Freely-available scientific journals are definitely the wave of the future, but I think PLOS is missing a greater opportunity to foster scientific thought
Not only should these articles be made availble on the web to anyone who wants to read them, but to encourage the sharing of scientific ideas, persons ought to be able to post commentary on each article in real time, avoiding the typical several week tuern-around times required to mail letters to journals.
Of course, all commentray letters are not created equal, which could make for a plethora of uninspired or even falacious commentary. To counteract this tendency, I think that those persons who, over time, demonstrate that they have "Insightful" or "Interesting" (or even "Funny") comments to make, be allowed to make other persons' comments more or less visible by awarding them positive or negative points.
In turn, those awarded the most moderators' points ("mod points") would get a limited number of "mod points" (say, 5) to apply to future comments, perpetuating the cycle and allowing the best commentary on each article to rise to the top -- sort of a redistribution of "good" and "bad" karma.
While I'm not aware that such a system has ever been tried before, I cannot imagine how it might be abused, and I'm sure it would act only to stimulate a flowering of scientific discourse.
There's another interesting resource I found, Origins, that has a great deal of scientific articles
I was wondering why the parent article was modded "Troll", so I followed the link. It's a web site advocating the pseudo-scientific, crypto-creationist "Intelligent Design" nonsense.
If you haven't stepped in this dogpile before, "Intelligent Design" basically claims not to necessarily advocate a God, but does advocate the need for a fore-thinking "designer" to account for the complexity of life. It ignores the implicit bottomless recursion: if all life on Earth is the product of an intelligent designer, and indeed required, because of its complexity, and intelligent designer, wasn't that designer itself so complex as to require an intelligent designer, and so on ad infinitum? Yes, it's turtles all the way down, unless of course you propose a timeless and omnipotent god. And thus, "Itelligent Design" is just Creationism given a shave and haircut and dressed up in a stolen lab coat to hid the priestly vestments.
In times past, Creationists would point to the eyes, and ask how such a marvelous and complex device could be the product of "random" evolution; but now scientists have simulated the development of the eye and shown it actually doesn't take that any forethought or much time (in evolutionary terms). So to, the "Intelligent Design" advocates hang much of their "theory" on aspects of biology (like rotating flagella in bacteria) that to them is surprising or "unlikely". It should not need to be said -- but unfortunately does need to be said -- that the argument from personal surprise is not science.
We can find many things that are true but counter-intuitive -- including much of physics, not to mention the apparently built-in inability of humans to intuitively grasp certain ideas about statistical likelihood (witness the popularity of lotteries), or concepts, such as "infinity", that our evolution did not prepare us to easily come to terms with. But only the "Intelligent Design" "theorists" see "I wouldn't have expected that" not as a statement about the limits of human minds, but about the limits of the universe. Being dumbfounded by the grandeur of the universe may make good poetry and pleasing holy books, but it's emphatically not science, and neither is "Intelligent Design"; it's religious opinion masquerading as science.
All that said, while I strongly support keeping so-called "Intelligent Design" out of the public schools and out of any serious scientific discussion, I'm uncomfortable calling the parent post a "Troll". Just because I/you/we don't agree with an opinion does not make it a troll, and I prefer open discussion and refutation of bad ideas to their suppression with mod points. Bad ideas, especially, need the disinfectant of open discussion. That's my opinion, anyway.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the proprietary windows format doesn't play on my portable MP3 player. And it ties me to Windows in a way I don't want to be tied. (Speaking of dead horses, Slashdot's been moving about as fast as one for the last week.)
But this you probably haven't heard before, from the linked article:
Telstra says BigPond Music will become Australia's largest music download site. Single tracks and albums will be available for download in early December, and will not count towards broadband download caps.
Yes, it probably will become Australia's largest (legal) download site, because Telestra BigPond will be both music vendor and ISP. In a triumph of vertical integration, users will continue to have download limits for Telestra's competitors, but will be able to "avoid" extra charges (which I'm sure will be built into the price of the music) for Telestra's own music site.
Now I know that download limits, and extra charges to go beyond those limits are pretty much unavoidable in Oz, but it strikes me as anti-competitve to lift those lmits for the ISPs favored affiliates.
And I worry that if this is succesful in Oz, we'll begin to see it elsewhere: high speed big pipes, for example, connecting AOL's users to Time Warner's offerings, and -- what an unfortunate coincidence! -- crappy connections outside the AOL-Time Warner group of companies. Or, no download limits between, perhsps, Verizon and eBay, but don't expect the same quality of connection, to, oh, Slashdot.
Of course, this will all be put over as "special benefits to our customers", providing "expeditetd access to the most requested web sites", but it's a short step from "special relationship" to the ISP turning its customers into another commodity to be rented -- "we have 10 million eyes with 5 million credit cards" to the highest bidding affiliate.
We're nowhere near fit and walked pretty much the entire course, and still came in smack in the middle of the standings.
You must remember that many/.ers think "too much exercise" means "leaving the basement".
And "exhausting journey" means "getting beyond WiFi range of my home WLAN".
And "Strenuous Trek" is a code phrase for what they did when they last played their collection of "Seven of Nine of Borg" videos. (Yeah, they got "assimilated".)
i think the internet is becoming a more commercial media, and with that come benefits as well as disadvantages.
It's not just the commerical media, it's the wide-spread access that's also ruining the internet.
I'll limit my rant to usenet; slashdot is too slow for the numerous post previews required to get a longer post right, or more brief.
Anybody remember usenet back in 1996? Or 1993? I remeber when you could hang out in the newsgroups for hours, reading thought, incisive, meaningful posts. alt.angst was a favorite of mine -- I still rememeber some of the laments and cries in the wilderness posted there a decade latter.
There was one post, from a guy who would lie awake in bed at 3am, and think about his good job as a programmer, his lovely and loyal wife, his comfortable home, and feel a great aching emptiness inside him as he recalls for the nth time that he had never made a scientific discovery, had never designed a unique algorithm, had never made a lasting contribution to the progress of mankind's knowledge. And it was written far more hauntingly than my lacluster rendition.
What's in alt.angst now? Oh, there are still a few good posters, but of course it's all deluged in aol'er "me too"s, in penis enlargment and porn spam, and psychotic ramblings.
alt.folklore.urban still has a dedicated core of erudite posters, but the last time I made in a regular part of my day, it was deluged -- for weeks, with megs of posts -- by the "Snuh Buh" crapflooders (DejaGoogle for it it you really need to completely waste your time).
The comp. hierarchy still works, but outside of the moderated gtroups, the signal-to-noise ratio declines thanks to
the "do my homework" crowd ("I want to develop an algorithm for, uh, moving these three towers in Hanoi. Can anyone help me by giving my a compilable solution that I can put my name on?"),
top-posters who have Microsoft newsreaders and so don't know better,
top-posters who are told repeatedly not to top-post, but don't get it,
and my favorite, posters to comp.lang.c or comp.lang.c++ who show a zealous dedication to not understanding the concept of a language Standard ("But it's not undefined behavior in Visual C++. Abd whose (sic) this Steve Clamage guy to tell me I'm off-topic. This newsgroups (sic) for C++ and I want to do graphics in C++, so graphic are on-topic. I demand you help me with graphic! (sic))
About three years ago I finally blew my stack at one such off-topic poster, went extremely personal and insulting -- went too far -- and relaized I just couldn't stick around in comp.lang.c++ anymore. which is a shame, given the truly great C++ coders who hang out there to offer stunningly detailed advice for free. But still, too much noise.
If I sound elitist ("usenet for articulate posters only!", maybe I am. But when usenet was mostly limited to.edus, it wasn't a golden age, but it was a hell of a lot better.
This has nothing to do with anything remotely Slashdot related, but I need to do something before my head explodes...
There's a place for this.
Once upon a time this would have been perfect for alt.angst, but of course alt.angst went to hell and gone along with the rest of usenet somewhere around the intersection of 1996 and aol.com
The best replacement I've found is craigslist.org. It has a post board called "rants and raves" for which your post would be an excellent contribution and highly appreciated.
Since craigslist is sub-domained by (major) cities, and given that you think it's 3am, I'd suggest their London "office".
And best of luck and you have my sincere sympathies.
Putting on my amatuer psychologist hat (it's a threadbare hat), it seems she wants you to know in no uncertain terms that she couldn't handle, after ten years of friendship, hooking up with you. Maybe she hopes a rather cruel and swift demonstration of this will salvage the friendship by showing you precisely how and why it wouldn't work out. Or perhaps she's trying to tell you (and herself) that the hookup was so insignificant (in her mind) that she can do the same thing the next week right in front of you and with your roommate no less.
I figure (having been your friend for 10 years) she can't be oblivious to what this is doing to you, so doing it in front of you must be her way of communicating something. Perhaps you (after they've finished rutting) sinply ask her what the fuck that something is.
(Since this is off-topic, I'll post without my karma bonus, and I'll gracefully accept whatever karma hit whomever is modding tonight thinks deserved.)
Note that the substance being used is Teflon, so as to start with a good non-stick surface and make it even less sticky by crafting its surface into "nano-spikes"
It can also cause flu-like symptoms in humans (see above link).
I would imagine (but don't know) that if you form the Teflon into "nano-spikes", you increase the service area and thus can expect more fumes to be produced.
PS - users should to keep in mind that emusic is watermarking all tracks you download using their download manager. The watermarking happens on the client side by the emusicdlm program itself. It also breaks several frames in the mp3.
Any evidence for this? Several months ago (but after the new download manager was forced on me), I compared the MD5 sum of admittedly one track with the MD5 sum another downloader got, and the MD5 sums matched.
We've been saying it on the currently-dead message boards for months -- if all of Emusic's subscribers downloaded as much as we did, they'd expire overnight, taking in less than a penny per track.
It was only a matter of time before they had to revamp their pricing structure.
I'm not so sure about that. If emusic had a million subscribers, they'd get $10 million per month, $120 million per year.
Along with that point, it destroys what I thought was eMusic's greatest virtue: It was really easy to go find some new band you had never heard of and see if you liked 'em.
That's precisely it. Under the old emusic policy, I could try stuff out without worrying about being burnt.
If I have to worry that I'm using up several of a limited numbre of downloads, I won't feel that freedom to explore. And so it's just not as worthwhile to me.
At some point MS could make a dll very much like this a part of Windows and code the OS to break if you modfy or delete the dll. Then license out the technology to the RIAA. That would stop directly ripping protected CDs or DVD's on Windows
Yes, and Microsoft probably will. That's what Palladium (or whatever Microsoft is calling it this week) is all about.
I don't know what Microsoft will name that.dll, but I know what my name for it will be: the linux killer app.
Seriously, the more Microsoft talks about DRM, the more I move toward linux. I'm moving slowly; right now I'm trying to rely only on Windows apps that have a version in linux as well, so that when I transition I'll be able to use apps I'm used to.
As Microsoft moves faster toward DRM, I'll move faster to linux. And I won't be the only one to switch.
And the bonus is, of course, that when we are attacked by a carnivorous intelligent giant cat-species, we can use the lasers to fight back..
When the Kzin first encountered humans, the Kzinti telepath assured his commander (Chuft-Captain?) that the humans had no weapons, because that was what he read in the humans' minds. He also opined that human might be tasty (even though given that the telepath wasn't a warrior, and so was despised, he'd never taste any).
So the Kzin arrogantly attacked head on with little subterfuge, hoping to recover some humans to eat.
But while the peaceable humans did not, in fact, think they had weapons, one human remembered out during the attack that they did have a big-ass laser, big enough for inter-planetary communication.
And he figured that if it was powerful enough to communicate over thousands of miles, it could be used as devastatingly powerful weapon at close range. And he fried the smug, unsuspecting Kzinti.
Er, of course, I didn't recall this myself. I'm no nerd. I, ah, heard it from, ah, a friend. Yeah.
A team of scientists have found that to the brain, a social snub is just like stubbing a toe.'
And they're absolutely right. I should know.
I've been feeling the pain of rejection a lot lately.
I got laid off.
Soon after I told my girlfriend about it, she dumped me.
Then one of my closest friends moved out of the country.
I'm camped out all alone in my cramped apartment, drinking cheap malt liquor and eating chips and salsa.
My only social outlet these days is -- on Slashdot. I don't think I have to explain the horror, the dark and lonely abyss, of that.
And imagine the anguish when I even get snubbed on Slashdot!
Only one thing makes me feel better, only one thing makes me feel like I have anything to offer, that I have any worth at all: seeing my Slashdot posts get modded up.
Please, save me from more pain heaped on pain, and consider being a brief ray of happiness in the dismal, stygian darkness of my pathetic, shameful, pain-filled life, and mod this post up!
My local Verizon store has been giving me the same date for several weeks, but mentioned that other companies are afraid of losing their current customers. My question to the Slashdot community is this: is that a valid concern?
Well they're already charging you a number-portability fee. And most carriers have been charging the fee for months.
And even after they've paid off the cost of the number portability system (and let's face it, it's a database -- how expensive can it be?) they'll continue charging the fee in perpetuity.
Your great-grandchildren (were you not/.ers and thus barred from breeding) will be paying the number-portability fee; the phone companies will never give up a cash cow, and that's what the fee will be.
So it seems only fair, since you have been paying the fee for months, and will pay the fee forever hereafter, for the phone company to actually give you what you've been paying for.
Or perhaps I'm unsympathetic -- given all those CEO bonuses the big phone companies insist on paying, perhaps they really do need to charge you for something they don't actually provide, while incidently locking in consumers and preventing market competition.
I don't build boilers not because I can't, but because they are dangerious (sic) enough to require more testing than I'm willing to give.
And my point was that if the original poster wished to proceed with his programming project, he should educate himself about it -- and educating youself is a lot more involved than posting an "Ask Slashdot", (seekers of free legal advice notwithstanding) --, and having proceeded, not forget to do the required testing.
You illustrate my point for me: you don't build a boiler not because you couldn't, but because you're unwiling to thoroughly test a boiler enough to ensure its safety. Surely you wouldn't confuse serious boiler testing with asking Slashdot.
building humungous lasers in their asteroid belt and planet surface, and using them to propel a light sail armed interstellar craft between stars.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but isn't using light pressure in a vacuum to drive a light sail entirely different from an aircraft with "specially designed photovoltaic cells carried onboard to power the plane's propeller"?
It's like (poor analogy alert) saying that a gasoline powered car and a squeeze-jet that squirts out liquid gasoline to propel itself through the water are using "the same" propulsive technology.
BTW, light sails were proposed by real physicists long before Niven and Pournelle wrote the excellent Mote in God's Eye.
Slashdot Mirror
Freely-available scientific journals are definitely the wave of the future, but I think PLOS is missing a greater opportunity to foster scientific thought
Not only should these articles be made availble on the web to anyone who wants to read them, but to encourage the sharing of scientific ideas, persons ought to be able to post commentary on each article in real time, avoiding the typical several week tuern-around times required to mail letters to journals.
Of course, all commentray letters are not created equal, which could make for a plethora of uninspired or even falacious commentary. To counteract this tendency, I think that those persons who, over time, demonstrate that they have "Insightful" or "Interesting" (or even "Funny") comments to make, be allowed to make other persons' comments more or less visible by awarding them positive or negative points.
In turn, those awarded the most moderators' points ("mod points") would get a limited number of "mod points" (say, 5) to apply to future comments, perpetuating the cycle and allowing the best commentary on each article to rise to the top -- sort of a redistribution of "good" and "bad" karma.
While I'm not aware that such a system has ever been tried before, I cannot imagine how it might be abused, and I'm sure it would act only to stimulate a flowering of scientific discourse.
Comments, anyone?
There's another interesting resource I found, Origins, that has a great deal of scientific articles
I was wondering why the parent article was modded "Troll", so I followed the link. It's a web site advocating the pseudo-scientific, crypto-creationist "Intelligent Design" nonsense.
If you haven't stepped in this dogpile before, "Intelligent Design" basically claims not to necessarily advocate a God, but does advocate the need for a fore-thinking "designer" to account for the complexity of life. It ignores the implicit bottomless recursion: if all life on Earth is the product of an intelligent designer, and indeed required, because of its complexity, and intelligent designer, wasn't that designer itself so complex as to require an intelligent designer, and so on ad infinitum? Yes, it's turtles all the way down, unless of course you propose a timeless and omnipotent god. And thus, "Itelligent Design" is just Creationism given a shave and haircut and dressed up in a stolen lab coat to hid the priestly vestments.
In times past, Creationists would point to the eyes, and ask how such a marvelous and complex device could be the product of "random" evolution; but now scientists have simulated the development of the eye and shown it actually doesn't take that any forethought or much time (in evolutionary terms). So to, the "Intelligent Design" advocates hang much of their "theory" on aspects of biology (like rotating flagella in bacteria) that to them is surprising or "unlikely". It should not need to be said -- but unfortunately does need to be said -- that the argument from personal surprise is not science.
We can find many things that are true but counter-intuitive -- including much of physics, not to mention the apparently built-in inability of humans to intuitively grasp certain ideas about statistical likelihood (witness the popularity of lotteries), or concepts, such as "infinity", that our evolution did not prepare us to easily come to terms with. But only the "Intelligent Design" "theorists" see "I wouldn't have expected that" not as a statement about the limits of human minds, but about the limits of the universe. Being dumbfounded by the grandeur of the universe may make good poetry and pleasing holy books, but it's emphatically not science, and neither is "Intelligent Design"; it's religious opinion masquerading as science.
All that said, while I strongly support keeping so-called "Intelligent Design" out of the public schools and out of any serious scientific discussion, I'm uncomfortable calling the parent post a "Troll". Just because I/you/we don't agree with an opinion does not make it a troll, and I prefer open discussion and refutation of bad ideas to their suppression with mod points. Bad ideas, especially, need the disinfectant of open discussion. That's my opinion, anyway.
But this you probably haven't heard before, from the linked article:
Yes, it probably will become Australia's largest (legal) download site, because Telestra BigPond will be both music vendor and ISP. In a triumph of vertical integration, users will continue to have download limits for Telestra's competitors, but will be able to "avoid" extra charges (which I'm sure will be built into the price of the music) for Telestra's own music site.
Now I know that download limits, and extra charges to go beyond those limits are pretty much unavoidable in Oz, but it strikes me as anti-competitve to lift those lmits for the ISPs favored affiliates.
And I worry that if this is succesful in Oz, we'll begin to see it elsewhere: high speed big pipes, for example, connecting AOL's users to Time Warner's offerings, and -- what an unfortunate coincidence! -- crappy connections outside the AOL-Time Warner group of companies. Or, no download limits between, perhsps, Verizon and eBay, but don't expect the same quality of connection, to, oh, Slashdot.
Of course, this will all be put over as "special benefits to our customers", providing "expeditetd access to the most requested web sites", but it's a short step from "special relationship" to the ISP turning its customers into another commodity to be rented -- "we have 10 million eyes with 5 million credit cards" to the highest bidding affiliate.
Funny, I don't see them attempting to use illegal trickery to get Bob Novak to reveal his sources...
You hadn't heard that President Bush has asked O.J. Simpson to track down the real leaker?
We're nowhere near fit and walked pretty much the entire course, and still came in smack in the middle of the standings.
/.ers think "too much exercise" means "leaving the basement".
You must remember that many
And "exhausting journey" means "getting beyond WiFi range of my home WLAN".
And "Strenuous Trek" is a code phrase for what they did when they last played their collection of "Seven of Nine of Borg" videos. (Yeah, they got "assimilated".)
It's not just the commerical media, it's the wide-spread access that's also ruining the internet.
I'll limit my rant to usenet; slashdot is too slow for the numerous post previews required to get a longer post right, or more brief.
Anybody remember usenet back in 1996? Or 1993? I remeber when you could hang out in the newsgroups for hours, reading thought, incisive, meaningful posts. alt.angst was a favorite of mine -- I still rememeber some of the laments and cries in the wilderness posted there a decade latter.
There was one post, from a guy who would lie awake in bed at 3am, and think about his good job as a programmer, his lovely and loyal wife, his comfortable home, and feel a great aching emptiness inside him as he recalls for the nth time that he had never made a scientific discovery, had never designed a unique algorithm, had never made a lasting contribution to the progress of mankind's knowledge. And it was written far more hauntingly than my lacluster rendition.
What's in alt.angst now? Oh, there are still a few good posters, but of course it's all deluged in aol'er "me too"s, in penis enlargment and porn spam, and psychotic ramblings.
alt.folklore.urban still has a dedicated core of erudite posters, but the last time I made in a regular part of my day, it was deluged -- for weeks, with megs of posts -- by the "Snuh Buh" crapflooders (DejaGoogle for it it you really need to completely waste your time).
The comp. hierarchy still works, but outside of the moderated gtroups, the signal-to-noise ratio declines thanks to
About three years ago I finally blew my stack at one such off-topic poster, went extremely personal and insulting -- went too far -- and relaized I just couldn't stick around in comp.lang.c++ anymore. which is a shame, given the truly great C++ coders who hang out there to offer stunningly detailed advice for free. But still, too much noise.
If I sound elitist ("usenet for articulate posters only!", maybe I am. But when usenet was mostly limited to
This has nothing to do with anything remotely Slashdot related, but I need to do something before my head explodes...
There's a place for this.
Once upon a time this would have been perfect for alt.angst, but of course alt.angst went to hell and gone along with the rest of usenet somewhere around the intersection of 1996 and aol.com
The best replacement I've found is craigslist.org. It has a post board called "rants and raves" for which your post would be an excellent contribution and highly appreciated.
Since craigslist is sub-domained by (major) cities, and given that you think it's 3am, I'd suggest their London "office".
And best of luck and you have my sincere sympathies.
Putting on my amatuer psychologist hat (it's a threadbare hat), it seems she wants you to know in no uncertain terms that she couldn't handle, after ten years of friendship, hooking up with you. Maybe she hopes a rather cruel and swift demonstration of this will salvage the friendship by showing you precisely how and why it wouldn't work out. Or perhaps she's trying to tell you (and herself) that the hookup was so insignificant (in her mind) that she can do the same thing the next week right in front of you and with your roommate no less.
I figure (having been your friend for 10 years) she can't be oblivious to what this is doing to you, so doing it in front of you must be her way of communicating something. Perhaps you (after they've finished rutting) sinply ask her what the fuck that something is.
(Since this is off-topic, I'll post without my karma bonus, and I'll gracefully accept whatever karma hit whomever is modding tonight thinks deserved.)
"Hamlet without the prince"
FYI, there is a an official Slashdot phrase for this:
Darl McBride without the unctuousness"
Used allusively to refer to an oozing bag of shit, without the shit or the ooze.
(C), (TM), (IP), (AYB) 1983-2003 SCO Group
Note that the substance being used is Teflon, so as to start with a good non-stick surface and make it even less sticky by crafting its surface into "nano-spikes"
Now Teflon is poisonous to birds in quantities small enough that pet birdscan be killed just by fumes given off by Teflon cookware in normal use.
It can also cause flu-like symptoms in humans (see above link).
I would imagine (but don't know) that if you form the Teflon into "nano-spikes", you increase the service area and thus can expect more fumes to be produced.
So how important is non-stick to you?
PS - users should to keep in mind that emusic is watermarking all tracks you download using their download manager. The watermarking happens on the client side by the emusicdlm program itself. It also breaks several frames in the mp3.
Any evidence for this? Several months ago (but after the new download manager was forced on me), I compared the MD5 sum of admittedly one track with the MD5 sum another downloader got, and the MD5 sums matched.
We've been saying it on the currently-dead message boards for months -- if all of Emusic's subscribers downloaded as much as we did, they'd expire overnight, taking in less than a penny per track.
It was only a matter of time before they had to revamp their pricing structure.
I'm not so sure about that. If emusic had a million subscribers, they'd get $10 million per month, $120 million per year.
You can see my full analysis here.
Along with that point, it destroys what I thought was eMusic's greatest virtue: It was really easy to go find some new band you had never heard of and see if you liked 'em.
That's precisely it. Under the old emusic policy, I could try stuff out without worrying about being burnt.
If I have to worry that I'm using up several of a limited numbre of downloads, I won't feel that freedom to explore. And so it's just not as worthwhile to me.
At some point MS could make a dll very much like this a part of Windows and code the OS to break if you modfy or delete the dll. Then license out the technology to the RIAA. That would stop directly ripping protected CDs or DVD's on Windows
.dll, but I know what my name for it will be: the linux killer app.
Yes, and Microsoft probably will. That's what Palladium (or whatever Microsoft is calling it this week) is all about.
I don't know what Microsoft will name that
Seriously, the more Microsoft talks about DRM, the more I move toward linux. I'm moving slowly; right now I'm trying to rely only on Windows apps that have a version in linux as well, so that when I transition I'll be able to use apps I'm used to.
As Microsoft moves faster toward DRM, I'll move faster to linux. And I won't be the only one to switch.
And the bonus is, of course, that when we are attacked by a carnivorous intelligent giant cat-species, we can use the lasers to fight back..
When the Kzin first encountered humans, the Kzinti telepath assured his commander (Chuft-Captain?) that the humans had no weapons, because that was what he read in the humans' minds. He also opined that human might be tasty (even though given that the telepath wasn't a warrior, and so was despised, he'd never taste any).
So the Kzin arrogantly attacked head on with little subterfuge, hoping to recover some humans to eat.
But while the peaceable humans did not, in fact, think they had weapons, one human remembered out during the attack that they did have a big-ass laser, big enough for inter-planetary communication.
And he figured that if it was powerful enough to communicate over thousands of miles, it could be used as devastatingly powerful weapon at close range. And he fried the smug, unsuspecting Kzinti.
Er, of course, I didn't recall this myself. I'm no nerd. I, ah, heard it from, ah, a friend. Yeah.
http://www.krokodilo.de/mela/mela.html
Eyes! Burning!
Must wash eyes! With acid!
Naked Euro-nerds speaking Esperanto.
Must. Destroy. Optic. Nerve.
A team of scientists have found that to the brain, a social snub is just like stubbing a toe.'
And they're absolutely right. I should know.
I've been feeling the pain of rejection a lot lately.
I got laid off.
Soon after I told my girlfriend about it, she dumped me.
Then one of my closest friends moved out of the country.
I'm camped out all alone in my cramped apartment, drinking cheap malt liquor and eating chips and salsa.
My only social outlet these days is -- on Slashdot. I don't think I have to explain the horror, the dark and lonely abyss, of that.
And imagine the anguish when I even get snubbed on Slashdot!
Only one thing makes me feel better, only one thing makes me feel like I have anything to offer, that I have any worth at all: seeing my Slashdot posts get modded up.
Please, save me from more pain heaped on pain, and consider being a brief ray of happiness in the dismal, stygian darkness of my pathetic, shameful, pain-filled life, and mod this post up!
(+1 Funny is my fav!)
My local Verizon store has been giving me the same date for several weeks, but mentioned that other companies are afraid of losing their current customers. My question to the Slashdot community is this: is that a valid concern?
/.ers and thus barred from breeding) will be paying the number-portability fee; the phone companies will never give up a cash cow, and that's what the fee will be.
Well they're already charging you a number-portability fee. And most carriers have been charging the fee for months.
And even after they've paid off the cost of the number portability system (and let's face it, it's a database -- how expensive can it be?) they'll continue charging the fee in perpetuity.
Your great-grandchildren (were you not
So it seems only fair, since you have been paying the fee for months, and will pay the fee forever hereafter, for the phone company to actually give you what you've been paying for.
Or perhaps I'm unsympathetic -- given all those CEO bonuses the big phone companies insist on paying, perhaps they really do need to charge you for something they don't actually provide, while incidently locking in consumers and preventing market competition.
I don't build boilers not because I can't, but because they are dangerious (sic) enough to require more testing than I'm willing to give.
And my point was that if the original poster wished to proceed with his programming project, he should educate himself about it -- and educating youself is a lot more involved than posting an "Ask Slashdot", (seekers of free legal advice notwithstanding) --, and having proceeded, not forget to do the required testing.
You illustrate my point for me: you don't build a boiler not because you couldn't, but because you're unwiling to thoroughly test a boiler enough to ensure its safety. Surely you wouldn't confuse serious boiler testing with asking Slashdot.
Not "hallmark", "landmark".
Or in the case of Neal Stephenson's new 900+ hardback Quicksilver, "doorstop" or "booster seat".
building humungous lasers in their asteroid belt and planet surface, and using them to propel a light sail armed interstellar craft between stars.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but isn't using light pressure in a vacuum to drive a light sail entirely different from an aircraft with "specially designed photovoltaic cells carried onboard to power the plane's propeller"?
It's like (poor analogy alert) saying that a gasoline powered car and a squeeze-jet that squirts out liquid gasoline to propel itself through the water are using "the same" propulsive technology.
BTW, light sails were proposed by real physicists long before Niven and Pournelle wrote the excellent Mote in God's Eye.
Sorry, but sharks are a protected species now. It was powered by ill tempered mutated sea bass with friggin' lasers on their heads.
Excuse me, but sea bass are an endangered species now.
Insensitive clod.
Harry Harrison Fan
Stainless Steel Rat! Forgot about that!
Okay, I disavow my ealier mockery of Esperanto.
So why should any geek learn Esperanto? For all the above reasons, but most of all:
Because we can.
Why should any geek learn to have a sense of humor?
Because my post was a joke.
What's Esperanto for "Lighten up and laugh"? Sheesh.
Do all gamers have huge rigs?
Probably not, but it hardly matters.
Those gamers are so busy playing EverCrack or whatever, that no girl ever gets near their rigs, big or small.
And after they've been playing for three days straight, what girl would want to?
Face it, those gamers only get action when their hands are on their joysticks.
Does it compare with potentially lethal projects? No.
Good point. My analogy should have been better.