided to reply instead. Those boards are using standard PHP BBS packages off the shelf. They're already pretty buggy; on the EFA you keep getting immediately logged out, you keep losing posts, etc. Surprisingly epileptics don't tend to be experts at putting together crackerjack bulletin boards secure from unconventional cyberattacks that nobody anticipates, like asshats uploading strobe light movies. I guess they have to shut down their mailing lists, too, in case a Scientologist uploads an attachment.
Most of the seizure-induced hallucinations I get while staring at a computer screen happen when I'm using Eclipse. Blocks of code start disappearing into blind spots or they fly across the screen but somehow remain at their home positions. It's actually kind of annoying because I know I have 20 minutes to check the shit in. Although it's visually-related epilepsy, it doesn't seem to be photosensitive so a trick like this probably wouldn't work. It's more shocking and insulting than anything. But one thing I will say about epilepsy is that you have to put up with a surprising amount of shit from people.
I'm a little wary of letting passing spacecraft come by and "taste" the atmospheres of our moons. Once these evil robot satellites get a taste of organic material they're going to want more, more, more... and when they're finished devouring the atmospheres of their home worlds in the outer solar system they'll come back to Earth to sap our precious bodily fluids!
I've never been there but I'm guessing that at the center of the black hole is a single point particle that makes quantum transitions to allowed states with higher and higher energy as stuff falls in.
Slashdot Mirror
The NYT has a set of automated tools that generate the stories that they will print.
Basically as a monkey turns a crank, text is pulled out of drudgereport.com and sent through various filters to remove the ALL CAPS and the sirens and the less compelling rumors. Then the content management system takes over and this is where a bunch of geeks apply hand-coded styling to the result so that you have all the distortions in one document and the markup cleanly separated in another. Then they run the result through a bunch of shell scripts to generate the Bill Kristol and David Brooks columns which get their own styles applied with their portraits included as inline images.
it was 99% spam
This is absolutely true- only about 1% of the emails were treasonous.
this administration believes itself above law Lay off the kool-aid, dude. At least this administration hasn't had the FBI files of the opposing party "somehow" appear in the White House.
Are you seriously comparing the stupid Clinton "Filegate" scandal to the Bush Administration's abuses of the justice system, which includes selective prosecution and actual imprisonment of people based on their political alignments? Even as Bush listens to your phone calls, monitors your financial activity, and records every web page you visit, with your open acquiescence?
I personally dislike the Clintons but the Whitewater Independent Counsel found in 2000 that there was no evidence of criminal activity or impropriety in "Filegate", nor was there evidence that anyone in the White House had actually requested any of the files. There was no hit on Vince Foster either.
Huh? It's the government! Do you really expect gov't to be efficient or do things correctly?
I guess we should just shut the government down if you idiots are too ideologically handicapped to run it.
Oh yeah? I heard global warming was caused by Sun in the first place.
We pull news out of our asses for newspaper man to deliver back to us next day!
True but not really relevant. Unless the readership of Slashdot is wider than I'm aware of the only frame of reference of relevance is that of the Earth. Hence that is the only frame you need to concern yourself with is that one.
Remember that the Earth frame is arbitrary. Although relativity stipulates that there is no privileged frame, strictly speaking there is only one intertial frame which is at rest with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation; if the Earth were at rest in it then we would see a sky with a uniform temperature in all directions. Instead we can observe a dipole moment in the sky's CMB spectrum consistent with motion at 380 km/s toward the direction of Virgo. The inertial frame of the black hole would also be worthy of consideration. But of course this is all just Slashdot nitpicking, you do your calculations in the Earth's frame because you want your result to come out in Earth proper time, and realistically this means you don't do anything different.
Not actually true: they are larger at those relative speeds but are certainly present and noticeable at far lower velocities e.g. atomic clocks on Concord, GR corrections to GPS satellite clocks etc.
Those effects are negligible with this level of approximation. Basically everything can be considered to be at rest; you guys are making this way harder than it is. This is a simple problem of geometric optics. We're seeing this glowing cloud, with a region 10 light years across, brightening and darkening within the space of 5 light years. That's very hard to explain as anything other than a light echo from a source nearby that must have been bright, and small, and rapidly varying in brightness. And look, there's this supermassive black hole sitting here 300 light years away. You don't have to be Einstein to figure this one out.
The star V838 Mon is a good example of a light echo. This star emitted a huge flash in 2002 that made it the brightest star in the galaxy for a couple months. Then it dimmed to a normal brightness. Once it did, starting in mid-late 2002, we started to see a huge reflection of the flash begin to expand out from the star as it lit up the gas and dust in the vicinity. At any given time we see a glowing sheet of gas shaped like a paraboloid open towards us with the star at its focus, and every year this paraboloid gets bigger. Now that it's 2008 this thing has become a Firefox logo 12 light years wide that continues to expand outward in all directions at the speed of light.
I know, seriously. Stop sending your rich folk and government officials here for treatment, will 'ya?, they're tying up our beds.
Are you from India or the Phillipines?
The country that invents most cures for diseases in the world can hardly be claimed to have the worst health care system.
Um, yes it can. "Inventing most cures for diseases in the world" isn't the same as having a good health care system. But it is ironic that a country that can invent cures for diseases still manages to have such an embarrassing health care system.
What ever happened to personal responsibility? just about every vice in our society now is handled by psychologists instead of jail guards.
This from someone who lives in a country home to the world's worst health care system and highest incarceration rates.
That's BSOD to you.
"People LIED on their applications (or just couldn't handle the loan) and as a result, lost their house. The only boneheads not doing their job are the moron ex-homeowners that tried to cheat the system."
Millions of people across the country suddenly turned into cheating morons, all at the same time? Doesn't that seem a little strange to you?
It's a typical response from the left: blame the faceless corporation or government rather than getting to the root of the problem.
Millions of people were the root of the problem? What was preventing all these people from causing so much trouble even just a few years before?
Are you "rich" or are you just speculating on the tax cuts. People making > $100,000 have to pay between 30-50% in taxes.
[Checks December pay stub] Oooh, what a giveaway. No way are you making more than $100,000.
This isn't fair for people that actually want to make money.
I like this. The "people who don't actually want to make money" are taking advantage of everybody else. That's rich.
and why is this? millions of people took on a loan they couldn't handle. It has to do with the fact that many banks were forced to give out loans (by the government) to people that they knew were not making enough to pay it back.
What the fuck did you expect would happen?
Trying to blame everybody is an attempt to blame nobody. There are a few people who more than anyone else share culpability for this disaster, conspicuously including Alan Greenspan, and the purpose of the talking point that you are parroting is to help them escape culpability and-as usual- shift blame onto the public at large. We saw this same pattern during Katrina and during the initial looting in Baghdad. Whenever a few boneheads fail to do their job and exert proper influence on everyone's behavior, they want to collectively blame everyone for their millions of individual decisions. It's like blaming the horses for leaving after a barn door was left open.
This was caused by deregulation of credit markets, a lack of transparency, "innovative" new financial instruments built on top of opaque derivatives, and a massive flood of fake cash that hit the housing and mortgage industry as a result. Because surprise, surprise, bankers don't know how to valuate their paper holdings in exotic investments which were designed by physics PhDs who incorporated the heat equation and fluid dynamics equations into their finance models. They figured their bullshit paper was worth real money. All this was made possible by aggressive deregulation of the banking industry motivated by ideological fervor in the ability of free markets to self-regulate.
Yes I saw the housing bubble unfold, and I rented through the whole thing. I scowled at people who bought houses. A good fraction were flippers, who are no better than scammers. But I can't blame the homeowners because there are too many of them. Given their exposure to an inflated credit market, a distorted housing market, a lack of good information, and an irresponsible financial industry that had become unconcerned with risk, homeowners were making the best economic decisions as rational actors that they were equipped to make with a normal IQ. But if they believed what their mortgage brokers told them, they made bad decisions. (The correct decision was renting.) Housing was going up. Interest rates were then very low. People often thought they were signing fixed-rate mortgages. They thought they were making safe, prudent investments because that's how houses were portrayed everywhere. Not everybody was trying to make a fast buck like the flippers were doing. Most were just trying to act responsibly, but in the face of bad information they made irresponsible decisions as a result.
The mortgage brokers- since there were fewer of them involved- are more to blame. But they weren't too clear on what was going on either. People were even signing up their local family members with exploding mortgages, claiming to be "helping the community". But they in turn got their marching orders from an even smaller, more culpable set of people above them, and they did what they had to do to score their bonuses. The whole deck was stacked. A very small number of people could have easily prevented this disaster, in fact, had the duty to stop it, and failed to do so.
I have no idea what you mean by bankers being "forced to give out loans by the government". I suppose, if the government dismantles financial regulation, it becomes a banker's fiduciary duty to take advantage of questionable opportunities that are also being opened up for competitors. But I think you are making a sillier point- trying to blame some welfare state for forcing bankers to give huge loans to pink-cadillac-driving home buyers. This attack makes a lot of sense because in this case you can't simply blame illegal aliens.
That's a bit of a generalization to just say "engineers make good terrorists". Maybe the engineers Raphael Perl has met are a little disgruntled but that's a sweeping statement to make about all engineers.
A more accurate statement would be "engineers who know Perl make good terrorists."
Wow- what a headache. What would you feed it?
Shouldn't just "being full of shit" count for anything? Why not just rate stories on their frequencies of lies, distortions, unsupported assertions, and factual inaccuracies?
That's what gives the impression of "bias" to a reader in the first place.
I hope somebody tells those scientists building the new type of photon gun, because if that thing fires magenta photons T-Mobile is going to be pissed.
Too bad I like him MORE before the whole Wright crap.
Why?
IANABP, but there's nothing wrong or outrageous about what Wright said, even if the entire media decided one day that he's "crazy" and "despicable". He was bitching about the way black people are treated in this country, like you'd imagine a black preacher might do, and said something that can look bad taken out of context. It's kind of hard not to given the setting and the subject. Even if Wright IS "crazy", a microsecond of thought should be all it takes to realize Obama is not responsible for the opinions of every single one of his supporters. I just can't imagine what sort of thought process would allow something like that to influence one's vote.
"But he did claim to have invented in the Internet. It's just that later he clarified his misstatement and spoke about his real accomplishment, which was to provide the funding for the transition from the old Internet infrastructure, centered around NSFNet and Milnet to the new consumer- and ebusiness-centric Internet infrastructure centered around commercial networks. Which is very laudable, but the oringal misstatement is so obviously humorous that it gets repeated."
Can you actually quote his original misstatement, then? Because from what I remember he never said he "invented the Internet".
For some, seizures do have a small risk of sudden death.
Actually I seem to remember there were two women posting on that message board who got killed by status seizures within weeks of each other, just a few months ago.
They're using Fusetalk as their forum software. It shows up in the footer on the error page that you get whenever you log in.
boards for epileptic support shouldn't be written with javascript and image upload ability in the first place? Just a thought.
I almost bitchslapped you down as Overrated but decided to reply instead. Those boards are using standard PHP BBS packages off the shelf. They're already pretty buggy; on the EFA you keep getting immediately logged out, you keep losing posts, etc. Surprisingly epileptics don't tend to be experts at putting together crackerjack bulletin boards secure from unconventional cyberattacks that nobody anticipates, like asshats uploading strobe light movies. I guess they have to shut down their mailing lists, too, in case a Scientologist uploads an attachment.
Most of the seizure-induced hallucinations I get while staring at a computer screen happen when I'm using Eclipse. Blocks of code start disappearing into blind spots or they fly across the screen but somehow remain at their home positions. It's actually kind of annoying because I know I have 20 minutes to check the shit in. Although it's visually-related epilepsy, it doesn't seem to be photosensitive so a trick like this probably wouldn't work. It's more shocking and insulting than anything. But one thing I will say about epilepsy is that you have to put up with a surprising amount of shit from people.
I'm a little wary of letting passing spacecraft come by and "taste" the atmospheres of our moons. Once these evil robot satellites get a taste of organic material they're going to want more, more, more... and when they're finished devouring the atmospheres of their home worlds in the outer solar system they'll come back to Earth to sap our precious bodily fluids!
I've never been there but I'm guessing that at the center of the black hole is a single point particle that makes quantum transitions to allowed states with higher and higher energy as stuff falls in.