DeadMonkey321 - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Locks only keep honest people honest (Score 1) 273

by DeadMonkey321 on Friday June 19, 2009 @06:59PM (#28397137) Attached to: German Parliament Enacts Internet Censorship Law

One of the reasons some people now believe (and I tend in that direction) that this law is not about protecting children at all.

Well yeah obviously. The general rule is, if you want a law passed immediately and without complaint, you somehow relate to child porn of "protecting the children". People who want to download child porn are such a minority that it doesn't make sense to censor the internet for the other 99.9% of the country who aren't pedo-bears. However, by saying this internet filter is up there to save those precious children's souls they are pretty much guaranteed a free ride to put up whatever they want. After all, if anyone objects you just slander them as proponents of child porn, and no politician would risk being the target of those red scare tactics. I'm pretty sure radical conservatives could get a wall erected on the US-Mexico border in like two weeks if they said that it was there to keep child porn-smuggling gang leaders out of our country.

Comment Re:Cool (Score 1) 156

by DeadMonkey321 on Wednesday June 03, 2009 @10:10PM (#28204903) Attached to: Device Reads Messages From Surface of the Brain

Agreed. Except I can't help but feel they conflict themselves when they say "less invasive" and "applied directly to the surface of your brain". Is there any non-invasive way to touch your brain?

Bohemian Rhapsody On Old Hardware 137

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday April 21, 2009 @01:26AM from the too-much-spare-time dept.

eldavojohn writes "The sweet sweet melodies of Queen and the late Freddie Mercury are reproduced by hardware almost as old as the song is. 'There are millions of computers sitting idle at home consuming fantom electricity. Let's see where all that power is going. This is dedicated to all fans of Queen and hey let's not forget about Mike Myers and Dana Carvey of Wayne's World. Please note no effects or sampling was used. What you see is what you hear (does that even make sense?) Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound, Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar, 8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass, 3.5 inch Hard drive as the gong, HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals. Please note I had to record the HP scanner 4 separate times for each voice. I tried to buy 4 HP scanners but for some reason sellers on E-Bay expect you to pay $80-$100, I got mine for $30.'"

Comment Re:As someone from Alabama, let me say thanks (Score 1) 1306

by DeadMonkey321 on Tuesday March 24, 2009 @08:14PM (#27322385) Attached to: Texas Vote May Challenge Teaching of Evolution

So if Jesus=Sqrt(-1), then Jesus = i. Which could only mean...i am Jesus!

Submission + - 17 million people stopped buying CDs in 2008 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

Houston 2600

on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @10:59PM

Houston 2600 writes: "While overall music sales were up 10 percent in 2008, the year saw a drop not only in CD sales, but in the number of customers actually purchasing music. But according to a new report, the act of music listening is actually on the rise. While digital music purchases remain strong, the numbers show that there is still much more work to be done in the industry's transition to a new, more diverse set of business models.
Sympathy for the devil?

NPD's annual Digital Music Study found that there were 17 million fewer CD customers in 2008 than in past years. CD sales have been dropping for quite some time, and while 1.5 billion songs were sold digitally last year, the number of Internet users paying for digital music only increased by 8 million in 2008."

Miscalculation Invalidates LHC Safety Assurances 684

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @07:07PM from the philosophy-of-science dept.

KentuckyFC writes "In a truly frightening study, physicists at the University of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid (abstract). The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se but the chances of any particular scientific argument being wrong. 'If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,' say the team. That has serious implications for the LHC, which some people worry could generate black holes that will swallow the planet. Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: 'there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.' The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this? The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."

Slashdot Top Deals