C'mon guys. Just a little bit of a clue?

Slashdot Taps WWN To Compile Article "Highlight" Stories

Slashdot has a problem: Its submitters send in hundreds of random links (I almost said "articles.") And most of it is dozens and dozens of sentences long, many with words of more than one syllable. Slashdot needs to distill something vaguely related to a few of those words that will generate page hits, and nobody does that better than Weekly World News, the "alien dingo Elvis impersonators ate my JFK love-child baby" organization. Slashdot officials have asked WWN for help in analyzing the 3,141,592 words collected just this year. What we really need in times like this is George Gilles de la Tourette. "Let's go to the story, pick up maybe three words out of it - USAF ESPN drone - and fill in the rest with whatever other random words come to mind."

How do you get 1/4 - 1/2 inches from 2.5cm? 2.5cm is .98 inches.

He probably thought they were using Imperial centimeters - they're a lot smaller than the metric version.

3. There is a loop

Timothy: Do not try and code the loop. That's impossible. Instead...only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Timothy: There is no loop.
Neo: There is no loop?
Timothy: Then you'll see, that it is not the code that loops, it is only yourself.
...
...
...
Neo: WTF?!?

...that's not how statistics work either. A result does not alter the underlying probabilities.

That's only true for dusty old fuddy-duddy classical Newtonian statistics. These days quantum statistics is where it's at. Everyone knows that reading poll results can fundamentally alter data, even data that wasn't tabulated for that specific poll. (Something to do with bell curve entanglement and the spin/charm of pundits - gets kind of technical at that point.) Why just yesterday I glanced at a USA Today that someone had left behind on the subway, saw the usual 57-color pie chart about whether readers thought giraffes tasted great or were less filling, and next thing I knew the first president of the USA was George Washington instead of Herbert Whistlefjord.

What useful arts and sciences does it promote?

What useful arts are promoted by other protected works like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Dumb and Dumber, It's Pat, broadcasts of football games, and every talking head on every 24-hour news channel? From an arts standpoint, is Operation Desert Stormy truly inferior to any random 2 hour rant by Glenn Beck? Yes, one has poor directing, an incoherent plot, rambling dialog, and truly terrible acting - while the other is arguably superior in all those areas but also happens to show naked people having sex.

If we extend protection to Battlefield Earth in the hopes that it will also encourage works like Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, then is it truly different from protecting Gigli or even Anal Whip-Sluts Volume 23 in the hopes of getting, say, Caligula?

You and your "real world". They are physicists.

First, assume a spherical bat. In keeping with long-standing physics traditions, assume the spherical ball is a cube.

The world will not be a better place when everyone and their dog can download and print their own guns.

I'll tell ya this much - the day that dogs can download and print their own guns is the day we're gonna find out if all that "man's best friend" stuff is for real.

"Fetch the stick boy, fetch the stick!"
"No. *ka-click* You fetch the damn stick."

The Author of the GPL code did not put a gnu to your head and forced you to choose their code.

FTFY

The poll found that 54% of Americans believe the TSA is doing a good or excellent job, and that 57% have a good or excellent opinion of the agency.

To ensure the poll contained a representative and informed sample group, it was conducted at airport security checkpoints. This also allowed for an additional efficiency and cost-saving measure - using the actual TSA employees as the pollsters. And to ensure answers were unbiased, participants were assured that under no circumstance would a negative response result in an "enhanced screening session" with Bubba, the large grinning man over there wearing the rubber gloves and holding a tube of KY Jelly.

The craft only caught on fire after it crashed, not during the test firing itself, and the explosion was due to the fire reaching the fuel tanks.

Sounds like we simply need to remove the fuel tanks to avoid this problem in the future.

Can I call that my own work and publish it?

Sure, why not - and you can call your book "The Sword of Shannara"

Physical laws only apply in TFA, titles exist in a parallel universe where physics does not have strict laws and the only thing that matters is clicks.

But as we know from basic Slashdot theory, the title and TFA are entangled at the point of publication - the so-called "quantum firehose phenomenon". Just look at the number of people who, from examining the title alone, are able to determine the article's content in sufficient detail to completely refute it without having read a single word. This is, of course, the real-world equivalent of Gallagher's Watermelon, which as we all know is based on the classic deiknymi (the ancient Greek term for "dessert") or gedankenexperiment (German, literally "seed spitting contest") in which a watermelon is put inside a box with a Geiger counter, a vial of Roundup, and a small sample of radiactive material, the contents of which become irrelevant once you hit them repeatedly with a sledgehammer. It doesn't really have much to do with science, but it's quite a lot of fun.

Where is Crocodile Dundee when you need him?

Wrong country, mate. In NZ ya get Kiwi Dundee, Mick's second cousin twice removed on his mum's side. Never made it as big in the movies, being rather a bit shorter than Mick and with a nose that's not exactly photogenic, if you know what I mean. Apparently got a touch of acrophobia as well - keep hearing he won't fly.