From what I've seen of teen chat these days, all you need is a bot that says
ASL? LOL
evey minute or so and you've covered about 80% of all conversation.
You forgot OMG ROFL and the positively blood-curdling LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
vegard@gyversalen:~$ ping -i 900 10.0.3.1 PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
--- 10.0.3.1 ping statistics --- 9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
What is it with Crichton's obsession with inefficient software interfaces? Granted, Jurassic Park and hopefully Disclosure were written before VRML and Microsoft Bob were recognised as useless, but still, he shouldn't have jumped on such a stupid bandwagon.
I have to agree with that sentiment. I used to like his early ideas, but the stuff he wrote after ~1996 is almost pure crap, especially his lame descriptions of time travel in Timeline. The only mitigating factor I can think of is that at that time VR really was considered cool - the holodeck from Star Trek for instance. (yeah i know that the holodeck was more than VR - used matter replicators and all that:-)). I guess Crichton's one of the authors who can turn out a good story given a little technology (Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man) but quickly overloads under techno-glut (Jurassic Park, Timeline). That of course is only my opinion, so use your discretion.
First person shooter.
This reminds me of a cool hack that uses Doom as a "process manager". Killing a Doom baddie basically "kill -9"s the process.
Cool idea. Have you read Disclosure by Michael Crichton? There's one imaginative sequence about a VR-based file explorer and UI. The concept is that you walk around hallways and chambers, opening drawers and reading files (which float in midair). Other logged-in users are visible too, in the appropriate locations (directories/files/work areas). If they are using a VR interface, they look lifelike. If they use a conventional CLI or GUI they look like cartoons on stick figures (apparently the system pulls an image of their face from an employee database and shows it on top of a stick figure). Was a pretty imaginative concept. I don't know if anyone has implemented anything similar yet.
Ya know, over all the browser name changes, I've wondered why Ford hasn't sued the shit out of them over the name of the mail client, Thunderbird.
Why go as far as their mail client? The *browser* used to be called Firebird. As in Pontiac Firebird.
As to why they haven't been sued (by GM in the case of Firebird), it's because their markets are completely different and the car manufacturers probably realize that themselves.
Speaking of Thunderbird, wasn't there once a surface-to-air missile named Thunderbird? That would have been an interesting battle had it ever come to Ford-vs-Thunderbird:
Ford: You have infringed on our tradema... [sees missile]
Missile dude: You were sayin'?
Could they not stamp "THIS SIDE UP" or whatever on the components?
They did something similar with the modified 747 that carries the shuttle orbiter back after landing. See this picture. This is supposed to be a sign on top of the 747, where the orbiter links to the top of the 747's fuselage. It reads "Place Orbiter Here...Black Side Down".
If this is real, they have one hell of a sense of humor.
I'm going to hazard a guess that Mr. Maughan's result looked something like "Mark... Maughan... And Associates have... not paid their taxes... practice without a license... eat babies."
If that's what this is about... hes god a point...
I posted something similar a couple hours back. Anyway, the point you raise does not arise in this case because Google's cache is far less accusatory than the contents of the linked page.
But then I realized the issue was not just "Google called me a criminal". For instance, my boss's kids have made a game of Googling for a name and a phrase, and reading the results. They find entertainment in results like "John Kerry...striptease on the table" and "Halliburton sucks...claimed Cheney." (I made those up, but you get the idea).
The point however is that virtually anyone can immediately see the relevance and quality of the search results. If a user is incapable of judging a search result's relevance in this fundamental way, then he/she is too incompetent to process any decent amount of information.
Therefore, even if Google had returned that patchwork quilt of sentence fragments (which in this case it did not) that gave a (conceivably) different meaning, one could easily show that a large majority of computer users are able to judge the quality, context and relevance of a search result.
Therefore, I personally feel Mark Maughan really doesn't have anything to stand on, not even some flimsy hypothetical excuse of "Google's ellipsis lowered my dignity".
It's the Disciplinary Actions page in the California Board of Accountancy section on the California Dept of Consumer Affairs's website.
Note that Google itself does not list any specific disciplinary actions, except for the rather damning page title of "Disciplinary Actions List - Bi-Bz".
He just wants some free publicity. Seriously, this will be good for his business.
Um, why exactly? Wouldn't one think "Oh yeah, that's the guy who blamed Google's search results!" and stay away from his firm?
I can see a genuine possibility for certain search queries to give misleading results, mainly a result of using ellipsis marks in the wrong place. Like searching for "$NAME $ANIMAL" without quotes might conceivably give something like "$NAME was severely reprimanded...for molesting $ANIMALs"
But searching for a name ("$FIRST $LAST" with or without the quotes) should not give something radically different from what was intended on the webpage. This incident therefore seems to be as bad as SCO picking on IBM.
but as I recall, the 'Indian Ocean' wasn't there when the second one augered in.
From what I know, the Indian subcontinent started off somewhere near where Madagascar is today, and moved north, until it finally collided with Asia and formed the Himalayas. The coast used to extend all the way up to present-day Nepal and western China. This has apparently been borne out by ammonite fossils found in the Himalayas. If that is the case, this asteroid could have fallen in that ocean before the Himalayas were formed.
The question now is whether the Indian subcontinent could move that far in just 65 million years. Geologists - please verify using the age of the Himalayas as a guide.
Wasn't there some speculation on lava plume in the region? Something about India having an abnormally short continental shelf along its west coast, which apparently can be accounted for if you assume that the subcontinent moved over a large lava plume on its northward journey, which set up enough stress that its western fringes broke away or disintegrated, leaving the rest with a shortened continental shelf.
The model I always think of is Krakatoa's eruption in 535 AD. Global climate change kicked in just after that -- years without any harvest in Europe, extreme volatility.
For people interested in following that up, the hypothesis was proposed by David Keys, who speculates in his book and BBC program Catastrophe (1999) that several events in world history in the 6th century AD were all linked to a volcanic eruption, which he feels is most probably Krakatoa.
There is some scepticism towards this theory, specifically the fact that Antarctic ice cores don't have any record of volcano-related climate change in the 6th century. But the jury's still out, and there is no evidence yet to prove or disprove David Keys's hypothesis conclusively.
Can someone sum up the differences between Free Software and Open Source Software?
I'll use an analogy that my friend told me once. Think of vegetarians. There are some people who are vegetarian because they believe killing animals is wrong. There are others who are vegetarian because some medical report says it's healthy. In other words, the former have ethical reasons, while the latter have pragmatic reasons.
So far so good. There doesn't seem to be any major conflict. The trouble starts when new findings are released which say that eating meat is actually good for you. The second (pragmatic) group will then eat meat too, while the first group WILL NOT - their point is that killing animals for food is wrong, irrespective of whether it's healthy for you or not.
The first group is Free Software, who advocate freedom as the primary goal and software as merely incidental. The second group is Open Source, who always advocate sharing source for practical benefits (more eyes examining etc), but don't say anything about freedom and liberty. If there is some exploit in the future that makes it seem like closed-source or proprietary software might offer benefits that open-source cannot, then the shear between the two groups will be readily apparent, with the Open Source advocates using closed-source for its benefits, and Free Software advocates holding out on principle.
but I can't imagine that all that extra heat being transfered to the atmospehere is a good thing.
This is rather easily estimated.
We can assume most (~95%) of the atmosphere lies in the first 14 kilometers (it's actually 18 km at the equator and 8 km at the poles). Assume Earth is a sphere of radius 6371 km. This gives a total atmospheric volume of 7.16e18 m^3. Assume a conservative average density of 0.8 kg/m^3; the mass is therefore 5.74e18 kg. If that seems overly heavy, consider that the Earth weighs about 5.98e24 kg, or about 1 million times more.
Assume the molecular mass of air is 29.2, and we get 1.96e20 moles. Assume its specific heat is (7/2)R == 29.1 J/K-mol, and we get the heat capacity of the entire atmosphere to be 5.71e21 J/K.
Hiroshima was a 5-kiloton blast, from 35 kg of Uranium. That is, 35 kg U directly converted to energy is like 5000 tons of conventional TNT-like high explosive. Hiroshima translates into 3.15e18 J, which would raise the global temperature by 0.0005 K.
Assume that life will be threatened if the atmospheric temperature rises by more than 2K. Raising the atmospheric temperature by 2K requires 1.14e22 J, which corresponds to 3622 Hiroshima bombs.
The question of whether a given asteroid is 3600 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb is left as an exercise to the (astrophysicist / nuclear physicist) reader.
Speaking as an engineer, I'd say that we're probably heating up the atmosphere far quicker all by ourselves, so we probably don't need to worry about asteroids.
Your "beambalance" thingie says a lot about weight, and air pressure.
Dead wrong. If I want to measure weight, I would use a spring balance. Mass is measured by a beam balance, but it gives the *correct* reading only when it's in perfect vacuum. All other readings are off by a small amount that accounts for the buoyancy of the medium that surrounds it (air). The point is that if you do the measurement on Earth at 1 atm, equal *masses* will appear to be slightly unequal due to buoyancy. If you add some mass to the bulkier material to offset the buoyancy, you'll get equal readings (weight) but the masses will no longer be equal.
A pure scientist assumes the weighing is always done in a perfect vacuum. A good engineer deliberately ignores the buoyancy effects, which is what I do most of the time. But this being a hypothetical question intended to generate the answer "They both weigh the same.", it deserves the counter-question "How was it weighed, and was buoyancy taken into account?".
What's heavier a ton of feathers or a ton of lead?
Would depend on how one measures and verifies the mass or weight of the material. Let's make the reasonable assumption that we're weighing both at room conditions (760 torr, 295 K) using a beam balance. The point is that feathers displace a lot more air than lead. This means that when we add enough feathers or lead to measure 1 kg, the mass of feathers is slightly more than that of lead (due to compensating for buoyancy in air etc). This applies even to a beam balance because the masses we use on the other pan are far smaller and denser than feathers.
Hence, "one kg" of feathers (as measured) has a real mass of about 1.01 kg, while "one kg" lead has a real mass of about 1.000091 kg. This difference is about 9.91 grams per kg measured, which adds up to 9.91 kg per metric ton measured.
Hence, "one metric ton" of feathers has 9.91 kg more matter in it than "one metric ton" of lead.
If you really want to answer that question satisfactorily, you must find measure out the masses AND verify the masses in a perfect vacuum.
++ Do they take Monopoly money?
+Yep, it was specially designed for pretending to buy pretend property.
Reminds me of a joke:
A little boy goes to the toy store and asks a salesman for a race car. The salesman shows him several and the boy makes a choice. The salesman tells him the price, and the boy offers him Monopoly money.
The salesman objects, "This isn't real money, it's toy money.".
To which the boy responds, "That's OK. I want only a toy car, not a real one.".
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the mirror. But this is what Babelfish had to say:
With movie "AKIRA" near future Tokyo, the deep-red motorcycle of protagonist Kanada which runs in length and breadth mutual loan and comes out.
Mutual loan??? Will someone who speaks Japanese please provide a sane translation?
Thank you.
From what I've seen of teen chat these days, all you need is a bot that says
ASL? LOL
evey minute or so and you've covered about 80% of all conversation.
You forgot OMG ROFL and the positively blood-curdling LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
Is it already April 1st somewhere?
That may well be the case, but stranger things have happened.
And here's the implementation by the Bergen LUG.
Here's the output (NOTE THOSE PING TIMES):
vegard@gyversalen:~$ ping -i 900 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
--- 10.0.3.1 ping statistics ---
9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
What is it with Crichton's obsession with inefficient software interfaces? Granted, Jurassic Park and hopefully Disclosure were written before VRML and Microsoft Bob were recognised as useless, but still, he shouldn't have jumped on such a stupid bandwagon.
:-)). I guess Crichton's one of the authors who can turn out a good story given a little technology (Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man) but quickly overloads under techno-glut (Jurassic Park, Timeline). That of course is only my opinion, so use your discretion.
I have to agree with that sentiment. I used to like his early ideas, but the stuff he wrote after ~1996 is almost pure crap, especially his lame descriptions of time travel in Timeline. The only mitigating factor I can think of is that at that time VR really was considered cool - the holodeck from Star Trek for instance. (yeah i know that the holodeck was more than VR - used matter replicators and all that
First person shooter.
This reminds me of a cool hack that uses Doom as a "process manager". Killing a Doom baddie basically "kill -9"s the process.
Cool idea. Have you read Disclosure by Michael Crichton? There's one imaginative sequence about a VR-based file explorer and UI. The concept is that you walk around hallways and chambers, opening drawers and reading files (which float in midair). Other logged-in users are visible too, in the appropriate locations (directories/files/work areas). If they are using a VR interface, they look lifelike. If they use a conventional CLI or GUI they look like cartoons on stick figures (apparently the system pulls an image of their face from an employee database and shows it on top of a stick figure). Was a pretty imaginative concept. I don't know if anyone has implemented anything similar yet.
Ya know, over all the browser name changes, I've wondered why Ford hasn't sued the shit out of them over the name of the mail client, Thunderbird.
Why go as far as their mail client? The *browser* used to be called Firebird. As in Pontiac Firebird.
As to why they haven't been sued (by GM in the case of Firebird), it's because their markets are completely different and the car manufacturers probably realize that themselves.
Speaking of Thunderbird, wasn't there once a surface-to-air missile named Thunderbird? That would have been an interesting battle had it ever come to Ford-vs-Thunderbird:
Ford: You have infringed on our tradema... [sees missile]
Missile dude: You were sayin'?
Who needs to SEE the movie? Just read the Slashot comments here, we'll eventually recite the entire script...
:-)
Good sir, are you saying that Slashdot will eventually produce the script in the same way that a crowd of monkeys eventually produces Hamlet?
Could they not stamp "THIS SIDE UP" or whatever on the components?
They did something similar with the modified 747 that carries the shuttle orbiter back after landing. See this picture. This is supposed to be a sign on top of the 747, where the orbiter links to the top of the 747's fuselage. It reads "Place Orbiter Here...Black Side Down".
If this is real, they have one hell of a sense of humor.
Its a documented (Swedish study I can't remember) mediacl fact that working with stupid people raises your blood pressure, and causes heart attacks.
This is what the parent is talking about:
WORKING WITH IDIOTS CAN KILL YOU
ARE THEY SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED? If not I'm not worried.
Sexually transmitted? Hi there! This is Slashdot!
I'm going to hazard a guess that Mr. Maughan's result looked something like "Mark... Maughan... And Associates have... not paid their taxes... practice without a license... eat babies."
If that's what this is about... hes god a point...
I posted something similar a couple hours back. Anyway, the point you raise does not arise in this case because Google's cache is far less accusatory than the contents of the linked page.
But then I realized the issue was not just "Google called me a criminal". For instance, my boss's kids have made a game of Googling for a name and a phrase, and reading the results. They find entertainment in results like "John Kerry...striptease on the table" and "Halliburton sucks...claimed Cheney." (I made those up, but you get the idea).
The point however is that virtually anyone can immediately see the relevance and quality of the search results. If a user is incapable of judging a search result's relevance in this fundamental way, then he/she is too incompetent to process any decent amount of information.
Therefore, even if Google had returned that patchwork quilt of sentence fragments (which in this case it did not) that gave a (conceivably) different meaning, one could easily show that a large majority of computer users are able to judge the quality, context and relevance of a search result.
Therefore, I personally feel Mark Maughan really doesn't have anything to stand on, not even some flimsy hypothetical excuse of "Google's ellipsis lowered my dignity".
Here's the offending page.
It's the Disciplinary Actions page in the California Board of Accountancy section on the California Dept of Consumer Affairs's website.
Note that Google itself does not list any specific disciplinary actions, except for the rather damning page title of "Disciplinary Actions List - Bi-Bz".
He just wants some free publicity. Seriously, this will be good for his business.
Um, why exactly? Wouldn't one think "Oh yeah, that's the guy who blamed Google's search results!" and stay away from his firm?
I can see a genuine possibility for certain search queries to give misleading results, mainly a result of using ellipsis marks in the wrong place. Like searching for "$NAME $ANIMAL" without quotes might conceivably give something like "$NAME was severely reprimanded...for molesting $ANIMALs"
But searching for a name ("$FIRST $LAST" with or without the quotes) should not give something radically different from what was intended on the webpage. This incident therefore seems to be as bad as SCO picking on IBM.
Why is it that so many Unix/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?
Well, here's what appears to be a screenshot of LilyPond in use.
but as I recall, the 'Indian Ocean' wasn't there when the second one augered in.
From what I know, the Indian subcontinent started off somewhere near where Madagascar is today, and moved north, until it finally collided with Asia and formed the Himalayas. The coast used to extend all the way up to present-day Nepal and western China. This has apparently been borne out by ammonite fossils found in the Himalayas. If that is the case, this asteroid could have fallen in that ocean before the Himalayas were formed.
The question now is whether the Indian subcontinent could move that far in just 65 million years. Geologists - please verify using the age of the Himalayas as a guide.
Wasn't there some speculation on lava plume in the region? Something about India having an abnormally short continental shelf along its west coast, which apparently can be accounted for if you assume that the subcontinent moved over a large lava plume on its northward journey, which set up enough stress that its western fringes broke away or disintegrated, leaving the rest with a shortened continental shelf.
The model I always think of is Krakatoa's eruption in 535 AD. Global climate change kicked in just after that -- years without any harvest in Europe, extreme volatility.
For people interested in following that up, the hypothesis was proposed by David Keys, who speculates in his book and BBC program Catastrophe (1999) that several events in world history in the 6th century AD were all linked to a volcanic eruption, which he feels is most probably Krakatoa.
There is some scepticism towards this theory, specifically the fact that Antarctic ice cores don't have any record of volcano-related climate change in the 6th century. But the jury's still out, and there is no evidence yet to prove or disprove David Keys's hypothesis conclusively.
Can someone sum up the differences between Free Software and Open Source Software?
I'll use an analogy that my friend told me once. Think of vegetarians. There are some people who are vegetarian because they believe killing animals is wrong. There are others who are vegetarian because some medical report says it's healthy. In other words, the former have ethical reasons, while the latter have pragmatic reasons.
So far so good. There doesn't seem to be any major conflict. The trouble starts when new findings are released which say that eating meat is actually good for you. The second (pragmatic) group will then eat meat too, while the first group WILL NOT - their point is that killing animals for food is wrong, irrespective of whether it's healthy for you or not.
The first group is Free Software, who advocate freedom as the primary goal and software as merely incidental. The second group is Open Source, who always advocate sharing source for practical benefits (more eyes examining etc), but don't say anything about freedom and liberty. If there is some exploit in the future that makes it seem like closed-source or proprietary software might offer benefits that open-source cannot, then the shear between the two groups will be readily apparent, with the Open Source advocates using closed-source for its benefits, and Free Software advocates holding out on principle.
but I can't imagine that all that extra heat being transfered to the atmospehere is a good thing.
This is rather easily estimated.
We can assume most (~95%) of the atmosphere lies in the first 14 kilometers (it's actually 18 km at the equator and 8 km at the poles). Assume Earth is a sphere of radius 6371 km. This gives a total atmospheric volume of 7.16e18 m^3. Assume a conservative average density of 0.8 kg/m^3; the mass is therefore 5.74e18 kg. If that seems overly heavy, consider that the Earth weighs about 5.98e24 kg, or about 1 million times more.
Assume the molecular mass of air is 29.2, and we get 1.96e20 moles. Assume its specific heat is (7/2)R == 29.1 J/K-mol, and we get the heat capacity of the entire atmosphere to be 5.71e21 J/K.
Hiroshima was a 5-kiloton blast, from 35 kg of Uranium. That is, 35 kg U directly converted to energy is like 5000 tons of conventional TNT-like high explosive. Hiroshima translates into 3.15e18 J, which would raise the global temperature by 0.0005 K.
Assume that life will be threatened if the atmospheric temperature rises by more than 2K. Raising the atmospheric temperature by 2K requires 1.14e22 J, which corresponds to 3622 Hiroshima bombs.
The question of whether a given asteroid is 3600 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb is left as an exercise to the (astrophysicist / nuclear physicist) reader.
Speaking as an engineer, I'd say that we're probably heating up the atmosphere far quicker all by ourselves, so we probably don't need to worry about asteroids.
Your "beambalance" thingie says a lot about weight, and air pressure.
Dead wrong. If I want to measure weight, I would use a spring balance. Mass is measured by a beam balance, but it gives the *correct* reading only when it's in perfect vacuum. All other readings are off by a small amount that accounts for the buoyancy of the medium that surrounds it (air). The point is that if you do the measurement on Earth at 1 atm, equal *masses* will appear to be slightly unequal due to buoyancy. If you add some mass to the bulkier material to offset the buoyancy, you'll get equal readings (weight) but the masses will no longer be equal.
A pure scientist assumes the weighing is always done in a perfect vacuum. A good engineer deliberately ignores the buoyancy effects, which is what I do most of the time. But this being a hypothetical question intended to generate the answer "They both weigh the same.", it deserves the counter-question "How was it weighed, and was buoyancy taken into account?".
200 Xbox + $50 mod chip + $100 HDD = $5,000 worth of entertainment equipment.
Not to mention a hefty fine and a jail sentence, thanks to the DMCA.
Whoa easy on the caps there cowboy
No no no no no!
It wasn't Cowboy! It was Michael!
<bink>ceswiedler <bink>
Malformed HTML! The HTML standard stipulates that every <bink> tag shall be terminated by a </bink> tag.
Oh...
What's heavier a ton of feathers or a ton of lead?
Would depend on how one measures and verifies the mass or weight of the material. Let's make the reasonable assumption that we're weighing both at room conditions (760 torr, 295 K) using a beam balance. The point is that feathers displace a lot more air than lead. This means that when we add enough feathers or lead to measure 1 kg, the mass of feathers is slightly more than that of lead (due to compensating for buoyancy in air etc). This applies even to a beam balance because the masses we use on the other pan are far smaller and denser than feathers.
Hence, "one kg" of feathers (as measured) has a real mass of about 1.01 kg, while "one kg" lead has a real mass of about 1.000091 kg. This difference is about 9.91 grams per kg measured, which adds up to 9.91 kg per metric ton measured.
Hence, "one metric ton" of feathers has 9.91 kg more matter in it than "one metric ton" of lead.
If you really want to answer that question satisfactorily, you must find measure out the masses AND verify the masses in a perfect vacuum.
++ Do they take Monopoly money?
+Yep, it was specially designed for pretending to buy pretend property.
Reminds me of a joke:
A little boy goes to the toy store and asks a salesman for a race car.
The salesman shows him several and the boy makes a choice.
The salesman tells him the price, and the boy offers him Monopoly money.
The salesman objects, "This isn't real money, it's toy money.".
To which the boy responds, "That's OK. I want only a toy car, not a real one.".