A lawyer who works in Texas gets a call about an emergency which requires him to immediately fly out of the state for a short period of time. He has no time to pack, so he calls home to tell his wife he is going.

The maid answers the call, but is quite hesitant about putting his wife on the phone. After quite a bit of interrogation, she admits that the wife is upstairs in bed with the mailman! The lawyer is furious, and wants to rush right home, but of course there is this emergency he must take care of. So instead, he tells the maid to go get the gun from the desk drawer and kill both his wife and the mailman. She protests, and thinking quickly the lawyer makes up an explanation that under Texas law it is legal to kill your adulterous wife and her lover. Using his silver tongue, he finally convinces her to do it. She puts down the phone, and soon the lawyer hears the sound of two gun shots, a scream, some loud thumps, and finally, two splashes.

The maid comes back to the phone. The lawyer asks, "Did you kill them?"

"Yes, " she replies.

The lawyer questions her again, "What did you do with the bodies?"

"I threw them in the pool," she responds.

There is a brief pause from the lawyer. He asks her, "Did you say the pool?"

"Yes! I threw them in the pool!" she says.

"Uh, is this 555-7724?"

What happens when the the British urge to meddle meets subtle American wit?

(regards to this cruel.com post)

Impress your friends and coworkers with the Goatse rescue floppy. Also available as an ISO image -- combine business and pleasure by multitracking that backup, service pack, or *BSD distribution with a Goatse boot CD today!

BTW: where's Simoniker?

So this guy dies and to his horror finds himself in Hell. A demon greets the man at the entrance and beckons him to follow to the processing office. Along the way he notices rooms containing different groups of tortured souls and learns from the demon that the torments are tailored to the group.

Muffled screams could be heard from one room, where rancid food is being shoved non-stop into the mouths of its occupants by imps. "Gluttons," the processing demon muttered as they walked past.

Further down the hall, more screaming. This time it's a group being shown a two minute clip on a film projector over and over again of a low-speed car collision where the occupants get out unharmed, talk a bit with each other, chuckle, get back in their cars and drive away. Perplexed, the man looks at the processing demon, who mutters "Trial lawyers."

But by far the worst was heard near the end of the hall. The man looks in the room and observes a bunch of screaming guys being forcefully given a bath, a beer, and a lapdance alternately by the hottest and most disgusted women he's ever seen.

"What's this?" the man asks. "Vanity? Prostitution?"

"Oh, it's not the women this room was designed to torture." replies the demon. "They're extras."

At this point the man is completely confused. "Why are the men screaming like that?"

"Beats me," says the demon, "but they're all here for abusing the Overrated mod option on Slashdot."

A man dies and wakes up to find he's in Hell. He's really depressed as he stands in the processing line waiting to talk to an admittance demon. He thinks to himself, "I know I led a wild life, but I wasn't that bad. I never thought it would come to this." Looking up, he sees that it is his turn to be processed into Hell. With fear and a heavy heart, he walks up to the demon.

Demon: "What's the problem? You look depressed."

Sinner: "Well, what do you expect? I'm in Hell."

Demon: "Hell's not so bad. We actually have a lot of fun. Do you like to drink?"

Sinner: "Sure."

Demon: "Well then, you're going to love Mondays. On Mondays we drink up a storm. You can have whiskey, rum, tequila, beer, whatever you want, and as much as you want. We party all night long. And you don't have to worry about your liver, because you're already dead! You'll love Mondays.

Do you smoke?"

Sinner: "Yes, I smoke cigars."

Demon: "You're going to love Tuesdays. Tuesday is smoke day. You get to smoke the finest cigars available anywhere. And you can smoke to your heart's content without worrying about cancer, because you're already dead. You're going to love Tuesdays. How about drugs?

Do you do any drugs?"

Sinner: "Well, in my younger days I experimented a little, but I never inhaled."

Demon: "Well, you can experiment with anything you want on Wednesdays. That's drug day. You can snort or shoot any kind of drug you'd like to experience, and you don't have to worry about overdoses or getting hooked, because you're already dead. You're going to love Wednesdays.

Do you like to gamble?"

Sinner: "Sure, I love to gamble."

Demon: "Well, Thursdays are for you! We gamble all day and night - blackjack, craps, slots, horse races, everything! You're going to love Thursdays.

Are you gay?"

Sinner: "No, I'm not."

Demon (wincing): "Oh. You're going to hate Fridays..."

While you might have been of the opinion that stealing movies is harmless fun, the laundry list of societal ills counterfeit DVD purchases help fund make it clear that the 15-year-old sneaking a camcorder into I, Robot is committing sins against humanity comparable in scale only to that of sysadmins who thought SPEWS level 2 was a good idea.

It was the summer of 104 when I first caught a glimpse of fundamental truth by consensus -- a conflicting concept, I realize, unless you have come to accept the precept that perception defines reality and mass perception moreso. Fresh with enthusiasm over my TrollBack victory yet stymied by the harsh sanctions against dissent recently imposed, I sought refuge in fully considering a situation which has occasionally provoked my curiosity.

Does nobody recognize the disturbing sameness in online communication? Some of you have of course; as trolls, you realize you can't paddle against the current without discovering the current in the first place. Cruelly relegated to read-only status, I had time to fully consider the emergent patterns here and on other forums, blogs, and the rest of the Internet.

You see repetitive drivel. So did I, until the unmistakable glimmer -- the merest hint, my friends -- of fundamental truth caught my eye from under a pile of posts justifying P2P use with suspect but undeclared motives. Immediately I set myself to finding a way to filter and distill to a most succinct form the common wisdom strewn throughout the Internet. Buried in its subconscious, if you will.

I'm no AI genius, but it seemed to me that what those guys are missing is simplicity. In one night I threw together some code that would download the Internet and run it through a regular expression filter that would look for statements that, in computer science notation, match the form SOMETHING is SOMETHING. I could have done the same thing with 'was' or 'will be' but my current concern is with the present. Singular.

Now you end up with a whole bunch of stuff when you do something like this, and it aborted halfway through downloading the Internet when I ran it the first time, wasting the second day of the experiment. After deleting some games off my hard drive, I ran the program again and when I woke up on day four I had a complete set of all declarative sentences and sentence fragments currently online downloaded and ready to parse.

This was a bit tougher, but certainly not impossible. First one has to make sure everything's spelt correctly, assuming things that aren't are proper names only if they show up in statistically significant numbers in the aggregate. Then throw out everything that isn't in American English. But here's where the magic occurs: if 'A is B' and 'B is C' then clearly 'A is C'. I suspected the scheme may need some tweaking, but in true hacker spirit I fired up the VB.net runtime anyway and hit the sack.

To my delight the program executed flawlessly, and I awoke to a status message informing me of its success. Tentatively, I pushed WINKEY+R and issued the command to display the output:

*BSD IS DYING

It's Christmas Eve, and if I wasn't down enough from all the assorted holiday obligations I've also got CNN on in the background. Apparently, my meat has a very slim yet present chance of being infected with mad cow.

I'm not particularly worried -- statistically speaking, people haven't been dropping like flies (although some of the symptoms of CJD sound suspiciously similar to Alzheimer's). But if you're concerned, I have a couple of links regarding beef handling in the U.S. for your holiday pleasure.

CNN story on the incident. One curiosity: the cow suspected of having mad cow aka BSE or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which is suspected of causing CJD or Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, is approximately 4 years old, but the fellow that wrote Mad Cow USA (which I read a few years back and thought was pretty interesting) was quoted in the article as saying it takes at least 6 years for BSE to show up in cows. It would be interesting to have this discrepancy examined and explained.

Click, choose first link, then 'Printer Friendly Display', then do a find in document for "MR. ACKERMAN". This is a debate over an amendment that would have prevented animals of certain species (including cows) from being introduced into the food supply if they are unable to stand or walk unassisted before entering the slaughterhouse. It did not pass, and you may want to use the 'noes' on this list to help guide your 2004 choices at the polls if that bothers you.

Ran across an MP3 of a somewhat interesting discussion in Canada regarding copyright and its effect on the artist.

High points (IMHO) include a description of moral rights/droit moral, which is a concept foreign to U.S. copyright law but otherwise quite common among the implementors of the Berne Convention, some examples of what copyright is doing right (from a starving artist's point of view), some examples of what copyright is doing wrong (from a fellow who, in his opinion, nearly had his book release sabotaged by a well-known copyright holder whom his book was intended to benefit), and Mark Hosler of Negativland (featuring some of his work).

Download page here. Approximately 41MB, 120min long.

Please feel free to comment on CmdrTaco's latest journal entry here. Sadly, there is no location in the entry itself to offer insight into a new moderation system or helpful office moving techniques, which creates a dearth of information and dialogue regarding both subjects. Please start the header of any goatse related comments with [goatse] for easier filtering and sorting.

Moving-related tips:

• Lift with your knees

Now, moderation is something that we could have a 600 comment discussion on... if it wasn't relegated to my pathetic corner of the website. Easily finding the good parts of said discussion might be a bit tougher for obvious reasons, but it'd make a good Ask Slashdot topic. Not that I'm about to submit it, but you can.

Remaining aware of the constraints of keeping the system responsive, keeping moderation simple, and keeping the selection/filtering of comments to read easy for the user, I think the concepts raised in the journal entry are good ones. For example, maybe the user could use better granularity in highlighting/sinking messages with particular content, such as being able to bump messages up that were 20% or more Funny by moderation. Maybe the moderation categories could be a little more helpful and moderators could rate a comment on more than one parameter: +1 Well-written, -1 Flamebait, -1 Incorrect on the same comment, for example.

Bayesian filtering in the way in which I have been accustomed to using it on spam sounds expensive, and infeasible on a per-user basis, but I assume he's talking about using it either on a subscriber-only basis or over every comment entered into the system in conjunction with the score of the comment to subtly affect the score on other comments with similar content. Or in some other way completely different from what I'm thinking.

I think it'd be interesting to rate comments similarly to the tipjar model. Everybody gets twenty points in the beginning of the week and is allowed to spend as much as they want on any and all comments (maybe even their own?) Promotion only, no downrating, no ceiling on comment scores. Or perhaps stagger the handouts, giving different sets of users twenty points every day such that by the end of the week everybody's had twenty. Obvious problems with multiple accounts, but perhaps those could be worked around or mitigated.

Then again, everybody's got a moderation model they'd like to see, and barring some kind of simulation there's only one way to test it (hopefully in parallel with slashdot.org, as was done with brak.slashdot.org). But there are other features that might improve the ability of getting the most meaningful information in front of the reader quickly.

Being able to see the newest comments in a story (hopefully fit in with the user's preferred reading method -- nested, threaded, flat, etc.) would not only save nested browsers scanning time but also much bandwidth. Well, one can work some of this functionality with 'Flat' 'Newest First (Ignore Threads)', but it'd be helpful to have a mode where older comments are threaded and newer comments are nested (fully visible) beneath them. And maybe very complex to implement too; I don't know.

Any thoughts?

Edit: Also, smileys??

The following is taken from Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, pages 38-39:

Notice that the syntax-directed definitions mentioned so far have the following important property: the string representing the translation of the nonterminal on the left side of each production is the concatenation of the translations of the nonterminals on the right, in the same order as in the production, with some additional strings (perhaps none) interleaved. A syntax-directed definition with this property is termed simple.