Actually, that'd be 'she' rather than 'he'. Hedy was an actress. And no, I doubt she has much to do with the amount of power output a cell phone has and what that does to your noggin' as you jabber endlessly while driving down the freeway....

Seriously, I doubt people who use cell phones moderately (eg. for emergency calls, etc), rather than as a primary contact medium or as a way to 'chat with the {boys|girls|etc}' while driving down the road, will have few cancer issues.

On a different note, Blazing Saddles won't be quite the same for me now.

On a different note, Blazing Saddles won't be quite the same for me now.

That's Hedley! ;-)

--
Feedin' crap to the trolls, until they barf.

Now it looks like we have a choice: we can get more people like Nitrozac, or we can get more "naked and petrified" people.

I know which one has a hell of a lot more interesting things to say!

It's not just the cretinous content of the posts:

It's the drain on moderators. I'd rather moderate interesting articles up then spend all my points moderating garbage down every time I moderate. Especially when the garbage-spewers simply spew more and more garbage.

It's the strain on readers. I enjoy being confronted by lunatic fringe opinions. But the garbage isn't someone with a lunatic fringe opinion -- it's someone who's expressly out to disrupt other people's conversations.

So what to do? I think any solution has to tie posts to identity a bit stronger. I like being an AC most of the time, but I'm willing to be a pseudonymous coward if I have to -- and I'm willing to give up an e-mail address (and not some throwaway hotmail account) if that's what it takes.

How about a new level of moderation: -2, garbage. When a poster accumulates several of these, their account gets disabled.

1. This stuff increases the load on the servers, and the traffic on the lines. The cumulative effect of so many of them is a creeping denial-of-service attack.
2. Worse is the demand on people's attention. I haven't seen the /. thread yet which was meant to be a piece out of talk.bizarre. These things would have a place there, but anywhere else they're off-topic and just wasting people's time even to page past them.
3. The repetition has lost them whatever humor value they ever had. A six-year-old will laugh at the same joke ten times in a row, but most /.'ers have advanced beyond the mentality of a six-year-old. The poster(s) seem to have serious cases of arrested development.
4. The poster(s) have this obsession with helpless, sexualized objects. It's pretty obvious that their fantasies involve encounters with blow-up dolls. (Has anyone pointed them at the "I Love Ewe" yet?)
5. As Katz has been noting over the past few days, this place is hostile to a lot of groups. Perhaps not deliberately, but there's a culture-clash here that isn't along ethnic, class or religious lines, but sexual ones. The people you're alienating aren't "them"; they are your mother, your sister, your girlfriend. What's really sad is that these posters don't have the empathy to care.

What to do about it? Ban the IP's? If they're from some large proxy server, this causes a lot of collateral damage. I favor the idea of giving moderators renewable (based on prompt meta-moderation) points for "off-topic", "redundant" and perhaps a new category of "hateful" down-moderations, combined with some auto-moderation which kicks things down based on all the boring and repetetive key-phrases most of us have come to hate. If "naked and petrified" automatically posts at -1 (Offtopic), moderators don't have to waste any time at all.
--
If sarcasm was posted to Slashdot, would anybody notice?

This is a two step proposal. One step is trival. The second takes a lot of work.

1. Include a moderation, -1, naked and petrified post
2. Allow people to screen out posts, or highlight posts, with certain moderations. Thus, if Nitrozac (who presumably posts at 2 by default) posts a "I want Linus Torvalds Naked and Petrified!!" and gets moderated down for a naked and petrified post, I wouldn't even see it if I was "bottom feeding" at a threshold of -1, if I didn't want to see a naked and petrified post. This would save considerable time and trouble for moderators, who would otherwise have to waste valuable moderation points moderating a "Naked and Petrified" post down to -2 (invisible). The downside is that "naked and petrified" posters wouldn't lose much karma...but hell, most of them post as AC's anyways, right?

One possible abuse: moderators who disagree with someone's comments can abuse the "Naked and Petrified" option. Blip their comments are never seen again, until meta-moderation, and then the moderator loses only one karma point. I'm not sure how to fix this except to up the karma penalty for an unfair "Naked and Petrified" post to -5.

I would like to blast the mainstream media (and, I suppose, mainstream culture) for regarding acting as more worthy of attention than invention. This will all change after the Geek Revolution (heh).

-- Unauthorized Access Only!

God bless you, Hedy. You're missed

-"S"HM

She was also in the news in '98 when she sued Corel for using her picture on the CorelDraw box without permission.
--
Len

True,

I just saw an NBC report, and it was quite extensive, but it said nothing about her being an inventor. This is very sad.

Not to mention the work of one Dr. Frankenfurter. There is no explicit documentary evidence that Frankenfurter's machine could do granite, per se, but I doubt that porting the mechanism would be difficult in comparison to the task of handling the conversion itself.

Furthermore, it strikes me that granite may not be the ideal material for petrifying naked young women; I am thinking, here, of the frictional elements and the consistency of "skin" tone. A white marble or perhaps a nice glossy black volcanic would likely be more pleasing to the touch and the eyes.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=nomic

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Safe rides home, any hour: $25 #Support

To Hedy Lamarr, the original, never-to-be forgotten, Tech Talking Babe.

(perhaps Ada Lovelace was the penultimate original tech talking babe, but can't forget Nitrozac either .. oh my)

Here is the picture for the statue freaks. Enjoy.

Hedy Lamarr must be about the closest thing to a geek guy's ideal woman.

So besides being well over 50 years my senior and dead, she's probably not this geek guy's type.

-Chuck

Some of these geeks are so desperate that never mind the divorces and arrests, even the *dead* thing wouldn't be enough to stop them if they got the chance!

-Chuck

My first wife was extremely beautiful, almost (but not quite) on par with Hedy Lamarr. She was well educated and articulate. My first wife was also a pathological liar, a compulsive shoplifter, sexually cold and distant, a check kiter, and occasional drunkard. She was mixed up in credit card fraud and all sorts of petty larceny. She was the perfect con artist and because of her beauty I've seen her con cops and judges in court. She beat many a rap.

She had a mean temper when drinking, and was bulemic to boot. Well, my friends all envied me because she was so poised and lovely to look at. If they only knew ...

Moral: beauty is only skin deep. I know oh how I know. Hedy Lamarr once said something to the effect that ``any woman can be glamorous, just stand still and look dumb''.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't. :P)

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't. :P)

Which was unauthorized. She sued 'em and won too.

And don't forget Jayne Mansfield, who reputedly had the "highest IQ in Hollywood" in her time... somewhere in the 180s, IIRC.

So why didn't she in her spare time invent side-looking radar or something like that? She was a pragmatist and decided that making movies was an easier way to get rich... Hey Lamarr never made a dime from her invention...

Personally, I think Corel should pay for a permanent memorial to her, in recognition for her services both in entertainment AND technology. (Given Corel's extremely unpleasent treatment of her in the past, such as false allegations in order to overturn a lawsuit filed against them, it is the least they can do.)

I also think that there should be some kind of fund, linking not only Hedy Lamarr but other well-known female geeks, nerds and innovators, to go to educating women (kids, teachers and parents) that it's OK to think, OK to earn decent money whilst clothed & vertical, and VERY OK to be interested in technology.

Is this person's death -that- important? YES! The fewer role-models that can speak out, the less chance there is of change. And society, frankly, sucks. The average person seems to keep their brains at waist-height, and technology is something people avoid like the plague. (More than a few -blame- it for the plague.) We need people who can stand up and say that intelligence is OK, that we were born with brains, and they aren't just for decoration in gorefest movies.

Sadly, those who -do- think about high-tech think "big machines, big budgets, big teams, egg-heads on Penguin Mints, and Military Backing". They don't think "piano", which is how Hedy came up with the idea of shifting frequencies. They don't think "storms & a compass", which is how Marconi developed the radio. They don't think "growing cells" or "living beings", which were the roots behind Alan Turing's and Von Neuman's developments in computing.

In the end, I doubt anyone will do a damn thing, in memory of this ingenious lady, to improve education, or to improve women's standing in society. But there ya go. What can you expect?

Maybe a Slashdot Hedy Lamarr Award for the most outstanding contribution made by a woman in the last year?

Hey, it could work.
TOYWAR!!
Note to etoy.AGENTS: DEFCON 1, NSI has not released domain name.

If there's to be a proposition for a Hedy Lamarr award, why not make it for the person of any gender who's had the best out-of-left-field idea that made the most impact?

Speaking of lateral thinking, that's a far better idea than the one I came up with. Hat's off to you.

How about it Slashdot? If you want I'll start developing products that we can sell...proceeds to go to the Hedy Lamarr Award for Lateral Thinking.

Smart girls want and need to see examples of smart women identified and recognized.

The day that as much as 40% of the "left field" award goes to women would be the day that I would subscribe to your 'gender-blind' model.

The fact that the preponderance of the announcements of Hedy's death don't mention her intellectual accomplishments is an indication to me that we can't pretend a level playing field exists.

The problem with this proposition is that it is not ok. Women are inferior to men (1 Timothy 2:11-14) and should act like it and obey the bible in order to save there lustfull and sinful souls from the flames of hell.

Dude...this is exactly the kind of ignorant, sexist garbage that keeps talented people from using their talents. (You do remember the parable of the talents, right?) If women using their God-given talents is against your religious code, then maybe you ought to re-think the way you worship.

I certainly hope your children don't grow up to resent you. Gods know if I had been raised to think the way you do, I'd end up bitter and angry at my own father as I came to the realization that the real world is completely different from what my father told me.

No, I skipped the rest of the bible. Turns out its pretty boring

Oh...well...this explains everything.

Care for some tea? One lump or two?

"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"
"Sure, it's called Quad Damage. It's the only way to frag."

Oh, sure, my submission about the passing of Ms. Lamarr gets rejected. Not that I'm bitter, mind you...

Anyway, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about her passing, inclding some nic e photos of her. They also had an overview of her spread spectrum invention.

Hedy was also honored by the EFF with a Pioneer Award in 1997 for her spread spectrum work.

Schwab

"Hey, Tone; who'd you rather have sex with: Amelia Earhart or Betty Page?"

"Hank, I tell ya: Betty's got the package, right? Tits, abs, ass-she's built. But flyin' across the Atlantic solo? Man, that shit is hot."

In 2 years, it was by far the most well reasoned, least sexist thing I ever heard him say.

Tone would see the allure of Hedy, no problem. She's Betty's body with Amelia's soul.

-"S"HM

As the evening wore on, Lamarr began outlining her idea for a sophisticated antijamming device for use in radio-controlled torpedoes. If this seems out of character for a 26-year old film beauty, the fact is that not only did Lamarr possess a first-class mind but she also had listened to her husband's dinner-table business discussions with customers for his armaments. After all, Fritz Mandl's Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik had supplied much of the equipment Benito Mussolini used when his troops invaded Ethiopia in 1935.

(another shameless quote from Blazing Saddles)

--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...

You've seen the Linux IPOs - just think what the nanotech IPOs will be like!

The hard transfer limit for this user has been reached

Not everyone has a site that can be slashdotted. Not everyone can afford it. I think in this case, someone has web hosting with limits, and we exceeded them.

A page that is probably lucky to get maybe a few hundred hits a month has probably been hit more tonight then it has in it's entire existance. In this case, some person's content may be totally inaccessable to others until their next billing period, which is sad.

Slashdot needs to remember this before linking a url in an article like that.

Problem is, I don't have a solution. Any suggestions?

The story of the "Secret Communications System" patent is truly one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard, (wouldn't it make a great film?) and a look at the patent is a real eye-opener for people who are familiar with modern digital technology.. Why? Because the design was for a digital system built with analog components..

And the person who said that Hedy and George had given their patent to the government in hopes of helping to stop Hitler was right..Hedy had seen facists and facism at close hand.. and so had my father, and they both knew what was at stake..

in spite of this, Hedy was still looked at suspiciously as an "enemy alien" by some.. :(

She was married off by her family when she was stillin her teens, and was kept virtual prisoner in Austria as a "trophy bride" of the Austrian arms magnate Fritz Mandel a few years before the war, and she literally had to drug a maid in order to flee..

While being forced to sit at the dinner table with her husband and his facist friends, who included high-ranking Nazi military officials, she built up a knowledge of military technology and carried that with her when she fled to London. (where Samuel Goldwyn, I think, gave her a ticket to the US) She met my father at a party at Janet Gaynor's house, and asked him if he could help her turn what was then a valid, but unformed idea into something that could work..(My father had a reputation in Hollywood as an experimental musician and as somebody who was familiar with the latest in technology..)

It took them about six months to do the whole process, and the patent is really interesting.

(you can see it at http://www.ncafe.com/chris/pat2/index.html at some point. I tried to check my site tonight and got a message saying that I had exceeded my "hard limit" ..Ive been linked to by media outlets several times, but this has never happened before..

I have my web site virtual hosted at what was until recently Best, but they were recently bought by Verio -perhaps "assimilated" is a better word..:(

(Best said that they would not turn off a site for a short anomaly like being picked "Cool Site of the Day", which is sort of like what has happened..but maybe that has changed..)

an aside...does anybody have any suggestions how to avoid this in the future?

Hedy and George never made a penny from the patent, which was really unjust, I think, because the government had classified it as "Top Secret" and made the commercial utilization of the invention difficult. Just after the patent expired, in 1960, it began to see commercial use..(in the Cuban Missle Crisis) Its now the main secure communications technology in use in Milstar, the US govt's 25 billion dollar "survivable" satellite communications system. Spread Spectrum is, in addition to being an incredibly efficient way to send data, inherently secure.. (one needs to know the code, in order to read the message..or usually, even know a message exists..)

By the way, spread spectrum holds out another possibility with startling implications.. It could be used to create a new television and/or radio broadcasting service that would be able to, in any given geographic area, accomodate the broadcast of many, many more channels of information, at higher quality, than we have now, eliminating scarcity on the airwaves and the battles over bandwidth.. Just imagine, community radio, community television, creativity, true democracy of the airwaves, and perhaps, even, no need for a license to broadcast..and no more canned satellite shows..

That possibility scares some interests tremendously. And its something worth fighting for.

They have digital radio in Europe, why not here?

Guess why...

Back to the patent:
Just a thought:
The government sat on this..Rightfully, they should have compensated Hedy and George for that, or extended the patent to make up for the years in which it was classified... I know that Hedy was poor for many years.. until quite recently actually. She lived on a small pension and basically spent time with friends and tried to live cheaply.. My father was better off in the later years of his life, I understand, but was never rich in the same way that many well-known composers were. He was quite prolific musically, writing the scores for over 60 films.. But my favorite music of his was his early pieces.. He was enamoured with the possibilities opened up by machines, which could play faster and more accurately than any human ever could..

Anyway, my father died about six weeks after I was born, so I never knew him.. But I definitely did inherit his interest in communications technology...and music..and now that I know the real story, I'm very proud of him..

Now if only I could only get my only two relatives on this planet to stop saying I'm "blackmailing" them for simply being open about my father..(Its a generational thing, I guess. my mother and father weren't married, big deal..)

By the way, thanks for an excellent site, I read it almost every day..

Chris Beaumont
chris@ncafe.com

Alas, this kind of behavior isn't unusual. From reading the stories on Hedy Lamarr, it seem like she died in solitude, and probably was alone the few remaining years of her life. Please be aware, I'm definitely not condoning her behavior.

Even, Lady Augusta Lovelace, considered by many to be the first programmer, was a heavy horse racing gambler. She ran up massive gamblings debts, pawned the family jewels twice, just to keep up her gambling habit. Even, Charles Babbage, ran up heavy gambing debts.

So, who knows what Hedy was thinking when she tried to take the items, but it was also stated that no charges were brought against her.

"If only I'd been born in Lily^H^H^H^HHedy's time, I would have been all right...."

I also keep thinking of the song from Little Shop of Horrors: "Would you like a Cadilac car? / Or a guest shot on Jack Parr? / How's about a date with Hedy Lamarr? / You're gonna get it (if you want it, baby)."

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/ "What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?" - Nick Lowe

Could someone pleeeease let me in on this? Don't MAKE me get Kibo on yo' ass.