What? Dude, I'd love to have Miles O'Brien give a narration of the launch... wait, you mean you're not talking about Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien from DS9? Nevermind. I'd settle for Scotty or Geordie, but please no B'Lanna.
And it's funny that the GP poster would complain about not enough technical details and too much human interest in the shuttle launches, I remembebr being annoyed with TV coverage of the war in Iraq for the oppisite reason. All the news channels had long-winded technical overviews of the weapons we were going to throw against the Iraqis, with middle-aged men going on and on about the laser guildance system of the Hellfire missle or the weapons load and depleted uranium shells of the A-10 Warthog. It was kind of disturbing, really, seeing pasty old men getting a boner from drooling over weapons as if they were viagra.
Oh, come on, this kind of thing is normal for any "tourist town". Especially places like Cancun, which draws the drunken frat-boy crowd more than most. From what I can tell, getting drunk in Cancun seems to be an annunal spring break ritual among American frat boys, and I'm sure more unsavory things go on there, too.
Not that Europeans and other nationals don't do it. I'm sure they go to some Mediterranian resort to enjoy the beaches, girls and drink, but the grandparent poster would not have seen that from Mexico.
Then again, the lure of drunken partying in Mexico might have something to do with the puritanical laws and campus regs in the states, which don't exist in Europe, so it might not get foisted on some random town overseas.
Do not worry, dear consumers! The tapes have not gone "missing". The studio that made the original landing footage simply took it back to their labs to Digitally Re-Master it for the Special Limited Collector's Edition DVD, which will be out by Christmas. Since the original director (Kubrik) is gone, they will have directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg collaborate on this wonderful new addition to the Disney(TM) Classics(TM) Collection(TM).
New, never-before scenes will be inserted into the middle of the old, staid footage! Tom Hanks will replace Neil Armstrong through the magic of digital effects! Kristie Alley will be Buzz Aldrin, adding an exciting new romantic subplot to the mission! A lovable animal sidekick will have your kids squealing in delight! Gagarin shoots first!
Master directors Spielberg and Lucas will also modernize the plot and imagery to give a fresh, "post-2001" look! The American flag, such an archaic-looking symbol (that didn't test well with audiences overseas), will be replaced with a pleasant, pastel blue UN flag. The ugly SUV 'lunar rover' will be digitally removed, and replaced with bicycles which the astronauts will pedal about the moon. The President will be updated to be a Texan oil millionaire conducting a needless war in Asia, who commander Michael Collins (played by academy award-winner Liam Neeson) will denounce for "having turned to the dark side". The "Cold War" sideplot will be updated to be a "Temporal War On Terror", which will feature terrorists from the future attempting to fly the Space Shuttle Columbia into the White House! Can our heroes stop them 'in time'?!
This and other new changes will keep the franchise fresh and exciting to today's viewers, and like Star Trek: Enterprise, will boldly re-write history that no one but nerds cares about anyways!
Apollo 11: The Special Limited Collector's Edititon: Coming Christmas 2006 - collect all 6 covers!
See, if they'd kept the source code on an Microsoft MS Windows machine with NT Technology and NTFS Filesystem, they would have been completely safe. Heck, they could have even placed it on a IBM Machine on a Wireless Wi-Fi hotspot at a Starbucks, with all the code on a USB Bus memory stick, and no one would have been able to touch it!
I know people around here swear by the GPL Licenced Linux Unix or the BSD Distribution, but we must admit we have been defeated. I, for one, welcome our Debian-cracking overlords.
In all seriousness, I don't see the ads as being offensive - all they're doing is grabbing each other, not forcing one to pick cotton or whipping one of them in chains. It's not even risque.
On the other hand, how could the Dutch or the ad agency not at least forsee that this would cause controversy among the more sensitive? Do they not have any black rights organizations in the Netherlands?
One thing that's striking about the way race issues seem to work in Europe is that it's seems like the white left that is condescending to non-white races, instead of non-whites organizing and publicly fighting for their rights like in America. I can't offhand think of a single non-white civil rights leader of Europe - who is their Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcom X?
There seems to be a lot of white people here who are saying "Well, why is it offensive only when it's the white person dominating, not the black one?". I think that shows the kind of disconnect from history that is common here. Slashdotters think in terms of philosophical equality, not in terms of historical relations between the races. The black woman dominating a white woman does not have the same kind of recollection of the past that the other ad has. If that ad had been a white woman dominating a Jewish one, there likely would have been more of a reaction in the Netherlands.
But again, I don't think the ad itself shows anything worth getting upset over - it's not even on the level of fighting, let alone slavery.
Why does this remind me of Austin Power's psychedelic 747 with bachelor pad interior?
Sergey: "Do I make you horny, baby?" Cute chick: "Sergey, it's not the 90's anymore." Sergey: "What do you mean, baby? Of course it's the 90's! As long as people use the internet mostly for porn and piracy of music and software, the 90's will always be alive!"
Dr. Evil: "I'm going to fucking kill Google!" *throws henchman's chair* Dr. Evil: "So, about those Killer Chair Robots With Lasers I ordered..." Henchman: "Well, it's about that, sir." Dr. Evil: "Yes?" Henchman: "We... could not complete the LongChair project. It kept crashing on us, I mean more than usual, in fact the prototype blew up spontaneously." Dr. Evil: "Well, okay, what do you have?" Henchman: "Ottomans." Dr. Evil: "Ottomans?" Henchman: "Ottomans, sir." Dr. Evil: "Do they have frickin' lasers on their heads?" Henchman: "No, sir." Dr. Evil: "Saw blades?" Henchman: "No, sir." Dr. Evil: "Flamethrowers?" Henchman: "No, sir." Dr. Evil: "Well, what the fuck do they have?!" Henchman: "Sir, we have integrated a Google search bar into their sides. It's really quite useful, you can Google while you lounge in-" Dr. Evil: "I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL GOOGLE!!!!" *throws chair with henchman through window*
Homonyms can also often have the same spellings. There are also homographs, which are words spelled the same, but pronounced differently with different meanings. Meaning that telling words apart will always require looking at the context either way.
"The bear must bear the burden of war and bear arms" "Live footage shows how they live" "The cock pecked at my cock" "I will will myself to write my will"
A phonetic spelling system would fix homographs written the same but pronounced differently, like "live/live" at least. Not that I support this particular project.
Re:"The mst complex machine ever built, blaah, bla
on
Shuttle Launch Success
·
· Score: 1
That's not a great analogy. It's NASA that has a crew cab pickup with room for 7 and cargo, the Russians have an old motorcyle with a side car that can fit three if they hae a guy hanging on the back.
Of course the motorcylce is cheaper, but it does a lot less.
Which reminds me, the only really cool arcade I've seen is Ground Kontrol in Portland, which has a bar serving beer:) As well as an old Nintendo with nearly every game for it, which is suprisingly lacking in most places.
As we have a slowly aging gamer demographic, hopefully we will see more acrade bars in the future. "Gimme a bloody mary and a cart of Castlevania, please"
I see you've been modded "troll" already, but I'll just assume you genuinely hold those opinions.
First, on the current generation: I don't get why you think X-Box has "moved in to the mainstream generic person arena." That would be the PS2. The X-box has carved out a niche of FPS players and American RPG fans, and is struggling with other genres. The PS2 is what most people think of when they think "video game machine" these days. The PS1 basically invented the concept of a console as a generic appliance for adults, and the PS2 succesfully extended that franchise. The PS2 has much, much higher sales rates, it's demographics are much wider, and has a wider selection of games.
Nintendo is the console for people who don't mind playing video games, and don't need the words "combat" or "warrior" in the game's title. That's probobly why they have higher sales in Japan than in the States.
Your argument about being an "adult demographic" with lots of money to throw around sounds a lot like what Microsoft were saying when they were hyping the X-box rpior to launch. I suppose it's not suprising that you like both PS3 and X-box, then. But that strategy worked horribly for Microsoft, who found out that: 1) There aren't that many rich adults who want to spend big bucks on games, especially when the PS2 can grab the cheap/simple market and the PC can grab the expensive/complex end of the market. 2) Kids actually have more buying power than adults because they can get their parents to buy games for them. It's way easier to nag your mom into buying a machine than convincing your wife/gf that it was a great idea to get one. Plus, there are way more kids who want to play video games than there are adults who do. 3) If your consoles are going to sell fewer units(because of a smaller market of adults), you need to either sell more games per person, or increase the price per game. The former you can't do because game-playing adults often have less time to play games than kids, and the latter ends up restricting your audience to richer folks or pushing them to cheaper consoles(PS2). Oh, and smaller market = less developer interest.
For above reasons, the X-box's original marketing strategy failed, and now they have to play second fiddle to Sony. Interestingly, Sony seems intent to follow them with the PS3. If it weren't for the terrible impression left by the X-box(especially in Japan) and anticipation of the Wii/Ps3, I suspect X-box 360 would be able to grab the Ps2's spot as the 'generic' console of that generation.
Oh, and given the cost of creating games these days, it's quite possible that there won't be much of a difference between XB360 and PS3 games. Its really takes a lot of skilled artists and programmers to take modern consoles to the limit of their graphics, and it may not be worth going to the PS3's capabilities past the XB360's.
Hey, maybe if we just explain to these hicks that MP3s are like moonshine, and the RIAA are like Revenuers, they'll finally get them off our backs! "Make fer th' county line, Jeb! Them RIAA won't be able to follow us there!"
Or maybe we could explain that internet porn is like barnyard animals... taking it out on them is better than doing it with your sister?
And Slashdot is like a Klan rally, except we hate Microsoft instead of black people!
Jesus Chri- er, I mean, Charles Darwin, people! It's perfectly obvious that all humans are related at some point, unless there is a group of cave-dwellers descended from hydrothermal vent bacteria who are not vertebrate arthropods of the kingdom Animalia, domain Eukaryote, with a completely differnt evolutionary history, who just *happened* to evolve the exact same biological features of modern humans.
This discussion seems to have been derailed by people who have not read the article or really thought about what it is saying. I have, and while thir methodlogy seems somewhat questionable, I don't disagree with the possibility of it happening.
Now the issue is, how close to the current time can all modern humans trace their ancestors? Well, that is an interesting question. 500BC sounds hard to account for people who have lived in the Americas and Australia who have not had European genes mixed in since their contact after 1500 AD or so. They seem to have left Eurasia during the last ice age, more than 10,000 years before.
On the other hand, it doesn't require one single person to visit those peoples in order for their genes to travel. Over the course of many generations, a person's descendants could move about and spread his genes. Even if he/she only moved to the next village, or made one ocean crossing, they could easily spread throughout the world, including to populations that had lived in relative isolation for thousands of years.
All it really takes is for one person to make it to someplace near an isolated community, and for their genes to be passed on. The natural shuffling of descendants between local communities will eventually ensure that their genes will spread to everyone in the region. Note that it will be a very small fraction of the genes, but it will be there.
Now I take issue with this comment: "Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled. Okay, he qualifies it with 'probably', but he does not seem to account for groups which were wiped out by natural disasters or wars. Those people would be more like uncles and aunts, not direct ancestors.
I would like to see the statistics backed up with more actual genetic data, but the study is interesting, at least.
Well, maybe you missed it but around here, people did care, and they did raise a fuss. It's the general population that didn't notice.
The Slashdot crowd has a lot of activist interest in things the general public hasn't even noticed - from the DMCA, software patents, the great firewall of China, to DRM.
In the 1990s, Slashdot had lots of stories on things like typosquatting, Echelon, Communications Decency Act, library internet filtering, cryptography(remember the "Clipper chip"?), and copyright extentions. I remember Echelon, Carnivore, and crypto being discussed in high school debate, even.
It's unfortunate that the general public is too distracted to care.
Well thanks a lot, you assholes, for taking my perfectly good joke post and turning it into a insightful discussion! Don't you know that's not what you do on Slashdot?!
Anyways, as far as the first poster goes, the sig could mean something along the lines of "America - love it or leave it" bumperstickers. You can avoid social security, you just have to leave the country:P
The argument that you shouldn't force others to spend on gov't programs is not really useful. Sure, you could have opt-in taxation, but since the gov't is supposed to be doing things that are not doable or profitable to private parties, and which benefits society as a whole, that will only give people a way to shirk responsibility.
A similar argument could be made about public education. You could go to private school, and never have kids, meaning you would never directly benefit from public education. However, the society as a whole benefits, and you do indirectly from the labors of the people educated by the system. Now imagine if there were no public education or vouchers, and only the rich or charity cases could be educated. That would be a terribly uneducated society.
Your second argument boils down to "America has a shitty social safety net, so let's not have one." America's system does not really reflect the usefulness of a social safety net. I've never heard anyone from western Europe or Canada, or even Australia say, "I wish we had America's level of social security." The fact is that we have terrible coverage of medical and financial hardships. If we wanted to talk about the usefulness of social securty, the question we should be asking is "How come ours isn't as good as Britain or Canada's?"
In that vein, I wonder if they have prepared a speech for the president in case something goes horribly wrong. Apparently they had such a speech for the Apollo 11 mission, just in case.
I would imagine Karl Rove is careful enough not to make the president wing it if he has to address the nation after such an event. God help us if that happens.
I was looking for a good streaming video of the launch in a F/OSS-friendly format, but I couldn't find one - NASA was Wmv/QT/Real, BBC was Real/Wmv. Does anyone know a good source of a shuttle launch stream that's in a free format like mpeg or theora?
Thankfully, Ubuntu made it easy to add a extra repository and install RealPlayer 10 in less than 10 minutes. Just in time to catch them scrub the launch.
"This just in, Hamas has threatened to open up a new MartyrSpace website to help lonely terrorists get laid and launch eye-shredding suicide webdesign attacks on Israel. The Israeli Defence Minister is reported as saying, 'The goggles... they do nothing!'"
I looked through it quickly, and saw that although it was "free as in beer", it was apparently not "free as in speech" - neither GPLed nor open-source in any way. And now it is going fully commercial. Which is too bad, but I am still interested in if this is still a good OS.
It says the it's not a *nix, which is interesting. Nowadays you only have *nix or Windows for desktop OSes, you hardly see any other types. Does anyone with experience on the OS care to tell just how the system design and philosophy is different from *nix?
"We will put network neutrality in a lockbox for future generations, and use it to give our seniors a perscription drug discount plan. I will put all uses of the network to a 'global test', so that our alies will be with us, not against us when we immanetize the eschaton. We will make sure there is no controlling legal authority on the information superhighway of the future, depending on what the definiton of the word 'is' is. Keep hope alive!"
I read through that FAQ, and they don't actually address the issue of patenting at all. Saying that "the data will be made available" and "we will not sell" the results does not rule out patents. The patent system requires you to publish the data on the thing you want to patent, and it certainly does not require you to stop others from publishing the data.
They're probobly not going to go start charging money for it, but it's possible they would patent it just to keep in their portfolio or have as a "defensive patent".
Slashdot Mirror
What? Dude, I'd love to have Miles O'Brien give a narration of the launch... wait, you mean you're not talking about Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien from DS9? Nevermind. I'd settle for Scotty or Geordie, but please no B'Lanna.
And it's funny that the GP poster would complain about not enough technical details and too much human interest in the shuttle launches, I remembebr being annoyed with TV coverage of the war in Iraq for the oppisite reason. All the news channels had long-winded technical overviews of the weapons we were going to throw against the Iraqis, with middle-aged men going on and on about the laser guildance system of the Hellfire missle or the weapons load and depleted uranium shells of the A-10 Warthog. It was kind of disturbing, really, seeing pasty old men getting a boner from drooling over weapons as if they were viagra.
Oh, come on, this kind of thing is normal for any "tourist town". Especially places like Cancun, which draws the drunken frat-boy crowd more than most. From what I can tell, getting drunk in Cancun seems to be an annunal spring break ritual among American frat boys, and I'm sure more unsavory things go on there, too.
Not that Europeans and other nationals don't do it. I'm sure they go to some Mediterranian resort to enjoy the beaches, girls and drink, but the grandparent poster would not have seen that from Mexico.
Then again, the lure of drunken partying in Mexico might have something to do with the puritanical laws and campus regs in the states, which don't exist in Europe, so it might not get foisted on some random town overseas.
Do not worry, dear consumers! The tapes have not gone "missing". The studio that made the original landing footage simply took it back to their labs to Digitally Re-Master it for the Special Limited Collector's Edition DVD, which will be out by Christmas. Since the original director (Kubrik) is gone, they will have directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg collaborate on this wonderful new addition to the Disney(TM) Classics(TM) Collection(TM).
New, never-before scenes will be inserted into the middle of the old, staid footage!
Tom Hanks will replace Neil Armstrong through the magic of digital effects!
Kristie Alley will be Buzz Aldrin, adding an exciting new romantic subplot to the mission!
A lovable animal sidekick will have your kids squealing in delight!
Gagarin shoots first!
Master directors Spielberg and Lucas will also modernize the plot and imagery to give a fresh, "post-2001" look!
The American flag, such an archaic-looking symbol (that didn't test well with audiences overseas), will be replaced with a pleasant, pastel blue UN flag. The ugly SUV 'lunar rover' will be digitally removed, and replaced with bicycles which the astronauts will pedal about the moon. The President will be updated to be a Texan oil millionaire conducting a needless war in Asia, who commander Michael Collins (played by academy award-winner Liam Neeson) will denounce for "having turned to the dark side". The "Cold War" sideplot will be updated to be a "Temporal War On Terror", which will feature terrorists from the future attempting to fly the Space Shuttle Columbia into the White House! Can our heroes stop them 'in time'?!
This and other new changes will keep the franchise fresh and exciting to today's viewers, and like Star Trek: Enterprise, will boldly re-write history that no one but nerds cares about anyways!
Apollo 11: The Special Limited Collector's Edititon: Coming Christmas 2006 - collect all 6 covers!
See, if they'd kept the source code on an Microsoft MS Windows machine with NT Technology and NTFS Filesystem, they would have been completely safe. Heck, they could have even placed it on a IBM Machine on a Wireless Wi-Fi hotspot at a Starbucks, with all the code on a USB Bus memory stick, and no one would have been able to touch it!
I know people around here swear by the GPL Licenced Linux Unix or the BSD Distribution, but we must admit we have been defeated. I, for one, welcome our Debian-cracking overlords.
No doubt, judging from the blackface performers in the Netherlands. Holy shit, I thought David Sedaris was kidding about the six to eight black men.
In all seriousness, I don't see the ads as being offensive - all they're doing is grabbing each other, not forcing one to pick cotton or whipping one of them in chains. It's not even risque.
On the other hand, how could the Dutch or the ad agency not at least forsee that this would cause controversy among the more sensitive? Do they not have any black rights organizations in the Netherlands?
One thing that's striking about the way race issues seem to work in Europe is that it's seems like the white left that is condescending to non-white races, instead of non-whites organizing and publicly fighting for their rights like in America. I can't offhand think of a single non-white civil rights leader of Europe - who is their Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcom X?
There seems to be a lot of white people here who are saying "Well, why is it offensive only when it's the white person dominating, not the black one?". I think that shows the kind of disconnect from history that is common here. Slashdotters think in terms of philosophical equality, not in terms of historical relations between the races. The black woman dominating a white woman does not have the same kind of recollection of the past that the other ad has. If that ad had been a white woman dominating a Jewish one, there likely would have been more of a reaction in the Netherlands.
But again, I don't think the ad itself shows anything worth getting upset over - it's not even on the level of fighting, let alone slavery.
Why does this remind me of Austin Power's psychedelic 747 with bachelor pad interior?
Sergey: "Do I make you horny, baby?"
Cute chick: "Sergey, it's not the 90's anymore."
Sergey: "What do you mean, baby? Of course it's the 90's! As long as people use the internet mostly for porn and piracy of music and software, the 90's will always be alive!"
Dr. Evil: "I'm going to fucking kill Google!" *throws henchman's chair*
Dr. Evil: "So, about those Killer Chair Robots With Lasers I ordered..."
Henchman: "Well, it's about that, sir."
Dr. Evil: "Yes?"
Henchman: "We... could not complete the LongChair project. It kept crashing on us, I mean more than usual, in fact the prototype blew up spontaneously."
Dr. Evil: "Well, okay, what do you have?"
Henchman: "Ottomans."
Dr. Evil: "Ottomans?"
Henchman: "Ottomans, sir."
Dr. Evil: "Do they have frickin' lasers on their heads?"
Henchman: "No, sir."
Dr. Evil: "Saw blades?"
Henchman: "No, sir."
Dr. Evil: "Flamethrowers?"
Henchman: "No, sir."
Dr. Evil: "Well, what the fuck do they have?!"
Henchman: "Sir, we have integrated a Google search bar into their sides. It's really quite useful, you can Google while you lounge in-"
Dr. Evil: "I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL GOOGLE!!!!" *throws chair with henchman through window*
Well, thank god terroists on eBay won't be able to use Google Checkout to buy terrorist equipment.
We may, however, have to keep an eye on Canadian Tire Money
Homonyms can also often have the same spellings. There are also homographs, which are words spelled the same, but pronounced differently with different meanings. Meaning that telling words apart will always require looking at the context either way.
"The bear must bear the burden of war and bear arms"
"Live footage shows how they live"
"The cock pecked at my cock"
"I will will myself to write my will"
A phonetic spelling system would fix homographs written the same but pronounced differently, like "live/live" at least. Not that I support this particular project.
That's not a great analogy. It's NASA that has a crew cab pickup with room for 7 and cargo, the Russians have an old motorcyle with a side car that can fit three if they hae a guy hanging on the back.
Of course the motorcylce is cheaper, but it does a lot less.
I'm not an HTML expert or anything, but roughly how much does myspace.com weigh?
Two Libraries of Congress - filled entirely with obscene crayon drawings and angst-filled teenage diaries.
Yes, weep for the future of humanity. Weep for us all.
Then blog about it.
Which reminds me, the only really cool arcade I've seen is Ground Kontrol in Portland, which has a bar serving beer :) As well as an old Nintendo with nearly every game for it, which is suprisingly lacking in most places.
As we have a slowly aging gamer demographic, hopefully we will see more acrade bars in the future. "Gimme a bloody mary and a cart of Castlevania, please"
I see you've been modded "troll" already, but I'll just assume you genuinely hold those opinions.
First, on the current generation: I don't get why you think X-Box has "moved in to the mainstream generic person arena." That would be the PS2. The X-box has carved out a niche of FPS players and American RPG fans, and is struggling with other genres. The PS2 is what most people think of when they think "video game machine" these days. The PS1 basically invented the concept of a console as a generic appliance for adults, and the PS2 succesfully extended that franchise. The PS2 has much, much higher sales rates, it's demographics are much wider, and has a wider selection of games.
Nintendo is the console for people who don't mind playing video games, and don't need the words "combat" or "warrior" in the game's title. That's probobly why they have higher sales in Japan than in the States.
Your argument about being an "adult demographic" with lots of money to throw around sounds a lot like what Microsoft were saying when they were hyping the X-box rpior to launch. I suppose it's not suprising that you like both PS3 and X-box, then. But that strategy worked horribly for Microsoft, who found out that:
1) There aren't that many rich adults who want to spend big bucks on games, especially when the PS2 can grab the cheap/simple market and the PC can grab the expensive/complex end of the market.
2) Kids actually have more buying power than adults because they can get their parents to buy games for them. It's way easier to nag your mom into buying a machine than convincing your wife/gf that it was a great idea to get one. Plus, there are way more kids who want to play video games than there are adults who do.
3) If your consoles are going to sell fewer units(because of a smaller market of adults), you need to either sell more games per person, or increase the price per game. The former you can't do because game-playing adults often have less time to play games than kids, and the latter ends up restricting your audience to richer folks or pushing them to cheaper consoles(PS2). Oh, and smaller market = less developer interest.
For above reasons, the X-box's original marketing strategy failed, and now they have to play second fiddle to Sony. Interestingly, Sony seems intent to follow them with the PS3. If it weren't for the terrible impression left by the X-box(especially in Japan) and anticipation of the Wii/Ps3, I suspect X-box 360 would be able to grab the Ps2's spot as the 'generic' console of that generation.
Oh, and given the cost of creating games these days, it's quite possible that there won't be much of a difference between XB360 and PS3 games. Its really takes a lot of skilled artists and programmers to take modern consoles to the limit of their graphics, and it may not be worth going to the PS3's capabilities past the XB360's.
Hey, maybe if we just explain to these hicks that MP3s are like moonshine, and the RIAA are like Revenuers, they'll finally get them off our backs! "Make fer th' county line, Jeb! Them RIAA won't be able to follow us there!"
Or maybe we could explain that internet porn is like barnyard animals... taking it out on them is better than doing it with your sister?
And Slashdot is like a Klan rally, except we hate Microsoft instead of black people!
Jesus Chri- er, I mean, Charles Darwin, people! It's perfectly obvious that all humans are related at some point, unless there is a group of cave-dwellers descended from hydrothermal vent bacteria who are not vertebrate arthropods of the kingdom Animalia, domain Eukaryote, with a completely differnt evolutionary history, who just *happened* to evolve the exact same biological features of modern humans.
This discussion seems to have been derailed by people who have not read the article or really thought about what it is saying. I have, and while thir methodlogy seems somewhat questionable, I don't disagree with the possibility of it happening.
Now the issue is, how close to the current time can all modern humans trace their ancestors? Well, that is an interesting question. 500BC sounds hard to account for people who have lived in the Americas and Australia who have not had European genes mixed in since their contact after 1500 AD or so. They seem to have left Eurasia during the last ice age, more than 10,000 years before.
On the other hand, it doesn't require one single person to visit those peoples in order for their genes to travel. Over the course of many generations, a person's descendants could move about and spread his genes. Even if he/she only moved to the next village, or made one ocean crossing, they could easily spread throughout the world, including to populations that had lived in relative isolation for thousands of years.
All it really takes is for one person to make it to someplace near an isolated community, and for their genes to be passed on. The natural shuffling of descendants between local communities will eventually ensure that their genes will spread to everyone in the region. Note that it will be a very small fraction of the genes, but it will be there.
Now I take issue with this comment: "Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled. Okay, he qualifies it with 'probably', but he does not seem to account for groups which were wiped out by natural disasters or wars. Those people would be more like uncles and aunts, not direct ancestors.
I would like to see the statistics backed up with more actual genetic data, but the study is interesting, at least.
Well, maybe you missed it but around here, people did care, and they did raise a fuss. It's the general population that didn't notice.
The Slashdot crowd has a lot of activist interest in things the general public hasn't even noticed - from the DMCA, software patents, the great firewall of China, to DRM.
In the 1990s, Slashdot had lots of stories on things like typosquatting, Echelon, Communications Decency Act, library internet filtering, cryptography(remember the "Clipper chip"?), and copyright extentions. I remember Echelon, Carnivore, and crypto being discussed in high school debate, even.
It's unfortunate that the general public is too distracted to care.
Well thanks a lot, you assholes, for taking my perfectly good joke post and turning it into a insightful discussion! Don't you know that's not what you do on Slashdot?!
:P
Anyways, as far as the first poster goes, the sig could mean something along the lines of "America - love it or leave it" bumperstickers. You can avoid social security, you just have to leave the country
The argument that you shouldn't force others to spend on gov't programs is not really useful. Sure, you could have opt-in taxation, but since the gov't is supposed to be doing things that are not doable or profitable to private parties, and which benefits society as a whole, that will only give people a way to shirk responsibility.
A similar argument could be made about public education. You could go to private school, and never have kids, meaning you would never directly benefit from public education. However, the society as a whole benefits, and you do indirectly from the labors of the people educated by the system. Now imagine if there were no public education or vouchers, and only the rich or charity cases could be educated. That would be a terribly uneducated society.
Your second argument boils down to "America has a shitty social safety net, so let's not have one." America's system does not really reflect the usefulness of a social safety net. I've never heard anyone from western Europe or Canada, or even Australia say, "I wish we had America's level of social security." The fact is that we have terrible coverage of medical and financial hardships. If we wanted to talk about the usefulness of social securty, the question we should be asking is "How come ours isn't as good as Britain or Canada's?"
In that vein, I wonder if they have prepared a speech for the president in case something goes horribly wrong. Apparently they had such a speech for the Apollo 11 mission, just in case.
I would imagine Karl Rove is careful enough not to make the president wing it if he has to address the nation after such an event. God help us if that happens.
I was looking for a good streaming video of the launch in a F/OSS-friendly format, but I couldn't find one - NASA was Wmv/QT/Real, BBC was Real/Wmv. Does anyone know a good source of a shuttle launch stream that's in a free format like mpeg or theora?
Thankfully, Ubuntu made it easy to add a extra repository and install RealPlayer 10 in less than 10 minutes. Just in time to catch them scrub the launch.
"If you blog with MySpace, you blog with Osama!"
"This just in, Hamas has threatened to open up a new MartyrSpace website to help lonely terrorists get laid and launch eye-shredding suicide webdesign attacks on Israel. The Israeli Defence Minister is reported as saying, 'The goggles... they do nothing!'"
I once heard a joke about how, "One day, you'll drive your Sony to the Sony to buy more Sony for your Sony".
We need a new one that goes, "One day, you'll Google for some more Google for your Google, and pay Google with Google"
I looked through it quickly, and saw that although it was "free as in beer", it was apparently not "free as in speech" - neither GPLed nor open-source in any way. And now it is going fully commercial. Which is too bad, but I am still interested in if this is still a good OS.
It says the it's not a *nix, which is interesting. Nowadays you only have *nix or Windows for desktop OSes, you hardly see any other types. Does anyone with experience on the OS care to tell just how the system design and philosophy is different from *nix?
"We will put network neutrality in a lockbox for future generations, and use it to give our seniors a perscription drug discount plan. I will put all uses of the network to a 'global test', so that our alies will be with us, not against us when we immanetize the eschaton. We will make sure there is no controlling legal authority on the information superhighway of the future, depending on what the definiton of the word 'is' is. Keep hope alive!"
I read through that FAQ, and they don't actually address the issue of patenting at all. Saying that "the data will be made available" and "we will not sell" the results does not rule out patents. The patent system requires you to publish the data on the thing you want to patent, and it certainly does not require you to stop others from publishing the data.
They're probobly not going to go start charging money for it, but it's possible they would patent it just to keep in their portfolio or have as a "defensive patent".
Maybe it's because your nodes were scavanged by refugees to jerry-rig shelters. After all, everyone knows how sturdy cluster node cabins are...
Microsoft - FUCK YEAH!
.doc files
Here we come to save the Motherfuckin' World, yeah!
Microsoft - FUCK YEAH!
Freedom is the only way, yeah!
Linux Hackers your day is up, cause now you have to answer to
Microsoft - FUCK YEAH!
So lick my butt, and suck my balls
Microsoft - FUCK YEAH!
What are you going to do when they send you
It's the dream we all share, MS Office for tommorow
FUCK YEAH!!!
Vista, FUCK YEAH!
Clippy, FUCK YEAH!
X-Box, FUCK YEAH!
Explorer, FUCK YEAH!
Spyware, FUCK YEAH!
Bluescreen, FUCK, YEAH!
chkdsk, FUCK YEAH!
Safe Mode, FUCK YEAH!
FUCK YEAH!!!