Alright, you know that's not fair, unless...
on
The Economics of Spam
·
· Score: 5, Funny
C'mon, we can't be hypocritical here. You can't call someone up in the middle of the night unless you have an existing business relationship with them.
That's right, no calls unless you've been the recipient of her SPAM.
[Checking inbox... "You Have 362 Unread Messages"]
Well, guess that's taken care of... What was Ms. Betterly's phone number again?
That said, the grandparent's author replied, and isn't AC, so perhaps this message's sibling:) should be considered for a mod-up as well, even if it's a bit... detached from reality.
(Now, it'll be interesting to see if my first "MOD PARENT UP" request tanks my karma!)
What will they sell us once their magic potions no longer work?
Well, there's always the Chicken Pox vaccine. Merck is making a killing (sorry) by preying on the fears of parents. Despite the fact that 99.99% of children recover from the disease (caveat emptor on that link), the vaccine is being pushed with FUD directed at health professionals (leading to news articles like this one). These tactics have been wildly successful -- now, schools are requiring students to be vaccinated against Chicken Pox as though it were as deadly as measles or whooping cough.
This despite the fact that your child is more likely to die on the way to the doctor to get the shot, than to die of Chicken Pox.
My wife is a clinical tech at a major Dallas children's hospital, and the off-the-record opinion among all the health workers there is that the vaccine is nothing but a boondoggle for its manufacturer. Meanwhile, she and the rest of the team are dealing with bugs like MRSA -- Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus. In fact, this BBC article from last month details the fear that MRSA staph would pick up Vancomycin resistance because of antibiotic overuse.
Gee... I wonder who stands to gain the most from both the current overuse of antibiotics and from the development of the "next generation" of overprescribed medications?
Wouldn't it be great if dweebs wrapped their tiny criminal minds around the fact that correlation does not imply causation?
I know it's not good for my Karma to reply to a troll (and be ignored along with him), but he/she/it makes a good point. Even if it's wrong.
Roughly translated from TrollSpeak, the poster is trying to point out that the huge popularity of the films is not a direct result of their being pirated. Shrek would have been a hit whether it was pirated or not, and the troll would like to think that the pirating is therefore completely unrelated to the film's success.
Since there's no causation, we should prosecute the pirates like the scum they are, right?
Well, hold on a sec.
If you extend that argument that correlation does not imply causation, then you've just blown away the entire advertising industry.
Say Proctor & Gamble advertises their new Demonic Tide on the TV show Friends. The next week, sales of Demonic Tide spike. That's a correleation, but is it there causation? What if it was just such a "hot" product that it would have sold big anyway?
Prosecute those who are making money from your IP if you must, but as far as the P2P networks and such... call it a "cost of doing business", and charge it to the promotions budget.
If the big studios are keeping such a close eye on the effect of illegal trading, why don't they use that information for marketing purposes?
I got a bootleg copy of Kiki's Delivery Service (the dub shown on JAL flights, IIRC), and it immediately became a hit with the kids and their friends. So when Disney finally got around to releasing it, did I say "Pfft, I've already got that one"? Heck no, I bought it as soon as I could find it! So why won't Disney make it available again?
But I don't want to get carried away about Disney (that would be a whole other discussion)... can I safely assume that this myopia is not specific to just one big studio?
In case you don't happen to have a loaded Acrobat (loaded acrobat? don't let him on the high wire!), or if you can't bear to wait for Adobe's disclaimers to load, here's a quick-n-dirty HTML mirror of the.pdf file. Ugly as sin: did it by pasting the text into Notetab and using "convert to HTML".
Yes, it's on Tripod, so beware the popups and banners. Whaddya expect from us skr1pt k1dd13z?
Oh, man... all this time I thought that Mickey and Minnie weren't actually related, or were perhaps cousins at the most. I mean, he gives her flowers, right?
So are they like these ones you hear about on the news that fall in love and then find out that they're long-lost siblings? Or have they known all along... eeewwww!
I'm glad I'm an only child.
Oh, crap.
[shuffles through drawers for wife's birth certificate]
The predicted hit of the gaming year is "Peanut Butter Toast". Gamers must attempt to evenly apply a series of different peanut butters onto a diverse selection of bread products.
Back in high school in the '80s (crap, that sounds like a long time ago now), I had a nowhere job bussing tables. Since there was little mental effort required to place the big plates in the tub just so, and the bowls like this, and the cups here, etc... I was bored outta my skull.
So I spent the time thinking how I might write a "Busboy!" video game. Your goal would be to pack as many tables' dishes into your bus tub as possible without them falling out. The beginner level would be "Breakfast", which is mostly small plates and oatmeal bowls. But watch out for "Wednesday Night" -- those oblong Steak Platters will bite you in the butt every time!
True story: I got p1ssed off one night and quit. Walking out the door, I ran into the prettiest girl in the Junior class. I told her how I'd Stood Up To The Man, and she said that was cool. Wow. Too bad I was now completely freakin' broke. When are they going to make *that* into a video game?
Actually, they *do* use toll tag transponders to track your speed. In Houston, the end result is this cool online map of traffic speeds on all monitored highways in the Houston/Galveston area.
But that data comes from an averaging of individual speeds. Somewhere, there's a computer owned by a government agency which has recorded the fact that Amtech/TransCore tag number 361836456148814 passed station X at 07:32:49.5 and passed station Y (1 mile away) at 07:33:14.2 for an average speed greater than the posted speed limit.
I also remember reading somewhere (possibly on San Antonio's similar site) that any Amtech system can be used to help with their traffic tracking. So their database has you tracked whether you've got a local tag, or one from San Antonio or Dallas, or even your Oklahoma Turnpike Pikepass.
Interesting fact: wrapping your TollTag (etc) in aluminum foil prevents it from being detected by the sensors. That tinfoil beanie doesn't look so silly now, does it?
High Income = Good Roads?
on
Sensors Gone Wild
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
A number of suburbs of Dallas, Texas (including Carrollton, where I work) are using computerized magnetic sensors to monitor traffic. They're temporary installations -- a box about 4" x 6" x 1" high is placed in the center of the traffic lane, and covered with a thick sheet of what looks to be asphalt-impregnated duct tape.
When they're done with the traffic survey -- 24 hours, typically -- the city engineers cut out the sensor, leaving the tape that was stuck to the ground. You'll see these squares all over town -- they don't seem to disintegrate for several months, even after heavy traffic driving over them. The busiest intersections have several of these leftovers.
A Dallas Morning News article a year or so ago detailed the city's use of the boxes, and noted that they could derive detailed information about the vehicles by their magnetic signatures. I didn't put 2 and 2 together, though, until Slashdot came to the rescue...
Dallas is one of the most insanely vehicle-as-status-symbol regions of the country (according to friends who have lived elsewhere). I thought that Carrollton was simply doing a traffic survey no different than the pneumatic roll-over count... but if you can tell a '82 Chevette from a brand-new Cadillac SUV, it adds a whole new dimension.
Anyone want to bet against the cities prioritizing road repairs based on relative driver income, as opposed to mere number of vehicles?
I think the server tried to defend itself, but it was a losing battle.
Warning: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (111) in/usr/local/apache/htdocs/thinknerd/html/pnadodb/dr ivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 108
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (111)
in/usr/local/apache/htdocs/thinknerd/html/pnadodb/dr ivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 108
mysql://thinknerd:@localhost/thinknerd failed to connectCan't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (111)
... then I got married. It was an efficiency apartment, and all available horizontal areas were covered either with clothes (the floor and dresser), dishes (the kitchen), or breadboards, chips, and discrete components. My last project was a little quickie 555 circuit. I hooked it up to a counter and some LED's to make a simple bounce back-and-forth effect.
My new wife wanted me to make something blinky that would go around a license plate frame. I started getting nervous... that would be a Real World design! Then, we needed the table for dinner (what was wrong with sitting on the bed, I wondered?). And within a couple of weeks, I realized that having more than one room is a Good Thing... when we moved to a one-bedroom apartment, the Geek Room was no more.
But there's hope for the next generation... my 12-year-old daughter just wrote her first Visual Basic program today. You click the button and a MsgBox pops up that says "THIS IS BORING".
My favorite chemical to imagine working with (when I worked at Texas Instruments and wandered around the 3rd floor pipe space looking at labels) was Silane. With a chemical formula just like Methane, with Silicon in the place of the Carbon, you'd imagine it would be explosive but not otherwise interesting.
Wrong! Silane can spontaneously explode when exposed to air. It has to be specially ducted and burned off or blown out quickly enough to prevent creation of a flammable concentration.
A friend of mine where I work now, though, had more direct experience with Silane while working at another semiconductor manufacturer. He claims that he once liberated a small volume of silane in the air, and found that it formed a bubble... the silane reacted with the air on the edge to form a protective shield around the remaining gas. Of course, when the bubble burst... the explosion was deafening. Strangely enough, I don't think my friend ever found the opportunity to experiment further.
But should you care to try it yourself on a smaller scale, go for it!
I know not everyone is in this situation, but here in Dallas/Fort Worth (Texas, y'all), I get all I need off the air for free:
02 - KDTN, 2nd PBS channel 04 - KDFW, Fox 05 - KXAS, NBC 08 - WFAA, ABC 11 - KTVT, CBS 13 - KERA, primary PBS 21 - KTXA, UPN 23 - KUVN, Univision 27 - KDFW, semi-independent (owned by 5, IIRC) 29 - KMPX, religious broadcasting 33 - KDAF, WB (was originally Fox, hence K-DAllas-Fox) 39 - KXTX, Telemundo 49 - KSTR, "K-Star", has the Dallas Stars games 52 - KFWD, semi-independent (can't remember which big station owns them) 55 - KLDT, independent (lots of Westerns) 58 - KDTX, religious broadcasting 68 - KPXD, PAX TV
That's 17 stations for no more than the price of a good rooftop antenna. Actually, we don't even have that... we have a 300-ohm rabbit ears that the kids move around when we change channels. Though sometimes the kids have to stand in the middle of the room, holding the antenna, until the show's over. But only if it's a really good show.
I wanted to spend some quality time with Open Source by running Mozilla, but my need for a stable browser overrode my desire to contribute to the Greater Good.
So I run Opera -- the free version, with the annoying banner ad -- about 75% of the time. About 10% of my surfing is on He That Shall Not Be Named for sites that don't support Opera properly (like Citibank), and the other 15% is spent with Lynx. The Lynx time rises to near 100% at work, where it's a Good Thing to be able to surf without using a graphical browser.
Speaking from a completely outside-the-loop observer, I'd conclude that it looks legit... if only because it is *so* dense with M$-speak. If it's a fake, it's an elaborately constructed fake... but then, it wouldn't be on/. if it weren't. Catch-22.
What I found interesting was near the bottom:
Copyright 2002 by the Open Source Initiative
Wouldn't this technically be a derivative work, based on a prior Microsoft work? I know I could copyright a work derived from a public domain work (like an annotated version of "O Danny Boy"), but does the M$ doc count as a public domain work?
I'm sure there's something in the EULA against that...
I don't think you'd want to point Hubble at the Moon to "prove" to some bozo that there's space junk there. I'm no Hubble expert, but I do know a few things:
* The Hubble doesn't just sit there unused. Every minute -- every second -- of its time is reserved months in advance for research purposes.
* Even if the project were deemed worthy, it would probably cost more than $15k to make the project happen.
* The Hubble is designed to look at very, very, very faint objects. Close yourself in a dark room, look at the light bulbs, then flip the switch to turn them on. Ouch! Now, imagine if your pupils couldn't contract... and your retina was worth several hundred million bucks. Double ouch!
* If you believe in the Hubble telescope's images, there's a very, very strong chance that you believe that man has landed on the Moon already. Conversely, if you don't believe in the moon landing, why would you believe in the Hubble?
And as for aerial images... it was big news when spy satellites could spot an object as large as a car from orbit. Compare these numbers:
* Distance to Space Shuttle (Low Earth Orbit): 400 km
* Distance to Geosynchronous (med-high) Orbit: 27,000 km
* Distance to Moon: 384,000 km!
If the CIA/KGB can barely make out an object the size of a car from Earth orbit, how likely is it to see an even smaller object from 10 times as far?
*whew* A great intellectual exercise... too bad the target of NASA's informative pamphlet don't work that muscle.
When I visited the Toledo Blade's main page, I noticed something interesting: the banner ads at the top *and* bottom of the page were for none other than our new favorite ISP, Buckeye Express. One at the top for their digital cable, one at the bottom for their ISP "service".
The only other banner ad I've seen on the site is for the local TV station -- and out of 6 pages (12 ads) I pulled up, only 4 of them (1/3) were for the TV station. The rest were either Buckeye cable or Buckeye internet.
Both ads are served through doubleclick.net (wish we could/. this site!), so it seems possible that they're just randomly placed. Sometimes, you even have the ironic juxtaposition of a story about Buckeye bracketed by ads for the service.
The paper's relationship with a major advertiser makes me wonder. Just how big was the "raid"? Was the FBI even really involved at all? The story says "Members of the Toledo police computer crimes task force and FBI agents seized computers and modems..." without ever telling how many FBI agents were involved or interviewing anyone with the local FBI office.
But they did get an interview with "Paul Shryock, vice president of information technology at Buckeye CableSystem."
Did the Toledo Blade blow things out of proportion at the behest of their biggest online advertiser? Did the local DA need a high-profile "cyber crime" in the week before election day, but couldn't get any of the local pedophiles to cooperate? Are we getting the whole story here?
It's been awfully hard to keep the Space Race going since the Soviet Union self-destructed and we're left with a Russia so strapped for cash that they're considering launching a boy-band's lead singer (not that shooting Lance Bass into orbit is a Bad Thing... the Bad Thing is bringing him back).
But I think things are about to get a lot more interesting... while the US press has been busy watching our Dubya waffle belligerently about Iraq, the Chinese have been quietly building their own manned space program. Operating under secrecy that would have made the old Sovietskis proud, China has built a city outside Beijing and has already made three launches of human-capable spacecraft.
Being the last superpower is like being the top dog in the pack... it's a nice place to be, but you've got a big ol' target on your head. With Russia in complete disarray, the US busy picking fights with third-rate dictators, and the EU still finding itself, China is really the only major power still interested in becoming the top dog.
If the Chinese manned launch rumored for next year materializes as planned, the space race could begin again... or the US could keep its head up its butt and wait for all those grave predictions from the first space race to come true.
...stars were lost most likely due to the fact that Saturn is such a bright planet - I am sure that if they adjusted the image to see the stars the image of Saturn would be saturated and just a bright blob.
There's an even more detailed explanation of this phenomenon at the Bad Astronomy web site, in the section where research astronomer and part-time hoax debunker Phil Plait explains in great detail why there are no stars in the pictures from the moon. Plait debunks the Fox TV least-common-denominator showcase "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" point by point... too bad the rubes the show was targeted to probably can't figure out that "Internit thang" anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon, we can't be hypocritical here. You can't call someone up in the middle of the night unless you have an existing business relationship with them.
That's right, no calls unless you've been the recipient of her SPAM.
[Checking inbox... "You Have 362 Unread Messages"]
Well, guess that's taken care of... What was Ms. Betterly's phone number again?
(My mama told me to always ask politely and NOT TO YELL.)
:) should be considered for a mod-up as well, even if it's a bit... detached from reality.
The parent of this message is written evenhandedly and fairly, despite being a reply to a post full of (IMHO) ludicrous claims and half-told stories.
That said, the grandparent's author replied, and isn't AC, so perhaps this message's sibling
(Now, it'll be interesting to see if my first "MOD PARENT UP" request tanks my karma!)
Hey, great plugs for "Colloidial Silver". It's natural, right? And anything natural must be a Good Thing, right?
Yeah, kinda like Hemlock is natural.
Check out these links before you hit the natural foods store:
Rosemary Jacob's Argyria Pages -- her skin is a fetching shade of blue-grey, somewhat like the robot on Futurama.
Politician turns blue from drinking 'health' solution -- the Libertarian US Senate candidate from Montana would have had the distinction, if elected, of being the only Blue member of Congress. (I'm a Green, myself).
What will they sell us once their magic potions no longer work?
Well, there's always the Chicken Pox vaccine. Merck is making a killing (sorry) by preying on the fears of parents. Despite the fact that 99.99% of children recover from the disease (caveat emptor on that link), the vaccine is being pushed with FUD directed at health professionals (leading to news articles like this one). These tactics have been wildly successful -- now, schools are requiring students to be vaccinated against Chicken Pox as though it were as deadly as measles or whooping cough.
This despite the fact that your child is more likely to die on the way to the doctor to get the shot, than to die of Chicken Pox.
My wife is a clinical tech at a major Dallas children's hospital, and the off-the-record opinion among all the health workers there is that the vaccine is nothing but a boondoggle for its manufacturer. Meanwhile, she and the rest of the team are dealing with bugs like MRSA -- Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus. In fact, this BBC article from last month details the fear that MRSA staph would pick up Vancomycin resistance because of antibiotic overuse.
Gee... I wonder who stands to gain the most from both the current overuse of antibiotics and from the development of the "next generation" of overprescribed medications?
Wouldn't it be great if dweebs wrapped their tiny criminal minds around the fact that correlation does not imply causation?
I know it's not good for my Karma to reply to a troll (and be ignored along with him), but he/she/it makes a good point. Even if it's wrong.
Roughly translated from TrollSpeak, the poster is trying to point out that the huge popularity of the films is not a direct result of their being pirated. Shrek would have been a hit whether it was pirated or not, and the troll would like to think that the pirating is therefore completely unrelated to the film's success.
Since there's no causation, we should prosecute the pirates like the scum they are, right?
Well, hold on a sec.
If you extend that argument that correlation does not imply causation, then you've just blown away the entire advertising industry.
Say Proctor & Gamble advertises their new Demonic Tide on the TV show Friends. The next week, sales of Demonic Tide spike. That's a correleation, but is it there causation? What if it was just such a "hot" product that it would have sold big anyway?
Prosecute those who are making money from your IP if you must, but as far as the P2P networks and such... call it a "cost of doing business", and charge it to the promotions budget.
If the big studios are keeping such a close eye on the effect of illegal trading, why don't they use that information for marketing purposes?
I got a bootleg copy of Kiki's Delivery Service (the dub shown on JAL flights, IIRC), and it immediately became a hit with the kids and their friends. So when Disney finally got around to releasing it, did I say "Pfft, I've already got that one"? Heck no, I bought it as soon as I could find it! So why won't Disney make it available again?
But I don't want to get carried away about Disney (that would be a whole other discussion)... can I safely assume that this myopia is not specific to just one big studio?
In case you don't happen to have a loaded Acrobat (loaded acrobat? don't let him on the high wire!), or if you can't bear to wait for Adobe's disclaimers to load, here's a quick-n-dirty HTML mirror of the .pdf file. Ugly as sin: did it by pasting the text into Notetab and using "convert to HTML".
Yes, it's on Tripod, so beware the popups and banners. Whaddya expect from us skr1pt k1dd13z?
Oh, man... all this time I thought that Mickey and Minnie weren't actually related, or were perhaps cousins at the most. I mean, he gives her flowers, right?
So are they like these ones you hear about on the news that fall in love and then find out that they're long-lost siblings? Or have they known all along... eeewwww!
I'm glad I'm an only child.
Oh, crap.
[shuffles through drawers for wife's birth certificate]
The predicted hit of the gaming year is "Peanut Butter Toast". Gamers must attempt to evenly apply a series of different peanut butters onto a diverse selection of bread products.
Back in high school in the '80s (crap, that sounds like a long time ago now), I had a nowhere job bussing tables. Since there was little mental effort required to place the big plates in the tub just so, and the bowls like this, and the cups here, etc... I was bored outta my skull.
So I spent the time thinking how I might write a "Busboy!" video game. Your goal would be to pack as many tables' dishes into your bus tub as possible without them falling out. The beginner level would be "Breakfast", which is mostly small plates and oatmeal bowls. But watch out for "Wednesday Night" -- those oblong Steak Platters will bite you in the butt every time!
True story: I got p1ssed off one night and quit. Walking out the door, I ran into the prettiest girl in the Junior class. I told her how I'd Stood Up To The Man, and she said that was cool. Wow. Too bad I was now completely freakin' broke. When are they going to make *that* into a video game?
Actually, they *do* use toll tag transponders to track your speed. In Houston, the end result is this cool online map of traffic speeds on all monitored highways in the Houston/Galveston area.
But that data comes from an averaging of individual speeds. Somewhere, there's a computer owned by a government agency which has recorded the fact that Amtech/TransCore tag number 361836456148814 passed station X at 07:32:49.5 and passed station Y (1 mile away) at 07:33:14.2 for an average speed greater than the posted speed limit.
I also remember reading somewhere (possibly on San Antonio's similar site) that any Amtech system can be used to help with their traffic tracking. So their database has you tracked whether you've got a local tag, or one from San Antonio or Dallas, or even your Oklahoma Turnpike Pikepass.
Interesting fact: wrapping your TollTag (etc) in aluminum foil prevents it from being detected by the sensors. That tinfoil beanie doesn't look so silly now, does it?
A number of suburbs of Dallas, Texas (including Carrollton, where I work) are using computerized magnetic sensors to monitor traffic. They're temporary installations -- a box about 4" x 6" x 1" high is placed in the center of the traffic lane, and covered with a thick sheet of what looks to be asphalt-impregnated duct tape.
When they're done with the traffic survey -- 24 hours, typically -- the city engineers cut out the sensor, leaving the tape that was stuck to the ground. You'll see these squares all over town -- they don't seem to disintegrate for several months, even after heavy traffic driving over them. The busiest intersections have several of these leftovers.
A Dallas Morning News article a year or so ago detailed the city's use of the boxes, and noted that they could derive detailed information about the vehicles by their magnetic signatures. I didn't put 2 and 2 together, though, until Slashdot came to the rescue...
Dallas is one of the most insanely vehicle-as-status-symbol regions of the country (according to friends who have lived elsewhere). I thought that Carrollton was simply doing a traffic survey no different than the pneumatic roll-over count... but if you can tell a '82 Chevette from a brand-new Cadillac SUV, it adds a whole new dimension.
Anyone want to bet against the cities prioritizing road repairs based on relative driver income, as opposed to mere number of vehicles?
... then I got married. It was an efficiency apartment, and all available horizontal areas were covered either with clothes (the floor and dresser), dishes (the kitchen), or breadboards, chips, and discrete components. My last project was a little quickie 555 circuit. I hooked it up to a counter and some LED's to make a simple bounce back-and-forth effect.
My new wife wanted me to make something blinky that would go around a license plate frame. I started getting nervous... that would be a Real World design! Then, we needed the table for dinner (what was wrong with sitting on the bed, I wondered?). And within a couple of weeks, I realized that having more than one room is a Good Thing... when we moved to a one-bedroom apartment, the Geek Room was no more.
But there's hope for the next generation... my 12-year-old daughter just wrote her first Visual Basic program today. You click the button and a MsgBox pops up that says "THIS IS BORING".
'Cause that's what happened to the poor sucker... slashdotted before there were even a dozen comments posted. Poor sucker.
The pr0n industry should be all over this...
Actually, a pervasive peddler of socially repugnant (but widely used) products has already enlisted an unsavory character to respond to hidden broadcast signals: 2/7/1997: Microsoft Launches ActiMates Early Learning System, featuring Barney the Dinosaur
Oddly enough, both product concepts include playing "peek-a-boo".
My favorite chemical to imagine working with (when I worked at Texas Instruments and wandered around the 3rd floor pipe space looking at labels) was Silane. With a chemical formula just like Methane, with Silicon in the place of the Carbon, you'd imagine it would be explosive but not otherwise interesting. Wrong! Silane can spontaneously explode when exposed to air. It has to be specially ducted and burned off or blown out quickly enough to prevent creation of a flammable concentration. A friend of mine where I work now, though, had more direct experience with Silane while working at another semiconductor manufacturer. He claims that he once liberated a small volume of silane in the air, and found that it formed a bubble... the silane reacted with the air on the edge to form a protective shield around the remaining gas. Of course, when the bubble burst... the explosion was deafening. Strangely enough, I don't think my friend ever found the opportunity to experiment further. But should you care to try it yourself on a smaller scale, go for it!
I know not everyone is in this situation, but here in Dallas/Fort Worth (Texas, y'all), I get all I need off the air for free:
02 - KDTN, 2nd PBS channel
04 - KDFW, Fox
05 - KXAS, NBC
08 - WFAA, ABC
11 - KTVT, CBS
13 - KERA, primary PBS
21 - KTXA, UPN
23 - KUVN, Univision
27 - KDFW, semi-independent (owned by 5, IIRC)
29 - KMPX, religious broadcasting
33 - KDAF, WB (was originally Fox, hence K-DAllas-Fox)
39 - KXTX, Telemundo
49 - KSTR, "K-Star", has the Dallas Stars games
52 - KFWD, semi-independent (can't remember which big station owns them)
55 - KLDT, independent (lots of Westerns)
58 - KDTX, religious broadcasting
68 - KPXD, PAX TV
That's 17 stations for no more than the price of a good rooftop antenna. Actually, we don't even have that... we have a 300-ohm rabbit ears that the kids move around when we change channels. Though sometimes the kids have to stand in the middle of the room, holding the antenna, until the show's over. But only if it's a really good show.
I wanted to spend some quality time with Open Source by running Mozilla, but my need for a stable browser overrode my desire to contribute to the Greater Good.
So I run Opera -- the free version, with the annoying banner ad -- about 75% of the time. About 10% of my surfing is on He That Shall Not Be Named for sites that don't support Opera properly (like Citibank), and the other 15% is spent with Lynx. The Lynx time rises to near 100% at work, where it's a Good Thing to be able to surf without using a graphical browser.
Speaking from a completely outside-the-loop observer, I'd conclude that it looks legit... if only because it is *so* dense with M$-speak. If it's a fake, it's an elaborately constructed fake... but then, it wouldn't be on /. if it weren't. Catch-22.
What I found interesting was near the bottom:
Copyright 2002 by the Open Source Initiative
Wouldn't this technically be a derivative work, based on a prior Microsoft work? I know I could copyright a work derived from a public domain work (like an annotated version of "O Danny Boy"), but does the M$ doc count as a public domain work?
I'm sure there's something in the EULA against that...
I don't think you'd want to point Hubble at the Moon to "prove" to some bozo that there's space junk there. I'm no Hubble expert, but I do know a few things:
* The Hubble doesn't just sit there unused. Every minute -- every second -- of its time is reserved months in advance for research purposes.
* Even if the project were deemed worthy, it would probably cost more than $15k to make the project happen.
* The Hubble is designed to look at very, very, very faint objects. Close yourself in a dark room, look at the light bulbs, then flip the switch to turn them on. Ouch! Now, imagine if your pupils couldn't contract... and your retina was worth several hundred million bucks. Double ouch!
* If you believe in the Hubble telescope's images, there's a very, very strong chance that you believe that man has landed on the Moon already. Conversely, if you don't believe in the moon landing, why would you believe in the Hubble?
And as for aerial images... it was big news when spy satellites could spot an object as large as a car from orbit. Compare these numbers:
* Distance to Space Shuttle (Low Earth Orbit): 400 km
* Distance to Geosynchronous (med-high) Orbit: 27,000 km
* Distance to Moon: 384,000 km!
If the CIA/KGB can barely make out an object the size of a car from Earth orbit, how likely is it to see an even smaller object from 10 times as far?
*whew* A great intellectual exercise... too bad the target of NASA's informative pamphlet don't work that muscle.
When I visited the Toledo Blade's main page, I noticed something interesting: the banner ads at the top *and* bottom of the page were for none other than our new favorite ISP, Buckeye Express. One at the top for their digital cable, one at the bottom for their ISP "service".
/. this site!), so it seems possible that they're just randomly placed. Sometimes, you even have the ironic juxtaposition of a story about Buckeye bracketed by ads for the service.
The only other banner ad I've seen on the site is for the local TV station -- and out of 6 pages (12 ads) I pulled up, only 4 of them (1/3) were for the TV station. The rest were either Buckeye cable or Buckeye internet.
Both ads are served through doubleclick.net (wish we could
The paper's relationship with a major advertiser makes me wonder. Just how big was the "raid"? Was the FBI even really involved at all? The story says "Members of the Toledo police computer crimes task force and FBI agents seized computers and modems..." without ever telling how many FBI agents were involved or interviewing anyone with the local FBI office.
But they did get an interview with "Paul Shryock, vice president of information technology at Buckeye CableSystem."
Did the Toledo Blade blow things out of proportion at the behest of their biggest online advertiser? Did the local DA need a high-profile "cyber crime" in the week before election day, but couldn't get any of the local pedophiles to cooperate? Are we getting the whole story here?
At least we know the answer to the last question.
It's been awfully hard to keep the Space Race going since the Soviet Union self-destructed and we're left with a Russia so strapped for cash that they're considering launching a boy-band's lead singer (not that shooting Lance Bass into orbit is a Bad Thing... the Bad Thing is bringing him back).
But I think things are about to get a lot more interesting... while the US press has been busy watching our Dubya waffle belligerently about Iraq, the Chinese have been quietly building their own manned space program. Operating under secrecy that would have made the old Sovietskis proud, China has built a city outside Beijing and has already made three launches of human-capable spacecraft.
Being the last superpower is like being the top dog in the pack... it's a nice place to be, but you've got a big ol' target on your head. With Russia in complete disarray, the US busy picking fights with third-rate dictators, and the EU still finding itself, China is really the only major power still interested in becoming the top dog.
If the Chinese manned launch rumored for next year materializes as planned, the space race could begin again... or the US could keep its head up its butt and wait for all those grave predictions from the first space race to come true.
...stars were lost most likely due to the fact that Saturn is such a bright planet - I am sure that if they adjusted the image to see the stars the image of Saturn would be saturated and just a bright blob.
There's an even more detailed explanation of this phenomenon at the Bad Astronomy web site, in the section where research astronomer and part-time hoax debunker Phil Plait explains in great detail why there are no stars in the pictures from the moon. Plait debunks the Fox TV least-common-denominator showcase "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" point by point... too bad the rubes the show was targeted to probably can't figure out that "Internit thang" anyway.