A now deleted post in the HN thread (for the Utah BLM posting) indicated it was placed by a local outdoor group in memory of someone who died. They were purportedly freaked out it had been found & were trying to get the BLM post deleted - not understanding it had gone viral.
Whoever installed it should have poured concrete in it if they wanted to make removal or theft difficult. BLM could have removed even then, albeit with a crane or front loader and a heavy truck.
wasn't this in the middle of nowhere? seems unlikely they'd have heavy equipment out there. Seems more likely some jerks decided to take it for themselves for bragging rights.
What person doesn't hear "Yeah, hear about that supposed alien monolith recently? Me and my mate Geoff stole it" and immadiately think "Wow, what a dickhead"?
I think that paying $10m for a stolen painting valued at $20m, I (as an affluent criminal) would brag that I own a painting worth $20m, not that I paid $10m for it.
I doubt it, given they are not targeting the European market. As a Utah firm clearly without an EU nexus, why would they need to care about EU law (or any other country besides their own?)
That's not true, geoblocking of digital goods is only illegal in the EU if you differentiate between different member states. Blocking all of the EU is fine.
No. If my company, my employees, my offices, and my web server are in SLC, I can let you access it from anywhere in the world without worrying about the laws anywhere else. I didn't follow the EU directive? So? What are they going to do, send assassins? Sue me in EU court? What levers of power over me do they have that have any relevance whatsoever?
I dislike tracking on the web as much as the next HN reader, but I can also understand how a small/cash-strapped local newspaper would be hard pressed to spend literally any time or resources making sure that they are compliant with regulations in countries on the other side of the planet.
So you want them to maintain two versions of their sites + testing + different cache settings, CDNs etc... because of legal requitements from countries an ocean away and people who are unlikely to visit the site anyway?
Yes. Why would they put any those resources in when it will not increase revenue?
Geoblocking takes less than a day to implement and shields them from legal issues, what you are asking is several weeks of work initially + continuous maintenance work.
From some of the images I see it has rivets holding the panels on. Any glimmer of hope that this time it is aliens has been dashed. https://www.instagram.com/p/CIBf7YuALr3/
It would actually be pretty funny if the extraterrestrial technology we like to imagine taking the form of some geometrically-perfect prism of exotic nano-materials did indeed exist, but had to be enclosed, for entirely practical reasons, in plain old riveted stainless steel.
It wouldn't even be that far off from what our species does anyway, putting our advanced nano-materials (integrated circuits) inside cases made of much lower-tech materials.
All that said, I don't think aliens would have left the lid behind.
Eh, if they're that capable, they probably have a lot of room to optimize for whatever they want. Maybe they consider rivets ugly—or consider making such a thing without rivets to be a demonstration of their skill (which it would be). I'd agree you can't assume for certain they wouldn't use rivets, but I'd say it seems likely they wouldn't.
(Of course, the chance they'd choose to make rivets in an exact shape and size and style that is presumably mass-produced somewhere on Earth is very unlikely unless they wanted to make something to blend in.)
I think it would. Any species we encounter is likely to be old and extraordinarily advanced. The idea that they stitch pieces of material together is absurd. Matter will be like software to them, the process of construction so advanced that objects will be constructed as they appear internally in the world of thoughts. Perfect geometric curves, down to the atomic level. No seams. They may even have a programmable matter and that for sure wont have seams.... and rivets! lol
Then the aliens started using Javascript for everything. Replacing aeons of stable, time-proven technology. And that's the last time we detected a signal from the mysterious celestial body known as Alpha Node 4.1.13.
Or was that 6.3.21? No wait...it's definitely 13.3.0. Huh!? 15.x already! I can't keep up.
A few weeks earlier, I saw this PBS Doc on "Desert X" which has a lot of interesting (if not metallic) artwork set in the deserts of Southern California:
https://www.pbs.org/video/desert-x-kqzqhx/
Curious if this might be an extension for their DESERT X 2021 launch, if not related to one of their artists, past or present:
https://www.desertx.org
That guy can't go to the corner store without calling someone a pedophile on Twitter, I'm pretty sure it's not him. Although the polycount on this thing is about where he seems to like it, so I can see where you get mixed up.
> I bought the camera used recently and didn’t update the exif date in the camera. I uploaded it on Wikipedia and I’m cool with it without copyright. The image is for the people. Patrickamackie2 (talk) 05:39, 28 November 2020 (UTC)patrickamackie
This was definitely dated back. Maybe by changing the EXIF information?
Note how there are many fingerprints on the monolith that only appeared after many people visited it. They cannot be seen on the early photos from right after the discovery.
Fingerprints are hardly permanent, especially out here in the desert. Although it does not rain often, when it does wind comes with it and tends to wipe everything clean and then dirty it up again in whole new ways. If someone had a time lapse of the 4 years it was out there, I am confident you'd see markings come and go from its surface throughout its entire time in the desert.
If you really want to do digital archaeology, you should be looking at the buildup of dirt in corners, and erosion of the rock surfaces at its base, not the amount of dirt on a flat surface.
Strikes me as performance art if it was removed by the installer. Or, as mentioned in this thread, an asshole took it or the aliens retrieved their DNA/Mana collection device. If it's the last option, check that those that found it are still here.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 97.9 ms ] threadref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25202573
I checked the poster's rep and he seemed like an ordinary HN geek. I'm this side of even odds, that he was being straight up with us.
edit: I see now that he seems to disavow the whole thing, toward the bottom of the thread.
What person doesn't hear "Yeah, hear about that supposed alien monolith recently? Me and my mate Geoff stole it" and immadiately think "Wow, what a dickhead"?
This is a weird assumption given the Monolith first appeared years after his death according to satellite photos last I saw.
Looks like it's difficult to remove trackers for some companies.
And traffic is traffic. It's not that unusual for Rest of World to want to look at an obscure US site.
If you want to read the whole regulation, it's here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...
I dislike tracking on the web as much as the next HN reader, but I can also understand how a small/cash-strapped local newspaper would be hard pressed to spend literally any time or resources making sure that they are compliant with regulations in countries on the other side of the planet.
Geoblocking takes less than a day to implement and shields them from legal issues, what you are asking is several weeks of work initially + continuous maintenance work.
Your comment reads as a textbook example of the expression "cut off the nose to spite the face".
Do you honestly believe that abusive tracking is in anyway in your best interests?
(sltrib.com blocks visitors from Europe)
It wouldn't even be that far off from what our species does anyway, putting our advanced nano-materials (integrated circuits) inside cases made of much lower-tech materials.
All that said, I don't think aliens would have left the lid behind.
(Of course, the chance they'd choose to make rivets in an exact shape and size and style that is presumably mass-produced somewhere on Earth is very unlikely unless they wanted to make something to blend in.)
How he knows the difference between human-made rivets and other types of rivets was not explained.
Their only limit is your imagination.
Also, they could have built it after they got here!
Or was that 6.3.21? No wait...it's definitely 13.3.0. Huh!? 15.x already! I can't keep up.
Curious if this might be an extension for their DESERT X 2021 launch, if not related to one of their artists, past or present: https://www.desertx.org
I'm just wondering what would be the incentive to steal something like that, considering the efforts to reach the location.
Maybe there's a market to sell "alien devices" to enthusiasts?
- Monolith taken by Patrick A. Mackie.
- Date and time of data generation: 08:05, 15 May 2016
- 4,000 × 6,000
OpenStreetMap status:
- https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/8162265901
- removed:tourism=artwork
- removed:artwork_type=sculpture
It means "Photograph of the monolith taken by Patrick A. Mackie" and not literally taken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Utah_monolit...?
Note how there are many fingerprints on the monolith that only appeared after many people visited it. They cannot be seen on the early photos from right after the discovery.
If you really want to do digital archaeology, you should be looking at the buildup of dirt in corners, and erosion of the rock surfaces at its base, not the amount of dirt on a flat surface.
https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl