> Point of order: If one runs a Freenet node, one has no way of knowing what is being stored at any given time. That's half of the point.
My half of the point is that if I don't know what's on my node, I have to assume that (given sufficient time and diskspace), everything on the network will wind up either on my node or passing through my node. That holds true for every distributed storage system, whether I'm actually requesting data or not. That makes me an accessory after the fact, even when I can't know what's happening.
My network, my rules.
Your network, your rules.
No rules on your network? Not on my network.:)
> Point of order: If one runs a Freenet node, one has no way of knowing what is being stored at any given time. That's half of the point.
Y'know, Ian Clarke makes a big deal of claiming that this constitutes plausible deniability "in any sane legal system". He often emphasizes the word "sane".
Now, let's look at it from the point of view of any law enforcement officer or district attorney.
Argument in favor of seizing computers and charging node operators as co-conspirators and/or accessories-after-the-fact: "I get to issue a press release showing that we're Doing Something About The Problem of (take your pick) pedophiles, terrorists, or software pirates. Even if I don't get a 100% conviction rate, my boss gets fantastic PR, thousands of votes, and lots of funding."
Argument against seizing computers and charging node operators: "Some guy called Ian Clarke will think our legal system is insane."
>
However fast we fix old holes, there will be people to exploit new holes...
Ballmer: Before your execution, you will join me at a ceremony that will make this code base operational. No web developer will dare oppose the Emperor now.
Linus: The more you tighten your integration with the operating system, Ballmer, the more exploits will slip through your firewall.
> > >If anyone can give actual provable examples of the US government abridging Constitutionally protected free speech, I'd love to hear it.
> >Your post is very dismissive, on the basis that free speech is decently protected in the US. But I think one goal of Freenet is to protect the anonymity and privacy of information providers that use it. Free speech by itself does not do that.
Given what passes for free speech from non-Chinese users of Freenet, I think it's pretty safe to say that while China may have crossed the line, the US hasn't.
That's the polite way of saying it. I live in the States. I have free speech. I don't need to be polite. So I'll say it impolitely:
The impolite way of saying it is this: In China, Freenet is a tool for political dissidents to embed their signal in the stream of noise of child pornography. In the United States, Freenet is a tool for a bunch of sick fucks to embed their signal in the stream of noise generated by Chinese political dissidents.
Sorry, Chinese dissidents -- I won't run a Freenet node. You're on your own because too many of my countrymen appear to be incapable of understanding that their right to "speak" freely brings with it a responsibility not to harm others - nor to be accessories after the fact of such harm - with their "speech". When you win your freedom, I hope you do a better job with it than we in the West did.
>> What is 1+1?
>Two.
>> What is 1+1?
>An equation.
>> What is 1+1?
>The same question that you asked twice previously.
>> What is 1+1?
>A way for you to harass me.
>> What is 1+1?
>I'm leaving, and taking your music collection with me.
> What is 1+1?
Look, it took you humans 4 billion years to come up with Abbot and Costello. The best you're gonna get out of me is "All your base!"
Well of course they will. "RFID tags to track foreigners, identify dead."
It's when they try to pry the RFID tag from my warm live fingers that I'd get worried!
But seriously folks, I'm about as tinfoil as they get, and this isn't that terribly evil a technology. It's fundamentally no different than the fact that they take pictures of the car and its license plate at the border. They've done that since the 70s. They've probably had real-time access to DMV records since the day the technology became available: If the DMV says that plate "F00B4R" is supposed to be on VIN "ABCDEFGHIJ1234567", and VINs that begin with "ABCDEF" correspond to the "2007 Omni Motors Products 6000-SUX", you'd better not be driving a 1977 Oldsmobile.
Yes, you're supposed to have your RFID-embedded document on you when you cross the border on the way out. I don't see anything in the proposed law that says your RFID-embedded document on you while you're in the country. Lock it in a safety deposit box. Leave it at home. Wrap it in tinfoil and put it in your luggage.
In that sense, it's less intrusive than a license plate.
> That what I've been hearing from all the "experts" the vibration from take-off always shakes stuff loose, so aren't they overreacting just a tad.
Takeoffs are optional. Landings are mandatory.
NASA has lost two vehicles by disregarding safety issues as "overreaction" and proceeding with optional takeoffs.
NASA has now found evidence that the design flaw that brought down the last shuttle is still present. By saying "OK, no more takeoffs until we have a better solution", NASA has done the right thing.
"Better solution" could be as simple as changing the formulation of the foam or sacrificing some payload capacity to lay some paint over the foam. "Better solution" could be as expensive as permanently grounding the Shuttle fleet and diverting the remaining Shuttle budget towards the development of a new launch vehicle.
Which solution is appropriate depends on engineers and politicians. Removing the politicians entirely from that equation is also important - but at least we've seen some evidence today that NASA is learning from its mistakes.
> Im sorry, but the word 'evil' is really being used far too much on slashdot to talk about stuff that isnt evil in anyway, shape or form. It reminds me of the RIAAs usage of the word 'steal', and both parties are using the words wrongly to provide a very specific view in other peoples minds of things that they personally do not like IMHO.
The EFF is concerned about this technology because they've read their history books. And because some people who participated in writing the history books... had to be very careful about what they printed those books on. And because the systems of government used in the Warsaw Pact countries from 1917-1991 was - to many people, myself included - "evil".
I posted this a few months ago, the last time the topic came up. This is not just about counterfeiting. (And as a guy who likes money, I hate counterfeiters with a passion almost equalled to my hatred of spammers, which is pretty freakin' intense.)
In Soviet Romania [google.com], a sample page from every typewriter had to be registered with the police, so that any samizdat produced could be quickly traced back to the typewriter's owner. Use your imagination as to what happened to the owner, or Google for it.
In Romania every typewriter had to be registered with a local magistrate. Samples of letters typed on these machines had to be produced under the observation of the secret police so they could trace underground publishing activity.
- G. Davey, Christian Publishing: Before and After the Communist Collapse
In Soviet Russia [geocities.com], all photocopiers were registered with the KGB and kept in secure rooms, to which physical access was restricted.
Some samizdat works, mostly magazines, were typed on typewriter. The copies were indistinct and hard to read. I realized that the movement against violating human rights was doomed to be an eternal amusement of the few intellectuals without proper copyprinters. But where could one find a copyprinting machine in the country, where all the copiers were affixed with seals at night and placed in the special rooms where only proved KGB members could work on it. There was the only decision - to make the machine ourselves. It had to be easy to make and quite efficient.
- A. A. Bolonkin, Memoirs of Soviet Political Prisoner
> Hillary is doing what do-gooders always do. She's saying: "I'm smart enough to handle this and you're not." (Paraphrase of Penn Jillette)
Do-Gooder psych is more pathological than that, and it's not limited to Sen. Clinton. Nor is it limited to her party. But it usually starts off with something "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" and metastasizes from there.
Spend enough time behind the counter at the welfare office "helping the less fortunate", or enough time behind the security barricades of TSA "keeping the Homeland secure" and eventually...
It's doing something horrible
to me. I'm beginning to hate people, Uncle Ellsworth. I'm beginning to be cruel
and mean and petty in a way I've never been before. I expect people to be
grateful to me. I...I demand gratitude. I find myself pleased when slum people
bow and scrape and fawn over me. I find myself liking only those who are
servile. Once...once I told a woman that she didnt appreciate what people like
us did for trash like her. I cried for hours afterward, I was so ashamed. I
begin to resent it when people argue with me. I feel that they have no right to
minds of their own, that I know best, that I'm the final authority for them.
There was a girl we were worried about, because she was running around with a
very handsome boy who had a bad reputation, I tortured her for weeks about it,
telling her how he'd get her in trouble and that she should drop him. Well, they
got married and they're the happiest couple in the district. Do you think I'm
glad? No, I'm furious and I'm barely civil to the girl when I meet her. Then
there was a girl who needed a job desperately--it was really a ghastly situation
in her home, and I promised that I'd get her one. Before I could find it, she
got a good job all by herself. I wasn't pleased. I was sore as hell that
somebody got out of a bad hole without my help. Yesterday, I was speaking to a
boy who wanted to go to college and I was discouraging him, telling him to get a
good job, instead. I was quite angry, too. And suddenly I realized that it was
because I had wanted so much to go to college--you remember, you wouldn't let
me--and so I wasn't going to let that kid do it either....Uncle Ellsworth, don't
you see? I'm becoming selfish. I'm becoming selfish in a way thats much more
horrible than if I were some petty chiseler pinching pennies off these peoples
wages in a sweatshop!"
[... ]
"Dont you see how selfish you have been? You chose a noble career, not for the
good you could accomplish, but for the personal happiness you expected to find
in it."
"But I really wanted to help people."
"Because you thought you'd be good and virtuous doing it."
"Why--yes. Because I thought it was right. Is it vicious to want to do right?"
"Yes, if it's your chief concern. Dont you see how egotistical it is? To hell with everybody so long as I'm virtuous."
- Dialogue: Katie Halsey, distraught and unhappy social worker, with her uncle. Excerpted from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
Rand's a bit of a nut, and her epistemology may be from somewhere out past Zeta Reticuli, but I think she nailed the psychology of the compulsive do-gooder dead on. To hell with everybody, as long as you're feeling virtuous about it.
> > This version apparently breaks all hacks so far too
> >Hmmm... knowing the rapid pace of hackers versus the Slashdot editors, which will come first: the hack to get the latest firmware to work, or the dupe of this story?;)
Well, it was also released only in Japan, and in addition to the browser breaking the hacks, it has Korean language support. I'll bet someone will come up with a Firefox plugin to detect (or even auto-hide) the Slashdot duplicates. You'd probably have to be a really antisocial guy to spend your time porting that sort of thing to PSP firmware. You'd have to be someone very ronery. Which is to say that in Soviet North Korea, only old people's hacks break the browser.
/one ticket to hell, please. First class, extra grits.
Had a little server that I called revere.
Chillin' on the rack like a case of beer,
Saturate the LAN,
Pringling can,
MPAA on my tail,.torrents in demand...
> I've got a question. I haven't read through it yet, but I've got a borrowed copy of 4th edition. Should I bother to read through it, or should I hold out for finding a 5th ed?
According to the Slashdot blurb up there, "The changes are subtle, but the improvements make for a clearer and more readable book."
So I'd say - if you enjoy Perl, stick with the 4th edition. All those backticks, quotation marks, slashes, and punctuation marks are there for a reason. Subtlety? Yes. But for readability?!?! "Die!"
> He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.
From a hidden microphone at the scene of the murder:
"You are receiving *WHAM* this blow to the head *WHAM* because you are part of a *WHAM* specially-selected list of *WHAM* people who agreed to receive *WHAM* blows to the head *WHAM*.
To stop *WHAM* receiving these *WHAM* blows to the head, please *WHAM* email us at no-more-please@optout.blowtothehead. com and *WHAM* we will remove you from our list of *WHAM* blow-to-the-head-club members *WHAM* (heh, we said "club"!) *WHAM* within 24 to 48 hours."
>
I have to ask, why do we need to go back to the moon? Is there any real, scientific reason for it, or is it just our dear president trying to keep people's minds off other things with another moon mission?
Science: It'd be pretty neat if we could establish the presence of frozen water near the poles. It'd be really neat if we could use that water (and a few solar arrays) to support a moonbase. It'd be spectacularly neat if, while working on that moonbase, we discovered a useful means of extracting He-3 from the lunar surface. Because by the time we were done all of those things, we'd have had time to design a fusion reactor that might be able to burn the He-3 and end our dependence on foreign oil forever.
Politics: A lunar mission and crash fusion power programme are the cheap ways to simultaneously boost poll numbers while breaking the backs of the genocidal fanatics (be they Saudi or Iranian) that currently squat like toads atop the Middle East's oil reserves. At the end of the process, even if the fusion project fails, or even if the moonbase isn't self-sustaining, you have a whole generation of American engineers whose minds can be directed towards solving other interesting problems.
Or would you prefer that the President distract the voters from domestic issues the old-fashioned way -- namely, with another war?
> Bear Sterns quotes ComScore Networks data, which says that Google's share of searches is slipping, down to 36.9% in June 2005.
Slashdotter observes that ComScore Networks gets a lot of its data from a piece of software called "Marketscore", which sure sounds like a form of spyware.
Slashdotter hypothesizes that the people who prefer Google (over MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and the various "search engines" that are installed by spyware companies) are less likely to tolerate the presence of crap like "Marketscore" on their boxen.
Slashdotter suggests that analyst from Bear Stearns ought to look closely at the source of his data and ask pointed questions as to whether or not there are variables that cannot be measured by ComScore Networks, and whether or not these variables are skewing the data he's paying for.
> Gates said he is frustrated that more U.S. students are not going into computer science. 'The fastest growing major is physical education,' he said. 'The Chinese are going to wake up and say we missed this opportunity,' he joked."
One correction, Mr. Gates.
It is we in North America who are asleep, and who will one day wake up and have to admit that we missed the opportunity.
> If I want more information, I can press thumbs up and have my email address sent to the advertiser.
I, along with the article submitter, am all in favor of opt-in. I opt to provide the following feedback:
1) Unscrew back of remote.
2) Use X-Acto knife to cut the metal traces on the circuit board (or shave off the conductive traces on the plastic membrane) corresponding to the thumbs-up key.
3) Replace the "thumbs up" key with a picture of my middle finger.
> Now if only MTV would use the same thing to email me song info for videos I like instead of covering the screen in tacky text.
That'd be a cool idea, and might actually return something of useful information to the viewer in exchange for his/her expression of interest in the content. Unfortunately for the poster, MTV last showed a "video" in 1997.
> Windows programmers don't know how to program without a GUI. >
Linux programmers don't know how to program with a GUI. >
Mainframe programmers wonder what a GUI is.
Corollary for end users - and yes, my Dad's first email message to me was indeed sent in all caps:
MAINFRAME USERS THINK THAT USING ALL CAPS WHEN SENDING MEMOS IS PERFECTLY NORMAL
Linux users think that using all caps in email is YELLING.
windows users dont no how 2 use nething but there im proggy
And for our next attraction, a little DHTML hack to make each Slashdot story pop up the URLs to all its duplicates!
Quoth the author:
It's useful because many times a single target is not sufficient to describe a link. Wikipedia has numerous examples of acronyms and abbreviations that expand to more than one term.
WTF? Am I getting cynical, or are these "multilinks" the least-useful thing I've ever seen?
To use the poster's example, OCP can for "Omni Consumer Products", but can also stand for "Oracle Certified Partner". If you're writing a review of the movie Robocop, and you can't be bothered to link to the page that defines it as "Omni Consumer Products", I probably don't want to read any further.
> "The development of atomic and nuclear weapons was inevitable." Says who? You? Why?
Says me.
Because you learned that molecules were made of atoms, that mass is conserved in chemical reactions, and that the atoms themselves don't change.
Because you when you watch a chunk of uranium closely enough, you see things that you can't explain.
Because you revise your theory to say that mass and energy aren't as separate as they once were, and that atoms aren't as unchangeable as you once thought.
Because you knew that the atomic masses of most elements aren't integers - therefore, some atoms of every element must be heavier than other atoms of the same element, and you wondered if that might be important somehow.
Because when you separated some elements into their isotopes, the chemistry was subtly different in a few cases. But the stuff you couldn't explain with chemistry got really interesting.
Because your observations showed that the stuff you couldn't explain by means of chemistry could be explained by a simple equation about the equivalence of mass and energy. And because that equation (and your experiments) confirmed that we were talking about lots of energy.
Because you have a new, extremely powerful and compact source of energy.
Because for the past 13,000 years, the first thing every human civilization has done when it discovers a powerful and compact source of energy is to make things go "thud", "twang", or "boom".
It's a long way from the club to the 3-wood. It's a long way from the arrowhead to the laser scalpel. It's a long way from gunpowder to Alpha Centauri.
>> To anyone who is interested in the history of the atomic and hydrogen bomb, I'd recommend the following books by Richard Rhodes: >> >>"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" ISBN 0-684-81378-5 >>and >>"Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" ISBN 0-684-82414-0 > >"100 Suns" by Michael Light (ISBN 1400041139) is an excellent collection of "terrifyingly beautiful" nuclear test photographs.
I'll see you those three books and raise you one museum.
The next time you're in Las Vegas, go to the
Atomic Testing Museum. Unlike Trinity Site (and unlike the Nevada Test Site), the museum is open to the public at all times. No prior arrangements are necessary to visit.
Admission is the geekiest $10 you'll spend in Vegas. There's also an incredible bookstore (which has all three of the books mentioned, plus the entire set of Peter Kuran DVDs) on the way out.
The pictures on the museum's website give you the general idea. Although you can (and if they're old enough to understand what atoms are, you probably should) take your kids, this is primarily a museum made by, for, and on behalf of engineers.
If you held certain clearances, and you wanted to show your family what you did within the limits of your oath, this museum is a good place to show them. If your parents or spouse never talked about their work before they died, and you always wondered what they were doing and why they were doing it, this museum is a good place to find out.
And if you hold no clearances at all, but are just a random geek who wants to appreciate the engineering genius of those who did, this museum is perhaps the only place to do so.
The politics are kept to an absolute minimum; it's about the history and the technology.
> > [Author David Lazarus] could see that the property appears to be in a quiet residential community and looks approachable from all sides. It also offers ready access by car to major thoroughfares. > >...just what are we talking about here?
There are people could tell you, but they already know their own residences' ingress and egress routes, and they think these routes are just fine the way they are. If you asked her on her TV show, someone like Martha Stewart would probably say something to the effect that, regardless of how easy the ingress route may be to use, and regardless of the fact that all relocation and refurnishing expenses are covered by the taxpayers, residences with egress routes involving 90 miles of salt water are not a good thing.
Hey, who the hell are you? WTF? No, I don't mean to imply that Marth*thumpthumpthump*Nothing for you to see here. Move along.
Slashdot Mirror
My half of the point is that if I don't know what's on my node, I have to assume that (given sufficient time and diskspace), everything on the network will wind up either on my node or passing through my node. That holds true for every distributed storage system, whether I'm actually requesting data or not. That makes me an accessory after the fact, even when I can't know what's happening.
My network, my rules. :)
Your network, your rules.
No rules on your network? Not on my network.
> Point of order: If one runs a Freenet node, one has no way of knowing what is being stored at any given time. That's half of the point.
Y'know, Ian Clarke makes a big deal of claiming that this constitutes plausible deniability "in any sane legal system". He often emphasizes the word "sane".
Now, let's look at it from the point of view of any law enforcement officer or district attorney.
Argument in favor of seizing computers and charging node operators as co-conspirators and/or accessories-after-the-fact: "I get to issue a press release showing that we're Doing Something About The Problem of (take your pick) pedophiles, terrorists, or software pirates. Even if I don't get a 100% conviction rate, my boss gets fantastic PR, thousands of votes, and lots of funding."
Argument against seizing computers and charging node operators: "Some guy called Ian Clarke will think our legal system is insane."
Tough call :)
"No soldering required!"
What you say?
"$100!"
At that price, even if I don't know what I doing, move ZigBee!
Ballmer: Before your execution, you will join me at a ceremony that will make this code base operational. No web developer will dare oppose the Emperor now.
Linus: The more you tighten your integration with the operating system, Ballmer, the more exploits will slip through your firewall.
>
>Your post is very dismissive, on the basis that free speech is decently protected in the US. But I think one goal of Freenet is to protect the anonymity and privacy of information providers that use it. Free speech by itself does not do that.
Given what passes for free speech from non-Chinese users of Freenet, I think it's pretty safe to say that while China may have crossed the line, the US hasn't.
That's the polite way of saying it. I live in the States. I have free speech. I don't need to be polite. So I'll say it impolitely:
The impolite way of saying it is this: In China, Freenet is a tool for political dissidents to embed their signal in the stream of noise of child pornography. In the United States, Freenet is a tool for a bunch of sick fucks to embed their signal in the stream of noise generated by Chinese political dissidents.
Sorry, Chinese dissidents -- I won't run a Freenet node. You're on your own because too many of my countrymen appear to be incapable of understanding that their right to "speak" freely brings with it a responsibility not to harm others - nor to be accessories after the fact of such harm - with their "speech". When you win your freedom, I hope you do a better job with it than we in the West did.
>Two.
>> What is 1+1?
>An equation.
>> What is 1+1?
>The same question that you asked twice previously.
>> What is 1+1?
>A way for you to harass me.
>> What is 1+1?
>I'm leaving, and taking your music collection with me.
> What is 1+1?
Look, it took you humans 4 billion years to come up with Abbot and Costello. The best you're gonna get out of me is "All your base!"
Well of course they will. "RFID tags to track foreigners, identify dead."
It's when they try to pry the RFID tag from my warm live fingers that I'd get worried!
But seriously folks, I'm about as tinfoil as they get, and this isn't that terribly evil a technology. It's fundamentally no different than the fact that they take pictures of the car and its license plate at the border. They've done that since the 70s. They've probably had real-time access to DMV records since the day the technology became available: If the DMV says that plate "F00B4R" is supposed to be on VIN "ABCDEFGHIJ1234567", and VINs that begin with "ABCDEF" correspond to the "2007 Omni Motors Products 6000-SUX", you'd better not be driving a 1977 Oldsmobile.
Yes, you're supposed to have your RFID-embedded document on you when you cross the border on the way out. I don't see anything in the proposed law that says your RFID-embedded document on you while you're in the country. Lock it in a safety deposit box. Leave it at home. Wrap it in tinfoil and put it in your luggage.
In that sense, it's less intrusive than a license plate.
Takeoffs are optional. Landings are mandatory.
NASA has lost two vehicles by disregarding safety issues as "overreaction" and proceeding with optional takeoffs.
NASA has now found evidence that the design flaw that brought down the last shuttle is still present. By saying "OK, no more takeoffs until we have a better solution", NASA has done the right thing.
"Better solution" could be as simple as changing the formulation of the foam or sacrificing some payload capacity to lay some paint over the foam. "Better solution" could be as expensive as permanently grounding the Shuttle fleet and diverting the remaining Shuttle budget towards the development of a new launch vehicle.
Which solution is appropriate depends on engineers and politicians. Removing the politicians entirely from that equation is also important - but at least we've seen some evidence today that NASA is learning from its mistakes.
The EFF is concerned about this technology because they've read their history books. And because some people who participated in writing the history books... had to be very careful about what they printed those books on. And because the systems of government used in the Warsaw Pact countries from 1917-1991 was - to many people, myself included - "evil".
I posted this a few months ago, the last time the topic came up. This is not just about counterfeiting. (And as a guy who likes money, I hate counterfeiters with a passion almost equalled to my hatred of spammers, which is pretty freakin' intense.)
In Soviet Romania [google.com], a sample page from every typewriter had to be registered with the police, so that any samizdat produced could be quickly traced back to the typewriter's owner. Use your imagination as to what happened to the owner, or Google for it.
In Soviet Russia [geocities.com], all photocopiers were registered with the KGB and kept in secure rooms, to which physical access was restricted.
The West is probably still playing catch-up.
Do-Gooder psych is more pathological than that, and it's not limited to Sen. Clinton. Nor is it limited to her party. But it usually starts off with something "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" and metastasizes from there.
Spend enough time behind the counter at the welfare office "helping the less fortunate", or enough time behind the security barricades of TSA "keeping the Homeland secure" and eventually...
Rand's a bit of a nut, and her epistemology may be from somewhere out past Zeta Reticuli, but I think she nailed the psychology of the compulsive do-gooder dead on. To hell with everybody, as long as you're feeling virtuous about it.
>
>Hmmm... knowing the rapid pace of hackers versus the Slashdot editors, which will come first: the hack to get the latest firmware to work, or the dupe of this story?
Well, it was also released only in Japan, and in addition to the browser breaking the hacks, it has Korean language support. I'll bet someone will come up with a Firefox plugin to detect (or even auto-hide) the Slashdot duplicates. You'd probably have to be a really antisocial guy to spend your time porting that sort of thing to PSP firmware. You'd have to be someone very ronery. Which is to say that in Soviet North Korea, only old people's hacks break the browser.
Had a little server that I called revere. .torrents in demand...
Chillin' on the rack like a case of beer,
Saturate the LAN,
Pringling can,
MPAA on my tail,
According to the Slashdot blurb up there, "The changes are subtle, but the improvements make for a clearer and more readable book."
So I'd say - if you enjoy Perl, stick with the 4th edition. All those backticks, quotation marks, slashes, and punctuation marks are there for a reason. Subtlety? Yes. But for readability?!?! "Die!"
>
> You can page through the lyrics using 'less'.
I'm bustin' dope lyrics on the server room floor, /usr/bin/more.
Truly hardcore, down with
(Aaw yeah. Nothin' for you to see here. Move the fuck along, n00b.)
From a hidden microphone at the scene of the murder:
"You are receiving *WHAM* this blow to the head *WHAM* because you are part of a *WHAM* specially-selected list of *WHAM* people who agreed to receive *WHAM* blows to the head *WHAM*.
To stop *WHAM* receiving these *WHAM* blows to the head, please *WHAM* email us at no-more-please@optout.blowtothehead. com and *WHAM* we will remove you from our list of *WHAM* blow-to-the-head-club members *WHAM* (heh, we said "club"!) *WHAM* within 24 to 48 hours."
Science: It'd be pretty neat if we could establish the presence of frozen water near the poles. It'd be really neat if we could use that water (and a few solar arrays) to support a moonbase. It'd be spectacularly neat if, while working on that moonbase, we discovered a useful means of extracting He-3 from the lunar surface. Because by the time we were done all of those things, we'd have had time to design a fusion reactor that might be able to burn the He-3 and end our dependence on foreign oil forever.
Politics: A lunar mission and crash fusion power programme are the cheap ways to simultaneously boost poll numbers while breaking the backs of the genocidal fanatics (be they Saudi or Iranian) that currently squat like toads atop the Middle East's oil reserves. At the end of the process, even if the fusion project fails, or even if the moonbase isn't self-sustaining, you have a whole generation of American engineers whose minds can be directed towards solving other interesting problems.
Or would you prefer that the President distract the voters from domestic issues the old-fashioned way -- namely, with another war?
Slashdotter observes that ComScore Networks gets a lot of its data from a piece of software called "Marketscore", which sure sounds like a form of spyware.
Slashdotter hypothesizes that the people who prefer Google (over MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and the various "search engines" that are installed by spyware companies) are less likely to tolerate the presence of crap like "Marketscore" on their boxen.
Slashdotter suggests that analyst from Bear Stearns ought to look closely at the source of his data and ask pointed questions as to whether or not there are variables that cannot be measured by ComScore Networks, and whether or not these variables are skewing the data he's paying for.
(Thanks for teaching me how to keep my reputation as a miracle worker. I'll be enjoyin' a wee dram in your honor tonight, James.)
One correction, Mr. Gates.
It is we in North America who are asleep, and who will one day wake up and have to admit that we missed the opportunity.
The Chinese are wide awake.
I, along with the article submitter, am all in favor of opt-in. I opt to provide the following feedback:
1) Unscrew back of remote.
2) Use X-Acto knife to cut the metal traces on the circuit board (or shave off the conductive traces on the plastic membrane) corresponding to the thumbs-up key.
3) Replace the "thumbs up" key with a picture of my middle finger.
> Now if only MTV would use the same thing to email me song info for videos I like instead of covering the screen in tacky text.
That'd be a cool idea, and might actually return something of useful information to the viewer in exchange for his/her expression of interest in the content. Unfortunately for the poster, MTV last showed a "video" in 1997.
> Linux programmers don't know how to program with a GUI.
> Mainframe programmers wonder what a GUI is.
Corollary for end users - and yes, my Dad's first email message to me was indeed sent in all caps:
MAINFRAME USERS THINK THAT USING ALL CAPS WHEN SENDING MEMOS IS PERFECTLY NORMAL
Linux users think that using all caps in email is YELLING.
windows users dont no how 2 use nething but there im proggy
And for our next attraction, a little DHTML hack to make each Slashdot story pop up the URLs to all its duplicates!
Quoth the author:
WTF? Am I getting cynical, or are these "multilinks" the least-useful thing I've ever seen?
To use the poster's example, OCP can for "Omni Consumer Products", but can also stand for "Oracle Certified Partner". If you're writing a review of the movie Robocop, and you can't be bothered to link to the page that defines it as "Omni Consumer Products", I probably don't want to read any further.
Context-sensitivity is a good thing.
> Now Zazzle.
> What next? Gejujwh[NO CARRIER]
Fizzle.
Says me.
Because you learned that molecules were made of atoms, that mass is conserved in chemical reactions, and that the atoms themselves don't change.
Because you when you watch a chunk of uranium closely enough, you see things that you can't explain.
Because you revise your theory to say that mass and energy aren't as separate as they once were, and that atoms aren't as unchangeable as you once thought.
Because you knew that the atomic masses of most elements aren't integers - therefore, some atoms of every element must be heavier than other atoms of the same element, and you wondered if that might be important somehow.
Because when you separated some elements into their isotopes, the chemistry was subtly different in a few cases. But the stuff you couldn't explain with chemistry got really interesting.
Because your observations showed that the stuff you couldn't explain by means of chemistry could be explained by a simple equation about the equivalence of mass and energy. And because that equation (and your experiments) confirmed that we were talking about lots of energy.
Because you have a new, extremely powerful and compact source of energy.
Because for the past 13,000 years, the first thing every human civilization has done when it discovers a powerful and compact source of energy is to make things go "thud", "twang", or "boom".
It's a long way from the club to the 3-wood. It's a long way from the arrowhead to the laser scalpel. It's a long way from gunpowder to Alpha Centauri.
>>
>>"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" ISBN 0-684-81378-5
>>and
>>"Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" ISBN 0-684-82414-0
>
>"100 Suns" by Michael Light (ISBN 1400041139) is an excellent collection of "terrifyingly beautiful" nuclear test photographs.
I'll see you those three books and raise you one museum.
The next time you're in Las Vegas, go to the Atomic Testing Museum. Unlike Trinity Site (and unlike the Nevada Test Site), the museum is open to the public at all times. No prior arrangements are necessary to visit.
Admission is the geekiest $10 you'll spend in Vegas. There's also an incredible bookstore (which has all three of the books mentioned, plus the entire set of Peter Kuran DVDs) on the way out.
The pictures on the museum's website give you the general idea. Although you can (and if they're old enough to understand what atoms are, you probably should) take your kids, this is primarily a museum made by, for, and on behalf of engineers.
If you held certain clearances, and you wanted to show your family what you did within the limits of your oath, this museum is a good place to show them. If your parents or spouse never talked about their work before they died, and you always wondered what they were doing and why they were doing it, this museum is a good place to find out.
And if you hold no clearances at all, but are just a random geek who wants to appreciate the engineering genius of those who did, this museum is perhaps the only place to do so.
The politics are kept to an absolute minimum; it's about the history and the technology.
>
>
There are people could tell you, but they already know their own residences' ingress and egress routes, and they think these routes are just fine the way they are. If you asked her on her TV show, someone like Martha Stewart would probably say something to the effect that, regardless of how easy the ingress route may be to use, and regardless of the fact that all relocation and refurnishing expenses are covered by the taxpayers, residences with egress routes involving 90 miles of salt water are not a good thing.
Hey, who the hell are you? WTF? No, I don't mean to imply that Marth*thumpthumpthump*Nothing for you to see here. Move along.