Here's another one I just invented
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
Player 1 and player 2 both pick up hefty boulders at the beginning of a round.
Player 1 drops his boulder. Player 2, in turn, drops his boulder.
Both players pick up the boulders again, unless one of them has managed to reach the ground. Rounds continue until the game is over.
If either player's boulder reaches the ground at the end of a round, the game is over, and that player wins. If both players reach the ground at the end of the round, the game is declared a draw.
"Patent pending" refers to the time after it's filed but before it's granted, during which the intellectual property is public knowledge. Before it's filed, the patent is not public knowledge. If eBay somehow took the idea from him before it was made public by the process of filing for a patent, the guy may still have a case that they stole a trade secret, but he'd have to prove that, and it wouldn't be patent law any more.
The only thing that's unclear is why eBay would ever have wanted to buy his patents from him, except possibly to save the expense of court proceedings. eBay itself surely knew the patent was invalid.
The Chinese government is reading/. today to find out what good sites they missed.
Fortunately, we are a nation of laws, not men
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
How many laws have actually passed and been challenged in the Supreme Court since 9/11? Our constitution clearly dictates what laws can remain standing--and which ones cannot.
Fear makes us all poor citizens, but it does not change our laws. I have faith in our country, as it has lasted over 200 years now. When the fear that is masquerading as patriotism finally dies out, when the power-hungry men who seek to profit from fear leave office because they must, real patriotism will return. Real patriotism will bring challenges to the laws of fear, and those laws will be destroyed by the courts.
AOL surely knows that if it comes down to a fistfight between web designers who Do It Wrong and AOL, AOL will win. There are more AOL users than there are CapitalOne customers. Would AOL get lots of calls? Yes. But CapitalOne would lose customers.
If AOL went with Netscape, broken websites would have to stop crippling non-IE browsers or start losing major traffic.
Assuming that the pattern of brain activity is always roughly the same when you're trying to fall asleep, this follows logically from a tenet of biological psychology called Hebb's principle. It states that when two neurons fire together, the connection between them is strengthened.
To explain, I'm going to invent a symbology. X,Y,Z, and K represent neurons in different regions of the brain. I'll create an arbitrary pattern that represents when each of those neurons fire. Let's say that as you fall asleep you normally have a pattern like: XYZYYKKZXK. (I intentionally avoided using A, B, C here for the musical connotations therein.) Let's say it's mapped into music now: XYZYYKKZXK (neurons firing)-> ABCBBGGCAG (notes played)
When you hear the note A, a particular region of your auditory centers is activated. When you hear B, a slightly different region is activated, and so on. Coincidentally, a lot of your auditory processing takes place in your brain stem, which is also where a lot of sleep-related functions take place, such as shutting down the body's muscles so you don't sleepwalk every night, but this coincidence isn't necessary for this explanation to work.
So you listen to your personalized auditory mapping and attempt to fall asleep. Because you're trying to fall asleep, even if you're insomniac, neurons for X will be a little more likely to fire, then neurons for Y, then Z, and so on. At the same time, neurons for A are firing, then B, then C.
According to Hebb, the synchonicity of these events will cause a physical connection between the neurons to strengthen, regardless of how much neural distance separates them. All the neurons in between will get activated a little bit, and the more they fire together, the more the entire system of connections becomes stronger. You've directly mapped sleep waves into music, so the synchronicity will be very strong. Consequently, the connection between the auditory centers and your sleep centers will get stronger very quickly.
Make that connection strong enough, and you will eventually be able to cause XYZK to fire by playing ABCG, in essence sending a message to your brain stem via your speakers. Do this long enough, and the feedback may go in the other direction as well: you may start to hear the music every time you fall asleep, regardless of whether it's actually playing.
Theoretically this would work by mapping those brain waves into just about anything you can perceive, not just sound, although it may work better with sound. For example, mapping it into images would certainly work; you could take the entire discussion above, replace "auditory centers" with "visual centers", and you get the same explanation.
Anyone want to comment on the fact that the first link claims that "About KDE" has been removed? I think unifying the appearances is a good thing, but I don't see what RedHat hopes to gain by not giving credit where it's due. Even if the licenses don't explicitly say these dialogs need to remain untouched (and for all I know they do) RH is making a bad PR move right there.
Everything else about the changes looks gravy to me.
Just because a company holds a patent doesn't mean they have to enforce it, or plan to. If they wish they can grant Linux or the world an unlimited license to use the patented technology (which would be the friendliest approach) or they can simply ignore patent violations, which is at least neutral. (Ignoring, rather than granting license to use, is worse because it means they may change their minds at some point when the technology's already running enterprise servers throughout the world, at which point they pull a Rambus. In some ways it's worse than enforcing right away; at least if they enforce right away there's less damage to existing codebases.)
My point is, if you don't understand asm, this is NOT obvious. It looks like a bunch of gobbledygook to the non-programmers who will be evaluating the merits of the case. Some sort of explanation is necessary as to why the similarity of two bunches of gobbledygook is incriminating. Maybe base rates was the wrong question to ask.
This would matter if there wasn't already an admission of guilt. (Just read the next reply up.)
that you are in fact correct, it is worth discussing if you're bringing the case to trial. The opposition's lawyer might well ask the same question I just did. If you don't have the answer, you look bad to the jury, because the jury has no idea whether or not convergence is possible. I didn't mean to sound like I disbelieved their claim that the code was stolen, because I do believe it. My point is, they'd better address the base rates issue, because it may come up.
It's not just new music, but it is caused by the music industry. Haven't you ever noticed how frequently good bands break up and reform into other, newer good bands? Personal conflicts with the other band members are usually cited as the reason for the breakup, but the truth is good bands break up because they get bored doing the same old shit, and they need fresh blood and fresh directions to keep making good music. Band breakups sometimes result in less good music, but I think the new (and different) bands that result are better for music quality on the whole. Think of it as sexual reproduction for music; more genes being passed around means more advantageous adaptations.
Yet at the same time, the music industry wants bands like Aerosmith to stay together for album after ass-like album, and usually, they have legal language in the contracts to enforce it for the first few albums. (After those few, if a band is still popular, they may have the clout to be able to write their own contracts. But they're usually dead by then.)
With very few exceptions, bands that have been around forever suck because they've been around forever, and their sound is tired and dead. But people keep buying their albums, as you just said yourself. The music industry, including the artists, realizes this: big name = more sales. New artists have little choice in the matter but to stay together. Big artists who get greedy try to stay together; big artists who care about the quality of their music go on to try different things. Those different things may not sell as well, but they sound better.
I've disassembled my own C code and even written a tiny bit of asm code, so I'm no stranger, to this topic but I don't feel qualified looking at the asm dumps to answer this crucial question:
How likely is it for the two dumps to have that much similarity by chance, or by convergence?
This is the 'base rates' problem. Taking an example from My Cousin Vinny, you can say "wow, that's amazing, those two car tires make exactly the same tracks" but it's meaningless if most cars have the same tires anyway. Could this be another such situation? If you compared two programs compiled on the same platform, you're bound to find identical code somewhere, and it becomes more likely the smaller the regions you look at. Comparing huge asm dumps is not likely to be compelling to a jury who knows nothing about asm, and comparing small asm dumps lacks statistical weight.
To really support their case, these guys need to get research data on the statistical similarity or dissimilarity of two programs written to do similar things.
Even the analog degradation can be beaten
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 2
I don't remember the name of the technique, but it's so simple it hardly needs a name. Rip it via analog over and over and over again. 8 times, 50 times, whatever you have the patience for. Then merge the copies. The "true" bits will be in the ripped version more often than erroroneous bits, so you just take the most frequent bits. Works best if the rips are done from multiple systems. A dedicated CD ripper could have the exact copy that was encrypted on the CD. Burn to mp3, distribute, enjoy with milk or non-dairy creamer.
"Proprietary" and "patented" are intended to mean "nobody else has this nifty feature." Recently though, they have come to mean "locks you into the seller's way of doing business." The second connotation is actually truer than the first connotation: Just because a feature is proprietary doesn't mean it can't be done some other way, but using a proprietary feature almost always means that transitioning to another product will be more difficult. Parent wasn't saying that ownership is bad, but that proprietariness isn't a benefit.
So from a marketing perspective, those two words are indeed bad, and you'll notice that in recent years companies have stopped using them to promote their products.
Really, I'm kind of a jerk that way. But seriously, I think there's another point here, which is that the reason why we want Open Source to gain respectability is to provide ourselves with popular support, and the protection it provides.
In the past there has been a lot of talk about "it doesn't matter what Microsoft does, and it doesn't matter if anyone ever adopts Linux, because Linux will never die. We'll just keep building it and using it, and I don't care if anyone else likes it, because I do."
That talk has been shown in recent years to be slightly--not totally--naive. There has been a very real legal movement in this country to squelch those things that make Open Source possible, to kill our right to use our own property--computers--and our own ideas, as we see fit. Everything from horrible management of patents to the Big Bad Acronyms (DRM, DMCA, and UCITA to name a few) are all having a negative impact on our coding freedom. And don't pretend it's just in this country. The US has the power to push its unfavorable laws onto other nations, and it has already started to do so. France and Australia in particular seem to be a in race with America to see who can squelch intellectual freedom faster.
The drive to Open everything is the force opposing that. OpenOffice is a flagship product of that force, our flapping banner (to mix a metaphor). So for one thing, how does it look that one of our banner products isn't truly free? Next, OO is an important tool for winning converts to our platform, and from there to our cause. If Sun doesn't give OO the freedom it needs to attract developers, it won't develop, and therefore its power to help our cause for freedom will be lost.
They really pay attention to details, I'll give them that. Before I even install the software I have already encountered several examples of Good Thinking.
#1: This is their installer: $ lynx -source http://install.oeone.com/ |sh
This trick has been around for a while (I use it myself) but it's good to see a commercial developer paying attention to tricks of the trade. No need to explain to people how to use the command line to run an installer, just paste, please.
#2: CVS pserver. Once again, commercial developer paying attention.
Now, I give them a strike for providing a RedHat-only installation. A binary tarball would have been fine. But...
#3: The source code hasn't just been dumped on the net with a little "here ya go, knock yerselves out" message. They've taken the time to explain how things work and even provided hints for Going Debian.
#4: Their mascot doesn't suck.:-) Even though I personally would have named it "Tuxilla."
Although 15% is an unusually high profit margin in any industry, let alone retail, as several have already pointed out. 10% is usually a target margin.
But even 6 bucks is too much for music if you ask me. The marginal cost of that CD is probably no more than double the cost of running the CD stamper, when you only count production costs. The rest is distribution markup for a product that can be distributed for free. Unfortunately, record stores are on the wrong side of that equation . . . they are the distributors for the evil music industry. It's not a supportable business model in the long term.
That's what people who "make their money on the music industry" simply don't get. Nobody cares about supporting the existing sales infrastructure or the existing business models. We want our music cheaper, and we can get away with taking it for nothing, so we do, legality and morality be damned. Arguing about how the rules should be made, or how we should voice our unhappiness to those "in charge" is moot from the beginning: we're in charge, and we've already made the new rules. The new rules say we get our music for next to nothing, and no amount of arguing is going to change that.
You have been selected as the winner of this month's fabulous appliance giveaway! You may claim your free Koala-brand washer/dryer set, Antarctic Refrigerator or Shrimp-On-The-Barbie barbecue set! Your plane ticket for coming to claim this prize is included in this envelope. Simply fly to Australia round-trip on us, and be available for us to capture on film as we photograph the winners*.
Don't delay - act now to claim your prize.
Sincerely,
Australian Bureau of Law Enforcement and Consumer Marketing
Consciousness studies are usually conducted with what I would term "consciouness aids". In the Timothy Leary sense. This could explain almost everything else this website reports on.
Let me preface this by saying that I have read Bruce's posts in this thread and I find myself agreeing with almost all of them, so I'm not trying to dis him.
Bruce posts in this thread (as of my post right now): 23
Amount of karma this thread would have earned him (had his karma not already been 50, which I'm sure it was):16 points.
As of this writing, only 11 of the 23 posts had been moderated, and of those that weren't moderated, almost all were among the 12 most recent.
Predicted amount of karma earned by Bruce in this thread before it gets archived: 30 points.
He's the expert in computers, after all.... So the person who's making the decision is, oddly, not all that affected by the filter, as I think about it.
And conversely, the person who's most affected by the filters is the person least likely to recognize the situation as a problem. A non-techie library patron doing a report on Communism (to pick an earlier example) might get a big filter warning message popping up. (This is even assuming the filtering software goes to the trouble to tell you that you've been filtered, which some don't.) As any sysadmin will tell you, end users frequently don't even attempt to read or understand error messages, so the filter error could be interpreted as a down website. Even if it's correctly identified as originating in the filter, the user might believe that this was an acceptable use of the filter, i.e. that the website he attempted to view contained naked Russian chicks or instructions on how to build biological weapons for fighting capitalism. The least likely outcome is for the user to see the error message, realize that the filtered site should have been available for him to view, and then go to the trouble to complain about it in such a way that the installer of the filtering software hears about the problem.
Indeed, the filter is designed that way. If it allowed you to see the content and judge for yourself whether it should have been available, it wouldn't be working, would it?
Slashdot Mirror
Player 1 and player 2 both pick up hefty boulders at the beginning of a round.
Player 1 drops his boulder.
Player 2, in turn, drops his boulder.
Both players pick up the boulders again, unless one of them has managed to reach the ground. Rounds continue until the game is over.
If either player's boulder reaches the ground at the end of a round, the game is over, and that player wins. If both players reach the ground at the end of the round, the game is declared a draw.
"Patent pending" refers to the time after it's filed but before it's granted, during which the intellectual property is public knowledge. Before it's filed, the patent is not public knowledge. If eBay somehow took the idea from him before it was made public by the process of filing for a patent, the guy may still have a case that they stole a trade secret, but he'd have to prove that, and it wouldn't be patent law any more.
The only thing that's unclear is why eBay would ever have wanted to buy his patents from him, except possibly to save the expense of court proceedings. eBay itself surely knew the patent was invalid.
The Chinese government is reading /. today to find out what good sites they missed.
How many laws have actually passed and been challenged in the Supreme Court since 9/11? Our constitution clearly dictates what laws can remain standing--and which ones cannot.
Fear makes us all poor citizens, but it does not change our laws. I have faith in our country, as it has lasted over 200 years now. When the fear that is masquerading as patriotism finally dies out, when the power-hungry men who seek to profit from fear leave office because they must, real patriotism will return. Real patriotism will bring challenges to the laws of fear, and those laws will be destroyed by the courts.
The sig, BTW, is a joke. The above is not.
AOL surely knows that if it comes down to a fistfight between web designers who Do It Wrong and AOL, AOL will win. There are more AOL users than there are CapitalOne customers. Would AOL get lots of calls? Yes. But CapitalOne would lose customers.
If AOL went with Netscape, broken websites would have to stop crippling non-IE browsers or start losing major traffic.
Assuming that the pattern of brain activity is always roughly the same when you're trying to fall asleep, this follows logically from a tenet of biological psychology called Hebb's principle. It states that when two neurons fire together, the connection between them is strengthened.
To explain, I'm going to invent a symbology. X,Y,Z, and K represent neurons in different regions of the brain. I'll create an arbitrary pattern that represents when each of those neurons fire. Let's say that as you fall asleep you normally have a pattern like: XYZYYKKZXK. (I intentionally avoided using A, B, C here for the musical connotations therein.) Let's say it's mapped into music now:
XYZYYKKZXK (neurons firing)->
ABCBBGGCAG (notes played)
When you hear the note A, a particular region of your auditory centers is activated. When you hear B, a slightly different region is activated, and so on. Coincidentally, a lot of your auditory processing takes place in your brain stem, which is also where a lot of sleep-related functions take place, such as shutting down the body's muscles so you don't sleepwalk every night, but this coincidence isn't necessary for this explanation to work.
So you listen to your personalized auditory mapping and attempt to fall asleep. Because you're trying to fall asleep, even if you're insomniac, neurons for X will be a little more likely to fire, then neurons for Y, then Z, and so on. At the same time, neurons for A are firing, then B, then C.
According to Hebb, the synchonicity of these events will cause a physical connection between the neurons to strengthen, regardless of how much neural distance separates them. All the neurons in between will get activated a little bit, and the more they fire together, the more the entire system of connections becomes stronger. You've directly mapped sleep waves into music, so the synchronicity will be very strong. Consequently, the connection between the auditory centers and your sleep centers will get stronger very quickly.
Make that connection strong enough, and you will eventually be able to cause XYZK to fire by playing ABCG, in essence sending a message to your brain stem via your speakers. Do this long enough, and the feedback may go in the other direction as well: you may start to hear the music every time you fall asleep, regardless of whether it's actually playing.
Theoretically this would work by mapping those brain waves into just about anything you can perceive, not just sound, although it may work better with sound. For example, mapping it into images would certainly work; you could take the entire discussion above, replace "auditory centers" with "visual centers", and you get the same explanation.
I'm so sick of that little blue gecko. It always reminds me of a fetus, for some reason. Don't have to look at that any more!
Anyone want to comment on the fact that the first link claims that "About KDE" has been removed? I think unifying the appearances is a good thing, but I don't see what RedHat hopes to gain by not giving credit where it's due. Even if the licenses don't explicitly say these dialogs need to remain untouched (and for all I know they do) RH is making a bad PR move right there.
Everything else about the changes looks gravy to me.
Just because a company holds a patent doesn't mean they have to enforce it, or plan to. If they wish they can grant Linux or the world an unlimited license to use the patented technology (which would be the friendliest approach) or they can simply ignore patent violations, which is at least neutral. (Ignoring, rather than granting license to use, is worse because it means they may change their minds at some point when the technology's already running enterprise servers throughout the world, at which point they pull a Rambus. In some ways it's worse than enforcing right away; at least if they enforce right away there's less damage to existing codebases.)
My point is, if you don't understand asm, this is NOT obvious. It looks like a bunch of gobbledygook to the non-programmers who will be evaluating the merits of the case. Some sort of explanation is necessary as to why the similarity of two bunches of gobbledygook is incriminating. Maybe base rates was the wrong question to ask.
This would matter if there wasn't already an admission of guilt. (Just read the next reply up.)
that you are in fact correct, it is worth discussing if you're bringing the case to trial. The opposition's lawyer might well ask the same question I just did. If you don't have the answer, you look bad to the jury, because the jury has no idea whether or not convergence is possible. I didn't mean to sound like I disbelieved their claim that the code was stolen, because I do believe it. My point is, they'd better address the base rates issue, because it may come up.
It's not just new music, but it is caused by the music industry. Haven't you ever noticed how frequently good bands break up and reform into other, newer good bands? Personal conflicts with the other band members are usually cited as the reason for the breakup, but the truth is good bands break up because they get bored doing the same old shit, and they need fresh blood and fresh directions to keep making good music. Band breakups sometimes result in less good music, but I think the new (and different) bands that result are better for music quality on the whole. Think of it as sexual reproduction for music; more genes being passed around means more advantageous adaptations.
Yet at the same time, the music industry wants bands like Aerosmith to stay together for album after ass-like album, and usually, they have legal language in the contracts to enforce it for the first few albums. (After those few, if a band is still popular, they may have the clout to be able to write their own contracts. But they're usually dead by then.)
With very few exceptions, bands that have been around forever suck because they've been around forever, and their sound is tired and dead. But people keep buying their albums, as you just said yourself. The music industry, including the artists, realizes this: big name = more sales. New artists have little choice in the matter but to stay together. Big artists who get greedy try to stay together; big artists who care about the quality of their music go on to try different things. Those different things may not sell as well, but they sound better.
I've disassembled my own C code and even written a tiny bit of asm code, so I'm no stranger, to this topic but I don't feel qualified looking at the asm dumps to answer this crucial question:
How likely is it for the two dumps to have that much similarity by chance, or by convergence?
This is the 'base rates' problem. Taking an example from My Cousin Vinny, you can say "wow, that's amazing, those two car tires make exactly the same tracks" but it's meaningless if most cars have the same tires anyway. Could this be another such situation? If you compared two programs compiled on the same platform, you're bound to find identical code somewhere, and it becomes more likely the smaller the regions you look at. Comparing huge asm dumps is not likely to be compelling to a jury who knows nothing about asm, and comparing small asm dumps lacks statistical weight.
To really support their case, these guys need to get research data on the statistical similarity or dissimilarity of two programs written to do similar things.
I don't remember the name of the technique, but it's so simple it hardly needs a name. Rip it via analog over and over and over again. 8 times, 50 times, whatever you have the patience for. Then merge the copies. The "true" bits will be in the ripped version more often than erroroneous bits, so you just take the most frequent bits. Works best if the rips are done from multiple systems. A dedicated CD ripper could have the exact copy that was encrypted on the CD. Burn to mp3, distribute, enjoy with milk or non-dairy creamer.
"Proprietary" and "patented" are intended to mean "nobody else has this nifty feature." Recently though, they have come to mean "locks you into the seller's way of doing business." The second connotation is actually truer than the first connotation: Just because a feature is proprietary doesn't mean it can't be done some other way, but using a proprietary feature almost always means that transitioning to another product will be more difficult. Parent wasn't saying that ownership is bad, but that proprietariness isn't a benefit.
So from a marketing perspective, those two words are indeed bad, and you'll notice that in recent years companies have stopped using them to promote their products.
Really, I'm kind of a jerk that way. But seriously, I think there's another point here, which is that the reason why we want Open Source to gain respectability is to provide ourselves with popular support, and the protection it provides.
In the past there has been a lot of talk about "it doesn't matter what Microsoft does, and it doesn't matter if anyone ever adopts Linux, because Linux will never die. We'll just keep building it and using it, and I don't care if anyone else likes it, because I do."
That talk has been shown in recent years to be slightly--not totally--naive. There has been a very real legal movement in this country to squelch those things that make Open Source possible, to kill our right to use our own property--computers--and our own ideas, as we see fit. Everything from horrible management of patents to the Big Bad Acronyms (DRM, DMCA, and UCITA to name a few) are all having a negative impact on our coding freedom. And don't pretend it's just in this country. The US has the power to push its unfavorable laws onto other nations, and it has already started to do so. France and Australia in particular seem to be a in race with America to see who can squelch intellectual freedom faster.
The drive to Open everything is the force opposing that. OpenOffice is a flagship product of that force, our flapping banner (to mix a metaphor). So for one thing, how does it look that one of our banner products isn't truly free? Next, OO is an important tool for winning converts to our platform, and from there to our cause. If Sun doesn't give OO the freedom it needs to attract developers, it won't develop, and therefore its power to help our cause for freedom will be lost.
I'm with ya, Bruce.
...it would have been funnier. How bout:
"The more you tighten your grip, the more Dell Systems slip through your fingers."
I shouldn't be getting karma for making fun of people. I don't need your point anyway. I've been pegged at 50 for months now.
They really pay attention to details, I'll give them that. Before I even install the software I have already encountered several examples of Good Thinking.
:-) Even though I personally would have named it "Tuxilla."
#1: This is their installer: $ lynx -source http://install.oeone.com/ |sh
This trick has been around for a while (I use it myself) but it's good to see a commercial developer paying attention to tricks of the trade. No need to explain to people how to use the command line to run an installer, just paste, please.
#2: CVS pserver. Once again, commercial developer paying attention.
Now, I give them a strike for providing a RedHat-only installation. A binary tarball would have been fine. But...
#3: The source code hasn't just been dumped on the net with a little "here ya go, knock yerselves out" message. They've taken the time to explain how things work and even provided hints for Going Debian.
#4: Their mascot doesn't suck.
You still didn't spell "cognitive" right. Dummy.
Although 15% is an unusually high profit margin in any industry, let alone retail, as several have already pointed out. 10% is usually a target margin.
But even 6 bucks is too much for music if you ask me. The marginal cost of that CD is probably no more than double the cost of running the CD stamper, when you only count production costs. The rest is distribution markup for a product that can be distributed for free. Unfortunately, record stores are on the wrong side of that equation . . . they are the distributors for the evil music industry. It's not a supportable business model in the long term.
That's what people who "make their money on the music industry" simply don't get. Nobody cares about supporting the existing sales infrastructure or the existing business models. We want our music cheaper, and we can get away with taking it for nothing, so we do, legality and morality be damned. Arguing about how the rules should be made, or how we should voice our unhappiness to those "in charge" is moot from the beginning: we're in charge, and we've already made the new rules. The new rules say we get our music for next to nothing, and no amount of arguing is going to change that.
Dear [Michael Eisner]:
You have been selected as the winner of this month's fabulous appliance giveaway! You may claim your free Koala-brand washer/dryer set, Antarctic Refrigerator or Shrimp-On-The-Barbie barbecue set! Your plane ticket for coming to claim this prize is included in this envelope. Simply fly to Australia round-trip on us, and be available for us to capture on film as we photograph the winners*.
Don't delay - act now to claim your prize.
Sincerely,
Australian Bureau of Law Enforcement and Consumer Marketing
*In front and side shots
Consciousness studies are usually conducted with what I would term "consciouness aids". In the Timothy Leary sense. This could explain almost everything else this website reports on.
Let me preface this by saying that I have read Bruce's posts in this thread and I find myself agreeing with almost all of them, so I'm not trying to dis him.
Bruce posts in this thread (as of my post right now): 23
Amount of karma this thread would have earned him (had his karma not already been 50, which I'm sure it was):16 points.
As of this writing, only 11 of the 23 posts had been moderated, and of those that weren't moderated, almost all were among the 12 most recent.
Predicted amount of karma earned by Bruce in this thread before it gets archived: 30 points.
Indeed, the filter is designed that way. If it allowed you to see the content and judge for yourself whether it should have been available, it wouldn't be working, would it?