Sometimes the coordinates fall on military bases. Sometimes they're in the ocean. Sometimes they're in the middle of Bill Gates's house (when that one happens, maybe we can work something out). So even if it weren't for the legality issues, there's a big common sense element.
The idea is that you get as close as you can to the point without going onto private property without permission. Most of the time, this means meeting on a road or cul-de-sac or whatnot. The point is just to get people close enough that they can all exchange high fives and then go to a nearby park or bar together.
I've met unfriendly people while out hiking (both for geohashing and for fun). I've also met some astonishingly friendly people, more than you'd expect. People on the whole are decent. But if you're wandering around in strange places in the real world, there are risks inherent to that, and you do have to use your judgment. If you treat the coordinates like commands and try to get at them no matter what, you're doing it wrong.
To everyone who's asked for a large poster of this -- I'm going to be offering large prints of it in the xkcd store before too long, but for a handful of reasons I can't easily do it immediately (I'm in the middle of the holiday rush with shipping out t-shirts). It's cool to hear so many people are interested, though! Thank you!
I would actually like to see someone else create a computer-generated poster with a higher level of detail (there will be algorithms for the mapping on the blag soon). I think you can do some interesting things with this fractal; it'd be neat to see all the websites you visit marked with red dots, more detailed survey info for the registry patchwork, server density/space usage (the 63-74 blocks are more densely populated than anything else), etc.
I lost count but I was keeping track of all the false rape and other claims being made from the beginning of the year. www.dailyrotten.com is great for that. All the stories where "Woman cries rape..oh wait..video evidence provided shows she was shooting a porn film" kind of stories, and other stuff.
Agreed, although at the same time there's a huge amount of societal bias against women in non-media-frenzy situations (the vast majority) which you want to avoid further encouraging, so it's a delicate line to walk. If you look at the statistics on how much rape goes unreported in the first place, it's kind of horrifying. (And let's not even get started on how any discussion of rape immediately draws a flood of "you know, men get raped too!" comments, as if mentioning that (tiny) percentage magically brushes aside all the completely undeniable social gender-related aspects of the issue.)
I notice that both Questionable Content and Penny Arcade are also down this morning. Someone suggested to me that they were all at the same datacenter. Is this true?
Even though it could just as easily happen to me, it's still satisfying to say "haha, n00bs".
Although I also note that the datacenter holding my server has on-property generators, which I assumed was pretty standard practice.
I used Metapad for a couple years, but discovered it had certain problems where it would insert a junk character at the end of files unexpectedly. This was really bad as I was using it to edit code, so I had to switch to WordPad.
"The site features a wide selection of Russian music, but is written in English with prices listed in United States dollars"
Goddamnit, how can we, as Americans, allow such a site to exist?!? Russian sites must be written in a native (or, at the most, european) language, and they'd better show prices in rubles. Well, I guess, euros would be okay as well, as long as they don't directly link to a currency conversions site.
I'd like to call, once and for all, for all sites not located within the US (or, um, England) to stop putting up sites in English.
Well, the point of the quote you're mocking is that we can infer something about the purpose of a site from what language it presents itself in -- in this case, the quite relevant fact that their target market speaks English. We can make of that what we will, but it's useful information that provides helpful context.
Ubuntu has been wonderful compared to other Linux distros. There are still headaches, and I think it's disingenuous to say that it is anywhere near as easy to use as Windows. I gave Dapper (beta 6) to my friend, claiming this. He was happy with the install and was delighted when the first thing he saw was that it had put icons on his desktop for his Windows drive. He clicked on them, and it said "you do not have permission to access this" (because the drives are mounted by root). There was no obvious recourse (the solution being editing/etc/fstab). From that point on, selling Ubuntu to him as easy-to-use was something of a losing battle.
It just really bothers me that literally the first thing he saw on his nice, clean desktop was broken. I have had exactly the same situation in installs on other computers (which is why I knew how to fix it). I sincerely hope this is working in the current release.
I use Ubuntu as my desktop OS, mainly because of Ion3. I love the strength and flexibility of Linux. But I no longer recommend it to those without serious computer experience. Ubuntu is trying very hard, but I think it's gonna take them a couple more years. I know this is the cliche in Linux, "ready for the desktop in five years", and I don't think it will necessarially be that long.
It's just that any OS designed for non-experts needs to do a lot more whole-system novice-user testing.
The first thing I would do is have the phone update to a page, wherethehellismyphone.com. I would have this constantly updated with rough GPS coordinates. I'm not sure what phones can tell you their rough GPS coords, though. But it could give you all sorts of useful information in case the phone is lost or stolen -- what it last saw, where it was last used, etc.
I mention this because I recently picked up this laptop, and one of my first plans is to get a GPS card installed in it. I'll have it running something netstumbler-like, and if it's lost or stolen, it will do its best to log in and upload the GPS coords to wherethehellismylaptop.com. So, if my laptop is lost or stolen, and the thief leaves it turned on while passing through any open wifi or going online in any way, presto. I could have the site have a Google Maps thingy that shows me where it was most recently spotted and when.
This doesn't even require the GPS card -- any information you can have the device update you with is useful. It could tell me what the person was last looking at, what pages they're frequenting, etc. Get their name from their MySpace page and have the police show up at their door. Letting mobile devices act as servers opens up a lot of these possibilities, including making them easy to use as James-Bond-type spy/bug gadgets and taking a big step in the direction of useful remote presence.
Of course, wherethehellismylaptop.com would require a very secure login if you want any privacy, ever.
In the last month or two, I've undergone a shift. I used to be fairly moderate in all this. I thought Lessig's book made some really good points, and I thought "there's a nice middle ground, it's only fair that the artists protect their rights, and that people should understand their own rights and at the same time not be piracy apologists. I don't pirate stuff very much, and I don't really mind when people do.
But especially with the new HDMI shit, with looking at what the DMCA actually lets people do, and thinking a little more about the big picture, I would like to take this chance to say: screw 'em. I hope the internet takes down the music industry, and then moves on to the movie industry. Let's take some risks, let's give people a little basic freedom, and let's let technology run its course a little and then figure out how to make money off the result. People have a hard time dealing with change, but it happens.
MPAA, I'm gonna go spend a little more time on the beach with my friends and a little less time trying to convince you and your surrogates that I legally own this DVD. Screw you and your careful licensing of permissions. And FSF, you've gained a contributor.
None of this is particularly new or revolutionary, but I want to add my voice to the chorus. Let's shake things up a bit.
Yes, it's a whole new generation of customers since ages ago, in 2003.
Seriously, I want a phone that dials numbers and lets me talk to people. It should ring, vibrate, and tell me when I missed some calls. I can actually see the utility in having a camera in it as well, but that's just because I feel the need to carry some kind of camera with me and it's either that or as a separate keychain device.
For the other stuff, I will use an ultraportable laptop/PDA.
It takes 30,000 years to grow 1 cubic inch of coral
. . . that's a confusing statistic for something that is inherently parallel in nature. It could take 30,000 years to grow 1 cubic inch of coral, and next to it another cubic inch of coral, and then you could say it takes 30,000 years to grow 2 cubic inches of coral. I mean, more than 1 cubic inch of coral grows every 30k years. Is that 1 cubic inch built up per square inch of area? Then it should be phrased differently, probably as 1 inch of thickness added.
This sloppy scarcastic language is found throughout the guide. Why should I take it seriously?
It's fairly sensible to accept more sloppy language in something disputing an extraordinary claim than in something making the claim in the first place. If you think about it, you see it everywhere. It's the same reason Snopes is reasonably trusted -- debunking a claim doesn't take nearly the credibility it takes to make one. After a claim is made, the incentives shift, and parties previously uninvolved are brought in. The dialogue changes, but the debate also changes to be more fact-check-y and less initial-claim-make-y. This permits sloppier language to be taken more seriously.
But by all means -- and I say this without sarcasm -- take seriously anything you want using whatever credibility metrics work for you.
My open-source mobile phone development solution: Verizon Broadband, Ubuntu, VoIP, and an ultraportable Fujitsu Lifebook P1510. And with the number of unsecure networks around, I can probably drop the Verizon Broadband one of these days.
Yeah, I may look silly with a laptop against my ear, but it's no sillier than a boombox back in the day. I hope it conveys similar street cred.
Most of the traffic I've seen about the conspiracy theories centers around the most recent Loose Change video. The claims in the video are well-argued but absolutely silly. While trying to explain this to several people who had sent it to me (as well as check to see if maybe some of their stuff was true) I stumbled on an excellent viewer's guide in which the video is taken apart line-by-line and fact/logic-checked. I found it on some cached upload site thing whose reliability I can't vouch for, so I've mirrored it here:
Yes. I recently tried to set up a non-computer-using but smart-and-anal-retentive friend with Ubuntu, which has been a dream compared to other distros I've tried. For the friend, though, it was a complete failure. He loved the philosophy, but too many things went wrong in the first three or four things he tried to do. He's now uninterested in trying Linux again.
I use Linux because it has the kind of window management I want -- namely, Ion. Linux is good on the desktop when it gives you options that you need. But there's a lot of work involved.
'My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance. The search business has been formed,'
Because Microsoft's entire history hasn't been one of moving in to an area where other people have worked out how to do things and then doing them better/cheaper/faster.
As anyone who watches TV via Cox Cable knows, the cable vs. satellite thing is what's on their minds.
+1 insightful -- You're right, this has nothing to do with Generic DVR vs. TiVO. This is Cox getting a hold of TiVO, and advertising it to prospective customers by means of what is effectively a push poll. Crafty.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps people should just stay inside all day.
Hey, Randall here (hey, my account still exists!)
Sometimes the coordinates fall on military bases. Sometimes they're in the ocean. Sometimes they're in the middle of Bill Gates's house (when that one happens, maybe we can work something out). So even if it weren't for the legality issues, there's a big common sense element.
The idea is that you get as close as you can to the point without going onto private property without permission. Most of the time, this means meeting on a road or cul-de-sac or whatnot. The point is just to get people close enough that they can all exchange high fives and then go to a nearby park or bar together.
I've met unfriendly people while out hiking (both for geohashing and for fun). I've also met some astonishingly friendly people, more than you'd expect. People on the whole are decent. But if you're wandering around in strange places in the real world, there are risks inherent to that, and you do have to use your judgment. If you treat the coordinates like commands and try to get at them no matter what, you're doing it wrong.
To everyone who's asked for a large poster of this -- I'm going to be offering large prints of it in the xkcd store before too long, but for a handful of reasons I can't easily do it immediately (I'm in the middle of the holiday rush with shipping out t-shirts). It's cool to hear so many people are interested, though! Thank you!
I would actually like to see someone else create a computer-generated poster with a higher level of detail (there will be algorithms for the mapping on the blag soon). I think you can do some interesting things with this fractal; it'd be neat to see all the websites you visit marked with red dots, more detailed survey info for the registry patchwork, server density/space usage (the 63-74 blocks are more densely populated than anything else), etc.
I thought in the options where you adjust the volume, you can turn down guitar, background, and vocals . . . am I remembering wrong?
Agreed, although at the same time there's a huge amount of societal bias against women in non-media-frenzy situations (the vast majority) which you want to avoid further encouraging, so it's a delicate line to walk. If you look at the statistics on how much rape goes unreported in the first place, it's kind of horrifying. (And let's not even get started on how any discussion of rape immediately draws a flood of "you know, men get raped too!" comments, as if mentioning that (tiny) percentage magically brushes aside all the completely undeniable social gender-related aspects of the issue.)
How did you get this number, Sharon?
I notice that both Questionable Content and Penny Arcade are also down this morning. Someone suggested to me that they were all at the same datacenter. Is this true?
Even though it could just as easily happen to me, it's still satisfying to say "haha, n00bs".
Although I also note that the datacenter holding my server has on-property generators, which I assumed was pretty standard practice.
I used Metapad for a couple years, but discovered it had certain problems where it would insert a junk character at the end of files unexpectedly. This was really bad as I was using it to edit code, so I had to switch to WordPad.
The "read" NTFS driver is included with Ubuntu. The drive is in fact mounted readable -- it's just only readable by root. Nothing to do with legality.
Well, the point of the quote you're mocking is that we can infer something about the purpose of a site from what language it presents itself in -- in this case, the quite relevant fact that their target market speaks English. We can make of that what we will, but it's useful information that provides helpful context.
To both parent and GP, I figured out how to do this. It takes some work, like many things in Linux, but is doable.
t o-breezy.html This may help.
/etc/fstab). From that point on, selling Ubuntu to him as easy-to-use was something of a losing battle.
http://www.ublug.org/ubuntu/twinview/twinview-how
I had to put this in the Device section:
Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x]"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "RenderAccel" "1"
Option "DigitalVibrance" "127" #Vary me
Option "backingstore" "true"
#twinview
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31.5-82.0"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50-70"
Option "MetaModes" "1600x1200,1280x1024; 1280x1024,1280x1024; 1280x1024,NULL; 1024x768,NULL; 800x600,NULL; 640x480,NULL"
Ubuntu has been wonderful compared to other Linux distros. There are still headaches, and I think it's disingenuous to say that it is anywhere near as easy to use as Windows. I gave Dapper (beta 6) to my friend, claiming this. He was happy with the install and was delighted when the first thing he saw was that it had put icons on his desktop for his Windows drive. He clicked on them, and it said "you do not have permission to access this" (because the drives are mounted by root). There was no obvious recourse (the solution being editing
It just really bothers me that literally the first thing he saw on his nice, clean desktop was broken. I have had exactly the same situation in installs on other computers (which is why I knew how to fix it). I sincerely hope this is working in the current release.
I use Ubuntu as my desktop OS, mainly because of Ion3. I love the strength and flexibility of Linux. But I no longer recommend it to those without serious computer experience. Ubuntu is trying very hard, but I think it's gonna take them a couple more years. I know this is the cliche in Linux, "ready for the desktop in five years", and I don't think it will necessarially be that long.
It's just that any OS designed for non-experts needs to do a lot more whole-system novice-user testing.
Parent somehow got a score of 4, Insightful?
Uh... what?
"insightful" on Slashdot = "you said it in a clever way." Around here, cleverly-phrased argument = insight.
He could have just said, "I don't think there are any interesting uses for this." But that would have gotten him modded down, if anything.
The first thing I would do is have the phone update to a page, wherethehellismyphone.com. I would have this constantly updated with rough GPS coordinates. I'm not sure what phones can tell you their rough GPS coords, though. But it could give you all sorts of useful information in case the phone is lost or stolen -- what it last saw, where it was last used, etc.
I mention this because I recently picked up this laptop, and one of my first plans is to get a GPS card installed in it. I'll have it running something netstumbler-like, and if it's lost or stolen, it will do its best to log in and upload the GPS coords to wherethehellismylaptop.com. So, if my laptop is lost or stolen, and the thief leaves it turned on while passing through any open wifi or going online in any way, presto. I could have the site have a Google Maps thingy that shows me where it was most recently spotted and when.
This doesn't even require the GPS card -- any information you can have the device update you with is useful. It could tell me what the person was last looking at, what pages they're frequenting, etc. Get their name from their MySpace page and have the police show up at their door. Letting mobile devices act as servers opens up a lot of these possibilities, including making them easy to use as James-Bond-type spy/bug gadgets and taking a big step in the direction of useful remote presence.
Of course, wherethehellismylaptop.com would require a very secure login if you want any privacy, ever.
Can it run Linux?
In the last month or two, I've undergone a shift. I used to be fairly moderate in all this. I thought Lessig's book made some really good points, and I thought "there's a nice middle ground, it's only fair that the artists protect their rights, and that people should understand their own rights and at the same time not be piracy apologists. I don't pirate stuff very much, and I don't really mind when people do.
But especially with the new HDMI shit, with looking at what the DMCA actually lets people do, and thinking a little more about the big picture, I would like to take this chance to say: screw 'em. I hope the internet takes down the music industry, and then moves on to the movie industry. Let's take some risks, let's give people a little basic freedom, and let's let technology run its course a little and then figure out how to make money off the result. People have a hard time dealing with change, but it happens.
MPAA, I'm gonna go spend a little more time on the beach with my friends and a little less time trying to convince you and your surrogates that I legally own this DVD. Screw you and your careful licensing of permissions. And FSF, you've gained a contributor.
None of this is particularly new or revolutionary, but I want to add my voice to the chorus. Let's shake things up a bit.
Yes, it's a whole new generation of customers since ages ago, in 2003.
Seriously, I want a phone that dials numbers and lets me talk to people. It should ring, vibrate, and tell me when I missed some calls. I can actually see the utility in having a camera in it as well, but that's just because I feel the need to carry some kind of camera with me and it's either that or as a separate keychain device.
For the other stuff, I will use an ultraportable laptop/PDA.
Pssh, I've seen far simpler gravity detectors.
It takes 30,000 years to grow 1 cubic inch of coral
. . . that's a confusing statistic for something that is inherently parallel in nature. It could take 30,000 years to grow 1 cubic inch of coral, and next to it another cubic inch of coral, and then you could say it takes 30,000 years to grow 2 cubic inches of coral. I mean, more than 1 cubic inch of coral grows every 30k years. Is that 1 cubic inch built up per square inch of area? Then it should be phrased differently, probably as 1 inch of thickness added.
I keep trying to read the story, and my brain just keeps seeing GOOGLE AJAX WEB DEVELOPMENT and filling in XML RUBY ON RAILS TAGBLOGCAST WEB 2.0.
It's fairly sensible to accept more sloppy language in something disputing an extraordinary claim than in something making the claim in the first place. If you think about it, you see it everywhere. It's the same reason Snopes is reasonably trusted -- debunking a claim doesn't take nearly the credibility it takes to make one. After a claim is made, the incentives shift, and parties previously uninvolved are brought in. The dialogue changes, but the debate also changes to be more fact-check-y and less initial-claim-make-y. This permits sloppier language to be taken more seriously.
But by all means -- and I say this without sarcasm -- take seriously anything you want using whatever credibility metrics work for you.
My open-source mobile phone development solution: Verizon Broadband, Ubuntu, VoIP, and an ultraportable Fujitsu Lifebook P1510. And with the number of unsecure networks around, I can probably drop the Verizon Broadband one of these days.
Yeah, I may look silly with a laptop against my ear, but it's no sillier than a boombox back in the day. I hope it conveys similar street cred.
Most of the traffic I've seen about the conspiracy theories centers around the most recent Loose Change video. The claims in the video are well-argued but absolutely silly. While trying to explain this to several people who had sent it to me (as well as check to see if maybe some of their stuff was true) I stumbled on an excellent viewer's guide in which the video is taken apart line-by-line and fact/logic-checked. I found it on some cached upload site thing whose reliability I can't vouch for, so I've mirrored it here:
http://xkcd.com/911_loose_change_viewer_guide.pdf
Remember: if you can't identify the fake conspiracy theories, you'll never learn who's really out to get you.
Yes. I recently tried to set up a non-computer-using but smart-and-anal-retentive friend with Ubuntu, which has been a dream compared to other distros I've tried. For the friend, though, it was a complete failure. He loved the philosophy, but too many things went wrong in the first three or four things he tried to do. He's now uninterested in trying Linux again.
I use Linux because it has the kind of window management I want -- namely, Ion. Linux is good on the desktop when it gives you options that you need. But there's a lot of work involved.
'My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance. The search business has been formed,'
Because Microsoft's entire history hasn't been one of moving in to an area where other people have worked out how to do things and then doing them better/cheaper/faster.
As anyone who watches TV via Cox Cable knows, the cable vs. satellite thing is what's on their minds.
+1 insightful -- You're right, this has nothing to do with Generic DVR vs. TiVO. This is Cox getting a hold of TiVO, and advertising it to prospective customers by means of what is effectively a push poll. Crafty.