(a) admit to yourself you've spent a fortune just to hear something the Star Trek team would have rejected as too absurd, or (b) go along with it. (b) is pretty rare
Damn lack of an 'edit' button... Come on, at least we should be able to edit our posts as long as we do it before anyone has replied or moderated?
Obviously, this should have been '(a) is pretty rare'.
Tell me that they've hurt people and we can talk. But tell me that Xenu is silly, and I'll tell you that you're taking cheap shots.
The thing about the Xenu story is that the Co$ promises people deep and important secrets once they've reached Operating Clear Super Saiyajin Thetan 5 or whatever the hell they call it. Secrets, they say, that could cause serious damage if told to someone not prepared by years of incredibly expensive courses.
Once you get there, you hear the Xenu story. At which point you either (a) admit to yourself you've spent a fortune just to hear something the Star Trek team would have rejected as too absurd, or (b) go along with it. (b) is pretty rare, as the cult brainwashing along with the good-money-after-bad effect makes it very hard to quit at that stage.
As a result, if you're running a website intended to protect people from Scientology, it makes sense to publish their secret stories. Print them in the open, and ask people if this bloody awful SF is really worth paying all that money for.
If the Scientologists were upfront about the Xenu tale in the same way that Christians are upfront about the Resurrection, I'd agree with you - mocking it as absurd would be a cheap shot. But this is a secret scripture. This is what they want you to spend all your money on training before they'll tell you. In which case, it's not a cheap shot - it's warning people about a con.
According to records of the Israeli investigation, Wieseltier told authorities that she received a Trojan-infested e-mail message bearing the address of gur_r@zahav.net.il, which she believed came from a friend.
But her friend's e-mail was actually gur-r@zahav.net.il. As Israeli investigators traced the origin of the bogus account they discovered that the person who had opened it lived in London and had charged the cost of the account to his American Express card.
Are we to believe that these super-phishers don't know how to spoof a From: header?
India was British for centuries. The UK is mostly metric, apart from long distances, which are in miles, and quantities of milk or beer, which are in pints; pints, I might add, which are rather larger than American pints, which I'm told you call British pints.
Chances are the Indians have acquired some of this fascinating heritage of inconsistent measurement:-)
I mean, do you think Edison wouldn't have invented the lightbulb if there hadn't been IP laws in place back then? (I'm not sure if there were, but I highly doubt they would have made much of a difference either way)
There were, and they did. Edison was sued by Joseph Swan, who had already invented the lightbulb, but AFAIK had not entered the American market, so Edison may have been unaware of this. The legal trouble was ended by a merger between the Edison and Swan companies, allowing money to be made on both sides of the Atlantic.
It's porn, not pr0n! Why is it necessary to obfuscate this word all the time?
Slashdot is a major centre of hacker culture. pr0n is traditional hacker usage, going back at the very least to the days of B1FF. It's basically an ethnic variant spelling.
On the other hand I recently heard an argument here in the UK that said that one of the arguments against forcing ISPs to cache all email traffic for later inspection by law enforcement in the "war on terror" is that the volume of spam makes it uneconomic (and the bad guys are using untraceable untappable voip anyway).
Hmm. You know, if it turns out that that's our best argument against mandatory ISP data retention, then I immediately give up opposing spam. Appalling plague on the net though it is, it beats every ISP becoming an involuntary branch of MI fucking 5.
I might also suggest that we try to get it to be known as the war against terror, rather than the war on terror. The acronym's more fun that way.
I've done a number of modules for NWN (Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, Demon)
Oh yeah, those. Yeah, they were quite good.
Which is to say that the last time you posted about them here I downloaded the first few Shadowlords modules, and then didn't sleep properly for a month as my halfling sorcerer went through the entire lot of them.
I might also add that at one point I nearly went into some kind of geek seizure... here I am, playing a fanmade D&D adventure game on my Linux box at some ungodly hour of the morning, and I end up playing a collectible card game with demons:-)
I'm currently going through Dreamcatcher as a half-elf ranger, just beginning to go Arcane Archer, with Teira, and next time through I'll probably play a thief and try to get Nooble to go evil...
I mean, it's Star Wars, and no self respecting nerd doesn't let his son watch Star Wars.
Correction: it's a Star Wars prequel.
OK, so it was Episode III, and it was quite good. But certainly any self-respecting nerd would refuse outright to permit his son to watch Episode I. Any self-respecting nerd would flatly deny the very existence of Episode I, and suggest the Holiday Special as alternative viewing truer to the original spirit of Star Wars...
... Eight qubits? ISTR that Shor's original quantum error correction code requires nine, and there are simpler codes requiring fewer. We're getting here into a scale where some very interesting features of quantum computation can be demonstrated.
There is no wealth creation on eDonkey/eMule. It's mostly just sharing the works of others, without asking them if they wanted to share it that way first.
That's still wealth creation. The pirate mp3 scene has made millions of people wealthier, in the sense that they now have more music than they otherwise would have. They wanted something they did not have, and now they have it; by what definition of 'wealth' is this not wealth creation?
A huge pile of pirated CDs and DVDs still counts as wealth to the pirate. It has greater value than the blank CDs and DVDs it would otherwise be, doesn't it? Legal or illegal, it's a product meeting a demand and it has value.
As the earlier post said: we need decss in order to view these DVDs. However, by its very nature that also allows us to rip. The same is true of commercial, closed source, Windows DVD players, it's just that there it's rather more difficult to obtain the decrypted video data and direct them to the hard disk rather than to the video card.
He did mention that Wikipedia's content was mirrored on answers.com and reference.com and that it took three more weeks for those sites to change content.
And how exactly is that Wikipedia's problem? He should go after answers.com and reference.com, if that's the case. Wikipedia seems to have worked as intended: a troll changed an entry to reflect their own weird tinfoil-hattish theory, someone else changed it back.
Um, well by that time, if we haven't wiped each other out, both Earth and Mars will probably be heavily populated, but most of the remaining carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and water in the solar system will be tied up in free space habitats, even out in the Oort Cloud. Most people by then will think that it was a stupid, inefficient waste of organic molecules and will be quite opposed to doing so again.
Now, come on. We're looking at fifteen million years here.
Assuming we don't wipe each other out inside the Solar System, fifteen million years hence I would expect to see the Galaxy full of the descendants of humans, in every conceivable niche. They will probably be a very diverse lot. But the one thing they will all have in common will be their ancestry - every one of them will be descended from the original population on the homeworlds, Earth and Mars.
Fifteen million years will surely change us dramatically, but if there's anything human left in the galactic citizens of that epoch then they'll keep Mars and Earth inhabitable, as nature reserves and historical parks. With the resources of the transhuman star travellers of that era, it would be trivial to achieve.
... even if Europe does cool, the Health and Safety mafia surely won't allow us to hold any frost fairs nowadays. We'll get cold, but won't be permitted to enjoy it...
The only melting ice that will raise sea levels is ice that is currently stuck on a land mass, above the ocean. That melts and then joins the ocean, causing an increase.
I have a sneaking suspicion that's most of it. Greenland's big. Antarctica's huge. Lots and lots of water locked up in ice up on land.
My guess would be that the huge thick ice deposits on Greenland account for a lot more water than the relatively thin sea ice on the Arctic Ocean; that stuff's thin enough that you can get a ship through it if you push a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn lack of an 'edit' button... Come on, at least we should be able to edit our posts as long as we do it before anyone has replied or moderated?
Obviously, this should have been '(a) is pretty rare'.
The thing about the Xenu story is that the Co$ promises people deep and important secrets once they've reached Operating Clear Super Saiyajin Thetan 5 or whatever the hell they call it. Secrets, they say, that could cause serious damage if told to someone not prepared by years of incredibly expensive courses.
Once you get there, you hear the Xenu story. At which point you either (a) admit to yourself you've spent a fortune just to hear something the Star Trek team would have rejected as too absurd, or (b) go along with it. (b) is pretty rare, as the cult brainwashing along with the good-money-after-bad effect makes it very hard to quit at that stage.
As a result, if you're running a website intended to protect people from Scientology, it makes sense to publish their secret stories. Print them in the open, and ask people if this bloody awful SF is really worth paying all that money for.
If the Scientologists were upfront about the Xenu tale in the same way that Christians are upfront about the Resurrection, I'd agree with you - mocking it as absurd would be a cheap shot. But this is a secret scripture. This is what they want you to spend all your money on training before they'll tell you. In which case, it's not a cheap shot - it's warning people about a con.
The Vehicle Assembly Building: 3.7 million cubic metres
Saturn V rockets were big.
Can we add a couple of years to his sentence for crimes against punctuation? Multiple exclamation marks: the Unforgivable Sin.
But her friend's e-mail was actually gur-r@zahav.net.il. As Israeli investigators traced the origin of the bogus account they discovered that the person who had opened it lived in London and had charged the cost of the account to his American Express card.
Are we to believe that these super-phishers don't know how to spoof a From: header?
You mean, in contrast to all your guys being Indians? (That was probably equally irresistible :)
India was British for centuries. The UK is mostly metric, apart from long distances, which are in miles, and quantities of milk or beer, which are in pints; pints, I might add, which are rather larger than American pints, which I'm told you call British pints.
Chances are the Indians have acquired some of this fascinating heritage of inconsistent measurement :-)
How delightfully Freudian.
There were, and they did. Edison was sued by Joseph Swan, who had already invented the lightbulb, but AFAIK had not entered the American market, so Edison may have been unaware of this. The legal trouble was ended by a merger between the Edison and Swan companies, allowing money to be made on both sides of the Atlantic.
Slashdot is a major centre of hacker culture. pr0n is traditional hacker usage, going back at the very least to the days of B1FF. It's basically an ethnic variant spelling.
Hmm. You know, if it turns out that that's our best argument against mandatory ISP data retention, then I immediately give up opposing spam. Appalling plague on the net though it is, it beats every ISP becoming an involuntary branch of MI fucking 5.
I might also suggest that we try to get it to be known as the war against terror, rather than the war on terror. The acronym's more fun that way.
Quantum cryptography already did get there first.
Oh yeah, those. Yeah, they were quite good.
Which is to say that the last time you posted about them here I downloaded the first few Shadowlords modules, and then didn't sleep properly for a month as my halfling sorcerer went through the entire lot of them. I might also add that at one point I nearly went into some kind of geek seizure... here I am, playing a fanmade D&D adventure game on my Linux box at some ungodly hour of the morning, and I end up playing a collectible card game with demons :-)
I'm currently going through Dreamcatcher as a half-elf ranger, just beginning to go Arcane Archer, with Teira, and next time through I'll probably play a thief and try to get Nooble to go evil...
Correction: it's a Star Wars prequel.
OK, so it was Episode III, and it was quite good. But certainly any self-respecting nerd would refuse outright to permit his son to watch Episode I. Any self-respecting nerd would flatly deny the very existence of Episode I, and suggest the Holiday Special as alternative viewing truer to the original spirit of Star Wars...
... Eight qubits? ISTR that Shor's original quantum error correction code requires nine, and there are simpler codes requiring fewer. We're getting here into a scale where some very interesting features of quantum computation can be demonstrated.
No, because you see, that would make the advertising too easy to filter. Advertisers don't make money if their adverts get filtered.
The point with .xxx is that it would make the pornography easy to filter. Pornographers don't make money if their pictures get filtered.
You see the important difference here?
Anyway, I think we already moved all the anime to .adv, or at least someone did...
That's still wealth creation. The pirate mp3 scene has made millions of people wealthier, in the sense that they now have more music than they otherwise would have. They wanted something they did not have, and now they have it; by what definition of 'wealth' is this not wealth creation?
A huge pile of pirated CDs and DVDs still counts as wealth to the pirate. It has greater value than the blank CDs and DVDs it would otherwise be, doesn't it? Legal or illegal, it's a product meeting a demand and it has value.
But the ability to view implies the ability to rip. What, in the end, is viewing, if not ripping to video memory rather than to the hard disk?
Effectively what we're doing is something like
$ cat /dev/dvd | decss | videoplayer | /dev/videocard
That's a legitimate use for decss, right? Viewing. But what if instead we
$ cat /dev/dvd | decss | transcode > piratecopy.mpg
As the earlier post said: we need decss in order to view these DVDs. However, by its very nature that also allows us to rip. The same is true of commercial, closed source, Windows DVD players, it's just that there it's rather more difficult to obtain the decrypted video data and direct them to the hard disk rather than to the video card.
What, the blackberry bush?
And how exactly is that Wikipedia's problem? He should go after answers.com and reference.com, if that's the case. Wikipedia seems to have worked as intended: a troll changed an entry to reflect their own weird tinfoil-hattish theory, someone else changed it back.
Now, come on. We're looking at fifteen million years here.
Assuming we don't wipe each other out inside the Solar System, fifteen million years hence I would expect to see the Galaxy full of the descendants of humans, in every conceivable niche. They will probably be a very diverse lot. But the one thing they will all have in common will be their ancestry - every one of them will be descended from the original population on the homeworlds, Earth and Mars.
Fifteen million years will surely change us dramatically, but if there's anything human left in the galactic citizens of that epoch then they'll keep Mars and Earth inhabitable, as nature reserves and historical parks. With the resources of the transhuman star travellers of that era, it would be trivial to achieve.
... even if Europe does cool, the Health and Safety mafia surely won't allow us to hold any frost fairs nowadays. We'll get cold, but won't be permitted to enjoy it...
I have a sneaking suspicion that's most of it. Greenland's big. Antarctica's huge. Lots and lots of water locked up in ice up on land.
My guess would be that the huge thick ice deposits on Greenland account for a lot more water than the relatively thin sea ice on the Arctic Ocean; that stuff's thin enough that you can get a ship through it if you push a bit.
My haiku is rotten
I hang my head in sorrow
Forgot the season.
Post with bad format
Then rewrite it correctly
Get double karma