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WTF? Are you trying to imply that the GFDL is worse than signing in blood and double-notarizing?

Okay, the blog thing seems like something that might make sense, but Wikipedia, WTF?

Publishing information to WP based on your own work would probably be original research according to WP. Which WP doesn't allow.

Secondly, WP doesn't allow copyrighted work like journals to be posted verbatim on the site--even IF the author grants explicit permission signed in blood and double-notarized to have the material published there too. For WP, it's basically 100% Free or no deal. So, the ONLY way this material could be posted on Wikipedia and stay up for more than 7 minutes with the WP Copyright Police would be if the author released it under GFDL. Which no one wants to do with anything, especially if it's their livelyhood. (I could see licensing a work of mine to Wikipedia, a donation to a nonprofit, but it would piss me off to see that work all over retarded AdSense farms that (legally) steal the content for profit.

And finally, since just posting full text of journal articles is not what WP does (or allows), this whole discussion is stupid. They don't accept full-text of newspaper columns, magazines, or your diary either. It's not a knowledge collective, it's a Freer-than-thou encyclopedia.

What WP does allow is citing these journal articles, and that's something that even our ludicrous current copyright laws has yet to forbid.

Though you can be sure that when citing copyrighted works does get forbidden WP will be the first to knuckle under and ban it, because they have shown in the past that they have no balls to stand up against unjust and overly-broad-interpreted IP laws, for example their complete denial that fair use rights exist.

While I am sure that there are plenty of issues still to be addressed...

- Power transmission, even at high voltages, is a lot less efficient than you might think.

- As the article said, you can utilise the heat given off by the generator in your cellar. In a power-plant, this is just waste.

- While I'm also in favor of nuclear power, power supply is interesting in that the load varies quite a lot (roughly twice as much electricity is needed during the day as at night), which complicates things. Nuclear power stations can only provide a fairly steady amount of power, so a method of supplying the peak load is also required. For this you need generators (e.g. gas) which can quickly be ramped up or down depending on the current load. Hydroelectric is just about the only method currently available for storing large amounts of power, but I think the amounts involved are just too large for a purely nuclear/hydro solution to be feasible.

It seems that for the first time in history an semi-realistic American cartoon character has purchased a lordship. When Zonker Harris - plant-whisperer and babysitter extraordinaire - was asked by BBC News about the honor he simply said "It's come completely out of the blue, I never would have guessed that I'd have that kind of honour, right up until when the credit card confirmation came through." For the world of fictional people as a whole, this is very much a good thing. It's great that cartoon characters are being recognized for their hard work and cultural impact on the world.

This looks a whole lot like what Steve Mann has been doing for several decades. He was doing research on wearable displays at MIT for a long time, now he's at the University of Toronto.

Not to say that his way of doing things isn't freakishly strange, but he's definitely a leader in the area:

• His research:
  http://wearcam.org/
• His company?:
  http://eyetap.org/mann/
• Brief summary of him:
  http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/science_f air_projects_encyclopedia/Steve_Mann
• CNN article:
  http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/14/in ternet.cyborb.ap/
• Same article at space.com:
  http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_man n_041012.html

I met him at a lecture he gave at McGill last year. I think he's a little out in left field, but he's also very bright, and deserves credit. He's been wearing this kind of laser device for some time now, and doesn't seem to have any retinal burn-in.

I think that you'd have to consider the intensity levels involved, it's a matter of wavelength, intensity and duration of exposure. It's quite possible that the 3 combined make this extremely safe. My approximation is that you probably risk more eye-damage from looking directly at a halogen desk lamp bulb.

His system is more interesting, because he includes a camera, and does image processing to include relevant information about the outside world onto the retinal image that is being displayed: ie. names of people (yes, little laser overlayed name tags), recalling facts and so on. I'm not sure how successful his systems are, but the way he speaks about them, they work fairly sucessfully.

...the results of the Milgram Authority experiments.


Ernest Borgnine knew him well, sent Will Shatner straight to Hell