You know, the more I think about the Penn and Teller examples, the more my reaction is "how can I get in on this?"
So the market's already saturated (har!) with bottled water, and someone took the moblie-phone sticker idea. Magnetic therapy bracelets are good -- what are some other ideas for using this effect to make money off of people, especially if one has the ability to BS the science behind it?
This seems like a good moment to plug the Penn and Teller series Bullshit.
I have so much more respect for the power of suggestion after seeing people try out bottled water brands in a nice restaurant and then say they're so good that they'd pay $6 a bottle for them (and go on for hours about the differences between each bottle). The bottles were all, of course, filled from the hose out back.
Ditto for the people who try out magnetic-therapy gloves, declare that their pain is gone and that they can feel the power as the magnets pass near their skin, and say that they'd pay $30-200 for them. The magnets are, of course, demagnetized.
But what the HELL is/. doing posting a story like this? Or am I just new here?
Sounds like someone spun off a silly version of it into a "we are victims of big brother for trying to help tsunami victims while using linux" story, which has a slashdot/blog popularity factor of 13/15. The only way it could go higher is if the story had claimed the guy had been arrested by SCO's thugs while trying to post a complaint to his congressman about the DCMA stopping him from helping starving tsunami victims to . . . download open-source software.
Seriously. Too good to be true, sounds exactly like an urban legend spun from someone's possibly false details about a real story. The reason this happens is that when you weren't there, you hear some parts and make up the details in your head, assuming you know the whole story. This is how urban legends, in general, happen.
This has all the markings of a story retold by someone who grabbed a few selective details and made them into a blog story that is so good that no one questions it. I'm really hoping that someone comes up with the actual facts here; I see boingboing has a note that they'll have more details soon. Hopefully it'll be explained then.
I asked around, and from what I hear, he was using both lynx AND nmap. So right away he's doing more than he should be. I can't find the sources, but some friends who have dug in further say he was in fact simply trying to hack it. Again, someone should corrobarate soon, and I hope it doesn't get swept aside by the blog flood.
As I said when this story first came up on boingboing,
"Well, this will hit/. eventually, and it won't matter what the facts are, we'll get to sit back and watch the thread pee its collective pants with joy at the perfect victimization story."
This is really, really good. Preventable disease is high on the list of tremendous world problems that are actually relatively easy to solve, we just don't. I recall some WHO report saying that 3 million people die anually from diseases that can be prevented with a pill or shot that causes next to nothing and wouldn't be hard to get to them with just a little funding. So politics aside, I'm enormously happy to see this.
The problem is, nobody can think at 100 words per minute. The only person who would ever need to type that fast would probably be a professional stenographer.
Obviously wrong, because you talk easily at 150-250 WPM, faster when excited.
I certainly wish I could type to people faster in instant messengers. My cousin types at over 150 WPM, and sounds like a machine gun as he talks on AIM.
In those comment threads hundreds of girls are absolutely SWOONING. I really don't understand that gender. But it's a hopeful sign. Wonder if I have a sweater like that in my closet somewhere.
I remember a conversation with Brian Snow, a highly placed senior cryptographer with the NSA. He said he would never trust an encryption algorithm designed by someone who had not earned their bones by first spending a lot of time cracking codes. That did make a lot of sense. I observed that practically no one in the commercial world of cryptography qualified under this criterion. "Yes", he said with a self assured smile, "And that makes our job at NSA so much easier."
-- Phil Zimmerman, PGP User's Guide, rev. 31 Aug 1994
Yes, it's a/.-posted urban legend (how often does that happen) and before I get to anything else, why don't I see an edit yet?
But Re: tsunamis in the open sea -- if memory serves, they are small on the surface but they move the water at all depths, which is how they carry tremendous energy. So talking about them being "short" is misleading; they're as deep as the ocean, unlike wind-driven waves.
That was one of the first problems I worked on back when I was learning calculus, and I found that there's basically no way to beat chemical batteries as far as power density goes even with perfect conversion efficiency. It's such a cool idea though that I keep playing with it. You'd have the mass spinning in a spherical shell and the outside shell would rotate around it so you could handle it like a baseball, etc . .. But for low, portable-ish masses it's way inefficient and I don't think it gets much better as you get bigger.
This problem does suffer the flaw that, if it is played like normal, the player doesn't really need to know what is said, and will therefore probably ignore it.
Did you not read the article? Maybe you assumed, like I did, that the foriegn language replaces the nonsense language used by the sims, which you don't need to understand. But german/whatever actually replaces the language in dialogues and menus, which the player does need to understand.
this and other comments keep mentioning hot-air balloons because it's easy to imagine heating air dynamically.
hot air gives lousy, LOUSY lift for volume. so so much less than helium.
(ideal gas law and shit, you go up 50 degrees celsius and that's going from 300 to 350 kelvin and that gives you a few tenths of a density difference, meaning maybe up to 100 grams per cubic meter, versus the full 1000/m^3 you get with helium. just numbers off the top of my head might be off a bit, but the principles are right)
I bet you $50 you'd never get a non-ultralight plane held up by hot air balloons. helium, maybe. hot air, not a chance.
They've got a lot of fascinating discussion of the century and the people who shaped it, I've gotten sucked back into reading it just while finding the proper links.
As long as there are strange people in groups, there will be strange games. Katamari Damacy has been a hit, and that, at least, should be a comforting thought.
All joking aside, the "autonomous" means it isn't getting controlled constantly by people watching the video feedback, which is usually the case.
I've built a few subersibles to do lake-bottom surveys in New England that were basically glorified radio-controlled cars, and from what I understand that's basically how the Titanic-exploring bots worked. There's been some absolutely fascinating talk about building an army of small subs like the ones in this story that can survey automatically, giving us -- finally -- a decent seafloor map.
And the potential -- imagine locating every single shipwreck of every ship that sunk throughout history. I mean, that's a little bit of a stretch, but you get the idea. So I'm glad to see this step in the right direction.
I don't believe it could be a contrail because it runs smack into the horizon without losing brightness. Geometrically, it doesn't seem right, though I could be wrong.
Additionally, if you were in the shadow, the sun have to be along the line of the contrail. But the sun is off to the right, far from the line. So that's not possible. Though again, I could be missing something.
I wasn't even assuming we'd BEEN to Mars yet. I was talking about meteorites and what we should conclude from them not having infected Earth yet, and how it affected what we should do with our probes.
clarification: in the last paragraph I meant "we are okay for the two reasons that 1. germs tend not to be built to just generally destroy shit, and 2. even if they were, they'd probably be designed to destroy martian shit, not human." the one wasn't following from the other.
If infection was going to take place, it already would have?
Then how come we're not finding our bacteria on mars?
Either (a) no bacteria here can possibly live or evolve to live on Mars and probably vice versa, or (b) your premise is false and the whole 'meteorite' process, with its extreme heat and cold and no oxygen, does a pretty good job of killing interesting bacteria (that is, any infection that was going to happen has NOT necessarially happened).
if (a) we're safe -- and people seem to think it unlikely -- but if (b) then maybe our collection processes are worth being careful about.
All that said, I doubt martian bacteria will be a danger to us. germs tend to evolve to work with their hosts but not do too much damage; things like ebola are the exception, not the norm. I don't expect martian bacteria to have much of an interest in destroying human cells. But that's just a guess. I could be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
An illegal service is one that directs you to somewhere where copyrighted material can be found?
Add some net support to ParentScan and it would be . . . NAPSTER!
You know, the more I think about the Penn and Teller examples, the more my reaction is "how can I get in on this?"
So the market's already saturated (har!) with bottled water, and someone took the moblie-phone sticker idea. Magnetic therapy bracelets are good -- what are some other ideas for using this effect to make money off of people, especially if one has the ability to BS the science behind it?
This seems like a good moment to plug the Penn and Teller series Bullshit.
/. doing posting a story like this? Or am I just new here?
I have so much more respect for the power of suggestion after seeing people try out bottled water brands in a nice restaurant and then say they're so good that they'd pay $6 a bottle for them (and go on for hours about the differences between each bottle). The bottles were all, of course, filled from the hose out back.
Ditto for the people who try out magnetic-therapy gloves, declare that their pain is gone and that they can feel the power as the magnets pass near their skin, and say that they'd pay $30-200 for them. The magnets are, of course, demagnetized.
But what the HELL is
Sounds like someone spun off a silly version of it into a "we are victims of big brother for trying to help tsunami victims while using linux" story, which has a slashdot/blog popularity factor of 13/15. The only way it could go higher is if the story had claimed the guy had been arrested by SCO's thugs while trying to post a complaint to his congressman about the DCMA stopping him from helping starving tsunami victims to . . . download open-source software.
Seriously. Too good to be true, sounds exactly like an urban legend spun from someone's possibly false details about a real story. The reason this happens is that when you weren't there, you hear some parts and make up the details in your head, assuming you know the whole story. This is how urban legends, in general, happen.
My first reaction was:
/. eventually, and it won't matter what the facts are, we'll get to sit back and watch the thread pee its collective pants with joy at the perfect victimization story."
This has all the markings of a story retold by someone who grabbed a few selective details and made them into a blog story that is so good that no one questions it. I'm really hoping that someone comes up with the actual facts here; I see boingboing has a note that they'll have more details soon. Hopefully it'll be explained then.
I asked around, and from what I hear, he was using both lynx AND nmap. So right away he's doing more than he should be. I can't find the sources, but some friends who have dug in further say he was in fact simply trying to hack it. Again, someone should corrobarate soon, and I hope it doesn't get swept aside by the blog flood.
As I said when this story first came up on boingboing,
"Well, this will hit
This is really, really good. Preventable disease is high on the list of tremendous world problems that are actually relatively easy to solve, we just don't. I recall some WHO report saying that 3 million people die anually from diseases that can be prevented with a pill or shot that causes next to nothing and wouldn't be hard to get to them with just a little funding. So politics aside, I'm enormously happy to see this.
Oh, good, I see two of the three most common letters are under the left pinky, one forcing you to stretch a little.
On the other hand, I'm not an expert.
The problem is, nobody can think at 100 words per minute. The only person who would ever need to type that fast would probably be a professional stenographer.
Obviously wrong, because you talk easily at 150-250 WPM, faster when excited.
I certainly wish I could type to people faster in instant messengers. My cousin types at over 150 WPM, and sounds like a machine gun as he talks on AIM.
He was NOT in Teen Beat. This story is wrong, the second time in about as many days that Snopes has scooped Slashdot.
He was NOT in Teen Beat. This story is wrong, the second time in about as many days that Snopes has scooped Slashdot.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/ohnotheydidnt /946946.html Link to the livejournal post where I saw this yesterday.
In those comment threads hundreds of girls are absolutely SWOONING. I really don't understand that gender. But it's a hopeful sign. Wonder if I have a sweater like that in my closet somewhere.
-- Phil Zimmerman, PGP User's Guide, rev. 31 Aug 1994
Yes, it's a /.-posted urban legend (how often does that happen) and before I get to anything else, why don't I see an edit yet?
But Re: tsunamis in the open sea -- if memory serves, they are small on the surface but they move the water at all depths, which is how they carry tremendous energy. So talking about them being "short" is misleading; they're as deep as the ocean, unlike wind-driven waves.
Livejournal is something like 65:35 female:male.
That was one of the first problems I worked on back when I was learning calculus, and I found that there's basically no way to beat chemical batteries as far as power density goes even with perfect conversion efficiency. It's such a cool idea though that I keep playing with it. You'd have the mass spinning in a spherical shell and the outside shell would rotate around it so you could handle it like a baseball, etc . . .
But for low, portable-ish masses it's way inefficient and I don't think it gets much better as you get bigger.
This problem does suffer the flaw that, if it is played like normal, the player doesn't really need to know what is said, and will therefore probably ignore it.
Did you not read the article? Maybe you assumed, like I did, that the foriegn language replaces the nonsense language used by the sims, which you don't need to understand. But german/whatever actually replaces the language in dialogues and menus, which the player does need to understand.
this and other comments keep mentioning hot-air balloons because it's easy to imagine heating air dynamically.
hot air gives lousy, LOUSY lift for volume. so so much less than helium.
(ideal gas law and shit, you go up 50 degrees celsius and that's going from 300 to 350 kelvin and that gives you a few tenths of a density difference, meaning maybe up to 100 grams per cubic meter, versus the full 1000/m^3 you get with helium. just numbers off the top of my head might be off a bit, but the principles are right)
I bet you $50 you'd never get a non-ultralight plane held up by hot air balloons. helium, maybe. hot air, not a chance.
Why Hitler was not Person of the Century
They've got a lot of fascinating discussion of the century and the people who shaped it, I've gotten sucked back into reading it just while finding the proper links.
As long as there are strange people in groups, there will be strange games. Katamari Damacy has been a hit, and that, at least, should be a comforting thought.
Well, what's the answer? I'm lazy.
.sex
Oh, fine, make me use my own brain.
All joking aside, the "autonomous" means it isn't getting controlled constantly by people watching the video feedback, which is usually the case.
I've built a few subersibles to do lake-bottom surveys in New England that were basically glorified radio-controlled cars, and from what I understand that's basically how the Titanic-exploring bots worked. There's been some absolutely fascinating talk about building an army of small subs like the ones in this story that can survey automatically, giving us -- finally -- a decent seafloor map.
And the potential -- imagine locating every single shipwreck of every ship that sunk throughout history. I mean, that's a little bit of a stretch, but you get the idea. So I'm glad to see this step in the right direction.
I don't believe it could be a contrail because it runs smack into the horizon without losing brightness. Geometrically, it doesn't seem right, though I could be wrong.
Additionally, if you were in the shadow, the sun have to be along the line of the contrail. But the sun is off to the right, far from the line. So that's not possible. Though again, I could be missing something.
I wasn't even assuming we'd BEEN to Mars yet. I was talking about meteorites and what we should conclude from them not having infected Earth yet, and how it affected what we should do with our probes.
clarification: in the last paragraph I meant "we are okay for the two reasons that 1. germs tend not to be built to just generally destroy shit, and 2. even if they were, they'd probably be designed to destroy martian shit, not human." the one wasn't following from the other.
If infection was going to take place, it already would have?
Then how come we're not finding our bacteria on mars?
Either (a) no bacteria here can possibly live or evolve to live on Mars and probably vice versa, or (b) your premise is false and the whole 'meteorite' process, with its extreme heat and cold and no oxygen, does a pretty good job of killing interesting bacteria (that is, any infection that was going to happen has NOT necessarially happened).
if (a) we're safe -- and people seem to think it unlikely -- but if (b) then maybe our collection processes are worth being careful about.
All that said, I doubt martian bacteria will be a danger to us. germs tend to evolve to work with their hosts but not do too much damage; things like ebola are the exception, not the norm. I don't expect martian bacteria to have much of an interest in destroying human cells. But that's just a guess. I could be wrong.