There is NO REASON at all to take it as existant for default or even presuppose its possible existence. The list include but is not limited to - Enorm Dinosaurus in small lake in england
Quite right. Absolutely no reason to believe those nonsensical stories about dinosaurs in English lakes.
Rly?... cuz my m8 got 0wned by this hacker on AIM. Posted about it on his myspace account if u wanna read it. u think i should tell him 2 go 2 IRC? r ther no hackers there? I'll tell him i heard its saf3r, k? cuz I heard they can get ur IP number on AIM & not on IRC, that true 2?
(egad, writing like that was a terrible strain, even if only for a few sentences... how do the aolam3rz manage it?)
Not just a supermarket chain. The supermarket chain. Ubiquitous, cheap, and very, very, very rich. I remember reading that something like one pound in every five spent at retail stores by the British public went to Tesco. This is the chain that's pushing cheap far-eastern region-free DVD players.
Just to underline the point for you all there. Multiregion DVD players are definitely not hard to get hold of.
I understand that most open source is written by people who care and are either college students or white collar workers who have time either at work (employer consenting), or at home if they have little family life.
Most open source, in terms of sheer number of projects or lines of code? Probably. But in terms of usage?
The major open-source projects have got corporate backing now. Linux, for instance? Lots of work being done on that by IBM, in addition to the employees of the likes of Red Hat or SuSE. Similarly, I believe AOL has been backing Mozilla lately, and the number of old-skool Unix utilities that contain copyrights of the University of California is enormous - after all, they wrote BSD.
It's not just anarchist hackers now. Open source has gone commercial in a really big way.
While murderers are by in large stupid people, you seldom have people stupid enough to murder somebody in a remote country house with only four or five other potential suspects.
Very pleased to hear it. I could have sworn someone here was out to get me, but could never have said who... Perhaps I'm just getting paranoid. Well, off to the Dining Room with me; I'm told Mrs White has prepared a candlelit dinner for us all.
I've had to refute time and again Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that entropy in a closed system can never decrease. They like to use this as an argument as to why organisms couldn't evolve. In order to agree with this, you have to acknowledge that organisms are very orderly (which I don't believe we are).
We are very orderly, incredibly so, but we aren't closed systems. We need an energy input to maintain that high level of order. You don't stay a living organism for long once you stop eating; thermodynamics will kill you pretty quickly if you ever DO become a closed system.
Most amusing is this meme, however, that seems very prevalent in creationist circles. 'Newton's second law of thermodynamics'. It seems to be a mutation that combines 'Newton's second law', and 'The second law of thermodynamics'. Its selection advantage is obvious, since Newton is one of the few physicists the average clueless creationist could name. However, it's useful as a marker: anyone who speaks thus of 'Newton's law of thermodynamics' can be safely ignored, as they have proved that they know nothing of either Newton's laws or of the laws of thermodynamics, and that they have mindlessly copied and pasted another creationist's text.
A "designer" who himself was not designed or came to be out of nothing, is by definition a supernatural being, and therefore, by definition, ID is supernaturalism.
Not necessarily the case. We are ourselves designers, and we were (as far as anyone can tell) not designed. That doesn't make us supernatural.
It's conceivable that there might somewhere be Intelligent Design World, the product of someone dropping a monolith on an empty planet and letting it work for a few billion years. It's conceivable that its inhabitants might note that their evolution seems to have been really weird, and they might even conclude that someone's been messing with them. They wouldn't necessarily be invoking the supernatural. They might even find a magnetic anomaly on their moon and dig up something astonishing...
However, this isn't what ID is about. Aliens leaving monoliths in the middle of Africa for a tribe of apes to find? Well, that's intelligent design, but somehow I think they wouldn't be happy with it. An intelligent designer who is himself a product of Darwin? I get the fairly strong impression that ID supporters not only have a very clear idea in mind about the designer, but that they also have a name for him, and a list of things they think he wants us to do for him, and a bunch of people they think are his official representatives.
Though I agreed with a good deal of your post, I've got to quarrel with this.
Look at what's on the top of each page. "News that matters".
That's NOT what it says. It's first of all News for nerds, and only then Stuff that matters. Interviews with obscure game designers or articles about some anime work-in-progress certainly do not qualify as stuff that matters, but they are undoubtedly news for nerds and definitely belong on Slashdot.
If these guys are smart enough to copy and paste stories to submit and get them posted, they are good enough to plagarize other posts and articles for karma whoring purposes.
How about something along the lines of the system used to deal out modpoints? That, IIRC, works on the basis of being an average/. user. Not someone who only logs in once a month, not someone who posts fifty times a day and sits there hitting refresh every 30 seconds. Someone within a vaguely-defined typical mid-range.
It still wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least eliminate the motive for blatant PageRank whoring that **BB is pursuing, while still allowing us to post the articles he's turned up for us.
I understand that in **Beatles-Beatles' case he usually provides a return link to his website which is full of advert links - so does the fact this link is posted on slashdot create the revenue for him (eg 20,000 users read the slashdot entry and he automatically gets 20,000 click throughs) , or do we still individually have to manually click through to his site?
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread what I think this is about. It's not really to do with clicks, it's about Google. The exact algorithm Google uses to determine which sites place more highly than others is a secret, but it is known that it depends heavily on links: a site which is linked from highly-rated sites inherits a high rating itself.
Slashdot is very highly rated by Google. Now **BB sends in as many stories as he can, and every one that gets accepted includes a link from the Slashdot front page to **BB's page. Googlebot sees this and increases the rating of **BB's page in turn. **BB can now sell links from his page to people who want to 'optimise' their search engine position.
It's a common technique, and it means that Google's results tend to fill up with garbage sites that have used spammish means such as this to get to the top, thereby damaging the usefulness of Google (and other search engines operating on similar lines) to all of us. This is why I loathe **BB and complain about his submissions, and probably why many others do the same.
It may be the case that at whatever time people in Roland's timezone are up and about, Timothy is on submissions duty, and when **BB's up and busy with his daily flood of submissions happens to be ScuttleMonkey's shift.
Anyone have statistics on the times of day at which R.P. and **BB stories turn up?
I thought the hue and cry after Roland Piquepaille was unnecessary. So he was trying to drive traffic to his blog and maybe become known as some kind of net pundit. That, it seemed to me, was fair enough. Isn't that essentially what we're all doing, sounding off here on the topic of the day?
But this Beatles guy isn't doing that. He's using his links back from/. to drive up the PageRank of his link farm, with the apparent overall aim of trying to push spam sites up Google, for money. This, as far as I and, it seems, a large number of/.'ers are concerned, is not fair play. It simply isn't cricket, and we don't like to see our community effectively supporting spam.
That's what gets me upset about **Beatles-Beatles, that didn't worry me about Roland. This kind of link farming and search engine spamming spoils the net for all of us, and a major geek centre like this one should be firmly against that.
Area 51 has the largest collection of fully-functional extra-terrestrial spacecraft in our Solar System (okay, I just made that last one up.)
Quite right. As if anyone thinks the government keeps the alien stuff at Groom Lake anymore, now that every UFO geek in the world knows about it. Nah. All the alien kit is now at the old Soviet base on Farside, which was handed over to the US after the cancellation of the Buran programme left the Russians unable to effectively maintain it.
All there is at Area 51 these days is a lot of secrecy and security, the kind of secrecy that gets you more attention than you would by just operating openly, and from time to time they send up some trippy lightshows to distract the conspiracy theorists from what's really going on.
(I fully expect to see this post quoted verbatim on godlikeproductions within a week. They love this kind of stuff.)
No longer will there be any doubt over whether the murder victim was strangled or beheaded, which has in the past been a cause of great difficulty in investigations due to the lack of any very obvious physical feature that might distinguish a decapitation victim from someone who has been hanged. You'll now have access to a DNA test to put the question beyond doubt.
Are you suggesting that, in orbit around a moon of an outer planet in the Polaris system, we'll find an alien artefact which, if docked with by a human ship, will transport it instantly across half the galaxy to make contact with its creators?
Excuse me.
* ring ring. ring ring *
Ah yes. Is that New Rossyth? Excellent. Could you get me Meredith Argent on the line please? Thank you. Yes. I'll hold. Hello? Meredith? Yes. Look, can you get hold of Mic Turner at short notice? And that prototype ship you've been working on? Terrific. Might have a destination for it...
What kind of a tyrant waits to be elected to take power and then leaves after only 8 years?
Hmm. Can't think of any off the top of my head, although I seem to remember a central European dictator in the middle of the last century who waited to be elected to take power, and then left after twelve years (after some strong encouragement from the Russians to take early retirement). Slightly less time than it took to get rid of Thatcher, IIRC.
Hm yes, let's change some of the texts in those books. I'm sure it'll go down well with the readers.
Well, weren't they all the same project originally? St Paul forked the Torah, and then Mohammed did the same a few centuries later? They're still open-source, then.
Personally, I'd want someone to go in and fix some of the more dangerous exploits in the code. The bit about 'while I'm not around, kids, please obey my official representative, MR BLACK! I'll be coming along real soon now, but for now here's MR BLACK!' has got to be sorted out.
Oh, and a there are a good few bugs related to conflicting definitions early on in the codebase. The scope of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and the scope of 'Kill all the unbelievers in the land I have given to you' really need to be more clearly defined.
Actually, I quite enjoy people that hotlink images from my site... I regularly watch my logs to see where it's happening, then substitute the hot-linked images with something like the goatse.cx main image.
I hotlinked to SomethingAwful once. Never again.
They seem to detect hotlinking by checking the referrer ID, and automatically substituting a different image if the link hasn't come from SA itself. And do they ever have some horrific images to substitute.
Bloody good question. Theory is unclear on this point. If you're betting, then the smart money's on 'they just merge and form a larger black hole', but things get all quantum when you try to actually prove it.
I read a while back that part of the problem is that it's common to view the event horizon of a black hole as the shell of photons emitted by the star just as it contracted below the Schwarzschild radius; these photons are trapped right on the edge, forever. If the merger forms a larger black hole, do the photons then move away? Personally I think this is a sign that we need a more robust definition of the event horizon, but I'm no expert.
It also occurs to me that if two holes were to merge, then unless their collision was head-on to an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy, the merger would result in a hole that was spinning really fast. Conservation of angular momentum. I recall hearing that it's conceivable that a black hole might rotate so rapidly that its event horizon vanishes entirely, leaving a naked singularity exposed to observers at a distance. If THAT happens, then... pretty much all bets are off.
I for one would more like to see space technology developed not towards space tourism, but towards expediting nuclear waste into space, be that into the Sun, towards some distant planet in our system, or else. I know this may sound harsh, but I'd say it's better to have it off planet than on planet, whichever place on earth that may eventually be.
I'd support this only once we have either a space elevator or Superman available to do the job. Launching nuke waste into space for disposal at present is going to cause more problems than it solves - either you run the risk of a launch failure spraying radioactives everywhere, or you use a heavy armoured container that's sure to survive a launch explosion, but drives launch costs through the roof. Not to mention the ozone damage done by every rocket ever launched.
It's also worth adding that throwing stuff into the Sun is actually very difficult. Remember, we're in orbit; to shift something that's orbiting along with the Earth into an orbit that intersects the Sun's surface takes a _lot_ of energy. It would actually be a good deal cheaper, energetically speaking, to send the stuff out of the solar system entirely.
Richard Branson and his Virgin brand are English, why should he listen to US rules when they are only binding in USA ?
Because he'll be launching from the USA, and chances are that his prospective customers (millionaires, but not billionaires - the billionaires would fly Soyuz) are disproportionately located in the USA.
Novell's unauthorized copying in its use and distribution of SuSE
Linux includes but is not limited to the appropriateion of the
following data structures and algorithms contained in or derived
from SCO's copyrighted material:
Pretty much everything that makes SuSE remotely like UNIX, basically. This seems to be derived from SCO's amusing claim that all our UNIX are belong to them; they must have sat down, asked themselves 'what makes a UNIX system so UNIXey?', written out a list and handed it to the lawyers...
Slashdot Mirror
Quite right. Absolutely no reason to believe those nonsensical stories about dinosaurs in English lakes.
They're all in Scotland, everyone knows that...
Rly? ... cuz my m8 got 0wned by this hacker on AIM. Posted about it on his myspace account if u wanna read it. u think i should tell him 2 go 2 IRC? r ther no hackers there? I'll tell him i heard its saf3r, k? cuz I heard they can get ur IP number on AIM & not on IRC, that true 2?
(egad, writing like that was a terrible strain, even if only for a few sentences... how do the aolam3rz manage it?)
Not just a supermarket chain. The supermarket chain. Ubiquitous, cheap, and very, very, very rich. I remember reading that something like one pound in every five spent at retail stores by the British public went to Tesco. This is the chain that's pushing cheap far-eastern region-free DVD players.
Just to underline the point for you all there. Multiregion DVD players are definitely not hard to get hold of.
Most open source, in terms of sheer number of projects or lines of code? Probably. But in terms of usage?
The major open-source projects have got corporate backing now. Linux, for instance? Lots of work being done on that by IBM, in addition to the employees of the likes of Red Hat or SuSE. Similarly, I believe AOL has been backing Mozilla lately, and the number of old-skool Unix utilities that contain copyrights of the University of California is enormous - after all, they wrote BSD.
It's not just anarchist hackers now. Open source has gone commercial in a really big way.
Very pleased to hear it. I could have sworn someone here was out to get me, but could never have said who... Perhaps I'm just getting paranoid. Well, off to the Dining Room with me; I'm told Mrs White has prepared a candlelit dinner for us all.
-- Dr. Black, Tudor Hall
We are very orderly, incredibly so, but we aren't closed systems. We need an energy input to maintain that high level of order. You don't stay a living organism for long once you stop eating; thermodynamics will kill you pretty quickly if you ever DO become a closed system.
Most amusing is this meme, however, that seems very prevalent in creationist circles. 'Newton's second law of thermodynamics'. It seems to be a mutation that combines 'Newton's second law', and 'The second law of thermodynamics'. Its selection advantage is obvious, since Newton is one of the few physicists the average clueless creationist could name. However, it's useful as a marker: anyone who speaks thus of 'Newton's law of thermodynamics' can be safely ignored, as they have proved that they know nothing of either Newton's laws or of the laws of thermodynamics, and that they have mindlessly copied and pasted another creationist's text.
Not necessarily the case. We are ourselves designers, and we were (as far as anyone can tell) not designed. That doesn't make us supernatural.
It's conceivable that there might somewhere be Intelligent Design World, the product of someone dropping a monolith on an empty planet and letting it work for a few billion years. It's conceivable that its inhabitants might note that their evolution seems to have been really weird, and they might even conclude that someone's been messing with them. They wouldn't necessarily be invoking the supernatural. They might even find a magnetic anomaly on their moon and dig up something astonishing...
However, this isn't what ID is about. Aliens leaving monoliths in the middle of Africa for a tribe of apes to find? Well, that's intelligent design, but somehow I think they wouldn't be happy with it. An intelligent designer who is himself a product of Darwin? I get the fairly strong impression that ID supporters not only have a very clear idea in mind about the designer, but that they also have a name for him, and a list of things they think he wants us to do for him, and a bunch of people they think are his official representatives.
Look at what's on the top of each page. "News that matters".
That's NOT what it says. It's first of all News for nerds, and only then Stuff that matters. Interviews with obscure game designers or articles about some anime work-in-progress certainly do not qualify as stuff that matters, but they are undoubtedly news for nerds and definitely belong on Slashdot.
How about something along the lines of the system used to deal out modpoints? That, IIRC, works on the basis of being an average /. user. Not someone who only logs in once a month, not someone who posts fifty times a day and sits there hitting refresh every 30 seconds. Someone within a vaguely-defined typical mid-range.
It still wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least eliminate the motive for blatant PageRank whoring that **BB is pursuing, while still allowing us to post the articles he's turned up for us.
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread what I think this is about. It's not really to do with clicks, it's about Google. The exact algorithm Google uses to determine which sites place more highly than others is a secret, but it is known that it depends heavily on links: a site which is linked from highly-rated sites inherits a high rating itself.
Slashdot is very highly rated by Google. Now **BB sends in as many stories as he can, and every one that gets accepted includes a link from the Slashdot front page to **BB's page. Googlebot sees this and increases the rating of **BB's page in turn. **BB can now sell links from his page to people who want to 'optimise' their search engine position.
It's a common technique, and it means that Google's results tend to fill up with garbage sites that have used spammish means such as this to get to the top, thereby damaging the usefulness of Google (and other search engines operating on similar lines) to all of us. This is why I loathe **BB and complain about his submissions, and probably why many others do the same.
Anyone have statistics on the times of day at which R.P. and **BB stories turn up?
I thought the hue and cry after Roland Piquepaille was unnecessary. So he was trying to drive traffic to his blog and maybe become known as some kind of net pundit. That, it seemed to me, was fair enough. Isn't that essentially what we're all doing, sounding off here on the topic of the day?
But this Beatles guy isn't doing that. He's using his links back from /. to drive up the PageRank of his link farm, with the apparent overall aim of trying to push spam sites up Google, for money. This, as far as I and, it seems, a large number of /.'ers are concerned, is not fair play. It simply isn't cricket, and we don't like to see our community effectively supporting spam.
That's what gets me upset about **Beatles-Beatles, that didn't worry me about Roland. This kind of link farming and search engine spamming spoils the net for all of us, and a major geek centre like this one should be firmly against that.
Quite right. As if anyone thinks the government keeps the alien stuff at Groom Lake anymore, now that every UFO geek in the world knows about it. Nah. All the alien kit is now at the old Soviet base on Farside, which was handed over to the US after the cancellation of the Buran programme left the Russians unable to effectively maintain it.
All there is at Area 51 these days is a lot of secrecy and security, the kind of secrecy that gets you more attention than you would by just operating openly, and from time to time they send up some trippy lightshows to distract the conspiracy theorists from what's really going on.
(I fully expect to see this post quoted verbatim on godlikeproductions within a week. They love this kind of stuff.)
Isn't progress wonderful?
Are you suggesting that, in orbit around a moon of an outer planet in the Polaris system, we'll find an alien artefact which, if docked with by a human ship, will transport it instantly across half the galaxy to make contact with its creators?
Excuse me.
* ring ring. ring ring *
Ah yes. Is that New Rossyth? Excellent. Could you get me Meredith Argent on the line please? Thank you. Yes. I'll hold. Hello? Meredith? Yes. Look, can you get hold of Mic Turner at short notice? And that prototype ship you've been working on? Terrific. Might have a destination for it...
Hmm. Can't think of any off the top of my head, although I seem to remember a central European dictator in the middle of the last century who waited to be elected to take power, and then left after twelve years (after some strong encouragement from the Russians to take early retirement). Slightly less time than it took to get rid of Thatcher, IIRC.
Seriously. That physically hurt.
Well, weren't they all the same project originally? St Paul forked the Torah, and then Mohammed did the same a few centuries later? They're still open-source, then.
Personally, I'd want someone to go in and fix some of the more dangerous exploits in the code. The bit about 'while I'm not around, kids, please obey my official representative, MR BLACK! I'll be coming along real soon now, but for now here's MR BLACK!' has got to be sorted out.
Oh, and a there are a good few bugs related to conflicting definitions early on in the codebase. The scope of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and the scope of 'Kill all the unbelievers in the land I have given to you' really need to be more clearly defined.
I hotlinked to SomethingAwful once. Never again.
They seem to detect hotlinking by checking the referrer ID, and automatically substituting a different image if the link hasn't come from SA itself. And do they ever have some horrific images to substitute.
Bloody good question. Theory is unclear on this point. If you're betting, then the smart money's on 'they just merge and form a larger black hole', but things get all quantum when you try to actually prove it.
I read a while back that part of the problem is that it's common to view the event horizon of a black hole as the shell of photons emitted by the star just as it contracted below the Schwarzschild radius; these photons are trapped right on the edge, forever. If the merger forms a larger black hole, do the photons then move away? Personally I think this is a sign that we need a more robust definition of the event horizon, but I'm no expert.
It also occurs to me that if two holes were to merge, then unless their collision was head-on to an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy, the merger would result in a hole that was spinning really fast. Conservation of angular momentum. I recall hearing that it's conceivable that a black hole might rotate so rapidly that its event horizon vanishes entirely, leaving a naked singularity exposed to observers at a distance. If THAT happens, then... pretty much all bets are off.
I'd support this only once we have either a space elevator or Superman available to do the job. Launching nuke waste into space for disposal at present is going to cause more problems than it solves - either you run the risk of a launch failure spraying radioactives everywhere, or you use a heavy armoured container that's sure to survive a launch explosion, but drives launch costs through the roof. Not to mention the ozone damage done by every rocket ever launched.
It's also worth adding that throwing stuff into the Sun is actually very difficult. Remember, we're in orbit; to shift something that's orbiting along with the Earth into an orbit that intersects the Sun's surface takes a _lot_ of energy. It would actually be a good deal cheaper, energetically speaking, to send the stuff out of the solar system entirely.
Because he'll be launching from the USA, and chances are that his prospective customers (millionaires, but not billionaires - the billionaires would fly Soyuz) are disproportionately located in the USA.
Well, some favour playing Championship Manager with real footballers.
There are worse ways to spend your absurdly large fortune than the one BillG's found :)
The Brick Testament is amusing. However... the Lego Camelot is just tremendous. It's Lego. And it's Camelot. But only a model...
Pretty much everything that makes SuSE remotely like UNIX, basically. This seems to be derived from SCO's amusing claim that all our UNIX are belong to them; they must have sat down, asked themselves 'what makes a UNIX system so UNIXey?', written out a list and handed it to the lawyers...