The creationists are doing their best to do to the word "Darwin" what the right-wingers successfully did to the term "liberal" in America: turn it into nothing but an off-the-cuff epithet for their bovine followers.
Of course, by doing this the word loses pretty much any real meaning to anyone else, but that's beside the point (or maybe that IS the point).
Maybe those farmers should consider NOT growing Franken-crops from Monsanto, then, if it's no longer economically advantageous to do so (to say nothing of any of the other negative impacts of those crops). Maybe they should go back to more "old fashioned" methods where they can, you know, actually keep/trade seed they've grown which they can use to plant next year's crop for free, instead of being bent over the barrel by greedy corporations every single year. Free seed, more biodiversity, less profit for scumbags like Monsanto... ahh, who am I kidding? It's a pipe dream.
Sigh, I can't even tell anymore with you darn kids whether you're being sarcastic or if you're all just lousy spellers. I'd tend to think that was just a simple misspelling, but you actually took the time to put it in bold face. I'm apparently getting too old and crotchety for the Internets.
meme
n: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.
Where's the issue? Even using your definition, the spreading of information--correct or otherwise--falls into this category. Think of a "generation" in this sense as each link in the chain of [mis]information.
Unless, by some amazing turn of events, there are two different persons named Matthew Kennelly who both happen to be District Judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois -- which is the listed job title for both names, incidentally -- then the discrepancy in the middle initial can be ignored.
It's so sad to see your post marked as "flamebait" when it's easily the most insightful piece of writing I've seen on Slashdot in a long, long time. But people don't like it when their (and their culture's) gross hypocrisy is pointed out, and you, sir, hit the nail on the head... hard. Sadly, mere words--no matter how insightful--won't make a whit of difference to a people who are obviously enraptured with and blinded by their own egos.
I'd give you a +1 insightful if I hadn't squandered my mod points last night.
You're clearly not keeping up with p2p technology. Bitcomet has had the option to encrypt headers for quite some time now, and Azureus has added that feature (in beta).
For example, from the Azureus wiki:
The following encapsulation protocol is designed to provide a completely random-looking header and (optionally) payload to avoid passive protocol identification and traffic shaping. When it is used with the stronger encryption mode (RC4) it also provides reasonable security for the encapsulated content against passive eavesdroppers.
"what incentive do I have to donate my bandwidth to them on top of the amount that I have paid in cash (or the cash that they have collected from advertisers in exchange for access to my eyeballs or my desktop or whatever)."
Absolutely none whatsoever, which is why this is such a ridiculous business model on the surface.
The only way that I can see this being a viable practice would be if people were to have accounts registered with the trackers (much like current private BT sites), and were given discounts on future purchases or other rewards based on how well they shared previous purchases. In that case, those companies providing the trackers had better darn well be able to implement some _really_ good cheat detection measures -- and DHT or other forms of client-side peer sharing would just be an absolute nightmare for them.
I just don't see it working, but then again I sometimes tend to see a world full of half-empty glasses.
"the idea of raising arms against the government is lunacy."
You've got that right. That's the problem with that old NRA argument -- the time when a bunch of citizens could have banded together and actually revolted against the US government is so long past as to be quite laughable. No matter how good your justifications, doing that now will just get you declared a terrorist, with half the citizens in the country howling for your blood and several branches of law enforcement shooting to kill.
Ahh, for the good old days when a few bullets could make a difference and votes actually counted (if you were a white male, that is).
Don't mind me, I'm extremely bitter and jaded but relatively harmless. Really.
They pay that much because they ask for "basic voice service" and then take the first offer the sales representative gives them. I learned long ago that you have to repeatedly ask about 5 or 6 times, stripping out bits of unnecessary garbage each time, before you actually get offered the true "basic" phone service (i.e. a dial tone).
It goes like this:
>Hello, this is SBC, how can I help you?
Umm.. Hello, I want to order basic phone service. I want a dial tone and NOTHING else. No caller ID, nothing but a dial tone. OK?
>OK, sir. We can do that for $35+ a month.
OK, and what's included in that besides the dial tone, which is all I'm asking for?
>Well, sir, that includes caller ID, call tracing, call---
Excuse me, but I told you I don't want any of that extra stuff. Please get rid of the extra stuff. I just want a dial tone. Nothing else but a dial tone, OK?
>OK, sir. That brings your monthly price down to $27.95.
Ummm.... OK, and what services does _that_ include besides just the basic dial tone I am asking you for?
>Well, sir, that includes... blah blah blah.
[rinse and repeat multiple times until you get them down to around $12]
Extremely infuriating, and a very sleazy business practice. SBC is one of the absolute worst companies I've ever had to deal with in terms of trying to sell you crap you don't want. Satellite TV, DSL, wireless, whatever... they _will_ do the hard sell on you and try to get you to purchase every single product that they offer every single time you have to talk to them.
Stoggs!! I obviously meant to say empower, not "empopwer". My sincerest apologies -- for all I know, "empopwer" is the most foul curse known to mankind.
What cracks me up is how upset certain people get over "strong" curses vs. the "weak" ones when the actual meaning and intent behind the phrases is _precisely_ the same. The obscenity strictures placed on the media are equally ridiculous to my way of thinking.
I mean, "shit" and "defacate" have pretty much the same meaning -- the ONLY real difference is in the perception of the listener. So why is it acceptable to say "I need to go defacate" and not acceptable to say "I need to take a shit"? What about "I have to go snoodle"? Is that acceptable, assuming the listener knows what you're saying? Or what about "I really need to take a giant, stinky fnarg"? Would that net you a trip to the principal's office?
Here's an example: I use the word "stoggs" quite frequently in place of the word "shit". Don't ask why, I just like making up my own words. I guarantee you that when I'm pissed off, I can utter "Stoggs!" with such anger or ferocity that it would make someone else's routine utterance of "shit" or "fuck" sound positively mild by comparison. But I probably wouldn't get sent to the principal's office for it, if I were still in school, and they almost certainly would. That's just absurd. A word is a word is a word, as far as I'm concerned -- it's entirely up to the listener to empopwer those words (or not).
These arbitrary, nonsensical distinctions that our society makes never cease to amuse and confound me. Things like that (and the other invisible hypocrisies that bind our societies) are a large part of why so many people are batshit, barking-at-the-moon crazy, if you ask me.
Oh, it's not uncommon at all, AFAIK. Growing up in Louisiana I had much the same experience, except that I went to a semi-private elementary/middle school, and they had nice bathrooms with locking doors on the stalls. People could be trusted there, apparently.
Completely different story in high school, though. There was not a single door in any of the male student bathrooms in the entire school -- the females had privacy, though. When they built a new wing on the school during my senior year, there were actually doors in the male bathrooms for about a month before they were removed.
The rationale behind this (I asked once) was that people could do drugs or have sex behind closed stall doors. Why that only applied to the male bathrooms and not the female ones, I couldn't say (well... I could, but I'd sound bitter and jaded).
"these people are guilty" "To assume that the accusations are false is to deny reality" "Someone has to be guilty."
You are _such_ a jackass. I hope, if I ever have to go to court, that I don't end up with an illiterate (you apparently can't even RTFA), prejudicial moron such as yourself in the jury box.
This is America, though, so it's practically a foregone conclusion that I would, sadly enough. The minds of most citizens here have been every bit as poisoned by corporate-sponsored propaganda as has yours, and the average citizen's capacity for reason is equally diminished.
The site works like a champ on my Mozilla (bangbang023). The game is a Java app and requires Sun's JRE 1.4 or later, so perhaps that's what's causing the problem for you.
That's right; WMP contains a search-and-destroy component that disables unapproved AV apps
Kinda reminds me of back in the day, when I was a lowly tech-support person at a small, "national" ISP (we used UUnet's POPs)...
We used to routinely--and by routinely, I mean that they constituted at least 75% of our calls--get a lot of people calling in with the same problem: they could dial into AOL just fine, but their computer couldn't successfully negotiate a connection with our (UUnet's) modems. It would just break down during the handshaking process and give one of several predictable errors.
Well, it turns out that whatever AOL was using in their specialized dial-up adapter broke the standard windows dial-up adapter. As soon as you nuked and reloaded the standard MS-provided Dial-Up Adapter from the Windows CD (a process I could still do in my sleep to this day, I've done it so many hundreds of times), those people could connect to our (UUnet's) POPs just fine. But guess what: if those people EVER dialed back into AOL--even if they just attempted to dial and then aborted the process--it would immediately re-break the standard MS-provided dial-up adapter and they'd soon be back on the phone with our tech support people.
Now fast forward to today, and who owns Netscape? Oh, that's right... it's AOL, so I guess this is just a more modern interpretation of their same old slimy tactics. What scumbags and/or incompetents they are.
He's a Mormon, not a Christian. And his writing--the fantasy stuff, at least, I don't remember any of the SF stuff that well--is quite often _deeply_ impregnated with Mormon beliefs and symbolism.
This shows tha[t] the republicans have the goal of making it so they are the only party in america.
Why else would they be so eager to get rid of filibusters? They wouldn't effecively neutralize such a huge weapon like that--one which would definitely benefit them if the political fortunes become reversed anytime in the future--unless they are feeling like they wouldn't ever need to use such a weapon.
Unfortunately for Americans, the corrupt right-wing strategists are playing their game decades ahead of their counterparts on the other side. Sad to say, but it's a bit like Garry Kasparov challenging a developmentally-disabled kindergartener to a game of chess. It's ugly, unfair, and sickening, and it's time for the opposition to wake up and do something about it.
Well, not really. Both Everquest and Everquest2 are already in deep, DEEP trouble due primarily to Sony's shortsightedness and greed. This will definitely hasten the death of EQ2 a little bit, methinks, but Sony pretty much shot themselves in the foot a long time ago with their horrible "vision" of a wretchedly buggy expansion of questionable worth being pumped-out every 4 to 6 months. Or their new "vision" in EQ2 of downloadable mini-expansions being pushed out every other month or whatever they have in mind.
I played EQ back in the "old days" (before Sony bought it out and completely ruined it) when an expansion of the game's world was HUGE news -- I think it was around 12-18 months after EQ came out before the first expansion was ever released. Back then, content was limited to the point where people got to know every square inch of their world--both the obvious stuff and the subtleties--so the rare occurrances of the world being massively expanded with new territory and new adventures were extremely exciting at the time.
What's of critical importance here is that new people could still get into the game at that point (and any MMO game is dead in the water without constant infusions of fresh blood) without having to purchase $300 worth (and counting!) of useless expansions and downloading patches for 36 hours straight as is the case now. What's the incentive for Joe Newbie to walk into CompUSA or EB and pick up a copy of EQ or EQ2 and get involved in an established MMO game under those horrid circumstances?
With the way they (Sony) are carelessly churning out their content now, it takes the casual gamer completely out of the loop and they're basically strangling their own market as more and more people realize the pointlessness and futility of trying to keep up with their virtual world. Unless you're in the uber-est of uber guilds, then by the time you've progressed halfway through the last shoddy expansion, they're already busy cramming the next one down your throat. No thanks.
Looks like the first part of that page got truncated and hosed the standard HTML structure; could be why it's not working correctly w/ Firefox's "open in a new tab" feature (same problem's showing up on my Firefox).
Seems to me that what TFA is suggesting is that organizations can use this to gain part-time Beowulf capabilities on machines that could be running Windoze or whatever during normal office hours -- they wouldn't just be giving the processing time away to some random project over the Internet (although that could easily be done too), but using it for in-house projects where an outside connection probably wouldn't even be needed in most cases.
I realize the "Is there a god?" post was a joke, but I searched it on Google anyway just for a hoot, and I noticed something interesting...
If you search for "Is there a god?", Google informs you that it left the words "is" and "a" out of the search since they're so common. What's odd is that, if you just search for "there god?" (leaving out "is" and "a" like the search supposedly does), you get an _entirely_ different set of results.
What gives? It's obvious that Google actually IS processing those very common words and returning search results based on them despite claiming otherwise (since the exact phrases showed up in the respective searches, common words and all), but why would they go to the trouble of claiming that they're omitting search terms when they really aren't?
Maybe I'm just slow for not noticing this years ago, but I still find it intriguing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Duke Nukem, who at best was two dimensional."
I think you're forgetting about this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D
+1 Insightful
The creationists are doing their best to do to the word "Darwin" what the right-wingers successfully did to the term "liberal" in America: turn it into nothing but an off-the-cuff epithet for their bovine followers.
Of course, by doing this the word loses pretty much any real meaning to anyone else, but that's beside the point (or maybe that IS the point).
Maybe those farmers should consider NOT growing Franken-crops from Monsanto, then, if it's no longer economically advantageous to do so (to say nothing of any of the other negative impacts of those crops). Maybe they should go back to more "old fashioned" methods where they can, you know, actually keep/trade seed they've grown which they can use to plant next year's crop for free, instead of being bent over the barrel by greedy corporations every single year. Free seed, more biodiversity, less profit for scumbags like Monsanto... ahh, who am I kidding? It's a pipe dream.
"...technoliteri (I LOVE that word!)"
Sigh, I can't even tell anymore with you darn kids whether you're being sarcastic or if you're all just lousy spellers. I'd tend to think that was just a simple misspelling, but you actually took the time to put it in bold face. I'm apparently getting too old and crotchety for the Internets.
meme n: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.
Where's the issue? Even using your definition, the spreading of information--correct or otherwise--falls into this category. Think of a "generation" in this sense as each link in the chain of [mis]information.
Unless, by some amazing turn of events, there are two different persons named Matthew Kennelly who both happen to be District Judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois -- which is the listed job title for both names, incidentally -- then the discrepancy in the middle initial can be ignored.
In other words: it's the same guy.
It's so sad to see your post marked as "flamebait" when it's easily the most insightful piece of writing I've seen on Slashdot in a long, long time. But people don't like it when their (and their culture's) gross hypocrisy is pointed out, and you, sir, hit the nail on the head... hard. Sadly, mere words--no matter how insightful--won't make a whit of difference to a people who are obviously enraptured with and blinded by their own egos.
I'd give you a +1 insightful if I hadn't squandered my mod points last night.
For example, from the Azureus wiki:
The following encapsulation protocol is designed to provide a completely random-looking header and (optionally) payload to avoid passive protocol identification and traffic shaping. When it is used with the stronger encryption mode (RC4) it also provides reasonable security for the encapsulated content against passive eavesdroppers.
That's good stuff. Short, sweet, and it made me giggle... if only I hadn't wasted my mod points.
Haven't those guys ever heard of the SlugBot? Why would they waste money feeding their robots pizza and Chinese food when slugs are free? *boggle*
"what incentive do I have to donate my bandwidth to them on top of the amount that I have paid in cash (or the cash that they have collected from advertisers in exchange for access to my eyeballs or my desktop or whatever)."
Absolutely none whatsoever, which is why this is such a ridiculous business model on the surface.
The only way that I can see this being a viable practice would be if people were to have accounts registered with the trackers (much like current private BT sites), and were given discounts on future purchases or other rewards based on how well they shared previous purchases. In that case, those companies providing the trackers had better darn well be able to implement some _really_ good cheat detection measures -- and DHT or other forms of client-side peer sharing would just be an absolute nightmare for them.
I just don't see it working, but then again I sometimes tend to see a world full of half-empty glasses.
"the idea of raising arms against the government is lunacy."
You've got that right. That's the problem with that old NRA argument -- the time when a bunch of citizens could have banded together and actually revolted against the US government is so long past as to be quite laughable. No matter how good your justifications, doing that now will just get you declared a terrorist, with half the citizens in the country howling for your blood and several branches of law enforcement shooting to kill.
Ahh, for the good old days when a few bullets could make a difference and votes actually counted (if you were a white male, that is).
Don't mind me, I'm extremely bitter and jaded but relatively harmless. Really.
They pay that much because they ask for "basic voice service" and then take the first offer the sales representative gives them. I learned long ago that you have to repeatedly ask about 5 or 6 times, stripping out bits of unnecessary garbage each time, before you actually get offered the true "basic" phone service (i.e. a dial tone).
It goes like this:
>Hello, this is SBC, how can I help you?
Umm.. Hello, I want to order basic phone service. I want a dial tone and NOTHING else. No caller ID, nothing but a dial tone. OK?
>OK, sir. We can do that for $35+ a month.
OK, and what's included in that besides the dial tone, which is all I'm asking for?
>Well, sir, that includes caller ID, call tracing, call---
Excuse me, but I told you I don't want any of that extra stuff. Please get rid of the extra stuff. I just want a dial tone. Nothing else but a dial tone, OK?
>OK, sir. That brings your monthly price down to $27.95.
Ummm.... OK, and what services does _that_ include besides just the basic dial tone I am asking you for?
>Well, sir, that includes... blah blah blah.
[rinse and repeat multiple times until you get them down to around $12]
Extremely infuriating, and a very sleazy business practice. SBC is one of the absolute worst companies I've ever had to deal with in terms of trying to sell you crap you don't want. Satellite TV, DSL, wireless, whatever... they _will_ do the hard sell on you and try to get you to purchase every single product that they offer every single time you have to talk to them.
Stoggs!! I obviously meant to say empower, not "empopwer". My sincerest apologies -- for all I know, "empopwer" is the most foul curse known to mankind.
What cracks me up is how upset certain people get over "strong" curses vs. the "weak" ones when the actual meaning and intent behind the phrases is _precisely_ the same. The obscenity strictures placed on the media are equally ridiculous to my way of thinking.
I mean, "shit" and "defacate" have pretty much the same meaning -- the ONLY real difference is in the perception of the listener. So why is it acceptable to say "I need to go defacate" and not acceptable to say "I need to take a shit"? What about "I have to go snoodle"? Is that acceptable, assuming the listener knows what you're saying? Or what about "I really need to take a giant, stinky fnarg"? Would that net you a trip to the principal's office?
Here's an example: I use the word "stoggs" quite frequently in place of the word "shit". Don't ask why, I just like making up my own words. I guarantee you that when I'm pissed off, I can utter "Stoggs!" with such anger or ferocity that it would make someone else's routine utterance of "shit" or "fuck" sound positively mild by comparison. But I probably wouldn't get sent to the principal's office for it, if I were still in school, and they almost certainly would. That's just absurd. A word is a word is a word, as far as I'm concerned -- it's entirely up to the listener to empopwer those words (or not).
These arbitrary, nonsensical distinctions that our society makes never cease to amuse and confound me. Things like that (and the other invisible hypocrisies that bind our societies) are a large part of why so many people are batshit, barking-at-the-moon crazy, if you ask me.
Oh, it's not uncommon at all, AFAIK. Growing up in Louisiana I had much the same experience, except that I went to a semi-private elementary/middle school, and they had nice bathrooms with locking doors on the stalls. People could be trusted there, apparently.
Completely different story in high school, though. There was not a single door in any of the male student bathrooms in the entire school -- the females had privacy, though. When they built a new wing on the school during my senior year, there were actually doors in the male bathrooms for about a month before they were removed.
The rationale behind this (I asked once) was that people could do drugs or have sex behind closed stall doors. Why that only applied to the male bathrooms and not the female ones, I couldn't say (well... I could, but I'd sound bitter and jaded).
"these people are guilty"
"To assume that the accusations are false is to deny reality"
"Someone has to be guilty."
You are _such_ a jackass. I hope, if I ever have to go to court, that I don't end up with an illiterate (you apparently can't even RTFA), prejudicial moron such as yourself in the jury box.
This is America, though, so it's practically a foregone conclusion that I would, sadly enough. The minds of most citizens here have been every bit as poisoned by corporate-sponsored propaganda as has yours, and the average citizen's capacity for reason is equally diminished.
The site works like a champ on my Mozilla (bangbang023). The game is a Java app and requires Sun's JRE 1.4 or later, so perhaps that's what's causing the problem for you.
Kinda reminds me of back in the day, when I was a lowly tech-support person at a small, "national" ISP (we used UUnet's POPs)...
We used to routinely--and by routinely, I mean that they constituted at least 75% of our calls--get a lot of people calling in with the same problem: they could dial into AOL just fine, but their computer couldn't successfully negotiate a connection with our (UUnet's) modems. It would just break down during the handshaking process and give one of several predictable errors.
Well, it turns out that whatever AOL was using in their specialized dial-up adapter broke the standard windows dial-up adapter. As soon as you nuked and reloaded the standard MS-provided Dial-Up Adapter from the Windows CD (a process I could still do in my sleep to this day, I've done it so many hundreds of times), those people could connect to our (UUnet's) POPs just fine. But guess what: if those people EVER dialed back into AOL--even if they just attempted to dial and then aborted the process--it would immediately re-break the standard MS-provided dial-up adapter and they'd soon be back on the phone with our tech support people.
Now fast forward to today, and who owns Netscape? Oh, that's right... it's AOL, so I guess this is just a more modern interpretation of their same old slimy tactics. What scumbags and/or incompetents they are.
He's a Mormon, not a Christian. And his writing--the fantasy stuff, at least, I don't remember any of the SF stuff that well--is quite often _deeply_ impregnated with Mormon beliefs and symbolism.
Why else would they be so eager to get rid of filibusters? They wouldn't effecively neutralize such a huge weapon like that--one which would definitely benefit them if the political fortunes become reversed anytime in the future--unless they are feeling like they wouldn't ever need to use such a weapon.
Unfortunately for Americans, the corrupt right-wing strategists are playing their game decades ahead of their counterparts on the other side. Sad to say, but it's a bit like Garry Kasparov challenging a developmentally-disabled kindergartener to a game of chess. It's ugly, unfair, and sickening, and it's time for the opposition to wake up and do something about it.
"This will destroy Everquest"
Well, not really. Both Everquest and Everquest2 are already in deep, DEEP trouble due primarily to Sony's shortsightedness and greed. This will definitely hasten the death of EQ2 a little bit, methinks, but Sony pretty much shot themselves in the foot a long time ago with their horrible "vision" of a wretchedly buggy expansion of questionable worth being pumped-out every 4 to 6 months. Or their new "vision" in EQ2 of downloadable mini-expansions being pushed out every other month or whatever they have in mind.
I played EQ back in the "old days" (before Sony bought it out and completely ruined it) when an expansion of the game's world was HUGE news -- I think it was around 12-18 months after EQ came out before the first expansion was ever released. Back then, content was limited to the point where people got to know every square inch of their world--both the obvious stuff and the subtleties--so the rare occurrances of the world being massively expanded with new territory and new adventures were extremely exciting at the time.
What's of critical importance here is that new people could still get into the game at that point (and any MMO game is dead in the water without constant infusions of fresh blood) without having to purchase $300 worth (and counting!) of useless expansions and downloading patches for 36 hours straight as is the case now. What's the incentive for Joe Newbie to walk into CompUSA or EB and pick up a copy of EQ or EQ2 and get involved in an established MMO game under those horrid circumstances?
With the way they (Sony) are carelessly churning out their content now, it takes the casual gamer completely out of the loop and they're basically strangling their own market as more and more people realize the pointlessness and futility of trying to keep up with their virtual world. Unless you're in the uber-est of uber guilds, then by the time you've progressed halfway through the last shoddy expansion, they're already busy cramming the next one down your throat. No thanks.
Looks like the first part of that page got truncated and hosed the standard HTML structure; could be why it's not working correctly w/ Firefox's "open in a new tab" feature (same problem's showing up on my Firefox).
Seems to me that what TFA is suggesting is that organizations can use this to gain part-time Beowulf capabilities on machines that could be running Windoze or whatever during normal office hours -- they wouldn't just be giving the processing time away to some random project over the Internet (although that could easily be done too), but using it for in-house projects where an outside connection probably wouldn't even be needed in most cases.
I realize the "Is there a god?" post was a joke, but I searched it on Google anyway just for a hoot, and I noticed something interesting...
If you search for "Is there a god?", Google informs you that it left the words "is" and "a" out of the search since they're so common. What's odd is that, if you just search for "there god?" (leaving out "is" and "a" like the search supposedly does), you get an _entirely_ different set of results.
What gives? It's obvious that Google actually IS processing those very common words and returning search results based on them despite claiming otherwise (since the exact phrases showed up in the respective searches, common words and all), but why would they go to the trouble of claiming that they're omitting search terms when they really aren't?
Maybe I'm just slow for not noticing this years ago, but I still find it intriguing.