... you could just go to the shop right next door. In three years in this country I've had, lets see, two and a half times where a denial of service actually influenced my course of action. Once I was clearly unwelcome in an establishment (still got to eat there, didn't go back though), once I got the same reaction but was let in because I was in a group of 25 Japanese people and they said they would take their $2000 drink bill elsewhere if I wasn't drinking with them, and once we knew ahead of time not to go to any of three popular clubs because only the fourth allowed foreigners on Saturdays.
Life is short and I have rather little desire to waste my limited amount of it complaining or acting against abberations that the market does a perfectly servicable job of sorting out. I'll pick my battles, like the one time a coworker got asked to translate a letter from a school to a Peruvian family saying "We're very sorry but, well, we don't serve your kind here. But don't worry, we're reasonable: here is a letter to get you out of trouble should your child be picked up for 'playing hookie' at the train station during the school day". (I should note that I'm a card-carrying Republican and am honestly ambivalent on whether a private business should be able to be racially discriminatory. If a hospital won't treat you because your skin color is wrong, thats more than worrisome but I've never heard of an issue with it. If a bar doesn't want to serve you drinks, well, it's the idiot's property, he can run it into the ground if he wants to. The market will sort it out. When the government starts doing it, thats when I think it is time to go all NAACP on the issue. I'm opposed to state schools not treating Koreans the same as everybody else, regardless of whether its Japanese or blacks/Hispanics who are benefitting from the discrimination. In Japan that makes me progressive, in America that makes me "a dittohead white-robe-wearing Nazi". Ahh, the fun little ironies of life.)
Japan, incidentally, doesn't hate you, any more than France hates you, any more than America hates you if you're Muslim, any more than Chicago hates you if you are a White Sox fan. There are, shockingly, many types of people here, the same as anywhere else. Many Japanese people have issues in dealing with foreigners, ranging from the trivial (they think all foreigners speak English or that all Americans own a gun) to the moderately serious. A small portion of Japanese people are serious bigots. And the majority of the population treats you like a person (Japan even has some America fanboys -- cowboy cosplay is some creepy stuff!;) ). The situation has improved markedly over the years -- its noticably better today than it was 5 years ago and I live in Japan's answer to rural Georgia. Plus with the shrinking birth rate and increasing immigration bringing folks closer together, I'm pretty confident that Japan is on the same trend of decreasing societal discrimination that America is.
... and folks are still talking about "Oh, any day now, its going to vanish". Yep, any day now, when Firefox completely reinvents the what makes people choose browsers like Apple reinvented what makes people choose MP3 players ("Price? Commodity hardware my sleek white plastic hiney! I think all you music lovers would sell your kidneys to be hip."). "The same as IE, except more secure" is not a good marketing pitch when after IE becomes *good enough* for most people.
"All our phone calls and Internet traffic are monitored" is just. not. true, and even if it were true there is a rather distinctive lack of getting shot in the back of the head for saying something against the government. I mean, if the American government "monitored" anti-Bush diatribes on Slashdot like China "monitors" discussions of Falun Gong we'd be down 20% of our user base before you could say "In Soviet Russia..."
Seriously, for $400 million or whatever it takes to send a single unmanned probe to Mars for a few weeks or months before the probe dies, we could either a) accomplish many somethings of genuine use back on Earth or b) learn a heck of a lot more about extreme environment microbes by studying the extreme environments that we have all freaking around us which can be studied *without* needing to put the experimental apparatus on a rocket first. Surely biologists would learn more from funding, oh, say a hundred trips to the bottom of the ocean/South African uranium mines/glacier ice/whatever than they do from another trip to what is, in all likelyhood, still just a big dead red rock.
Nothing to see here, please move along
on
An Ode To Al
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Seriously, there is nothing in that article worth reading for anyone with a passing aquaintance to Weird Al. Why don't you spend your time by going to iTunes or the record store and picking up his new CD (he has said he makes vastly more money from the CD sales, if that makes your decision easier). "White and Nerdy" is one of the funniest songs I have ever heard, and I've all but adopted it as my personal anthem.
I've posted below the DMCA's requirements. Note in particular that false statements constitute perjury under the DMCA. Realistically, they sent a list of infringing programs (names in English and romanized Japanese, dates of original broadcast, and rights holders), the URLs to any instances they found with language saying "And if you see anything else with that title, its probably ours too", and a signed/stamped* "Me, too!" letter from each participating rights holder. (*Traditionally in Japan contracts are executed with a personal seal or a seal representing the entity engaging in the contract. Signatures are also legally sufficient in the vast majority of cases, and when dealing with foreigners most people just sign stuff, but some folks and businesses stamp legal documents as a matter of course. Ironically the last time it happened at work it was an Italian who had read about it on the in-flight guide and was really hot to try -- we put in a rush order with a local carver when the person expressed his desire in the morning and had it ready for the "signing" ceremony after lunch.) --------- (Taken from the DMCA Faq located here: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID 130).
The name, address, and electronic signature of the complaining party [512(c)(3)(A)(i)]
The infringing materials and their Internet location [512(c)(3)(A)(ii-iii)], or if the service provider is an "information location tool" such as a search engine, the reference or link to the infringing materials [512(d)(3)].
Sufficient information to identify the copyrighted works [512(c)(3)(A)(iv)].
A statement by the owner that it has a good faith belief that there is no legal basis for the use of the materials complained of [512(c)(3)(A)(v)].
A statement of the accuracy of the notice and, under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on the behalf of the owner [512(c)(3)(A)(vi)].
(Slashdotters who already know this can feel free to ignore it. Everyone has to learn science sometime, if you had the good fortune to learn it years ago no reason to jump on someone who hasn't yet.)
Yes, uranium is naturally radioactive. Much of nature is naturally radioactive, including you, incidentally. There is a certain amount of what is called "background radiation" around you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there would still be even if no human had ever drawn a single breath. Uranium just happens to be quite a bit more radioactive than you are, owing to its nuclear structure.
Now, uranium like most metals doesn't come in handily available lumps in the natural world, but is found in ores: the ore is called pitchblend, in the case of uranium. Humans extract pitchblend (at a ratio of a few pounds of pitchblend to a lot of tons of boring old rock), extract the uranium, and then refine/enrich the uranium so that we get the exact isotopes of it we need for our nuclear power/weapons needs. (Isotopes are the same element, except with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus. Different isotopes of elements have vastly different radioactive properties. For example, the most common isotope of hydrogen isn't radioactive at all, and your body contains a heck of a lot of the stuff. The least common isotope of hydrogen, tritium, has two neutrons in it, and is used for making hydrogen bombs.)
So there are essentially three ways an atom can alter the configuration of its nucleus and release energy. Number one, it splits off into two atoms (fission). Number two, it fuses with another atom (fusion). Number three, it spits out something that was in its nucleus (radioactive decay -- there are a couple of types of this, producing radiation of various levels of danger -- alpha decay, for example, can be stopped with a piece of paper, gamma decay on the other hand will penetrate a meter of concrete). You can cause fission by manipulating radioactive decay in the right way, but it will happen really bloody slowly over time regardless -- uranium, for example, has a half life in the millions of years, which means that of a given sample it will take millions of years for one half of it to radiate and transform into whatever the next step is. Now, a bit of pitchblend just sitting on the counter isn't going to be useful for much of anything, although if you handle it for a few months or years you're at an elevated risk of getting cancer (and if you get radium, a radioactive gas, in your lungs, well, its less than good for you). So you can't, say, just chuck it in a specially designed miniature nuclear power plant and have it power your refrigerator. But a comparitively small amount of the concentrated, refined stuff (a few tens or hundreds of kilograms, as I recall), plus a nuclear plant designed to accelerate the fission faster than it occurs in nature, can literally power a city for years.
Nuclear power, even with the downside of producing harmful radiation (which is almost totally controllable, incidentally), is already very useful. Several countries and many, many communities are dependent on it to keep the lights running, the computers playing WoW, and air conditioners conditioning, the welders welding, and all those electricity-using things modern society depends on. If you're an environmentally concerned sort, you might also be happy to know that it generates extraordinarily little pollution compared to the refinement and combustion of fossil fuels.
This lesson in nuclear chemistry has been brought to you by the letter U and the number 235.
>> Back a second time eh? If I catch you reading it I'll have you crucified! Pilate.
I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down. Jesus, via Chumbawamba.
(P.S. Jokes aside, Pilate is generally depicted as having been rather reluctant to crucify Jesus, although he ends up succumbing to pressure from the crowd.)
China, yep, still a communist dictatorship. This is news for geeks in the same sense that "Today, Microsoft and Bank of America made a lot of money, and many dragons were slain in WoW... ON THE INTERNET" is.
There is another low-hanging fruit issue: you can never prevent all of the piracy for something and really, to have a measurable business effect, you don't have to. You just have to continue to make it more difficult for the vast majority of the world (i.e. doesn't read Slashdot, thinks AJAX is a brand of household cleaner, pirates things because its free, easy, and safe) to get to your content. And forcing casual users to have to understand arcane stuff about newsgroups, binaries, multi-part archives, and filename obfuscation raises the piracy bar a lot higher than "OK, Google this program called Azureus. They have a search box, you take it from there."
... many people won't. They'll be given the standard popup: critical security update, highly recommend you install, yadda yadda yadda: Install now, Don't Install, Ask Me Later. A heck of a lot of folks are going to hit the Install Now. I've already got my business website fixed for IE7 -- do you?
First, rather few people here are going to be interested. Second, Microsoft could Slashdot Slashdot with a link from its homepage and would notice it about as much as the Death Star noticed the cries of those freaky little mito-whatevers screaming out before they were silenced.
Speaking of evil empires, I'm installing IE as we speak;)
You're conflating Enron, an energy company, with..
on
Dot-Com Bubble v2.0?
·
· Score: 1
The dot-com collapse didn't destroy Anderson. Their consulting arm was spun off before the Enron fiasco in their accounting arm, just as a branding device I might add. This saved all of their jobs when a few bad apples from the auditing division decided to collaborate with Enron regarding hiding their numerous scams, which caused a total collapse of everybody still wearing the Arthur Andersen (note spelling, incidentally) label. This was despite them having over 10,000 partners (that is, partners as "we split the lion's share of the profits" partners, not partners like Starbucks or whoever has employees who they call partner as a PR gimmick) who had no connection to Enron whatsoever.
Nobody lost their retirement due to the tech bubble popping, unless they had manually speculated in the tech sector (and, within that, in the riskiest field of "Burn $2 million for Superbowl commercials" Internet stocks). So the retirement funds went down for a 2 year period. Oh no. It happens. As sure as the sun rises they'll go up again (and they did, and they are -- S&P 500 up about 28% versus five years ago and double what it was 10 years ago). You might remember a particular software company whose software isn't small, its Micro? Yep, they got battered in the bubble, too. They've more than tripled in value over the last 10 years, even accounting for the beating they took when the bubble popped.
How's about we focus a wee little more on the unsupervised contact of fist-to-cheek, which happens often enough in our schools as I'm sure some Slashdotters can attest, and a little less on the unsupervised contact of palm-to-shoulder? I remember plenty of days when I went home bruised and/or crying and exactly none of them were caused my tag (or dodgeball, for that matter). Somebody slip our litigation-adverse administrators a memo that the kid getting picked on has hired Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe.
I'd hate to get in the way of that radar if its moving 154 pound meteorites. My back of the envelope math suggests you could use it to microwave pizza leftovers the size of a small country. Like China.
We have determined that a portion of the MP3 Players distributed in August as part of a special promotion have been compromised by virii. This virus is capable of infecting a computer when the Player is connected. We strongly advise that customers not connect these players to their computers. We promise to promptly investigate what caused this to happen and do everything possible to minimize damage to our customers, and will keep you apprised of any changes.
1. Symptoms of Virus Infection
We have found Trojan horse viruses, worms, and spyware. As of the 12th [of October], we have received 7 reports from customers stating that "Notepad pops up with Chinese written in it", "A virus was detected", etc immediately upon connecting the MP3 player to the computer.
2. Customer Support
We have established the following to implement a swift recall of the infected promotional goods: 1) We are directly contacting customers who won the player via phone and email 2) We published information concerning the vulnerability on our website [link in Japanese: http://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/%5D 3) We released information concerning the vulnerability though our franchises 4) We have taken out several newspaper advertisements to advise the public about the vulnerability
2) This virus is capable of infecting a computer when the Player is connected. We strongly advise that customers not connect these players to their computers. We have prepared virus removal software for customers who have already exposed their computers. A link can be found on the McDonalds home page. [see above, in Japanese]
3) We are recalling all infected players immediately. They will be exchanged [for a non-infected player, presumably] as soon as arrangements can be made to do so.
[Snip of contact info]
3. How We Came To Be Compromised
These players were procured through Marketing Store, Co. [n.b. I'm unsure whether they are Inc., Co., LLC. or what have you] of Hong Kong. We are in the process of investigating how they came to be compromised. We apologize to our customers for this incident. [n.b. Think groveling apology, although not unusually so in this sort of context in Japan.] We will strengthen our internal quality control practices to ensure this sort of thing does not affect our customers again.
MP3 Campaign Summary Period: August 4th (Friday) through 31st (Thursday) (Prizes dispatched approximately September 29th, Friday) Prize item: MP3 player containing original music Prizes awarded: 10,000 Application method: L-sized [n.b. Large, although it sure doesn't feel like it when you're drinking one!] drinks purchased during the promotional period had serial numbers. Customers could input these on a special site designed for use by mobile phones. A portion of the serial numbers had been designated as winners.
I am not now, nor have I ever, been a Communist, but I guess I count as a subversive sympathizer under that definition. Just getting that out in the open. Anyhow, I'd be rather shocked to hear about a Knight of Columbus in Ireland unless he was an American expatriot (or tourist, naturally), as the organization was specifically founded to be an *American* Catholic lay organization. Its emphatically not like the Boy Scounts, which are American in America and British in Britain and what have you. (N.B. That the Knights of Columbus in the USA are a very patriotic organization, but when they talk about "America" in the historical sense they mean it in the sense of the American continents -- thats why they picked Columbus as their namesake, incidentally)
Anyhow, for those Americans reading this, there are probably Knights in a neighborhood close to you carrying out their subversive activities of operating soup kitchens, selling insurance (its a biggie -- long story), and escorting the flag on the Fourth of July. Oh, and giving $140 million to charity in 2005 alone. "Cumulative figures show that during the past decade, the Knights of Columbus has donated more than $1.208 billion to charity, and provided in excess of 574 million hours of volunteer service in support of charitable causes." (pulled from their website)
The Opus Dei, yep, also not the world-spanning Zionist-conspiracy-except-with-Catholics-instead-o f-Jews that you might think if you read too many bad Dan Brown novels. (Actually, "bad Dan Brown novels" is about one world longer than it needs to be. Remember, this is a guy whose novel about encryption had the NSA unable to defeat a cracker-jack decoder ring.)
Slashdot Mirror
She took my ring, said yes.
Onyxia was in Irvine, and pissed.
... you could just go to the shop right next door. In three years in this country I've had, lets see, two and a half times where a denial of service actually influenced my course of action. Once I was clearly unwelcome in an establishment (still got to eat there, didn't go back though), once I got the same reaction but was let in because I was in a group of 25 Japanese people and they said they would take their $2000 drink bill elsewhere if I wasn't drinking with them, and once we knew ahead of time not to go to any of three popular clubs because only the fourth allowed foreigners on Saturdays.
;) ). The situation has improved markedly over the years -- its noticably better today than it was 5 years ago and I live in Japan's answer to rural Georgia. Plus with the shrinking birth rate and increasing immigration bringing folks closer together, I'm pretty confident that Japan is on the same trend of decreasing societal discrimination that America is.
Life is short and I have rather little desire to waste my limited amount of it complaining or acting against abberations that the market does a perfectly servicable job of sorting out. I'll pick my battles, like the one time a coworker got asked to translate a letter from a school to a Peruvian family saying "We're very sorry but, well, we don't serve your kind here. But don't worry, we're reasonable: here is a letter to get you out of trouble should your child be picked up for 'playing hookie' at the train station during the school day". (I should note that I'm a card-carrying Republican and am honestly ambivalent on whether a private business should be able to be racially discriminatory. If a hospital won't treat you because your skin color is wrong, thats more than worrisome but I've never heard of an issue with it. If a bar doesn't want to serve you drinks, well, it's the idiot's property, he can run it into the ground if he wants to. The market will sort it out. When the government starts doing it, thats when I think it is time to go all NAACP on the issue. I'm opposed to state schools not treating Koreans the same as everybody else, regardless of whether its Japanese or blacks/Hispanics who are benefitting from the discrimination. In Japan that makes me progressive, in America that makes me "a dittohead white-robe-wearing Nazi". Ahh, the fun little ironies of life.)
Japan, incidentally, doesn't hate you, any more than France hates you, any more than America hates you if you're Muslim, any more than Chicago hates you if you are a White Sox fan. There are, shockingly, many types of people here, the same as anywhere else. Many Japanese people have issues in dealing with foreigners, ranging from the trivial (they think all foreigners speak English or that all Americans own a gun) to the moderately serious. A small portion of Japanese people are serious bigots. And the majority of the population treats you like a person (Japan even has some America fanboys -- cowboy cosplay is some creepy stuff!
... and folks are still talking about "Oh, any day now, its going to vanish". Yep, any day now, when Firefox completely reinvents the what makes people choose browsers like Apple reinvented what makes people choose MP3 players ("Price? Commodity hardware my sleek white plastic hiney! I think all you music lovers would sell your kidneys to be hip."). "The same as IE, except more secure" is not a good marketing pitch when after IE becomes *good enough* for most people.
"All our phone calls and Internet traffic are monitored" is just. not. true, and even if it were true there is a rather distinctive lack of getting shot in the back of the head for saying something against the government. I mean, if the American government "monitored" anti-Bush diatribes on Slashdot like China "monitors" discussions of Falun Gong we'd be down 20% of our user base before you could say "In Soviet Russia..."
Seriously, for $400 million or whatever it takes to send a single unmanned probe to Mars for a few weeks or months before the probe dies, we could either a) accomplish many somethings of genuine use back on Earth or b) learn a heck of a lot more about extreme environment microbes by studying the extreme environments that we have all freaking around us which can be studied *without* needing to put the experimental apparatus on a rocket first. Surely biologists would learn more from funding, oh, say a hundred trips to the bottom of the ocean/South African uranium mines/glacier ice/whatever than they do from another trip to what is, in all likelyhood, still just a big dead red rock.
Seriously, there is nothing in that article worth reading for anyone with a passing aquaintance to Weird Al. Why don't you spend your time by going to iTunes or the record store and picking up his new CD (he has said he makes vastly more money from the CD sales, if that makes your decision easier). "White and Nerdy" is one of the funniest songs I have ever heard, and I've all but adopted it as my personal anthem.
... there were STILL more actual women playing men playing men playing women, then there are women playing female night elves.
I've posted below the DMCA's requirements. Note in particular that false statements constitute perjury under the DMCA. Realistically, they sent a list of infringing programs (names in English and romanized Japanese, dates of original broadcast, and rights holders), the URLs to any instances they found with language saying "And if you see anything else with that title, its probably ours too", and a signed/stamped* "Me, too!" letter from each participating rights holder. (*Traditionally in Japan contracts are executed with a personal seal or a seal representing the entity engaging in the contract. Signatures are also legally sufficient in the vast majority of cases, and when dealing with foreigners most people just sign stuff, but some folks and businesses stamp legal documents as a matter of course. Ironically the last time it happened at work it was an Italian who had read about it on the in-flight guide and was really hot to try -- we put in a rush order with a local carver when the person expressed his desire in the morning and had it ready for the "signing" ceremony after lunch.)D 130).
---------
(Taken from the DMCA Faq located here: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QI
The name, address, and electronic signature of the complaining party [512(c)(3)(A)(i)]
The infringing materials and their Internet location [512(c)(3)(A)(ii-iii)], or if the service provider is an "information location tool" such as a search engine, the reference or link to the infringing materials [512(d)(3)].
Sufficient information to identify the copyrighted works [512(c)(3)(A)(iv)].
A statement by the owner that it has a good faith belief that there is no legal basis for the use of the materials complained of [512(c)(3)(A)(v)].
A statement of the accuracy of the notice and, under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on the behalf of the owner [512(c)(3)(A)(vi)].
You're right, I goofed.
(Slashdotters who already know this can feel free to ignore it. Everyone has to learn science sometime, if you had the good fortune to learn it years ago no reason to jump on someone who hasn't yet.)
Yes, uranium is naturally radioactive. Much of nature is naturally radioactive, including you, incidentally. There is a certain amount of what is called "background radiation" around you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there would still be even if no human had ever drawn a single breath. Uranium just happens to be quite a bit more radioactive than you are, owing to its nuclear structure.
Now, uranium like most metals doesn't come in handily available lumps in the natural world, but is found in ores: the ore is called pitchblend, in the case of uranium. Humans extract pitchblend (at a ratio of a few pounds of pitchblend to a lot of tons of boring old rock), extract the uranium, and then refine/enrich the uranium so that we get the exact isotopes of it we need for our nuclear power/weapons needs. (Isotopes are the same element, except with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus. Different isotopes of elements have vastly different radioactive properties. For example, the most common isotope of hydrogen isn't radioactive at all, and your body contains a heck of a lot of the stuff. The least common isotope of hydrogen, tritium, has two neutrons in it, and is used for making hydrogen bombs.)
So there are essentially three ways an atom can alter the configuration of its nucleus and release energy. Number one, it splits off into two atoms (fission). Number two, it fuses with another atom (fusion). Number three, it spits out something that was in its nucleus (radioactive decay -- there are a couple of types of this, producing radiation of various levels of danger -- alpha decay, for example, can be stopped with a piece of paper, gamma decay on the other hand will penetrate a meter of concrete). You can cause fission by manipulating radioactive decay in the right way, but it will happen really bloody slowly over time regardless -- uranium, for example, has a half life in the millions of years, which means that of a given sample it will take millions of years for one half of it to radiate and transform into whatever the next step is. Now, a bit of pitchblend just sitting on the counter isn't going to be useful for much of anything, although if you handle it for a few months or years you're at an elevated risk of getting cancer (and if you get radium, a radioactive gas, in your lungs, well, its less than good for you). So you can't, say, just chuck it in a specially designed miniature nuclear power plant and have it power your refrigerator. But a comparitively small amount of the concentrated, refined stuff (a few tens or hundreds of kilograms, as I recall), plus a nuclear plant designed to accelerate the fission faster than it occurs in nature, can literally power a city for years.
Nuclear power, even with the downside of producing harmful radiation (which is almost totally controllable, incidentally), is already very useful. Several countries and many, many communities are dependent on it to keep the lights running, the computers playing WoW, and air conditioners conditioning, the welders welding, and all those electricity-using things modern society depends on. If you're an environmentally concerned sort, you might also be happy to know that it generates extraordinarily little pollution compared to the refinement and combustion of fossil fuels.
This lesson in nuclear chemistry has been brought to you by the letter U and the number 235.
>> Back a second time eh? If I catch you reading it I'll have you crucified! Pilate.
I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down. Jesus, via Chumbawamba.
(P.S. Jokes aside, Pilate is generally depicted as having been rather reluctant to crucify Jesus, although he ends up succumbing to pressure from the crowd.)
*sigh* And I sincerely wanted to move to IE7 from Firefox just to be contrarian.
China, yep, still a communist dictatorship. This is news for geeks in the same sense that "Today, Microsoft and Bank of America made a lot of money, and many dragons were slain in WoW... ON THE INTERNET" is.
There is another low-hanging fruit issue: you can never prevent all of the piracy for something and really, to have a measurable business effect, you don't have to. You just have to continue to make it more difficult for the vast majority of the world (i.e. doesn't read Slashdot, thinks AJAX is a brand of household cleaner, pirates things because its free, easy, and safe) to get to your content. And forcing casual users to have to understand arcane stuff about newsgroups, binaries, multi-part archives, and filename obfuscation raises the piracy bar a lot higher than "OK, Google this program called Azureus. They have a search box, you take it from there."
... many people won't. They'll be given the standard popup: critical security update, highly recommend you install, yadda yadda yadda: Install now, Don't Install, Ask Me Later. A heck of a lot of folks are going to hit the Install Now. I've already got my business website fixed for IE7 -- do you?
"Yay, finally half of my incoming support calls will vanish without me needing to make a housecall to install Firefox first."
First, rather few people here are going to be interested. Second, Microsoft could Slashdot Slashdot with a link from its homepage and would notice it about as much as the Death Star noticed the cries of those freaky little mito-whatevers screaming out before they were silenced.
;)
Speaking of evil empires, I'm installing IE as we speak
... the chorus would be "Humanity. "#$% yeah."
The dot-com collapse didn't destroy Anderson. Their consulting arm was spun off before the Enron fiasco in their accounting arm, just as a branding device I might add. This saved all of their jobs when a few bad apples from the auditing division decided to collaborate with Enron regarding hiding their numerous scams, which caused a total collapse of everybody still wearing the Arthur Andersen (note spelling, incidentally) label. This was despite them having over 10,000 partners (that is, partners as "we split the lion's share of the profits" partners, not partners like Starbucks or whoever has employees who they call partner as a PR gimmick) who had no connection to Enron whatsoever.
Nobody lost their retirement due to the tech bubble popping, unless they had manually speculated in the tech sector (and, within that, in the riskiest field of "Burn $2 million for Superbowl commercials" Internet stocks). So the retirement funds went down for a 2 year period. Oh no. It happens. As sure as the sun rises they'll go up again (and they did, and they are -- S&P 500 up about 28% versus five years ago and double what it was 10 years ago). You might remember a particular software company whose software isn't small, its Micro? Yep, they got battered in the bubble, too. They've more than tripled in value over the last 10 years, even accounting for the beating they took when the bubble popped.
How's about we focus a wee little more on the unsupervised contact of fist-to-cheek, which happens often enough in our schools as I'm sure some Slashdotters can attest, and a little less on the unsupervised contact of palm-to-shoulder? I remember plenty of days when I went home bruised and/or crying and exactly none of them were caused my tag (or dodgeball, for that matter). Somebody slip our litigation-adverse administrators a memo that the kid getting picked on has hired Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe.
I'd hate to get in the way of that radar if its moving 154 pound meteorites. My back of the envelope math suggests you could use it to microwave pizza leftovers the size of a small country. Like China.
Beanie Babies with my next Babelfish translation?! Sweet! "Stopping the work of the translator, you will gather the lovely doll!" (Oh will I ever!)
We have determined that a portion of the MP3 Players distributed in August as part of a special promotion have been compromised by virii. This virus is capable of infecting a computer when the Player is connected. We strongly advise that customers not connect these players to their computers. We promise to promptly investigate what caused this to happen and do everything possible to minimize damage to our customers, and will keep you apprised of any changes.
1. Symptoms of Virus Infection
We have found Trojan horse viruses, worms, and spyware. As of the 12th [of October], we have received 7 reports from customers stating that "Notepad pops up with Chinese written in it", "A virus was detected", etc immediately upon connecting the MP3 player to the computer.
2. Customer Support
We have established the following to implement a swift recall of the infected promotional goods:
1) We are directly contacting customers who won the player via phone and email
2) We published information concerning the vulnerability on our website [link in Japanese: http://www.mcdonalds.co.jp/%5D
3) We released information concerning the vulnerability though our franchises
4) We have taken out several newspaper advertisements to advise the public about the vulnerability
2) This virus is capable of infecting a computer when the Player is connected. We strongly advise that customers not connect these players to their computers. We have prepared virus removal software for customers who have already exposed their computers. A link can be found on the McDonalds home page. [see above, in Japanese]
3) We are recalling all infected players immediately. They will be exchanged [for a non-infected player, presumably] as soon as arrangements can be made to do so.
[Snip of contact info]
3. How We Came To Be Compromised
These players were procured through Marketing Store, Co. [n.b. I'm unsure whether they are Inc., Co., LLC. or what have you] of Hong Kong. We are in the process of investigating how they came to be compromised. We apologize to our customers for this incident. [n.b. Think groveling apology, although not unusually so in this sort of context in Japan.] We will strengthen our internal quality control practices to ensure this sort of thing does not affect our customers again.
MP3 Campaign Summary
Period: August 4th (Friday) through 31st (Thursday) (Prizes dispatched approximately September 29th, Friday)
Prize item: MP3 player containing original music
Prizes awarded: 10,000
Application method: L-sized [n.b. Large, although it sure doesn't feel like it when you're drinking one!] drinks purchased during the promotional period had serial numbers. Customers could input these on a special site designed for use by mobile phones. A portion of the serial numbers had been designated as winners.
I am not now, nor have I ever, been a Communist, but I guess I count as a subversive sympathizer under that definition. Just getting that out in the open. Anyhow, I'd be rather shocked to hear about a Knight of Columbus in Ireland unless he was an American expatriot (or tourist, naturally), as the organization was specifically founded to be an *American* Catholic lay organization. Its emphatically not like the Boy Scounts, which are American in America and British in Britain and what have you. (N.B. That the Knights of Columbus in the USA are a very patriotic organization, but when they talk about "America" in the historical sense they mean it in the sense of the American continents -- thats why they picked Columbus as their namesake, incidentally)
o f-Jews that you might think if you read too many bad Dan Brown novels. (Actually, "bad Dan Brown novels" is about one world longer than it needs to be. Remember, this is a guy whose novel about encryption had the NSA unable to defeat a cracker-jack decoder ring.)
Anyhow, for those Americans reading this, there are probably Knights in a neighborhood close to you carrying out their subversive activities of operating soup kitchens, selling insurance (its a biggie -- long story), and escorting the flag on the Fourth of July. Oh, and giving $140 million to charity in 2005 alone. "Cumulative figures show that during the past decade, the Knights of Columbus has donated more than $1.208 billion to charity, and provided in excess of 574 million hours of volunteer service in support of charitable causes." (pulled from their website)
The Opus Dei, yep, also not the world-spanning Zionist-conspiracy-except-with-Catholics-instead-