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f you'll allow an art analogy (sorry, can't think of one involving cars), take a painting by Jackson Pollock and compare it to accidentally dropping a bucket of paint.

Actually, I did and fail to see the difference.

JP may have /thought/ he was making great art, but mostly he helped to ushered in a new age of people slathering paint randomly on canvas and calling it art. Personally, I think he did it for the sheer amusement value involved in watching people trying to figure out what the heck it "meant".

This isn't to say that I disagree with your point on the subject at hand... I don't. Just suggesting that Jackson Pollock may not be the best example to make that point...

This is an older model, but they have some pretty fancy new ones too.
However I find it to be the easiest way to get Windows 100% secure.

Is the default wallpaper black with a big picture of a lock on it?

I'm betting it's blue and has a big picture of a devil on it.

Cue Banner

Incidentally, we're about to build 5 new prisons

well, once they've locked-up everyone who views stick-figure porn* or keeps a secret from the government, they'd have to let out all the burglars

* yes I know that's australia, but UK law does the same thing now

Because there is a widely proliferated (heh-heh) image that is more or less exactly what you describe. It was popular as a background on the "security" distributions. It's interesting that now I can't seem to find it.

In other news, there is also this -- which I have also seen many times.

In fact I thought someone had proven that they're all flawed, one way or another?

They all let idiots vote.

The worst systems let them win an election without anyone voting

The decoupling of matter and radiation is an extremely interesting event that happened 400,000 years after the big bang. Its nature makes it the oldest possible observable event, and interestingly enough, thanks to experiments as COBE and WMAP we have very pretty pictures of that event.

I believe that the proper term for these Chinese hackers is "Useful idiots".

Read the answer by Mike Godwin (Gerneral Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation) to reproaches by the EFF.

Fat drunk people are funny.
Look at classical depictions of Bacchus...never skinny.

*Ahem* I hate to be nit-picky, ... well, actually that's a complete lie, I live for being picky. But Bakkhos is not noticeably fat in classical depictions (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

I'm guessing you're thinking of Silenos ... except that, usually, he's also not distinctively fat (1, 2, 3), except when painted by Rubens -- a painter of the modern period. And I defy anyone to regard the Silenos in that painting as jolly -- he's revolting! We're not talking goatse revolting, not quite, ... though I can imagine him pulling a goatse after a couple more goblets of wine.

Oaooow. Now my brain needs washing to get rid of that mental image.

Fat drunk people are funny.
Look at classical depictions of Bacchus...never skinny.

*Ahem* I hate to be nit-picky, ... well, actually that's a complete lie, I live for being picky. But Bakkhos is not noticeably fat in classical depictions (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

I'm guessing you're thinking of Silenos ... except that, usually, he's also not distinctively fat (1, 2, 3), except when painted by Rubens -- a painter of the modern period. And I defy anyone to regard the Silenos in that painting as jolly -- he's revolting! We're not talking goatse revolting, not quite, ... though I can imagine him pulling a goatse after a couple more goblets of wine.

Oaooow. Now my brain needs washing to get rid of that mental image.

The Pacific Ocean is older than the Atlantic.

The Atlantic formed when Pangaea split (~130 mya). The Pacific ocean is simply what's left from the ancient Panthalassic Ocean.

The Hawai'ian Islands are relatively new, though. They're the newest of a long string of (mostly submerged) peaks, formed as the Pacific plate drags its butt over a hotspot.

The Pacific Ocean is older than the Atlantic.

The Atlantic formed when Pangaea split (~130 mya). The Pacific ocean is simply what's left from the ancient Panthalassic Ocean.

The Hawai'ian Islands are relatively new, though. They're the newest of a long string of (mostly submerged) peaks, formed as the Pacific plate drags its butt over a hotspot.

Actually, depending on where you live, you will get to learn different numbers.

Here are shown the common ways to split the continents:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Continental_models.gif

Nah, you're wrong. The Moon smells like freedom.

Still don't wanna see the Chi-Coms coming at me in one of those.

No worries ... we'll send our secret fleet back at 'em

I'm not sure if all the posts are still there (the site went down many years back and I haven't looked since), but you can poke around the flat earth society website. There was at least one true believer that had counter-arguments for just about everything. They also have a FAQ

Before reading through their posts, I didn't really understand how one could think the Earth was flat. This map was enlightening. I also liked their model for the sun and moon. Basically the arguments in the thread (which was many hundreds of pages long) came down to two camps. One is the ability to trust what somebody else tells you (astronauts landed on the moon, so-and-so city is XYZ miles away from you, etc). The other was to bend science just a little so that it was technically true but meaningless. For example, [in their model] gravity is actually caused by the flat plane of the Earth accelerating. To which, somebody might ask, "Wouldn't we accelerate to the speed of light?" Well, no, because acceleration is asymptotic in their reference frame. What they don't answer is, "Wouldn't you need infinite energy to keep accelerating and where does this energy come from?"

A question I never did see asked and answered was, "If the map is as you say it is, why are plane flights from the tip of South America to the tip of Africa not excessively longer than those from NYC to London?" (I suspect the answer would be, "How do you know it isn't? Have you traveled both by plane and timed it with a stopwatch?")

Overall, they have bad science backed up by paranoia and distrust. The Electric Universe people are in the same category.

You failed to understand the first sentence in your link: "1998 no longer the hottest year on record in USA". If you'll check, 1938 was not close to the recent global temperatures.

And you wonder why we have no respect for those like you who ignore the science.

Want to know what's really hilarious? Hearing American font-snobs pronounce "Comic Sans" like "Comic Sense" with a long "e". Sans is French. It means "without", and in the case of fonts it means without serifs, the little "feet" at the end of the strokes. Listen.

Wikimedia Tech Blog post.

(This would have happened sooner, but Brion was snowed under.)

In 18 months Moore's Law will kick in anyway.

Who cares? If the laptop is doing its job I don't plan to upgrade. I don't need state-of-the-art to do any of my work, and I don't needs state-of-the-art for my personal laptop. Word processing, presentations and Eclipse work fine on an old laptop -- as long as it isn't falling apart. (Anything that needs high spec -- which to be honest is just games for me -- I run on a desktop computer).

In 18 months Moore's Law will kick in anyway. If you're going to argue 18 months vs. 2 years, read this quote from the above link:

[snip]. Despite popular misconception, he [Moore] is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". However, an Intel colleague had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months. [boldfacing added, italics in original]

Do they have a dam nearby they can use as a power reservoir?

Nope. Florida is quite flat and low. The highest point (Britton Hill) is only 105M above sea level.

Topo map (WARNING : 2.5MB SVG image)

If you want them to actually work you need quite a lot of water to get a temperature difference - we're not talking about a Volkwagen Beetle here

These things have a lot more area in contact with the air than a Beetle. They don't need water to operate.

With respect I suggest removing the sig until attempting Engineering 202,th respect I suggest removing the sig until attempting Engineering 202,

I graduated in engineering thirty years ago, having studied both mechanical and electronics engineering and worked in both fields. I worked for five years at a company that operates three different nuclear power plants, so I know what I'm talking about.

forgot to add... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/CANDU_fuel_cycles.jpg

I dunno about Sumita, but I'd really like to bang a a gong with Higginbotham.

Nope.

It's a violation of B.C.'s Friends of Gays policy. Too many emails mass-sent proudly proclaiming their friends' sexuality clogs the network, so they have to stop it.

Despite their good intentions I think it sets a bad precedent that is much broader.

As an editor with hundreds of anonymous edits and only a few under my recently setup UID, this also sets another scary precedent.

There is a need to control spam and colbertism on The Big Wiki. When asking for votes for keep or delete on articles, the deletionists have thrown out keep votes of people without "enough" edits. Add to that some deletionists going to voter's user pages throwing out trivial edits when counting to the "enough" edits and they can quickly shrink the pool enough to ensure a win.

If 25 edits is what it takes for an account to be considered eligible for this massive of a vote, then that standard will get held up in the little battles in those discussion pages. After all, if it is good enough for the license it should be good enough for everything, right?

But at least you will know that if you want a REAL Wikipedia account, you need to save up 25 major edits before you or your sock puppets register.

I voted for the change yesterday, but after doing so, I began to think about what this will actually solve.

I mean, their problem is the GFDL in its current implementation being slightly too difficult to work with, and generally not really what they want for Wikipedia. Correct?

My question is, since they plan to DUAL LICENSE everything, not only replace the GFDL with CC-BY-SA (apparently), won't they still be bound to whatever problems they have with their old license? So how will this fix their problem?

They'll have to just scrawl their taunts on the sides of the bombs with chalk, rather than have them embellished with beautifully proportioned females and flaming decals.

Oh hell, who am I kidding, they can just use wingdings.

This reminds me of a great April Fool's Day prank from the late 80s (IIRC--I cannot find a link). Someone posted a description of a wonderful new way to economize on backups, using UUCP. The idea was to create the backup and then uucp it back to oneself using a somewhat circuitous route, so that it would arrive back just when it might be needed (say, a fortnight hence). And thus no tape would be needed to hold the backup in the mean time.

(This was in fact an absurd suggestion, of course, since data transmission was very limited and expensive at the time, and the data would end up being temporarily stored anyway on the disks of one's neighbors.)

BSDs are descendants of UNIX: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Unix-history.svg

From the article linked in the Slashdot story: "The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying - that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes."

And: "This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one - not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration - has ever interpreted the law this way." [emphasis added]

In recent years, the U.S. government has carried other corruption to levels never seen before: 1) A higher percentage of its people in prison than ever before in the history of the world. 2) More countries invaded or bombed than any other country in the history of the world. (24 since the end of the 2nd world war.) 3) More government debt than any other country in the history of the world. 4) More people killed during undeclared wars than any other country in the history of the world. (11,000,000 killed directly and indirectly in 24 countries.) 5) More money spent on secret surveillance than any country in the history of the world.

The book House of Bush, House of Saud, tells about how Bush and his friends and family took money to support the Saudis against the best interests of the United States.

One guess is that someone told the Obama administration a huge number of lies to get people to allow the corruption. That's what they did with the Bush administration.

The U.S. government is no longer under control of the people, it is a dictatorship of the corrupters. What does it matter if a majority vote for a change if there is no change?

Here's an image that uses lights to approximate population density: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Megalopolis.png - Full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BosWash - There's a lot of empty space in the United States that has not been wired-up. It's comparable to the European Union in scale:

Russian Federation 7 Mbit/s
European Union, United States 6
Canada, Australia 5
Brazil, China 2
Mexico 1 Mbit/s

And if you prefer to look on a state-by-state basis of the EU, US, and Canada then you get:
1 Sweden 11 Mbit/s
2 Delaware 10
3 Washington 9
4 Netherlands,RI,NJ,MA 8
5 VA,NY,CO,CT,AZ,Germany, British Columbia 7 Mbit/s

I gotta say it... I was pretty shocked to see "Thagomizer" excluded from the article!

It's a term for the tail spikes of a Stegosaurus, which comes from this Far Side cartoon.

I'd say you probably were the only one to think of Far Side as science fiction, yes.

I gotta say it... I was pretty shocked to see "Thagomizer" excluded from the article!

It's a term for the tail spikes of a Stegosaurus, which comes from this Far Side cartoon.

Nope, many of you probably don't. Around the time the Russians put up Sputnik, the American space program was centered around Project Vanguard. It was going to put our first satellite into orbit. And our first satellite was going to be way better than Sputnik.

Only the rockets kept crashing. It became a source of national embarrassment and the subject of jokes.

See this image, for examp.e.

subducting plates build mountains, i think they can break open a concrete container. even if the waste were to subduct, what's to stop it from floating up into a pluton and shooting out a volcano?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/02/Subduction01.jpg

This one is much more interesting. Its only for the state of Maine, but they measured the wind OFFSHORE as well. Look at the difference! Putting wind farms offshore makes much more financial sense than on land. As for those who say you need backup power equivalent to the whole wind grid, that isn't true. Offshore wind is fairly constant and you can play statistics with different regions. No wind across the entire atlantic seaboard is probably a 1 in 1 billion years event. Much more likely that someone will steal copper from a major transmission line and trigger an unforseen cascade failure.

They go after people for taking non-informative pictures of miscellaneous microwave antennas and a big repeater array? Un-fucking-likely.

There's no access to those areas, but only because that's where the city of LA has a number of fire, police, and agency radio repeaters. There's an emergency communications bunker up there, but it's not the governor's, it's the city's--- and it's hardly secret.

> Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.

Oh, really?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?&search=hollywood+sign
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=hollywood%20sign

Man, they must be making millions, nay, billions off those lawsuits!

OMG! I stand corrected.
The disgusting offensive (to Americans) picture is indeed on !

Now somebody call the cops to go round up Jimmy Wales and all those Wikipedia pornographers! About time!

Actually, you're mistaken.

If you really want to donate the 10000 images, uploading them one by one would be a bit painful indeed. There is a bunch of tools to do it though. The main problem is setting them up to annotate and categorize your images so they can actually be found.

If that is not enough, offer your content it on the Commons Village Pump, I'm sure someone will be happy to help you.
If the license is clear (which it should be if they are all your own work) and you have decent metadata (perhaps date, location ,and at least a basic description of content), this should work great.

You can also always write an email to info@wikimedia.org if you want to offer media.

If you really want to donate the 10000 images, uploading them one by one would be a bit painful indeed. There is a bunch of tools to do it though. The main problem is setting them up to annotate and categorize your images so they can actually be found.

If that is not enough, offer your content it on the Commons Village Pump, I'm sure someone will be happy to help you.
If the license is clear (which it should be if they are all your own work) and you have decent metadata (perhaps date, location ,and at least a basic description of content), this should work great.

You can also always write an email to info@wikimedia.org if you want to offer media.

This is why the Wikimedia Foundation has been in talks with the FSF, which resulted in a new version of the GFDL that allows dual licensing with CC-BY-SA. A proposal is now underway to make such dual licensing mandatory for all new content on Wikimedia projects.

It isn't that hard. I have submitted quite a few pictures to Wikipedia, and have learned a bit along the way.

The first one does take a while, but then you know what you want to use. I have hundreds of pictures on Commons, with most of them still on the Wikipedia pages. The ones that aren't have been replaced by better pictures.

The main thing is that pictures that you took, and can license in any way you want should go on commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ . That allows your pictures to be used on other language Wikipedias, which images only on en.Wikipedia can't be due to licensing issues. Then, they will be listed in your gallery, and contributions lists.

Pictures where you can only claim a fair-use license have to go on Wikipedia, since fair-use is a US only thing, and can't necessarily be used in other countries.

If you have pictures of species that don't currently have pictures on Wikipedia, then it would be helpful if you put pictures on those pages, with the images hosted on Commons, and maybe added to the other language Wikipdeias as well.

You'll just love this then. Humans have ten times more bacteria that human cells.

[citation needed]