The Earth did not slow down, and if it did, it could not be measured. One second is added to (or subtracted from) the atomic clock each year because of the clock's built-in accuracy. In other words, just because it is "atomic" doesn't make it God's clock. It gains or loses time like any other clock. And it was built so that the gain or loss will amount to approximately one second each year.
Wackos hear about this second and attribute it to things like the speed of light slowing down, proof that Armageddon is coming. Or that the Earth is slowing down, leading to the same result.
If scientists are pushing this, then they are doing it so they can get a grant to research the topic... These types of things revolve around money, and are usually a pile of bull.
Because think about it: How exactly do you go about measuring the position of the Earth at a specific time each year, when the positions of all objects in space are relative to one another, and when all objects are constantly moving in a way that is extremely difficult to compute? Just to compute the relative positions of two massive bodies in motion in space requires some horrendously complicated calculus because of factors like the gravitation pull of one object on the other. Add a third object and the math becomes exponentially more complicated. In fact, nobody knows exactly how to do it, and all of these computations (like sending people to the moon) are approximated. (Why do you think the astronauts have to do some things manually when they get there?) And you mean to tell me that someone can measure the position of the Earth every year since 1971 within one second of accuracy and tell that there is a difference? Bullshit.
How dare they say that Voynich is a hoax?! I wrote the damn thing just yesterday.
Just like when I buy something the day after payday, and I pull out a hundred dollar bill, and they start to look at it to figure out if it's real, and I say, "It's real, I just made it this morning."
(Made it as in earned it? Or made it as in printed it? Kind of a double meaning kind of joke kind of thing, if you think about it...)
I think all programmers at SCO should simultaneously quit without giving any notice of any kind, and simultaneously tell the management that unless all of the assets of SCO are divided evenly among all the programmers IMMEDIATELY, leaving SCO completely bankrupt, all of the programmers will produce evidence that will put SCO management in jail.
Why they should NOT keep these turbines from operating:
Some of the environmentalists who want to do good for our planet are actually doing quite a lot of harm. For example, we recycle used paper, which requires all kinds of nasty chemicals that end up causing more harm than good for the planet. Why not shred all the old paper and use it in fertilizer? It works fine! Trees can be grown in tree farms. But to the environmentalist, this is a big no-no. The myth that recycling is the only way feels good, while the truth and the facts don't. Which brings me to forests: It is actually necessary to remove some trees in forests, to prevent overgrowth that ends up killing many other plants on the forest floor. Engineers are figuring out ways to get in between the trees and remove only selected ones without harming others. But once again, environmentalists are against this. So just exactly where are we supposed to get wood for our houses? Are we supposed to live in caves?
Which brings me to my next point: On the news the other day, they showed that piece of shit Osama Bin Laden taking a hike through a bunch of rocks in some mountains somewhere. I said something about how they live over there, and someone said that's how they (the terrorists) want all of the U.S. to look. Like a huge dustbin full of rocks and no civilization. Because that's the "natural" way. I jokingly said that Osama is just an environmentalist extremist, and if you think about it really hard, you'll find it's not that far from the truth.
Environmentalists should learn to keep an open mind about things. I'm not against protecting the birds somehow. But I am against shutting down a source of clean power because some bird that doesn't know any better might fly into it.
I propose that the new high performance intermediate language be English. You would code in it as follows:
Computer, please allocate some room on the stack for a variable, and please call that variable 'i'. Thank you, Computer. Now, computer, please set the value of the aforementioned variable, 'i', to zero. Thank you, Computer.
..... I don't have the patience to write more of this crap.
I want everybody in the community to know that 5.2 RC2 is the best version of FreeBSD yet, and is even the best OS out there. I have been using 5.2 RC2 for over three years over here, currently reflected in its uptime, because it has not crashed at all over the entire three years.
Anybody who hasn't tried 5.2 RC2 yet is really in for a treat...
Perhaps one of the reasons academic institutions need their own "Internet-2" (so to speak) is to avoid spam and other traffic that goes through the big bad "Internet-1". A private network for academics takes them back to the "good ol'" days when only professionals had access and there wasn't much abuse going on.
Meanwhile, many companies, from small businesses to worldwide corporations, are spending a lot of money to fight spam and other problems. I see a need for many large businesses to get together and build their own network, an "Internet-3" so to speak. They would still have security concerns, but because most of the network's traffic will be business related, the signal to noise ratio will be much better.
With wireless access becoming more popular, I even see the normal consumer providing pieces of the Internet. This network, the original Internet, might eventually become the place where a lot of garbage goes around, while private worldwide networks might eventually keep things clean.
Of course, once all these networks become large, I can see connections made between them, and that will defeat the whole purpose.
Apple concentrates on innovation all the time, which means that the moment they're done innovating a particular product, it's out the door and they've forgotten it in their move to the next thing.
I think that if Apple would invest only a little bit more in managing their current products, they would be much more successful, and would therefore have more resources with which to innovate.
Think of it this way: Why is it that Apple has, what, 2% of the market, when Dell, which doesn't innovate at all in its product, has a huge chunk of the market? Dell does nothing but manage.
I'm saying all of these things because Apple's product is very promising, and I would be very happy if they would gain a larger chunk of the market, so that more people would use Apple computers, so that more software would be released for them, so that more hardware options would become available for them, and basically so that the computer world, as regular folks see it, won't be the monotonous Wintel platform...
Of course, I want to see my favorite OS (BSD) getting a big boost.
In other news, SCO sues Coca Cola for infringing SCO's copyrights and patents by copying SCO's formula for the soft drink. SCO invented the formula in 1906. According to SCO CEO Darl McBride, Coca Cola contains over 1 million ingredients invented by SCO.
In more other news, SCO sues the Catholic Church for infringing SCO's copyrights and patents through unlawful reproduction and distribution of the Holy Bible. According to SCO CEO Darl McBride, the Bible contains over 1 million verses copied illegally from SCO intellectual property.
SCO reports that over 8 trillion lines of code were stolen and put into Linux (just like every McDonald's franchise served over 8 trillion people, when there are only 6 billion people in the whole world).
From their press release: "The 8 trillion lines [of code] are written in Microsoft Visual Basic.NET 2003."
Yup, that's proof of SCO's claims as far as I'm concerned.
I have a slightly better idea... Everyone on/. buys SCO stock at the same time, waits an hour, and dumps the shares at 1 penny each. That would give a lot of people the idea that SCO stock is worthless.
Better yet, we should buy the SCO stock and use the certificates as toilet tissue.
Hmmm... This sounds like a very innovative product: LEDs that were supposed to have an MTBF of 100,000 years lasted 800,000 years. That's a miracle if you ask me.
One thing this product doesn't do though... it doesn't sing the blessings for you. It should at least have a karaoke mode.
You take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
that the industrial world finds for embedded Linum (emphasis mine)
Here at my company, which develops industrial automation systems, I've heard a lot of buzz about this Linum. The engineers over in C3 (the software development area) say that Linum is much better than Linux for embedded applications, mostly because it ends with "m" instead of "x"...
Of course, I've heard some heated arguments in the cafeteria about Linux vs. Linum, and I think the whole thing is turning into a big holy war over here. Kind of like the 1TBS.
Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations.
Hmmm... And it took a lot of expensive research to come to this conclusion? I thought just about every free email client had this feature already--unless there is a difference between "threaded" and "nested" but I can't imagine what that difference might be.
As always, it's Microsoft. Where do you think you're going today?
I have an idea. Microsoft should purchase all the governments of the world and then pass laws everywhere that no non-Microsoft product may be bought, sold, or used anywhere in the world. If someone needs a product that is not offered by Microsoft, too fucking bad.
Heh, count on the open source community to do Microsoft's job. What else do you expect?
I can tell you this: It doesn't surprise me that Microsoft isn't doing its job properly. It's a software company. It should produce a reliable product. But instead, it produces trouble.
Further, it doesn't surprise me that the open source community is fighting back, so to speak, by fixing this particular problem. I think that as time goes by, more patches for commercial software will be released by independant programmers in the open source community, because of frustration with the inability to get satisfaction from the "real" producer of the software.
I only hope that Microsoft won't pull some stupid DMCA bullshit to stop this. "Yeah, your honor, we believe it is detrimental to the best interests of our customers when bugs in our software are fixed. It should, instead, be illegal to discuss, fix, or exploit these bugs in any way, unless one is a member of the underground h4x0r community, in which case, exploiting the bugs is perfectly ok." (We all know Bill Gates is the leader of all these movements to steal credit card numbers through exploits in his own code. That's how he earned his zillions of dollars. Nobody actually buys stuff from Microsoft, you know.
"The extra time on windows created by regional coding is an opportunity that pirates exploit." (A quote by Blockbuster Inc. president and chief operating officer Nigel Travis.)
I firmly believe this is (yet) another example of how anti-piracy measures do nothing to stop pirates, while doing everything to inconvenience legitimate consumers. Region coding accomplishes the following:
Legitimate consumers cannot buy a DVD in one region, for example, during a vacation there, and view it back home in another region.
Legitimate consumers cannot buy a movie over the Internet from somewhere in another region.
Legitimate consumers in one region may entirely lose access to material released in another region if whoever releases it there doesn't bother to release it worldwide.
Legitimate consumers in one country may have to wait months upon months to see a movie that was already released in another country.
Pirates take advantage of all of the above to make a profit by mass-copying movies illegally.
So what's the reason for this stupid idea in the first place? I can't figure it out... I think it was just a stupid idea that couldn't possibly work, but was put into effect by corporate executives who do not understand the piracy problem, do not understand what consumers want (or could potentially want if offered), and merely panicked from the possibility of having less control than in the days when different regions had their movies in incompatible formats.
This is no longer the 1800's, this is almost the year 2004. Movie execs: Wake up!
Hey, let's sue our fans!! What shall we do next?! Hey, I have another great idea: Every time someone buys blank CD media, they are immediately arrested and imprisoned for a period not less than 20 years in a maximum security prison for each blank CD, alongside murderers and rapists, whose crimes are certainly lesser than that of music piracy. After the 20 year per blank CD period, the person is released from prison and allowed to take their blank CD(s).
This law would ignore the fact that blank CDs are used for mostly legitimate reasons, because piracy, being worse than murder or rape, should be handled under a no-fucking-around policy. And all books should be burned. And all people whose skin is not within 0.0000000000001% tolerance of a specific shade should be hung.
If I were the judge, I would force them to display ALL of their source code until the trial is over so that EVERYBODY can see it and try to figure out who's code infringes on who's rights, if any such infringements exists. Yes, SCO's so-called "trade secrets" would be out in the open, but that is definitely a desired side effect, because it would undermine investor confidence in SCO while not really helping nor harming anyone else, since SCO most likely does NOT have any trade secrets, and whatever they claim is a trade secret is most likely common knowledge since 1970.
I think it is easier than some think to implement Universal DRM. Simply follow these steps:
Install Orwellian Memory Holes (tm) in billions of convenient locations worldwide, so that every media--including paper, magnetic, plastic, etc.--can be vaporized upon creation.
Poke everybody's eyes out to prevent them from seeing something copyrighted, because doing so places a copy in their head, which is a violation of copyright.
Pop everybody's ear drums to prevent them from hearing something copyrighted, because doing so places a copy in their head, which is a violation of copyright.
Cut everyone's vocal chords to prevent them from saying something copyrighted, because doing so creates a copy of valuable intellectual property, which is a violation of copyright.
In fact, cut off everyone's arms and legs, to prevent sign language from being used to violate copyrights.
Finally, kill everyone to prevent any other form of body language from being used to violate copyrights.
By following these simple steps, we can ensure that nobody's copyright can be violated. This will benefit all of humanity, as piracy will become impossible.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention... Bill Gates and Darl McBride are exempt from the above, because they are the Creators of copyrighted valuable intellectual property.
"FEMA has concluded that introduction of unwanted interference from the implementation of BPL technology into the high frequency radio spectrum will result in significant detriment to the operation of FEMA [emergency] radio systems such as FNARS."
Not to mention that when the whole danged power grid goes down all over the western hemisphere, we'll lose not only the power, but also all of our communication... and that would be really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad.
Instead, I think we should use satellites, dedicated lines, the cable television system, the phone system, line-of-sight, radio waves, and every other system out there or that we can devise. Also, I think that companies should come out with generators that every Joe Shmoe can use to generate his own private power, so that when the danged grid goes down, most people will still have their own private power, so it will be a minor inconvenience, a road bump, a small glitch, rather than a dangerous situation for an entire region.
Everybody's talking about the New York power outtage, but not many people remember that five states in the western United States were without power for several hours because of a similar event.
Slashdot Mirror
Wackos hear about this second and attribute it to things like the speed of light slowing down, proof that Armageddon is coming. Or that the Earth is slowing down, leading to the same result.
If scientists are pushing this, then they are doing it so they can get a grant to research the topic... These types of things revolve around money, and are usually a pile of bull.
Because think about it: How exactly do you go about measuring the position of the Earth at a specific time each year, when the positions of all objects in space are relative to one another, and when all objects are constantly moving in a way that is extremely difficult to compute? Just to compute the relative positions of two massive bodies in motion in space requires some horrendously complicated calculus because of factors like the gravitation pull of one object on the other. Add a third object and the math becomes exponentially more complicated. In fact, nobody knows exactly how to do it, and all of these computations (like sending people to the moon) are approximated. (Why do you think the astronauts have to do some things manually when they get there?) And you mean to tell me that someone can measure the position of the Earth every year since 1971 within one second of accuracy and tell that there is a difference? Bullshit.
Just like when I buy something the day after payday, and I pull out a hundred dollar bill, and they start to look at it to figure out if it's real, and I say, "It's real, I just made it this morning."
(Made it as in earned it? Or made it as in printed it? Kind of a double meaning kind of joke kind of thing, if you think about it...)
He was also on this little show that nobody likely ever heard of... Star Trek. I doubt any /.er knows what that is.
I think all programmers at SCO should simultaneously quit without giving any notice of any kind, and simultaneously tell the management that unless all of the assets of SCO are divided evenly among all the programmers IMMEDIATELY, leaving SCO completely bankrupt, all of the programmers will produce evidence that will put SCO management in jail.
Some of the environmentalists who want to do good for our planet are actually doing quite a lot of harm. For example, we recycle used paper, which requires all kinds of nasty chemicals that end up causing more harm than good for the planet. Why not shred all the old paper and use it in fertilizer? It works fine! Trees can be grown in tree farms. But to the environmentalist, this is a big no-no. The myth that recycling is the only way feels good, while the truth and the facts don't. Which brings me to forests: It is actually necessary to remove some trees in forests, to prevent overgrowth that ends up killing many other plants on the forest floor. Engineers are figuring out ways to get in between the trees and remove only selected ones without harming others. But once again, environmentalists are against this. So just exactly where are we supposed to get wood for our houses? Are we supposed to live in caves?
Which brings me to my next point: On the news the other day, they showed that piece of shit Osama Bin Laden taking a hike through a bunch of rocks in some mountains somewhere. I said something about how they live over there, and someone said that's how they (the terrorists) want all of the U.S. to look. Like a huge dustbin full of rocks and no civilization. Because that's the "natural" way. I jokingly said that Osama is just an environmentalist extremist, and if you think about it really hard, you'll find it's not that far from the truth.
Environmentalists should learn to keep an open mind about things. I'm not against protecting the birds somehow. But I am against shutting down a source of clean power because some bird that doesn't know any better might fly into it.
Computer, please allocate some room on the stack for a variable, and please call that variable 'i'. Thank you, Computer. Now, computer, please set the value of the aforementioned variable, 'i', to zero. Thank you, Computer.
..... I don't have the patience to write more of this crap.
This would be an excellent place for me to store my bottle cap collection.
Anybody who hasn't tried 5.2 RC2 yet is really in for a treat...
Meanwhile, many companies, from small businesses to worldwide corporations, are spending a lot of money to fight spam and other problems. I see a need for many large businesses to get together and build their own network, an "Internet-3" so to speak. They would still have security concerns, but because most of the network's traffic will be business related, the signal to noise ratio will be much better.
With wireless access becoming more popular, I even see the normal consumer providing pieces of the Internet. This network, the original Internet, might eventually become the place where a lot of garbage goes around, while private worldwide networks might eventually keep things clean.
Of course, once all these networks become large, I can see connections made between them, and that will defeat the whole purpose.
I think that if Apple would invest only a little bit more in managing their current products, they would be much more successful, and would therefore have more resources with which to innovate.
Think of it this way: Why is it that Apple has, what, 2% of the market, when Dell, which doesn't innovate at all in its product, has a huge chunk of the market? Dell does nothing but manage.
I'm saying all of these things because Apple's product is very promising, and I would be very happy if they would gain a larger chunk of the market, so that more people would use Apple computers, so that more software would be released for them, so that more hardware options would become available for them, and basically so that the computer world, as regular folks see it, won't be the monotonous Wintel platform...
Of course, I want to see my favorite OS (BSD) getting a big boost.
In more other news, SCO sues the Catholic Church for infringing SCO's copyrights and patents through unlawful reproduction and distribution of the Holy Bible. According to SCO CEO Darl McBride, the Bible contains over 1 million verses copied illegally from SCO intellectual property.
In yet more other news... oh I give up.
From their press release: "The 8 trillion lines [of code] are written in Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003."
Yup, that's proof of SCO's claims as far as I'm concerned.
Better yet, we should buy the SCO stock and use the certificates as toilet tissue.
One thing this product doesn't do though... it doesn't sing the blessings for you. It should at least have a karaoke mode.
You take the blue pill, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Here at my company, which develops industrial automation systems, I've heard a lot of buzz about this Linum. The engineers over in C3 (the software development area) say that Linum is much better than Linux for embedded applications, mostly because it ends with "m" instead of "x"...
Of course, I've heard some heated arguments in the cafeteria about Linux vs. Linum, and I think the whole thing is turning into a big holy war over here. Kind of like the 1TBS.
Future Outlook versions might integrate the nested interface for e-mail conversations.
Hmmm... And it took a lot of expensive research to come to this conclusion? I thought just about every free email client had this feature already--unless there is a difference between "threaded" and "nested" but I can't imagine what that difference might be.
As always, it's Microsoft. Where do you think you're going today?
I have an idea. Microsoft should purchase all the governments of the world and then pass laws everywhere that no non-Microsoft product may be bought, sold, or used anywhere in the world. If someone needs a product that is not offered by Microsoft, too fucking bad.
I can tell you this: It doesn't surprise me that Microsoft isn't doing its job properly. It's a software company. It should produce a reliable product. But instead, it produces trouble.
Further, it doesn't surprise me that the open source community is fighting back, so to speak, by fixing this particular problem. I think that as time goes by, more patches for commercial software will be released by independant programmers in the open source community, because of frustration with the inability to get satisfaction from the "real" producer of the software.
I only hope that Microsoft won't pull some stupid DMCA bullshit to stop this. "Yeah, your honor, we believe it is detrimental to the best interests of our customers when bugs in our software are fixed. It should, instead, be illegal to discuss, fix, or exploit these bugs in any way, unless one is a member of the underground h4x0r community, in which case, exploiting the bugs is perfectly ok." (We all know Bill Gates is the leader of all these movements to steal credit card numbers through exploits in his own code. That's how he earned his zillions of dollars. Nobody actually buys stuff from Microsoft, you know.
"The extra time on windows created by regional coding is an opportunity that pirates exploit." (A quote by Blockbuster Inc. president and chief operating officer Nigel Travis.)
I firmly believe this is (yet) another example of how anti-piracy measures do nothing to stop pirates, while doing everything to inconvenience legitimate consumers. Region coding accomplishes the following:
- Legitimate consumers cannot buy a DVD in one region, for example, during a vacation there, and view it back home in another region.
- Legitimate consumers cannot buy a movie over the Internet from somewhere in another region.
- Legitimate consumers in one region may entirely lose access to material released in another region if whoever releases it there doesn't bother to release it worldwide.
- Legitimate consumers in one country may have to wait months upon months to see a movie that was already released in another country.
- Pirates take advantage of all of the above to make a profit by mass-copying movies illegally.
So what's the reason for this stupid idea in the first place? I can't figure it out... I think it was just a stupid idea that couldn't possibly work, but was put into effect by corporate executives who do not understand the piracy problem, do not understand what consumers want (or could potentially want if offered), and merely panicked from the possibility of having less control than in the days when different regions had their movies in incompatible formats.This is no longer the 1800's, this is almost the year 2004. Movie execs: Wake up!
This law would ignore the fact that blank CDs are used for mostly legitimate reasons, because piracy, being worse than murder or rape, should be handled under a no-fucking-around policy. And all books should be burned. And all people whose skin is not within 0.0000000000001% tolerance of a specific shade should be hung.
If I were the judge, I would force them to display ALL of their source code until the trial is over so that EVERYBODY can see it and try to figure out who's code infringes on who's rights, if any such infringements exists. Yes, SCO's so-called "trade secrets" would be out in the open, but that is definitely a desired side effect, because it would undermine investor confidence in SCO while not really helping nor harming anyone else, since SCO most likely does NOT have any trade secrets, and whatever they claim is a trade secret is most likely common knowledge since 1970.
- Install Orwellian Memory Holes (tm) in billions of convenient locations worldwide, so that every media--including paper, magnetic, plastic, etc.--can be vaporized upon creation.
- Poke everybody's eyes out to prevent them from seeing something copyrighted, because doing so places a copy in their head, which is a violation of copyright.
- Pop everybody's ear drums to prevent them from hearing something copyrighted, because doing so places a copy in their head, which is a violation of copyright.
- Cut everyone's vocal chords to prevent them from saying something copyrighted, because doing so creates a copy of valuable intellectual property, which is a violation of copyright.
- In fact, cut off everyone's arms and legs, to prevent sign language from being used to violate copyrights.
- Finally, kill everyone to prevent any other form of body language from being used to violate copyrights.
By following these simple steps, we can ensure that nobody's copyright can be violated. This will benefit all of humanity, as piracy will become impossible.Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention... Bill Gates and Darl McBride are exempt from the above, because they are the Creators of copyrighted valuable intellectual property.
Not to mention that when the whole danged power grid goes down all over the western hemisphere, we'll lose not only the power, but also all of our communication... and that would be really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad.
Instead, I think we should use satellites, dedicated lines, the cable television system, the phone system, line-of-sight, radio waves, and every other system out there or that we can devise. Also, I think that companies should come out with generators that every Joe Shmoe can use to generate his own private power, so that when the danged grid goes down, most people will still have their own private power, so it will be a minor inconvenience, a road bump, a small glitch, rather than a dangerous situation for an entire region.
Everybody's talking about the New York power outtage, but not many people remember that five states in the western United States were without power for several hours because of a similar event.
Oh well.
All these worlds are yours - except Europa. Attempt no landing there.