> First thing I want bender to say when he comes back....
> >"Fox can bite my shiny metal ass"
X-Bender: Yeah, well I'm gonna build my own slashdot posting about Futurama! With blackjack! And Hookers! Actually, forget the slashdot post. And the blackjack. Aaaawww... forget the whole thing!
> Wired is reporting that a lot of medical research firms are using India's poor as a hot test bed.
The Miracle of Birth, Part 2: The Third World
Mom: Come on, now. Out you go. Now, uh, Dalip, Bhim, Harinder, Ajit, Indra, Mandeep, it is being past your bedtime. Kids: Oh, mother! Mom: Now, not to be arguing! Lakshmi, Sita, Gita, Surinder... Dad: Wait! I have something to be telling whole family. Mom: Oh, quick - please to be going and getting the others in, Pradeep. Kids: What could it be being? Dad: The call center is closed! There is to be no more work.
We are now to live among the untouchable. Kids: [whispering among themselves] Dad: Come in my little loves, I am having
no option but to be selling you all for scientific experiments.
(Dad goes on to blame the Anglican church for not standing up to the (bloody) Catholics (who are to be filling up the whole world with children they cannot afford to be bloody feeding) when it came to talking about contraception in the UN and WHO forums on overpopulation, and the whole family breaks out into song... You know the rest.)
There are Jews in the world, there are Buddhists,
Anglicans and Catholics, and then,
There are those that outsource to Mohammed, but
I've never been one of them...
> Why did they fail? I see it as a success in not authoritizing it.
You're obviously not a Senator.
If you look at it from the point of view of someone who stands to get a lot of campaign donations in exchange funneling federal dollars to surveillance and detention centers in his constituents' disctrict, and a lot of votes from his constituents for the jobs they'll get running the camps and being on the Stasi payroll, it's indeed a failure.
All around the world, freedom is on the march! Why does the Constitution stand in the way? The constitution hates us for our freedom!
> > How many crimes does Monkeyboy have to commit before he is held to account?
> >As many as he likes, as long as they don't involve consensual sex and hummers.
> NSA is already eavesdropping on every email it can find. [... ] Oh, and if NSA 'just happens' to come across something in an email that suggests a possible criminal act within the United States, then they're required to turn it over to the appropriate law enforcement authority - police, FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, whoever - for investigation. > >
In short, if you're doing something dodgy, don't use email to plan it!
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas
of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new
research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and
ask for one!"
One of my oldest entries in my collection of.sig quotes, it's nice to see it finally come true:)
> -- > You must think in Russian.
"Major, you will be compiling the fastest, most sophisticated web browser on the face of this earth." "Where's the source?" "Hosted on Kremvax."
> European individuals can gain exemptions from having their data retentioned if they sign a waiver giving away all rights to their first-born to the audio-video retail industry.
I originally parsed that as the "adult-video" industry, and remembered that in Old America, there was a law written (the Video Privacy Protection Act) that made it illegal for video rental chains to disclose customer viewing histories, almost immediately after Supreme Court Justice Nominee Robert Bork had his video rental records disclosed during his hearings.
His tastes in movies was pretty tame - mostly PG-rated movies, comedies, westerns, and spy flicks, but enough of our Rulers realized that if Bork's PG-rated habits were fair game in politics, their viewing habits could also become public record, and enough of them decided that they had enough to hide that they passed the Video Privacy Protection Act in short order.
Bottom line: If you want even a fig leaf of privacy rights back, some privacy activist is going to have get him or herself hired in the data retention department, and leak the surfing habits of some of the Rulers and their friends.
The tamer the stuff you leak, and the cleaner the record of the Ruler whose habits you leak, the better. (If you leak about the Ruler who happens to be into the goat/midget thing, the other 90% of them - who are into everything from moose necrophilia to squirrel-gerbiling - they'll simply turn on him and claim he was an isolated incident. But if you just casually leak that some guy looked up the directions to the nearest McDonald's, but then it looks like he changed his mind and went to Burger King later that afternoon, you'll put the fear of the electorate into all of 'em.)
> Not physically of course, but instead raise your voice! The 'Net is the best damn communication medium I think anyones ever seen - use it.
Yes, please, raise your voices! The 'net is the best damn unperson self-registration system I think Miniluv ever seen - go right ahead, use it.
> Seriously Slashdot may not seem like it makes a difference but collectivly the ebb and flow of conversation influences people and if what you say is coherent enough maybe many people. Logging? Doesn't matter. What would really matter is if civil conversations became prohibited because that's what it would take to stop the most amazing tool of freedom ever invented.
Seriously, if there is hope it's in the proles, and if what you say is coherent enough, you might even get hired to write prolefeed like me! Logging? Doesn't matter, because all we really need to know is everyone's own private Worst Thing In The World, because that's all it'll take to make Room 101 the most amazing tool of social control ever invented.
> > A rocket engine is a gravity manipulation device. > >No it is not. It counters the effects of force of gravity with opposite force, as do many other effects like aerodynamic lift and so on.. but no.. they do not change gravity at all.
Actually, it is. As long as the windows are closed, you can't immediately tell the difference between 1g acceleration due to gravity, or 1g acceleration due to a rocket.
"The reason you're not feeling weightlessness is because the antimatter drive is accelerating you away from Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second. The reason the windows show nothing but a static starfield is because five days at 1g acceleration isn't anywhere long enough to get to relativistic velocity."
(If, by seasons 2 and 3 of the show, I started to notice a visible barrel distortion around the viewscreens as we got into the neighborhood of.99c range, I might even be fooled myself:-)
> A customer enters a restaurant and buys a meal, receiving the portable media player and an electronic code that authorizes a partial download of a movie, video or other media file, which can be downloaded while in the restaurant, according to a United States Patent and Trademark Office application filed by Disney. Then, with each subsequent return, the customer earns more downloadable data, eventually getting an entire movie or game.
Yes, please. This is a fantastic idea. As a 30something hardware geek, er, movie fan who has no... umm, I mean, with three small children, who loves*cough* hates! who hates cooking, this would get me to visit every McDonald's restaurant in my city at least once!
> Of course these people know their beliefs are right and if people don't believe them then they bloody well should do. Welcome to the world of religious extremism, if you need me I'll be in the bar with the bulletproof glass.
Which will work well until the night of broken glass.
> > All they have to do is provide some sort of incentive for switching to the new format, and before long there will be more people using the new over the old. > >
The odd part is that we've already had two high quality audio formats for years now: DVD-Audio and SACD. Neither of those formats are selling very well.
Because everything is "good enough" these days.
I'm no audiophile, but on decent headphones, I can't tell LAME-encoded MP3 at 320kbps from CDs. Most of the time, I have difficulty telling LAME-encoded MP3 at 192kbps from the CD sources.
I've had this conversation with about dozen friends and cow orkers over the years, and found that about half of this admittedly-limited group can't hear the difference between Xing-encoded 128kbps (which to my ears, is unlistenably compression-artifacted) from CD, and that there are some who can't even hear the difference on headphones, never mind the crap desktop PC speakers most of these people are using.
Expecting people like me to pay a premium for the improvements in the audio fidelity offered by DVD-A/SACD versus CDDA is too much. Audio's reached the stage of "good enough" that only a small amount of the market is willing to pay a premium for anything better.
The initially-small market means that it's unlikely that economies of scale will develop, ensuring that the price gap between "better than CDDA" and "CDDA" will forever remain too wide to entice folks like me (never mind my 128kbps Xing friends) into it.
> This isn't difficult to figure out, and I am not sure why the music companies are having trouble with this. > >
DRM can't work on CD's that need to play in a normal CD player.
Because that's not the answer the consultants and salesweasels are giving the C-level execs (because the consultants want the contracts to implement the production processes, and the salesweasels want the commissions from the consultants), and nobody in-house dares tell the C-level folks that the Emperor Has No Clothes.
> If you were playing a game called "Virtual Accountant" or perhaps "Home Maker Simulator" then yes, it's fine to have your player model have a pot belly, flabby thighs and skinny, stick-like arms.
Aha! John Smedley of Star Wars Galaxies fame, we've found your Slashdot userid at last!
> Within the discussion throughout, there's a good bit of attention paid to configuring Speech Server and the problems people are typically confronted with when they create speech enabled apps.
> Who actually uses that convoluted Internet Zone setting in the first place?
"Zones" were quite possibly the dumbest design flaw in the history of web browsers, arguably exceeding even the decision to "integrate" the browser with the OS.
> I remember seeing it in IE4 thinking that it was a good idea but how damn complicated it is to actualy use. AND, it's not portable so on each Win98 re-install, all your settings had to be rebuilt.
I said the same thing you did - except that instead of thinking it was a "good idea", I said "Fuck, now I have to turn off Javascript four times instead of once".
The "Intranet" zone is 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and/or 192.168.0.0/16. Bill could go suck it in 1998. He can still suck it.
> Additionally, I guess we might expect a whole slew of bogus "Symantec Anti-Virus check online! Click here!" that actually propagate trojans and whatnot to unsuspecting users.
And after that, since the "software as a service" business model relies on the software always phoning home to what it assumes is a "trusted" source, and immediately executing whatever it's sent (or worse, listening on all ports for "update" requests:), all the worm authors need to do is make it download the next trusted update from trustme.synnantec.cn instead of trusted.symantec.com.
> TW/AOL:Losses in the billions. >
Microsoft Entertainment/Internet Operations: Losses in the billions
In other news, Anne Alyst (B.Com, MBA, CFA) of Foobar Fiduciary, has upgraded Steelcase, Restoration Hardware, Furniture Brands, and La-Z-Boy to "Screaming Buy" based on the possibilities for expansion into new growth markets.
Ms. Ann Thrope, senior partner at Lotta Trimmings Hedge Fund, agrees that the fine folks at Foobar Fiduciary may be onto something. Not only does Ms. Thrope say that the market for throwable copulating chairs is a long way from saturation, but she's also Service Corp. International, a provider of funeral and cemetery services in North America: "With all the fucking chairs being thrown around in boardrooms today, someone's going to end up getting fucking buried, and that can only be bullish for SCI."
Finally, the.sig quote becomes true. To bring the life back into balance...
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
I must drink beer.
Beer is the painkiller.
And beer is the little drink that brings total satisfaction.
I will drink my beer.
I will permit it to pass through me.
And where the beer has gone there will be nothing.
Only a hangover will remain.
Caffeine in the morning to awaken the mind and refresh the liver. Alcochol at night to knock 'em both back down again for a good night's sleep.
> Does anyone have suggestions on how to get into this game? Is there anything I should do other than "buy the basic set and start playing"?
Start off on the good foot. If you're a magic-user, the most important spell is Lvl. 3 Eroticism. Be sure to tell the GM that you would like to "put on your robe and wizard hat" before you learn it, aight?
If your party ever encounters a gazebo, be sure to ask the GM how many hit dice it has. Be careful - those things have powerful resists.
And on a more serious note, if you enjoyed either of those links, you're on the right track. Buy a basic set. Find a group of players who recognize a (Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python, Terry Pratchett, Snow Crash, or any other bit of canonical geek humor) and start playing. If they're not playing D&D, play whatever it is they're playing. All pen-and-paper RPGs are fundamentally the same - if you've got even the slightest inklings of an imagination and a sense of humor, it doesn't matter how introverted you are. You'll have more fun than you ever thought possible.
Slashdot Mirror
>
>"Fox can bite my shiny metal ass"
X-Bender: Yeah, well I'm gonna build my own slashdot posting about Futurama! With blackjack! And Hookers! Actually, forget the slashdot post. And the blackjack. Aaaawww... forget the whole thing!
The Miracle of Birth, Part 2: The Third World
Mom: Come on, now. Out you go. Now, uh, Dalip, Bhim, Harinder, Ajit, Indra, Mandeep, it is being past your bedtime.
Kids: Oh, mother!
Mom: Now, not to be arguing! Lakshmi, Sita, Gita, Surinder...
Dad: Wait! I have something to be telling whole family.
Mom: Oh, quick - please to be going and getting the others in, Pradeep.
Kids: What could it be being?
Dad: The call center is closed! There is to be no more work. We are now to live among the untouchable.
Kids: [whispering among themselves]
Dad: Come in my little loves, I am having no option but to be selling you all for scientific experiments.
(Dad goes on to blame the Anglican church for not standing up to the (bloody) Catholics (who are to be filling up the whole world with children they cannot afford to be bloody feeding) when it came to talking about contraception in the UN and WHO forums on overpopulation, and the whole family breaks out into song... You know the rest.)
There are Jews in the world, there are Buddhists,
Anglicans and Catholics, and then,
There are those that outsource to Mohammed, but
I've never been one of them...
4:16PM up 4 days, 6:24, 2740 users, load averages: 8.44, 7.42, 3.38
Mood: Slashdotted.
You're obviously not a Senator.
If you look at it from the point of view of someone who stands to get a lot of campaign donations in exchange funneling federal dollars to surveillance and detention centers in his constituents' disctrict, and a lot of votes from his constituents for the jobs they'll get running the camps and being on the Stasi payroll, it's indeed a failure.
All around the world, freedom is on the march! Why does the Constitution stand in the way? The constitution hates us for our freedom!
> Thats what knowing COBOL brings you in the long run !!!
But only the ones who learned it recently enough that there was support in OO COBOL for garbage collection.
Silicon heaven, of course.
(No such thing as Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! Just ask the collection of HP calculators nobly enshrined atop the PDP-11 in my basement!)
>
>As many as he likes, as long as they don't involve consensual sex and hummers.
"Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"
One ticket to hell, please.
>
> In short, if you're doing something dodgy, don't use email to plan it!
"NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one!"
One of my oldest entries in my collection of .sig quotes, it's nice to see it finally come true :)
> --
> You must think in Russian.
"Major, you will be compiling the fastest, most sophisticated web browser on the face of this earth."
"Where's the source?"
"Hosted on Kremvax."
I originally parsed that as the "adult-video" industry, and remembered that in Old America, there was a law written (the Video Privacy Protection Act) that made it illegal for video rental chains to disclose customer viewing histories, almost immediately after Supreme Court Justice Nominee Robert Bork had his video rental records disclosed during his hearings.
His tastes in movies was pretty tame - mostly PG-rated movies, comedies, westerns, and spy flicks, but enough of our Rulers realized that if Bork's PG-rated habits were fair game in politics, their viewing habits could also become public record, and enough of them decided that they had enough to hide that they passed the Video Privacy Protection Act in short order.
Bottom line: If you want even a fig leaf of privacy rights back, some privacy activist is going to have get him or herself hired in the data retention department, and leak the surfing habits of some of the Rulers and their friends.
The tamer the stuff you leak, and the cleaner the record of the Ruler whose habits you leak, the better. (If you leak about the Ruler who happens to be into the goat/midget thing, the other 90% of them - who are into everything from moose necrophilia to squirrel-gerbiling - they'll simply turn on him and claim he was an isolated incident. But if you just casually leak that some guy looked up the directions to the nearest McDonald's, but then it looks like he changed his mind and went to Burger King later that afternoon, you'll put the fear of the electorate into all of 'em.)
Yes, please, raise your voices! The 'net is the best damn unperson self-registration system I think Miniluv ever seen - go right ahead, use it.
> Seriously Slashdot may not seem like it makes a difference but collectivly the ebb and flow of conversation influences people and if what you say is coherent enough maybe many people. Logging? Doesn't matter. What would really matter is if civil conversations became prohibited because that's what it would take to stop the most amazing tool of freedom ever invented.
Seriously, if there is hope it's in the proles, and if what you say is coherent enough, you might even get hired to write prolefeed like me! Logging? Doesn't matter, because all we really need to know is everyone's own private Worst Thing In The World, because that's all it'll take to make Room 101 the most amazing tool of social control ever invented.
>
>No it is not. It counters the effects of force of gravity with opposite force, as do many other effects like aerodynamic lift and so on.. but no.. they do not change gravity at all.
Actually, it is. As long as the windows are closed, you can't immediately tell the difference between 1g acceleration due to gravity, or 1g acceleration due to a rocket.
"The reason you're not feeling weightlessness is because the antimatter drive is accelerating you away from Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second. The reason the windows show nothing but a static starfield is because five days at 1g acceleration isn't anywhere long enough to get to relativistic velocity."
(If, by seasons 2 and 3 of the show, I started to notice a visible barrel distortion around the viewscreens as we got into the neighborhood of .99c range, I might even be fooled myself :-)
Yes, please. This is a fantastic idea. As a 30something hardware geek, er, movie fan who has no... umm, I mean, with three small children, who loves*cough* hates! who hates cooking, this would get me to visit every McDonald's restaurant in my city at least once!
Which will work well until the night of broken glass.
Maybe it's not 1984, but it's 1938.
>
> The odd part is that we've already had two high quality audio formats for years now: DVD-Audio and SACD. Neither of those formats are selling very well.
Because everything is "good enough" these days.
I'm no audiophile, but on decent headphones, I can't tell LAME-encoded MP3 at 320kbps from CDs. Most of the time, I have difficulty telling LAME-encoded MP3 at 192kbps from the CD sources.
I've had this conversation with about dozen friends and cow orkers over the years, and found that about half of this admittedly-limited group can't hear the difference between Xing-encoded 128kbps (which to my ears, is unlistenably compression-artifacted) from CD, and that there are some who can't even hear the difference on headphones, never mind the crap desktop PC speakers most of these people are using.
Expecting people like me to pay a premium for the improvements in the audio fidelity offered by DVD-A/SACD versus CDDA is too much. Audio's reached the stage of "good enough" that only a small amount of the market is willing to pay a premium for anything better.
The initially-small market means that it's unlikely that economies of scale will develop, ensuring that the price gap between "better than CDDA" and "CDDA" will forever remain too wide to entice folks like me (never mind my 128kbps Xing friends) into it.
>
> DRM can't work on CD's that need to play in a normal CD player.
Because that's not the answer the consultants and salesweasels are giving the C-level execs (because the consultants want the contracts to implement the production processes, and the salesweasels want the commissions from the consultants), and nobody in-house dares tell the C-level folks that the Emperor Has No Clothes.
Aha! John Smedley of Star Wars Galaxies fame, we've found your Slashdot userid at last!
"Start! Run! Cee-Emm-Dee! Format! Cee-Colon Slash X, Slash, U, Slash Y! Enter!"
And now you get to write a book on rebuilding intelligent .NET applications...
"Zones" were quite possibly the dumbest design flaw in the history of web browsers, arguably exceeding even the decision to "integrate" the browser with the OS.
> I remember seeing it in IE4 thinking that it was a good idea but how damn complicated it is to actualy use. AND, it's not portable so on each Win98 re-install, all your settings had to be rebuilt.
I said the same thing you did - except that instead of thinking it was a "good idea", I said "Fuck, now I have to turn off Javascript four times instead of once".
The "Intranet" zone is 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and/or 192.168.0.0/16. Bill could go suck it in 1998. He can still suck it.
And after that, since the "software as a service" business model relies on the software always phoning home to what it assumes is a "trusted" source, and immediately executing whatever it's sent (or worse, listening on all ports for "update" requests :), all the worm authors need to do is make it download the next trusted update from trustme.synnantec.cn instead of trusted.symantec.com.
So you're saying this is all a bunch of kat FUD? (Oh, pleasepleaseplease...)
>
>What do you know - it's a triple!
"I think so, EditorTaco, but me and Kathleen Fent, what would the children look like?"
> Microsoft Entertainment/Internet Operations: Losses in the billions
In other news, Anne Alyst (B.Com, MBA, CFA) of Foobar Fiduciary, has upgraded Steelcase, Restoration Hardware, Furniture Brands, and La-Z-Boy to "Screaming Buy" based on the possibilities for expansion into new growth markets.
Ms. Ann Thrope, senior partner at Lotta Trimmings Hedge Fund, agrees that the fine folks at Foobar Fiduciary may be onto something. Not only does Ms. Thrope say that the market for throwable copulating chairs is a long way from saturation, but she's also Service Corp. International, a provider of funeral and cemetery services in North America: "With all the fucking chairs being thrown around in boardrooms today, someone's going to end up getting fucking buried, and that can only be bullish for SCI."
> How the hell am I supposed to watch that?
Well, if you're not running Windows, how the hell else are you supposed to get memory leaks? They don't just grow on B-Trees, y'know!
Caffeine in the morning to awaken the mind and refresh the liver. Alcochol at night to knock 'em both back down again for a good night's sleep.
Start off on the good foot. If you're a magic-user, the most important spell is Lvl. 3 Eroticism. Be sure to tell the GM that you would like to "put on your robe and wizard hat" before you learn it, aight?
If your party ever encounters a gazebo, be sure to ask the GM how many hit dice it has. Be careful - those things have powerful resists.
And on a more serious note, if you enjoyed either of those links, you're on the right track. Buy a basic set. Find a group of players who recognize a (Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python, Terry Pratchett, Snow Crash, or any other bit of canonical geek humor) and start playing. If they're not playing D&D, play whatever it is they're playing. All pen-and-paper RPGs are fundamentally the same - if you've got even the slightest inklings of an imagination and a sense of humor, it doesn't matter how introverted you are. You'll have more fun than you ever thought possible.