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> Oh, my mistake, I must have read the poorly translated bible.
Your real mistake is assuming you know more that you do. Reading books filled with dubious (and contradictory) theories, poor scholarship and wishful thinking don't make one wise.

> If you were to take the Egyptean religion (the one used by the people,
> not the leaders) as of about 100 bc and mix it with Judaism,
> the results would be very much like pre-Roman Christianity.
And I must believe, O hallowed authority, because... ?

> Thats very clear to me and there are many of examples in the bible
> where Jesus introduced concepts that were common in the nearby areas
> that were not common in Judaism. The best example might be dealing
> with sick people.
?
? Miracles were not very common then, neither are they common now.

> As far as other ledgedens. Not all groups in the world do remember
> a global flood however all groups that live near major rivers
> do have flood stories. Most of which have been corrupted by
> well meaning missionaries.
Um, global floods, as in floods that kill all mankind? Like the more than 2500 year Vedic story from Hinduism. I used to be Hindu. Let me tell you my people are no pushovers, and certainly not given to rewriting all copies of (what they see as) scriptures on the say so of a few missionaries. And then, there are the other people groups listed here?

> Also the bird release thing is nonsense considering one
> was a 6 day flood vs a 40 day flood. If you want to check
> out what happens when ground is underwater for 40 days, look
> into the Mississippi flood of 93 since some areas were underwater
> for that length of time.

What! 40 days?!!? It lasted more than a year --
the most precisely recorded year of the Bible. It took months for the waters to recede as written in the Bible. Genesis chapter 7 says the rain started on the "second month, in the seventeenth day of the month". Genesis chapter 8 shows the waters finally receding: "And the waters were going and falling until the tenth month. In the tenth month, in the first of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen" (the mountains being pretty high - the Ararat ranges) (emphasis added).

Does this sound like a global flood or not?

Also, the order of release of birds makes sense. A dove is a clean bird, not a carrion feeder like the raven that is happy to feed on floating carcasses. Once the dove found a place to rest, Noah was sure it is safe for him to go out.

• proposing laws to strip American suspects of their citizenship,
• imprisoning American citizens arrested on American soil as "enemy combatants" without recourse to civilian courts or legal counsel despite the contrary dictates of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, and
• sending non-citizens arrested in the U.S. to be tortured in third countries at the whim of U.S. authorities.

• hasn't bothered to reform an FBI that in the days before September 11th intentionally destroyed translated intercepted terrorist conversations, in order to get the FBI budget increased,
• apparently preferred to invade Iraq rather than deal with the more immediate threat of Osama bin Laden after September 11th,
• and now in the ultimate on ironies, while ignoring the Sixth amendment (and the Fourth) is telling us that a top priority should be, not Iraq, not Osama, but passing a Constitutional Amendment to marginalize gays!

Years ago, (circa 1990) we had one of the salesman drop by to deliver our "free" Marriam Webster dictionary. He was selling $3000 ecyclopedia sets. I asked him for a CD version but he was intent on selling a shelf full of books that would be obsolete in a year (or less).

As opposed to a CD which will magically update itself every year (or less).

It seems other people had been asking for the same thing.

CDs that magically updated themselves every year?

He really became quite agitated about me insisting on a subscription based CD version and stormed off.

Maybe you should have taken the hint the first time he said he didn't offer a CD version and not been such a prick.

No $3000 sale of rotting books,

Rotting books that will last 150 years if well cared for as opposed to 30 years in an absolute best case scenario for the CD (much less considering the proprietary executable on the CD which will only run on a certain version of a particular OS).

Companies that do not listen to their potential customers deserve whatever fate they create for themselves.

They're listening to you, it's just that they're too busy laughing their balls off at your stupid ass to satisfy you with a new product.

I imagine that if they were to take the material that they already had on computer and market it through CD's and then later through DVD's they would still have a booming business.

Speak of the devil, and it's only $69.95. You sir are a genius.

I nominate you for Slavish Technology Worshipping Jacknuts of the Year.

They are available. Encyclopaedia Britannica Print Set Suite

"Everybody knows something about something. If we'd just WRITE THIS STUFF DOWN, we wouldn't have to keep paying people to keep looking it up for us."

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=encyclope dia

I don't see anything referring to "authority". You're just pulling shit out of your ass.

How do you determine authority? What, does it depend if X amount of people believe them to be telling the truth?

Great, so the wiki dictionary does not think that the wiki encyclopaedia needs authority. Outstanding! I think we should find the wiki magazine that awards a +5 informative to this nugget of information. Oh well, slashdot will have to do.

In order for the articles for a body of knowlege to be considered accurate, they would have to be authoritative. To that end, they should be compiled by recognized authorities in the field in question. The history of the encyclopedia britannica illustrates this point. Section on psychoanalysis written by Sigmund Freud makes more sense than section on psychoanalysis by J Random Hacker on the internet, or Mr Trollsworth for that matter.

For what it is worth, you are probably an authority on the video games you were writing about. I am not sure since there are no links to your contributions.

Wikipedia is great BECAUSE it is free and ad-free, and is not swayed by commercial interests.

If you want a commercial encyclopedia, you'll find one here.

haha!

And for those that will miss the reference when the story is surely ammended:

"Sunday is the one hundreth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modren Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd."

LOL!

And for those that will miss the reference when the story is surely ammended:

"Sunday is the one hundreth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modren Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd."

> They don't give out Nobel prizes for "Most Novel New Method to Kill People".

Um, he didn't say "Nobel Peace Prize." He said Nobel Prize. They do give out Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, economics, medicine/physiology, and literature as well as for peace.

I'm sure plenty of Nobel-prize-worthy groundbreaking discoveries in the areas of physics and chemistry are created for the express purpose of killing people.

> They don't give out Nobel prizes for "Most
> Novel New Method to Kill People".

Irony intended, I'm sure, but you do know what Alfred Nobel was famous for, right?

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
-- Jesus

Many years ago, I was doing a school report on Fidel Castro's revolutionary activities. My mother had an encyclopedia that had been bought in 1959 -- Just about the time that Castro was starting his second (and successful) revolution. The Encyclopedia Brittanica had about one paragraph on him -- describing him as little more than a failed revolutionary.

For me, this historical view of Castro (the view itself being of historical nature) was rather interesting... and unlikely to have been repeated in later versions of the encyclopedia. Today, even the teaser for the Fidel Castro's entry in the encyclopedia is as long as the entire original

. I'm very glad that my mother bought the original Encyclopedia, and that my sister has seen fit to keep it. I would also encourag anybody who has such old works to keep them as historical record, much less likely to change than the 'net.

For Umberto's third record form -- organic memory -- I live in BC, which still has a reasonably active Native culture. There are still a small handful of people in BC who grew up trained almost exclusively in the pre-european style of the various nations that are now British Columbia. The Native tradition is very much an oral one, and they had methods and customs designed to keep such histories constant over time... Present day researchers were surprised to find that centuries after first contact in the far north, the native oral histories of the episodes were pretty much in agreement with the written logs of the explorers of that time.

I remember one native elder recalling how his (then) elder scoffed at the european tradition of writing everything down...

"If it's that important, why do they have to write it down to remember it?"

Names of minerals are a tricky subject, and there are a lot of fallacies- a mineral may have a chemical composition, a common use name, and belong to a general group of closely-related compounds. Because of this, the guidelines do exist. It's not unlike trying to name a species of organisms.A history of the Commission on New Minerals and Mineral Names (CNMMN) demonstrates that this is not a subject touched upon lightly in the scientific world. (this comment is going to have a lot of links, because i'm interested in rocks and minerals. The info may be interesting or, as with the IMA info, useful and particularly relevant, so please bear with me.)

It becomes an issue in the everyday world more than one might expect. For example, i have anAlexandrite ring, a family heirloom. It's gorgeous, it's stunning, and it's a rock rarely seen in the jeweller's.

What's the difference between this and any other cut and polished 'ballistic missile from god'? (thank you, Mr. Watterson, for that beautiful quote.) It's pretty. So people remember it, although most people get it confused with iolite.

Amethyst is just another kind of quartz.

Rocks for which there is no scientific use frequently end up as jewellery, or even bookends, and i guess that's where a lot of the names get dropped. Rhodochrosite becomes 'that pink stone there,' and Calcite becomes (and i do not jest) "Fiberoptic stone," or sometimes "TV stone," or i've even seen it just listed as 'refractive' or 'optical' quartz. (Yeah, i've gotten kicked out of the museum of science gift shop over this one, but they let me back in when i promised to shut up.)

Personally, i think that such uses should involve the chemical composition in the labelling, sonce then people would grow up knowing the difference between nephrite and jadeite, and things labelled 'serpentine' (yes, it also talks about chromium)(see also here)and 'amazonite' would then end up consistently identified. Red ruby would be "ruby- Al2O3" and people would learn to recognise it the way they did the contents of ordinary table salt.

*sigh*

Yeah, i know nobody's going to label Paramelaconite (a tetragonal oxide of copper) for the common consumer... but isn't it a nice thought? For more on the naming of minerals, try and here, and also here, with the International Mineralogical Association.

Because he WASN'T like the other hard line "commies." Gorby was the first of the next generation of the Communist (Bolshevik) party. Here, what follows is the birth and death dates of the rulers (since the name of the post changed a lot) of the USSR.

Lenin 1870-1924
Stalin 1879-1953 (note this period)
Khrushchev 1894-1971
Brezhnev 1906-1982
Andropov 1914-1984
Cherenko 1911-1985
Gorby 1931-????

Note that everyone up to Gorby was not only alive during the Lenin years but was policialy indoctrinated in the Stalin years. Gorby came too late for that. Born in 1931, Gorby's school years got him nearly all the way through the Stalin period.

Consequently, Gorbachev was really a product of the Khrushchev years rather than Stalin. Realize that Khrushchev's break with Stalin (as mentioned in grandparent post) was not looked upon favorably by the hard line commies you refer to and their move on power following his tenure instituted a period of reactionary extremism.

Gorbachev then, represented a fundamental ideological break with the old hard line elements in the party. If Reagan (note I'm fixing my spelling. All you ACs who bitched about it clearly didn't read the sig) had really been the deciding factor in the fall of the Soviet Union one would expect to see a re-centering of the political climate under Cherenko, Brezhnev, and Andropov all of whom held power during Reagan's first term of office. Instead, what you see is the exact opposite. These three are Stalinists they don't move to the center, but rather further to the extremes.

Reagan's evil empire musings and his overtly hostile attitude towards the Soviet Union weren't terribly helpfull in the big picture. In fact Reagan's saber rattling nearly plunged us into thermonuclear war during the Able Archer exercises, a little publicized intelligence/war-game debacle that got way out of hand.

As for the spending of the 1980s, the United States dug itself into a multi trillion dollar hole in the process. Most of that money went into the military industrial complex. While I've no real issue beefing up the military (as having the 2nd best isn't good for much) its a real pity that some of the social programs so badly needed in this country go un-funded so we can sink another billion into systems both unneeded and unwanted by the Pentagon.

Getting back to the point... Gorby did what he did because he saw the ruin being perpetuated on his country by the lies and secrecy of the Stalinists. He genuinely believed he could redeem the Soviet Government and put to rest some of the injustices done in the name of the Party under Stalin and his followers. He was wrong.

When the dust settled Bush and Reagan got to grin at the world and tell it what a great job they did because no one was left to disagree with them.

I was just talking about this yesterday with a co-worker... Sometimes real books are just better, but when I see that a set of encyclopedias is $1,395, I think I'm sticking to the online method.

It makes me wonder what people's libraries will look like 50 years from now...

These days I only keep the Britannica "Great Books" series in my home and assorted DVDROM encyclopedias. I rarely use the DVDs though.

I used to buy the newspaper for movies. The telephone book for numbers. The TV Guide (in the Sunday paper) for TV shows. Now all of that is taken care of in Apple's Sherlock or Watson. I don't even mail anything these days...I use email. I do mail stuff for half.com sales and netflix.com....but even my bills are starting to be handled through an online bill pay service.

I am starting to get a lot of my news from the internet too. Soon, I will only watch TV for news commentary and shows...on Tivo, of course! :-)

...called it Social Intermental Activity. I too believe he predates everyone else.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Tarde

But I still have a couple of criticisms. First, it is rude and lame to lecture me on the whole "noble savages" thing when you're replying to a thread I started on the very same theme.

Second, you need to do a little more reading before you latch onto a pleasing theory. A lot of species went away 10,000 years ago, and on all the continents. Now, you can blame this on overhunting, since this is precisely when human populations began to increase drastically. But few experts accept this as the only cause. The planet was undergoing a massive climatic shift at the time. The most striking example of this is the Sahara desert, which before this period was more like the Sahara jungle.

I'm going to say it one last time, then I'm going to give up: you need to approach theories about the past with scepticism. Not just about the agenda of the person propounding theory, but your own agenda.

This link [St Andrew's University, UK] credits Hooke with determining that Jupiter rotates and this link [Wikipedia] and [Encylopaedia Britannica] credit discovery of the GRS to either Hooke or Cassini around 1665. Schwabe was the first person to produce an accurate drawing and description of the GRS.

Actually, it's "seppuku." http://www.britannica.com/ebi/article?eu=350542

I would consider it fundamental to at least have basic knowledge of the last 500 years of political history...

Well you'd know that the US didn't exist 500 years ago, right? But that's beside the point. Let's have a little history lesson.

Remember the 80's, when the USSR was touted as having the best health care system in the world, since it was all free? I mean, the government paid for it, but it was free! And all the doctors were women! It was like a democrat's wet dream. But then the Berlin wall came down, and the USSR collapsed in on itself... and we learned the truth. They had third-world style hospitals and most people never got the care they needed. But obviously that was something that was specific to the USSR, and the same thing would never happen here, right? So let's just suck up the money from the people that work for a living, and give it a try! After all, the only thing we have to lose is our lives!

How about taxes? Since YOU said you like to go back 500 years for reference, maybe you'd like to know that the Founding Fathers specifically stated that Congress "no tax shall be laid unless in proportion to the census". Oh, and about the 16th amendment? Before the Democrats passed it in 1913, the Supreme Court found it Unconstitutional. Imagine that. So, Federal Income Tax is Unconstitutional. While we raise the federal income tax, we should also probably raise the state income tax... just in case there isn't enough money being drained out of "working families" pockets.

Education? Well, let's consider. Here's a test that was actually given to 8th graders in 1895. Can you pass it now? Can you get over 50%? Maybe our current education system isn't working then. Maybe it's time to hold children accountable for what they know, and what they don't know. If they can't pass a test, they don't pass the grade. Period. I don't see what's so hard about that. If more than 50% of the class doesn't pass a test, then fire the teacher. No more teacher's unions and whining about money. There are PLENTY of people out there looking for jobs as teachers that would be more than happy to show you how much children can learn.

Environment? The earth, according to all kinds of scientists, is over 10,000,000,000 years old. Do you REALLY think that us driving SUV's is going to kill the environment? The earth has survived earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, meteor showers, explosions, fires, radiation from the sun, UV rays, etc. Do you really think using 0.0005% more gasoline to get from point A to point B is REALLY going to make Mother Nature shiver in her boots?

Any other questions?

• Why didn't Corel wordperfect come with a pen?
  Would you like to buy this tablet computer, on sale this week?
• -Where do I buy ink if the typewriter runs out of ink?
  We're having a sale on inkjet cartridges...
• -If I press delete does that delete everything?
  To delete everything so that nobody can ever read it again, you need this special program.
• -I heard it comes with a dictionary. Can I upgrade to an encyclopedia set?
  Of course. Just click here to order Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• -Does this program open on sundays and saturdays?
  Yes, but if you don't want it to, we can put in a timer that shuts it down on weekends.

1. Normans were Danes (aka Vikings) who took over the northern coast of France. See this article
2. Much of England was under Viking control at one time, this was called the Danelaw

But don't go thinking that France (or the EU, or for that matter the UN) is representative of the voice of the world, either.

France doesn't, but the UN clearly should

Should it? Have a careful look at the people who founded the UN, and their views (here's an interesting perspective on an odd piece of NU and US combined subversion), and you might form a different opinion. Likewise the EU; many of the movers and shakers are committed to rebuilding Charlemagne's empire, quite a different picture from the one held by the rest of the world and a good chunk of the EU's own constituents besides. Some are "more equal than others."

Nevertheless, the UN, regardless of its roots and covert original aim, should be representative of the world's people. It's a pity that they represent nothing like it, if any such single view actually exists.

[quoting Patrick Henry] For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth

Well, it's not by browsing CNN we are going to get that.

Oh, no. What a shocking surprise.
My faith in the impartiality of the world's media is irretrievably shaken. </sarcasm weight=leaden>

Are you truly so dillusional that you unquestionably assume your own intelligence at all times? You couldn't even bother to go to an online dictionary and look up the word? Ahh... I love slashdot.

btw, here is the definition of irregardless.

Of course, it goes without saying that not only are YOU the idiot, but you are a hopelessly arrogant one as well.

Britannica beats them both. Subscription service though - worth it in my opinion.

1. the act or process of consolidating : the state of being consolidated
2. the process of uniting : the quality or state of being united; specifically : the unification of two or more corporations by dissolution of existing ones and creation of a single new corporation
3. pathological alteration of lung tissue from an aerated condition to one of solid consistency

I'm pointing out this vocabulary word because I'm trying to say that all these VICTIM companies must band together in an effort to wipe out these criminals, and furthermore, to take legal action against the government for allowing a ridiculous patent, which was OBVIOUSLY issued in malice, to be issued in the first place.

Oh yeah. And don't forget to spell "consolidation" twenty five times and to use it in three sentences.

It's sarcasm, people. Sarcasm.

As for the *DEFINITION*, as you put it, you might want to look it up, some other time before you troll.

As for the rest of your nonsense, you should consider the possibility that some people might disagree with the Israeli oppression of the palestineans as well as the palestinean terror.

Not that I really enjoy debating semantics, but...

cartel: association of independent firms or individuals for the purpose of exerting some form of restrictive or monopolistic influence on the production or sale of a commodity or group of commodities." -- Britannica

I.e. a cartel is not a monopoly per se, but a cartel is monopolistic.

(On the other hand, the reason I used the word "monopolistic" instead of "monopoly" is that I couldn't remember the word "cartel", so I guess your rebuttal did me some good.)

-a

For those of you who were like me and have no clue what this story is talking about:

Parrot Code
Parrot FAQ
Parrot

It's probably because a plausible theory backed up by solid scientific evidence adequately describes the evolution of fruit flies, but a similar mechanism for spontaneous generation of software has not yet been discovered.

Get an encyclopedia. A troll is a mythological creature. By the way, I couldn't find your definition of troll at either www.dictionary.com or www.webster.com. What dictionary were you looking at?

Thank you for putting things into perspective. I have never been to Poland, so can hardly picture what life is like there. Was in USSR in the eighties, and if that was any indication...

Most of the 20th century meant wars or occupation for Poland (I personally know people who were prisoners of the extermination camps in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), so I've heard a lot of really terrible stories), but there were times, where we had an empire that reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea, being a very important power in Europe, not only as a military power, but also in the terms of culture and science. Those were times of the great Aztecs civilisation in America.

Living in the exact centre of Europe is nice, but being exactly between the Germany and USSR used to be very unfortunate.

Now we're part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and soon we'll join the European Union. I do hope that things will change for better, and that the 21st century will mean, unlike the 20th century, first of all peace and freedom, but also a fast economical and technological growth for Poland.

A good introduction to Polish history is the History of Poland on Encyclopedia.com and the History of Poland on Wikipedia.

You can find more general info on Encyclopedia.com, on Wikipedia and on Britannica.com. If you're interested, there are lots of links to information about Poland on Polska.pl (Polska means Poland in Polish).

If you are ever on the West Coast of the US, drop me a line. Email is the last bit of my URL at the domain name in front of it. I'd be happy to show you one way of providing bandwidth to a community.

Can material described in the article really be called "concrete"?

As it is written there its only resemblance to concrete is that it consists of coarse aggregate, fine aggregate and binding agent. But this is not a recipe for concrete only - also for other materials. Also, Dr. Price's secret material can't be poured or produced on site - one the main reasons of traditional concrete popularity. It would probably find its use in form of blocks of translucent material, that could be used to enhance possibilities for architects but what Dr. Price is trying to do is another building material, which is very interesting indeed but can hardly be called "concrete".

The relevant part; tape 2, side 2:

"...The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases with time. Moreover, when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems."

(He gives an example)

" The Second Law of Thermodynamics has a rather different status to that of other laws of science. Other laws, such as Newton's Law of Gravity, for example, are absolute laws. That is, they always hold.

On the other hand, the Second Law is a statistical law. That is, it does not hold always, just in the vast majority of cases."

Zero-point energy probably does exist. There certainly is something there, we have managed to prove that much. I just don't believe that a single person, working alone, with a mechanical background, is going to 'suddenly uncover' the secret. I believe we are, unfortunately, beyond that point in our scientific development.

Almost all of these supposed 'perpetual motion' devices have some mechanical component. Something moving, some clockworks, something. There was even one instance where the reporter noticed the speed of the device was rather random. Upon closer inspection, a small cable was found, leading to the next room. The device was, in fact, powered by an elderly man in a rocking chair!

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", huh?

They still kept troops in Italy. However, it would have been more difficult to move a large amount of men and machinery through the Alps and would have been easier for the Germans to defend it. Moving an army through the plains of France is much easier. Invading via northern France would also allow them to use the numerous air bases in the UK for air cover and offensive purposes. The logistics of moving men & supplies from the UK across the channel would be easier and faster. According to this page, it was the Russians who _really_ wanted an invasion of France and the Brits were the ones who wanted to take out N. Africa and Italy first to protect their empire and MidEast oil.

Going through Greece wouldn't have helped them that much: it would have extended their supply lines, wouldn't have provided as many forward bases, all the while being closer to Germany's main troop strength. It would have been easier for the Nazi's to shift large amounts of troops to fight in Greece than it would France.

Politics had a lot to do with it as did stopping outside Paris and letting DeGaule and his troops take the city. It still was a smart thing to do militarily and the US leadership was no more incompetent than the British.

I used to use Encyclopedia Britannica once in a while. But now, I can't use it at all because it's a pay site. I can't justify paying a subscription when I might use it once or twice a month.

I currently pay to subscribe to one on-line content provider : Cooks Illustrated. Its worth it to me. Salon might be worth it to me, too, but I don't buy it. As more and more sites go pay-for-play, I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of sites. 1) I am only a casual reader, and 2) even if I thought it was worth it, I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars a month to keep up with all the sites I visit.

And here's where it starts to break down: the (commercial) web can end up just like print media. Sure, any print publication could be subscribed to by everyone, but everyone is not going to subscribe to everything, or even one thing. So you have your subscribers, and you don't reach anyone else.

I know that Salon Premium pretty much drove me away from Salon. I accept that in the future, I will be much more limited web site availability. I'm willing to pay that price because all that casual content isn't worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to maintain subscriptions.

Micropayments, anyone?

"I wish that I understood how people could be happy yet lack curiosity,
because I would no longer find them so alien, so frightening, so unlikely to
care about anything beyond their own comfort." --Jonathan W. King (adapted)

Dude, I think you need to pick up a history book. Yes, the war of 1812 was started by the Americans invading what we now call Canada (yes, I'm Canadian). Both the French and the British fought the US in that war because they had land stakes in that area. The war went to December 24, 1814. In 1814, the British took Washington. Undoubtedly there were French militia with them since they were fight with the British in the war.

Even if we suppose that there is a global conspiracy to cover up a different burning of the White House not in 1814 but during the war of 1812 prior to that which happened during the British occupation of Washington in 1814, it still doesn't explain why there is a letter from 1811 refering to it at the White House (did this burning of the pink house happen both during the war of 1812 and before 1811?). If you don't trust snopes, then the encyclopoedia britannica, which is a British publication, states that the term "White House" was commonly used in 1810.

Quite frankly, your version of history does not make sence (starting with the sentance "It happened during the war of 1812, not in 1814") because it isn't reality. You were duped by an urban legend. It happens.

Mea Culpa: I did this search, which only gets external links, and they don't work in my browser anyway.

Plus Ice T, who isn't in Britannica at all

Errrr, come on - this is pure FUD. At least try the search before you post, and you'll find articles on

• Gangsta Rap
• Hip Hop
• Los Angeles 1990's Overview

The last of which mentiones Ice T in the second paragraph...

Oh, and it gives you two external guides (The Rough Guide is my favourite) with history and discography.

You are not going to promote Open Source / Open Documents / Community Efforts by being factually incorrect.

Plus Ice T, who isn't in Britannica at all

Errrr, come on - this is pure FUD. At least try the search before you post, and you'll find articles on

• Gangsta Rap
• Hip Hop
• Los Angeles 1990's Overview

The last of which mentiones Ice T in the second paragraph...

Oh, and it gives you two external guides (The Rough Guide is my favourite) with history and discography.

You are not going to promote Open Source / Open Documents / Community Efforts by being factually incorrect.

Plus Ice T, who isn't in Britannica at all

Errrr, come on - this is pure FUD. At least try the search before you post, and you'll find articles on

• Gangsta Rap
• Hip Hop
• Los Angeles 1990's Overview

The last of which mentiones Ice T in the second paragraph...

Oh, and it gives you two external guides (The Rough Guide is my favourite) with history and discography.

You are not going to promote Open Source / Open Documents / Community Efforts by being factually incorrect.

Plus Ice T, who isn't in Britannica at all

Errrr, come on - this is pure FUD. At least try the search before you post, and you'll find articles on

• Gangsta Rap
• Hip Hop
• Los Angeles 1990's Overview

The last of which mentiones Ice T in the second paragraph...

Oh, and it gives you two external guides (The Rough Guide is my favourite) with history and discography.

You are not going to promote Open Source / Open Documents / Community Efforts by being factually incorrect.

Plus Ice T, who isn't in Britannica at all

Errrr, come on - this is pure FUD. At least try the search before you post, and you'll find articles on

• Gangsta Rap
• Hip Hop
• Los Angeles 1990's Overview

The last of which mentiones Ice T in the second paragraph...

Oh, and it gives you two external guides (The Rough Guide is my favourite) with history and discography.

You are not going to promote Open Source / Open Documents / Community Efforts by being factually incorrect.

no reference work started out comprehensive

And what exactly are you basing that observation on? I have a facimille of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and, while some of the articles are a bit shorter that we would expect in a modern volume (famously the complete entry for Woman runs: "the female of man. See Homo.") but it is comprehensive with few, if any, obvious omissions.

Similarly, the French L'Encyclopédie was, with its original 28 and first edition 35 volumes in folio size, a remarkably comprehensive work.

Indeed, I would argue that (commercial) encyclopaedias have a history of being very comprehensive from the first edition onwards. In this spirit, none of the free versions are anywhere close, not even beta.

The point of an encyclopaedia is, indeed, to be comprehensive and also authoritative. I had a look at the "best of Wikipedia" pages, and while the writing was sometimes engaging, on these two counts the articles simply did not measure up.

As an example, look at the article on Calendar. On the first count, that of being comprehansive, it fails obviously by missing half of the articles to specific calendars it mentions at the bottom. (This may change over time.)

On the second count, that of being authoritative, the Encyclopædia Britannica (subscription required, yadayada) runs to 17 double column pages in my printed edition. It mentions over 15 specific calendars, as opposed to the 6 of Wiki (3 of which has no content).

And - I almost forgot! - the Wiki page is factually incorrect. A calendar does not measure time, a clock does. The printed Britannica definition "a calendar is a means of grouping days in ways convenient for regulating life and religious observances and for historical and scientific purposes" is much better.

For the computer programmers out there, think of the calendar as the thing that translates time (time_t or whatever; an event in the Universe) into a date; a date having a legal or social meaning. In this context it is interesting that the calendar can change with eight to ten weeks' notice.

So I guess I'm not impressed yet. Still, it is early days and the project may grow.

It's funny you should mention reductio ad absurdum, since that is actually my point.. Why you're a big fan of it beats me (other than entertainment :-)

- Steeltoe

It's a reference to "yellow journalism", the use of lurid features and sensationalized news in newspaper publishing to attract readers and increase circulation. The phrase was coined in the 1890s to describe the tactics employed in furious competition between two New York City newspapers, the World and the Journal. Read about it here in Encyclopedia Britannica