> > [method of exercising a cat] "...directing an intense coherent beam of invisible light ~ to produce a bright highly-focused pattern of light at the intersection of the beam and an opaque surface ". > > (emphasis mine) Now I don't know about them, but all those years of college physics taught me that unless the wavelength is altered, "invisible" light cannot become "visible," and focusing light doesn't alter its wavelength. Therefore, this patent is impossible to implement, and therefore a waste of cash and ink.
Naw. Infrared light, such as that produced from a CO2 laser, is invisible to the human eye.
So you use a 10W CO2 laser. Believe me, you'll get plenty of light wherever the beam intersects with an opaque surface, and while I'm not convinced that "fascinated" is the right word to use, I can guarantee you that any cats in the vicinity will move very quickly.
(Note: If your cat moves towards the light, you'll need to get a new cat. But think of it as Darwin's way of telling you that you probably needed a new cat anyways.)
> I wouldn't mind watching Tampax commercials during a football game if they could make me laugh.
"So, honey, you said it was that time of the month. *waving hand towards Tampax ad* So what's up for this weekend - horseback riding or mountain biking?"
> I'm more concerned about a cabinet level spy chief, which reminds of of the abuses of J. Edgar Hoover, than taxes.
"When J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, we supported him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either!"
- Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, some time next week.
> I see your point but the thing I find funny is that best tunes I downloaded, in my opinion, were by Bing Crosby. And it was a recording of a radio show that was broadcast free at the time...
Yeah, and truth be told, I've got nothing against Bing.
It's the 5000 "$POPSTAR_OF_THE_WEEK Sings $CAROL" compilations albums that always show up this time of year that just make me want to... well... sneak into a CD pressing plant and replace an entire year's Xmas lineup of RIAA crap with John Valby:)
> What are some examples of uses of this long-term inactive storage? I can understand like maybe a one-year archive, but you can keep that on an active raid array if need be.
For home use, pretty obvious - MP3z, DiVX movies, and TiVO shows. Re-downloading the MP3z and pr0n^H^H^H^HDiVX movies would suck because you'd have to find and re-download the missing files. Likewise, re-recording the TV shows on your PVR would be a pain because you'd have to wait for your cable company to air them again.
You'd keep the RAID array up at home, and that'd be your media box.
But you'd still need a couple of 120G drives down at the local bank in the event of a fire at home. Or better yet, at your Grandma's house 100 miles away, if you live in an earthquake-prone area.
And while I've mentioned the time cost of re-downloading, this risk really isn't about piracy - even if you own everything on your media server, you can't re-encode your CD or DVD collection if said collection has been transmogrified into a melted lump of goo or shards of polycarb.
Every time you visit Grandma, or once every six months, whichever is less frequent, you swap drives.
(Just remember to pack the drives securely when you drive to Grandma's. And drive carefully. RAID won't protect you if all the drives in the array go sailing through the window at 60 mph;-)
> The Library of Congress is attempting to answer this question as they have huge amounts of media that is on highly degrading (nitrate-based films) materials. > Their answer? A huge RAID array starting at 180TB and growing steadily over time.
Last time I looked, one Library of Congress was only 10TB, and I bought a 100G drive for $100.
So my rig sported a cool 0.02 LoC in my rig. I felt gr8. I mean, I 0wn3d.
Now you're telling me I only have 0.00055555 Libraries of Congress? I f33l s0 l4m3.
> > > would have been 4 sharp, 'cept the cabbie bringing the bride got lost > >
Cabbie? You tight fisted git! >
>
No kidding! Had a cab pulled up to pick up my wife at our wedding, there would not have been a wedding!
So the wedding was at 411 because the bride was 404?
And yeah, I don't blame your wife. I mean, if I was standing at the altar, about to get married, and my wife suddenly showed up in a cab, I'd probably get a big 403 from the both of 'em.
(Unless I was in Utah, where that sorta thing goes on all the time. )
>Mr. Spammer, I am publishing my price:
>Your head. On a plate.
Morden: "What do YOU want?"
Vir: "I'd like to live JUST long enough to be there when they cut your head off and stick it on a pike in front of Verio headquarters, as a reminder to the next ten generations that some things come with TOO high a price. I'd look up into your lifeless eyes, and I'd wave - just like this. (gives happy little wave). Can you and your associates arrange that for me?"
> > "The food supply is so sparse that the bugs reproduce maybe only once in a thousand, or perhaps even a million years. That means organisms the scientists are seeing today have had little opportunity to change since the earliest history of life on earth."
> > Allow me to be the first to put a paranoid spin on the whole issue... where a microbe has lain nearly dormant for 65 million years, living on the odd hydrogen atom, patiently waiting for its chance to do for humankind what it did for the dinosaurs. Nobody is safe this time!
Awright, so it's more like the Deep Hot Slow Biosphere:-)
I find the idea of an cell that divides on such a long timeframe fascinating - how the hell does it store its chemical/energy supply and keep it stable for so damn long before finally having "enough" to do cell division? (or budding?)
Any bio geeks now how these things actually reproduce? (I'm imagining a rock-ful of these would show them in various stages of division. Or does the reproduction actually proceed quickly, relying on a 1000-year accumulated store of energy?)
> The Ipsos-Reid results summary is very vague anyway... it doesn't say that poll respondants paid for a download service, just that they "paid for any music they have downloaded". They very well could have bought a CD of music that they downloaded online... I would think many people would consider that paying for the music.
Or most likely of all: They don't know the distinction between what their own ISP serves and content they get from somewhere else.
I'll bet most of that 31% said something like "I pay $21.95 a month to subscribe to the Internet. I get my email at $ISP.com. My start page is $ISP.com, and that's where I go when I surf the web. My friend gave me this Kazaa thing, which lets my Internet get music too. I'm paying $ISP.com $21.95 a month them to give me email, the web, and music."
It's actually pretty natural for a naive user to assume that as long as they pay to access "The Internet", and just as "The Internet" includes email and a web browser, so long as their experience of "The Internet" includes downloading music, they'll continue to believe they're paying to download music.
Such users aren't idiots, they're just naive users who have constructed inaccurate mental models based on their experience: In every other area of their experience, paying a monthly fee and getting access to $FOO as long as they keep paying, is called "paying to subscribe to $FOO." Why should they expect the Internet to be any different?
> Sunday 11:01am - Typed the words 'christmas' into eMule.
Sunday 11:02 am - Typed the words 'john valby' int o my favorite P2P app. Downloaded "Herniated Jingle Balls".
> Monday 07:45am - Moved 5 downloaded albums into my not-shared folder and looked at the other 10 that are still downloading.
Monday 07:45 am - Begin playback. Wipe coffee off monitor. Replace keyboard.
Monday 07:46 am - Realize I'll never have to grimace my way through yet another sickly-sweet goddamn Christmas album again because I now know the real lyrics to all the Christmas carols.
Monday 12:30 am - Sent a money order to John Valby and a note of thanks.
> Ipsos-Reid claims that 60 million Americans
download music, and 31% (about 18 million) "reported having paid for any of the music they have downloaded." Maybe I'm missing one, but
You and Ipsos-Reid missed something.
It took me a while to figure it out, but I'll bet the 31% that "reported" having paid for the music did this:
Q: Did you download music from the Internet?
A: Yes, I've downloaded music from the Innurnet.
Q: Did you pay for the music you downloaded?
A: 69% - "Fuck no, I l33ched it from a P2P service, FTP site, or USENET newsgroup"
A: 31% - "Of course. The TV ads for my ISP said I could listen to music with AOL 8.0! For just $21.95 per month, a friend of mine showed me this Kazaa thing that puts lots of music in my AOL! He says it even works with other Internets too, not just AOL!1!! But $21.95 a month for all that music is a pretty good price!"
> Sometimes, when you're feeling particularly reclusive, force yourself to take your walk in a populated area, just to make sure that your subconscious still has a fresh image of what people look like.
Note to self: Lock myself indoors for at least six months after the release of Doom III, just in case anyone else takes your advice:-)
> Has anyone suffered at the hands of this diamond gem? It's a dated game, I know, but when I received it, it was PURELY a matter of having other things I more greatly desired to do that enabled me to leave the machine. In early college I missed countless dinners.
> >4:00 p.m. Home from class, sit down to CivII. > 7:39 p.m. Look at clock for first time. Missed dinner. Dammit.
Bah, you lightweight, you haven't even begun to suffer:-)
4:00 pm - Home from work, sit down to install shiny package UPS-d00d brung me.
7:39 am - Look at clock for first time. Missed breakfast. Damnit. *g*
> The game is brilliantly designed so that there is NEVER a point where you have nothing to do on a given turn; you never have all tasks sufficiently completed at once, and the game returns control to you with 50 new tasks to close or issues to tie up.
IMO, that's the hallmark of good game design. Sid Meier's "God Games" (CivI, II, III, Alpha Centauri ("SMAC") and Alien Crossfire ("SMAX")) all feature this behiavor, as do most of the Sims games. The Civ series gives you a set of goals from which to choose, and the Sims give you the meta-goal of figuring out what goal you want to achieve.
Long as we're talking about open-endedness, if you enjoy a dungeon crawl, don't care about graphics, but love an engrossing story/gameplay (albeit a much more linear story than the preceding strategy games), go for Wizardry I through VII/Gold, and Wizardry 8 if you can find it.
(Asides: Wizardry IV is IMHO still the most challenging RPG ever written. The maps will simply make your brain melt. Wizardry Gold - the Win3.1 re-issue of Wizardry 7 - is a good story with a wonderful automap for playability. I can't tell you how relieved I was to put away the pencil and graph paper. Wiz8 is beautiful to look at, but combat progresses glacially. I'd recommend getting 8, but would say 7/Gold was the more playable game of the two.)
> Having a life: the anti-addiction entity.
I prefer single-player RPG and strategy gaming simply because I don't want to deal with the ickiness of MMORPG human-player interaction.
While that sometimes detracts from gameplay (the AI has to be half-decent, or the game very well-designed), it's nice to game on your own terms. (I game because I want to, not because I have to - a direct offshoot of being able to game when, and for how long, I want to.
As for MMORPG addiction - there's a word for "having to be online from 9-to-5 every day because your Guild/Clan needs you". It's called work, and even if it's 9:00pm to 5:00am, it sux0rz.:-)
> Superconducting power lines would transmit electricity from power plants to homes without most of the energy loss that occurs now
> >...unless the temperature ever goes above freezing... for DRY ICE.
So 90% of Canada is safe. At least, it sure feels that way. *G*
Sign him up to various organizations: > -NAMBLA > -The Klan > -The Rosie O'Donnel Fan club
Objection!
Judging from the pr0n spams I've gotten from eithe rRalsky, or his close associate Haberli, NAMBLA's members are probably customers.
As for the Klan, no way. No mixing of races, because it's against God's will for a human to lie with an animal, remember? They may refer to the melanin-enhanced among us as "mud people", but the Klan still uses the word people. That doesn't apply to spammers, of course.
Rosie O'Donnell Fan Club? Sure, I'd pay good money to see Rosie sit on Ralsky and crush him to death like the piece of cockroach shit he is (please convey my apologies to the Cockroach Fecal Matter Anti-Defamation League), but I'm afraid Ralsky would enjoy it too much. If I know it, you think the Rosie Fan Club doesn't also know it, and are taking precautions?
If you don't want these exciting offers, why don't you just opt out?
I'm sure that Aaron Adams will be happy to stop sending you stuff. Now, whether Aaron Afton will stop sending you stuff, you'll have to ask him to stop, too. But by DMA rules, the opt-out is only good for one person, and for one year. That's okay. By the time you've opted out of Zeke Zjibidan's list of exciting offers, you should have at least a couple of days before Aaron Adams can ask you if you're sure you still wanna be opted out of his Aaron's list.
(Okay, so I admit that opting Ralsky into junk mail isn't quite as much fun as, say, opting him into a service that would have gone all-Vlad-the-Impaler on him in front of Chinanet's headquarters as a warning to the Falun Gong and Level3, but it sounds like it was a delightful bit of revenge. Kudos to whoever came up with the idea and to all who participated. I wish I'd been a part of it.)
> this is *exactly* the kind of elitist attitude that is directly responsible for OSS *not* being more widely accepted.
Precisely. Another part of the problem is that OSS developers, typically being geographically-disperse and having little access to funding, have no contact with their end users during the design and development phase and cannot do usability testing.
(There's also a "willingness" aspect -- a developer is often not the right person to be doing usability testing with naive users. It's a touchy-feely kind of task, which most developers, OSS or not, wouldn't enjoy, let alone be able to do it well. In commercial environments, that's what the human-factors folks are for.)
Which is how we got to the present situation on OSS and usability testing:
"When writing Soviet GPL code, user interface tests you!"
> Yeah! undead and red. Course they gotta be banned. > >Attack of the Undead Seafood Zombies, coming to a web site near you...
Maybe that's it! What if Red Lobster had an FAQ about why lobsters turn red when boiled, and some lame-azz.cn censorware picked up on "red" and "dead" in the same sentence, and mistook it for the Cold War anticommunist slogan.
> Because they're red. You know, those Red Lobsters just don't have the right philosophical attitude, waving their lobster claws around and generally raising a fuss.
The day I see a red lobster waving its claws is the day I start oiling my chainsaw garlic butter: "Evil Dead IV: Undead Lobster Grooviness!"
> There is the huge airship hangar and stuff down in San Jose, on the same site as NASA Ames, that should also be worth a visit. Think you have to be a US citizen to get in though.
Also, directly in the shadow of a huge airship hangar at Moffett Field, is the Computer History Museum.
Very geek-friendly, geared towards a technical audience, and not at all dumbed-down like the "kid-friendly" computer sections in "normal" museums.
The
site says open Wednesday/Friday at 1300h, and the First and Third Saturdays of each month at 1300 and 1400h. Admittance to Moffet Field requires that you show driver's licence or other photo ID, but I don't think you have to be a US citizen.
Upcoming lectures include Steve Wozniak on December 10th. (woot!)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> (emphasis mine) Now I don't know about them, but all those years of college physics taught me that unless the wavelength is altered, "invisible" light cannot become "visible," and focusing light doesn't alter its wavelength. Therefore, this patent is impossible to implement, and therefore a waste of cash and ink.
Naw. Infrared light, such as that produced from a CO2 laser, is invisible to the human eye.
So you use a 10W CO2 laser. Believe me, you'll get plenty of light wherever the beam intersects with an opaque surface, and while I'm not convinced that "fascinated" is the right word to use, I can guarantee you that any cats in the vicinity will move very quickly.
(Note: If your cat moves towards the light, you'll need to get a new cat. But think of it as Darwin's way of telling you that you probably needed a new cat anyways.)
"So, honey, you said it was that time of the month. *waving hand towards Tampax ad* So what's up for this weekend - horseback riding or mountain biking?"
Works for me.
"When J. Edgar Hoover was head of the FBI, we supported him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either!"
- Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, some time next week.
Cow Orker: "Here, Tackhead, hold my pet rock while I get some of that wonderful decaf!"
Tackhead: "Yep. Decaf rots the mind."
Yeah, and truth be told, I've got nothing against Bing.
It's the 5000 "$POPSTAR_OF_THE_WEEK Sings $CAROL" compilations albums that always show up this time of year that just make me want to... well... sneak into a CD pressing plant and replace an entire year's Xmas lineup of RIAA crap with John Valby :)
For home use, pretty obvious - MP3z, DiVX movies, and TiVO shows. Re-downloading the MP3z and pr0n^H^H^H^HDiVX movies would suck because you'd have to find and re-download the missing files. Likewise, re-recording the TV shows on your PVR would be a pain because you'd have to wait for your cable company to air them again.
You'd keep the RAID array up at home, and that'd be your media box.
But you'd still need a couple of 120G drives down at the local bank in the event of a fire at home. Or better yet, at your Grandma's house 100 miles away, if you live in an earthquake-prone area.
And while I've mentioned the time cost of re-downloading, this risk really isn't about piracy - even if you own everything on your media server, you can't re-encode your CD or DVD collection if said collection has been transmogrified into a melted lump of goo or shards of polycarb.
Every time you visit Grandma, or once every six months, whichever is less frequent, you swap drives.
(Just remember to pack the drives securely when you drive to Grandma's. And drive carefully. RAID won't protect you if all the drives in the array go sailing through the window at 60 mph ;-)
> Their answer? A huge RAID array starting at 180TB and growing steadily over time.
Last time I looked, one Library of Congress was only 10TB, and I bought a 100G drive for $100.
So my rig sported a cool 0.02 LoC in my rig. I felt gr8. I mean, I 0wn3d.
Now you're telling me I only have 0.00055555 Libraries of Congress? I f33l s0 l4m3.
Bastards.
> > Cabbie? You tight fisted git!
>
> No kidding! Had a cab pulled up to pick up my wife at our wedding, there would not have been a wedding!
So the wedding was at 411 because the bride was 404?
And yeah, I don't blame your wife. I mean, if I was standing at the altar, about to get married, and my wife suddenly showed up in a cab, I'd probably get a big 403 from the both of 'em. (Unless I was in Utah, where that sorta thing goes on all the time. )
>Your head. On a plate.
Morden: "What do YOU want?"
Vir: "I'd like to live JUST long enough to be there when they cut your head off and stick it on a pike in front of Verio headquarters, as a reminder to the next ten generations that some things come with TOO high a price. I'd look up into your lifeless eyes, and I'd wave - just like this. (gives happy little wave). Can you and your associates arrange that for me?"
- Spamylon 5: "Over the Coals"
>
> Allow me to be the first to put a paranoid spin on the whole issue... where a microbe has lain nearly dormant for 65 million years, living on the odd hydrogen atom, patiently waiting for its chance to do for humankind what it did for the dinosaurs. Nobody is safe this time!
Awright, so it's more like the Deep Hot Slow Biosphere :-)
I find the idea of an cell that divides on such a long timeframe fascinating - how the hell does it store its chemical/energy supply and keep it stable for so damn long before finally having "enough" to do cell division? (or budding?)
Any bio geeks now how these things actually reproduce? (I'm imagining a rock-ful of these would show them in various stages of division. Or does the reproduction actually proceed quickly, relying on a 1000-year accumulated store of energy?)
Or most likely of all: They don't know the distinction between what their own ISP serves and content they get from somewhere else.
I'll bet most of that 31% said something like "I pay $21.95 a month to subscribe to the Internet. I get my email at $ISP.com. My start page is $ISP.com, and that's where I go when I surf the web. My friend gave me this Kazaa thing, which lets my Internet get music too. I'm paying $ISP.com $21.95 a month them to give me email, the web, and music."
It's actually pretty natural for a naive user to assume that as long as they pay to access "The Internet", and just as "The Internet" includes email and a web browser, so long as their experience of "The Internet" includes downloading music, they'll continue to believe they're paying to download music.
Such users aren't idiots, they're just naive users who have constructed inaccurate mental models based on their experience: In every other area of their experience, paying a monthly fee and getting access to $FOO as long as they keep paying, is called "paying to subscribe to $FOO." Why should they expect the Internet to be any different?
> Sunday 11:01am - Typed the words 'christmas' into eMule.
Sunday 11:02 am - Typed the words 'john valby' int o my favorite P2P app. Downloaded "Herniated Jingle Balls".
> Monday 07:45am - Moved 5 downloaded albums into my not-shared folder and looked at the other 10 that are still downloading.
Monday 07:45 am - Begin playback. Wipe coffee off monitor. Replace keyboard.
Monday 07:46 am - Realize I'll never have to grimace my way through yet another sickly-sweet goddamn Christmas album again because I now know the real lyrics to all the Christmas carols.
Monday 12:30 am - Sent a money order to John Valby and a note of thanks.
You and Ipsos-Reid missed something.
It took me a while to figure it out, but I'll bet the 31% that "reported" having paid for the music did this:
Q: Did you download music from the Internet?
A: Yes, I've downloaded music from the Innurnet.
Q: Did you pay for the music you downloaded?
A: 69% - "Fuck no, I l33ched it from a P2P service, FTP site, or USENET newsgroup"
A: 31% - "Of course. The TV ads for my ISP said I could listen to music with AOL 8.0! For just $21.95 per month, a friend of mine showed me this Kazaa thing that puts lots of music in my AOL! He says it even works with other Internets too, not just AOL!1!! But $21.95 a month for all that music is a pretty good price!"
Note to self: Lock myself indoors for at least six months after the release of Doom III, just in case anyone else takes your advice :-)
>
>4:00 p.m. Home from class, sit down to CivII.
> 7:39 p.m. Look at clock for first time. Missed dinner. Dammit. Bah, you lightweight, you haven't even begun to suffer
4:00 pm - Home from work, sit down to install shiny package UPS-d00d brung me.
7:39 am - Look at clock for first time. Missed breakfast. Damnit. *g*
> The game is brilliantly designed so that there is NEVER a point where you have nothing to do on a given turn; you never have all tasks sufficiently completed at once, and the game returns control to you with 50 new tasks to close or issues to tie up.
IMO, that's the hallmark of good game design. Sid Meier's "God Games" (CivI, II, III, Alpha Centauri ("SMAC") and Alien Crossfire ("SMAX")) all feature this behiavor, as do most of the Sims games. The Civ series gives you a set of goals from which to choose, and the Sims give you the meta-goal of figuring out what goal you want to achieve.
Long as we're talking about open-endedness, if you enjoy a dungeon crawl, don't care about graphics, but love an engrossing story/gameplay (albeit a much more linear story than the preceding strategy games), go for Wizardry I through VII/Gold, and Wizardry 8 if you can find it.
(Asides: Wizardry IV is IMHO still the most challenging RPG ever written. The maps will simply make your brain melt. Wizardry Gold - the Win3.1 re-issue of Wizardry 7 - is a good story with a wonderful automap for playability. I can't tell you how relieved I was to put away the pencil and graph paper. Wiz8 is beautiful to look at, but combat progresses glacially. I'd recommend getting 8, but would say 7/Gold was the more playable game of the two.)
> Having a life: the anti-addiction entity.
I prefer single-player RPG and strategy gaming simply because I don't want to deal with the ickiness of MMORPG human-player interaction.
While that sometimes detracts from gameplay (the AI has to be half-decent, or the game very well-designed), it's nice to game on your own terms. (I game because I want to, not because I have to - a direct offshoot of being able to game when, and for how long, I want to.
As for MMORPG addiction - there's a word for "having to be online from 9-to-5 every day because your Guild/Clan needs you". It's called work, and even if it's 9:00pm to 5:00am, it sux0rz. :-)
>
>...unless the temperature ever goes above freezing... for DRY ICE.
So 90% of Canada is safe. At least, it sure feels that way. *G*
According to this, there's 12 tons of pig shite "near Halsted and Maple, in West Bloomfield, IL".
I doubt it's the fresh stuff, though. That'd be quality pig shite.
Is something you find in the dictionary between shit and syphillis.
So's "spammer".
Shit, syphillis, and spammers.
If I had to choose any two, I'd take the shit and the syph.
At least we can get rid of the first two.
> -NAMBLA
> -The Klan
> -The Rosie O'Donnel Fan club
Objection!
Judging from the pr0n spams I've gotten from eithe rRalsky, or his close associate Haberli, NAMBLA's members are probably customers.
As for the Klan, no way. No mixing of races, because it's against God's will for a human to lie with an animal, remember? They may refer to the melanin-enhanced among us as "mud people", but the Klan still uses the word people. That doesn't apply to spammers, of course.
Rosie O'Donnell Fan Club? Sure, I'd pay good money to see Rosie sit on Ralsky and crush him to death like the piece of cockroach shit he is (please convey my apologies to the Cockroach Fecal Matter Anti-Defamation League), but I'm afraid Ralsky would enjoy it too much. If I know it, you think the Rosie Fan Club doesn't also know it, and are taking precautions?
If you don't want these exciting offers, why don't you just opt out?
I'm sure that Aaron Adams will be happy to stop sending you stuff. Now, whether Aaron Afton will stop sending you stuff, you'll have to ask him to stop, too. But by DMA rules, the opt-out is only good for one person, and for one year. That's okay. By the time you've opted out of Zeke Zjibidan's list of exciting offers, you should have at least a couple of days before Aaron Adams can ask you if you're sure you still wanna be opted out of his Aaron's list.
(Okay, so I admit that opting Ralsky into junk mail isn't quite as much fun as, say, opting him into a service that would have gone all-Vlad-the-Impaler on him in front of Chinanet's headquarters as a warning to the Falun Gong and Level3, but it sounds like it was a delightful bit of revenge. Kudos to whoever came up with the idea and to all who participated. I wish I'd been a part of it.)
>
> Man, remember when we were worried about Carnivore?
Da, comrade. In Soviet Russia, umm, they watched KGB?
Precisely. Another part of the problem is that OSS developers, typically being geographically-disperse and having little access to funding, have no contact with their end users during the design and development phase and cannot do usability testing.
(There's also a "willingness" aspect -- a developer is often not the right person to be doing usability testing with naive users. It's a touchy-feely kind of task, which most developers, OSS or not, wouldn't enjoy, let alone be able to do it well. In commercial environments, that's what the human-factors folks are for.)
Which is how we got to the present situation on OSS and usability testing:
"When writing Soviet GPL code, user interface tests you!"
>
>Attack of the Undead Seafood Zombies, coming to a web site near you...
Maybe that's it! What if Red Lobster had an FAQ about why lobsters turn red when boiled, and some lame-azz .cn censorware picked up on "red" and "dead" in the same sentence, and mistook it for the Cold War anticommunist slogan.
"Better undead than red!" :)
The day I see a red lobster waving its claws is the day I start oiling my chainsaw garlic butter: "Evil Dead IV: Undead Lobster Grooviness!"
Also, directly in the shadow of a huge airship hangar at Moffett Field, is the Computer History Museum.
Very geek-friendly, geared towards a technical audience, and not at all dumbed-down like the "kid-friendly" computer sections in "normal" museums.
The site says open Wednesday/Friday at 1300h, and the First and Third Saturdays of each month at 1300 and 1400h. Admittance to Moffet Field requires that you show driver's licence or other photo ID, but I don't think you have to be a US citizen.
Upcoming lectures include Steve Wozniak on December 10th. (woot!)