Slashdot Mirror

I don't like Wikipedia's system and its edit wars and such. That's why I use Everything2 instead, because it doesn't have wiki's flaws.

Anyone checked out e2 recently?

Slashdot is a public forum where everything is dicussed in far too much depth and 90% of it is pointless

193. Klingon women don't dance tango.

The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!

I think you missed the gp's point. He wants to center a container object, not text or the text within a container. text-align is a text property.

While margin: 0 auto; is the correct way of doing this, IE demands you use text-align anyway, even though it's intended for text (this is IE's fault, not CSS's). Use text-align: center; on the element that the one you want to center is inside of, and then text-align: left; to counteract it again for the element itself.

Which is one of the many reasons why I don't like Internet Explorer.

The same thing happened with Tetris.

And in that case, you can look up the references at the Wikipedia article or at the E2 article.

E2 started out as a similar project, which eventually evolved into a community with both community oversight and a set of editors and admins charged with vetting content. Unfortunately everyone decided that was too difficult and started writing stuff about girls and boys and poetry.

It's not broken, anyone can fix it.

In other news, e2 (who I trust above anything else) libels Charles Manson as a "mass murderer". Now even if he killed a bunch of people (as it admits he only "quite possibly never" did), he digged Timothy Leary, which is cool, the Beatles, which is cool, and made music himself... of which I like "Mechanical Man". So that's a whole bunch of cool, and... uh... politicans are bad, they kill more, and stuff, and they're not cool, never added something to society, never enjoyed anything beyond having more power, yeah, add quote "the military does not start wars. Politicians start wars" (William Westmoreland). (The committee would also like to recommend Corrosion of Conformity - Dirty Hands Empty Pockets)

Actually, both of these things (Base and now Fremont) seem more like everything2 than anything else.

Yes, you can break a penis.

I Am Extreme
Yesterday at work I drank an Extreme Gulp while doing some Extreme Programming, and then I went home and ate Extreme Duritos while watching Extreme Sports on cable.

Today every muscle in my body aches.

Posted on May 01, 2002
http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/000192.html

keyboardism

AC wrote:

Look for the kind of jobs that *are* available in your geographical area and adapt those skills?

By the time I've gone to school to learn those jobs, they won't be in demand anymore.

Work on some homebrew projects with an interesting idea focusing on the above skillset

I already have worked on homebrew projects, but despite my homebrew projects, employers don't want me.

adding a few more projects to your resume even if these are your own ideas that you have or will implement (think java, j2ee, c++, large scale systems, sql, oracle, async messaging etc.)

How can I work with enterprise level projects if I don't already have an enterprise level budget to buy a single-user license for some of these? I can afford PHP and MySQL but not Oracle. What exactly are "large scale systems"?

Get published, initially a few articles here and there would suffice, this gets you noticed better than anything else.

What subjects? Print or online? I've already written a few articles about GBA sprite memory management and present and future Nintendo DS modding methods. And if you count everything2, I have nearly 400 articles posted.

Move to a better and more technology friendly area, if you can.

Moving costs money. My job as a clerical volunteer for the VA hospital in Fort Wayne pays $0.00 per hour. Even minimum wage employers such as restaurants and mall stores don't want to hire me. What should I do?

Okay, high-brow litterature it isn't but I still enjoy Rick Cook's Wizard series. The main character is a geek that gets transported to a parallel world where magic works and computers don't. He is like a fish on land until he figures out how to program magic. From there the fun begins. Also, the references to programming and computers are mostly correct.

I'm in two minds about Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. It's a brilliant story, no doubt about that. Orson is also geeky enough -- in the 80s, he even worked for a computer magazine to which I contributed. But Ender's Game is a straightforward story with a twist. It doesn't force you to keep rewriting your mental maps, like, say, The Eye in the Pyramid.

Glad you got the joke and realized it wasn't a spelling error.
Definition of patiented
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Patiented &lastnode_id=1765531

Here's the link http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=176552 3&lastnode_id=1765513

Good post. Though it wasn't the web that brought in the influx of everyone and all of everyone's uncles, so much as it was The September that never ended.

Kingdom Hearts one had, as its theme, Disney animation. Which is well and good, because animation has historically been the thing Disney does best. Although many of the worlds of the game were wildly different from each other as to invite cognative dissonance (Jack Skellington and Alladin, Beast and those Final Fantasy dweebs?), at least they could cop to "Disney magic" being the theme, which, although it may be a lousy piece of corporate propaganda to build a game around, at least it attempted to dodge the issue.

And, the animation on the main Disney guys WAS pretty good.

This time around, they're putting Tron and Pirates of the Carribean into a game. For the characters in the game, no problem, these are just another set of "worlds" to travel though, they're supposed to be different from each other.

For the player, however, or to ME at least, this just seems like a lousy exercise in enhancing brand recognition. What's Disney-magical about Tron? When it came out, most people didn't even HAVE a computer.

Yeah, I bitched and moaned about the original Kingdom Hearts too. (Warning: link contains extreme invective.) No one listened to me then either. What's it gonna take, Kingdom Hearts 3, containing all the Buena Vista and Miramax characters? Is Sora and company going to run into Mr. 3000 and Hot Chick next? Will they go on a Mission to Mars to avert Armageddon? Play B-Ball with Air Bud? Will they meet Dante and Randall? Will they stick it to the corporate man alongside Michael Moore in a Fahrenheit 9/11 world, doing 9999 damage to a hulking George W. Bush? Will...

Dammit, I'd better stop. This is getting too cool.

No, it was a true vector game, fitted with a color XY monitor. Video hardware of that day was nowhere near fast enough to rasterize a 3D scene at that resolution and framerate, even in wireframe.

How much easier would it be to influence people's votes if those people have no education?

How can it be any easier than it is now? Politicians control the curriculum. Politicians control the textbook choices. Politicians control what teachers are and are not allowed to say (do not offend the majority orthodoxy). Politicians control what students are and are not allowed to say (remember all of the post-Columbine harassment of disillusioned kids? yesterday's story about student blogs being censored?).

Of course, I've ranted about this before.

"Jack Thompson Off Of Alabama Case"

(And yes, I had that version of the compiler, and was quite amused by the sample program.)

The generalized uncertainty principle relates the product of uncertainties in two measurable quantities to the commutator of the operators representing the two quantities. If the two quantities are cannonically conjugate (like position and momentum), then it takes the simple form (Delta x)*(Delta p) >= hbar/2. You can think of the commutation relation that leads to that ([x,p] = i*hbar) sort of as the assumption imposing debroglie's relation in a more mathematically abstract way. If you want more detail about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, see my explanation here.

Correction: I said, "Appreciating why Bell's inequalities must be true requires some knowledge of quantum mechanics," but what I should have said is that appreciating why quantum mechanics can violate Bell's inequalities while classical mechanics can't takes some knowledge of quantum mechanics (specifically quantum entanglement). To understand just Bell's inequalities themselves you only need to understand mathematics, as it's merely a result about the limitations of classical physics.

Unfortunately, I'm a pretty busy guy these days and have meetings I must attend (and be sharp for) tomorrow, so I was only able to give his Feynman paper a glance. My reaction to the parts I read is that I doubt very strongly that it has any validity. Essentially, his claim seems to be that quantum mechanics (QM) has internal contradictions and gives nonsensical predictions (or no predictions). You have to ask yourself when anyone makes claims like those, "If that's true, how is it that physicists have used these theories to make specific, highly accurate predictions?" If the guys using the theory can make specific (and correct) predictions and agree on what the predictions are, then it doesn't seem his claims could be true from the outset. Note, this is different from if he were to claim they are logically consistent but make incorrect predictions.

My general reaction to the little bit I did read is that he is attacking straw men. Feynman's explanation of the Bohr radius in terms of the uncertainty principle is a way of attempting to get a feel for why the Bohr radius has that value, but it is not the way in which one would actually "prove" the stability of the Hydrogen atom. To find the ground state of hydrogen, you just use the Schroedinger equation, which reduces it to a problem in partial differential equations. I've not read Feynman's explanation personally, so I can't speak about its validity. In essence, he's attacking a particular explanation, not the actual derivation the people rely on. To show this is stable to radiative damping, one would add the quantized electromagnetic field to the calculation. He doesn't actually address this sort of calculation anywhere in the paper. He does talk about Dirac's equation, but one need not go to the relativistic formulation in order to treat the quantized EM field in this situation. Mostly he seems upset with some of the mathematical details of quantum field theory, though he makes no correct, persuasive points about it's problems (it seems he doesn't like renormalization). He also seems to spend time attacking the Bohr model of the atom, which doesn't make any sense, since no one claims this to be the correct model (it was a very early idea that later lead to the modern, QM, model).

Some other apparent errors I noted: Mills claims that the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle (HUP) is derived from the Schroedinger equation. That is incorrect. The HUP simply arises from the fact that you describe particles as waves according to de Broglie's relation. The Schroedinger equation is an extra assumption that then tells you how those waves behave in time. Mills claims as one of the problems with Dirac's equation that it admits negative energy states, but Dirac soon realized these were not negative energy states but antimatter, which was later observed vindicating his theory. All in all, I don't see a lot of specific objections here, just vague claims that problems exist.

In replying to another post, I did come up with a specific critique of Mills' work (see paragraph 3 of this post). I can't see how he can get around this objection, unless he wishes to claim his theory is non-local, in which case it isn't really classical, macroscopic physics as he said.

You can't say that New York was completely unplanned.
The grid system of Manhattan was a deliberate attempt to avoid the crazy street layouts of Europe.

Central Park was created before the proper city extended that far north. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1286521

Planning for New York's City Water Tunnel #3 started in 1954, construction began in the 1970s, and the current completion date is 2020.http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/news/3rdtunn el.html

and there are places like the Five Points that have been wiped out, unplanned districts can become slums.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points_(Ma nhattan)

Planned cities can become failures as well, http://imdb.com/title/tt0317248/
but you should moderate your opinion.

Wow, a tinfoil hat and robe! When do the pants and underwear come in?

They're not necessary! All I need is my trusty Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece!

180solutions is not a perpetrator and you can't implicate them in this scheme. If someone spray-painted "HAHA I RULE, SINCERELY, JOE SMITH 212-555-5555" on your house would you immediately call the cops asking that they arrest Joe Smith? Let's not forget what Joe Jobs are.

Now 180solutions could invoke the terms of their affiliate agreement and freeze payments to the scumbags that install this software on the sly. Of course that's no consolation to the consumer that gets stuck with that adware/spyware on his machine.

Forcibly installing 180solutions' software is no different legally than forcibly installing Firefox the next time someone visits your website with an unpatched version of IE. Both are immoral and should be illegal, but the software authors can't be faulted for producing software that may be installed without the user's consent by way of an IE vulnerability.

Where's the fourth horseman? There are supposed to be four!

You say, "But don't you ever wonder what exactly causes those high suicide rates?"

First, it's important to mention the suicide rates aren't high or low, they are relatively higher or lower (to say otherwise is ambiguous and nearly meaningless -- what is high and low?). It is more precise to say that Japan's rate is higher than America's. Sorry for the nitpick. Back on topic...

One doesn't have to 'ever wonder' about it. You can read about it. A good place to start is googling "karoshi" or "karoushi" (here's my blurb about it http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=476054 ). While karoshi is not a leading cause of suicide (nor a leading form of karoshi as roughly a third of karoshi are suicides) it is an important and relevant place to start in understanding the societal (and thus family/work) pressures that lead to suicide in Japan (to get in a /. meme). It wouldn't hurt to research conformity, pop-culture, Buddhism (including Zen), bushido and their enduring effects (in no particular order) on loyalty, honor, "saving face", filial and ancestral relationships, perception of after-life, taboos, etc.

To save you the trouble, the short version is something like this: We think suicide is bad... our acculturation demands it, but not so much in Japan. It's a sin for us but in some cases it is seemingly requisite to a Nihonjin. The "barrier to entry", if you will, is lower. Once again it's the context that matters.

Finally, not to you specifically (but to take part in the hand-waving of this thread), the teen pregnancy rates and violent or sexual TV have essentially nothing to do with it.

Anyhow, nothing personal. :-)

(Plural, personal pronouns used broadly and loosely.)

What may help Wikipedia is to adapt some of Everything2's ideas. Namely, to allow several concurring writeups for one topic. This would allow for many different viewpoints to coexist. For some topics it is simply not possible to condensate all the opinions and views into *one* coherent body of text.

Of course you'd still have the problem that a potential reader does not know which of these writeups he can rely on. So you could add 2 mechanisms. First, highlight articles from experts somehow, and second, have one 'main writeup' that is maintained exactly as it is now.

This would yield a consenus view on the subject AND additional personal viewpoints.

And the nice thing is, you could simply implement it by adding the possibility of writeups ('comments') to the existing articles and some sort of registered users who have proven credibility for certain subjects.

So long as there's a picture of cowboy neal's pondering visage next to every story (throw out those damn colourful icons).

Here are a few to template:
http://panamaus.org/gallery/albums/e2misc/cowboyne al_pokemon2.highlight.jpg
Cowboy Breakfast

http://everything2.com/images/incoming/FuPater.jpg
Cowboy neal salesman protection stance

http://doulopolis.net/albums/E2%20Photos/Hollandai se%20Vapormeet%20(Michigan)/cowboyneal_playing_gui tar.jpg
'Good Times'

You're not getting it-- if it wasn't for the idiots who buy things from spam e-mails and thereby make it a profitable venture, spammers would have no incentive to bother in the first place.

Quite right, what about the Office of Strategic Influence?

At least Evil Dead has the camp feel of something like "Cannibal, The Musical". There have been worse. Stephen King's Carrie. Rocky. Lolita. Prettybelle,. Flowers for Algernon (wtf?).

Homer: e2 node & Simpsons Archive.

• Tabbed message windows for easy switching of conversations Accounts option allows user to log on as many different accounts at once as desired

• Transparency support via a plugin for conversation and buddy list windows (only under Microsoft Windows)

• Aliasing nicknames by real name of user

• Grouping different buddies that are really the same person into a "contact" [2]

• Logging conversations and messages supported [3]

• Buddy Pounce feature pops up notifications or plays a sound when a user changes status [4]

but rather than the Necronomicon, I'd recommend reading the Gastronomicon. Yum, fried Chtulhu tentacles...

Why should you trash Mario, when even Super Mario Bros 1 has a complex story?

Maybe if you had a good keyboard, you could just rinse it off in the shower.

This is common in Japanese corporations. Keiretsu

No, he mentioned it. There's a difference

Similarities between Wikipedia and E2

• Large searchable database of articles, pretty much every conceivable title has something written under it
• You can log in and write stuff
• That's about it

Why E2 is different

• You gotta log in to write something
• Anything you write stays yours and can't be changed by other people
• There's a voting/experience system
• POV and proud of it
• Original research is welcomed, along with stuff like this, personal anecdotes, fiction, and outright lies
• Has no actual long-term goals whatsoever
• Contains stuff which would actually blow your mind

Similarities between Wikipedia and E2

• Large searchable database of articles, pretty much every conceivable title has something written under it
• You can log in and write stuff
• That's about it

Why E2 is different

• You gotta log in to write something
• Anything you write stays yours and can't be changed by other people
• There's a voting/experience system
• POV and proud of it
• Original research is welcomed, along with stuff like this, personal anecdotes, fiction, and outright lies
• Has no actual long-term goals whatsoever
• Contains stuff which would actually blow your mind

Similarities between Wikipedia and E2

• Large searchable database of articles, pretty much every conceivable title has something written under it
• You can log in and write stuff
• That's about it

Why E2 is different

• You gotta log in to write something
• Anything you write stays yours and can't be changed by other people
• There's a voting/experience system
• POV and proud of it
• Original research is welcomed, along with stuff like this, personal anecdotes, fiction, and outright lies
• Has no actual long-term goals whatsoever
• Contains stuff which would actually blow your mind

Similarities between Wikipedia and E2

• Large searchable database of articles, pretty much every conceivable title has something written under it
• You can log in and write stuff
• That's about it

Why E2 is different

• You gotta log in to write something
• Anything you write stays yours and can't be changed by other people
• There's a voting/experience system
• POV and proud of it
• Original research is welcomed, along with stuff like this, personal anecdotes, fiction, and outright lies
• Has no actual long-term goals whatsoever
• Contains stuff which would actually blow your mind

Everything2.